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Alice Munro, I have been thinking, writes mystery stories, maybe murder mysteries. These mystery stories do not have a detective, or a sidekick. No one pulls all the clues together at the end of the story in the library, or anywhere else. No punishment is meted out. There are not even really clues, just bits and pieces of information that appear here and there, floating through the telling of the story, many of them unspoken, coded, implied, resonating through silences. While the usual mystery story might be said to be a kind of comedy of manners, moving from disorder to order, Munro's endings are not tidy. They resist closure. Her pieces might be called tragi-comedies of manners, because they certainly do present the manner of small-town and rural Ontario, most especially in their way of speaking and not-speaking, of telling and not-telling stories, half-stories, hidden stories of the light and darkness which are people's lives.

The story which first tugged at my mind this way was "Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You." I came to it through the filter of "Walker Brothers Cowboy," where I learned to watch for secrets, for the ways in which things are "not told," not spoken of. The narrator, thinking back on the past and an experience she shares with her father of visiting a woman who was once obviously important to him, knows that this visit is not to be talked about: "My father does not say anything to me about not mentioning things at home, but I know, just from the thoughtfulness, the pause when he passes the licorice, that there are things not to be mentioned. The whisky, maybe the dancing" (Selected Stories 18).

So this is a learned behaviour, a way of communicating/not communicating. Her father does not say that she is to be quiet. He conveys the message through non-speech, through thoughtfulness - and a pause. Already, she knows how to hear that language: it has syntax, grammar, even a kind of vocabulary of pause and gesture. He is teaching her more about how this language of not-saying works. He is showing her how stories are told, how significant pieces, perhaps the most important pieces, are withheld. These are subtle cues for a child, and a reader, to pick up.

Along with Del, I learned more about this encoding, watching her watch the aunts, in Lives of Girls and Women. Their language was a dangerous place, full of twists, allusions, intricate signings. "My mother went along straight lines. Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace wove in and out around her, retreating and disappearing and coming back, slippery and soft-voiced and indestructible. She pushed them out of her way as if they were cobwebs; I knew better than that . . . There was a whole new language to learn in their house. Conversations there had many levels, nothing could be stated directly, every joke might be a thrust turned inside out" (Lives of Girls and Women 36-37). What could serve a mystery writer better than a language like that? Where shades of meaning are multiple, where language rarely means what it seems to mean. Where conclusions are suspect and motives well hidden.

In the deep snow-silence of this Southwestern Ontario winter, it seems appropriate to be considering Alice Munro's silences. The silences of this snowscape are certainly not empty. They offer a kind of peace, but they are also full of the dangers of extreme cold, potentially lethal. They crackle with the snap of a tree limb breaking, of an icicle falling, of ice tightening in the creek. Sounds sharp with significance carry a long way, define the quiet. There is a fullness of fragments, of story, of secret comings and goings of small animals, of sound and of the smell of cold, of absence.

Silences in the conversations of this part of the world seem to me similar. Certainly, they are not empty. They resonate with waiting, with lurking danger. Words spoken into that stillness seem fraught with meaning, echoing into wide spaces, defining them, controlling them. No wonder, in looking into them, Munro suspects secrets, control, even malevolence. I began to learn this language in "Walker Brothers Cowboy" and had those lessons extended in Lives of Girls and Women. A hovering feel for this way of speaking, not-speaking, accompanied my reading of "Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You," and then in "Save the Reaper," I had the sense of a circle coming around to meet itself, completing itself.

I go back to re-read "Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You," to see what I think now. For a long time, I have considered it a murder mystery, where the narrator killed her sister. Why did I think that? Would I still read it that way?

At the beginning, Char, one of the sisters is described by the other sister, Et who is not, in fact, narrating the story, but is certainly the focus for the third person, distant narrator: "Char was pale in the first place as anybody could get. She was like a ghost now, with her hair gone white" (Selected Stories 61). Early on, I learn that Et resents her sister's beauty, has resented it from when they were very young. I also learn that Char's beauty is cold, somewhat other-worldly, statue-like. Et is not beautiful but she has a great deal of vitality and energy. It also appears that she likes to control people, that sometimes she does not say, because "That way, Et was left knowing more" (70).

Through the story and the comments Et makes, the stories she tells and those she keeps to herself, references to ghosts build. As do stories about poisons - especially slow poison.

Although Blaikie Noble is Char's lover, Et and Arthur and Char begin to seem a triangle of relationship. Arthur loves Char and marries her and later thinks he was a fool to do so. He turns often to Et for comfort, for companionship, for food. Et thinks, as she considers Char's beauty, that "the qualities of legend were real, that they surfaced, where and when you least expected" (66). She was thinking about the story of Arthur and Guinevere. In a letter game, Et declares that " 'I love my love with an A, because he is absentminded. His name is Arthur, and he lives in an ash can'" (73). She is irritated by his sitting quietly among them, while Char and Blaikie shine out in their love for each other, and he sits "in the rocker with a quilt over his knees, foolish as something that hasn't grown its final, most necesssary skin. Yet in a way the people like Arthur were the most troublemaking of all" (73).

We depend, in the story, for all knowledge, on Et's perceptions. She is not a very reliable source. Mistress of the silences, she withholds information, she exaggerates, she makes up stories - or at least she says she does. The narrator, distant and apparently uninvolved, makes no comment on the "facts" presented through Et, who is certainly the strong focalizer we follow through the piece. She tells us that when Blaikie Noble, Char's lover, ran away with another woman, "Char swallowed poison. Or what she thought was poison. It was laundry blueing" (70). Char was dreadfully ill, throwing up until she got rid of it all and refusing to allow Et to call the doctor for help. After Char's marriage to Arthur, Et tells us that she binged on food and then was violently sick, unable to look at food for days. We, probably, conclude that Char is suffering from bulimia.

Through Et's perspective, we also learn about a bottle of poison which she finds in the kitchen cupboard: "In with the vanilla and the almond extract and the artificial rum she found a small bottle of a strange liquid. ZINC PHOSPHIDE. She read the label and turned it around in her hands. A rodenticide. Rat poison, that must mean. She had not known Char and Arthur were troubled with rats" (71). And I cannot help wondering who - or what - the rats are. It is a clear colourless liquid, with no smell, presumably to fool the rats.

When the unhappy Char is found dead in her bed, peaceful and beautiful, the most obvious suggestion is that she committed suicide, that she took the poison. When Et goes to look at the bottle she finds it empty. Et lets us think that Char committed suicide because Et told her that once again Blaikie Noble had run away with another woman. So at the very least, Et is a mischief maker who has made Char so unhappy that she kills herself.

"There was no fuss about the cause of death as there is in stories ..."(80). Taught to read Alice Munro, by Alice Munro, I cannot let that pass. In the absence of detective-in-the-story, I become the detective, an irony I thoroughly enjoy.

I start putting pieces together. The language slows down into deliberateness as Et watches Arthur drink the egg nog she prepared for him: "She made Arthur his eggnog and took it in and watched him drink it. A slow poison" (71). This juxtaposition of suggestion happens because Et is remembering a story Blaikie Noble told about someone dying from "slow poison." I notice, wonder about, the significant pause. Arthur is semi-invalid through most of the story. Is she poisoning him? Is Char? Why does Char keep thowing up? At the end, when Char dies, Et and Arthur live happily together. Both got what they wanted through Char's death.

The power of stories keeps eddying in this piece - like the story Blaikie tells about slow poison. Et thinking about the rodenticide bottle, muses, "Like something you read about, Agatha Christie" (72). A reference which sets my associations tumbling. The story about Arthur and Guinevere, the love triangle. Et says we all know how that one ends. (Do we?) The story Et makes up to tell Char about Blaikie Noble leaving her again . . . The significant pauses of "Walker Brothers Cowboy," the pieces of story not-told, where suggestions of infidelity lie - or at least dissatisfaction . . . The complicated language of Del's aunts . . . . They all come together around Char, beautifully dead, tidy on her pillow, apparently having died of a heart attack. Maybe she did.

Et's behaviour raises puzzling questions in my mind. She hurries to look at the poison bottle in the cupboard and finds it gone. "Could Char have found the time to bury it" (80) she wonders. "There is something I've been meaning to tell you," Et thinks, feeling that she should tell Arthur about the bottle and about what she thinks happened. But she never does. It suits her to remain silent about it. Does she suspect Arthur? Or does she not want him to think that Char committed suicide? Or is all this just Et's love of a story - and mine? And Munro's?

So what am I to do with all this? I do not trust Et, because Munro has planted all sorts of doubts about her, and probably because Agatha Christie, in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, showed me that the story-teller can be the murderer: an old plot re-surfacing when I least expect it, or when I have been led to recall it.

Suicide? Murder? I keep thinking about that bottle on the kitchen shelf. What is Zinc phosphide? Is there such a thing? A colourless and odourless liquid, Et finds. I decide to check the Internet for information about it. I do not know anyone I can ask, and I do not want my pharmacist wondering about why I want to know . . . .The search engine turns up 2370 web sites of information about it. The first thing I discover, on a Mississippi State University site about controlling rats in poultry houses, is that it has "an offensive odour and is unattractive in colour." In the next place I check, from the University of California, I learn that it is a dark grey powder, insoluble in water and it produces "terminal symptoms [in rats] of convulsions, paralysis, coma and death from asphyxia." On a third site, I find that "Signs of severe poisoning include labored breathing, shock, halted urine output, metabolic acidosis, muscle cramps and convulsions. The compound's caustic action may cause the esophagus to close" (www. epa.gov). So . . . it is not zinc phosphide in that bottle, and it seems unlikely that Char, lying peaceful and graceful, died of zinc phosphide, self-administered, as Et might like to imagine.

Therefore, the narrator and Et may have been lying about the bottle. She may have known what was in it. She may have administered it. At the very least, she takes some satisfaction in having been the cause of Char's death through the story she told. Et believes in the power of stories. So do I.

There is another possibility which is suggested by the way the story is told. Maybe Arthur did it. Maybe he killed Char, so he could be free of her and live happily with Et. In that scenario, the bottle may have been there and contained some other poison. Arthur would have had time to get rid of it. But Char does not seem to have died of that kind of poison so it must have been some other kind. It is perhaps also possible that Blaikie killed her and then skipped town, but he would not really have had access to that bottle - if there ever was a bottle and not a figment of Et's overactive imagination.

The final possibility, I realize, is that Char died (peacefully?) of cardiac arrest. Et does say that all that throwing up would have been enough to tax anyone's heart. Et loves stories and language, uses telling and withholding as ways to gain power. It is perfectly likely that she enjoys the idea that she caused Char's death through the power of her story-telling, and she basks in the benefits which come to her from that death, a happy life with Arthur. Somehow, though, I am still not satisfied. There is another, other consciousness, lurking somewhere behind Et, telling this story. Who may or may not know what happened: "something I've been meaning to tell you . . ." but she - or he - like Et, never does.

Mysteries can remain unsolved. Munro offers us a complex idea of mystery, maybe even murder - or suicide - where silence protects the guilty. Lurking in the silences, in the spaces of a story told or not-told are, perhaps, answers. If we can find a way to frame the questions. After this reading, I am inclined to think that Arthur murdered Char. There can be, Munro shows us, subtle ways to construct mystery stories, outwit the conventions we have gathered around their telling: investigator, clues, guilt, resolution. Is Et the investigator? Or am I? Munro offers gaps - places to look into, listen into, carefully. Clues, in this telling, not-telling, are simply distraction: scarlet herrings. Guilt is complicated, shared by the victim and many possible perpetrators - why, if she committed suicide, was Char unhappy enough to do it? "Resolution" begins to seem simple-minded. Blame lies in the language, in that language of silence, used to manage and to control. At the very least, someone knows that Et tells stories to amuse herself, at other people's expense, and she knows when/how to keep silent. Most silent of all, in this story, it occurs to me, is Arthur.

In "Save the Reaper," a grandmother is taking a car-ride in the country with her young grandchildren, looking for a wall covered with bits of glass which she remembers from an earlier visit. They stumble into a sinister farmhouse. My memory of that story is that there is a body buried in the front room of the house. Why was I so sure?

Again, "Walker Brothers Cowboy" hovers as a subtext while I read this story. The grandmother, Eve, seems to me the little girl of the early story grown up, become grandmother. She also reminds me of Del, from Lives of Girls and Women. Incidentally, she has uncanny resemblances to Munro herself: "gray-blond frizzy curls held back by a black hairband" (The Love of a Good Woman 164). Eve has rented a cottage for a month to share with her daughter and her two grandchildren, Philip and Daisy. "She had picked this stretch of the Lake Huron shore because her parents used to bring her here with her brother when they were children" (149). She remembers riding in the country with her mother, as Del did, and her memories are touched with the same embarrassments Del's were - especially about how her mother dressed and looked. She is ashamed now of those memories and chooses not to report them to her daughter. Her father, reminiscent of the one in "Walker Brothers Cowboy," comes into this story when Eve tells her grandchildren "what her father had once told her - that at night you could hear the corn growing" (149). Eve is looking for a wall with pictures made out of bits of glass, which she remembers from those trips with her mother.

There are similarities in the two stories. An adult, in a car, with two young children, is driving back country roads looking for a memory, a happiness from the past, something that "glittered:" an old girlfriend in the first story, a wall constructed with bits of glass in the later story. In the early story, the house they enter is on the whole benevolent, although sad and smelling of neglect and loneliness. In the more recent piece, the house is malevolent, reeking of filth, of sex, and possibly of a dead body. The recent story is more complex than the earlier one, with layers of time and memory, about Eve's young womanhood, her daughter's birth and then her life with her daughter and her new baby. Out of all the complexities of the story, why do I remember that house so vividly? Why am I so sure that there is a dead body around there somewhere? There is something about how it all smells . . . .

From the moment Eve stops in the drive beside the house, a strange little man tells her that Harold owns the house now because although Mary used to, he had to send her away, to the Home, and so now he owns it: "Mary, she owns it, but Harold he put her in the Home, so now he does. It wasn't his fault, she had to go there" (166). (Of course it was, I think . . . but all those commas make me think there is something even more sinister going on.) The little man invites her into the house to ask Harold about the glass wall: "Make your way through. You don't mind it's got a little untidy here? Mary's in the Home, nobody to keep it tidied up like it used to be" (167). Perhaps it is his repetition of the idea that Mary is in the Home . . . maybe it's the capital letter on "Home." Maybe it has to do with the fact that he is furtive and that everything he says seems loaded with unspoken meaning, or at least understatement: "Massive disorder was what they had to make their way through - the kind that takes years to accumulate" (167). "The windows were so successfully covered up with furniture or hanging quilts that you could not tell where they were, and the smell was that of a junk store, a plugged sink, or maybe a plugged toilet, cooking and grease and cigarettes and human sweat and dog mess and unremoved garbage" (167).

Later, among the people in the dining room, "She thought, There is a smell of semen in this room" (168). Eve is appalled by the nakedness of one of the men in the room and by a hovering aura of perversion, but she is also frightened - and so am I. Even worse than all this is the exchange between the little man and Harold:

"I told her maybe there was pictures in the front but she couldn't go in there you got that shut up," the little man said. Harold said, "You shut up"(169).

There is something about the pauses in that exchange and the repeated phrase. If it is not Mary who is buried in the house, I am sure that someone or something incriminating is . . . . Certainly, the title, "Save the Reaper," suggests that this is a story about death, and no one actually dies in the piece.

Most interesting to me is that, at the end, when Eve tells the story at home, she leaves parts out. She does it very deliberately, thinking about what she can say and not say, protecting her daughter and her husband from the darker parts of the story. She does not mention her fear or the sex. She knows she is doing it, she selects carefully. Her young grandson had been with her throughout, but "Philip had added nothing to Eve's story, and had not seemed to be concerned with the telling of it" (180). But after it was told, and the conversation had moved on to theorizing about the changing patterns of local life, "Philip did look up from his stooping and crawling work [gathering corn husks] around the adults' feet. He looked at Eve. A flat look, a moment of conspiratorial blankness, a buried smile that passed before there could be any need for recognition of it" (180). The flat look, the blankness, the buried smile are all part of that language of silence, of not-saying, but communicating: three elements of how it works. Philip is a bright child who uses language vividly, imaginatively, in the car at the beginning of the story, creating fantasy worlds where "coding" is an important ingredient. This not-speaking is as deliberate a choice on his part as not-telling is on Eve's. He is already skilled in this language which Eve (and Del, and the little girl in "Walker Brothers Cowboy") have learned, been taught. Eve is passing on to another generation this not-telling, this withholding, this other language.

Eve notices and comments on Philip's not-speaking; she knows that it is full of meaning: "What did this mean? Only that he had begun the private work of storing and secreting, deciding on his own what should be preserved and how, and what these things were going to mean to him, in his unknown future" (180). He is also learning how these things are to be conveyed - and to whom. Juxtaposition of images, faint echoes of words are part of the way this silent language works. This story ends with an echo in Eve's mind of her father's joke about hearing the corn grow at night: "Not tonight but tomorrow night Eve would lie down in this hollowed-out house, its board walls like a paper shell around her, willing herself to grow light, relieved of consequence, with nothing in her head but the rustle of the deep tall corn which might have stopped growing now but still made its live noise after dark" (180).

These stories are full of conspiracies of silence, some of them fairly benevolent, others perhaps concealing fearsome acts. The tellings and not-tellings eddy around and around whatever may have happened, shifting and changing with the teller, with the reader, so that the truth is never really clear, so that the detective is not necessary, could not sort it all out anyway.

The detector, in so far as there is one, is the reader, or the narrator, or a character or the writer herself, Alice Munro investigating how stories work, how they are told, how we learn what to say and what not to say ... always resisting closure, always giving the story another turn, another possibility. If I were to read these stories again, I would, undoubtedly, see other explanations, other "solutions." These are stories about strange deaths, sinister people, darkness, and also about story, about mystery, creating without ever saying so a new genre, another way to write about the unsolved, the unspoken. About what is said. Or not said. This is a language which is complex and perhaps delightful, but as Del learned, it is also dangerous, full of hidden eddies. It is used clumsily, deviously by men like Harold, cleverly and deliberately by people like Del and Eve and Philip and Et, telling some things but not others: "There are people who carry decency and optimism around with them, who seem to cleanse every atmosphere they settle in, and you can't tell such people things, it is too disruptive" (179), so those "things" hover in the silences, unspoken but vividly there.

Works Cited

Munro, Alice.	Lives of Girls and Women. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1971. The Love of a Good Woman. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1998. Selected Stories. Toronto: Penguin, 1996.
Control Commensal Rodents In Poultry Houses,"	Mississippi State University Extension Service, http://www.mstate.edu/dept/poultry/rodents.htm "Emergency First Aid Treatment Guide for ZINC PHOSPHIDE," http://www.epa.gov/swercepp/ehs/firstaid/1314847.txt.
"Rodenticides for Control of Norway Rats, Roof Rats and House Mice,"	Poultry Fact Sheet No. 23, Desley Whisson, University of California, Davis, http://www.envtox.ucdavis.edu/avs/pfS23.htm.