John Betancourt - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006

There had been no cars. Everyone must have made it home and decided to stay there. There was a ghost of a road to my left, and I figured it led to a farmhouse. I turned. It was harder and harder to keep going. The wind kept pummeling me from all sides. The snow was an inch deep one step, six inches deep the next. Little drifts everywhere. I kept hoping that someone would come. I was praying this wasn’t just a field road, that there really was a house at the end of it.

Dark clouds on the horizon — tall, overgrown lilac bushes, with leaves still on them. Behind them, firs and birches. A shelterbelt, and that meant a farm. I took as deep a breath as I could through my frozen muffler, my frozen face, and went on. More trees, and then a yard and, thank God, the buildings. I went past the garage, the outbuildings, and on to the house. Up the stairs to the front porch. The door was locked. I leaned against the door and tried not to die of despair. Then I made myself go back down and around to the back of the house. The back door was open.

The silence. The dark. The warmth. I pulled back my hood, unwrapped my muffler, stripped off my gloves, zipped down my parka. Snow sifted down all around me. I called out:

“Hello? Anybody home? Hello?”

Nothing. Silence. I looked around. I was in the mudroom. I knocked as much snow as I could off my boots — no reason to give my unknown benefactors more of a mess to clean up than was necessary — and opened the door into the kitchen. Dark and quiet. I called out again. Still no sounds. I flipped the switch. The lights didn’t come on. The power must be out. I walked through into the dining room, the living room, the small bedroom, past the dark stairs leading to the darker second floor. A tiny bathroom reminded me how long I’d been out. It was cold and smelled of mildew, but at least it wasn’t windy and snowing. I flushed and went back into the kitchen.

I desperately wanted something hot to drink. There was a kettle on a gas stove, so I tried the burner — it didn’t light, but I could smell gas, so I turned it off and started looking for matches. They were in the cupboard by the stove. I filled the kettle, lit the burner, and looked around some more. I found cups in one cupboard, instant coffee in another, and in a dark corner of the kitchen, the telephone.

I had a decision to make. I thought it over while the water boiled, while I made a cup of coffee, while I drank it. It was the best coffee I’d ever had in my life. I sighed and went to the phone and dialed 911. The dispatcher who answered — probably in Laskin, thirty miles away — asked my name and location, and I read her the telephone number of where I was and how I’d gotten there and how there was nobody home. I told her about going out for a ride. She asked if I was crazy. I told her yeah, and how we’d skidded off the road, into the ditch. She asked if I’d been drinking. I told her no, but Nick had. She asked if Nick was with me. I told her no, that Nick had passed out and was still in the car. She expressed some concern about that.

“Can someone come get him?” I asked.

Maybe. The interstate was closed, the roads were horrendous, only emergency vehicles were allowed out, but maybe. I promised to stay put — where was I going to go? She said they’d do what they could, and we both said goodbye.

I made another cup of coffee, and watched the snow flying past the window. I’d given him a chance; that was more than he’d given Bill. The rest was up to winter.

The shadow of the Venetian blinds, etched by the sun on the wall of the breakfast nook, faded out and sharpened again as clouds tumbled across the sky on this breezy June morning. Detective Sergeant Cyrus Auburn yawned over the headlines in the morning paper while half-listening to the chugging and burbling of the electric percolator, the clicking and clatter made by birds rummaging in the roof gutters for food and nest-building materials, and the creaking of the east side of the house warming up.

The giggle of his digital phone in the bedroom summoned him to the cool, dark side.

“Cy, it’s Laporte. You’re not on the road yet, are you?” Lieutenant Gavin Laporte, third watch commander. “On your way in, touch base with Dollinger and Krasnoy at the corner of Jardine and Pace. They’ve got a citizen down.”

“Drowning?”

“Shooting. Elderly female. Apparently robbed.”

“ID?”

“Ida Claire Blanford. Single, aged seventy-four. Retired schoolteacher. Shot down within a few yards of her house. An evidence tech will be at the scene by the time you get there.”

The corner of Jardine and Pace wasn’t exactly on Auburn’s way to headquarters. The two streets met at a right angle and ended, at the south bank of the river, in an older residential district that was gradually degenerating into a slum. It had once been a flourishing urban neighborhood, but its development had been arrested by the natural barrier of the river, and property values had begun to decline as many of the houses slowly disintegrated in the hands of absentee landlords.

Between the river and the point where Jardine and Pace dead-ended into each other there was a broad grassy levee planted with oaks, which were just now coming into leaf. Auburn saw a cruiser and an evidence van parked on the street, and festoons of yellow tape at the crest of the levee, fringed by the inevitable crowd of onlookers. Climbing up himself, he found Patrolmen Fritz Dollinger and Terry Krasnoy down near the water conferring with Kestrel, the evidence technician from headquarters.

Ancient sycamores grew along the water’s edge, some of them leaning far out and ready to topple because their massive roots had been undermined by the scour of the current when the river was high. But it hadn’t rained for more than a week now, and the river had dwindled to a sluggish stream barely an eighth of a mile wide, leaving broad, slimy mud flats along both banks.

The body of the victim lay, on a sloping stretch of bank well out from solid ground, under a blue plastic sheet weighted at the corners against the breeze with stones. A black leather handbag rested on top of the sheet. Auburn noticed a rowboat equipped with a trawling motor moored to a tangle of wild shrubbery a few yards downstream. On the far bank of the river he could see a few spectators clustered on balconies and at upper windows.

Patrolman Krasnoy gave him a quasi-military salute. “Good morning, Sergeant,” he said. “We didn’t know if they were sending you or the Coast Guard.”

“Are you sure this isn’t a drowning?”

“We didn’t do an autopsy yet,” said Dollinger, “but her clothes are dry. Except for right around the hole in her chest. Take a look.”

Kestrel, the evidence man, registered acute distress. “Afraid I’ll have to veto that for now,” he said. “You can’t get near the body without making more tracks in the mud, and I haven’t shot any pictures yet.”

“I can wait,” said Auburn. “What do we know?”

“A fisherman in a boat spotted the body an hour or so ago,” said Dollinger. “He’s around somewhere. He already filled out a 201, but we asked him to hang loose till you talked to him. When he saw the body, he tied up, climbed the levee, and called Public Safety from a bar and grill up there. The guy who runs the bar came across for a look at the body and recognized her as the woman who lives in that house right there.”

He pointed to a huge, old white frame house, not a hundred yards away. Its long narrow back yard extended all the way to the riverbank, from which it was separated by a stone wall. The property was well maintained, and beds of spring flowers in the side yards relieved the severity of the house’s boxy architecture.