Beevey woke up. Large, dark eyes opened in a thickly furred head. Something had changed, Beevey – short for Black Velvet – knew.
The cat listened for a moment. Both the adult humans were still asleep. So he unfolded himself from the closet floor and set off into the dark to peruse the rest of the upstairs.
Beevey padded down the hall to the baby’s room. With the aid of a soft night light, he hopped up on a chest of drawers and looked down into the crib. The little girl was also asleep. Of course, had that changed, there would have been lots of noise and one of the adults would have gotten up.
Beevey hopped down, the carpet muffling his landing. Back in the hallway, he listened intently and then made his quiet way down the stairs.
In the living room, a gentle late-spring breeze sauntered in through an open window. Beevey had checked that window before napping and it had been closed.
Now his sensitive ears turned and honed in on a sound. Someone was moving around near the kitchen. Beevey wondered who it could be and went to investigate.
At the kitchen door, he sat and waited. The person was about to come into the hallway.
Like most of his species, Beevey had never grasped that humans do not see well in the dark and that a black cat in an unlit doorway at night was invisible.
The person tripped over Beevey and stumbled into the kitchen; he crashed against the island and dropped a couple of objects he was carrying. The person and the objects fell heavily to the linoleum floor. Beevey hissed his disapproval of such needless clumsiness and noise and retreated to the open window.
From upstairs came shouts and a baby’s wail.
A short time later, some cars with brightly flashing lights on top pulled up. Beevey’s male caretaker opened the door to let in some people who were all dressed alike. Beevey left his perch in the window to watch. The four new arrivals put a cloth to the first visitor’s face as he was bleeding. As that person headed out the door with the four look-alikes, he spared a hateful glance and a few evil words for Beevey.
Beevey calmly and pointedly groomed himself briefly – the feline equivalent of brushing invisible lint off one’s clothing – and returned to his customary sleeping spot in the adults’ bedroom closet.
He hoped the baby would go back to sleep soon. The odd mouse was one thing, but all this commotion was entirely too much for one night.
