Donald Moffitt - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 57, No. 7 & 8, July/August 2012

The lots in Rentz’s neighborhood ran back hundreds of feet toward the wooded slopes of an ancient cemetery. His rear deck commanded a view of oak leaves turning gold on distant heights under the fraternal kiss of an October sun. Nearer at hand, asters flourished and squirrels foraged among the unkempt ornamental borders that separated his place from his neighbors’ better-tended flower gardens.

Joy Lynn Robiche gathered up Styrofoam containers and plastic cups, the remains of a fast-food lunch for two, and dropped them into a waste can in a corner of the deck.

Rentz consulted a pocket watch on a chain. “What time’s your conference?”

“Three.” The lie fell smoothly from her tongue.

“I hope you’ll have time for ice cream and cake and some socializing before you have to leave.”

Joy Lynn nodded silently. If her manner was proprietorial and efficient rather than affectionate, Rentz didn’t seem to mind, or even to notice. Her appointment was pure fiction, designed to allow for an early escape from the party.

At a little past one o’clock, Howard’s two sons and their families mounted the steps to the deck in a semisolemn procession. Kevin and Virgil were copy-and-paste replicas of their father — rough hewn, beetle browed, obstinate as spring steel. Kevin’s wife Sheeba, with skin and hair the color of chilled honey, leaned over Rentz’s shoulder from behind and planted a noisy kiss on his cheek. “Happy birthday, Dad.” She deposited two wrapped presents on the table at his elbow.

Virgil’s wife Cary added another package to the pile and headed for the door to the kitchen. She was dark, slow moving, and unabashedly plump. “I’ll put you-know-what in the refrigerator,” she confided as she passed close to her father-in-law.

The adults seated themselves on an assortment of metal chairs and babbled desultorily about nothing in particular. A psychologist might have peeled away layer after layer of family pathology here without ever getting to the bottom of things. More telling than the laconic and barely civil exchanges were the periodic silences.

Cary and Sheeba were evidently at loggerheads over something that went deeper than their sharply contrasting temperaments. Virgil and Kevin’s manner toward their father was a lumpy blend of filial awe and rude condescension. Everyone but Rentz displayed a savage coolness toward Joy Lynn. The men treated her merely as an unwelcome intruder, but the women’s wry glances and curt asides expressed disapproval of everything about her, from hairstyle and shoes to demeanor and personal code of ethics.

The three preteen children each went their own way. Virgil and Cary’s boy Jacob marched purposefully toward a weedy thicket in the middle distance, where anyone who was paying attention would have seen him slicing open milkweed pods with a stainless steel knife and examining their contents with a magnifying lens.

As for Kevin and Sheeba’s son Devlin (a k a Speedo and Loco Boy), within five minutes of his arrival in his grandfather’s backyard he had slid into a nonexistent home plate about thirty times, always with different sound effects. By the time his father called off the game, Devlin’s jeans had accumulated enough grass stains to overwhelm even the leading brand of laundry detergent — not that it mattered, since he had also shredded the fabric beyond repair.

Devlin’s sister Deirdre lingered on the deck, surreptitiously eavesdropping on adult conversations. She had an eyebrow ring, a rosebud tattoo on her left calf, and an alarmingly advanced vocabulary for a child of eleven.

“Hey, girl, come here,” Rentz summoned her in a stage whisper. “I got a job for you. This is just between the two of us.” He massaged her shoulder with a big bony paw while whispering a commission in her ear. She nodded compliance and made off for the kitchen. Just before she reached the door he called after her, “And, hey, girl — a big spoon, okay?”

A round-shouldered little man with a face like an owl appeared on the deck with his head tilted to one side, his gait an uncompromising waddle. “Happy birthday, Howard,” he said. “I guess no coffee today?”

“We’ve got coffee. Joy Lynn, get Wally a cup of coffee.”

“Just black,” said Wally with a shy glance at Joy Lynn. “No sugar.”

“I know.”

Rentz swung around to face his sons. “Everything okay at the shop?”

“No problems, Dad,” said Virgil. “But we’ve got to talk some more about that Wagner plant. It’s just sitting there empty—”

“Okay, you mugs,” chirped Sheeba, “no business discussions today.”

“But next week could be too late,” objected Virgil, without meeting his sister-in-law’s gaze.

Cary began dispensing ice cream and cake, pausing frequently to lick her fingers. Jacob was called in from the edge of the woods, where he was trapping insects in a plastic specimen bottle, and Devlin was persuaded to remain seated for a full five minutes with the promise of double rations of carbohydrates. For a few minutes a morose kind of tranquility reigned.

Sheeba took pictures of her father-in-law opening his presents — an imitation ivory backscratcher, a baseball cap with a mildly sleazy caption, the kind of gifts middle-aged people usually receive from family members instead of articles of intrinsic value. Rentz held a T-shirt adorned with a monkey face across his chest and mimicked the monkey’s grimace for the camera.

“Kind of chilly out here this afternoon,” he remarked as he laid the shirt aside.

“Well, we are about three weeks into fall,” Joy Lynn reminded him.

“Hey, is it raining?”

His sudden exclamation was seconded by indignant outcries from the others.

Rentz leaned over the wooden railing of the deck. “Ricedale! What do you think you’re doing down there?”

In the side yard of the house next door a wiry man in a checkered cap was watering the potted plants suspended from an awning by sticking his finger into the threaded metal fitting on the end of a garden hose so as to send a jet of water curving gently upward. “That’s Mister Ricedale, if you don’t mind. I’m irrigating the hanging gardens of Bangladesh, same like I do every day about this time.”

“Well, you’re also irrigating the ice cream and cake.”

“So what is this, the Queen’s birthday?”

“It’s my birthday, you dingbat. And if you don’t get out of here with that fire hose, I might decide to administer a kick to your southern hemisphere.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, if you did that, I might decide to run a sickle through your giblets.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, if you did that, some folks downtown might decide to hang you from a long pole with a short rope.”

“Well, in that case I better come up there and help myself to a last meal of iced Beam and steak, I think you said.”

Ricedale’s arrival on the deck introduced a welcome note of joviality into the proceedings. Kevin and Virgil nevertheless finally managed to corner their father for some serious talk.

“Look, Dad,” said Virgil “we need to move fast on this Wagner plant deal. It’d be bad enough if somebody bought the place and junked all the equipment and turned it into a skating rink, but what if they started up another heating and cooling business?”

“They’d be crazy if they did,” said Rentz. “Wagner went bankrupt.”

Kevin moved his chair closer to his father’s. “That’s because he’s an alcoholic. Another guy with some capital and both feet on the ground could come in there, take over that shop, and give us more competition than Wagner ever did.”

Virgil returned to the charge with a different line of argument. “Wagner just bought a couple of twelve-foot Dodge forming brakes last year. The beds and the rams both tilt. They can punch and notch at the same time. The dies that go with them would just about fill the back shed.”