Where’s Fred?
FRIDAY, 5:23 PM
Susan couldn’t wait to get home, change into a t-shirt and sweats, nuke some dinner in the microwave, and finish watching Love at First Sight. It had been a busy and chaotic week at work, and she couldn’t wait to spend her weekend doing nothing but catching up on her favorite shows. The only person she wanted to see this weekend wasn’t even a person, but her cat, Fred.
Upon arriving to her house, she grabbed her mail, unlocked her backdoor, and walked into her kitchen. She was immediately greeted by Fred who was frantically meowing and dancing around his food bowl. There was still food in the bowl, but it had reached what Susan called, “the panic level.” Fred became very nervous whenever his food got down to a certain level and had to inform Susan that his food supply was dangerously low, and he would probably die at any moment. Instead of filling up the bowl immediately, Susan, liked to make Fred wait a bit to try and teach him patience. She walked back to her bedroom and changed out of her work clothes with Fred sitting in the doorway watching her. Once she was done, he immediately starting meowing again. He started walking down the hall meowing with that cute purr meow he did. Susan stood in her bedroom doorway and watched him. He turned around expecting to see her obediently following him to the kitchen, but discovered she was just standing there not moving. He ran back and frantically rubbed up against her legs with his body, meowing and purring. He then started down the hall again with his head turned back watching Susan making sure she was following him.
“Alright, alright! Let’s fill up that bowl of yours!” Susan said while laughing.
After reheating some leftover lasagna in the microwave, Susan sat on her couch and turned on her television to finish watching the second season of Love at First Sight.
SATURDAY, 12:08 AM
Hours had passed without Susan noticing and when she finally looked at her phone, she saw that it was after midnight. She turned off the television and went to her bedroom where she expected to see Fred laying on her bed asleep. Fred had an internal clock, and he went to bed at 9:30 pm every night, with or without Susan. Susan loved his independent nature.
When Susan got to her room, however, Fred was not on the bed. She thought that was strange, but assumed that he had fallen asleep somewhere else. She changed into her pajamas and went to the bathroom to remove her contacts, brush her teeth, and wash her face. She came out of the bathroom rubbing in her face cream and started calling for Fred.
“Here kitty, kitty. Kitty, kitty! Frrreeddd?” But there was no meow, no kitty feet pattering on the floor, and not even the exasperated sigh that Fred often did when she had the audacity to call him. “Where is he?” Susan thought. She said out loud, “Fine, Fred. Ignore me. I’ll just go to bed without you.” Have fun sleeping on the couch!” She went in her bedroom and shut the door. She turned off the overhead light and turned on the lamp on her bedside table.
“Who am I kidding?” she thought. She knew she would never be able to sleep without finding Fred. She went through her house room by room looking for him. She ended her search back in her bedroom. She had just looked through her closet and didn’t find him. She scanned the room with her eyes looking for all the areas he could be hiding when her eyes fell on the space under her bed. She hadn’t looked there yet. All the movie scenes from horror movies that involve something creepy under the bed flashed through her mind.
“Fred, if you’re under the bed, you’d better come out. Now.” But he didn’t come out. She got her flashlight from her top dresser drawer and switched it on. “I better not come face to face with a freaking clown doll…or a doll…or a clown…or anything that’s not Fred!”
She got down on her knees and shined her flashlight under the bed. There was nothing but dust bunnies. “I need to clean under here,” she muttered to herself. She stood up and turned off the flashlight. “Where could he be?” She was starting to get worried.
Just then she heard a tapping noise on her window. She froze in fear. “What was that?” She waited and listened again and heard the noise again. It was more like a clicking noise, not a tapping. Like someone hitting the window with their fingernails.
“Click, click, click.” Could it be Fred? She opened the curtains but could only see her own reflection staring back at her. She turned off her lamp and looked again. There was Fred! He had jumped on her windowsill and was standing on his back legs clawing the window with his front paws. She ran to her front door and opened it for Fred. She had expected to see him standing on the porch, but he wasn’t. She ran around to her window so she could get him down, but he wasn’t there! She started calling for him and looking in the bushes under her window. She still had the flashlight in her hand and turned it on shining it through the bushes and all over the yard. But there was no Fred. “Where’d he go?”
Susan went back in the house and went back in her bedroom. She stood in the dark looking out the window searching for Fred. “How did he get outside?!” Susan thought. She didn’t remember going outside or opening the door at all. Fred was declawed and not allowed outside. She was very diligent about making sure that he did not escape out an open door and all her windows had screens on them to prevent him from jumping out an open window. She wondered if one of the window screens had fallen out. She walked around her house checking all the windows. All the windows were shut, however, and all of them had their screens in place. She came back into her bedroom and looked back out the window for Fred.
“How did he get outside?”
SATURDAY, 12:53 AM
Susan laid in bed wide awake thinking about how Fred could have gotten outside. Maybe she had opened the door and just forgot. “It’s not like I haven’t done something and forgotten about it before,” she thought. She remembered the time she was at her parents’ house for Christmas and volunteered to make everyone dinner the day after Christmas. She had prepared the casserole but had forgot to preheat the oven. She turned the oven on and decided to check her emails while waiting for it to preheat. She had gone to her room and laid on the bed reading through her emails on her phone. After some time had passed, she got up and went to see if the oven was ready. When she got to the kitchen, the oven was preheated, but the casserole dish was no longer on the stovetop where she had left it. She noticed that the oven timer was counting down and opened the oven door to see that the casserole had already been put in to bake. She stepped into the living room where her parents and siblings were watching a movie.
“Hey, thanks to whoever put the casserole in the oven for me,” she said. “I guess I lost track of time while I was checking my email.” They all looked confused. “What?” she asked.
“Susan, you put the casserole in the oven,” her dad said.
“No, I didn’t! I came out of my room and it was already in there.”
“Susan, this is the second time you’ve come out of your room,” her mom said. “You came out about ten minutes ago and put the casserole in the oven. Then you went back into your room.”
“Did I really?” she asked.
“Yes!” everyone replied at once.
Susan had laughed. “I have no memory of doing that!” she exclaimed.
If she had forgotten about that, maybe she forgot about opening the door. She had been really stressed at work and she noticed that her memory would get worse the more stressed she was.
She got up from bed again and looked out her window, but didn’t see anything. She walked through the house again looking out each window in hopes of seeing Fred. After looking out the kitchen window, she started walking back to her bedroom. As she passed Fred’s food bowl, she noticed it that it was completely empty.
“I know I filled his food bowl up when I came home from work today,” she thought. “There is no way it could already be empty!” She filled the bowl up not wanting it to be empty when Fred returned and walked back to her room.
She laid awake in her bed thinking about Fred. Thoughts like, “I did fill up his food bowl, didn’t I?” and “I didn’t open the door, did I?” kept running through her head.
After what seemed like hours, she finally drifted to sleep.
SATURDAY, 3:17 AM
BANG!
Susan sat straight up in bed startled by a loud bang. Confused, she looked around her dark room. She was unsure of where the sound had come from. She reached for her phone on her bedside table to check the time, but it wasn’t there.
“What was that?” she thought.
Suddenly she heard a blood curdling screech coming from the end of the hallway. The sound startled Susan causing her to jump and scream. The screech did not sound human, it sounded like a cat!
“Was that a cat?! Fred? Is that you?!”
There was no response. There was no noise at all. Susan tried to calm herself down. “Breathe,” she told herself. “Just breathe.” She started to climb out of bed when all of a sudden, another noise ripped through the silence.
Susan stopped breathing trying to hear the sound. It was quiet but growing louder. No, not louder, but closer. It was a scratching noise. It sounded like someone was running their fingernails along the walls as they walked towards her bedroom.
“Who’s there?!” She shouted. There was no response. Just the scratching noise getting closer. The noise stopped right outside her bedroom door. She sat there in silence, terrified. Too terrified to move. Too terrified to speak. Too terrified to breathe.
“It’s me, Susan,” a strange, but almost familiar, voice whispered. “I see you finally filled the food bowl.”
“What?!” Susan gasped.
BANG!
The door flew opened with such force that the door knob went through the wall behind it.
“I’M SO SORRY!” Susan yelled.
MONDAY, 9:28 AM
“Where’s Susan?” Tori asked.
“I haven’t seen her come in yet,” Paul replied.
“Well, we have a meeting with Mr. Fitzpatrick at 9:30 am. He’s one of our biggest clients and I’d hate for him to have to wait,” Tori responded.
“I’ll try calling her,” Paul said.
MONDAY, 10:59 AM
“Have you been able to reach her yet?” Tori asked Paul.
“No, I’ve left several messages, but I haven’t heard back from her,” Paul replied.
“I’m starting to get worried,” Tori said.
“I’m sure Susan is fine,” Paul said. “Remember that time last year when she didn’t come into work and we couldn’t reach her?”
“Oh, yeah,” Tori smiled as she remembered. Susan had been sick that day and sent out a text first thing in the morning to her team at work, but the text failed to send for some reason. They had spent all morning trying to reach her and then Tori ended up driving over to Susan’s house during lunch to check on her. Susan had opened the door with her hair a mess, a red nose from blowing it so much, and wearing her pajamas. Tori was relieved that Susan was alright aside from the cold she had. They had laughed about it for weeks afterwards.
“Well, if we can’t reach her by noon, I’ll have to stop by her house again!” Tori said.
“Just make sure to take pictures this time!” Paul said. They both laughed.
MONDAY, 12:32 PM
“Hello,” John answered.
“John, it’s Tori. I went to check on Susan and…well, it’s bad, John. It’s real bad.” Tori stifled a sob.
“What’s wrong?” John asked.
“I’ll tell you later, but I need you to get the phone numbers for Susan’s parents from HR. The police need those numbers right away.”
“The police?! Tori, what happened?”
Tori started sobbing. “She’s dead, John. Susan’s dead!”
“What?!” John yelled in disbelief.
“The police said they are investigating her death as a homicide. She was murdered!” Tori said.
“Oh my, God! I can’t believe it!”
“I’ll call you back, John,” Tori said and hung up the phone.
Tori saw a police officer coming out of the house awkwardly carrying an orange tabby cat.
“Excuse me, Officer, what are you planning on doing with that cat?” Tori asked.
“Animal Control is on the way to pick him up,” the officer replied.
“Can I take him?” Tori asked. “Susan adored her cat and I would hate for him to end up at the pound.”
“Sure,” he said and handed Fred to Tori. “The poor guy was in the bedroom with the victim – er, I mean, Susan. He’s been through quite a lot.”
Tori put Fred on the passenger seat and started the car. “Let’s get you something to eat, Fred,” she said.
“Meow,” said Fred, and he laid down and started purring.
THE END