She came back a moment later, handed the sheriff a cup, and sat down with another one in her lap. “Is it still hot enough?”
The sheriff took a sip. “Just fine. I don’t like it
“I’m getting a little old for that, I guess, Sheriff. No, if I can sell the farm, I will. And maybe it’s sold already, kind of.”
“Who to, if I may ask, ma’am?”
“Mr. Loursat’s got a brother, working in Menominee. He’s a machinist but he was raised on a farm and likes farming; he’s been talking about getting himself a little one instead of working in a town. Mr. Loursat’s going to write him about it. They’re close to one another, and he thinks his brother will jump at a chance to get a farm next to his. He says, too, he can raise enough money to lend his brother for a down payment if he hasn’t got that much saved.”
“Sounds like a good idea, ma’am.”
“Yes, it does. And if it takes a little while to work out, I’ve got enough help to get me by, at least till the end of school vacation. Mr. Kramer, who owns the farm on the other side, has a boy in high school, doing nothing this summer but helping his father. He dropped in to tell me the boy’s a good worker and would work half days for me if I wanted, the rest of the summer.”
“Sounds fine, ma’am. Looks like you’ll make out all right. Plan to live in town? Here, I mean, in Bartlesville?”
“I—haven’t decided yet.”
“Don’t I remember you got a son and a daughter?”
“I—had. But Siegfried quarreled with them both, and wouldn’t let me write to either. And they gave up writing, it’s been over ten years now.”
“You don’t know the last addresses?”
“Not street addresses. Bertha was in Cincinnati, Max was in Milwaukee. But that was ten years ago.”
The sheriff smiled. “Knew if I kept asking questions I’d find something I could do for you. I’ll write the chief of police in both places. They’ll be able to find a lead to at least one of them, maybe as easy as looking in the phone book. And if you find one, you’ll find both; they’re probably in touch with one another.”
“Thank you, Sheriff.” Mrs. Gross smiled, but then suddenly there were tears running down her cheeks.
Another knock, Loursat’s, sent her to the door, hastily wiping her eyes and her cheeks as she went.
Within ten minutes they had all gone; the sheriff first and, a few minutes later, Mrs. Grass and Loursat; he had waited to show her the letter he had just written to his brother in Menominee, Michigan, which he intended to mail while they were in town.
The mind thing considered.
He had plenty of time to consider, during the two hours she was away, and afterwards when she had gone to bed and to sleep.
He planned. Now that he knew
She was asleep now and he could have taken over, but he didn’t; he could wait—she’d be sleeping here every night for at least a couple of weeks. And after all, there was the possibility things wouldn’t work out as she had planned; maybe Loursat’s brother wouldn’t want the farm, and maybe the sheriff would be unable to locate either her son or her daughter. Also, it would be bad to have to make her kill herself here, even if he could arrange to make it look like an accident; two deaths by violence would draw altogether too much interest to the farm.
But he could wait, and plan while he waited, always taking a better chance in another direction if he could find one. The sheriff would be an excellent next host, better than Elsa Gross even if her plans worked out; the sheriff could find reason any time to take a trip to Milwaukee and would have complete freedom of movement there to investigate things and people the mind thing would want investigated. And the sheriff drove a car, so it would be easy to get him killed when he had served his purpose; he could simply have a head-on collision in such a way that it would be presumed that he had gone to sleep at the wheel, or blacked out. If the sheriff turned out to be a drinking man so that getting drunk wouldn’t be too out of character for him, it could be worked that way.
But getting the sheriff for a host was an outside chance, in any case. He lived, and slept, in the county seat. In Wilcox, not in Bartlesville. That was too far for the mind thing to risk having himself transported there by an animal host.
Meanwhile, though, he could expand his knowledge of the countryside and the nearby town, and of the inhabitants of the town. The radio-television repairman had turned out to be a poor prospect, but there might be better ones. Even if not, one could not have too much knowledge.
So—the cats. The silent-footed, keen-eared cats that made such perfect spy-hosts.
The mind thing concentrated upon the concept
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Friday morning was cloudy in Bartlesville, and just before noon a slight drizzle of rain started to fall. Willie Chandler looked out of the window of his radio and television repair shop and was glad he’d brought a lunch and wouldn’t have to walk to the restaurant.
It was about the only thing he was glad about.
Business was poor and he was head over heels in debt. He’d made a bad mistake, three years ago, in believing that Bartlesville was large enough to support a repair shop for radio and television sets. Every family, almost, had a radio—but it was very seldom that anything went wrong with one. And there were few television sets; it was possible to get reception from Green Bay, but it was not too satisfactory at that distance. Even the few people who owned sets used them very little.
Willie Chandler was thirty-two; he was tall and lanky and wore shell-rimmed glasses. He had a cheerful smile and people nod him and gave him what repair business they had, but it just wasn’t enough to let him support himself and an invalid mother.
He had been born and raised in Bartlesville. His father had owned a not too prosperous feed business there and, after high school, he had worked in his father’s store until his father’s death.
But he had never liked the feed business, and had always been interested in radio; he had made his own sets as a boy and understood a little, at least, of how they worked. He had talked his mother into selling the feed store —the only valuable part of his father’s estate—and using part of the proceeds to send him to Chicago for four months to attend a technical school that taught radio and television repairing. His mother had not been an invalid then, so it had been all right for him to leave her that long. At the end of the course, most of the rest of his father’s money had gone into setting him up in business as a repairman.
The shop had never actually lost money, but it had earned pitifully little. A year later his mother had been partly paralyzed by a stroke, and doctor and hospital bills had taken the rest of her money. He had had to borrow several times from the bank and to stretch his credit to the breaking point with wholesalers to keep up his stock of tubes and other parts. Currently the shop brought him in barely enough to stave off foreclosure by paying interest on his loans, and to provide the absolute necessities of life for his mother and himself. At their home, a small rented cottage with the rent usually a month or two overdue, a neighbor came in to feed Mrs. Chandler at lunchtime; Willie did all the rest of the work himself.
Except for his mother, whom he could not leave and who was unable to travel, he knew he’d be much better off to let the bank and his creditors foreclose and take his stock and equipment. In a city such as Milwaukee or Minneapolis, he could get a job as assistant in a repair shop big enough to use more than one man and make more money than he was making now, a lot more. But unless her condition should improve, and that seemed unlikely, he was stuck with the status quo. He couldn’t even call the deal off and take a job in some other store in town, selling
