For a moment the cat blinked at him sleepily and then it put its head down again and went back to sleep—or pretended to. If it understood his offer, it wasn’t having any.
Doc sighed; he hadn’t really expected the cat to go and sit on the target. If it was—well, if it wasn’t altogether a cat, it would be giving itself away by doing that. And shooting it would have been the last thing he’d have done under those circumstances. Especially with a gun he hadn’t bothered to load.
He put the pistol and the target back where he’d taken them from and went into the kitchen. He’d have a final can of beer and a snack, if something in the refrigerator looked good to him, and then go to bed.
The sound of the refrigerator door brought the cat from the sofa into the kitchen. It paid no attention to anything he said but it had come to recognize that sound—or more likely was familiar with it from having been in the Kramers’ kitchen—and he couldn’t get anything from the refrigerator without the cat being there watching him. It didn’t beg, but it was on the spot and ready for any handouts he might give it.
He found a few slices of liverwurst, dropped one into the cat’s dish, and made himself a sandwich with the rest of it. He opened a can of beer and went over to the table. The cat finished its share of the liverwurst and went back to the living room, presumably to lie on the sofa again. Doc had managed to convince it that once he’d taken his own food to the table, further begging was useless. Besides, the cat couldn’t be really hungry. It came to him when he went to the refrigerator only because it wanted a snack of something different from its staple diet of cat food and milk.
Doc got the flashlight before he turned off the lights; he still used one to light himself up to the bedroom as he had the first night the cat had been in the house, but not for quite the same reason. Now he simply didn’t want to step on or fall over the cat in darkness. Since it could see in the dark itself, it couldn’t realize that he couldn’t.
The next day, Friday, nothing special happened. He made his usual trip into town but found no mail waiting for him, and didn’t have to do any shopping. He dropped in at the newspaper office on the excuse of canceling his ad about having found a cat, but mostly just to talk to Ed Hollis a while to make sure nothing unusual had happened since the day before. Nothing had, except that the Garners had found a buyer for their farm and were planning to move west, possibly to the Ozarks, possibly on to California. And Gus Hoffman, Tommy’s father, was putting an ad in the Bartlesville paper offering his farm for sale, and was planning to run one in the Green Bay paper too.
“My guess,” Hollis said, “is that that means Charlotte’s pregnant. The Garners moving, I mean.”
“You’d better not put a guess like that in your paper, Ed.”
Hollis looked at Doc so resentfully that Doc apologized.
“But why,” Hollis wondered aloud, “would that make Gus Hoffman decide to move too? I mean, with Tommy dead, a scandal—not that there’d be much of one anyway—wouldn’t hurt Gus.”
“You’re a damn fool, Ed. Hoffman will stick close to the Garners from here on in. He hasn’t a wife or a child—but he’s got a grandson or granddaughter on the way. Illegitimate or not, he’ll be crazy about that kid.”
“Hell, yes. Why didn’t I think of that? Probably, wherever they go, he’ll talk the Garners into letting him come in with them on a farm big enough for him too. And Charlotte will be a very young widow named Mrs. Hoffman and Gus will be her father-in-law. So the kid will even have Gus’s name, and Gus will again have something to live for.”
Doc had so few errands to do in town that day that he got back quite early and decided he might as well spend the rest of the afternoon fishing. It would be his first time fishing since he’d run over the dog and had through that episode become interested in the strange details surrounding the death of Tommy Hoffman.
He was glad to notice that the cat had apparently reconciled itself to staying in his house; at least—although he took precautions both times—it made no effort to get past him when he let himself in to get his fishing equipment or let himself out after he had gathered what he needed. It was becoming acclimated.
Or was it because it understood everything he’d told it and knew that he’d promised it its freedom on Monday anyway? He put that thought out of his mind and decided to concentrate on the pleasure of his hike to the nearest trout stream and his fishing when he reached it.
The fishing was quite good, considering that it was the wrong time of day for it. Within an hour he had five medium-sized trout in his creel. Enjoyable as the fishing was in itself, that satisfied him. It was more than he could eat today, possibly even tomorrow, even with the help of a cat. And fresh trout were infinitely more tasty than ones that had been in the refrigerator for more than a day or so.
After his return he cleaned the fish and cooked three of them. He ate two and the cat had no trouble disposing of the third, so avidly that Doc was amused. He said, “All right, Cat, consider that a bribe if you want. But over all, if you decide to stay with me, I’ll promise you a trout about every third day. Not every day, though.”
At breakfast Monday morning he gave thought to his decision to release the cat about mid-morning, then see whether, after five or six hours of freedom, it would return at the usual feeding time he had established for it. Oh, he’d do it; he couldn’t keep, didn’t want to keep, a cat shut up any longer than the few days he’d decided to keep it. He’d let it out; it would be a free agent as to whether it returned to him or not. But there was one little thing he could do and might as well do. He had a pair of excellent binoculars with him. The moment he let the cat out of the door he’d take them upstairs. From the window of one or another of the rooms up there he’d be able to follow it quite a distance, no matter which direction it went. If it headed toward the Kramer farm, he’d probably never see it again; if it went any other direction he might. If it stayed around the immediate vicinity, just wandering in the yard, it would be almost certain to come back in if he called it at feeding time.
Looking out, he saw that a light drizzle had started and wondered if a real rain was coming. If so, the cat probably wouldn’t go out at all; cats hate water. But the drizzle lasted only ten or fifteen minutes, just enough to lay the dust and moisten the ground a bit.
At ten o’clock exactly—might as well keep his promise on the dot, he thought; he’d said the middle of the morning—he went into the living room past the cat on the sofa and to the front door. He opened it wide and said, “Well, Cat, want out a while?”
The cat understood the action if not the words. It got down from the sofa, stretched itself leisurely and unhurriedly, and then padded past him through the open doorway.
Quickly he got the binoculars and went upstairs with them. He tried the window of the front bedroom first and it turned out to be the right one; the cat was about halfway across the front yard, heading for the place where the road dead-ended. It was neither hurrying nor dawdling, walking unconcernedly at the pace of a cat that knows where it’s going but is in no hurry to get there.
Probably heading back to the Kramers’, he thought. Well, if that’s what it wanted that was all right, and maybe all to the good. The Kramer woman’s attitude in giving it to him had shown him that it might not be as easy as he had assumed for him to find a home for it later. And, since he certainly wouldn’t abandon an animal, he might have to take it back to Boston with him, and that would be a confounded nuisance.
But when it reached the dead end of the road, the cat stopped. It turned its head and stared back at the house it had just left. Doc stepped hastily back from the window, but kept the cat in the field of the binoculars. Was it looking back in indecision as to whether it wanted to go home, after all? Or was it watching to see if he was watching it? He didn’t think it had seen him, or that it could see him now that he’d stepped back from the window.
It stayed there half a minute, either making up its mind or making sure that it wasn’t being watche
d. Which?
Then it started again, going a little faster this time, and not down the road that would take it to the Kramers’. It went right across the end of the road instead, into the woods. He could follow it only a few yards after that.
Doc put down the binoculars and scratched his head. After all, its behavior was probably perfectly normal, but—
Then he remembered the drizzle that had fallen a while half an hour ago. Because of that, it would be leaving paw prints. And why shouldn’t he follow them a while, for as far as he could, and see if he could find out where it was going? After all, he had nothing else to do right now that had to be done today, and a walk would be as pleasant a way of filling in the time as any other.
He started at once, delaying only to put on a hat and to hang a raincoat over his arm, in case the rain might start again. The cat’s paw prints were clear across the yard and once he bent down and studied a few prints to memorize their size and shape; he didn’t want to end up tracking some other small animal instead.
It was harder going when he got to the woods, for the prints didn’t show in grassy areas, nor did they show at all clearly under trees; the rain hadn’t been hard enough to work its way through the leaves and under every tree was a completely dry circle.
Then it got easier again when he realized that the cat, wherever it was going, had been traveling in an almost perfect straight line.
After that, Doc was able to make better time; he simply walked in a straight line himself across any grassy or dry areas and didn’t have to cast about on the other side to pick up the trail; it would be right at the place he himself came out.
He was at least a mile and a half into the woods when the trail ended. Suddenly, at the edge of a small stream of water that wasn’t over four feet wide at this point. Had the cat jumped across it? He jumped across it himself and tried to pick up the trail on the other side. It simply wasn’t there. The ground for several feet on either side of the stream was bare and moist; the cat’s prints leading down to the water were as clear as any he’d found. But the cat hadn’t jumped across or its prints would be just as clear as the ones leading to the stream.
Not quite daring to allow himself to think as yet, Doc followed the stream along the far side. Downstream, of course. The current was slow.
It took him only about twenty paces to see what he had been afraid he would see, ever since he reached the stream. In the water, drowned, one small gray cat.
It was even more obviously a suicide than the dog that had run in front of his car, the owl that had flown through a window, the field mouse that had attacked Tommy Hoffman, or the other cat that had attacked a vicious dog ten times its size.
And it had lived with him for days. It had refused his gambit with the pistol, it had not tried to starve itself or to bring about its own death in any other way.
It had waited till it could commit the act unobserved, so deep in the woods that—if he had not still had a residue of suspicion and the advantage of that brief drizzle that had made it trackable—its body would probably never have been found.
Had it, after all, understood every word he’d said to it and intelligently decided, when he promised to let it go this morning, that it would stand less chance of giving itself away by waiting that long than by making any attempt to die sooner?
But—suicide is no end in itself. What was the purpose?
The cat had been an ordinary cat once; he’d traced its origin. The dog Buck had been an ordinary dog until it had run away from its master only a short time before it had found death under the wheels of a car.
Was something using animals, each for some mysterious purpose, and then getting free of them by causing them to kill themselves?
What had been in the mind of that cat, all the time it had been with him?
And what of the human beings, Tommy Hoffman and Siegfried Gross? Had something been using them, controlling their minds, causing them to commit some action too difficult for an animal host, and then causing them to kill themselves?
But what? And why?
He remembered stroking the cat and enjoying its purring under his hand. What had he really been stroking?
He shuddered. The slight scare he’d had the night the cat had hidden from him—had that been only Tuesday night?—was nothing now. It had been based on nothing more than hunch or intuition.
Then he’d been only guessing. Now he knew.
But what did he know? Only that he was frightened.
He found a stick and maneuvered the small body to the edge of the water where he could reach it. He picked it up gingerly and carried it back with him to the house. He wrapped it in an old blanket and put it in the back of the station wagon. To take it to the laboratory in Green Bay and have it autopsied? He hadn’t decided yet, but the body was there now if he should decide to take it in. But what could he tell them to check for? There was certainly no remote suspicion of rabies this time; the cat had been—or seemed—completely normal when he had let it out less than an hour before.
He smoked a pipe and thought a while and then realized what was the first thing he must do. He got the envelope with the copies of the statement he had dictated to Miss Talley and drove to town with them. He should have mailed them sooner; now he’d get them in the mail as soon as he could add the story of the cat to what they already contained and dictate the covering letters.
Miss Talley was not at home. There was a note on her door, “Back about 3 p.m.” It was time for lunch anyway, so he drove back to the downtown district and ate, then killed time at the tavern drinking a few beers. He had several chances to get into conversation, but he didn’t feel like talking. He could hardly bring up suddenly now what he was thinking about; there was too much to tell all at once to anyone with whom he hadn’t talked before. And that left only Miss Talley.
He watched the clock and reached her place a few minutes early, but she was there.
“Doctor!” she said, when she saw his face. “Come in. Has something new happened?”
He nodded, a little grimly. “It’s about the cat. But I want to dictate it as an addendum to the statement I dictated to you last week. If you’ll get your notebook—”
Miss Talley got it, and her eyes danced as excitedly as her pencil point as he talked and she wrote. He told the whole story of the cat, from her first glimpse of it during his previous dictation to his finding it drowned in the little creek. He went into detail and it took him over an hour.
Miss Talley looked up then. “Doctor! Besides mailing these to your two friends, you’ve got to go to the sheriff now. Or call in the F. B. I.—or something, if he won’t take it seriously.”
Doc nodded slowly. “I’m going to, Miss Talley. I’ll tell you my plans before I leave, but first, while I’m dictating, let me give you the two covering letters that go with the statements that I’m going to mail out.”
He dictated again, and the letters ran longer than he had anticipated; it was almost five o’clock when he had finished. “Miss Talley, about how long do you think it will take you to transcribe all that?”
“A few hours, possibly four, but I’ll start it right away; I won’t even eat until I’ve finished. While I’m doing it you can go see the sheriff and—”
“No, I want to wait till I have a copy of the full statement to have him read when I see him. It’ll impress him more that way, I think. After all, outside of the gray cat episode, nothing in here will be new to him, and for me just to tell him over again—well, I’d rather have him read the statement.
“And I’m not going to let you work all evening without eating, or waste time cooking for yourself either. Put your coat on and we’ll eat together in town. Then I’ll drive you back here and leave you. You can do your typing, and in the morning I’ll talk to the sheriff and get those letters in the mail—airmail special delivery. It’ll be too late by the time you finish this evening, even if I’d let you work straight through.”
“Well—I suppose it would, even if
you went in to Green Bay to mail them. But are you going to take the chance of staying out there tonight? Everything that’s happened has been, or has started, along that road you live on. And the last thing, the cat, right where you live!”
Doc smiled. “I’ll be all right tonight, Miss Talley,” he told her.
And he was, because the mind thing was otherwise occupied.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The mind thing, finally freed of his annoying imprisonment in a host that had become of no further use to him, was back in his own body, his own shell, under the back steps of the Gross farmhouse. He felt relieved and well satisfied with what he had just done. He had taken his cat-host so far into the woods before drowning it that its body would probably never be found. Staunton might wonder if he learned that the cat had not returned to its former home—but Staunton would never learn that because tonight, while he slept, he would cease to be Staunton; the mind thing would have him.
The mind thing’s plans were simple, and he’d had plenty of time to think them out while, as a cat, he’d nothing to do but laze around Staunton’s house and play the cat role to the hilt. He felt sure that he’d done just that; he’d managed not to do a single thing out of character for a cat. He’d been tempted, just for a second, when Staunton had offered to shoot him but he’d seen through the trap easily. If he’d gone to sit on the target on the floor, Staunton’s suspicions would have been verified and shooting him would have been the last thing Staunton would have done. Instead, Staunton would probably have caged him and kept him indefinitely for intensive study. Possibly he’d even have fed him intravenously by force to keep him from achieving death by starvation.
But all that was safely past now, and after tonight he’d be really safe. He’d be in control of the only human being who was a menace to him and who at the same time was his optimum host.
It was of such major importance that he take over Staunton at the earliest possible time that he wouldn’t even take the risk of using an animal or bird host for the purpose. Mrs. Gross would be safer and surer. He’d take her over as soon as she went to sleep. He’d wait until, say, one o’clock, by which time everyone between here and Staunton’s place would certainly be sound asleep; then he’d have her carry him that distance. If there was a light on in Staunton’s place, she’d wait until a full hour after it had gone out, then hide him within range of the sleeping Staunton. Then she’d come back home and die. He’d make it look like an accident—a fall down the stairs, perhaps, in the middle of the night. True, her death, in any way except a natural one, would be a suspicious coincidence so shortly after her husband’s death, but that wouldn’t matter, because within a minute after her death he’d have Staunton, the one person who could otherwise be dangerous to him. Let others wonder; he’d be safe.
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