The Cry of the Owl (28 page)

“I don’t mind if I do. One for you, sir?”

“Got mine here, thanks, Sherry. Bristol Cream.”

Robert fixed his drink, then asked if he could help. The table in the dining room, he noticed, had already been set for two. The doctor said he didn’t need any help, as they were having something simple, cold turkey and cranberry sauce from the delicatessen and macaroni with cheese from the freezing compartment.

The doctor produced some amontillado when they sat down at the table. He and his wife, he said, had been great sherry fanciers, sherry and tea. He had sixteen varieties of Chinese tea in the kitchen.

“I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is for me to have your company,” said the doctor during a silence in the meal. He had just been asking Robert about his work, and Robert had told him also about the insect book, which he had finished for Professor Gumbolowski. He had had to do six or seven drawings over, but he had finished in March. “You know, you’re the first guest I’ve had since my wife died,” said the doctor. “People ask me out—you know—but it’s difficult, because they’re making such an effort for you. Strangely enough, I wanted to ask a lot of my old friends over, have a real good dinner party, but I thought they’d think I was off my head, trying to have a good time so soon after my wife died. So I did absolutely nothing. Until you.” He smiled happily, sipped his sherry, then lit a small cigar. “And you a stranger. It’s funny.”

It was much the same after a divorce, Robert thought. He found nothing to reply, but the doctor didn’t seem to mind.
Until you
, Robert thought. A man whose neighbors abhorred him and wanted him out, a man responsible for a suicide, a man who might have knocked another man in the river and who had denied that he had. What did the doctor really think, and really think of him? Or did
it matter to the doctor, obsessed with his own grief? Wasn’t Robert something like a small distraction merely, like a television program the doctor had turned on to take his thoughts for a while from the absence of his wife? Robert supposed he would never know the answers to those questions, not tonight, not even tomorrow or Sunday, by which time some pronouncement would have been made on the corpse. The doctor, he felt, would never pass a judgment, never reveal his opinion. But certainly he had one, and certainly he was interested in Robert’s situation. The doctor had cared enough to want to see the papers.

“Do you play chess?” asked the doctor.

Robert squirmed back in his seat. “A little, but badly.”

They went upstairs to Robert’s room to play. There was a game table up there of inlaid teak and ivory. Robert had noticed it, but he thought the doctor also chose the room because it was upstairs and at the back of the house. It was dark outside now. When they climbed the stairs, they left no lights on downstairs. The doctor carried their coffee cups and the coffee decanter on a tray. Robert knew the rules of chess and had even read a couple of books on it years ago; his main problem was that he had no real desire to win. But he tried hard, in order to please the doctor. The doctor chuckled and murmured to himself as he contemplated his moves. In a good-natured way, he was out to checkmate Robert as quickly as possible. Two games were over in twenty minutes, Robert the loser. In the next game, Robert concentrated harder, and the game lasted nearly an hour. The result, however, was the same. The doctor sat back in his chair, chuckling, and Robert laughed, too.

“I can’t say I’m out of practice, because I never was in,” Robert said.

In the distance, a car shifted gears. Otherwise there was no sound, and Robert could hear even the slow ticking of a clock downstairs.

“Ten-twenty! How about a spot of brandy?” said the doctor.

“Not brandy, thanks. It’s apt to—”

“Oh, I know. Some of my sherry then. Really, it’s delicious.” The doctor was up. “No, don’t come down. I’ll just be a minute.” He was gone.

Robert walked toward the double bed, and turned, listening. His tension made his left arm hurt, and he forced himself to relax. There hadn’t been a sound outside. Robert heard a squeak and a slam from downstairs, as of a liquor cabinet door being closed. He watched the half-open door, listening for the doctor’s step on the stairs.

There was a shot, then a crash of glass.

Robert ran down the stairs.

The doctor was lying in the wide doorway between the living room and the hall, only a few feet from the stairway. His eyes were open, his head askew against the doorjamb.

“Dr. Knott?” Robert shook him slightly by the shoulder, watching the slightly open mouth that Robert expected to move, to speak, in the next second. Robert saw no wound on him.

Robert stood up, looked into the lighted living room, at the partly open window, the five- or six-inch gap between sill and frame of the bay window in the corner. Robert went into the hall, opened the front door, and went out on the porch. In the corner by the bay window there was only black silence. The empty lawn was pale green from the light thrown by a nearby street lamp, and black with the shadows of trees and bushes. Robert stood without breathing, trying to hear
if anything was moving either to right or left on the sidewalk. Then a window went up in the house next door.

“What was that?” a woman’s voice cried. “Dr. Knott?”

Robert went back to the doctor. He had not moved. Robert pulled him to a sitting position, and his head lolled forward. Then Robert saw a red gash along the back of his head, blood running down through the thin hair into his white collar. It was a gash made by a bullet, Robert thought, but it looked like only a graze. The doctor might have been knocked unconscious by falling against the doorjamb. He started to lift him, but a glassiness in the doctor’s eyes stopped him. Quickly, Robert felt for his heartbeat. It was there.

He half carried, half dragged the doctor to the sofa, then ran to the kitchen and fumbled around for the light, found it, and wet a few paper towels under cold water. He went back to the doctor and wiped the blood from the back of the doctor’s head. There was enough of the paper left clean to wipe the doctor’s face and forehead. Still the eyes remained glassy and open, the mouth ajar, and now the doctor drooled a little. Robert ran up the stairs to the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet on a confusion of little bottles on three or four glass shelves. Robert knocked a couple of the bottles into the basin in his search, but they didn’t break, and he found what he wanted, aromatic spirits of ammonia. He read the label a second time to be sure. “
Dose: ½ to 1 teaspoonful diluted with water. An excellent and quick stimulant.”
Robert smelled it—it was strong—and ran downstairs with it.

Holding it under the doctor’s nose had no effect. Robert was afraid of choking him if he tried to give him any in water. Now the doctor’s hands were cool. The pulse seemed weaker. Robert grabbed
a fringed shawl that was folded on a love seat and spread it over the doctor. Then he picked up the telephone and dialed the operator. He told her he wanted a doctor and that it was an emergency. Waverly Avenue, Dr. Knott’s house. Robert didn’t know the number.

“It’s a white house. I’ll have a light on in front. Do you think you can get a doctor immediately?”

“Oh, yes, that should be possible. It’s near the Rittersville Hospital. I’ll call them right away.”

Robert went back to the doctor and waited, holding his wrist to feel the pulse. The doctor’s shiny blue eyes seemed to be looking straight at Robert.

“Dr. Knott?” He looked about to speak, but he did not move at all.

There was a knock on the door.

Robert opened it.

“Oh!” A plump, fiftyish woman stood there with a man of about the same age. “We thought we heard a shot over here.”

“Yes. Come in.” Robert stepped back. “The doctor was hit. I think only—He’s unconscious.”

“Dr. Knott!” the woman gasped, rushing toward him, stopping. She looked at her husband. “Oh, George!”

“Did he shoot himself or—Where’s he hit?” asked the man.

Robert told him what had happened, and said that he had just sent for a doctor.

“You’re a friend?” said the man, squinting. “Say, you’re not—”

“Robert Forester,” Robert said.

The woman looked at him openmouthed. “The prowler!”

“We read in the papers Dr. Knott took care of you last night,” said the man.

“Yes. He did.” The man and the woman seemed to be edging away from him, the woman moving toward the front door.

Robert glanced at the doctor, who had not moved.

“We might stay here till the doctor comes, Irma. I’m interested to know how he is,” said the man.

“Yes, George.”

Nobody sat down. Nobody said anything for what seemed like three or four minutes. Robert felt again for the doctor’s pulse. The doctor’s open eyes unnerved him. Now they seemed accusing, and also dead, but he wasn’t dead, because the pulse was still there.
Until you
, the doctor’s eyes seemed to say. Robert could hear the doctor’s voice:
I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is for me to have your company. … You’re the first guest
. … Robert blinked and looked at the two people in the room.

The man called George was smoking a cigarette, holding it close up in the fork of his fingers. He looked at Robert challengingly, with contempt, as if he had a right to be in the house and Robert had none. Then he sat down in a straight, upholstered chair, and said, “Sit down, Irma.”

“No, I’m all right, George.”

The man drew on his cigarette, then asked, “You call the police, too?”

“No,” Robert said. “Not yet.”

“Why not?”

Robert took a breath. “I thought getting a doctor was the most important.”

The man stared at him. “Who fired the shot?” he asked coldly.

Robert returned his look calmly. It seemed funny to Robert that the man could sit there with his back to the windows, funny that
he hadn’t asked before where the shot came from. “I don’t know,” Robert said. “Maybe the same person who fired at me last night.”

“You were hit?”

“Yes, in the arm.” Robert’s sleeves were rolled down, the bandage out of sight. He detested the man and the woman and wished he could send them away.

“Don’t you think you’d better call the police?” asked the man, as if he thought Robert was avoiding calling them, and his tone was so snide even his wife said, “George,” in an admonishing tone. And yet her eyes, when they looked at Robert, betrayed a fear that her husband’s didn’t.

“Why don’t you call them?” Robert asked the man. “I think you’d get better results than I.”

“Better?” said the man aggressively.

“Quicker,” Robert said.

The man glanced at his wife, then went to the telephone.

There was another knock on the door. This time it was a doctor, and a woman who said she lived across the street. Robert answered the neighbor’s questions while he watched the doctor. The doctor opened Dr. Knott’s shirt front, and listened to his heart with a stethoscope. Robert noticed that he had barely glanced at the head wound. Then he took the doctor’s jacket off, rolled up his sleeve and gave him an injection.

“This man’ll have to be moved to a hospital,” the doctor said to Irma.

Irma had been standing close by. “Yes, doctor. We’ll see to that.”

“In an ambulance,” added the doctor to himself, going to the telephone.

Robert went up to the doctor. “What is it? How is he?”

“Coma,” said the doctor. “I don’t know how sound his heart is, that’s the trouble. It doesn’t sound too good.” He looked irritably around him. “That’s a bullet wound. Why aren’t the police here?”

“They’re on their way,” said George.

The doctor picked up the telephone, dialed a number, and curtly ordered an ambulance.

Robert looked at the upside-down tray on the floor, at the shattered little glasses whose two stems and feet were still intact, at the bottle of sherry that had rolled unbroken into the hall, at the drops of blood in the doorway. Then he faced the window, the window whose sill would be just about as high as Greg’s chin, if Greg had been standing on the lawn. Where was Greg now? Walking away into what darkness?

“What’s the latest about the doctor?” Jack Nielson asked.

“The same. He’s still in a coma,” Robert said.

Jack did not want to sit down. He stood awkwardly in the middle of Robert’s living room in his raincoat, his hands crossed in front of him. Robert walked slowly around the room, circling suitcases and cartons. Out of one carton, Jenny’s mother-in-law plant stuck up ten inches over the top. It was 10:25
A.M
., Saturday morning. Robert kept looking at his watch every five minutes. He was going to call the hospital again at eleven.

“Sure you won’t have any coffee?” Robert asked. He had never seen Jack refuse coffee before.

Jack shook his head. “No. Bob, I came over to say—Betty and I don’t see quite eye to eye about this. She’s a little scared. I guess too scared to have you stay with us. You know I asked you to.”

“I don’t need it, Jack. I said thanks.” Robert walked slowly, looking at the floor.

“I think she’s more upset about the prowling story than anything else. I can understand it—the way you told it to me. I told her she could have, too, if she’d heard you. You know how women are—and with all these bullets.”

The conversation irked Robert. “I do understand, and I wouldn’t dream of staying in somebody’s house, and I was an idiot to have gone with the doctor. He wanted me to. He was a doctor and I had a bullet hole in my arm.” Robert threw his cigarette into the fireplace. It smoldered there, ugly and unsightly on the cleanly swept stones. “The doctor may die, and it’s my fault,” Robert said.

Jack said nothing. It was as if he kept a polite silence for the already dead.

Robert glanced at him.

“Well, I’ll be taking off, Bob.”

After he had gone, Robert realized that Jack hadn’t asked him how or where he was going to spend tonight, hadn’t said he would go against his wife’s wishes and hide him in the attic or the cellar tonight. Jack was going to go along with his wife, all the way, sooner or later, Robert thought. Probably by this afternoon, or this evening. The dentist was due at noon today, Lippenholtz had told Robert last night. Robert went to the telephone and called the Rittersville Hospital.