Judas Cat Read Online Free PDF Page A

wouldn’t live long after Addison went,” Mrs. Oakes said. She lived across the street.
    “That’s the way with old people when their friends go. I had an aunt once …”
    “Poor man could have starved to death without a soul knowing it. I always say …”
    “Didn’t old Addison leave him anything? With the millions he had you’d think …”
    “You’d think Mabel’d have the decency to look in on him once in a while, the way she carried on about him twenty years ago …”
    “I saw him at Durkin’s last week. Terrible feeble he looked. When people get up in years …”
    The same things were said over and over again to each newcomer on the scene. Alex wished that he could get away quickly. It was curiosity that had brought him there himself in a way, and yet its manifestations in this mob of people sickened him.
    “Alex. Alex Whiting!”
    Miss Turnsby was flailing her way through the crowd to him. She pulled him back into her yard after her. “Look what they’re doing to my lawn,” she said. “Look at my forsythia and they bloomed the first time this year. How can people carry on this way?”
    She was almost in tears, as close to tears as Mabel ever came, he thought. She had more in this crowd than she bargained for and he wanted to say as much to her. But what was the point? Instead he collared a youngster leaping across the bushes and assisted him into the crowd on the sidewalk. “How would you like it if this was your place?” he said.
    “Aw, I wouldn’t put it past the old maid to have done him in herself.”
    The words “done in” passed through the crowd like a fly.
    The county ambulance pulled up then, and presently the attendants carried Andy’s remains out of the house. The deputy and the coroner followed them. Alex drifted back to where Waterman was standing at the side of the house. Together they watched the crowd dwindle down to a handful of men who might have been seen talking in the same fashion on the post office steps any day of the week.
    “Ain’t people the dangedest things?” Waterman said.
    “Aren’t they?” said Alex. “Is there anything I can do?”
    “Want to go through the old man’s things?”
    “I’d like to. I’d like to see what I can find out about him.”
    “I’ll be in the station, Alex. I’d appreciate your making a list of anything you find.”
    Alex, alone in the house, wondered where he should begin. It was singularly bare of any of the comforts one associates with a long-time residence. The drapes were faded and dust-ridden, and there were no cushions except those that were a part of the sofa. A bucket half-filled with coal stood by the old-fashioned stove, evidently there since the last fire in spring. Three volumes stood between a set of tarnished book ends on the table, untouched and unread for years, by their appearance. Alex looked at the titles: Theories of Compressed Air, Hydraulics and Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason.
    He picked up one of the science books and blew the dust from it. At one time it had been well read and studied, with notations in the margins. Alex did not know much about hydraulics, but he gathered from the jottings, that whoever owned the books did. On one page after another, problems had been neatly copied in the white spaces, illustrating the theories or questioning them. Alex turned to the flyleaf. Andrew Mattson, 1893. The writing was bold, well-disciplined.
    He looked at The Age of Reason. There was an inscription on the flyleaf, the writing thin and delicate:
To Andrew,
    Heaven forgive my encouraging you—but bless you in your pursuit of truth.
    My love,
    October 11, 1885 Anne
    1885. That was sixty-three years ago. Alex tried to imagine how Andy Mattson might have looked then. He would have been about thirty. Who was Anne? Someone in love with him? His sister? “… in your pursuit of truth,” she had written. There should be other books in the house, writing, evidences of study. Or had he abandoned the pursuit