Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 36, No. 6, June 1991

The Customs man, garbed in white shirt and dark tie, smiled pleasantly. “Welcome home. Have you got your luggage ready for inspection?”

Clay smiled weakly. Once past this line, he could be either rich — or dead. “No. I haven’t any luggage. I left it aboard ship.”

The Customs inspector’s smile faded to a puzzled frown. “Aren’t you going to bring your luggage into the United States? It must pass inspection if you are.”

“No.” Clay shook his head.

“Do you have anything to declare, then?”

“Nothing,” said Clay, “except a small bag full of diamonds.”

The Customs inspector stared at him as if he were a lunatic. Then Clay reached into his pocket, took out the bag, and poured the glittering stones into the astonished inspector’s hands.

“These aren’t mine. They’re the property of that gentleman,” Clay pointed to Klaas De Jongh standing in the next line, “over there.”

The inspector glanced at the glittering diamonds, then motioned excitedly to a policeman. “Hold that man!” He pointed to Klaas.

The fat man panicked and began to run. He didn’t even reach the end of the pier before he was caught, and Francoise and the two musclemen were subsequently arrested.

There were many questions. It was hours before they released Clay Felton. But there was one item of good news. He had not known that there is a reward for information leading to the arrest of smugglers and the confiscation of valuable property that one attempts to smuggle into the United States. Up to twenty-five percent of the market value of the contraband merchandise, to a maximum reward of fifty thousand dollars, was what the man said. At any rate, it ought to be a tidy sum.

Clay quickly ducked into a phone booth to call Anne. It was time to start planning that celebration.

Picking Daisies

by Edie Ramer

I had been looking for wildflowers. Instead I found a bone — a human bone.

It was late August. The humid air clogged my sinuses and fogged my head. My blouse stuck to my back, and when my cocker spaniel pulled on the leash, the bursitis in my right shoulder gave me hell. But Honey was only two years old, a teenager in dog years, and she could go on for another five miles. I was forty-five, with a human’s two legs instead of a dog’s four, good for maybe a half mile more.

We reached the swamp. Birds squawked at Honey. Crickets sang. Honey stopped to do her business on the edge of the road. Two boys, about six and seven, played catch across the street. I waved to their mother, then turned away. That’s when I saw them.

About three yards in. Milk-white petals, butter-yellow insides, twice as large as the daisies in my rock garden. I wanted them. I could picture them in my Chinese vase on my dining room table. My mother-in-law was coming to dinner that night, looking down at me as usual for being an unpaid poet and a housewife. I would show Helen that homemaking could be an art form.

Honey finished and strained at the leash. I took a step onto the green edge. Water squished under my shoes. Muddy water. I hesitated, and Honey hesitated, too. Was I actually letting her in this special place after pulling her out of it for months? I thought of my white Reeboks. I thought of the bath Honey would need, the burrs in her curly hair. A car honked at the family across the street — someone from our subdivision, probably, because the road was less than a mile long. I looked at the perfect daisies again. I stepped forward.

I separated weeds and long grasses. Honey sniffed the ground. Bugs hovered over her head and her tail. I brushed some from my short hair. We reached the daisies and I bent down. Honey sprinted after a squirrel, jerking the leash. Off-balance, I fell. My hand pushed through wet grasses and wetter ground, and when I came up I had a bone in my hand.

I didn’t pick any daisies. On our trudge home, Honey kept jumping up, trying to snatch the bone from me. I wondered if I should take a bath before calling the police. But I didn’t.

“Annie, what’s going on?”

I was watching the deputies comb the swamp across the street and had to blink twice before I recognized the man sticking his head out of the blue van as my husband.

After I had shown the deputies where the bone had come from, the woman across the street had called me over. Now Carol and I drank iced tea and lounged in our back yard seats while the boys played with Honey and the deputies in the swamp slapped mosquitoes.

“Annie!” Brad frowned at me.

“I found a bone in the swamp.”

Brad’s frown deepened.

“A human bone.” I struggled out of the lawn chair’s webbing. “The deputies have been finding more.”

“To think it was right across the street from me.” Carol shook her head. “For years, Don said.”

Brad’s mouth tightened. “All right, who is Don?”

“One of the deputies.” I flexed my sore shoulder. “Carol’s lived in Rivers End all her life. She knows everyone.”

Carol lowered her eyelids modestly. “Not everyone. Not the new people.”