Puzzles of the Black Widowers - By Isaac Asimov Page 0,84

and it wouldn't be right that her cooking secrets should die with her. She flattered Ginny right out of her shoes, and I could see Ginny was beginning to think there was something to it.

"To tell you the truth, I was sort of in favor, too. I would have liked to have her known far and wide for her cooking. I would be proud. So I pushed her, and she began thinking about it even more.

"Not that it was easy, you know. She talked about it and she would say things like, 'I just cook. I do things without even thinking about it. I add and mix and it's all in my fingertips, not in my brain. If I sit down to write a recipe, I would have to figure each one out.'

" 'Do it anyway,' I said. 'Even if it's hard, you do it. Writing any kind of book is hard. Why shouldn't a cook-book be hard, too?'

"So she started to work at it now and then, and she'd keep all the recipes she worked out in a little fireproof box, which locked up with a key, and she would say to me, 'I just can't include the blueberry muffin recipe. That's my secret.' I would say, 'Come on, Ginny, no secrets,' but I knew what she meant.

"Those blueberry muffins were the one thing that created hard feelings against Ginny. They were so good and all the husbands loved them so much that all the wives had their noses out of joint. The other things lots of them could do almost as well, but Ginny's muffins were just out of reach. There was a lot of sentiment that she ought to put the recipe up on the church bulletin board and that it was a lack of Christian charity to hog it like that. But Ginny wouldn't be moved.

"Anyway, now you have the explanation. One day, they were having some meeting at the church and, for a wonder, Ginny didn't feel she had to attend. She explained she wanted to stay home and work on her recipes and she said she would take care of some of the younger kids for those who attended the meeting to make up for not going. She ended up with five kids in the house for about three hours. In those three hours, the house was locked up, even the windows, because we had air-conditioning. There was no one in the house but Ginny and five little kids. That was it."

"Where were you, Mr. Dynast?" asked Avalon.

"I was in the city. To tell you the truth, I always try to be elsewhere when the kids get too thick. Ginny doesn't mind. Glad not to have me underfoot, I suppose."

Gonzalo said, "Is this the locked room you're talking about, Mr. Dynast? Your house locked up with just your wife and the five children in it?"

"That's right."

"I should have thought," said Avalon, "that Mrs. Dynast would get very little work done with five children underfoot."

"It wasn't bad," said Dynast. "Four of the children were old-timers, so to speak, who'd been in the house lots of times. They knew Ginny and Ginny knew them. They were all three or four years old and they had cookies and milk, and toys, and games. One of the children was new, but he was the best one. He belonged to a cousin of one of the regular mothers. The cousin and her husband were both going to the meeting with the mother, and Ginny was glad to take on the new child. His name was Harold and he was maybe almost five, very well-behaved and good-natured, according to Ginny. He helped take care of the other children, in fact. He was very good with them.

"So Ginny kept working on her recipes and, for the first time, she actually wrote down the recipe for her blueberry muffins. She hated to do it, she said, so she wrote it down in pencil, lightly, as though that were equivalent to only half writing it down. Even so, she lost heart because just before it was all over and the children were taken away, she tore the card into confetti.

"That was what was so impossible to explain. She had written down the recipe near the start of her babysitting stint; she had torn it up near the end. It had existed maybe two and a half hours in that closed house, with no one inside but her and the five children, and during