Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 50, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2005

“Send for him?” Dorothea’s light blazed. “My dear young man, have you any idea what the South was like in 1925? Why, children of the poor were often employed without even asking their last names. I couldn’t have told you Willie’s. No one on the staff knew where he lived and once he vanished he was like a drop of water in the gulf. And I repeat, the napkin ring was never recovered.”

“Willie didn’t take it. That lousy waiter did.”

“That occurred to me, and standing there in the garden I explained to the man that the napkin ring was not valuable at all, that my husband had bought it for me from a street peddler in Madrid on our honeymoon, and that I cherished it for that reason alone. I told him it was probably worth about three dollars, as he’d find out if he tried to sell it. Then I offered him fifty dollars to return it. He was unable to produce it.”

Simon said desperately, “There were other hired people. One of them—”

“Goodbye. Please leave the museum at once or I shall—”

“Wait! Please!” Three strides took him to her and involuntarily he put out his hand to detain her. He felt, instead of the satin of a sleeve or the flesh of a hand, only emptiness. She seemed to shrink from him. Simon stepped back bewildered, then suddenly laughed. He mimicked her tone again.

“ ‘I shall touch the alarm and the police will come!’ Honey, you can’t touch anything, can you?” She was motionless and silent. “You can’t even report me to the guard.” He chuckled delightedly. “I’m the only one you can mess with, just me, the — what was that word? — the miscreant, right?”

Dorothea’s light flared jaggedly but still she was silent. Simon began to stroll around the room. “Why, I could rip this place off and you couldn’t do one thing about it.” He turned and faced her. “You’re a faker, Dorothea, and you’re just lucky that I’m not a thief.” He walked to the Nativity. “Neither was Willie, and I’m going to prove it to you.” He touched the painting lovingly. “It’s too late tonight, Jesus, honey. But I’ll be back tomorrow. We’ll have two nights to put you and your folks on my canvas. And if Dorothea here wants to join us, why not? We can all rap about art. How about it, Dorothea?”

He turned, but she was a painting again.

Elated, Simon retraced his steps and reached his bike, but as he rolled it down the slope, his morale dissolved. Sure, he’d won the first round with Dorothea, but would she eventually get him on points? Uncle Willie’s innocence had suddenly become the big issue, and how do you go about trying to right a seventy-year-old wrong when the accused person is dying and the accuser is dead — well, not that dead...

His brains in a knot, he tooled up Sapphire Drive in the inky darkness of one A.M., crossed South Trail, and reached Fortieth Street. His mother and Aunt Hannah had made their home real pretty. Aunt Hannah was Uncle Willie’s twin sister, a ninety-pound cleaning machine. The garden was his mom’s thing.

Simon got off the bike a little way down the street and walked it to his driveway. The garage was open. He rolled the bike in and secured it, wishing he didn’t have to pull the door down but, of course, he must. The sound always woke his mother up, and he didn’t feel like having to fake answers to her questions about how the movie was. As it turned out, he didn’t have to.

The light in the breezeway was on. Simon walked through and into the kitchen. His mother and Aunt Hannah were sitting there, coffee mugs on the table. “What the heck are you two doing up?” he asked.

“Willie’s very low, Si,” his mother said.

“Couple of more days, they told us.” Hannah’s frail old hand trembled as she lifted her mug.

He couldn’t say, “Yes, I know,” so he sat down and asked, “When were you over there?”

“I went over after lunch,” said his mother. “Then I came home and got Hannah and we went back for a while. Want some coffee?”

Simon shook his head, reached across the table, and squeezed his mother’s hand. Then he reached for Hannah’s, but she was clutching something on her lap.

“What’s that?” he asked

“Oh...” She shrugged her skinny little shoulders and brought up a worn brown paper bag. “I couldn’t stop thinking about Willie when we got home and I drug this out of the closet. It’s a bunch of old pictures. We’ve been looking at them and kind of crying some. That Willie, he was so handsome.”

Simon looked at the bag, his heart beating a bit faster. “Are there any of him when he was a little boy?”

“Are you kidding? Who could afford a camera back then?” Hannah slid some of the pictures on the table and his mother reached for one. She said, “Here’s my favorite. He was eighteen and he’d just enlisted in the army.”