Outside the gate I _did_ run.
I got to a phone as fast as I could, at a corner drugstore, and sat in the booth a while to get my breathing back to normal before I put in a call to the city desk.
The Barnacle bellowed at me. “What you got?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe nothing. Who was Mrs. Clayborne’s doctor?”
He told me. I asked him if he knew who her nurse had been, and he asked how the hell should he know, so I hung up.
I went to see the doctor and he threw me out.
I spent the rest of the day tracking down the nurse; when I finally found her she threw me out too. So there was a full day’s work gone entirely down the drain.
It was late in the afternoon when I got back to the office. Barnacle Bill pounced on me at once. “What did you get?”
“Nothing,” I told him. There was no use telling him about that track underneath the window. By that time, I was beginning to doubt I’d ever seen it, it seemed so unbelievable.
“How big do ducks get?” I asked him. He growled at me and went back to his work.
I looked at the next day’s page in the assignment book. He had me down for the Community Chest, and: _See Dr. Thomas at Univ.-magnetism._
“What’s this?” I asked. “This magnetism business?”
“Guy’s been working on it for years,” said the Barnacle. “I got it on good authority he’s set to pop with something.”
There was that “good authority” again. And just about as hazy as the most of his hot tips.
And anyhow, I don’t like to interview scientists. More often than not, they’re a crochety set and are apt to look down their noses at newspapermen. Ten to one the newspaperman is earning more than they are – and in his own way, more than likely, doing just as good a job and with less fumbling.
I saw that Jo Ann was getting ready to go home, so I walked over to her and asked her how it went.
“I got a funny feeling in my gizzard, Mark,” she told me. “Buy me a drink and I’ll tell you all about it.”
So we went down to the corner bar and took a booth way in the back.
Joe came over and he was grumbling about business, which was unusual for him. “If it weren’t for you folks over at the paper,” be said, “I’d close up and go home. That must be what all my customers are doing; they sure ain’t coming here. Can you think of anything more disgusting than going straight home from your job?”
We told him that we couldn’t, and to show that he appreciated our attitude he wiped off the table – a thing he almost never did.
He brought the drinks and Jo Ann told me about the old lady and her hundredth birthday. “It was horrible. There she sat in her rocking chair in that bare living room, rocking back and forth, gently, delicately, the way old ladies rock. And she was glad to see me, and she smiled so nice and she introduced me all around.”
“Well, that was fine,” I said. “Were there a lot of people there?”
“Not a soul.”
I choked on _my_ drink. “But you said she introduced…”
“She did. To empty chairs.”
“Good Lord!”
“They all were dead,” she said.
“Now, let’s get this straight…”
“She said, ‘Miss Evans, I want you to meet my old friend, Mrs. Smith. She lives just down the street. I recall the day she moved into the neighborhood, back in ’33. Those were hard times, I tell you.’ Chattering on, you know, like most old ladies do. And me, standing there and staring at an empty chair, wondering what to do. And, Mark, I don’t know if I did right or not, but I said, ‘Hello, Mrs. Smith. I am glad to know you.’ And do you know what happened then?”
“No,” I said. “How could I?”
“The ‘old lady said, just as casually as could be – just conversationally, as if it were the most natural thing in all the world-‘You know, Miss Evans, Mrs. Smith died three years ago. Don’t you think it’s nice she dropped in to see me?'”
“She was pulling your leg,” I said. “Some of these old ones sometimes get pretty sly.”
“I don’t think she was. She introduced me all around; there were six or seven of them, and all of them were dead.”
“She was happy, thinking they were there. What difference does it make?”
“It was horrible,” said Jo Ann.
So we had another drink to chase away the horror.
Joe was still down in the mouth. “Did you ever see the like of it? You could shoot off a cannon in this joint and not touch a single soul. By this time, usually, they’d be lined up against the bar, and it’d be a dull evening if someone hadn’t taken a poke at someone else – although you understand I run a decent place.”
“Sure you do,” I said. “Sit down and have a drink with us.”
“It ain’t right that I should,” said Joe. “A bartender should never take a drink when he’s conducting business. But I feel so low that if you don’t mind, I’ll take you up on it.”
He went back to the bar and got a bottle and a glass and we had quite a few.
The corner, he said, had always been a good spot – steady business all the time, with a rush at noon and a good crowd in the evening. But business had started dropping off six weeks before, and now was down to nothing.
“It’s the same all over town,” he said, “some places worse than others. This place is one of the worst; I just don’t know what’s gotten into people.”
We said we didn’t, either. I fished out some money and left it for the drinks, and we made our escape.
Outside I asked Jo Ann to have dinner with me, but she said it was the night her bridge club met, so I drove her home and went on to my place.
I take a lot of ribbing at the office for living so far out of town, but I like it. I got the cottage cheap, and it’s better than living in a couple of cooped-up rooms in a third-rate resident hotel-which would be the best I could afford if I stayed in town.
After I’d fixed up a steak and some fried potatoes for supper, I went down to the dock and rowed out into the lake a ways. I sat there for a while, watching the lighted windows winking all around the shore and listening to the sounds you never hear in daytime – the muskrat swimming and the soft chuckling of the ducks and the occasional slap of a jumping fish.
It was a bit chilly and after a little while I rowed back in again, thinking there was a lot to do before winter came. The boat should be caulked and painted; the cottage itself could take a coat of paint, if I could get around to it. There were a couple of storm windows that needed glass replaced, and by rights I should putty all of them. The chimney needed some bricks to replace the ones that had blown off in a windstorm earlier in the year, and the door should have new weatherstripping.
I sat around and read a while and then I went to bed. Just before I went to sleep I thought some about the two old ladies – one of them happy and the other dead.
The next morning I got the Community Chest story out of the way, first thing; then I got an encyclopedia from the library and did some reading on magnetism.
I figured that I should know something about it, before I saw this whiz-bang at the university.
But I needn’t have worried so much; this Dr. Thomas turned out to be a regular Joe. We sat around and had quite a talk. He told me about magnetism, and when he found out I lived at the lake be talked about fishing; then we found we knew some of the same people, and it was all right.
Except he didn’t have a story.
“There may be one in another year or so,” he told me. “When there is, I’ll let you in on it.”
I’d heard that one before, of course, so I tried to pin him down.
“Its a promise,” he said; “you get it first, ahead of anyone?’
I let it go at that. You couldn’t ask the man to sign a contract on it.
I was watching for a chance to get away, but I could see he still had more to say. So I stayed on; it’s refreshing to find someone who wants to talk to you.