"Okay," I admitted. "I hear the noises. They seem to be coming from
behind the walls, if anywhere."
Stoddard looked smugly triumphant.
"I told you so," he smirked.
"But they aren't rat scrapings," I said. "I know the sounds rats make,
and those aren't rat sounds."
Stoddard sat bolt upright. "What?" he demanded indignantly. "Do you mean
to sit there and tell me--"
"I do," I cut in. "Ever heard rat noises?"
Stoddard looked at his wife. Both of them frowned. He looked back at me.
"No-o," he admitted slowly. "That is, not until we got these rats. Never
had rats before."
"So you jumped to conclusions and thought they were rat noises," I said,
"even though you wouldn't recognize a rat noise if you heard one."
Stoddard suddenly stood up. "But dagnabit, man!" he exploded. "If those
aren't rat noises, what are they?"
I shrugged. "I don't know," I admitted. "They sound as if they might be
coming through the pipes. Perhaps we ought to take a look around the
house, beginning with the basement, eh?"
Stoddard considered this a minute. Then he nodded.
"That seems reasonable enough," he admitted.
* * * * *
I followed the amateur designer-owner of this madhouse down into the
basement. There we began our prowl for the source of the noise. He
snapped on the light switch, and I had a look around. The boiler and
everything else in the basement was exactly as I remembered it--in the
wrong place.
There was an array of sealed tin cans, each holding about five gallons,
banked around the boiler. I tapped on the sides of these and asked
Stoddard what they were.
"Naphtha," he explained, "for my wife's cleaning."
"Hell of a place to put them," I commented.
A familiar light came into Stoddard's stubborn eyes.
"That's where I want to put them," he said.
I shrugged. "Okay," I told him. "But don't let the insurance people find
out about it."
We poked around the basement some more, and finally, on finding nothing
that seemed to indicate a source of the sound, we went back up to the
first floor.
Our investigation of pipes and other possible sound carriers on the
first floor was also fruitless, although the sounds grew slightly
stronger than they'd been in the basement.
I looked at Stoddard, shrugging. "We'd better try the second floor," I
said.
I followed him upstairs to the second floor. Aside from the crazy belfry
just above the attic, it was the top floor of the wildly constructed
domicile.
The sounds were distinctly more audible up there, especially in the
center bedroom. We covered the second floor twice and ended back up in
that center bedroom again before I realized that we were directly
beneath the attic.