Case 028

Case 028: Year of the Cat

Celest St. Claire's Notes

Hey,

As I mentioned in my note, I’m sure that my conclusions will match Sullivan’s. That being the case, if you’ve already asked him about these clues, you probably won’t learn anything new here.

If you do choose to use this site, you’ll still need to email Sullivan about The Cat’s Identity. You’ll also need to email him the case’s Solution once you’ve figured out where The Cat intends to strike next.

If you haven’t emailed Sullivan yet, you can visit SleuthKings.com/Case-028 to send him your first email. When you want to address either of the issues above, just include the appropriate underlined word from above in the body of your email.

If you want to see my thoughts on any of the clues in your case file, just click the corresponding button below.

This message is really weird, isn’t it? If you ignore the spaces, several Zodiac characters are spelled out.

Doesn’t The Cat’s note talk about how they plan to “take out as many other Zodiacs” as they can? Given all of the Zodiacs present in the note, there has to be a deeper meaning to that than just trying to scare Spencer.

Taking out all of the spaces between words might help you see things in a different light:

“OXTHESHEEPDPIGRRABBIT

ATIGERGRATOSNAKE

NMONKEYISDOGNOT

HORSEINVITEDROOSTER.”

If we remove each of the Zodiac animals from the long string of text, we’re left with:

“The D R A G O N Is Not Invited.”

Doesn’t the invitation that Sullivan found talk about how two Zodiacs aren’t invited to The Cat’s banquet? I wonder if this is one of them. If so, it’s probably a good idea to focus on trying to find the other one.

Don’t forget to let Sullivan know once you’ve figured out who The Cat is. If you haven’t sent him an email yet, you can do so at SleuthKings.com/Case-028. When you want to let him know The Cat’s identity, just be sure to include the word identity in the body of your email so that he knows what you’re talking about.

I’m sure you’ve noticed the grid, right? It’s too small to put the Zodiac cards on, but I’m pretty sure it’s telling us that we need to arrange the cards into 3 rows and 4 columns.

So far, I’ve been able to use The Cat’s story to put together the left-most column. From the top down, the order is: Rat, Ox, and Rooster.

I’m sure that we need to read the handwritten letters on each card, but I don’t think they’re going to make much sense until we have the rest of the cards arranged correctly.

This was surprisingly more difficult than I thought it would be, but I finally managed to get everything arranged correctly.

From left-to-right, the top row is:

Rat, Monkey, Snake, Rabbit

The second row should be:

Ox, Dragon, Dog, Tiger

The third row is:

Rooster, Sheep, Horse, Pig

When you read the handwritten letters from left-to-right in each column, they say:

“RABB

ITISNOT

WELCOME”

Finally, once everything is spaced out a little less awkwardly, the message says, “Rabbit is not welcome.”

That has to be the other Zodiac that isn’t invited to The Cat’s banquet! Now that Clue 1 and Clue 2 helped us find the left-out Zodiacs, I think we should be able to make sense out of the invitation Sullivan found. Once we do, I’m pretty sure it should tell us The Cat’s identity.

In order to make sense out of this, I’m positive that we need to figure out what date “broke everything” for The Cat.

I’ve searched through everything in your case file, but I haven’t been able to find anything about a date. Maybe once you let Sullivan know The Cat’s identity, he’ll be able to come up with one.

Once you’ve got the date, I think you’ll want to format it so that it reads MM/DD/YYYY and then repeat it until you reach the end of the message. If you do that, it should help you figure out how much to shift each letter backward by.

Since I can’t find a date, I’m going to move on to the next clue for now. If you find yourself stuck with this one, maybe Sullivan will be able to help put it together for you.

So far, I’ve been able to figure out what each of the words in the circles are.

The circle with a dog is “Watchdog,” the one with a rabbit is “Whiskers” (cute!), the pig is “Smelling,” and the horse is “Stampede.”

With all of those figured out, the next step is to figure out how to place the button in each circle so that we can decode the message. I think one of the animals on the button will probably face the cat, but I’m not sure which yet. Sullivan might be able to help after he investigates the person behind The Cat, but I’m going to see what I can do in the meantime.

I got it! The Cat always calls Spencer “Rat,” right? Guess what? If you line the button up so that the rat always faces the cat, the button’s symbols line up correctly with each letter. When we use the combination of the button and the word wheel, we can finally decode the symbols!

When we arrange everything correctly, the coded word beside “Watchdog” becomes “Watch.”

The word beside “Whiskers” becomes “Where.”

The word beside “Smelling” is “Enemies.”

The word next to “Stampede” is “Meet.”

Put it all together, and we get “Watch where enemies meet.” I’m not sure what to make of that yet, but it must be the key to figuring out where The Cat is going to strike next.

Without being able to look into the person behind The Cat myself, I think I’ve come as far as I can with this case. I’m sure that between you and Sullivan, though, you’ll be able to stop The Cat and keep Spencer safe.

Don’t forget – if you haven’t gotten in touch with Sullivan yet, you can send him your first email at SleuthKings.com/Case-028. If you want to let him know who The Cat is, be sure to include the word Identity in the body of your email. Or, when you think you know where The Cat intends to strike next, you can include the word Solution in the body of your email.

Good Luck!

Clues 1 & 2 helped us figure out which animals aren’t invited to The Cat’s banquet, right? If we keep those two Zodiacs in mind, I think we should be able to look at the invitation a little differently – somehow.

I think I’m going to start with the awkward poem under The Cat’s signature. I’d recommend you do the same. The Cat must have included it for some reason. If we’re lucky, maybe it will tell us who they really are.

Yes! I just figured out what The Cat means about excluding the two Zodiac animals from the banquet. None of the letters found in either Zodiac’s name can appear in the poem below The Cat’s signature.

If we can eliminate all of those letters, I’m pretty sure what we’ll be left with is The Cat’s name.

Thanks to Clues 1 & 2, we know that Rabbit and Dragon aren’t invited to the banquet, right? That means, if we exclude all of the letters in their names (R, A, B, I, T, D, G, O, N) from the poem, what we’re left with should be The Cat’s name.

Here’s what’s left when we do just that:

“Sue

Lee.”

I have no idea who Sue Lee is, but that sure sounds like a name to me, how about you? She must either be The Cat or someone related to them. Either way, you should let Sullivan know that he needs to look into her right away!

If you haven’t already emailed Sullivan, you can send him your first email at SleuthKings.com/Case-028. When you do, be sure to include the word identity in the body of your email when you let him know that The Cat’s identity is Sue Lee.

I’m not sure what he’ll find when he looks into Sue but, hopefully, the rest of the pieces will start clicking into place! For now, I’m going to see what else – if anything – I can learn from the other things The Cat left behind.