They left just before sunset Friday. But once more, as they approached the white van, several young men came out of the park to stand near the far curb and watch.
“This is beginning to scare me,” Cathy said after they had driven away from the block. “Those guys, watching us, like they’re just waiting for the right time to strike. They marked the van and now they’re just watching.”
In the middle seat, Nick was looking out the back window. He wouldn’t say anything, not yet, but it was beginning to wear on his nerves as well.
“We don’t know that it’s the same ones who painted the side of the van,” Harmon said. Most of that had come off after a brisk scrubbing. “They haven’t done anything, haven’t said anything.” He glanced in the outside rearview mirror. “They’re probably just curious, wondering what three white people are doing spending so much time in their neighborhood.”
“What about Mrs. Beloit. Could she be in danger because of us?” Cathy asked.
“I’ll mention the kids to her. She hasn’t said anything. After all, it’s her neighborhood. She must know if there’s anything to worry about.”
“Call her tonight, as soon as we get back to school,” Cathy urged. “She’s got to go out to work tonight.”
“No, I don’t know who they might be,” Marietta Beloit said when Harmon told her about the young men in the park. “My boys were already in. If you had said something then, Teddy—he’s the oldest—could have gone out with you to look. All my neighbors know what you folks have been doing here. I made sure of that the first day. Some folks might have wondered if I hadn’t. Then there might have been trouble. People might have thought you were the law. But I don’t know about any kids watching from in the park. I’ll keep my eyes open and ask around.”
“Please, be careful,” Harmon said. “You’ve been so good to us all week. I don’t want to cause you any trouble with your neighbors, or put you in any danger.”
She laughed harshly. “Don’t you worry ’bout me, Professor. I’ve lived a long time in this city. I can take care of myself.”
6.
It was just past seven-thirty the next morning when the ringing telephone woke Harmon Griffin at home. On the bed next to him, his wife grunted, then poked him in the back. “You get that, honey,” she said.
Mrs. Beloit was on the telephone, and she was even more excited than she had been the day before.
“We hit the jackpot, Professor,” she told him. “There are three mice in the traps this morning. Three of them!” she repeated, her voice climbing in pitch and volume.
“That’s great,” Harmon said. “Three of them?”
“Two in the kitchen and one in the bathroom upstairs, right under the vanity.”
Harmon rubbed at his eyes. “I’ll be over as soon as I can. Maybe an hour and a half. Is that OK?”
“Fine, Professor. No trouble at all.”
“Did you have any trouble last night after we left?”
“Not a glimmer. There was nobody across the street when I went to work.”
There was no difficulty about getting into the labs even on a Saturday. Harmon took his three new captives in and spent an hour getting them situated with the mouse that had been captured the day before.
“I guess I’m going to have to hunt down some food for you critters myself,” he said, hovering over the large glass cage he had appropriated for the mice. “Get enough to tide you over for the next few days, and enough to try to catch a few more members of your clan.” The ants that he had had Cathy and Nick hunt up the afternoon before behind the Beloit house would not go far.
“You four just get chummy and I’ll take care of everything else,” Harmon said. All three of the new captives were female. Things were definitely looking up.
By Monday morning, the mouse count was five, two males and three females. The second male had been trapped Saturday night.
“We don’t really need any more than that, do we?” Cathy asked when she joined Professor Griffin and Nick in the lab at noon Monday. “This should be enough to start a breeding colony.”
“The more the merrier,” Nick said. “The more we have, the better the chance of getting a little genetic variety.”
“He’s right,” Griffin said. “With what may be a very small total population, the dangers of inbreeding are going to be exceptionally high in any case. Besides, we can use a few more days of observation of how they act in their native habitat. Record more tape of them in the nest, get more examples of their behavior when they’re out in view of the other cameras foraging.”
“Can we at least start leaving a little earlier, like well before sunset?” Cathy asked.
“Does it make you that nervous?” Harmon asked.
“Yes! I’ve been having nightmares. I keep seeing people watching me, just staring, until it’s all I can do to not scream because I don’t know what they’re going to do next.”
“It does get kind of spooky,” Nick said. “It’s like we’re asking for trouble.”
“OK, we can leave earlier,” Harmon said. Their moment of privacy was over anyway. There were people coming. News of the unusual mice was beginning to spread around the university.
7.
“We’ll leave the traps and the cameras for a few more days, maybe through Friday, and take the rest of our gear out today,” Griffin explained to Mrs. Beloit that afternoon. Discussion between the professor and his assistants during the drive over had led to firmer plans. “I’ll stop by every day to collect any mice we catch, rebait the traps, collect the videotapes, and put new ones in, spend a little time doing some observing while I’m here, maybe. If you would turn the cameras we have on, the two out in the rooms and the one peeking into the nest in the kitchen, before you leave for work at night, that will give us a chance to observe them when they should be most active.”
“You figure you’ve got everything you need?” Marietta asked.
“Well, under other circumstances it might be nice to get video of twenty-four consecutive hours, get the full cycle, maybe repeat it several times over a couple of weeks to a month, but I don’t want to impose on you that much.” In ideal circumstances, he would have preferred to take over the house completely for as much as a full year, put a team of observers in to watch the mice around the clock. But that was clearly impossible.
“You think we’ll catch all of the mice in just another four days?” was Marietta’s next question.
“Probably not,” Harmon admitted. “Traps alone might never do it. There would likely always be pups in the nests. And we haven’t taken that large a percentage of them so far, and mice do learn to avoid hazards. But if we haven’t got them all by Friday, I’ll make arrangements to have an exterminator come in to get rid of the rest of them for you. If we can do that. I’m still waiting to hear back from the lawyers.”
She nodded slowly. “But there’s nothing to stop more of them from moving in, is there? I mean, if there are more of these mice in the block.”
“No, there isn’t,” he agreed.
“You know, if all these mice eat are bugs, maybe they aren’t so bad after all. Let me think on it, about bringing in somebody to kill them all.”
It was six o’clock when they left the Beloit house on Monday, carrying the gear that they would no longer be using. The sun was still visible over the tops of the trees and buildings, but the street itself was already in shadow from the trees in the park.