If ever there was a cat wrapped in mystery, it was Sky. She just appeared one night outside a lonely 7-11 store in Naples, Florida – and started meowing nonstop.
A couple leaving the store couldn’t ignore her cries. They took the cat home and gave her a bath. A lot of baths, in fact. She was covered in fleas.
Then the real work of figuring out where this enigmatic cat came from began. The couple who scooped her up from the convenience store parking lot eventually took her to the Naples Cat Alliance, an organization that shelters and finds homes for countless strays – with a little help from a certain cat-loving dog named Bitsy.
At first, it seemed Sky’s case would be quickly solved. She was, after all, microchipped.
But all Megan Sorbara, president of the Naples Cat Alliance, could glean from the chip was that it had been implanted by a humane society … in Missouri.
That organization gave Sorbara a breadcrumb – an owner’s name, along with a phone number that was no longer in service.
An army of animal lovers on a Facebook page then got involved with the investigation.
“These women on this page just went crazy hunting down this person,” Sorbara tells. “They were making a million phone calls. Finally, they found the girl’s father – who told them his daughter had moved to Kansas four years earlier.
And finally, Sky’s past was revealed.
The man explained that his daughter and her husband had lost their cat seven years ago, back in Naples. The family looked everywhere for their Sky. They finally gave up, moving to Kansas City.
Sorbara called the family there.
Your cat has been found. Seven years – and no telling how many cat lives – later. In front of a 7-11 hundreds of miles away.
“They were blown away,” Sorbara says. “They didn’t believe it. They were so excited, they were crying.”
On Friday, Sky will fly to Kansas City, where her family will be waiting at the airport.
