Last Updated on May 30, 2026 by admin
The repo agent in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho found the cat in the basement.
Her name is Geraldine Trumbull. She works freelance for half a dozen small-property landlords across Kootenai County, doing the unpleasant work of changing locks, hauling out abandoned furniture, and putting a house back into the kind of shape where another tenant could be persuaded to move in.
The house on East Sherman Avenue had been vacant for eleven weeks. The last tenant had stopped paying in early March and disappeared in the last week of the same month, taking — Geraldine assumed, looking around — none of the kitchen appliances and most of the wall art.
She went down to the basement on the second day of the cleanout because the basement was the last room left.
The cat was on top of the old chest freezer, in a nest he had made out of an army blanket and what looked like the inside lining of a winter coat. He was enormous. He was a Maine Coon, or close enough — a long-bodied, lion-ruffed gray-and-cream tabby with a torn left ear, white tufts between his toes, and eyes that were the precise pale yellow of well-aged butter.
He did not flinch when Geraldine turned on the light. He looked at her like he had been expecting her, on roughly that schedule, for some time.
Geraldine sat down on the basement steps and called her sister Annette.
Annette Trumbull lives in Spokane Valley now. She used to live, in 2017 and 2018, in a small brick rancher on West Hayden Avenue in Coeur d’Alene — three blocks east of the house on East Sherman.
Annette remembered, immediately, the missing-cat flyers that had gone up in their old neighborhood in the fall of 2017. She remembered the cat — a young Maine Coon named Bunting who had bolted through an open front door during a furniture-delivery in October — because the owner, a quiet middle-school music teacher named Bart Klaussen, had cried in their driveway when he came around to put up a flyer on her mailbox.
Annette had taken a photograph of one of the flyers in October 2017. She still had it. She had posted it, in a long-defunct neighborhood Facebook group called “Hayden Lake Neighbors Who Lose Things,” in November 2017.
The photo was still in the group’s archive.
Annette pulled it up on her phone. She zoomed in on the picture of the cat on the flyer — a five-year-old Maine Coon with a torn left ear, white tufts between his toes, and pale-yellow eyes — and she sent it to her sister sitting on the basement steps three blocks east of where Bart Klaussen had lived eight years and seven months earlier.
Geraldine looked at the photo. She looked at the cat on the chest freezer.
It was the same cat.
Bart Klaussen, who now lives in Spokane and teaches middle-school orchestra at a Catholic school in the Garland district, drove the forty-three miles east into Idaho the same afternoon. He had not been back to Coeur d’Alene since the move. He had not, he said in the driveway, been able to.
Bunting walked out of the basement on Geraldine’s arm. Bart saw him from the front yard.
Bart sat down in the gravel. He held his arms out. Bunting walked across the lawn at the unhurried, ground-eating gait of a fourteen-year-old Maine Coon who has had eight years to think about exactly this moment, and stepped into them.
Bart did not say anything for about four minutes. Bunting did the talking — a low, sustained, rolling purr that Geraldine, on the porch, said she could hear from twenty feet away.
Bunting is fourteen now. He is back in Spokane. He sleeps, mostly, on Bart’s chest.
The Facebook group “Hayden Lake Neighbors Who Lose Things” has not been active in seven years.
It found something, anyway. 🐾