by Conny Manero

Created on: July 29, 2008

Last Thursday I came home from work and got changed.
I put my office clothes away and put my jewelery on the dresser.
Usually I put the jewelery away in its box, but as I was in a rush, I just placed the various items on the dresser thinking they would be safe.

When I went to bed that night I noticed the jewelery and started placing everything in its proper place.

Then suddenly - oh oh, my gold pendant was missing.
Well, not MY pendant, it was my mother's pendant, but I inherited it after she recently passed away.

The pendant is worth (I will not say a fortune) but a lot of money.
It is a little over an inch long, half an inch wide, and made of solid 18 K gold.
My father had it made for my mother in honor of their 50th wedding anniversary and along with the pendant came a long gold chain.

The chain I found on my bed, but the pendant itself was gone.
There was only one explanation for the pendant's disappearance ... one of my cats must have taken it to play with it.

Charlie and Chanel were above suspicion, because they do not steal things, but Charlotte and Mickey were a different matter. They take anything they can get their paws on.

Now while the pendant is fairly big, it is small if you have to go look for it.
I search all over my bed ... nothing; I searched on the floor ... nothing. I was getting more frantic by the minute.

"Go to bed, we will look for it tomorrow," my son Dieter said.
Yeah right, like I would be able to sleep knowing that a gold pendant was laying around somewhere.
It had to be found and it had to be found tonight.
In the meantime it was getting later and later though and I had to get up in the morning for work.

Then I noticed that Charlotte was missing too and I got the funny feeling that if I found Charlotte I would find the pendant too.

True enough, when I looked under my bed there was Charlotte, happily smacking around her new toy - my pendant.
"Give me that," I said and reached under the bed.
Quick as lightning her paw shot out and nearly clawed my finger.
Hm, she was not going to give up her toy that easy, I would have to outsmart her.

I tried to distract her with another toy, a fuzzy mouse, but she was having none of it. She preferred the shiny toy.
"Charlotte come on," I said, "this is not the time to play games."
I wiggled and squeaked the fuzzy mouse. "This is yours, that is mine, let's trade."

Charlotte looked at me with her big green eyes as if she was considering my proposal and possessively put one of her paws on the pendant as if to say "You want it, come and get it."
Eventually I managed to get hold of the pendant, but I can assure you, Charlotte was not impressed.

Needless to say, I will not be so careless with my jewelery anymore.
As a matter of fact, I am going to check my jewelery box and see what else is missing.

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