It stayed there half a minute, either making up its mind or making sure that it wasn’t being watched. 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.