Isaac Asimov - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 73, No. 3. Whole No. 424, March 1979

It was on one of the days that they had gone to the cellar that my mother disappeared. I watched them from the front steps and then after a while I went back to the orchard to play. I saw my father come back from the field and go into the house and then a little later Jeff came back and took the milk pails that had been drying in the sun and went out to the barn. I wandered down to the barn and stroked the nose of the Jersey cow that was my special favorite while Jeff did the milking. When we went up to the house it was suppertime and Mother was gone.

She didn’t come home that night. The cold winter passed into spring and my father had notified the sheriff, but still there was no word about my mother or the encyclopedia salesman. That spring the cardinals came back and Daddy packed up the clothes that Mother had left behind and took them into town to the Salvation Army store.

On the day the cardinals were first trying to teach their babies to fly, Jeff went down into the old cellar to replace the water bottles for the summer storm season. I was standing at the top of the stairs when I heard him give a strangled cry. He came running up the stairs, very white in the face, and was sick all over the ground. He slammed down the iron door before he ran into the house to the phone, but just before the door shut I got a whiff of the terrible odor that had probably made Jeff so sick.

That afternoon there were people all over the place. First the state police car came with two men in it, and then more police cars. Daddy hugged me for a minute and then went away in the first car. The other policemen stayed until a red and white ambulance came. The ambulance men went down into the cellar and came back carrying two stretchers covered with blankets. Soon everyone left but the county sheriff. Then Grandma came out from town and the sheriff left too.

Grandma put her big suitcase in Mother and Daddy’s room. She explained that she would stay with us until Daddy came back.

That summer the cardinals’ first family flew away and they raised their second. But Daddy didn’t come back. In the fall Jeff had to hire some men to help with the harvest because at 17 he couldn’t handle the work alone. Daddy still hadn’t come back.

Then one afternoon in November I wandered into the kitchen to see what had come in the mail and found Grandma and Jeff sitting at the table. Jeff was looking very stiff-faced, like the time he had had to bury our old collie dog when she got hit by a car, and Grandma was crying quietly. The newspaper the mailman had brought had slipped to the floor. I just got a glimpse of the headline. “Lights Dim Briefly in State Capital.”

Grandma saw me and grabbed the paper. Jeff sat me down at the table and explained that there had been a change and Daddy wasn’t coming back any more.

That winter Grandma brought the rest of her things from town and moved in to stay. In the spring we watched the cardinals together. That fall, after the cardinals deserted the juniper tree for the corn crib, Jeff left too. He went up north to the agricultural college.

He came home at Thanksgiving and again at Christmas, but during the times in between Grandma and I were pretty much alone. I guess it was a lot of work for an old woman, even with the hired help and nice neighbors.

After Christmas vacation, when Jeff had gone back to college, Grandma started talking about moving into her house in town and renting out the farm, at least until Jeff was through college. I knew that if we left it would be forever. Jeff was transferring to the State University and planning on studying law after he graduated. When that happened he would probably sell the farm.

I wandered around the orchard and out to the barn to the cows that had become my responsibility now that Jeff was gone. I would miss all this if we moved. But most of all I would miss the cardinals when they came in the spring. I knew I couldn’t leave the cardinals.

That night, when Grandma went down to the basement to get some ice cream out of the freezer, I shut the basement door and slid the sturdy bolt into its catch. That way, no matter how much she pounded, the bolt would hold and Grandma couldn’t get out. I didn’t mean to keep her there that long. Just until the cardinals returned.

It was like that day I had sat on the steps to the old cellar and listened to the salesman and my mother laughing together. Then they had stopped laughing and started talking about going away together and never coming back. It was hard to push that big wooden door closed and then lift the heavy iron bar into place in the brackets on either side of the frame. But I was determined and could do lots of things people never imagined I could, just looking at how small I was.

I didn’t mean to keep them there so long either, just until they changed their minds. But there never seemed any good time when I could get Daddy alone and tell him where Mother was.

I like it here in this place. The people are more dependable. If they go away it is just for a little while for something called treatment. Then they always come back. There aren’t any bars on the windows, just a heavy screen mesh.

I write stories about growing up on a farm. In my stories Mother and Daddy and Jeff and I are all together and nobody ever goes away.

I like it here, but there are times when I wish I could leave. Jeff is married now and has a family, so they don’t have room in their house for me. Jeff and his wife come to see me sometimes, on visiting days. Sometimes they bring the children but this makes Jeff nervous for some reason. Jeff has sold the farm to strangers, so I couldn’t go back there. I don’t really want to anyway. It’s just now, while the snow still covers the ground but there is the least hint of spring in the air, that I would like to go back and see if the cardinals have returned.

Peter Lovesey is well known on the mystery scene as a specialist in historical detective stories (a division of the genre in which the late John Dickson Carr was a master). Mr. Lovesey’s first book, WOBBLE TO DEATH (1970), won the Macmillan-Panther First Crime Novel Competition, and introduced Sergeant Cribb and his assistant, Constable Thackeray, two authentic police-officers of the Victorian era who have since appeared in seven other novels.

Mr. Lovesey’s first story in EQMM is not a tale of historical detection, although the story has its roots, its beginnings, in 1840. But the action takes place today — a persistent investigation by Inspector Gent of the C.I.D. Why did the mysterious tenant want that particular flat and be willing to wait nearly a year for it to become vacant? Join Inspector Gent in ferreting out the secret behind the locked door, the unusual secret of the room above the tobacconist’s shop...

Sometimes when the shop was quiet Braid would look up at the ceiling and give a thought to the locked room overhead. He was mildly curious, no more. If the police had not taken an interest he would never have done anything about it.

The Inspector appeared one Wednesday soon after eleven, stepping in from Leadenhall Street with enough confidence about him to show he was no tourist. Neither was he in business; it is one of the City’s most solemn conventions that between ten and four nobody is seen on the streets in a coat. This one was a brown imitation-leather coat, categorically not City at any hour.

Gaunt and pale, a band of black hair trained across his head to combat baldness, the Inspector stood back from the counter, not interested in buying cigarettes, waiting rather, one hand in a pocket of the coat, the other fingering his woolen tie, while the last genuine customer named his brand and took his change.