Charles Ardai - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 102, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 618 & 619, October 1993

When the hour seemed right, when the profound stillness of night was invaded by the twittering of those birds that herald the dawn’s approach, Selena ended her vigil and ran lightly across the dew-soaked lawn to the playhouse, where she calmly proceeded to empty the contents of the milk jug over the floor and those few sticks of furniture in the single rectangular room. Then, outside the door, she lit the torch Rob had fashioned for her and tossed it into the room, quickly backing away and removing herself to a safe distance as the flames erupted.

She thought of Rob hidden somewhere in the patch of woodland separating the Winship property from the adjoining modest cottage. Selena was confident he would not disappoint her. He desperately wanted that ten-speed bike.

The firemen found her, seemingly in a state of shock, cowering at the edge of the lawn. They could make little sense of her incoherent babbling, which instantly dried up as Beryl and Gordon came racing down from the house. Beryl whisked Selena away, and after getting her tucked into bed found one of the firemen, apparently the one in charge, waiting for her on the terrace, where he was looking down on the smouldering ruins of the playhouse.

“She’ll be all right,” said Beryl, plainly in shock herself, or close to it. “I gave her a sleeping pill.”

“Lucky kid, Mrs. Winship. She must have a guardian angel to have got out of there alive. Place must have gone up like a torch.”

Beryl couldn’t stop trembling. “It’s too terrible. I can’t bear to think about it. But who called in the alarm?”

“A neighbor. Didn’t give his name.”

“But how did it start?” cried Beryl. “There’s no electric power down there. No candles.”

“One of our men did get a few words out of the girl. None of it made much sense. One thing, she kept asking if we’d got her daddy out.”

Beryl’s head jerked back as if he’d slapped her. “Her—? Oh, his picture. She meant his picture. She kept a picture of her father in the playhouse. I still can’t understand how it could have happened.”

“I’m afraid it didn’t just happen, Mrs. Winship. The fire was deliberately set. We found a plastic milk jug on the grass a few feet from the structure. It reeked of gasoline.”

Beryl seemed about to faint, reached out blindly for support. “Oh God.”

“That’s not all. Your daughter said something else. She said, ‘I saw him. It was the milkman. I saw his face.’ Does that make any sense to you?”

Beryl clutched her throat, as if to prevent a scream from reaching her lips. Then she said weakly, “No. No, it doesn’t. No sense at all.”

“Like I say, she was pretty incoherent. The inspector can question her later... and the police.”

“Gordon’s gone,” announced Selena with the faintest of pussycat smiles. It was late afternoon. She and Rob were sitting on the shore tossing pebbles out into the lake.

“Gone for good?”

“Good is the word. Rode off into the sunset on his beloved Harley.”

“What happened?”

“Let’s just say Gordon decided it might be healthier somewhere else. You know what a health nut he is.”

“Come on, Selena, tell me the truth.”

Selena giggled. “The truth, dear boy, is not for your tender ears. I’ll tell you this much. There’ll be no more Gordons. Not ever. Beryl will be a good little mummy from now on.”

“But what did you tell them, about the fire?”

Selena examined an especially interesting spotted pebble before tossing it into the water. “What I told them? Or what I told Beryl? What I told Beryl is that I woke up and looked out the playhouse window and saw this man standing on the lawn in the moonlight holding a milk jug. I said I got scared and crept out and ran down and hid by the lake before the playhouse went up in flames. I told her the man wore his hair in a pigtail. And then she called me a liar and a wicked girl and I had to remind her that the fire sparked — pardon the pun — certain memories , but not to worry. I wouldn’t want to get her into trouble.”

Rob’s pleasant but somewhat dull features betrayed a mental struggle to comprehend all this, as if it were the plot of a story beyond his intellectual grasp. “What memories?”

“None of your business. Anyway, we had a cozy little chat and I promised I’d tell them I must have been dreaming, and as for the milk jug on the lawn, we’d say you left it there after mowing. Remember that, in case you’re asked. As I told Beryl, that’ll be my story as long as I don’t see that man with the pigtail again. Ever. Poor Beryl. She ran out of the room crying and shortly after that I looked out and saw Gordon strapping a knapsack on his Harley and off he went.”

“You mean he got scared off just because he thought they’d believe you if you told them he set the fire? What a wimp.”

“Well, there’s a little more to it than that, but I’ll spare you the sordid details. That’s history. Oh, by the way, I’ve got a present for you.”

She drew Beryl’s check from her pocket and handed it to him. “Gee, great,” he said with a beaming smile. “I wasn’t sure you’d keep your end of the bargain.”

“Thanks a lot. I told Beryl I’d promised to pay you for painting the playhouse. Oh yes, we had a most satisfactory talk. She’s raising my allowance and agreed to see the family lawyer about making certain changes in the trust fund. Beryl’s rather a dear — when she has to be. And I do have to protect her from rats like Gordon.” Her smile, both pious and resolute, betrayed only the faintest shade of satire. “A daughter’s duty, you know.”

“Muzza” from Things As They Are by Paul Horgan. Copyright © 1964 by Paul Horgan, renewed 1992. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.

Born in Buffalo, New York in 1903, Paul Horgan is the author of seventeen novels, four volumes of short stories, and several distinguished works of nonfiction. Although the author can by no means be described as a crime writer, the following is as fine an example of a crime story as one could hope to find. Tracings, a book of recollections by Mr. Horgan, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in September of this year...

How do we manage to love at all when there is so much hatred masquerading in love’s name? I saw, if I did not understand, how this could be when I lost forever a friend whom I tried to rescue from peril. But a larger peril claimed him.

His name was John Burley. Nobody ever loved him enough to give him a natural nickname. Instead, he was the subject of mocking refrain.

“John, John, the dog-faced one,” sang the other boys our age when they saw John and me playing together in our neighborhood. He was my next-door neighbor, and I didn’t know there was anything really different about him until I saw him abused by other children.

Before we were old enough to go to school we owned the whole world all day long except for nap time after lunch. We played in the open grassy yards behind and between our houses, and when John was busy and dreaming with play, he was a good friend to have, and never made trouble. But when people noticed him, he became someone else, and now I know that his parents, and mine too, out of sympathy, wondered and wondered how things would be for him when the time came for him to go off to school like any other boy and make a place for himself among small strangers who might find his oddness a source of fun and power for themselves.