That really got to me!!!!!  what a great story.   Jean.

This is so funny because almost exactly the same thing happened to my first
cat (except that he was walled-up at most for a couple of hours, not for
days).  I was in graduate school at the time and was home for the summer.
My parents were having some work done in the wall of the basement.  The
contractor finished his work, plastered over the hole, and left.  A short
time later, I could hear my cat crying.  I went all over the house looking
and calling for him.  In response, I could hear him crying but could not
find him.  At some point, I looked overhead -- and there I could see just
the tip of his little paw sticking out from the *air conditioner vent.*
Moreover, he was in the wall at ceiling-height of the ground floor, so he
had crawled up the wall from the basement.  My father went into a closet on
the second story, where he knew the pipe that had been installed led.  He
cut a hole there, and my cat came crawling up to us.  He was smart, too (the
cat, that is) -- the first hole was too small, but he did not try to push
his way through and possibly get stuck.  Instead, he backed down and just
stayed there while my father enlarged the hole.  (This is the same cat that
also managed to get into the wall through a small hole in a motel room -- I
learned to carefully scour every place we went for holes of any sort!)

MaryL