WHERE OH WHERE HAS MY LITTLE CAT GONE?

Heaven help me, I've lost one of the cats. Again.

There are two of them here. Buttons, the bigger one, is allowed outside and likes to hunt for mice and stuff. The other, Jasmine, is an inside cat only and is very, very timid. I hardly see hair nor hide of her other than when she comes around in the early evening looking for her spoon-full of canned food. But for three days she didn't come. I called for her several times throughout the day but didn't really expect she'd answer as she's just not that type of kitty, at least not for me. I was told not to worry if I didn't see her, she likes to hide out. But after three days of not eating, I was getting worried. The son here noticed she wasn't around and so went looking on day three. He found her locked up in the garage, scared and hungry. I guess she got in there when he went to the freezer for some of the boxed meals his mom stocked up on, and he didn't notice.

She couldn't wait to dig into her food and then curled up for a long nap in her carpet covered box on a stick thing (I'm not a cat person, OK? I have no idea what they are called), and that was the last time I saw her. It's now been another two days. Yesterday, in the cool of the evening, I went to the mailbox to get the mail and saw, at the side of the road, a little pink collar with a bell attached to it. Oh no. As I bent to pick it up, I tried to recall what the color of her collar, with a bell, is. I am thinking yellow. I hope I am right.

I am sitting in a lamp-lit living room with the TV on at low volume for company, I am on line, reading some stuff, and I become increasingly aware of a strange high-pitched sound outside the bay window. I mute the TV and listen for a moment. It is right outside the window, which is three stories up. A dawning horror creeps over me like a ghost and I quickly type into Google search - 'do bats make a sound'? Turns out that, yes they do make sounds that people can hear. Either when communicating with their young, or fighting. This sounds more like a fight than momma comforting the tykes. I feel like I might have heart failure. I mean, I know there are bats around here at night. I was told that there are. I also saw the evidence of it on the deck one morning when I accidentally left the indoor kitty out on it for the night (it is also three stories up and fully railed so she didn't go anywhere). I found a small pile of poop on one deck chair, and a tiny set of ears attached to a bloody stump on the other. I thought at first it might be a mouse but something about it made me think 'bat'. Turns out that if kitty is left out on the deck for the night, she kills bats. It's happened before.

So sitting in the living room with the hair on the back of my neck standing on end, I now have to get up the courage to go to the doors that lead to said deck, open the screen (it's on the inside for some reason) and then close the glass sliders without letting a bat inside. I am not cut out for this.