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

It all started Sunday morning. The minister pulled Ellen and me aside after church and said somebody had pulled a prank on Kevin’s Sunday school teacher. You remember Miss Prichett — she was my Sunday school teacher too, only she’s about eighty now and even meaner and skinnier than she used to be. Well, somebody put her e-mail address on a mailing list for — well, nasty stuff. You know what I mean — special Web sites and ads for gizmos that are supposed to make to make body parts bigger but probably wouldn’t work even if they were reasonably priced because stuff like that is pretty much physically impossible, isn’t it? Hell, we get junk e-mail like that ourselves, just through our regular server. Apparently, the stuff Miss Prichett’s getting is even raunchier than the stuff everybody gets. Then another teacher heard Kevin and his Little League buddies snickering, and she got the impression that one of the boys had played the joke and the others knew about it. So the minister asked us to have a talk with Kevin.

At first Kevin denied everything, but Ellen kept at him until he finally admitted one of his friends had done it. But he wouldn’t say who. After all, Kevin said, he hadn’t done anything wrong himself, and if he told, his friends would hate him so much for snitching that he might have to drop Little League. That, he said, wasn’t fair. At the time, it seemed to me Kevin was making some good points. Feeling confused, I said he had to make his own decisions, Ellen got steamed, and then, thank goodness, the phone rang.

It was Bolt. A body had been found below Petite Falls — probably an accidental drowning, but there were “odd circumstances pertaining to the case” (that was Bolt’s phrase), so could I please come? I was glad to go. A probable accidental drowning sounded like a walk in the park compared to the heavy ethical issues Ellen and Kevin were getting into. So I kissed her, hugged him, and said they could work it out any way they wanted. Ellen gave me a dirty look, but I pretended not to notice.

I found Bolt, a dozen uniforms and lab guys, and the coroner on the banks of Slushy River, just below Petite Falls. It was cold for November, and Bolt was shivering — he needs a new raincoat with a thicker lining, you should tell him that next time you write him — but there was no snow. The body had been pulled onto the bank and covered by a waterproof sheet. Bolt turned the sheet back, and I took a look. It was a girl, twenty or so, blindfolded with a pale blue silk scarf. Right away, I figured out the blindfold was one of the odd pertaining circumstances Bolt had had in mind.

“Do we know who she is?” I asked.

“Yes, sir,” Bolt said, pushing his wispy gray hair back from his face. “We found her coat neatly folded on the bank, with her purse and some other items tucked underneath. Her ID indicates she’s Maggie Warren from Indianapolis, twenty-one as of last month, a sophomore at Culbert College.”

A college kid. I glanced at the coroner. “Cause of death definitely drowning?”

She glared, like she always does when I’m around. “Nothing’s definite till I get her to the lab. But drowning looks right. She’s got some bumps and bruises, including two big bashes on her forehead, but nothing that couldn’t be accounted for by a tumble over Petite Falls and close encounters with the rocks at the bottom. If you ask me, she tried walking across the stepping-stones above the falls, slipped, knocked herself out on the rocks, filled her lungs with water, and that was that.”

I’ve never admitted this to you before, Mother, but you’ve probably always pretty much known: I’ve walked across those stepping-stones myself, lots of times. You always warned me not to, but jeez. It didn’t seem like much of a risk — the stones so flat and close together, and the drop barely ten feet, and the current of Slushy River so sluggish. Even if you slipped, it wouldn’t be a big deal if you had friends standing by — and I always had friends standing by, ready to fish me out or pay me off, depending on whether I made good on the dare. It was dumb, I know, but sometimes, when I really needed a few bucks, it seemed almost sensible. It paid for your Mother’s Day present my junior year in high school, and that’s the last I’m going to say about it.

But this girl — hadn’t she had friends standing by when she started across the stepping stones? Why hadn’t they fished her out when she slipped?