Cliff

Chapter 15 -- Off to Piddley California

There was no question in Sally's mind that they were going to Piddley. She was always that kind of person. For Tom it was no challenge either. He wanted to be with Sally, and besides, he had a car. In fact, a fairly reliable one. Since he was on leave from school, if not from his senses, he had time to go to California on short notice.

For Sally it was a different story. For her it was a more serious decision. If she is to be gone for very long, she will either lose credit for her courses, or have to talk to her professors and drop them. And if she makes plans and drops her classes, she will have to explain what she is doing, or make up something to tell her professors. Desperately hoping that this expedition won't take too long, and that it will work out somehow, she just leaves. Besides, finding out what happened here is more important right now than course work. She hoped to be able to return to her course work.

"This costs money," Sally said, "I haven't got much."

"We will just have to do the best we can. I haven't got a lot either, but I can put the car and the motel on the credit card for a while. Are you OK with a single room?"

"We'll have to, she said. I can do it if you can do it."

"What if the cheap one only has a single bed? Does one of us get to sleep on the floor or in the car?"

"Whatever. We'll deal with that when it comes."

"I'm not looking forward to it. I don't want to be with you like that. I don't want to have to control myself around you. You're too sexy."

"Sexy! That's a new one! Tom, that's sweet. I promise I'll be considerate. Not overwhelm your chivalrous instincts with my womanly wiles. I'll get undressed in the dark. Are you being silly, or what?"

"You are a very attractive woman. I am normal enough to notice that. It will be a problem. Not for you, maybe, but for me."

"Me Tarzan...You Jane... Or something like that."

"I just don't want to put myself in the position of always wanting to push things, and knowing that I shouldn't. I mean, I guess I could sleep on the floor, or in the car, but it would still be just silly."

"What are we worried about? My reputation? What a novel idea! I never knew I had one, or needed one. Who on God's earth cares whether we share a room or not?"

"Nobody other than us. But that still leaves two people."

"Hey, wait a minute! Just lets stop for a minute. You're serious! I can't believe you're actually uncomfortable around me? Because you might not be able to control yourself around me? You can't be serious! Me?"

As she listens to what she is saying, Sally blushes. Or would, if she had the complexion for it.

"No, I will be able to control myself, all right, but it won't be comfortable. You and I are friends, but it wasn't like you and bob. You were, well, engaged?, to Bob."

"I think it was a relationship of convenience for both of us. I wasn't school-girl over him. We both had lives. Once we were past our current projects, we would have had to decide. As long as we could just be friends, and closer than that when we wanted, and it didn't cost us anything to do that, we did that. "

"Once he got his PhD and advertized for offers, it would be choice time. I hadn't made up my mind to follow him anywhere he went. I still don't know if I would have gone with him. It would have been a very hard decision to make. I was glad I could just put it off."

"You are a good man. I like you. I'm very comfortable around you. I like being with you. I'm not sexy. I won't ever be. I don't know how."

"And that's all beside the point. Somebody killed my friend. Nobody gets to kill my friend like that and get away with it. They don't get to do it in the first place, and they don't get to mess with my mind about it in the second place. We're going to figure this thing out, and if it means sharing a bed with you then it means sharing a bed with you."

She was crying. Why do women always cry at times like these?, she wondered.

"I'm not saying that I will have sex with you, but I'm damn sure not telling you I won't have sex with you. But nobody is going to sleep on the floor, or in the car. This isn't an old black and white movie. We are going to sleep in the same room in the same bed and like it!"

"I will, anyway."

"Damn you, Tom xxxxxxx, I will too! And I am not sexy!"

And that was settled.

They got to Piddley that same day. Sure enough, the cheapest room in the cheapest motel they could stand to go into was a single with a double bed. Tom rented it.

Then they found the library, which was closed. When it opened the next morning, they were waiting at the door.

The Piddley Public Library was small and friendly. There wasn't much of a reference section, but they did have back files of the local newspaper. Librarians are known not to ask questions, especially these days, and the newspapers were provided quickly and without comment. There were ads for garage sales in each edition.

Then things bogged down. There was no guarantee that every computer sold was in fact advertised. The mystery computer could easily have been sold at a garage sale whose ad did not mention a computer. It could have been sold at an unadvertised garage sale.

Some of the ads mentioned computers for sale, and computers were offered for sale in other ads as well. Using Tom 's cell phone, Sally made the first call. No answer.

"Tom, this isn't going to work. What do we do with this one? Call it back? We could get real lucky and actually talk to the person who sold the computer, and know that we did that, but we sure won't know if we missed him."

"Do you believe in luck?" Tom asked.

"Halfway. I believe in bad luck."

"I thought we had pretty good luck, finding that postcard. It got us here."

"Yeah, Tom, it got us, uh, here. Real good luck. Right."

"So make another phone call. What have you got to lose?"

So they did. They made several phone calls, in fact. Eventually they got to talk to a real person. When Sally asked him if he sold a computer in a garage sale three years ago, he said he didn't remember, he has garage sales twice a year at least, and some of the stuff he sells wasn't his. Sally thanked him for his time and hung up.

She was told "no". She was told to take their name off the calling list. She was asked "Who wants to know?" She was hung up on without comment. Their spirits sank lower with each call they made.

"Tom, this isn't working. I feel like a telemarketer. I don't like this."

Tom agreed that it didn't seem to be getting them anywhere. At least half the calls weren't going through to a human anyway, and it was hard to see how leaving messages was ever going to produce results.

After some discussion, a new tactic emerged. Fred had said something about the sale being an estate sale. If it was an estate sale, then someone must have died. They should be looking at obituary columns as well as ads for computers or garage sales. Even more logic suggested an obituary followed by a related estate sale.

That produced more of the same results. The couldn't precisely connect the sale with the obituary. They wouldn't ask directly if someone had died recently, and they got no useful responses. Maybe if they could narrow it down some more.

Completely frustrated, they made another call to Fred.

"You did say 'Estate sale?,' didn't you? Where did the owner die?"

Fred didn't know.

Sally had an idea. Maybe they should change tactics. Track the mysterious disertation, not the machine. Where do disertations occur in nature? At universities. We could go to universities and look for obits in the school paper. Then we would have a name, and a date, and a place for the death of the person who owned the computer before Fred got it.

Now which University did it come from? All of them that grant PhDs. Great, that eliminates community colleges and junior colleges. Big help. We don't even know what state the university is in.

Another call to Fred. This time Tom made the call. Sally didn't have the nerve.

"Fred, can we ask you a couple more questions about the computer."

Reluctantly, yes, we could.

"Did you ever use it at all?"

"Sure, I started it several times, played the games, started the programs. I wanted to play internet games on it but the modem wouldn't work. It was set up to call the university computer center, and I never could figure out how to change it."

Tom paused for a long time letting this sink in. Then, as casually as he could, as though the information would fly away if he didn't ask just exactly right, he asked, "What university, Fred."

"Cal Tech."