Борден Дил - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 1, No. 12, December 1956

The car slid to a stop beside him while he still stood there looking up. He felt the gun in his hand and thought. It could have hit me, not her. I could be dead. It was inconceivable, but it was true. He could begin to believe it, as he could not have done ten minutes ago.

A car door slammed. He turned. A woman in a pink-striped dress was walking toward him through the wild mustard. He had a moment’s startled feeling that she was Anne. Tall, thin, with big dark eyes, but these eyes met his squarely. They glanced once at the gun.

Cliff opened his hand wide and flat and heard the gun thump to the ground beside the bright summer dress at his feet. Without knowing that he was going to speak at all without even thinking what he would say, he heard his own voice with hysteria in it.

“She did it herself! You’ve got to believe me! She did it herself. She pushed the gun in my hand and made me pull the trigger.”

The woman’s dark eyes searched his face. She looked down once into the grass and then away again. “Be still,” she said. “Let me think.” She put her hands over her face and again he thought of Anne. But when she looked up again, she was resolute and not like Anne at all.

“All right,” she said. “It’s done. Nothing can help that now. But nobody will believe you. You know that.”

“But it’s true! She—”

“I saw you on the pier together,” the woman broke in. “The bartender must have seen you leave together. Do you think the police will listen to you after that?”

He gulped and held his breath, desperately afraid he was going to cry. “I didn’t,” he said, hearing in his own voice a hint of the helplessness he had seen in Anne. “I didn’t do it!”

She stood there for a long moment in silence, looking down again at the thin, motionless girl lying among the wild mustard, the highway dust blowing over her in the headlights. Then she seemed to pull herself together with a little shudder, and she stepped quickly to the car and reached in to switch off the lights. In the sudden dark she said, “All right. I knew her. I believe you. I believe it happened just as you say. Now listen. I’ll help you, but you’ll have to do exactly as I tell you. First of all, we’ll put her in the back of my car. Wait, I’ll spread out the tarp.”

She turned swiftly, saying over her shoulder, “Go on, hurry before another car comes.”

But Cliff felt a fragment of caution stirring in the midst of his relief and his terror. “Maybe we ought to call a doctor,” he stammered. “Maybe—”

“Have you looked?” the woman said harshly, opening the back of the car. “She’s dead.”

“But the police—”

“Call the police and you’re done for.” She paused and looked at him in the dim starlight. “Now do you want out of this or don’t you? Make up your mind fast.”

“I... I’ll do what you say.”

“All right, then. Here, I’ll help. You take her shoulders.”

Her arms were like dry twigs again and she weighed nothing at all. Tall as she had been, she doubled up easily — with her feet against the spare tire, in the dark cavern of the car. The woman hesitated a moment before she closed the big curved lid. She stooped and put a strand of the straggling black hair aside quite gently from the good side of the shattered face. Half of it still looked very much like her own.

“Get in front,” she said in a controlled voice. “We have a long drive ahead.”

He didn’t say a word for a long while. He was nothing inside, he thought. Nothing but a quivering and shaking mass. With a part of his mind, he was walking along the dark highway with Anne beside him and all this a nightmare that hadn’t ever happened. If he could only go back, he thought with passion. If he could only go back, say half an hour, and leave her as his instinct had warned him, when they came out of the bar. He remembered how the gun had thumped against his side, never imagining then that it was a gun, and he thought he would never, never be fool enough again to let another human being get that close to him. He sat as far from the woman at the wheel as the seat allowed him. If it weren’t for the shaking inside, he would have jumped from the car at the first stoplight and run until he dropped. But all he could do now was shut himself off, shut out the world.

It was late and they made good time. When they hit the freeway, the woman let the car really go, and the rest of the traffic became explosive, shining blurs that shot backward past the windows.

As they drove through silent Pasadena, he said, “Are you—” He licked dry lips and tried again, needing to know. “Were you her sister?”

She laughed like a little cough, quick and startled. “Under the skin, maybe.”

“I thought— You look alike, and I thought—”

“We weren’t related,” she told him in a flat, unemotional voice.

He was silent awhile, and the car left the outskirts of the city and began to climb. A sign flashed past. “Angeles Crest Highway.”

“I saw you on the pier,” he said. “It was you, wasn’t it? You pointed her out when she was about to jump. Why?”

“I’ve been watching her. Ever since I got to town.”

“Why? Why were you watching her?”

“Call it morbid curiosity if you like. I knew the state she was in. I knew what she might try to do. But I never really expected — this.” She drew her shoulders together and was silent.

They went up steeply a long way. They passed the crest and began to drop. The hot breath of the desert blew in their faces. “We’ll be there soon,” she said.

They left the highway at last, and drove awhile with the lights switched off and only the pale starlight and the glow of paler sand to guide them. Somewhere far off the road they drew up at last, among Joshua trees that sighed noisily when the sound of the motor stopped. The stars were a blaze that filled the whole sky, infinitely many, powderings beyond powderings of pale silver that crowded the spaces behind the bright, familiar stars.

“Get out,” the woman said. “Now we dig.”

He thought of balking.

“Come on, get it over,” she said impatiently. “We’re on the same side. I’m covering up for, you. But you’ve got to help. We’re very lucky there’s a shovel in the car. We’ll take turns.”

“But why?” he demanded. “I don’t understand. Why?”

She paused to look at him in the starlight. “Because if she had to die, at least some good can come of it. I didn’t expect this. I didn’t want it. But now it’s happened — well, she and I had a lot in common.” A sardonic note sounded in the woman’s voice. “I couldn’t help her when she was alive. But now she’s dead, she can help me.” Briskly she turned away, glancing around the sandy clearing. “Nobody will find her here. I know this desert pretty well. I grew up here. I can cover our tracks. But we’ll have to dig deep. Let’s get started.”

They dug very deep. Tough roots tried to stop them; rocks rang under the shovel. Sand kept running back again into the grave until they had gone quite a way down. When the woman thought it was deep enough, she helped him bring Anne. Together they lowered her gently, in her bright summer dress, and laid her with the bad side of her face down upon the dark, curved cradle of her grave. The woman put Anne’s handbag beside her and then stood up and dropped something small upon the folds of the print dress, something that flashed once in the starlight as it fell.

“What was that?” Cliff asked, hushed.

“Never mind. Bring me the tarp, please.”

They folded it over her before they shoveled the dirt back. She looked quite relaxed and at peace, lying there among the deep roots with the tarp to keep the sand off her face.