Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 40, No. 6, June, 1995

Back in the kitchen DiDi gingerly lifted the flat metal lid atop one of the jars of Uncle Willis’s pickles. Her heart was beating so loudly she could hear it thumping in her head, the here-and-now Didi thought she could hear the then DiDi’s heart through the television. The pickles smelled spicy, the pickles looked perfect; even after she sifted rat poison into the jar, they looked good, since the fine powder sank to the bottom, disintegrated, disappeared.

Was it enough? Should she do another jar? As she debated (Did she really want to do this, any of it? It wouldn’t kill him, would it? Just a little rat poison? Make him sick, that’s all it would do. Make him seriously ill and he’d have to go to the hospital and... no, that wouldn’t help. Mother’d just nurse him back to health, DiDi knew how she was, she was Florence Nightingale reincarnated when it came to ailments. DiDi’d just have to go ahead and...), the screen door banged, someone was coming. Watching the scene unfold, she could swear she heard music, ominous music, Alfred Hitchcock music rising up and over like in Psycho when danger is on its way...

DiDi moved quickly, doused the pickle jar with powder once more and thrust the rat poison tin into a jeans pocket, replaced the lid, and picked up the tongs. Judging from her armchair she rated young DiDi’s hand and eye coordination A-one.

Uncle Willis came into the kitchen. “Lucille... oh, it’s you, Didi. I thought it was your mother. Making pickles, I see. You’re being mother’s little helper. That’s nice.”

Didi smiled, nodded, “Yours are over there.”

“So they are. And just in time. I’m on my last jar.”

Mother’s voice came down the stairs, “Didi, are you taking the pickles out of their bath? The ten minutes are up.”

“Yes, ma’am. Excuse me, Uncle Willis. You might get burned if you come too close. And we wouldn’t want to get burned, would we, Uncle Willis?” What an innocent face, what a sweet innocent face, no wonder he’d willed Didi (small d

) his belongings, suspecting that child of ill will was unthinkable. Such a sweet girl. Such a sweet pretty girl. Should have the world at her feet. Should have.

She remembered the months that followed. Great gobs of guilt followed. In her bed at night she thought of ways to undo what she’d done. What she’d done was terrible. Horrible. Unthinkable.

So why was she thinking of it? Why had she chosen that (random?) date... with a sudden movement, she hit the stop, hit the power, turned it off. All this nostalgia stuff, sure, she could relive joyful days... if she could remember when they were, there must have been some, there must have been many... Relive... how about anticipate? Could her Beta foretell the future? Aha, that was the question — the lottery number was drawn on Saturday nights. If, say, she had the number in advance... why not? If she could see next Sunday’s newspaper... on Sunday mornings she always read the newspaper from cover to cover, and on page two the lottery numbers were listed... yeah, hey, that was the deal!

She found a pen and pad, calculated, and gave Beta the Sundaycoming date. “Turn it on first, you dope,” she said aloud, then followed suit. Date repeated, she sat back to watch.

The TV screen said NO FILE FOUND.

She said aloud, “What do you mean, no file found?”

The screen blinked. NO FILE FOUND.

She tried again, something easier, tomorrow’s date. Again the message came, No file found.

Great. No future from Beta. Only the past.

The G-d past.

You can’t run away from the past, Didi, she could hear her mother saying that. Her mother had a litany of trite sayings, tried and true was among them. Certain beliefs were “tried and true.” Such as, “What goes around comes around.” She’d asked her once, “What the heck does that mean?”

“You’ll find out,” she’d said. “One day you’ll find out.”

Mornings when Uncle Willis was in residence he’d come down for breakfast and watch Mother, watch DiDi with his little beady eyes, and she’d reconsider anew. He deserved a poisoned pickle, the dirty old man... no, no, he doesn’t, no one deserves that. But how to undo what she’d done? By ruining all the pickles, how could she explain that, the jars had leaked? Mother had closed the jars herself, checked them thoroughly. The best plan, destroy the offending jar was the best plan, but which was the one? She should have marked it somehow, that’s what she should have done, but she hadn’t and now when she sneaked down to his cubbyhole (Uncle Willis’s pickles were kept in that special place, dark and cool, a little cave behind the chimney in the basement because it was thought that things kept longer and better there) and looked at the jars — how many, eleven, now ten, then nine, eight — he was working on jar number four, was it the one? He seemed all right — yet was number four, his current jar, the one? No signs yet of any illness, but would he suddenly gasp for breath, clutch his throat, keel over right then and there and die?

“Didi, are you feeling all right? You look so funny...”