Eileen Dewhurst - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 112, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 684 & 685, September/October 1998

Old-fashioned kitchen on his left. Opposite it, the downstairs bedroom. Then the utility porch, with the back door that had been open to admit Tom what’s-his-name, Hastings. Of course, someone else could have come in that way to make sure the old man had his accident, or maybe left by the back door. He or she or they could always have come in by the front door. Sure. Or dropped down the chimney. Inventing comic-book scenarios was dumb.

Just before the utility porch, bare concrete steps led downward. He took them. They angled left halfway down, then he was on the basement floor. Weak gray light filtered through grimy ground-level windows.

He reached up for the string that tripped the switch that lit the naked sixty-watt ceiling light.

Despite the cold, the deep jutting shadows, the basement was more welcoming than the upstairs had been. Heavy wooden shelving held cardboard packing boxes, contents listed on labels. Less dust than he remembered. Old leather suitcases. A steamer trunk. The old daybed in the corner hadn’t been moved since he’d first come to live here. Under the furnace, the pilot light made a faint glow. Ancient wires from a conduit snaked to the switch box but didn’t quite make it, hanging loosely near their contacts.

He turned the furnace on high. It came alight with a whoosh , settled into a quiet roar. He began to feel a spreading warmth, took a deep breath.

The basement was the one place where the old man’s deprivation scheme had sometimes broken down. It had been here, shortly before his fifteenth birthday, that he had first got Jan Tarquin’s panties down. She lived across the street.

He had never seen a real live naked girl before, much less fondled one, and had chosen her to advance his education because she was new to Eugene and hadn’t many friends and was quite appealing. He’d caught her watching him a few times, her face thoughtful, speculative. He suspected her of harboring improbably romantic yearnings, or perhaps a sexual curiosity as lively as his own. A classmate, she was slender and dark-haired and almost as tall as he was, with thick arching eyebrows and big eyes and, undressed, a sleek fragile-seeming young body that wasn’t at all fragile and that evoked astonished delight and dispassionate objective study. He wanted to learn fast.

Perhaps she had too, because she had soon signaled her willingness to return to the basement with him, and their increasingly rewarding gropings and grapplings had continued until summer vacation had taken her to visit relatives in Arizona. When she returned to start the new school year he was already involved with another girl, Jan Tarquin’s opposite, a practiced voluptuary of sixteen who found his seriousness amusing but no bar to carnal enjoyment. He had, for a while, been strongly attracted to her body, and intrigued by the depths underlying her cheerful sexuality until forced to conclude that there weren’t any. By then she was becoming involved with someone else, and he and Jan had become little more than distant acquaintances.

He went back upstairs.

The rest of the house was simply the place where he had grown up through untold hours of boredom. From grade school onward, his drive for academic success had goaded him, before every scheduled exam, to commit the contents of his fanatically maintained notebooks, plus a lot of textbook pages, to memory. Better be safe than sorry. Not knowing an answer meant more than embarrassment, it meant betraying his essential identity and left him quivering and defenseless. He’d hardly ever let it happen.

...Well, once more unto the breach, one more bout of deep boredom while he looked for that possibly imaginary lockbox, cleared the house of junk, and got everything ready for sale or donation as soon as the house and its contents were declared legally his.

He checked the service porch. The back door was bolted and locked with an old-fashioned skeleton key: no automatic spring latch here. Windows shut, bolted. The downstairs bedroom, which the old man had moved into when climbing stairs got difficult, was spare as a cell and as secure. The walk-in closet had clothes on hangers and storage boxes neatly crammed onto upper shelves. More storage boxes were visible under the bed, behind the nearly floor-length drape of the bedspread. In the adjacent bathroom, with its clawfooted tub, the window had been painted shut.

He returned to the front room — in time to catch movement just outside the front window, a flicker of deeper darkness visible at the edge of the blind.

He turned sharply to the front door and jerked it open.

A startled young man stood a foot away. He was tall and thin and wore a lumberjack’s hat with the earflaps down, a scuffed leather jacket, and threadbare jeans. His hands were stuffed into the pockets of the jacket. His eyes were blue and his face was long and pale. His mouth hung open.

Dave North snapped, “Yes?” and became aware of a girl in a hooded rain slicker off to his left near the window.

The young man closed his mouth and said in a thready voice, “Uh... who the hell are you?”

“I belong here. You don’t. What do you want?”

“I w-wanna know who you are ’n’ what you’re doing here.”

“None of your business and none of your business,” Dave said. “Get lost.”

“Guess we need the cops.” The young lip curled. Truculence had been quickly achieved.

“Call them.”

The girl’s voice said, through a congested nose, “Bet he was lookin’ for that lockbox.”

“Yeah.” The tall, thin guy took his hands out of his pockets. He had big hands. “Start talkin’, bud.”

“Sure.” Dave stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door shut. Without warning he hit the young guy in the chest, hard and fast, with the heel of his right hand, sending him reeling backwards. He reached the steps and kept going and hit the wet concrete pathway flat on his back.

The girl squealed, “Virg!” She ran down the steps and knelt beside him while a squad car glided to the curb under the elm with a brief growl from its siren. Virg struggled to sit up, grabbing his ankle and making noises like a hurt kid.

Two cops, in no hurry at all, got out of the squad car and crossed the parking strip. One was young, the other not so young. Both wore the obligatory cop look of stone indifference. The young one said, “Well, look who’s here: Virg and Kathy,” and stayed with them.

The other came up onto the porch. The nametag on his chest said Kraniak.

Somewhere along the line the rain had stopped again.

Dave said, “Did you guys just happen along by accident?”

“The lady in sixteen-fourteen called in,” Kraniak said. “Mrs. Ford. She said a couple of prowlers were acting suspicious around the old prof’s house. Didn’t say anything about you, though. Can I see some ID?”

“We buried the ‘old prof’ this morning.” Dave showed his driver’s license. “I’m his grandson. I’ll be staying here a few days, doing whatever needs doing — I’m not sure of the legalities yet.”

Kraniak pointed to the Tercel. “Yours?”

“A rental.”

“Why’d you hit the kid?”

“He was talking tough. When he took his hands out of his pockets I thought he was getting physical.”

“Yeah,” Kraniak said meaninglessly, and went down the porch steps. Dave followed him.

Virg was on his feet now, favoring the left, his mouth twisted with pain, leaning on the girl. She had an uninteresting face and a lot of stringy hair poking out from under the hood of the slicker. She looked mad.

“That man hit my brother!” She pointed dramatically to Dave. “For no reason! Just up and hit him and threw him off the porch—”

“We saw, so calm down. Mr. North, meet Virg and Kathy Howard.” Kraniak pointed to the MacDonald house. “They live down at the end of the block.”