Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 26, No. 4. Whole No. 143, October 1955

“No, no,” cried my heart, but Cynthia agreed placidly. I wished I had the courage to say I’d changed my mind, but I hadn’t. As I left the house Raymond brought the car round to the front and went in to tell Cynthia he’d be ready in five minutes. Cynthia came down to the gate and waved me off.

“Ask Mrs. Rose for tea if we’re not back,” she said.

Not back! Well I knew the two of them would never come back — I knew it as certainly as I knew my own name.

I did my shopping and lingered over tea in the village; I wanted to put off my return as long as I could, but sooner or later I had to go back. The instant Mrs. Rose opened the door for me I knew it had happened.

“Oh, Mrs. Frost,” she whispered, “there’s been a terrible accident.”

I felt my heart freeze. “The car?” But I knew the answer.

“Yes, madam. That dreadful hill. Cars shouldn’t be allowed to go down there. I always knew there’d be a crash sooner or later.”

“Dead?” I whispered.

She nodded. “Oh, yes, madam. No one would have a chance. The car’s smashed to pieces, that lovely car. There was a witness, a gentleman; he said it seemed to go out of control.”

“So much for Broadbents being foolproof,” I said bitterly.

“He said something about a nut working loose, they didn’t know how,” she amplified.

I could tell you, I thought. In my mind’s eye I saw a murderous finger and thumb deliberately turning the nut, insuring catastrophe.

Mrs. Rose was speaking again. “Thank goodness, she wasn’t in it,” she said.

“She — wasn’t—?” I didn’t think I’d heard right.

“No, Mrs. Frost. At the last minute Madam had a headache and decided to stay at home. I daresay if she’d gone with him it wouldn’t have happened. Mrs. Martin would never go with her husband on that hill.”

Her voice said it was a judgment on him.

Cynthia came down later, very pale, very remote.

“Oh, Cynnie,” I whispered, “Mrs. Rose told me.” But that’s all I could say; the words stuck in my throat.

Cynthia came over to the mantelpiece. “It had to happen some time,” she said calmly. “I suppose this is what Madame Clementine foresaw.” And then, unbelievably, she laughed. That laughter rang through the house. “It’s all right, Anne,” she said between gasps, “I’m not hysterical. I’m just thinking how funny it is to realize we all took it for granted the violent death would be mine! And yet, there are two parties to every marriage.”

I couldn’t meet her eyes. I longed only to leave the house and never see her again. Because I knew now with shattering certainty whose finger and thumb had turned that nut so that, on the hill, the car would go out of control.

“Cynthia’s a mechanic,” Agatha had said.

And — “I drive by guess and by God,” confessed Raymond.

I remembered again what Agatha had said. The wife’s always the last to know.

The last? I wonder!

The Perfectionist by Donald McNutt Douglass

WINNER OF A SECOND PRIZE

Perhaps the most significant development in last year’s competition — EQMM’s Tenth Annual Contest — was the remarkable number of top prizes won by those writers who had originally been discovered by EQMM or those well-known authors who had never written short stories but were now encouraged to do so especially for EQMM. In the latter category there were two: Shirley Barker, an established historical novelist, won a Second Prize for her first short story, “The Fog on Pemble Green,” and Wade Miller, a collaboration with nearly twenty detective-mystery novels already to their credit, won a Second Prize for their first short story, “Invitation to an Accident.” But the record was even more startling in the first category — writers discovered by EQMM. Out of eleven top prizewinners last year, no less than five — nearly half! — made their literary debuts in the pages of EQMM.