On Tuesday, Harvey found three filter cigarettes in his refrigerator; they were standing almost upright in one of the indentations hollowed for eggs in a door shelf. Neither Harvey nor his wife Emily smoked filter cigarettes, and they tried to remember someone among their recent guests who had been drinking too much and who smoked that particular brand. They couldn't, so they forgot about it. But on Thursday, when Emily came home from shopping, she found three more cigarettes in the same place, and she knew that one of her eggs was missing.
"Before I went to the market," she said, "I checked to see if we needed eggs. We had an even half dozen, and now there are five."
"Is it the same kind of cigarette?" Harvey asked.
"Yes, of course."
"Why 'of course'?"
"Because I'd naturally check that, " Emily told him.
"Perhaps it's an advertising gimmick," Harvey said. "Let me try one of them; I've never had a chilled cigarette."
"Don't be funny, Harvey. I'd like to know who's coming in our house."
So they searched for other signs of theft. Emily checked her jewelery box and the silverware; Harvey looked over his trout flies, the ones he'd tied himself. Nothing was touched. On Friday, for no reason that Harvey could see, Emily looked in her lingerie drawer to find out if anything had been handled or mussed in any way. That, she told Harvey, would indicate a sex maniac. But everything seemed as she had left it.
Even so, Emily worried; when Harvey's mother phoned on Saturday, just to say that things were fine in Boston, Emily told her that there was something funny going on in Maine. It had been Harvey's mother's house, but when Harvey's father died his mother had given it to them. Harvey had taken a job as a photographer for a post card company in Boothbay; it was a job not unlike his previous work with a Boston newspaper, taking "human interest" pictures, only it was more leisurely. Harvey was an hour away from Boothbay, but he drove there only once or twice a week. If the move to Maine was difficiult for Emily, it was only because she needed to get used to the quiet. They were young and certainly couldn't consider this permanent-- this was an exciting change for them both, and Harvey's mother was pleased to have them living in the house. She suggested to Emily that they tell Mrs. Wathan about the cigarettes.
Mrs. Wathan lived alone at the end of the peninsula; alone except for an army of cats and one anonymous-looking dog-- fat, fatter than Mrs. Wathan, with a long, mottled collie face and the thick, stunted legs of a terrier-- hopelessly a mongrel. The animals, all fat but for a few of the cats, lingered all day in front of the house and alongside the sagging ramp to the barn. At first glance the abundance of these creatures suggested a house prolific with children, and uncles and aunts, but Mrs. Wathan had lived alone for eleven years, since the death of her husband and moving away of her sons. She wore her husband's old overalls and layers of sweat shirts, frayed at the cuffs, and she smelled of the sea she fished from, alone.
Harvey had to admit some unfairness in equating this woman with the blue-haired chatterers who were dying greedily in his mother's apartment house; in fact, he had to admit some general unfairness in the way he felt about most old people. Harvey was twenty-seven-- a good age to realize finally that he could never again run as fast or as long as a mere teen-ager. Yet he was young enough to have no honest conception of himself becoming really old. It seemed to him quite logical to assume that he would never wrinkle or limp; and senilitiy, that inglorious return to bedwetting, could happen only to other people.
Emily had never seen Mrs. Watlan's house, and she stood with some wonder in the muddy drive. Long ridges of the mud had frozen, and thinly iced rivers laced the tire tracks from Mrs. Wathan's jeep. The jeep was parked by the kitchen door, the only door now used, and strewn about the brown lawn were broken old lobster traps. By noon in November the sun was finally warm enough to raise some steam from the frozen ground. The lobster traps, in this curious fog, seemed like skeletons-- emptied and staved in.
"Is she home?" Emily asked, and her voice triggered the first low bark of the dog, who-- until she had spoken was waddling in retreat. Now it stepped forward, growled and barked again.
"Her jeep's here," Harvey said, and he saw the old woman peek from behind the gray kitchen curtains. Then she was at the door.
"Good morning, Mrs. Walthan," Harvey said.
"'Morning."
"Good morning," Emily said.
"'Morning," Mrs. Walthan repeated, her head stiffly motionless, her bright eyes skipping from Harvey to Emily and back to Harvey.
"We've had a little mystery down our way," Harvey said.
"Have some tea," Mrs. Walthan replied. It was a command, not a question.
"If it's not any trouble," Emily said.
"Tea's no trouble. Come in." She swung open the door and moved into the kitchen, leaving them in the yard. They followed her in, into the steam and smells of a small and cluttered kichen-- not dirty, but simply filled with half-empty cartons and rows of heavy, musty coats hanging from the walls and piles of drying cups and saucers, which suggested that Mrs. Walthan never ate meals, but only munched.
"Move something and sit down," Mrs. Walthan said, seating herself on a low stool in front of the oven. She cracked open the oven door and squinted into the heat; then she shut the door and leaned back against it.
"Something smells good," Emily said. Harvey had thought that it was an anonymous smell-- the smell of an empty oven warming and burning all the old drippings from chickens and hams and pies, mostly pies.
"Well," Mrs. Walthan said, "it don't smell good to me. It's just an old pie I made last week, and I keep on warming it up whenever I'd like a piece." She looked up from her stool.
"You going to sit down?" she asked.
"Really," Harvey said, "It's nothing too important, and we won't bother you for long. We've had a little trouble at our house, and my mother told us to see you."
"Roof leaking?" Mrs. Walthan asked.
"No, no," Emily said. "Someone's getting in."
"Breaking in?"
"Oh, no," Harvey said. "We don't lock it."
"I shouldn't think so," Mrs. Walthan replied. "There's none of that trouble once those summer kids leave."
"This is funny," Harvey said, "what's happening now."
"Funny?"
"Yes. You see, someone steals an egg and leaves cigarettes for it."
"How many cigarettes?"
"Three."
Mrs. Walthan sat, mentally figuring. "There was a time," she said, "when eggs was cheap enough so's that would have been fair. Now they'd have to leave you five cigarettes."
"But you see," Emily told her, "it's the idea of someone's coming into our house without our knowing who it is. They could take something else. I mean, it's very strange."
"They haven't taken anything else," Harvey said.
"But they might," Emily protested, speaking to Mrs. Wathan but looking at Harvey.
"Cecil Moffett," Mrs. Wathan said.
"Who's that?" Harvey asked.
"An old fool," Mrs. Wathcn said. "Fool enough to think of doing some such thing, and old enough to still be thinking back when eggs was cheap."
"Is he very strange?" Emily asked.
"No," Mrs. Walthan said. "He's just an old fool."
"What's he do?" Emily asked.
"He's a clam digger," Mrs. Walthan said.
"Well, we can't really know it's him," Harvey told them.
"It's him, all right." Mrs. Wathan said.
"Where can we find him?" Emily asked.
"No," Harvey said. "We're not going to look for the old man. That's out."
"Wouldn't you like to know?" asked Emily.
"Yes, of course I would," Harvey said, but he knew he was lying. He felt confused. Mrs. Walthan's reasoning struck him as flawless, and yet Harvey realized that he hadn't been prepared for such a matter-of-fact solution. This was not a crime he cared to solve; he couldn't feel it was even a crime, but simply a gesture, mysterious and exciting, that warranted no more than his appreciation.
"Honestly," Emily said, "you mean to tell me that you don't care to accept this Moffett character as at least a logical possibility?"
"I don't mean to tell you anything," Harvey said, "and I don't want to hear anything logical."
And then he saw that he'd surprised her, maybe even hurt her. He should be more careful of his tone. It had escaped him. He'd felt what he said in that tone of voice, nastily, finally, but he had meant to say it laughingly, and he tried laughing now. "I mean, darling, what can I tell you about this when we don't really know?"
