Free Talk of the Town by Anne Marie Rodgers

that the North American equivalent of the Abominable Snowman?”
    “It is.” Louise picked up the salad bowl. “It is also called Sasquatch, and the Himalayan monsters are called Yeti.” She spooned a portion of salad onto her plate, then realized both her sisters were staring at her. “What?”
    “Interesting trivia for you to know,” Jane said with a grin.
    “Cynthia had to do a report on the topic in school one time,” Louise said. “What else would you like to know?”
    “Do you think they’re real?” Alice took the salad from Louise.
    “I just don’t know.” Louise shrugged. “I’m skeptical. There are no fossil records, no skeletal remains, no records of any hunter ever bagging one… on the other hand, there are many, many eyewitness reports and findings of tracks. There have even been a few claims of finding nests or scat.”
    “Scat?” Jane’s brow wrinkled.
    Louise gave her a look. “F-e-c-e-s.”
    “Oh.” Jane made a face. “Sorry. Keep going.”
    “Some of the eyewitness accounts are extremely detailed and a significant number of them share commonalities that the average person would not have known.”
    “Geographically speaking,” Jane said, “I don’t think we are exactly in the center of Bigfoot sightings. Aren’t most of them out in the Northwest?”
    Louise nodded. “A lot of reports have come from areas where there are extremely large tracts of undeveloped land.”
    “So the four of you are the only ones who saw these tracks?” Jane asked Alice.
    Alice nodded. “Ronald was going to get a camera, and we had talked about making plaster casts. And then it rained.”
    “It didn’t just rain,” Louise said. “It poured. And it’s still raining, although certainly not as hard as it did earlier.”
    “It just kills me to think of Wendell being out in this.” Alice had to voice the thought that wouldn’t stop circling in her brain, despite the memory of her unusual experience during the afternoon. “It’s supposed to get down into the low forties tonight.”
    “Perhaps he’s not outside,” said Jane. “Maybe he’s found sanctuary with some lovely person who will call us tomorrow. Or maybe he’s sneaked into someone’s warm, dry garage.”
    “Oh, I hope so.” Alice’s voice quavered and Jane reached over and placed a comforting hand atop her sister’s.
    “Have faith,” Jane said. “We just have to have faith.”
    Alice realized, apparently at almost the same moment Jane did, that Louise had been noticeably silent during their exchange. She reached out and clasped Louise’s hand and Jane did the same.
    “It is not your fault, Louise,” Alice said firmly. “Neither of us blames you, and we won’t let you blame yourself. If I’d been in the kitchen and caught him on the table, I’d have reacted very much the same.”
    “Do you remember the time he leaped onto the counter and walked right across that freshly iced sheet cake I had made for the Potterston Art Festival?” Jane asked. “By the time I found him, he had licked his feet clean, but the paw prints in the icing gave him away. I wasn’t very happy with him that day.”
    Alice chuckled. “And how about the day he got into one of our guest rooms and knocked over the little girl’s goldfish bowl that she’d won at the fair? Thank heavens I was walking down the hall and heard the crash. That poor fish was flopping around and Wendell was trying to pin it down until I scooped it up and dropped it into a glass of water.”
    Louise finally smiled a little at that memory. “I bet those guests will never come back.”
    “Probably not.” Alice’s eyes lost their momentary sparkle. “Tomorrow I’m going to put up some more posters if we don’t hear anything by noon.”
    “I can help,” Louise volunteered. “And we can go to Potterston to try to find him again. By now, he must be getting hungry and lonely. Maybe he’ll come out if he’s hiding in the bushes.”
    “Maybe.” Alice tried to hold