It was Molly, said Jonas. It was quite clearly Molly. Who else would leave tracks in the kitchen running from the cupboard to the table? Molly sat on the windowsill, licking a paw, looking like someone who has done nothing and resents everyone for staring.
The tracks were made of flour. Tiny footprints, smaller than a fingernail, in a neat row, as if someone had walked very carefully. They began at the skirting board, where the red door had hung since December, and ended at the table leg. There lay a note: I ONLY LOOKED.
Only Mille knew what had happened in the night. She had woken because it smelled of cinnamon. Cinnamon came from the kitchen, and the kitchen was forbidden, because Molly lived there, and cats and gnomes had, as Grandfather Aske put it, an agreement based on distance.
But cinnamon. Mille pulled her hat down tight and went. The hallway was long and dark, the kitchen tiles as cold as a frozen lake. On the table stood the tin of cinnamon stars and beside it, tipped over, the flour bag, from which a white hill had slid onto the floor. Mille saw it too late. She was standing in the middle of the flour.
From then on, every step was a footprint. Mille tried to walk on tiptoe, which gnomes are bad at, because their boots have no toes. She tried walking backwards. She tried wiping the tracks away with her hat, and only made them wider.
Then she heard the sound. A soft landing. Molly had jumped down from the windowsill and sat two steps away, as big as a house, with eyes like two green lamps. Mille held her breath. So did Molly. For a while they just sat there, the cat and the gnome, looking at the tracks.
Then Molly did something strange. She set her paw down beside Mille’s footprint, once, twice, until a row of cat prints lay beside the row of gnome prints all the way to the table leg. She looked at Mille as if to say: There. Now we are both to blame. And went back to the window.
In the morning Jonas and Lea argued about who had made the tracks, the cat or the gnome. They did not agree. Molly got a treat anyway, and that evening Mille found a cinnamon star outside her door. On the note beneath it, in Lea’s big letters, it said: NEXT TIME JUST ASK.
