The Cry of the Owl Read Free Page A

irises the evening he met him. The professor had brought some of the drawings for his book, for which he already had a contract with an American publisher. The young Frenchman who had started the drawings, and more than half finished them, had died. This in itself was enough to make Robert decline the assignment—not that he was superstitious, but the situation was vaguely depressing and hehad had enough depression. He was also not enamored of insects and spiders. But the professor was enthralled by his iris blossoms, which Robert had drawn on a whim from flowers in his and Nickie’s apartment, and was sure he could complete the Frenchman’s drawings in the style in which they had been begun. Before the evening was over, Robert had accepted the assignment. It was certainly different from anything he had ever done before, and he was trying to create for himself a “different” life. He had separated from Nickie and was living in a hotel in New York, he was about to quit his job, and he was trying to choose a city to go and live in. The insect book might lead to other such assignments; he might like it very much or he might detest it, but at least he would find out. So he had come to Rittersville, Pennsylvania, a larger town than Langley, stayed for ten days and found nothing in the way of a job, and then he had come to Langley to investigate Langley Aeronautics. The town was dull, but he was not sorry he had moved from New York. Even though one had to take one’s old self along wherever one went, a change of scene was that much change, and it helped. He was to get eight hundred dollars when he completed the drawings, and he had until the end of February to finish them. Robert set himself four drawings per week. He drew from the professor’s detailed but rough sketches and from enlarged photographs the professor had given him. Robert found that he enjoyed the work, and it helped to pass the long weekends.
    Robert entered Langley from the east and drove past “Red Redding’s Used Car Riots.” Here were solid square blocks of hardtops and convertibles, illuminated in a ghostly way by street lights set in narrow paved lanes that ran among them. The cars looked likea vast army of dead soldiers in armor, and of what battles, Robert wondered, could each car tell? Of a crash that had been repaired, but the owner killed? Of a family man gone broke, so the car had to be sold?
    The Camelot Apartments, where Robert lived, was a four-story structure on the west side of Langley, only a mile from the plant where he worked. Its lobby was lighted by two table lamps that shone through philodendron boxes. A switchboard in the corner had been abandoned and never removed: Mrs. Rhoads had told him that she thought her “people,” after all, preferred private telephone lines, even if they couldn’t get messages taken for them. Mrs. Rhoads lived on the ground floor right, and she was usually in the lobby or her front sitting room, whose door was always open, when anyone went in or out. She was in the lobby when Robert came in, and she was pouring water from a lacquered-brass watering pot into a philodendron box.
    “Good evening, Mr. Forester. And how are you this evening?” she asked.
    “Very well, thank you,” Robert said, smiling. “And you?”
    “Good enough. Working late tonight?”
    “No, just driving around. I like to take a look at the countryside.”
    Then she asked him if he was getting enough heat in a certain one of his radiators, and Robert assured her that he was, though he hadn’t noticed anything about the radiator. Then he went up the stairs. There were six or eight apartments in the building, and there was no elevator. Robert’s apartment was on the top floor. He had not troubled to get acquainted with any of the other people—a couple of young bachelors, a girl in her twenties, a middle-aged widow who went to work very early—but he nodded and spoke wheneverhe encountered anyone. One of the young men, Tom