When playing in the Wakefields’ back yard in book four, Jessica and Elizabeth discovered a stray cat in the bushes. In this book, the weather changes and the girls decide that the only thing to do is take the cat inside out of the rain, even though Ned and Steven are both allergic to cats.

The girls name the cat Misty, and set up a home for her inside their wardrobe. Surprisingly enough, Misty is quite content to be shut in a cupboard for most of each day, with only a blanket and a box of dirt as her toilet. She somehow remains undetected, despite the twins acting very strangely and asking for glasses of milk and sneaking cans of tuna out of the kitchen.

At school, Jess and Liz tell a couple of friends about their secret cat, but soon everyone knows all about Misty. Their classmates all want to go to the Wakefields’ class to meet her. They’re particularly worried when tattletale Caroline Pearce turns up on their doorstep and asks to see Misty, but she actually saves the day, covering for the twins when Alice hears a sound from the cupboard and smells fish in the girls’ room.

Ned and Steven, by this point, are quite ill from their allergy to Misty. The twins feel guilty, but it is only when Misty starts acting very strangely that they finally confess to Alice, worried that the cat is sick. Alice is remarkably calm about the revelation (probably because she’s used to much worse—just wait until Jessica’s in high school, Alice!) and reassures the girls that Misty is perfectly healthy: she’s just about to have kittens.

All ends well, with Caroline’s parents allowing her to adopt Misty and three of the five kittens finding homes before the end of the book.

This is quite an unusual one, in that the twins are not punished at all for doing something that they know they shouldn’t—very rare for a franchise that delights in heaping karma upon Jessica’s head. I like that they put the emphasis on the good intentions of the twins and that Liz and Jess worked out a way to solve the problem themselves, instead of being rescued by adults.

As an aside, I wonder how many small children tried to hide animals in their cupboards after reading this.

00002541