No Matter How Improbable

Irene blinked back tears as she opened the can of cat food and tried to coax Mr. Hopkins’s cat out of hiding. She couldn’t believe he was really dead. They said hello when they got the mail and made small talk about each other’s yards. She took him cookies at Christmas and he’d invited her to his Aunt Eva’s party when he found out that she admired the scientist’s work. It was shortly after that Aunt Eva sent Mr. Hopkins the cat. They had been trying to genetically engineer a sentient cat (personally, Irene thought cats were already smart enough) and instead had only succeeded in making them significantly larger. Holmes was a large tawny cat, looking like a miniature lion, and very picky about his food. Mr. Hopkins had been having difficulty getting him to eat.

Irene finally gave up on getting the cat out of hiding and set the food down. Probably if she ignored it, Holmes would come and eat eventually. She heated up a frozen dinner - after seeing Mr. Hopkins’s body she really didn’t fell like cooking. She shuddered at the memory. After hearing Holmes yowling up a racket, she had knocked on the door to see if anything was wrong. Mr. Hopkins hadn’t answered, but as she peered through the frosted window, she saw the body. Of course then she thought he’d had a heart attack or something medical and frantically called an ambulance. But it was too late.

The front room was circular with a high ceiling. Opposite the door there was a ledge, supported by two Roman columns, framing the hall to the living room. Resting on the ledge was a bust of Julius Caesar and some other statuettes. Or at least there had been. But when they entered, Mr. Hopkins had been laying in the front hall, his head smashed by Julius Caesar. The other knickknacks were broken beside him. Holmes had leaped down from the ledge and vanished. The police were summoned, and Irene answered questions in a fog. It was such a tragic accident. Someone tried to suggest it was a murder or a suicide, but it couldn’t have been. Mr. Hopkins was well liked, on good terms with his Aunt Eva - there wasn’t anyone who had a grudge against him. “Except for the cat,” she sniffed, “He didn’t like any of the cat food. Mr. Hopkins tried everything.”

“And there’s no way anyone could have pushed that bust down,” said the officer. “But how did it manage to fall?”

Everyone looked up at the ledge, devoid of its usual collection of figurines. Irene’s gaze caught sight of the fireplace mantle. There had been a Grecian urn there once, until Holmes had pushed it off. She looked back to the ledge,  “Holmes, I suppose. He’s always pushing things over.”

“Of course,” said the police officer, “Just like a cat. I’ve got two. Anything breakable stays behind glass.” He made some notes and surveyed the scene again, “I suppose he could’ve done it on purpose in revenge for the bad food.”

Irene flinched.

“Sorry,” muttered the officer, suddenly red in the face. “I wasn’t thinking there.”

He stayed to help her track Holmes down and manhandle him back to her house. They both had several scratches and one disgruntled cat by the time they were done. She thought the officer had the better end of the deal. He got to leave. Holmes turned up his nose at a can of tuna fish and disappeared again. She called Aunt Eva and they cried together over Mr. Hopkins’s death and Aunt Eva promised to let her know the funeral arrangements and agreed to come and pick the tawny cat up, “I’m sure someone in the family will want him,” she assured Irene. “I kept two of the cats from the experiment myself. Einstein and Galileo.” She chuckled, “I was over confident they’d turn out smart. But no. Just large. And picky eaters to boot.”

She’d run to the store for the cat food, but Holmes was still refusing to acknowledge it. She ate her own dinner, while binge watching Netflix. She needed some kind of diversion. It mostly worked. The light and the noise kept her distracted, but something kept pulling her mind back to the crime scene - accident, she reminded herself, accident - and she couldn’t focus on the show. She didn’t notice when Holmes arrived in the kitchen until she felt him staring at her. He sat beside the full food bowl and meowed expectantly. “It’s perfectly good cat food,” she informed him. “I don’t know what you want.”

He kept meowing. She opened a different can of cat food, and in desperation a can of chicken, but still the cat refused it. Shaking her head, she left it all out for him. Surely in the night he would get hungry enough to eat. He followed her as she locked the doors, still meowing. She wondered if he would keep it up all night and went looking for her earplugs. “I’m going to bed,” she informed him once she found them. “And you can make as much noise as you want. I’m not going to hear you.”
He growled and jumped at her hand. Irene stumbled and managed not to fall, but lost her hold on the earplugs. Holmes ran off with them. Irene glared after him. “It’s not like you can hear me!”

With a huff she hurried to her bedroom, flicking off lights as she went. What a coincidence. He’d seemed to know exactly what she was talking about. She opened her bedroom door and flipped off the last hall light, but didn’t turn on the bedroom light. The moon coming through her window was bright enough. Then the nagging feeling came back to her and she paused.

How exactly had Aunt Eva and the other scientists known their experiment had failed? Where was the proof that Holmes wasn’t smarter than the average cat? She rubbed the scratches on her arms. Stealing earplugs seemed pretty smart. And pushing a bust off a ledge just when a man walked under it - that would take timing. Her mouth went dry. Holmes had a known grudge against Mr. Hopkins. And apparently - against her as well. What was that saying - from Sherlock Holmes, the real one - once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable must be the truth. Her heart beat faster and she took a deep breath, trying to stay calm. But a sentient cat wasn’t impossible or there never would have been an experiment. Not impossible, just improbable. Her heart beat faster

She heard a growl from down the hall. In the moonlight she could only see two glowing eyes with murder in them.



Prompt: A classic approach to a universal problem. What's more classic than Sherlock?