Detective work solves whodunit

I love a good mystery. Little did I realize, however, that a lifetime of reading whodunits would help solve our own puzzle.

Join me in ... The Case of the Missing Bottle Opener.

The place: Our kitchen.

The time: Evening.

First, I have to explain that I'm attached to our bottle opener/corkscrew. My husband and I have been through dozens of bottle openers and corkscrews, and I'm obsessively fond of the one we've settled on.

On the evening in question, I was working on supper and decided to open a bottle of wine. As always, I reached into the drawer where the bottle opener/corkscrew always is.

It wasn't. Hmm. Strange.

I looked in the dish drainer, the dishwasher, the cabinet with the glasses and the scary drawer with the knives. ... Nothing.

I searched the whole house. ... Nothing.

Obviously, someone had stolen it. There was nothing to do now but draw up a list of suspects and find the culprit - and my bottle opener.

On any given day, I have a husband, daughters, son-in-law, friends and others wandering through the kitchen.

I eliminated our four cats, who can open cabinet doors but haven't graduated to drawers (yet) and our 19-month-old grandson, Capt. Adorable, who is quite capable of getting into places he's not supposed to but is so excited at his own success when he sneaks past parental control that we all know when he snags some contraband.

That left my daughters and son-in-law, who have perfectly good bottle openers of their own, and my friends, who all understand the importance of finding the right bottle opener/corkscrew and would never deprive me of mine.

The process of elimination had left one person standing: My husband.

Who else could be in the kitchen without suspicion? Who else appreciated the bottle opener's virtues?

I was a little fuzzy about motive - I mean, before he'd always used the bottle opener and then put it back, but I was determined to use my best detecting methods to find out. He was driving between work and home, so I called him, planning to use subtlety and nuance to find the answer.

"Did you take the bottle opener?" I blurted out. Subtlety is overrated.

He paused for a minute and then started laughing.

Turns out he had been using the bottle opener in the garage, set some newspapers in his car and somehow the bottle opener ended up in the car under the papers.

That's his story, anyway. And he's sticking to it.

Cathy Wood is a freelance writer living in the Shoals. For more from her, visit TimesDaily.com.