FAIRHOPE, Ala. — Bill Setzer and Karen Wiggins said they never gave up hope, and 14 months later they got the call they’d been praying for.

“I think I’ve got your cat,” said Glenda Turner to the two owners of the 10-year-old black-and-white cat, who escaped accidentally from a cage at Bay Animal Clinic in Montrose on Sept. 8, 2008. “I’m about 99 percent sure this is Sylvester. I’m almost positive.”

Setzer and Wiggins were returning home from a vacation and still several hours away from Fairhope when they got the phone call that came just a few weeks before what will be a special Thanksgiving this year.

“Tears came to my eyes,” said Setzer, when he heard Turner’s words on a cell phone while driving from Georgia toward South Alabama. “I told myself, I don’t have to look anymore.”

And look, he and wife, Karen, had.

They put up flyers and ran ads in local newspapers for months and scoured the neighborhood for signs of their beloved cat, day after day and night after night.

Wiggins said whenever an ad would hit the stands, they would get a half dozen calls immediately with people saying they thought they might have “our Sylvester.”

But those calls never panned out.

“I went on some wild goose chases,” Setzer said. “So many people were so nice and caring. It shows you the good side of folks.”

Enter Turner, a former accountant and mortgage banker from Chicago, who moved to the Fairhope area and got into the animal rescue business, founding the nonprofit Fairhope Cat Coalition in 2000, which traps feral cats and has them spayed or neutered to keep the local feline population from growing.

She’s one of three core volunteers and works upward of 50 hours a week, taking calls from people who’ve been feeding lost or stray cats in their neighborhoods.

She’d received a call about some cats in the Montrose area and went out there the first weekend in November to humanely trap the ones she could and then get them to Bay Animal Clinic, where she had made an appointment in case she was successful. Vet offices like that one offer low-cost services to nonprofit groups like hers, she said

“I looked closer and said, ‘You know, this cat looks really familiar’,” she recollected about looking through the cage at the long-haired black cat with the furry white mane and half-white face.

“It doesn’t happen very often,” said Turner, of finding lost cats and being able to help return them to their owners. “It was extremely gratifying. I know what it’s like to lose a dog or cat.”

Turner said she had helped during some of the initial searches for Sylvester in the fall of 2008, and knew what he looked like. But she also keeps flyers and posters of lost cats, so she will recognize one if she sees it.

“I almost ran off the road,” said Setzer, when he got the call from Turner.

He and Wiggins then called Bay Animal Clinic, where Turner had taken the cat, to let them know they were on the way but would be racing to make it by closing.

“We’re not going anywhere,” one of the vet’s employees said.

Setzer said “it was like a reunion” when the vet’s office staff saw the cat they’d come to know over the years. They also knew well about the year-long-search to find him, he said.

“They had a party,” he said of the vet’s office when Turner showed up with the cat who had been having to live on his own for so long.

As the crow flies, Sylvester was never far from home and just about a half-mile from where he got lost.

“He was a little on the scraggly side when we saw him that first time at Bay Animal,” Wiggins said, as she held Sylvester close a couple weeks after his return home.

She placed Sylvester in Setzer’s lap and pretty soon, Sylvester’s dad, a large black cat named Big Willie came up and nuzzled his son, nose to nose, as Bill scratched Sylvester's neck.

“She said she would be looking out, and she kept her word,” Setzer said of Turner’s promise to keep an eye out for Sylvester.

“We always felt like he was alive out there somewhere,” he said.

And with that, Sylvester purred loudly.