Fletcher Flora - The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™ - 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

“Am I under arrest?” he said.

“That’s right. You are.”

“You’re making a mistake. You’ll see.” He stood up and looked toward the house. “If you’ll wait out here, I’ll get some things together and say good-by.”

I let him go. He went across the yard and into the house, and he was in there for maybe fifteen minutes. He came out carrying a little leather bag, and we got into the patrol car and drove back to town. In the office at the jail, Rudy was sitting in a chair away from the desk with his feet on the floor. He must have heard us coming.

“Hello, Colby,” he said. “Hello, Fergus. What you two doing together?”

“He’s under arrest for murder,” I said. “Lock him up.”

“Murder!” Rudy jumped as if his chair was wired and someone had thrown the switch. “Whose murder?”

“How many murders we had around here lately, Rudy?”

“Faye Bratton’s, you mean?”

“Faye Bratton’s, I mean.”

“Well, Jesus, Colby. I got to thinking after you left, and what I thought was Snuffy Cleaker must have done it.”

“You weren’t thinking, Rudy. Your brain was just turning over. There’s a difference.”

“That may be, Colby, if you say so, but I’m thinking now for sure, and what I’m thinking is you ought to tell me more about what’s going on.”

“Excuse me, Rudy. I’ll try to do better. Right now I’m going back to Crawley Bratton’s to tell him we’ve made an arrest, and then I’m coming in to see the county attorney. Tell Lard two more for dinner instead of one.”

I went out and got into the patrol car and drove west for the third time that day. I stood beside the car in Crawley’s back yard and looked out over all the fields as far as I could see, but there wasn’t any sign of Crawley out there, and so I went over and hammered on the back door of the house, but there wasn’t any sight or sound of him there, either. Then I went out to the barn and inside, and there he was. He was lying on his back on the rough plank floor, and nearby, where it had fallen from his hands, was a double barreled 12-gauge shotgun. Most of the top of Crawley’s head was off. Some of it was on the floor, and the rest was on the wall behind him. There was something else on the wall, too. It was a note pinned to the planking with Crawley’s pocket knife. I went over and ripped the note loose and read it, and this is what Crawley had written:

Colby:

I thought you’d find out, and I’m glad you did. Thanks again for letting me know you knew, and for giving me time to get out of it my own way. This is it, Colby. This is the way. It was a tough break, that dumb kid seeing me kill Faye, but it’s all right. I don’t think I could have lived with myself very long, knowing all the time I was a murderer. I wasn’t cut out for it.

I didn’t really plan to kill her. I just walked down to the creek to find her and bring her back, and there she was with her dress torn, and she’d been crying, and I could see someone had treated her rough. She said it was Fergus Cass who did it, and wanted me to go find him and kill him. Instead, I killed her. I finished what he’d started, and killed her. I guess I knew right along that she’d been carrying on with him. I just didn’t want to admit it to myself. A man’s pride keeps him from admitting things sometimes. Maybe later I’d have killed Fergus Cass, too. I was thinking about it, and so I guess it’s better it’s ending this way before I could.

You can imagine how surprised I was when the haystack caught fire. I was going back after dark to bury her. I had a place picked out.

I hope you find me soon, Colby. See that we’re buried together.

Well, hell. So it was just a misunderstanding. So I figured it was Fergus Cass, and all the time it was Crawley. I can see, looking back, how the misunderstanding came about naturally. When I came up from the creek with Snuffy Cleaker and said that Snuffy had seen someone choking Faye, not saying who it was Snuffy had seen, and then making that crack about Crawley knowing as well as I did who it was, why, what the hell was he naturally to think? Being guilty, although I didn’t know it, he thought there was only one person I could possibly mean, and that person was Crawley Bratton, although it wasn’t. The only reason he could see for my not arresting him then was just to give him a chance to take his own way out, and that’s why he said thanks when I left, and took the way when I was gone.

I’m glad he did, and I think it’s time Virgil had my job.

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine , September 1960.

“Wake up,” the voice said.

Freda opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling and waited for the voice to continue, but it was silent. This was not in the least disturbing, however, for sometimes it did not speak to her for hours and hours on end, and then it would speak suddenly, at some odd moment, with specific instructions to do this or that in a particular way at such and such a time. In the beginning the voice had frightened Freda, in the very beginning, but she had soon understood that there was nothing at all to be frightened of, quite the contrary, and she had begun waiting for the voice and listening for it, but she never knew when it would speak. Sometimes it spoke to her when she was quite alone, but at other times it would speak when she was in company, even when she was herself speaking to someone else, and then she would have to quit speaking, perhaps in the middle of a sentence, and listen intently to what the voice said. This was always disconcerting to the other person, of course, the one she was speaking to, and it was really very amusing, in a sense, a kind of comic situation to be laughed at silently.

A strange thing about it was that the voice, although it spoke quite clearly, was never heard by anyone but herself. Another strange thing, even stranger, was that it was never necessary to answer the voice aloud, but only to think quite deliberately the words she wanted heard, and the voice heard them and answered them, and so it was possible to carry on conversations, quite long ones sometimes, without being overheard by anyone else who might be present. These things were strange, however, only in the sense that they were exceptional, undoubtedly beyond the belief of someone who had never experienced them, but they were really conceivable realities. There was nothing supernatural about them, like the presence of light in darkness and a world of sound below the level of hearing.

It was the voice that had brought her to this city, where she had arrived last night, and to this room in this hotel, where she had just awakened. The voice told her what to do, exactly when and how, but she knew perfectly well what she must do in the end, after all the little things that must be done before, and it was to do this, the thing that must be done, that she had come to this place at this time. She had come to kill a man named Hugo Weis.

“You had better get out of bed,” the voice said.

It was a gentle reminder. There was in the voice no trace of anger at her lethargy, nor even a suggestion of impatience. The voice was always gentle, always soft, and it was, in truth, a voice of poignant beauty, with a whisper of sadness running through the sounds of vowels and consonants like the slightest soughing of wind among trees at dusk.

“Yes,” she thought. “I’d better.”

She arose and went into the bathroom and turned on a light. Her face reflected in the mirror above the lavatory seemed somehow the face of another person, not of a stranger but of a person she had known a long time ago in another place and could not now clearly remember. She felt sorry for the face, for the person it belonged to, and she wanted suddenly to cry and tell the face how sorry she was. Instead, she took off her pajamas and showered and went back into the bedroom and dressed and began to brush her hair. She sat on the edge of the bed and brushed with short, quick strokes, her head tilted first to one side and then the other, and as she brushed she began to think about the voice, which did not now respond to her thoughts, and about Hugo Weis, whom she was going to kill.