“Dr. Saunders?” And when he nodded, she stepped back. “Won’t you come in?”
Doc said, “Thank you, Miss Talley,” and entered.
“If you’ll be seated, Doctor, I’ll get my notebook and—”
“Uh—Miss Talley. I suppose I can dictate here, but I think I’d be distracted and I could do a lot better at my own place. It’s about eight miles out of town, last house on what they call the Bascombe Road. If you could possibly work out there—for taking the dictation, that is; it will be perfectly all right if you do the typing back here. The only thing is that I’m staying there alone and—” He floundered.
Miss Talley smiled slightly. “We’re alone here, Doctor, so that shouldn’t matter. I assure you that I don’t feel the need of a chaperone. Or rather, I’m one myself. I chaperone most of the high school dances and socials. Of course the time involved in traveling—”
“Naturally,” Doc said. “We’re punching the time clock as of now, one p.m. If you’ll get your notebook and pencils—”
Outside, Miss Talley insisted that she wanted to take her own car, the Volkswagen, and follow him out instead of riding with him. She took as a polite lie (which it was) his statement that he had to come back to town anyway at the end of the afternoon so it would be no inconvenience for him to take her out and bring her back, but he finally convinced her; she got into the station wagon with him.
* * *
The quiet, stealthy little cats. Such wonderful hosts, with their soft padded feet, their quickness, their keen hearing. Able to go almost anywhere and to be taken for granted, not noticed.
With several of them—one at a time, of course—the mind thing had visited every farm between the Gross farm and town, except two that had fierce dogs that stayed around the barnyard; one of them had killed the cat-host in use at the time.
But it didn’t seem to matter that he’d had to skip two of the farms; he’d learned nothing of importance at the other ones. He had started to make a survey of the town itself next, starting with the person who logically should have been his best bet as an electronics expert, the local television repairman, but he had proved utterly hopeless as a host, if for no other reason than that he was too tied down for financial reasons.
The big black cat that had shared Willie Chandler’s lunch and then had left him spent the remainder of the afternoon exploring the rest of the town and listening to conversations here and there without learning much worth knowing; it spent the evening similarly until the mind thing remembered the interesting little man called Staunton who had visited the Gross farm with the sheriff, and who had been so interested in the suicide of Siegfried Gross. He decided to let the rest of the town go until he had found and investigated the man called Staunton.
And he must live, the mind thing decided, out farther from town than the Grosses, and on the same road. In the body of a sparrow, the mind thing had flown to the road to try to follow Staunton and had seen two cars moving away, in opposite directions, both too distant for him to catch up with or follow. Since it would have been much more likely that the sheriff would have been driving into Bartlesville, and through it to his office in Wilcox, Staunton must have been going in the opposite direction, away from town.
There were only fifteen or sixteen more farmhouses in that direction before the road ended, and he decided to investigate them the first thing in the morning, before finishing his check of the town.
He started the black cat out of town, but when it was only about halfway along the road it fell; he realized that he had overworked it and made it travel too fast. Not only was it in a state of utter exhaustion, but its feet were bleeding, leaving a noticeable trail. Even a night’s rest, the mind thing realized, wouldn’t restore it enough to make it a good host for another day. He forced the cat to get to its feet and stay that way, to leave the road and run across fields till it dropped dead of exhaustion within less than half a mile.
Early the next morning he took another host, a small gray cat that lived, with several other cats, on the third farm east from the Gross farm, toward the end of the road. He checked its memories first; luckily, it was a cat that had done exploring and from its mental pictures of the occupants of nearby farmhouses the mind thing was able to eliminate five of them, besides the farm on which the gray cat lived, as places where Staunton might be. These five farms included the ones between the Gross farm and the cat’s own home farm, so he was able to start it directly east and skip the next three farms.
From there he checked each house carefully, staying as near the road as he could so he would not miss Staunton if Staunton should drive into town and pass him.
That is just what happened a little after eleven o’clock, when he was moving across a field between two farms, but near the edge of the road. He heard a noisy car coming from the east and hurried to the open in time to see an old station wagon pass on the way into town. The man Staunton was driving it.
At the next farm the gray cat was treed atop a small shed for almost an hour by a dog until the woman of the house, annoyed by the barking, came out and called in the dog. By now the mind thing, correlating many things, including Tommy Hoffman’s memories, was sure that Staunton had come from the last house. Staunton, from his appearance and from his way of talking at the time he had been at the Gross house, was almost certainly not a farmer, and only the last house on this road was not being farmed. Someone in the East, Tommy had known vaguely, had bought it and lived in it only a month or two each year, using it as a base for fishing and relative seclusion. Almost certainly, Staunton would he living there.
He inspected the next two farms only casually and came to the last house.
Yes, there were recent tire tracks in the yard—where Staunton apparently kept his car, since there was no garage—and other signs of recent occupancy. But had Staunton left permanently?
Luckily there seemed to be no dog on the premises, so the cat was able to examine the house closely and at leisure. There were several cellar windows at ground level and through them he was able to hear the throbbing of a gasoline generator and the hum of an electric motor. That meant Staunton had not left permanently, and would be back. But was he living here alone, or had he left someone behind him in the house?
The cat made a full circuit of the house, looking for a way in. There was none. Several of the downstairs windows were open, but only an inch or two. Only one upstairs window was open wide.
The mind thing realized he would have to wait till Staunton came back to investigate further. But that might not be until late afternoon or evening, so he looked over the surrounding area. Keeping out of sight most of the time, in case someone was in the house, he made several circuits of the yard. The only building aside from the house was a small wooden one that had probably served as a tool shed, but the door was gone and the shed was empty. There were signs of what had once been the foundation for a barn, but the barn was long gone; either it had burned or had been razed for its lumber.
He went close to the house again, this time pausing under each window to listen for the sound of voices or of someone moving inside, but he heard nothing.
He walked over to where the cleared area of the yard ended in clumps of weeds and lay down behind one of them to wait. He let his host sleep; there was, he’d realized after what he’d done to the black cat, no advantage in pushing a host beyond its capacity and having to get a new one for each operation. And he knew it would awaken instantly at the sound of an approaching car.
The wait wasn’t as long as he’d feared it might be. The cat had been sleeping only half an hour when its sensitive ears told the mind thing that a car was turning into the yard. He opened his host’s eyes and moved to peer through the weeds.
It was Staunton’s station wagon, and Staunton was driving it, but there was a woman with him. A tall, thin, elderly woman.
The mind thing knew her—from Tommy Hoffman’s memories, which he had made his own. She was Miss Talley, and she had been Tommy Hoffman’s h
igh school English teacher. (Tally Ho, the students used to call her, among themselves.) Was she a friend of Staunton’s? Was he another teacher? Then he saw that she carried a shorthand notebook and remembered that she sometimes supplemented her income by doing stenographic or bookkeeping work outside of school hours or during school vacations. That, then, must be Staunton’s reason for bringing her here. That was good; if he was going to dictate letters to her, the mind thing could learn plenty about Staunton by listening to those letters.
The moment they had gone inside, he ran to the house and around it, so close that he could not be seen from the inside, pausing briefly to listen under each window to find out what room they were in. He heard them—their voices, but not the words—from under a window at the back, probably a kitchen window. He crouched under it to leap up onto the window sill, as he had done at other houses. From there he’d he able to hear everything said. And if he was seen, nothing would be thought of it, as he now knew by experience. Possibly if they were people who liked cats, they might even open the window and ask him in, as Willie Chandler had done. That would be even better.
He tried the jump and found to his annoyance that he was short by a full eight inches even of getting his host’s front paws on the window ledge. The damned cat was too small. Any one of the fully grown cats that had been former hosts could have reached that ledge easily. For a moment he considered getting rid of his current host as quickly as he could kill it and trying for another—but the new one might be miles away, too far to bring here before Staunton had finished his dictating. He must keep that as a last desperate resort if everything else failed.
Quickly he ran to the back door, which would also open into the kitchen, put the cat’s ear against it; the door was too thick; again he could hear voices but not words.
Around the house. Still the one upstairs window was the only one open wider than an inch or two. But he saw something now that he had not noticed before. There was a tree, an elm, at that side of the house, and one of its branches dipped near the open window, the tip of the branch about four feet above the sill. The branch tapered considerably; possibly the cat’s weight would bend it down to a point from which he could jump to the window sill.
Quickly the gray cat climbed the tree and worked its way warily along the branch. Yes, as it neared the end, the branch bent; his jump from the end of it wouldn’t be too difficult. But first, he looked into the room—it was a bedroom—and made sure that the door to it was open. It would have done him no good at all to get in, only to find himself blocked by a closed bedroom door.
He jumped. Then from the window sill he looked back and saw that, as he had suspected, it would not also serve him as an exit. The branch had sprung back and it was too far away from him to jump to it from the window. But other ways out would no doubt present themselves; Staunton wouldn’t keep all the downstairs windows closed or almost closed all of the time.
He ran out into the hallway and down the stairs, and then quietly padded along the hallway that led from the front doorway to the kitchen. He stopped just short of the turn in the passage; it was a perfect listening post.
There was the sound of a refrigerator door opening, and now he could hear the words that were spoken.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Are you sure you won’t have a beer with me, Miss Talley?” Doc asked. “Dictating is dry work, and taking it down must be even drier.”
Miss Talley smiled slightly, the first time Doc had seen her do so. “If you insist, Doctor. But you must promise to keep it a deep secret. In towns as small as this one, teachers simply do not drink or smoke.”
“I’ll keep your secret,” Doc said over his shoulder as he took a second can of beer from the refrigerator. “I wish I could tempt you to smoke too, but alas, I have only pipes to offer. Uh—it won’t bother you if I smoke while I’m dictating, will it?”
“Not at all. I rather like the smell of pipe smoke, except possibly in very confined quarters. And this is a magnificently large kitchen you have.”
“The better to pace in. I like it; I practically live in it. Except when I’m out fishing or in town.” He came back with two glasses of beer, put one in front of Miss Talley and the other across the table from it. He sat down. “You can put down that pencil, Miss Talley,” he said. “I’m too lazy to start dictating this minute. Unless you’d rather have me dictate than listen to me talk. Sometimes I think my students would rather have me hew to the line more than I do.”
“Your students? Are you a teacher too, Doctor?”
“Yes, Miss Talley. Physics, at M. I. T. I specialize in electronics and, though to a lesser degree, in nuclear physics.”
Miss Talley had put down her pencil; she stared at him. “Staunton—Dr. Ralph S. Staunton? Of course. And you’ve worked on all the big satellite projects.”
Doc smiled. “Not quite all. But I’m really flattered, Miss Talley, that you’ve heard of me. Are you interested in science?”
“Of course I am. Who isn’t? Especially when it comes to matters of reaching the moon and the planets. I’ve been an avid reader of science fiction for a great many years.”
“You, Miss Talley?”
“Of course. Why not?”
Why not indeed, Doc thought, feeling himself backed into a corner. He could hardly tell her that she had looked to him to be just about the least likely person to be an avid reader of science fiction, so he decided he’d best treat the “Why not?” as a rhetorical question. He said, “I’m afraid I do my escape reading in the form of mystery novels. I know some scientists do read science fiction, and enjoy it, but when I read for relaxation I like to get as far away from science as I can.”
“I can understand that,” Miss Talley said. “Is what you’re going to dictate now scientific matter, or are you just catching up on correspondence?”
“Not either—and I’m afraid it’s difficult to explain just what I am doing. But something strange has been going on near here. I’ve been—well, investigating a bit, and I want to put what I’ve learned thus far down in the form of a statement of my investigation to date, before I might forget a point or two.”
Miss Talley stared at him. “You mean—the suicides?”
“Yes. Don’t tell me they’ve aroused your curiosity too? I thought everyone around here, from the sheriff down, took them as perfectly ordinary events.”
“Not quite, Doctor. Incidentally, I know now where I saw you before—at the inquest on Tommy Hoffman. You must have been at the back; I passed you on my way out.”
Doc filled his pipe and started to tamp it down. “I was there. I didn’t see you, that I recall, but that’s because I was trying to keep my eye on Mr. Garner and reach him before he got away. I didn’t succeed, but talked to the sheriff instead.”
“You mean you had further information on something connected with— Oh, never mind answering that, Doctor. If it’s anything connected with Tommy’s suicide, I’ll learn about it while you’re dictating; there’s no need for you to say it twice.”
Doc waited till he finished lighting his pipe before answering. “That makes sense, Miss Talley. But you say you’ve been interested too, so I’m going to ask what you know first. If you have any relevant facts that I don’t already have, I might as well learn them before I start so I can add them to what I do know. Now, on Tommy Hoffman, do you know anything at all that didn’t come out at the inquest?”
“Not facts exactly, but I knew Tommy. Charlotte, too, for that matter. I taught them both freshman English and had them in a class of mine in great English literature again last year. And I know that Tommy was as sane a boy as I’ve ever known. Not bright and not much of a scholar, but sane, ordinary, and uncomplicated. And perfectly sound physically. I talked to Dr. Gruen—he delivered Tommy and was his doctor all of his life—and he tells me that Tommy was in perfect physical shape. Measles and whooping cough, both years ago, were the only illnesses he ever had.”
“But that could mean the doctor hadn’t seen
him for quite a few years.”
“It could, but as it happens it doesn’t. Tommy was injured playing high school baseball last spring. No, not a head injury; it was a broken rib. Dr. Gruen treated it. And our school has a strict rule, a very good one I believe, requiring that when a student is injured in any athletic contest he must have a thorough physical examination before his re-admittance to the team. Dr. Gruen told me, when I asked him last week, that when he examined Tommy only about two months ago he was absolutely sound and in perfect health. Mens sana in corpore sano. I can guarantee the mental part; literally or figuratively, he didn’t know what a neurosis is.”
“Nor apparently,” said Doc drily, “was he suffering from sexual repression. What do you know about Charlotte Garner?”
“A good girl—and I mean that; I’m not a prude, Doctor, despite my age and occupation. And a smart girl, a little smarter than Tommy was. Even smart enough never to have let him suspect she was the smarter of the two.”
“Imaginative?”
“No, very literal, Doctor. If you’re thinking about her story about the field mouse, it would have happened just as she described it, not exaggerated in the slightest. And I admire her courage for having managed to bring it out at the inquest, despite the coroner and the sheriff both pooh-poohing it as irrelevant when they talked to her before the inquest. I don’t know how it might not be irrelevant, but it’s too—too bizarre an episode to be brushed off when it occurred in connection with as bizarre a suicide as that of Tommy.”
“I agree with you, Miss Talley. Anything else you can tell me? Aside from what was brought out at the inquest, of course.”
“I’m afraid not. And I know very little about the suicide of Mr. Gross. I mentioned ‘two suicides’ simply because of the coincidence of two suicides so close together, in time and in location, when we hadn’t had a suicide closer than Wilcox for years, and when there could be no possible connection between them. I mean, Tommy must have known Gross by sight and possibly vice versa, but they wouldn’t really have known each other.”
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