They call me Nancy Drew, sometimes.

Who’s that knocking at my door? What creature of the night came THISclose to my place the other night?

Mysterious animal tracks in the snow not-snow. I think the curved lines on the left bottom might be a tail. Or claws…

I was so excited when I saw these paw prints on the floor of my carport! Our complex is gated, so we don’t see many animals in here. I knew it wasn’t a cat, didn’t think it was a dog, and hoped it was something interesting, like a raccoon. (The tracks are about twice the size of cat paws.)

One of the things I loved best when it snowed back east was going out early, before the dog or my brothers messed up the snow, to look for tracks of squirrels or pheasants or other birds and animals. We don’t have snow or mud here, but I happen to have this powder on my floor, so we make do for tracking in SoCal…

Water set to splash on burglar.

I asked my neighbor to look at the tracks, and she agreed they were too big to be a cat, and thought it might be a raccoon or opossum.

Then she asked me why I even had all this white powder on the floor, anyway.

I explained that a couple months earlier I had found a $5 bill folded up twice, in this narrow space between my car and a filing cabinet. It couldn’t have blown there, as it would have had to slide under the whole length of my car, still folded. I figure it’s usually men who keep loose folded money in their pockets, and that the night before some disgusting lowlife had squeezed in between my car and the cabinet, (shudder) and that’s when the money fell out of his pocket. I was quite disturbed about this creepy prowler, in spite of the fact that it was HE who had given money to ME. So after I found the money I decided to sprinkle baby powder in that space, to get his footprints if he ever came back.

Instead, a couple days later I found cat footprints, and some of the powder was on the hood of my mint 1991 Saturn! I was furious. I had seen my awful neighbor’s awful cat climb on other cars, and shooed him off, but for some reason I thought he hadn’t been climbing on MY car, I told her.

She said, kind of loudly, “Why you’re just a regular Nancy Drew, aren’t you!” She sounded amused, but not that admiring. (I know she thinks I’m a little eccentric, because she invites my other neighbors to brunch, but not me.)

I didn’t tell her that that when the cat peed on my car, my sleuthing turned from the prowler to the cat. That’s right, that cat is a very bad cat. And if cat pee kills grass, I imagine it could burn into vintage paint. I’m not going to go into the sadness of living in a building that just missed rent control (by a year), but it’s scary, so in short, I couldn’t resolve this matter with my neighbor the way I would normally do. I just had to deal with this damn cat myself.

I decided to mix baking soda with the talcum powder, so the cat would get a bad taste when he licked his feet. Didn’t work. Then I read that cats hate moth balls, so scattered them around, but the smell doesn’t last long outside.

By the time this mystery animal came along, I had upped my game: I sprayed corners with expensive Keep Off cat repellant, threw moth crystals all over, sifted a fine layer of talcum powder and baking soda all over the area (with a new layer each time he walked in the old one) and balanced a cup of water, which is totally ready to splash over any sneaky cat that brushes by. (although it didn’t fall on this bigger animal, drat.)

Yet another great find at Book Expo! When I was little my best friend had a collection of the original Nancy Drews, The Secret of Red Gate Farm (Nancy Drew, Book 6), and the covers were so great.

Suzie went back to her laundry and then I remembered that I had picked up some nature guides from Book Expo here in LA. They’re called Pocket Naturalist Guides by Waterford Press, and I got one on California Butterflies, one on birds, and one on Animal Tracks: An Introduction to the Tracks & Signs of Familiar North American Species.! And they were still on my desk, yay! They’re just laminated folders, so for a real wilderness trek I’d want more pages, but for tracks in my carport? Perfect. It took just 30 seconds; bingo, it was skunk tracks! I see skunks quite a lot in this neighborhood, but it was still kind of cool that now I had the tracks.

I was hoping that maybe the smell of the skunk tracks (which didn’t smell at all to me, but wouldn’t another animal smell them? In spite of the baby powder and moth balls?) would keep the cat away, but just this weekend I saw little cat tracks AGAIN, right next to the skunk tracks, which that damn cat ruined.

I hate that cat. Next I’m going to try tin foil, which I read that cats hate, and use double edged scotch tape to hold it down, to get sticky on his paws. Some guests need the book thrown at them.

Update: The cup of water fell today! It’s a sign of good times ahead.