“Take it easy with that kind of talk,” Harmon said. “Mrs. Beloit lost a cat just before the mice showed up.”
“Hell, that mouse she brought you didn’t eat any cat,” Nick said. “Not with that snout.”
“No, but there are probably packs of rats in this neighborhood. Sewer rats. Norway rats, Rattus norvegicus. If the cat got hurt or sick and crawled down here from inside the house and rats found him, or the body, they sure wouldn’t have let it go to waste. Let’s finish looking around and get back out where I can stand up.”
“The cat you said was missing, was it orange?” Harmon asked Mrs. Beloit after he emerged from beneath the house.
“An orange tiger, like the one in the funny papers,” she said. “You found Pickles?”
“I’m sorry. We found bones and a little fur, nothing else, but it was a cat.”
“Don’t tell the children,” Mrs. Beloit urged. “Please, don’t say anything about it to them.”
Her three children had arrived home from school while the initial survey was going on. The youngest, a seven-year-old girl, arrived an hour before her two brothers. Samantha was the only one who gave the three intruders more than a passing glance. During most of the survey, she stayed close and watched. But while Harmon and Nick were under the house, she had gone inside. Her brothers had been home and gone in minutes.
Samantha had questions, dozens of them, some asked of all three strangers in turn.
“Are you going to find more funny mouses?” was her favorite question.
“We’re looking for them,” Griffin told her.
“You gonna kill them?”
“I hope not. We want to catch some alive so we can study them,” he said.
“I saw the mouse Mama caught. I saw it first, even before she did.”
“After it was in the trap?” Harmon asked.
The little girl nodded solemnly. “It was already dead.”
Later she asked, “If you catch more, can I keep one as a pet? I used to have a cat, Pickles, but he ran away. I can keep a mouse in a little cage where he can’t run away.”
Harmon smiled. “Whether you can keep one depends on at least two things. One is how many we find. We need some to study. But more important, you’ll have to ask your mother. She might not like to have a pet mouse around.”
That sent Samantha off to her mother. When Samantha returned ten or fifteen minutes later, she didn’t say anything about keeping a mouse as a pet.
“We’ve got everything set up, but there’s not much more we can do today,” Griffin told Mrs. Beloit a few minutes after six o’clock. “If you’ll just switch on the controls for the two video cameras before you go to work, and turn them off in the morning when you get home?”
She nodded. “I can do that, all right, but what about those traps? I’m not real happy with having those little bitty ants you brought in the house.”
“They won’t get out of the traps, Mrs. Beloit. The sides of those glass dishes are coated with a special lubricant. The ants can’t climb it or eat it. They just slide right back off. We had to improvise. If your mouse is specialized to eat small insects—and with that snout, my guess is that it is—it wouldn’t do any good to bait the traps with cheese or peanut butter or the other things that people use to catch regular mice. And even if the ants did get out, say, if someone bumped into one of the traps and knocked one of the dishes over, it still wouldn’t hurt. The ants are all sterile. They can’t breed and give you a long-term problem.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“I am, about that, at least. Tomorrow morning, if there’s anything in any of the traps, call me right away. I’ll be in my office a few minutes after eight. If there’s nothing, we’ll be back out tomorrow afternoon, about the same time as today, to start using the probes to look and listen between the walls and so forth, to try to find where any mice might be nesting.”
3.
The telephone was ringing when Harmon reached his office the next morning. Mrs. Beloit was on the line.
“Did we catch anything?” Harmon asked. His heart had started beating faster as soon as he heard the ringing.
“No. I thought you told me those ants couldn’t get out of those dishes,” Mrs. Beloit said.
“Not unless they were tipped over,” Griffin replied.
“Oh, yeah? Those dishes are all empty, and none of the traps were touched.”
“Have you actually seen any of the ants?”
“Not yet.”
Harmon hesitated. The lubricant was supposed to be proof against the ants. It always had been. He had used it before.
“Maybe the ants didn’t escape,” he said finally.
“They sure didn’t turn invisible,” Mrs. Beloit countered.
“It might mean that the mice can reach farther with those snouts than we allowed for.” It had been a rough measurement, as much guess as anything else. There hadn’t been time to construct new traps. Griffin had taken a model that was available, that he could quickly convert for live bait. If those anteater-like snouts could reach the bait from the sides, it might explain how the ants could be missing with the traps empty. “I’ll have to look to see if either of the cameras spotted anything.”
It was Marietta’s turn to hesitate. “You think that maybe I do have more of those mice?” The tone of her voice suggested that she hadn’t given much credence to that possibility before.
“We’ll know better after I run the tapes. I’ve got two classes this morning, but we’ll be out first thing this afternoon. You’ll be home?”
“I’ll be here. I’m going to bed now. I just got home from work. But I’ll be up before you get here.”
“We can make it a little later, if you like,” Harmon offered. “Give you a chance to get more sleep.”
“No, one o’clock, like yesterday, is fine. I’m off tonight anyway, so I want to be able to sleep then.”
Nick Peragamos thought that the glass dish in one trap had been moved, ever so slightly, closer to one side. “I was careful,” he told the professor. “I put each one precisely in the middle. I’ve got a good eye for things like that.”
Mrs. Beloit assured them that the traps had not been touched by her or her children. “I told them to stay away from the traps and your equipment, that I didn’t want them bumping those traps and maybe letting the ants get loose.”
She watched while Griffin carefully examined the traps and the now-empty dishes. She lifted an eyebrow, and bit at her lip to keep from talking, when the professor replaced the ants in the dishes.
“This way, we give them a chance to get away—if they can—while we’re here,” Harmon said when he noticed her look. “I don’t think that’s what happened, but I can’t rule it out. Maybe we’ll know better after we check the videotapes.”
While Griffin had been working with the traps, Cathy and Nick had replaced the tapes in the two video cameras. Both cassettes showed that the tape in them had run for a short time. They would, at a minimum, have recorded five minutes after being switched on, as Mrs. Beloit left, and again in the morning when she approached, until she turned each one off.
“What we’re looking for is anything between those two times,” Griffin said after explaining to Mrs. Beloit that she would have triggered the cameras herself.
The tapes were standard VHS cassettes. There was a VCR in the living room. Nick handled the controls. The first camera had been set up in the kitchen, near the doorway so that it could cover most of the kitchen floor.