This chore taken care of, he thought what he should do next to play his part to the hilt. He’d lie down and sleep a while, probably. Find a soft comfortable place to rest in. There was a sofa in the living room. He padded through the doorway, jumped up onto the sofa, and curled himself up comfortably.
Staunton was standing there in the doorway. “Okay, Cat,” he said. “Might as well make yourself at home. What made you hide yesterday and last night?” Then he went back into the kitchen.
The mind thing let his cat-body rest and sleep, but his own mind was thinking what a fool he’d been, letting himself panic, and hiding twice, once when the woman had seen him in the hallway, once when, after he’d walked through the flour, Staunton had come home after midnight.
He let himself explore his host’s mind thoroughly now, at leisure. Losing a few days being shut up here would be an annoyance but still only a minor delay. Apparently Staunton wasn’t going to try him out with specific psychological tests, but just keep him under general observation. It should be easy for the mind thing, now that he knew what he had to do.
It was beginning to get a little warm and Staunton was going around opening all of the downstairs windows—but each only a carefully calculated scant two inches, just enough so a medium-small cat couldn’t get through.
A little later, Staunton was looking down at him. “Cat,” he said, “I’m going downtown a while; you hold the fort. I’ll pick up some cat food or liver or something. While you’re here, I might as well be the perfect host.”
The mind thing almost made his present host jump; then he realized Staunton was using the word “host” in a different sense. He blinked at him sleepily.
When Staunton walked to the front door he jumped off the sofa and ran after him, to stay in character. But Staunton reached down a hand and took him gently by the scruff of the neck—the first time there had been physical contact between them—and held him back until he was able to get the door closed from the outside, with the cat inside.
In Bartlesville Doc made his first stop at the office of the Clarion.
Hollis looked up from the typewriter he’d been hammering. “Hi,” he said. “What’s new?”
“Nothing startling, Ed. Just wanted to ask you a question. Know anybody looking for a missing cat?”
Hollis laughed. “A cat? Cats are a dime a dozen around here. If one wanders off, it wanders off. Why? You find one?”
“Yes. And thought I might keep it a while if it wants to stay with me. But I wouldn’t if I knew whoever owned it really wanted it. It might be a child’s pet, for instance.”
“There’s that. Well, I can run an ad in the lost and found column for you. Deadline for that is Friday noon; that’s when we start closing the forms.”
Staunton thought a moment. He might as well save stopping in again by giving Hollis the ad now. He said, “Okay, I’ll give you the ad now. ‘Found, small gray cat.’ And give it a box number; I’ll check with you next week to see if there’s been an answer.”
“Sure.” Hollis jotted it down on a pad. “But hey, I know whose cat it might be. I was out at Kramer’s last week and he had a small gray cat, among several others. That’s out your way, so it might be his.”
“Just where out my way?”
“Next door to the Gross farm. You know where that is; heard you were out there with the sheriff after the suicide. It’s the farm east of theirs; Loursat has the one to the west.”
“Thanks, Ed. I’ll drop in on my way home to find out. You run that ad, though, unless I tell you not to. So long.”
When he did his shopping, Doc bought two cans of cat food. One can was surely enough for a cat that size for two days so two cans would run him until he let the cat out to see if it would stay around and come back, or would run away.
From the drugstore he phoned Miss Talley to ask her whether she was still sure she’d be done by Thursday noon, and whether she’d learned anything new. Yes, she was sure she’d be finished by the time she’d predicted, and no, she’d learned nothing interesting; she wouldn’t have much chance to put or keep her ear to the ground until she’d finished the typing.
And, she wanted to know, had he found a cat at his house? He told her about the cat and about his decision in connection with it.
On his way home he stopped at the farm east of the Gross farm. There were two cats on the front porch. Both were about the same size as the gray one and could easily be from the same litter.
A plump, friendly woman answered his knock on the door.
“I’m Ralph Staunton,” he told her. “I live in the last house down the road. I—”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I’ve heard your name, and I’ve seen you drive past. Won’t you step in?” She moved back to make way for him.
“I might as well, but just for a moment. It’s nothing very important, Mrs. Kramer. I hear you have a gray cat. I’ve found one, about the size of those two cats on the porch and I wondered—”
“Oh, yes. I hadn’t seen him for a day or two and wondered if anything had happened to him.”
“Nothing has, except that he wandered into my house. Thought I might like to keep him. Would you consider selling him?”
She laughed. “Sell him? Oh, goodness no. But you can have him if you want him. We’ve got three other cats—our old cat had a litter of six last time and we were able to find homes for only three of them. And she’s going to have another litter soon.” She shook her head. “I’m afraid after that we’re going to get rid of her or take her to the vet and have her spayed. Else we’ll be drowning in cats.”
“Thanks a lot,” Doc said. “I’ll be glad to take him, and I’ll promise to find a home for him when I leave at the end of the summer—or take him back with me if I can’t. That is, if he stays with me.”
“But I thought you said—”
“I’ve got him shut in the house right now, to see if he’ll get used to it and to me and want to stay. But I can’t do that forever so in a few more days I’ll have to let him out—and we’ll have to see whether he’ll want to stay with me or come back to you. I can’t very well keep him against his will; cats are very independent people.”
“Oh dear. I guess you’re right, but I do hope he’ll stay with you. His name is Jerry, by the way.”
“Not any more, if he stays with me,” Doc said. “I’ve given him a new name. I call him Cat.”
Mrs. Kramer laughed.
The cat must have heard Doc Staunton coming because it was waiting inside the door and tried to get past him, but he managed to catch it. “No, Cat,” he said, this time taking it up in his arms and kicking the door shut with his foot. “I explained that to you; you’re in stir for a few days. Then you can make up your mind whether you want to keep on being Cat with me, or go back to being Jerry with the Kramers. I know who you are now, you see.”
He put it down on the sofa and stood looking down at it. “Or do I?” he added softly.
It wasn’t until he went to open a window wider and remembered in time not to, that it occurred to him that he’d forgotten to check on getting screens fitted while he was in town. Well, he’d be in town again tomorrow; one day wouldn’t matter.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
One day didn’t make the slightest difference, it turned out, on his ordering the screens. He went into town again the next day, Thursday, and saw Hank Purdy, the town’s only really good rough carpenter. He learned that Hank had more work than he could handle for at least a week. He promised to come out later the following week, take measurements and make an estimate. Doc might have found someone else who could do the job sooner, but he liked Hank, whom he knew from the poker games in the back room at the tavern, and decided he’d rather wait and have Hank do the job. After all, he wasn’t going to keep the cat shut up more than another few days, and after that the house would be in no more immediate need of screens than it had been all along. Besides, the weather was mild and having the windows as they were now, each of them raised about two inches, provided plenty of ventilation.