The mind thing did learn, though, the answer to a question that had mildly puzzled him earlier: why Gross’s nearest neighbor would keep a dog so vicious that it had to be kept chained in the barn. His neighbors were the Loursats (a French name, but they were of Belgian extraction). The dog was a Labrador retriever bitch, a fairly valuable dog that John Loursat used for duck hunting. Before it had suddenly turned vicious—toward everyone but Loursat himself—he had had it bred to another good Labrador and was due to have a litter within a few weeks. Since it had attacked Loursat’s wife—fortunately it had not bitten her—it was under sentence of death, but Loursat was hoping that it would not turn on its puppies when it had them and that he could let it nurse them long enough to salvage the litter before he had to shoot the dog. He had chained it in an unused corner of the barn and had given strict orders that neither his wife nor daughter was to go near it. Gross had happened to know this because Loursat, one of the neighbors with whom he was still on civil terms, had asked him if he wanted one of the puppies and, even when Gross had refused, went on to explain about them and why he would want to find homes for them as quickly as he could. Gross did not like dogs any more than he liked people; he tolerated a cat, so long as it lived in the barn, because it killed mice there.
Through Gross’s eyes the mind thing looked at the clock and decided that he had been in the solution long enough; he had to decide it on a basis of timing because while in a host’s mind he had no sensation in his own body.
Gross stood up and took the shell out of the now cooled solution and started with it toward the outer door. Then the thing in his mind had an afterthought and he turned back to the sink. He rinsed the shell off very thoroughly and dried it. The mind thing’s afterthought had been that the odor of the solution might attract some animal and cause it to crawl under the steps and draw attention to them, perhaps even drag the mind thing out from under them. He himself had no odor whatsoever. He knew that from having been in the mind of the dog Buck when the dog had dug him up in the cave and moved him to the hollow log.
Gross carried him outside, again leaving the door wide to give himself a little light. The mind thing made his hiding place even safer by having Gross scoop out some dirt under the steps and bury him an inch or so deep, smoothing the ground carefully. Then from the steps he reached down and smoothed out the marks of his bare feet on the ground beside the steps.
Then he went inside to die.
But first he cleaned up the evidence of what he had been doing; he poured the rest of the solution down the drain and washed the three things he had used. He put the pan and the gravy bowl back where they belonged, the empty glass jar with other empty jars. Of course Elsa might miss the stock and the gravy and wonder a little, but there was nothing he could do about that. Besides, she was getting absent-minded lately and knew it; she’d probably think she’d used the stock and the gravy and forgotten about it. Then, too, there’d be the shock of his death to distract her from trivia. Although she wouldn’t grieve for him, any sudden event that changes one’s life is a shock. Later she’d come to realize that she was better off for his having killed himself. What the sale of the farm would bring would be much better provision for the old age of one person than of two.
Should he mention that in his suicide note? For a suicide note there was going to be, this time. That lesson the mind thing had learned from Tommy’s death; it had aroused too much curiosity, enough to send Hoffman and Garner to the cave, even to make them decide to dig there. He wanted Gross’s suicide to appear to be perfectly normal, fully motivated, so it would arouse no curiosity at all.
He had Gross get a writing tablet and a pencil and sit down at the kitchen table with them. Then he gave thought to how Gross would word a suicide note if he genuinely decided to kill himself. He would not have and would not mention any such unselfish motive as leaving more money for Elsa’s old age. And his note, if he wrote one at all, would be short and to the point, with no apologies and no good-byes.
Gross wrote slowly and laboriously, in a handwriting that still looked more like German script than English, although the words were English, spelled as Gross would have spelled them.
“I cant stand pane from artherites army more. I kill myself.”
He signed his name in full and then, under it, a final defiance, in German, to the country he hated. His last word. “Deutschland uber Alles.”
Then he got his shotgun from the kitchen closet, loaded it, and sat down at the table again. He put the muzzle in his mouth, pointing upward, and pulled the trigger. Blood and brain matter splattered the note on the top page of the writing tablet, but the words were still legible.
Back in his own body, well hidden under the steps, the mind thing, able again to use his perceptive sense, heard Elsa cry out her husband’s name upstairs. He watched her turn on the bedroom light, then the hall light, and come down the stairs.
CHAPTER NINE
Doc Staunton awoke slowly, turned over, and raised his arm to look at his wrist watch. It was after ten, which was not surprising since he’d got to bed pretty late the night before. He’d gone into Bartlesville late the previous afternoon so the time would be right for him to phone the laboratory in Green Bay about the dog. He’d phoned them and had learned what, he realized now, he’d known all along he would learn.
The dog Buck had not had rabies. Nor had he had, aside from the injuries that had caused his death, anything organically wrong with him that could be determined by dissection. The dog’s having run in front of the car couldn’t be explained by anything ascertainably physically wrong with him.
Doc had sighed, and had phoned into Wilcox to try to reach the sheriff. The sheriff would be interested, or at least he should be interested. But the sheriff wasn’t available and his office didn’t know where he was. Doc had stayed in town for dinner at the better—such as it was—of the two local restaurants. Then he’d tried to reach the sheriff again, this time first at his office and then at his home number. He got no answer at the former and no satisfaction at the latter.
He’d killed a little time in the tavern and had been enlisted in a poker game starting in the back room. One of the local merchants, Hans Weiss, the grocer from whom he bought most of his supplies, had invited him and vouched for him. There were only four others, counting Hans, ready to start the game and they’d needed a fifth. The stakes were just enough to make the game interesting; nickel ante, fifty-cent limit. Doc lost twelve dollars in the first half hour without winning a hand, then a big hand put him ahead and he stayed that way. Twice, once around eight o’clock and once around nine, he tried to reach the sheriff and failed. The next time he happened to look at his watch it was almost midnight and he decided it was too late to try again that night. By that time there were seven in the game and he was the big winner, about seventy dollars ahead, so he didn’t think he should quit until someone else suggested breaking up the game. That hadn’t happened until one-thirty and he’d got home at two, still forty- some dollars to the good. And he’d become a friend of everyone in the game and had accepted an invitation to play again. After all, he had to give the boys a chance to win their money back. As a comparative stranger in their midst, that was the least he could do.
Now, Thursday morning, he yawned and got up. Might as well get into Bartlesville before noon and phone the sheriff; he could make an appointment, if the sheriff was free, to drive on into Wilcox to see him. Unless, of course, the sheriff was coming into Bartlesville anyway; then he could ask the sheriff to have lunch with him.
He made himself only coffee for breakfast and got into town by half-past eleven, where he phoned the sheriff from the drugstore. This time he connected.
“Doc Staunton, Sheriff,” he said. “Something I wanted to talk to you about, if you can spare me a few minutes. You coming here anyway, or shall I drive in to Wilcox and come to your office?”
“You caught me just as I was leaving, Doc. For Bartlesville.”
“Good. Can you have lunch with me, then?”
“Guess so. Sure, thanks. Which restaurant?”
Doc said, “Let’s meet at the tavern first. One drink won’t hurt us, if we’re eating right afterward.”
The sheriff agreed and said he’d be there within half an hour.
Doc walked from the wall phone to the drug counter to make a few purchases. The druggist was one of the men with whom he’d played poker last night and they greeted each other by name.
“Heard you call the guy you were talking to ‘Sheriff,’ Doc,” the druggist said. “Nothing wrong, I hope.”
“No. Just want to pass on some information to him.”
