Ellery Queen's Bad Scenes by Eleanor Sullivan

Author:Eleanor Sullivan [Sullivan, Eleanor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0802757456
Publisher: Walker & Company
Published: 1989-10-31T21:00:00+00:00

DAVID MORRELL

THE GOOD TIMES ALWAYS END

I knew she’d blame me, but I couldn’t very well stand by and let the cops go in. Their uniforms, their badges and their guns—they would have scared her. This way, hearing it from me, she might go willingly, though with reluctance. She might realize she had no choice. She’d have a chance to leave with dignity.

The house had been her absolute domain for sixty years. She’d moved in at the age of twenty on the day she was married. She had given birth to each of us six children there. She’d raised us there. She’d seen my dad, her husband, die there.

Now she planned to die there, too. She’d always said that. The old homestead with its memories was all that really mattered to her. It embodied her whole life’s achievement, everything she had ever worked for. She was proud that she had lived to eighty, proud that she could still maintain the property. Without that house, its every splinter intimate to her, without the farm, its every field and orchard one with her, she had no goal, no meaning.

Though I wasn’t there the day she got the letter from the county, I heard how she phoned the planner who had signed the letter. He explained politely why the county had to build that road.

“We’ll pay you market price,” the planner said. “The farm. The house. You’ll make a lot of money.”

“I don’t need the money. Go around me.”

“Mrs. Wade, the square-foot cost of asphalt. . .If we curve the road, that’s too expensive.”

“I don’t care. I’m staying.”

“Mrs. Wade, that isn’t possible.”

The planner must have had a premonition, must have sensed the trouble coming, when he heard the strength behind that brittle, feeble voice.

“The day I leave is when I die,” Mom said, “You’ll have to take me out feet first.”

“The road—”

“Goes over my dead body.”

I’ll say this to give the planner credit. He went out there to the farm. He tried to do the decent thing by facing her instead of sending her another letter. He knocked bravely on the door, and when she opened it, he introduced himself.

I have to give my mother credit, too. She wasn’t going to let some nice young man sweet-talk her. She slammed the door on him.

The planner later told me that he stood outside for half an hour, talking to the door. He knew she was listening from somewhere in the house while he explained about the law, about the county’s right to buy up any property it needed in the name of progress. Sure, to move would inconvenience her, he said. He sympathized. But she’d be justly compensated, and the county’s needs were more important than one person’s inconvenience.

Still, he never got an answer, and he finally turned to other matters that required his attention. I’m not sure if he forgot about her, or if he naturally assumed she at last would see the sense of his position. When construction started, he was overwhelmed by

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