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“Oh, has it been stolen again?”
Well, that seemed to answer that question.
“I guess so,” I replied. I was in the dining room, setting the table, and I could tell from the pained expression on the cat’s face that he wasn’t very happy about my current activity. Because Archie couldn’t bear to be anywhere near if there was even the slightest chance of Calvin and me exchanging intimacies, he tended to bolt out the door the second my boyfriend showed up. I went on, “Josie said she went by the nativity to check on it earlier today, and baby Jesus was missing.”
Archie jumped off the couch and took up a position at the center of the living room rug, then began kneading it with his claws. I tried my best not to sigh. He’d disdained the scratching post I’d gotten for him, but he loved shredding that rug.
You can afford to replace it,I told myself, but those inner words didn’t reassure me quite as much as I’d hoped.
I really liked that rug.
But since I’d long ago learned that admonishing Archie wouldn’t do a bit of good, I ignored him and said, “Josie told me the nativity was carved about sixty years ago. You were a cat by then, right?”
His golden eyes slitted. While he loved to complain about being in his cat form — and he nagged me regularly about breaking the curse so he could go back to being a man — he absolutely hated it when I brought up his unfortunate situation on my own.
But at least it appeared as though he would deign to reply this time.
“Yes,” he said. “I’d been a cat about ten years when Malcolm carved those figures. I don’t know what spurred him to do it, but he always was working on projects like that — had a whole bunch of totem poles in his yard that he’d carved after studying a number of photos on the subject. They made excellent scratching posts.”
I refrained from comment. While Archie’s depredations on my living room rug annoyed the heck out of me, at least he wasn’t shredding art I’d personally created.
“At any rate,” he continued, “the very first year the nativity scene went up, someone took the baby Jesus out of the cradle. It remained missing for several weeks, until it reappeared sitting on top of the bronze tiger mascot we had out in front of the school back then.”
Why the tiger no longer presided over the entrance to Globe High School, I wasn’t sure. Possibly it had also been subjected to several pranks over the years and the powers that be had decided to remove it.
I filed that question away for another day and asked, “Was it high school kids who took the figure?”
Archie’s shoulders twitched slightly, his cat version of a shrug. “They never found the culprit, but that was the main assumption. And then the baby Jesus was taken about five or six years later, although it only disappeared for a night and then showed up again the next morning. Again, most likely some of Globe’s youth thinking they were being clever.”
“Do you think it’s high school kids this time, too?”
“I should think so.” He licked a paw and rubbed it over one cheek. “After all, who else has time for that kind of foolishness?”
Good question. Since all the local kids were out of school for the holidays, they probably had more time on their hands than they knew what to do with. If that was really the case, though, it should be easy enough to check on what those kids had been doing during their vacation, something that wouldn’t have been possible back in the 1960s or even the 1990s.
After all, they didn’t have Instagram and Facebook back then.
“No one I know,” I told Archie, and he gave another of those cat shrugs and then made his way back over to the couch, clearly bored with the conversation and ready to take another power nap.
Fine.
Since I had some time before Calvin was going to show up, and I’d made things easy on myself by putting a pot roast and veggies in the crock pot before I headed down to work that morning, I went to my purse and pulled out my phone. I’d deleted Instagram after my disastrous foray into social media this past June, but I still had Facebook installed.
Then again, did kids even use Facebook anymore? I seemed to dimly recall reading somewhere that they’d mostly abandoned it for TikTok and Instagram.
But I didn’t have TikTok on my phone, and I definitely didn’t feel like installing it. A couple of quick searches should be all I needed to do.
Well, except that anyone who stole baby Jesus probably isn’t putting a description of the theft in a public post,I thought as I navigated to the Facebook app.
Then again, that might have been giving the perpetrator the benefit of the doubt. It seemed like almost every day I was reading an account of someone who’d gotten caught for one crime or another because of something idiotic they’d posted on Facebook. Apparently, not everyone had figured out their privacy controls.
But either the kids in Globe were on top of that situation, or they simply hadn’t been involved in the theft, because I couldn’t find a single post or photo that referenced the Christ heist. Which was about what I had expected, but at least this way I could tell myself I’d tried the easy route before I moved on to something else.
What that “something else” would be, I didn’t know for sure. I certainly wasn’t going to bother Grandma Ellen with this, but I also didn’t want to make a spectacle of myself by walking around Globe, fluorite pendulum swinging, as I tried to track down the location of the purloined statue.
I was saved from trying to puzzle out the conundrum by a knock at the door. On cue, Archie bolted from the sofa and headed out the window, which I’d left cracked against this eventuality. That particular solution to Archie’s fear of physical intimacy didn’t work quite as well in December as it had in September, but since there wasn’t really anywhere in the apartment to install a cat door, I had to stick with it for now. To compensate, I’d cranked the heat and turned on the gas fireplace.
“Hey,” Calvin said after I opened the door, and bent down to give me a quick kiss.
