Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 123, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 751 & 752, March/April 2004

The Fruit Cellar by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates has distinguished herself as a novelist, short story writer, playwright, and poet; and even within prose fiction, her range extends from the literary to several entertainment genres. Readers interested in Ms. Oates’s most recent work should look for the novel The Tattooed Girl (Ecco Press/’03), the novella, Rape: A Love Story (Carroll & Graf/’04), and the short story collection I Am No One You Know (Ecco Press ’04).

“ ‘Peery.’ Does the name mean anything to you?”

“ ‘Perry’? I don’t think so.”

“ ‘Peery.’ ‘Lisa Peery.’ ”

The voice, which was the telephone voice of Shannon’s older brother Mark, sounded carefully neutral. So often had Shannon and her brother spoken on the phone during the past eight months — monitoring their father’s illness, rapid decline, and death, the funeral arrangements, the funeral, and now the aftermath, in Shannon’s numbed imagination a high-piled sludge like the muddy debris following a flood — it took her a moment to realize that Mark’s voice was different this morning, somehow. For this was not one of their shared emotions, it was Mark’s own, mysterious to her.

“ ‘Lisa Peery.’ Now I remember, I think — that little girl? The abducted girl? From the park. I was in high school, my junior year.” Shannon had begun to speak rapidly, nervously. She heard her voice with dismay and dislike yet could not restrain herself. “It was in — nineteen eighty-nine? Around this time of year. June.”

In a rush of blurred images the banner headlines, the photographs of the ten-year-old child came to her. Memory underlaid with a sense of dread, an obscure shame. In that early summer thirteen years before posters and fliers had blossomed everywhere Shannon had looked, glaring-yellow borders and tall black captions like shouts.

It had been a nightmare season. No child had ever been abducted from Strykersville. Not in the known history of the small city south of Lake On-tario. No child had ever “vanished” from Myrtle Park, a stretch of hilly, partly wooded municipal land through which a deep ravine ran, abutting the rear of the large old properties along Highland Avenue where Shannon and Mark had grown up in the Leigh family house.

Mark said, “I think you’d better come over here, Shannon. Now.”

There was no question what here meant.

Shannon, who was staying in Strykersville with relatives, drove across town to Highland Avenue, in the bright gusty air of early June in upstate New York. As recently as the other week, there had been frost on the ground in the early morning; in another week, there might be a heat wave. Returning to Strykersville from her present life was, for Shannon, a return to an unresolved past: Her mood was melancholy, elegiac. This had been true even before her parents’ deaths and was doubly true now. She was thinking of how her father had insisted upon living alone for the past several, increasingly difficult years after her mother’s death: stubbornly, grimly, yet with a kind of elation. He’d said he would die “on his own turf, on his own terms.” He would leave them “everything” — “everything you can lay your hands on.” It was a curious choice of language. But then, Mr. Leigh had always spoken, in private moments, in a curious way; he’d alarmed and exasperated and exhausted both his children yet they’d had to concede, he was a courageous, indomitable old man, he’d never lost his pride.

Until the past year Mr. Leigh had been the kind of stoutly energetic older man you call hale, hearty. Though a worry to his grown children he was an admired figure to others. The kind of man who swam laps several times a week at the YMCA before having breakfast at the Blue Point Diner where he’d cultivated a reputation as an acerbic “character” with strong opinions on contemporary America. The kind of man who made a show of “fast-walking” in the neighborhood with the buoyant air of an athlete in training, calling out “Good morning!” to everyone he met. Before retiring at the age of seventy Mr. Leigh had been an aggressively successful real-estate broker in Niagara County; he’d been an officer in the local Chamber of Commerce, and a deacon in the First Presbyterian Church of Strykersville; for four decades he’d been an avid Shriner, and had never missed one of the flamboyant Shriners conventions in Philadelphia. Abruptly after Mrs. Leigh’s death he’d begun to lose interest in his public personality; the side of his personality he’d kept private, known only to his family, of secrecy, moodiness, cynicism, began to be predominant. Relatives reported to Shannon and Mark that he’d grown rude to them, refusing their invitations; he’d walked out of the funeral service for an elderly aunt, at which he’d appeared “unshaven, disheveled”; he was drinking; he was becoming something of a recluse in the house on Highland Avenue. Shannon and Mark, who lived, as if by design, in cities approximately equidistant from Strykersville, took turns dutifully visiting him and reported to each other afterward, in painstaking detail. The monitoring of an elderly ailing parent is a cerebral as well as an emotional challenge, like interpreting a tricky poem: You are obliged to decode his most casual remarks, for these are the remarks that are likely to reveal his heart. During Shannon’s last visit before Mr. Leigh’s final hospitalization, she’d hurriedly called Mark to tell him, “It’s like Dad’s body is caving in. Like his bones are shrinking and crumbling. He’s always stood so tall, held his head so high, now he’s shorter than I am. He asked me in this sarcastic voice, ‘What are you wearing, stacked shoes?’ ”

Mr. Leigh was seventy-four at that time. Not really elderly by contemporary standards. Shortly he would learn that the chemotherapy treatments he’d endured for months were having no effect upon his cancer. Shannon had not wanted to tell her brother I hate him, I’m afraid of him. For perhaps that wasn’t true, entirely. More likely she meant Why doesn’t he love me? Why hasn’t he loved me? I’ve waited so long.

Shannon turned into the familiar driveway at 38 Highland. It was jarring to see the front lawn overgrown, choked in dandelions. Water-stained newspapers and fliers had been tossed into the unpruned shrubs at the front of the house; each time Shannon saw these she made a note to retrieve them, and each time she forgot. When she and Mark were growing up, Highland Avenue near Myrtle Park was the most prestigious neighborhood in Strykersville. Now, the large old brick and colonial houses were distinctly less impressive. In bright, gusty air the heavy slate roofs and numerous bay windows, the soot-darkened chimneys, exuded an air of subtle dereliction. No one with money cared to live on Highland Avenue any longer: The fashion was for newer suburban neighborhoods, houses as large as these but sleekly contemporary with cathedral ceilings, country kitchens that were self-contained apartments, indoor swimming pools. Mr. Leigh had been wittily contemptuous of these — “McMansions” they were called. But then, Mr. Leigh’s real-estate agency had not brokered the land for these showy properties.

There was Mark waiting on a side porch, smoking a cigarette. Not sitting on the comfortable rattan sofa-swing where in early evening their mother often sat in warm weather, listening, as Mrs. Leigh said, to the birds’ vespers, but on his feet, with a look of barely concealed impatience.

“Is something wrong, Mark?”

Shannon stared at her brother’s face. His expression was unreadable.

Mark led Shannon inside the house. Only the previous evening she’d been here, sorting things with Mark, labeling and ticketing things for Estates Managers, Inc. to haul away; she felt at once the familiar oppression like a dull ache behind the eyes; like a dream she’d imagined she had wakened from, but had not. The old brick colonial which had once belonged to Mr. Leigh’s parents, dignified and stately from the street, was shabby close up, and would be marketed at a price that would have deeply insulted Mr. Leigh had he known. It smelled of dust and mice and that faint sour chemical odor Shannon didn’t want to think was the odor of her father’s dying body after months of his futile treatment. Most of the rooms were only partly furnished now yet seemed crowded, for there were cartons and movers’ barrels amid the furniture, shadeless lamps, mirrors and wall hangings and stacks of leatherbound books unread for decades. Neither Mark nor Shannon had room for their parents’ cherished belongings.

“We should each take something. As a memento at least,” Shannon said. Mark had said, “Go ahead. Take whatever you want.”

On the kitchen table was a chipped metal box, covered in dust and cobwebs, measuring about two feet by eighteen inches, and about twelve inches deep. Mark had found it in the cellar, he said, beneath their father’s old workbench. Shannon approached the opened box dry-mouthed. She’d never seen it before, she was certain.

“What is it?”

“See for yourself.” From boyhood Mark had tended to sobriety. Rarely did he joke, at least with Shannon; he wasn’t one to exaggerate, or to dramatize. Shannon thought, Should I look? Should I peek? As a child she’d had a way of hiding her eyes with her hands but separating her fingers so she could peek through, giggling with shivery excitement. As an adult she had no choice but to look head-on.

Mark, smoking his cigarette, walked out onto the porch leaving Shannon to ponder the material inside their father’s box by herself. She noted that Mark had taken nothing out of the box but had left it as he’d presumably found it, in layers like rock strata.

On top were yellowed newspaper clippings. The entire front page of the Strykersville Journal. GIRL MISSING. 10-YEAR-OLD GIRL MISSING. NIAGARA COUNTY POLICE BAFFLED IN MISSING-CHILD CASE. NO RANSOM NOTE, PEERY FAMILY INSISTS. LISA PEERY, 10 YEARS OLD. MYRTLE PARK ABDUCTION SEARCH CONTINUES. The little girl had “vanished” — “disappeared” while playing in the park. She’d been with several other children including her twelve-year-old sister but she had apparently “wandered off.” The ravine cut through the park dividing it into two general areas. The area beyond the ravine tended to be overgrown, littered. Still, there was a picnic grove there, a place romantically sheltered by tall evergreens, as Shannon recalled, and it was believed that Lisa Peery had been playing with a dog there, or had followed a dog; she hadn’t been missed by the other children for perhaps half an hour. Then no one could find her.

Reports had been of a car with out-of-state license plates idling in the road beyond the picnic grove. Several individuals had insisted they’d seen a stranger in the park at about that time: a man. One witness believed he was “Negro.” At any rate, “dark-skinned.” He had a moustache, he wore dark glasses. He wore dark clothes. He was “tall” — he was “short and heavyset” — “somewhere in his late twenties” — “somewhere in his late thirties.”

The abductor of Lisa Peery was never found. Her body had never been found. So far as anyone knew, no ransom note had been sent. There were days, in time there were weeks of search parties, local police, Boy Scouts, citizen volunteers from everywhere in the county. Panic in Strykersville, especially in the families of elementary school children. Everywhere on lampposts, walls, fences were posters of Lisa Peery’s innocently smiling face. MISSING. CHILD MISSING. HAVE YOU SEEN ME?

Eventually Lisa Peery subsided into Strykersville legend. The nightmare belonged to a bygone season in Shannon’s adolescent life which, from her adult perspective, had now a remote and bittersweet aura like the teen music, hair styles, clothes of that time. These were memories with the power to embarrass but not to illuminate.

The Leighs’ two-acre property was adjacent to a densely wooded section of Myrtle Park. The land was hilly here, with bare outcroppings of rock and wild rose. In the weeks following the abduction, Mr. Leigh, at that time a vigorous, stocky man of fifty-two, had helped participate in one or two of the searches. He’d contributed to a fund for a $25,000 reward offered for information leading to Lisa Peery’s safe return. Shannon recalled her father saying, in a quavering voice, “That cowardly bastard is one thousand miles away with that child by now. We can only pray he will let her live.”

Beneath the newspaper clippings were torn-out pages from what must have been pornographic magazines. Stark, up-close photos of very young, naked girls, some of them luridly made up with lipstick, rouge, eyeliner, and teased hair. The youngest were no older than four, the eldest about eleven. The girls’ faces appeared stunned, or were contorted and weeping, or, worse, smiling slyly at the camera as they’d been taught.

“Oh, my God.”

Shannon stepped back from the box, appalled.

Mark was watching her from the doorway. “Look at the bottom of the box. Don’t touch the things, just look.” Shannon did as Mark told, steeling herself for something very ugly. She saw a child’s plastic barrette, a single badly soiled white anklet sock, a lock of curly pale blond hair.

Mark said, “And there’s this key.”

Key? To what? Through her eyes that were stinging with moisture Shannon now stared at the key in the palm of Mark’s hand. It appeared to be an ordinary household key, slightly rusted.

“It was in the box,” Mark said. “I’ve been checking, I think it must be to the fruit cellar. There’s a padlock on the door.”

The fruit cellar: Shannon had not thought of it in years.

Really it wasn’t a cellar, just a closet in the old part of the cellar; that part that belonged to the original Leigh house, built in the late 1890s. Over the decades the house had been substantially remodeled, expanded, modernized; a new addition had been built that was as large as the original house; an attractive new basement had been added, with a concrete floor covered in linoleum. Only the earthen-floored fruit cellar remained, relic of an earlier, seemingly more innocent era before the 1960s when even well-to-do women like Shannon’s grandmother had preserved and canned fruit in glass jars, an elaborate process requiring many hours’ work; these jars had been stored in the fruit cellar, a cavelike space of the size of a good walk-in closet hollowed out of the earth and lined with stone and mortar. One spring day when Shannon was in seventh grade, Mrs. Leigh had asked her to help clean out the old fruit cellar, and so they’d emptied that dank, cobwebbed space of aged jars of fruit (pears, peaches, cherries) that no one had ever troubled to open, and eat; these must have been twenty years old, Mrs. Leigh said, and would be moldy by now, poison. There had been something fascinating — Shannon was remembering now, with a shudder — about holding in your hand a heavy jar of fruit that was very likely toxic, though possibly, in a dish, it would look like any other canned fruit. (Except: Probably it would smell. The fruit cellar stank.) Shannon and her mother hadn’t been able to clean the fruit cellar of the accumulated dirt of decades but they’d emptied the shelves, Mrs. Leigh had aimed the vacuum cleaner nozzle into the corners, and shut the door again.

There had never been any padlock on the fruit cellar door, that Shannon could remember. To what purpose, a lock on that door?

“We wouldn’t have to open it.”

“We do, though.”

They were in the basement, in the older area. Here, the ceiling was lower than in the newer area. There was a strong smell of damp. Mark was standing before the door to the fruit cellar, fumbling the key, trying to fit it into the rusted padlock. (Yes, there was a padlock on the door Shannon could swear had not existed until now.) In the thin light from overhead, that had the prismatic quaver of light reflected in water, the slot for the key looked fine as a hair. Shannon was swallowing compulsively, tasting something black and chill at the back of her mouth. She saw that her tall assured brother was perspiring, and that his hand trembled. With a stab of satisfaction she saw that his hair was thinning at the crown of his head. Mark was headmaster of a prestigious New England prep school, a man accustomed to giving orders and being obeyed, but now he stood stooped, uncertain, trying to force a key into a rusted padlock. Shannon said, her voice rising sharply, “We don’t have to open it, Mark.”

“Of course we do.”

“God. I hate you.”

Without knowing what she did Shannon snatched the key from her brother’s fingers and threw it clumsily, blindly away. The key clattered against a wall and fell to the floor glinting, clearly visible. Before Mark could curse her, Shannon ran from the room, into the newer part of the basement. Here the ceiling was higher and the space less oppressive but still the overhead lights made her eyes ache. In a panic she was remembering how, when she’d been a little girl, she’d trailed her father around the house, for her father was so rarely in the house; sometimes she would discover him in the cellar at what he called his workbench; here, he had electrical tools, as well as hammers, pliers, screwdrivers. She remembered brightly calling, “Daddy?” Descending the stairs in the pretense that Daddy wanted her company, and there was Daddy with his back to her, at the workbench, quickly sliding something into a manila envelope, and the envelope into a drawer, and the drawer firmly shut, she’d had the impression it was a magazine but she knew better than to inquire for Daddy didn’t like inquisitive little girls.

She was trying to remember her father’s face. He’d been a young man then, or nearly. His smile, the glint of his eyeglasses. She tried but couldn’t remember his eyes behind those chunky black-rimmed glasses but of course they’d been there, Daddy’s eyes. And there was Daddy smiling at her, “Why, Shannon! What brings you down here?”