Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 44, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1999

Naturally, at the time, my sisters and I knew nothing of these events or the dismay produced in my mother when she learned we had acquired a permanent houseguest. What we did know was that Claud was always at the farm. In the way of children, we did not question his presence, did not question who he was, did not question what his function might be. The adult world was filled with things too complex for us to understand, so there were things we seldom questioned and this especially included why certain adults happened to be in certain places. We always assumed, for example, that a waitress was a waitress because that’s what she was, not because it was what she chose to be or what she had to be. We never looked into anyone’s motives for being in a certain job or a certain place. Claud was Claud and he was at the country house; that was all there was to it.

Perhaps some questions might have formed in our minds if we had come to know him better. But we never did come to know Claud. He appeared at meals; otherwise we saw him infrequently. Sometimes we would see him walking toward the front gate, going somewhere, and sometimes we would see him coming from the front gate, coming from somewhere, but he never did anything on the farm itself. He never worked or played. He just came and went. Indoors, other than at meals, the only times we saw him — and they were seldom — were when he was seated at the otherwise empty dining table playing patience. On those occasions he wore a green plastic eyeshade.

It was because of Claud that we kept the country house when Father experienced severe financial trouble during a recession. He needed money, and he wanted to sell the farm. But he couldn’t because of Claud. Father was simply too much of a gentleman to allow a broker not to warn a potential new buyer about Claud, yet obviously nobody would buy it knowing that a permanent houseguest came as part of the package. So we kept the farm and Father barely avoided bankruptcy. It put him through the wringer. In the end it turned out well because Father survived without selling the farm.

Claud died last summer. It was sudden and unexpected. He was walking down the road and just dropped dead of a heart attack. The doctor said that sort of heart attack seldom happened. Father claimed it was the best way to go. I’m not so sure; I think I would want some warning.

Father paid for Claud’s burial in the nearest cemetery and for a nice headstone after a quick investigation confirmed that he had no family.

It was only then, when Father was going through Claud’s papers in his room (the court appointed him and a local lawyer co-executors) that he found the promissory note. Forty years earlier it had been given to Claud Heister, farmhand, by the then owner of the farm, John Williams. The note was for accumulated back wages, which Williams was unable to pay, amounting to two thousand three hundred dollars. The interest was eight percent a year, compounded annually. An attached statement signed by Williams stipulated that Claud Heister would be allowed to live on the farm rent-free until the note and interest were paid and that the promise was binding on Williams’ heirs, assigns, and other successors in ownership of the farm.

We have since wondered, and probably will wonder ever after, whether Claud had slyly refrained from mentioning the debt to later owners after it had been forgotten, realizing that the free room was a better deal than the money (although the money would have amounted to almost fifty thousand dollars by the time he died), and if someone ever did order him to leave he could always produce the note and collect the money. But maybe that wasn’t the reason he’d never referred to the note. Maybe he’d simply been too polite to mention it.

That’s a Switch by John H. Dirckx

At twilight the crickets and frogs began serenading one another, the bats made their first low flights over the tree-tops, and Midgy Lunken emerged from her underground burrow into the shadows of the night. Everything she wore had been salvaged from trashcans or stolen from careless shopkeepers. Everything she possessed in the world she carried in a dingy, threadbare knapsack.

Her home was the transformer vault of an abandoned tire factory where mice ate anything not stored in metal and sometimes bit her while she slept on her bed of newspapers and rags. Midgy Lunken was just under five feet tall, with eyes like a ferret’s and a nose like a blob of putty. It was three weeks since she’d washed her hair, in the ladies’ room at the bus station, when both of the female security guards were off on the same night.