“Not about our poker games, I hope. Say, Doc, you live out the Bascombe Road, don’t you?”
Doc nodded. “I’ve wondered why they call it that, but I do. Last house. Why?”
“Another suicide out your way, last night. Or maybe you heard about it already?”
Something prickled at the back of Doc’s neck. “No, I hadn’t. Just got in town; this is my first stop. Who was it?”
“Old geezer by the name of Siegfried Gross. Not much loss; nobody liked him and he liked everybody even less than that. He lives—lived—about five miles out from town. That’d be about three miles from your place.”
Doc probed but found out only two things more: that Gross had killed himself with a shotgun sometime in the middle of the night, and that he had left a suicide note saying be was killing himself because of the pain of his arthritis.
He put his drugstore purchases in his car and strolled thoughtfully to the tavern. Mike, the bartender, was talking with two customers about the suicide of Gross, but none of them knew any more than Doc had already learned from the druggist.
Doc nursed a beer until the sheriff came in, then he downed what was left of it and he and the sheriff took the booth they’d sat in after the inquest.
“No beer for me this time,” the sheriff said wearily. “I can use a pickup, Mike. Double bourbon, water on the side.” Doc said he’d settle for another beer and Mike went back to the bar.
The sheriff yawned. “Guess you heard about Siegfried Gross,” he said. “I had to go out there in the middle of the night and ain’t slept since. Gawd, but I’m tired. And soon as we eat I got to go out there again.”
“Mind if I go with you?” Doc asked.
“If you want. Was it something about the Gross business you wanted to tell me, Doc?”
“No, I didn’t even know of it when I phoned you. It’s about the Hoffman dog. It did not have rabies.”
The sheriff raised bushy eyebrows. “You mean you had it checked? What for, it didn’t bite nobody. Or did it?”
“No, it bit no one. But I was curious, especially after you told me it was car-shy, why it ran blindly in front of my car. If it had been rabid, that would have explained it.”
“Hell, Doc, dogs get run over every day. He was probably tracking a rabbit that crossed the road there, had his nose down and wasn’t watching. You can’t make a supreme court case out of a dog getting itself run over.”
“I suppose not, but—Sheriff, was there anything unusual in connection with Gross’s suicide?”
“It was plenty messy. Put the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, blew his brains all over the place. Took our mortician friend over an hour to clean up that kitchen. Lord, what a mess.”
“Will there be an inquest?”
“With a suicide note in his own writing, what for? Just a waste of taxpayers’ money. Well, let’s have one more quick one and then go and eat, huh?”
It wasn’t until over dessert and coffee that Doc again asked if there had been any unusual circumstances, anything at all, in connection with the suicide.
“Funny thing or two happened the same night, but nothing to do with the suicide,” the sheriff said. “An owl flew through the window, through the glass, I mean, around midnight, and Gross had to shoot it because it had a busted wing.”
“With the same shotgun?”
“Hell, no. Used a twenty-two rifle for that. And it was maybe three hours after that he killed himself, but I figure he couldn’t go back to sleep and laid there suffering and finally decided to put himself out of his misery like he’d done to the owl, and went down to the kitchen and did it.”
Doc frowned. “Was there any physical contact between Gross and the owl?”
“Not till after it was dead. After he shot it Gross tossed it out through the busted window and told his wife he’d bury it in the morning.” The sheriff stopped to take a swallow of his coffee. “Loursat, that’s the guy next door, buried it. And the cat. Sometime in the night Gross’s cat got in Loursat’s barn and a vicious dog there killed it.”
Doc Staunton took a deep breath. He said softly, so softly that the sheriff could barely hear it, “ ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea, in a beautiful pea-green boat’.”
“Huh?”
“Line from a nonsense poem by Edward Lear. Sheriff, have you ever known an owl to fly through a pane of glass before?”
“Dunno about an owl especially, Doc, but birds fly into glass all the time. Got a picture window in my house that a bird flies into—oh, maybe once or twice a week. Mostly sparrows. Usually just stun themselves a minute, but once in a while one breaks its neck. Well, guess we’re ready. You want to ride out with me, or go in separate cars so you can go on home after?”
CHAPTER TEN
The mind thing had learned much that surprised him.
Since the suicide of Siegfried Gross he had spent most of the time deliberately hostless so he could stay within himself under the steps and use his perceptive senses to see and hear all that went on inside the Gross farmhouse or near it.
He learned above all that he had been careless, and had aroused curiosity by the things he had made his hosts, human or animal, do, especially by the manner in which he had made them kill themselves.
He had had no idea of the fuss and bother caused by a human suicide, even when the suicide left a note saying that he was killing himself. What had happened in the Gross house since Siegfried’s suicide in the kitchen had been a revelation to him in human mores.
It had started immediately after the shotgun blast. Elsa Gross had come running down the stairs, and had been a good deal more excited and disturbed than he had anticipated, having known from Gross’s mind that there was no real love between them.
Her initial shock had been tremendous. After the worst of it had worn off she had put her shoes on and a coat over her nightgown and had run out of the house and started off in the direction of the nearest neighbors, the Loursats’, through whose window he had earlier seen the man and woman in the bedroom of the sick child. It was their vicious dog that had obligingly freed him from his cat host by killing the cat.
Elsa Gross had come back about half an hour later and Loursat had been with her. From their conversation the mind thing had learned that Loursat had phoned the sheriff and that he would be there within an hour; Loursat had come back with her to await the sheriff’s coming. His wife would have come too, except that she had to stay with the sick child, who was better, but still shouldn’t be left alone.
Loursat suggested that Elsa Gross go upstairs and dress, and while she did this he examined the kitchen as thoroughly as he could without stepping into any of the blood splatters. He read the suicide note several times and shook his head. But he didn’t touch it or anything else in the kitchen.
Then he went into the living room—still well within range of the mind thing’s perception—and waited there until Elsa Gross came down. There in the living room, out of sight of the thing in the kitchen, they talked.
The mind thing learned that, despite the note, Elsa Gross was bewildered by her husband’s sudden suicide. He had had arthritis, yes, but it just couldn’t have been bad enough to make him want to kill himself because of it. Why, he’d been perfectly normal and not in pain at all around midnight when the owl had waked them up flying through the window. Loursat had asked her about that and she’d told him what had happened.
“Funny about the owl,” Loursat said. “Never knew one to do that before. Wonder if there’s some kind of craziness going around. Like—you’ve heard about Tommy Hoffman, haven’t you?”
She hadn’t, and he told her.
It was a little after three o’clock in the morning when the sheriff came in an ambulance and brought with him the coroner and the mortician.
From all the questions and the conversations, the mind thing was learning how seriously human beings took the suicide of one of themselves, even when the suicide left a note to explain his reasons.
The next day he learned even more. Neighbors dropped in to sympathize with Mrs. Gross and to offer their
