Judas Cat by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

awful close-mouthed.”
    “Ever hear him mention the name Anne?”
    Something in Miss Turnsby’s eyes sharpened, and yet her expression remained unchanged and she answered quickly. “Not that I remember.”
    Alex felt that she was lying. But it might have been that the old man had mistakenly called her by the name. For all his intended logic, Alex had embroidered on his idea of Anne … beautiful, strong-minded, trying to condition herself to Andy’s agnosticism, maybe his anti-social ways, and then despairing of it. He shook his head. It was silly, sentimental stuff and Miss Turnsby was talking to him. She had asked him to have coffee and rolls.
    “Thank you,” he said. “I do love a cup of coffee in the middle of the morning.”
    The coffee had been prepared beforehand. And she had baked the cinnamon rolls that morning. He wondered if that was what he had smelled in the house and about her. But to prepare fresh rolls in hopes of a caller … it told of her loneliness. At the table she seated herself opposite him so that she had a full view of the street and Andy’s house.
    “Have you any idea where Andy came from, or why he picked Hillside?” he asked.
    She shook her head and then leaned across the table confidentially. “He didn’t learn them fine manners of his in any small town,” she said. “And the way he made things when he was younger, I’d say he was a mighty well-educated man.”
    “What kind of things?”
    “Bird houses and the like. He gave me one once. I had it for years. There was one thrush came there every spring. Then a grackle came and drove him away. They’re mean birds, and noisy and homely like witches. It just broke my heart so I took it down.”
    Alex sipped his coffee thoughtfully. An old-fashioned coffee grinder was sitting on the cupboard with a jar of coffee beans beside it. “Andy must have been a fine figure of a man in his day,” he said.
    “Indeed he was. Spruce, down-right dapper, as we used to say.”
    “These rolls are delicious, ma’m. You’re a wonderful cook.”
    “For plain cooking I can’t be beat,” Miss Turnsby said.
    Alex nodded. “Andy held his age mighty well until the last few years, didn’t he? I wonder when he began to show it.”
    “I can tell you that,” she said. “He closed up the house for a couple of months about fifteen years ago and went off. Right in the depression it was. I guess we all remember them years. I began to think he was gone for good. Then he was out on the porch like usual one morning. I took him over some rolls. Same as these, I remember. And my, he was different. Thanked me. Told me that afternoon how nice they were. He wasn’t a mean man before that, mind you, Alex, but he had an awful bite.”
    “And after that?”
    “He wasn’t neighborly, exactly. But he passed time of day, and it seemed people just didn’t think much about him anymore.”
    “But it was then people began thinking of him as an old man?”
    “I think so. I remember saying how stooped he was, and he didn’t take care of himself like he did before that.”
    “I don’t know that it means anything,” Alex said, “but could you put it more closely what year it was?”
    “Let me see,” she said. She had a habit of sucking in her under lip when she was thinking. “It was the first year during the depression my Endicott stocks paid anything. Not much, but I got the check the same morning he came back and it kind of cheered me up, them both coming on the same day. It’s right lonesome with no neighbor on the kitchen side of the house. What will they do with his place now, Alex?”
    “I don’t know for sure. I think it’s impounded for so long to see if any heirs show up. I’d be grateful if you could tell me the year he went away. Maybe from there we could learn something about him.”
    Miss Turnsby pulled the chair from the table to the cupboard. Putting a newspaper on it, she climbed up and took a tin box from the top shelf. Alex helped her