Okie doke, when I'm at home again I will upload more pictures. This work computer still won't let me! If you look at my pictures of George (Susan's brother) in my post in the Newbie section, his reddish color is the color of Susan's red spots. As you can see from my avatar she was pretty much just black and grey when she was a kitten, but as she got older she started having the red areas. The mother cat was definitely lots of different colors; tortie or torbie I'm not sure. I wish I had a picture of her but I don't.
More pictures would be nice But from what I can see now she's not a tortie. She's a Brown Tabby. Some Tabby's are really warm, that warm that the fur inbetween the tabby pattern turns to brown-ish. That's what I see here. She's a warm Tabby.
Tortie means that she has sections that are made of the base color black, and sections that are made of the base color orange - they basically have 2 base colors mixed together on one cat. This means that the tabby pattern is black as well as parts with red. I don't see any of the tabby in a red coloring, but just the fur inbetween is of a warmer color. And thus, I would label her as a Brown (Black) Tabby.
I had never heard of a brown tabby. I don't know much about the names of different colorings. That makes sense that she would be one. She is definitely a beauty and loves it when I tell her so! She has gorgeous eyes too. I'll try to get a close up of her eyes. :-)
How I understand it: a torbie starts as a tortoiseshell, which is black and "red" as the orange-er shades are known. The "bie/by" comes in when you add tabby in the black coloring (not in the red, as red coloring is basically tabby by default).
So Susan to me looks like a coloring that I would call torbie given that she has patches of the orange-ish color and tabby markings in the black. I figure it should work in reverse: if you take away the tabby markings, she would be a tortie right? So that would make her a torbie. But I could be missing a detail. It's possible I misidentified my own cat who I also thought was torbie. Susan has very similar pattern, right down to the white chin bib, which seems to be common.
Her mother was tortie and her father was orange and white. I no longer have her though...she and her brother got very sick. Georgie died of FIP but Susie pulled through. She is up for adoption by someone who can afford all the meds she needs. I'm planning to get kittens in December when they are old enough...I will be back here with pictures when they come home. :-)