Not this one or any other.’
‘That’s strange,’ he said.
‘As strange to me as to you,’ I told him. ‘I don’t know what you’re
getting at. Suppose you try to tell me.’
I knew the lying in the long run would not get me anywhere, but for the
moment it was buying me some time. I was pretty sure that right now he
couldn’t tie me to the telephone.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you. Tom Preston was the man who saw
it. He’d sent Ed to take out your phone, and later in the afternoon he was
walking past your office and he happened to look in and saw the phone
standing on your desk. It made him pretty sore. You can see how it might
have made him sore.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Knowing Tom, I presume he would be sore.’
‘He’d sent Ed out to get that phone and the first thing he thought of
was that you’d talked Ed out of taking it. Or maybe Ed had just sort of
failed to drop around and get it. He knew you and Ed were friends.’
‘I suppose, he was so sore that he broke in and took it.’
‘No,’ said Hiram, ‘he never did break in. He went down to the bank and
talked Daniel Willoughby into giving him the key.’
‘Without considering,’ I said, ‘that I was renting the office.’
‘But you hadn’t paid your rent for three solid months. If you ask me,
I’d figure Daniel had the right.’
‘In my book,’ I told him, ‘Tom and Daniel broke into my place and
robbed me.’
‘I told you. They didn’t do any breaking. And Daniel had no part in it.
Except giving Tom the extra key. Tom went back alone. Besides, you say you’d
never seen this phone, that you never owned it.’
‘That’s beside the point. No matter what was in my office, he had no
right to take it. Whether it was mine or not. How do I know he didn’t walk
away with some other stuff?’
‘You know damn well he didn’t,’ Hiram told me. ‘You said you wanted to
hear about this.’
‘So go ahead and tell me.’
‘Well, Tom got the key and got into your office and he saw right away
that it was a different kind of phone. It didn’t have a dial and it wasn’t
connected. So he turned around and started to walk out and before he reached
the door, the phone rang.’
‘It what?’
‘It rang.’
‘But it wasn’t connected.’
‘I know, but anyhow, it rang.’
‘So he answered it,’ I said, ‘and there was Santa Claus.’
‘He answered it,’ said Hiram, ‘and there was Tupper Tyler.’
‘Tupper! But Tupper…’
‘Yeah, I know,’ said Hiram. ‘Tupper disappeared. Ten years ago or so.
But Tom said it was Tupper’s voice. He said he couldn’t be mistaken.’
‘And what did Tupper tell him?’
‘Tom said hello and Tupper asked him who he was and Tom told him who he
was. Then Tupper said get off this phone, you’re not authorized to use it.
Then the phone went dead.’
‘Look, Hiram, Tom was kidding you.’
‘No, he wasn’t. He thought someone was kidding him. He thought you and
Ed had cooked it up. He thought it was a joke. He thought you were trying to
get even with him.’
‘But that’s crazy,’ I protested. ‘Even if Ed and I had fixed up a gag
like that, how could we have known that Tom would come busting in?’
‘I know,’ said Hiram.
‘You mean you believe all this?’
‘You bet I believe it. There’s something wrong, something awfully
wrong.’
But his tone of voice was defensive. I had him on the run. He had
hauled me in to pin me to the wall and it hadn’t worked that way and now he
was just a little sheepish about the entire matter. But in a little while
he’d start getting sore.
He was that kind of jerk.
‘When did Tom tell you all of this?’
‘This morning.’
‘Why not last night? If he thought it was so important…’
“But I told you. He didn’t think it was important. He thought it was a
joke. He thought it was you getting back at him. He didn’t think it was
important until all hell broke loose this morning. After he answered and
heard Tupper’s voice, he took the phone. He thought that might reverse the
joke, you see. He thought you’d gone to a lot of work…’
‘Yes, I see,’ I said. ‘But now he thinks that it was really Tupper
calling and that the call actually was for me.’
‘Well, yes, I’d say so. He took the phone home and a couple of times
early that evening he picked up the receiver and the phone was alive, but no
one answered. That business about the phone being alive puzzled him. It
bothered him a lot. It wasn’t tied into any line, you see.’
‘And now the two of you want to make some sort of case against me.’
Hiram’s face hardened. ‘I know you’re up to something,’ he said. ‘I
know you went out to Stiffy’s shack last night. After Doc and I had taken
Stiffy in to Elmore.’
‘Yes, I did,’ I said. ‘I found his keys where they had fallen out of
his pocket. So I went out to his place to see if it was locked and
everything was all right.’
‘You sneaked in,’ Hiram said. ‘You turned off your lights to go up
Stiffy’s lane.’
‘I didn’t turn them off. The electrical circuit shorted. I got them
fixed before I left the shack.’
It was pretty weak. But it was the best I could think of fast. Hiram
didn’t press the point.
‘This morning,’ he said, ‘me and Tom went out to the shack.’
‘So it was Tom who was spying on me.’
Hiram grunted. ‘He was upset about the phone. He got suspicious of
you.’
‘And you broke into the shack. You must have. I locked it when I left.’
‘Yeah,’ said Hiram, ‘we broke in. And we found more of them telephones.
A whole box full of them.’
‘You can quit looking at me like that,’ I said. ‘I saw no telephones. I
didn’t snoop around.’
I could see the two of them, Hiram and Tom, roaring out to the shack in
full cry, convinced that there existed some sinister plot which they could
not understand, but that whatever it might be, both Stiffy and myself were
neck-deep in it.
And there was some sort of plot, I told myself and Stiffy and myself
were both entangled in it and I hoped that Stiffy knew what it was all
about, for certainly I didn’t. The little I knew only made it more confused.
And Gerald Sherwood, unless he’d lied to me (and I was inclined to think he
hadn’t) knew little more about it than I did.
Suddenly I was thankful that Hiram did not know about the phone in
Sherwood’s study, or all those other phones which must be in the village, in
the hands of those persons who had been employed as readers by whoever used
the phones for communication.
Although, I told myself, there was little chance that Hiram would ever
know about those phones, for the people who had them certainly would hide
them most securely and would keep very mum about them once this business of
the phones became public knowledge. And I was certain that within a few
hours’ time the story of the mystery phones would be known to everyone.
Neither Hiram nor Tom Preston could keep their big mouths shut.
Who would these other people be, I wondered, the ones who had the
phones – and all at once I knew. They would be the down-and-outers, the poor
unfortunates, the widows who had been left without savings or insurance, the
aged who had not been able to provide for their later years, the failures
and the no-goods and the hard-of-luck.
For that was the way it had worked with Sherwood and myself. Sherwood
had not been contacted (if that was the word for it) before he faced
financial ruin and they (whoever they might be) had not been concerned with
me until I was a business failure and willing to admit it. And the man who
seemed to have had the most to do with all of it was the village bum.
‘Well?’ asked the constable.
‘You want to know what I know about it?’
‘Yes, I do,’ said Hiram, ‘and if you know what’s good for you…’
‘Hiram,’ I told him, ‘don’t you ever threaten me. Don’t you even look
as though you meant to threaten me. Because if you do…’
Floyd Caldwell stuck his head inside the door.
‘It’s moving!’ he yelled at us. ‘The barrier is moving!’
Both Hiram and I jumped to our feet and headed for the door. Outside
people were running and yelling and Grandma Jones was standing out in the