by Patricia Fry
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It’s probably not surprising to readers that Rags’s klepto habit has served many purposes and has caused many different reactions. He seems to love carrying things around in his mouth, and people generally get a kick out of seeing this. He really is cute when he walks into a room with one of his stuffed toys in his mouth. Not so much when it’s a guest’s packet of hormone pills or a photograph a guest would rather not share.
Yes, at times his behavior seems designed to cause someone embarrassment, like when he dragged out one of my most revealing bras in front of the cameras during the filming of his documentary. Talk about being humiliated!
At other times, he seems to have the uncanny ability to expose an appropriate clue to just the right person at the perfect time. Or is this us trying to personify him? He is simply and complexly a cat, after all. And he’s curious. Rags just does what Rags does and quite often his actions result in something rather spectacular. Like the time he helped reunite twin sisters who had been separated for decades.
While it may seem as though Rags has something akin to human intellect, he’s still a cat. Most of the time he sleeps and eats. He plays a little, sits and watches people, snoops, begs, and sheds on the furniture and any garment you forget to hang up. He urfs hairballs, claws the sofa sometimes instead of his carpeted cat tree, and he annoys our dog, Lexie, when he thinks he can get away with it. He also carries things around in his mouth, stores some of them in his stash, escapes nearly every chance he gets, and sometimes he winds up in the right place at the right time with a clue that’s on target.
In the case of the twins, it all started when Michael volunteered to help Max round up a litter of kittens that had escaped from Max’s and Auntie’s shelter. It was later revealed that someone was deliberately setting the shelter cats free. But that’s another story for another time. On this occasion, Michael found the frightened kittens among some shrubbery along the foundation of Max’s and Auntie’s house. Michael was surprised to discover a set of cement steps behind the shrub—steps that led to a door. But he wasn’t as surprised as Max and Auntie were; they had never noticed this basement entrance before.
Max explained that when he bought the property, people were operating a nursery there. He turned the greenhouse into a cat shelter, began using some of the buildings for storage, and transformed the offices into a home for himself and later for him and my aunt. He didn’t know about or he had forgotten about the basement room.
Once they’d corralled the little tabby siblings that day, Max and Michael decided to check out the hidden room. We all had things to do that morning, so we agreed to meet there later in the afternoon. I couldn’t wait to see what was behind the mystery door.
Yeah, I’m fairly inquisitive. According to my friends and family, my curiosity level has always been off the chart, and I tend to agree with them. So when I heard there was a room on Max’s property that he’d never explored, I counted myself in on the adventure. I won’t even go into all of the “what ifs” I conjured up about what we might discover in that room. As it turned out, what we found surprised us all.
The previous owners had rented the small space in the basement to an older single man who had died prior to Max’s buying the place, and the man had a huge secret.
That afternoon, I took Rags along with us to Auntie’s and Max’s to visit his former kitty housemate, Layla. While we gals visited and played with the cats, Michael and Max cut down the large shrub that had been hiding the doorway to the basement. When it came time to check out the secret room, I took Rags with us to keep him from getting rowdy in the house. And Rags, being Rags, took the exploration to another level.
We discovered it to be a fairly ordinary room with some interesting furniture, but nothing else. As we snooped to our satisfaction, Rags checked out the closet, dove in and out of a couple of kitchen cabinets, and walked around for a few minutes in the old shower stall. I rolled my eyes when I saw him lying on his back, digging under a small bedside table, and we were all surprised when he came out with an envelope.
Rags is funny about his treasures. You never know if he’ll hoard it and keep it to himself or if he’ll eagerly share it. In this instance, we simply took the sealed envelope from him and discovered a shocking truth—you might say a partial truth.
Inside the envelope was a letter. It explained that the child the letter writer had raised—now a grown woman—was not actually his (or her?) child at all. The writer said that he had abducted her when she was a toddler. The letter was not signed and it did not identify the child. In fact, we weren’t completely sure that the man who lived there most recently was the abductor. Maybe the letter was placed under the nightstand by a former tenant. We were fairly certain that whoever wrote the letter did so purely as a way to clear his or her conscience.
It’s interesting how, when you come into possession of information like this, you somehow feel responsible for taking the next step—or taking some sort of step—to intervene—to help. I felt awful for this unknown girl. I wondered if she was okay. I could imagine the heartbreak suffered by the family who had lost their child. I wondered if she was an only child. How old was she? How did he get his hands on her? Did he treat her well? Yes, I have a curious mind.
Strangely, during that summer coincidences began to pile up. I noticed this, but I was seeing only part of the picture. It was Rags’s actions and perfect timing that brought the truth to the surface and put a reunion into motion.
Coincidentally, I happened to meet the family who had lost their three-year-old daughter thirty years earlier, but I didn’t know this part of their story until much later. Things started to mushroom when I decided to take our almost-one-year-old daughter, Lily, to a day care a couple of hours a week. I wanted her to learn to share and socialize with other children. The day care provider, Barbara, had a daughter about my age who had a child a little older than Lily. Jenna and I hit it off and began spending time together with the children. I was somewhat confused when, at about the same time, I met a young woman in a party store who looked familiar. She and I were both shopping for our daughters’ birthday party supplies.
I realized later that Mary very closely resembled Jenna. It took weeks for all of the pieces of this puzzle to fall together, and you can bet that Rags was involved in making it happen. This was not through any sort of intuition on his part; his actions were purely innocent and catlike. At least I think I believe so. But my Ragsie was definitely responsible for putting the clue in place at just the right time in order to happily heal and repair a broken family.
What we didn’t know at the time was that Rags had deposited a piece to this puzzle behind Aunt Maggie’s sofa. The evening we found the strange letter, Rags took off with the envelope and ran behind the couch. There had evidently been something inside the envelope that we didn’t notice—a baby locket. Days went by before the locket was found. In fact, Rags is the one who brought it to our attention. When he came out from behind the sofa with the locket dangling from his mouth, Auntie quickly took it from him, thinking it was Lily’s. Even though I knew it wasn’t, I dropped it into my purse. And it was the locket that brought out the truth.
Did Rags know the significance of that baby necklace? Intellectually, I’d say, no. But then, why did he pull it out of my purse the day Mary visited with her little daughter, Crissy? Mary recognized it immediately as being hers. She remembered her father (the kidnapper) giving it to her when she was a child. She was overwhelmed by emotion upon getting it back and she immediately put it on her little daughter, Crissy.
Everything changed for Mary when I handed her the letter we’d found in Auntie’s and Max’s basement room.
That day I’d arranged for Jenna and Mary to meet. Through research, we’d already established that Jenna’s parents, Barbara and Allan, had lost a child. She was taken from their yard more than thirty years earlier. It was such a painful memory for Barbara that, after many false alarms and dead ends in their search, she closed th
at chapter of her life, and in fact, denied ever having had another child. Jenna grew up believing she was an only child until Auntie and I began showing her some of the information we’d uncovered.
When Jenna met Mary and she saw the necklace around Crissy’s neck, she knew that Mary was her twin—a sister she had grown up knowing nothing about—a twin sister her mother had denied because the memory was so painful. It took Rags to open up the possibilities, along with some old wounds. Thankfully, a major healing took place in that family, and at least some of the credit went to Rags.
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There are times when Rags behaves much like a search-and-rescue dog or a dog that’s trained to sniff out drugs, fruit, or other items. He certainly has a knack for finding things. While dogs most often need to be trained, Rags does some of these things quite naturally and without the promise of a reward. Like the time he found some valuable gems that had been well hidden for many years under an abandoned building. What dog would do that? As a matter of fact, it was mighty unusual behavior for a cat.
We were doing a craft fair in the building as a fundraiser for the Hammond Cat Alliance when Rags managed to get loose and go on an adventure of his own. Why was he at a craft fair? Well, Michael and I had a booth, representing the veterinary clinic, where we handed out information and answered visitors’ questions. Some of the alliance members suggested that Rags should accompany us as a sort of ambassador. We agreed that he might add an element of interest to our booth.
Over the years, we had learned time and time again what a high-maintenance cat Rags can be, especially when we take him someplace. But it always seems like a good idea at the time.
In this case, I trusted a little boy to hold Rags’s leash for a few minutes, and the cat got away from him. When Rags returned, he was carrying a pouch full of valuable gems. Word of the gems seemed to spread, and people came out of the woodwork to get their hands on them. It didn’t take long for Detective Craig to discover what some people seemed to already know—that the gems were part of a famous unsolved heist that had occurred decades earlier. The pouch Rags found was just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, and Craig was frantic to find the rest of the gems before the crooks did. Trouble was, Rags decided not to reveal where he’d found them.
This is one area where search dogs tend to trump the concept of a search cat. A dog can be trained to perform more complex tasks. Dogs are more obedient and will respond to treats and praise. Rags, on the other hand, either didn’t understand what we were asking of him or he didn’t give a darn. There was also the possibility that no more gems were hidden in the building—that Rags had found all of them. But Detective Craig had to be sure, so in an attempt to follow Rags’s path that day, he called on eyewitnesses who were at the craft fair when Rags found the gems. When that didn’t result in locating the rest of the loot, he tried other methods.
It took weeks and a lot of patience, coaxing, and false starts. There were some harrowing moments when my aunt and Colbi went missing, when someone was attacked, and when a strange being was discovered living inside the old place. But with coaxing and direction, Rags finally led Craig to the gems before the crooks could get their hands on them and before anyone else was harmed.
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Rags has been called to police duty on several occasions—once when Brianna went missing. Even though Craig, Michael, Auntie, and I were frantically searching for a trail leading to her whereabouts, we kept hitting dead ends. You wouldn’t believe the ploys, deception, and ruses we used to find my sister. As a last resort, we sent Rags in to flush out the kidnappers and help free Brianna. Boy, did that stunt almost backfire!
As it happened, Auntie and I hadn’t planned to take Rags with us to Los Angeles that day to search for information about Brianna’s whereabouts. It was one of those occasions when he secretly hitched a ride in the car. By the time we discovered our stowaway, we were too far from home to turn back. We were stuck with him.
At the same time, Michael and Craig had flown to New York to follow another lead in Brianna’s disappearance. When Auntie and I stumbled upon what we thought was a solid clue to where Bri was, I called Craig and begged him to join us in Southern California. He did so, and he’s the one who devised a plan that would involve Rags.
Ever put a GPS device on a cat to track him? That’s what we tried with Rags. Then, ever so reluctantly, I agreed to turn him over to the guy we believed was a culprit in Brianna’s plight. That was one of the hardest things I’d ever done; I feared I’d never see Rags again. It could have been a serious mistake. When we stopped receiving the GPS signal, I was certain I’d signed Rags’s death warrant.
You’re probably wondering why we gave Rags, rigged with a GPS device, to a suspected kidnapper. Didn’t the man question the gadget? Well, this fellow was rather simple and we didn’t believe he was the brains behind the crime, but instead only an accessory or maybe an innocent bystander. In any case, he expressed an interest in Rags, so it wasn’t completely random that we would offer Rags to him. Craig saw this as a great opportunity to find Brianna before anything awful happened to her.
As for the device, we were able to convince the guy that Rags was wearing it for medical reasons. We told him he could remove it after two or three days. He believed us, or so we thought.
As it happened, Rags found Brianna, but we didn’t know this because, soon after we gave him to the man, we lost the signal. When the GPS stopped communicating with us, we were certain that the suspected kidnapper had gotten wise to us and took it off him.
Would you believe it was Brianna who had done it? Rags found her all right, and she recognized him. She thought her captor had strapped the odd-looking gadget on him, and she promptly removed it, then watched as a horse or a goat or some other barnyard animal stomped and chewed on it, rendering it useless.
Fortunately, we had received a clue from Bri when we briefly spoke to her on the phone earlier and we focused on that as a way to locate her, because it was all we had left. But this was one of those awful instances of miscommunication. I learned later that I’d completely misinterpreted the meaning of what Brianna had said. Her shout of “Geronimo” was nothing more than her attempt at maintaining her sanity in a bad situation.
We had grown up in Los Angeles and I thought her cry of “Geronimo” was a hint about where she was being held. I remembered our family adopting a kitten, which we named Geronimo, from some people who lived on a ranch on the outskirts of the city.
Thankfully, we followed what I thought was a clue, and, miraculously, it led us to where Brianna was being held. What a happy moment it was when Auntie and I saw Craig leading Brianna and Rags to the safety of our waiting car late that night. Sure, they’d been followed and they were being chased, but we were safely out of range by the time the raid, which Craig had arranged, took place. Brianna was safe, the perpetrators were appropriately dealt with, and Rags still had six or seven of his nine lives intact.
****
We used Rags more recently in a suspected jewelry heist. We knew he had a fascination for jewelry. In fact, he’s the one who brought the vintage jewelry to our attention. We were staying in an airbnb in Colorado, near Michael’s brother and his family, when a few pieces of this jewelry showed up in the house. My sister-in-law, Holly, and I became curious. We did some research and concluded that we could be sitting on the take from a seventy-year-old jewelry-store robbery. The problem was, Rags seemed to be the only one who knew where the jewelry was hidden, and he wasn’t talking.
That case became quite volatile. You might say it blew up right in our faces, and then it followed us back to California, where the mystery took some unexpected twists and turns. Of course, Rags continued to pursue the case with us, getting a broken leg for his heroic efforts and sitting by when I almost got arrested.
How did we use him in that case? Craig initiated both Rags’s and my help in two unusual and awkward situations. First, we took Rags to a mining camp, where he found a dead body and expos
ed the character of the person Craig had initially suspected of taking the jewelry from the airbnb in Colorado. When we didn’t find the loot on that trip, we drove down to San Francisco to follow another clue. There, again, Craig used Rags to flush out the information he was after. Believe it or not, Rags was the catalyst through which the truth was revealed.
As far as Rags was concerned, he simply got to go for a ride in the car with people he loves, and embark on some new adventures.
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Clues are Rags’s specialty, and sometimes he has to get physical in order to obtain a clue. I’m pretty sure that in most cases he doesn’t actually understand that the item he has confiscated is important. When he attacks someone in order to get the evidence, however, that might be a different story. Like the time he clawed an intruder who came too close to the pen he was hanging out in. The clue Rags snatched from that guy and the mark he left on the man helped to take the heat off Michael, who had been set up to take the fall for a killing he obviously didn’t do.
That was a rough period for us. A dog died unexpectedly after having surgery in our clinic. Michael was completely at a loss as to what had happened and he felt awful. Of course, the dog’s owner, Pete Gamble, was also upset, and he didn’t handle the situation well at all. Pete needed someone to blame, and that someone became Michael. Pete was so angry that he came to the clinic and attacked both of us, causing us some painful injuries, and he wound up in jail. Later, Pete Gamble was found dead inside our veterinary clinic.
Naturally, Michael was a prime suspect. The people who killed him must have thought they’d committed the perfect crime. And they might have gotten away with it if it weren’t for Rags.