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

I lay there and thought how they’d have to believe me now when I told them the truth. They really couldn’t think I had been in on this with Ed, even if they found out later that we were cellmates back upstate. They’d have to believe that no one would take this kind of a beating just to make it look good. Ed had really done me a favor. He hadn’t really meant to. He was just talking when he said that. He liked beating me up. I knew that. He got a kick out of it, and that’s why he did it. But it was going to turn out to be a good thing for me that I was so beat up when they came and found me.

I lay there and waited for them to come. It would be soon, I knew. Ed would never make it across the river to Route 90.

I could see it inside my head — Ed driving up to the toll bridge at the river and reaching out to pay the dollar toll at the one booth they kept open at night, reaching out of the old Chevy’s window to put a dollar bill into the hand of Charlie Fenway where his wife had dropped him off for the night shift on the bridge.

And even with all the pain, I kept this picture in my head while I lay there and waited and wondered why, back there in the cell, I had one time thought it might be nice to be as smart as Ed.

Hide and Seek

by Melissa Milich

When I was nine years old, I read my first Nancy Drew book, The Clue of the Broken Locket,

and for some time after that the only thing I wanted to do in my life was solve a mystery, preferably one that had stumped the police. I even carried a magnifying glass from a Cracker Jack box around with me in case I stumbled upon some clues. Just like Nancy Drew, Girl Detective. I ached for her spunk, her courage, her moral fiber, and most of all her interesting life because I grew up in a small town where nothing ever happened.

But as I got older (approximately four times as old if you’re counting), the thought of a mystery in my life was something I wanted to avoid, kind of like a flat tire, an inconvenience.

I’m a person who likes to find her keys in the morning. I like to know where my purse is, how much money is in it, and what I’m having for dinner. An ordered life. I have been working at the same job for the last ten years, society editor at the local newspaper. I wear white blouses to work, and to me it’s a personal accomplishment to get through the day without getting ink marks all over them.

I thought my Nancy Drew days were gone forever, but then Naomi Ray, a dead body, came into my life.

It’s probably more accurate to call Naomi Ray a missing person because nobody had actually located her body. She simply disappeared one day, vanished it seems, off the face of the earth. She could have been snatched by a UFO, but more than a few people suspected her husband, Cyrus. Trouble is, Cyrus Ray was a member of the Rotary club and a church volunteer, what you call a pillar of the community, and pillars don’t go around knocking off their wives. He let the police come in the house and go through everything just like you would expect a pillar of the community to do. He said he had nothing to hide.

And you can’t convict somebody without a body. So then Cyrus started getting all this sympathy from the community because the sheriff decided Naomi simply woke up one day wondering why she had married Cyrus in the first place and walked away from her old life. He said she was probably living in another state with a new haircut.

Naomi’s side of the family didn’t believe it for a minute. They said Naomi would never have abandoned them, her parents and sisters. Plus, Naomi supposedly disappeared with nothing, not even her most valuable emerald necklace that she could have sold if she’d wanted to start a new life somewhere else. They were sure she was murdered, and Naomi’s family continued to harrass Cyrus Ray until finally a judge ordered them to stop.

Then one day Naomi’s sister Elaine asked me

to help them put Cyrus Ray behind bars. I think originally she just dropped by the newspaper to ask me to run an announcement from her church, but instead she brought up Naomi, and I had to tell her what everybody’d been telling the family for the past three years. “They have closed the case, Elaine.”

“But if we could only find her body! I just can’t stand the thought of him walking around a free man while Naomi...” Her voice trailed off, and I handed her a box of tissues.

At that point I started thinking about Naomi Ray so hard that I got distracted and careless with my ink pen and made a big line right across the front of my blouse.

Elaine continued crying. “Please. Please.”

So there she was squeezing this crumpled tissue, and before I got a grip on myself, I promised. Something got into me that afternoon. In fact, I gave her my Girl Scout promise which was something else left over from being nine years old. But I still couldn’t figure out why she had asked me and exactly what I had promised.