Fletcher Flora - The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery MEGAPACK™ - 20 Classic Mystery & Crime Stories!

“What’s that?” he asked.

“It’s a music box,” she said. “When you open it, it begins to play, and a little ballerina comes up and dances to the music.”

“Where did you get it?”

“At a shop I passed on my way home. It was in the window.”

“How much did it cost?”

She was tempted to lie, to make her extravagance seem a little less flagrant than it was. But then, before the lie could be told, she understood that evasion was impossible, and that somehow everything must be saved or lost on this issue.

“Ten dollars,” she said. And added, as if impelled to make worse what was already bad enough, “It was almost all the money I had.”

For a moment he did not move or speak. Then, still silent, he reached out and picked up the music box. There was in his movement an awful restraint, a sign that he was exercising the last measure of control, and the effect was to give it a quality of slow-motion and a stark clarity of detail. He raised the lid, and the ballerina arose upon her toes, but the mechanism had run down, and she stood poised and waiting in an absence of sound and motion. Luke’s thumb and index finger, big and brutal and incredibly ugly, began to twist the key. The tiny bells began to ring, the ballerina began to pirouette. He twisted and twisted and kept on twisting...

His name was Hadley. He had come, in response to her call, with two other men. For quite a long time they had remained in the kitchen, and she, sitting quietly on the edge of her bed with her feet primly together and her hands folded in her lap, could hear their movements and the low murmur of their voices. Now, at last, Hadley had come into the bedroom, which had grown dark as the light outside was drawn away by the sun, and he was sitting, after turning on a small bedside lamp, on the edge of a chair just outside the pale perimeter that the lamp cast. His hands were restless, and his voice was troubled.

“I don’t quite understand,” he said. “Please tell me again what happened.”

She stirred and sighed and lifted her eyes to the overcast of shadows below the ceiling.

“He broke my music box,” she said. “He was angry because I spent my last ten dollars for it, and he picked it up and wound it and wound it, and the spring broke inside, and it couldn’t play anymore. It will never play again.”

She was silent, hearing again the dying whimper of the broken spring, the shower of tiny sounds within her mind as her frail fantasy of happiness fell in a thousand glittering shards. The ballerina stood still as stone in a mute world.

“All right,” Hadley said. “Then what happened?”

“Then he put the music box back on the dresser and walked away without a word. Without even looking at me. He went into the kitchen and sat at his place at the table, but he didn’t eat. I think he must have been ashamed.” She paused again, considering his shame. “I sat down on the edge of the bed, just as I’m sitting now, and at first I couldn’t think or feel anything, not even anger; then I began to realize what Luke had done, but more than that, I began to understand what terrible things he must have suffered to make him do it. Poor lost Luke.”

Hadley made an abrupt gesture, seeming to fend off an intangible encroachment from the shadows.

“So you killed him.”

“Yes. I shot him. The gun was in the top dresser drawer. Luke always kept it loaded, and I got it and went into the kitchen and shot him.”

He stood up and rubbed his hands together and leaned toward her from the hips. His voice was curiously dull and deliberate, sustaining a kind of negative emphasis.

“You do not kill a man for breaking a music box,” he said. “You simply do not kill a man for breaking a music box!”

“No.” There was a faint note of surprise in her voice, and she seemed for a moment to be examining a vision of truth. “It’s really too absurd when you consider it, isn’t it? He was so futile, you see. His dying was so hard. It was taking so long.”

She lowered her eyes and stared at her folded hands, accepting a world in which there was no music or dancing or hope.

“Poor lost Luke,” she said again.

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine , September 1965.

Clara Deforest, Mrs. Jason J. DeForest, was entertaining her minister, the Reverend Mr. Kenneth Culling, who conducted himself with a kind of practiced and professional reticence, faintly suggesting a reverent hush, that was appropriate to a house of bereavement. The situation, however, was delicate. In fact, the Reverend Mr. Culling was not at all certain that his visit, under the ticklish circumstances, was quite proper. So far as he could determine, there seemed to be no etiquette established for such occasions. But he had decided he could not afford to risk offending a parishioner as prominent as Clara DeForest, and that he must offer at least a tactful expression of sympathy. So here he was, with a teacup balanced on his knee and a small sweet cracker in his hand.

It was close to the time when he customarily fortified himself with a glass of sherry, and he wished wistfully that he were, at this instant, doing that very thing. He was unaware that Clara DeForest, who was also drinking tea and eating crackers, would have greatly preferred a glass or two of sherry, and would have happily supplied it. In short, the two were not quite in contact, and they were forced to suffer, consequently, the petty misery common to misunderstandings.

Clara DeForest’s bereavement, to put it bluntly, was qualified. It was true that her husband Jason was gone, but he had gone of his own volition, aboard a jet headed for Mexico City, and not in the arms of angels headed for heaven. At least, that was the rumor. It was also rumored that he had withdrawn his and Clara’s joint checking account and sold some bonds, had helped himself to the most valuable pieces in Clara’s jewelry box, and had been accompanied on the jet by a platinum blond. Clara made no effort to refute these charges. Neither did she confirm them. She merely made it clear, with a touch of pious stoicism, that she preferred to forgive and forget the treacheries of her errant husband, whatever they may have been precisely. Her marriage to Jason, twenty years her junior, had been under sentence from the beginning, and it was well over and done with. She was prepared, in short, to cut her losses. The Reverend Mr. Culling was vastly relieved and reassured to find her so nicely adjusted to her misfortune.

“I must say, Mrs. DeForest,” he said, “that you are looking remarkably well.”

“I feel well, thank you.”

“Is there nothing that you need? Any small comfort that I may offer?”

“I am already quite comfortable. I appreciate your kindness, but I assure you that I need nothing.”

“Your fortitude is admirable. A lesser woman would indulge herself in tears and recriminations.”

“Not I. The truth is, I have no regrets whatever. Jason has deserted, and I am well rid of him.”

“Do you feel no resentment, no anger? It would be perfectly understandable if you did.”

The Reverend Mr. Culling looked at Clara hopefully. He would have been pleased to pray for the cleansing of Clara’s heart. It would have given him something to do and made him feel useful. But Clara’s heart, apparently, required no cleansing. “None at all,” she said. “Jason was a young scoundrel, but he was quite a charming one, and I am rather grateful to him than otherwise. He gave me three exciting years at a time of life when I had no reasonable expectation of them.”

The nature of Clara’s excitement took the shape of a vague vision in the minister’s mind, and he tried without immediate success to divert his thoughts, which were hardly proper in connection with a woman of fifty, or any woman at all, however effectively preserved. He could not be blamed for noticing, however, that Clara was still capable of displaying a slender leg and a neat ankle.