Moss heard it first with her left ear.
She was curled on the hallway rug — the scratchy one with the red diamonds — when her left ear swiveled sharp toward the living room. Then her right ear followed. Something was rustling in the big potted jungle plant. Not the wind. Not the heating pipes clicking. Something *deliberate*.
Moss stood up. She stretched one back leg, then the other. Then she padded toward the living room, whiskers pushed forward, one careful paw at a time.
*Sniff, sniff, sniff.* The floor smelled of cold wood and something else — something faintly damp. Moss dropped her nose low and found them: tiny wet footprints, crossing the floorboards in a wobbly line. Too small for a mouse. Too round for a beetle. Moss had never seen prints quite like these, and that made them very interesting indeed.
*Sniff, sniff, sniff.* She followed the trail past the armchair leg, past the knocked-over coaster nobody had picked up, all the way to the big terracotta pot where the jungle plant lived. The plant's leaves hung down to the floor like green curtains, dark and rustly at the edges.
Moss looked up. The plant was enormous. It had seventeen leaves — she counted three of them before she stopped counting. Somewhere deep inside its shadowy middle, something shifted. Her ears went straight as two small radio towers.
She crept closer. The wet trail curved behind the pot, then disappeared under the lowest leaf, which drooped all the way to the floorboards like it was keeping a secret. Moss put one paw on the leaf. She pushed it aside, very precisely, and peered into the shadows underneath.
Nothing. Just the dusty base of the pot, a lost pen lid, and the dark grille of the floor vent. Then — *squeak*. Soft and hollow. Moss froze. Every whisker went stiff.
She looked down. Wedged right against the curved base of the pot, wobbling on the uneven wood, was a small yellow rubber duck. Every time the vent clicked on with a gust of warm air, the duck rocked. And when the duck rocked — *squeak*.
The duck wasn't lost exactly. The duck was just… stuck.
Moss considered this for a moment. Then she pressed her nose against the duck's smooth rubber side and pushed, firm and steady, until it rolled free from the gap with a final triumphant *SQUEAK*. Moss leapt backwards two whole feet. Her back hit the armchair. She sat up very straight and looked at the ceiling as though she had meant to do that entirely.
She looked back at the duck. The duck sat there, yellow and round and silent now, no longer stuck, no longer squeaking, no longer mysterious. Case closed. The mystery of the rustling plant was fully, completely, officially solved.
*Sniff, sniff, sniff.* Moss gave the duck one last investigative sniff — it smelled of rubber and bathwater and a small child — then batted it gently under the armchair where it belonged.
She turned in a slow circle, once, twice, and tucked herself into the curved shadow at the base of the pot, between the warm terracotta and the quiet leaf. The floor vent clicked off. The house went still.
Moss closed her eyes. Her ears lay flat for the first time all evening, two small orange triangles, finally at rest.
