LINCOLN — The chronicles of Narnia the cat began, not with a magic wardrobe, but with an open car door and an inattentive moment in a Lincoln hotel parking lot.
They entered their final chapter Saturday, with Narnia heading out to rejoin her family.
Along the way there was a U.S. Army recruiting truck, a cat-loving auto body shop owner and an identifying microchip.
Without them, Lt. Col. Denise Coakley and her family might be still wondering and worrying about the fate of their 6-year-old black lap cat.
"Everybody's excited that she's well and we're going to get her back," Coakley said Sunday. "When you lose a pet, it's like losing a member of the family."
The story began early this month with Coakley, a 25-year Army nurse, returning from a deployment in Iraq.
While she reported to work at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., her husband, Walter Konstantynowicz, started the family's move to Ft. Lewis, Wash., where Coakley is being reassigned.
Konstantynowicz, traveling with the couple's two younger daughters and two cats, stopped for the night in Lincoln on Aug. 3.
Narnia slipped out while they unloaded suitcases. She was gone before they could react.
The family called for her throughout the night and into the next morning. Eventually, devastated, they had to move on.
Narnia, meanwhile, found herself in the maze of traffic and businesses surrounding the Lincoln airport and Interstate 80.
Despite being declawed on all four paws and living indoors since the family found her as a stray kitten in Colorado, she survived several days on her own.
But trust an Army cat to find shelter with the Army.
Somewhere along the way, she climbed up in the body of a Ford F-350 truck used for Army recruitment.
Last Monday morning, Doug Kielian, an auto body shop owner driving in northwest Lincoln, saw the truck pull out of a hotel parking lot and head south on Northwest 12th Street.
When the truck took off at a stoplight, he noticed a black object bounce out from under the rear of the truck and slide across the road.
The object then got up and scampered across the far lane into the grass.
"I recognized, oh, my gosh, it's a cat," Kielian said.
A confirmed animal lover and longtime volunteer at the Cat House, a Lincoln cat shelter, he stopped immediately to see if the cat was OK.
She was, other than being a bit shook up. And it didn't take much coaxing to get Narnia to come to him and allow herself to be picked up.
Kielian's wife, Stephanie, then took the cat to a veterinarian for a quick check and to scan for an implanted microchip.
Turned out she had one, which led the Kielians to a happy and relieved Coakley.
Coakley said all of the family's animals, including Cotton, the other cat, and Ebony, their labrador, are microchipped for identification.
The chips proved their usefulness when Ebony took off twice, she said. This is the first time for Narnia.
"It's peace of mind," she said.
Narnia and her family should be reunited later this month.
Coakley's sister, Pat Chambers, drove from Gladstone, Mo., on Saturday to pick up the cat.
Narnia will stay with Chambers until Coakley, who grew up in Kansas City, makes the cross-country drive to her new station.
"I'm pretty amazed that it worked," Chambers said. "I feel very lucky that she's gotten her back alive."
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