Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 44, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1999

“You mean you’re not a chemical whiz after all?” Chuck Lang asked with a sly contempt. “You, a rocket scientist?”

Leonard was fuming. “Shut up!”

“Oh, I’ll shut up. Whatever you say, professor.”

It was too much for Leonard. He had scorned rough red brick till his arms ached, his hands were bleached from all the chemical indignities they’d undergone, and now he was expected to endure this verbal abuse on top of it all? It was too much. He flung the furnace door open and began firing cans and bottles into the flames. “Hey, buddy, hold it!” Chuck Lang bellowed. But it was too late. He saw the gasoline container go into the box, then Leonard kicked the door shut with his big black boot.

There was a sound in the belly of the firebox like a huge piece of ordnance going off. The furnace pipes jumped, the walls shook, and dust rained down in a noxious snowfall on their baseball caps.

“Jeez!” said Chuck, an I-told-you-so look on his face mixed with raw terror, “you ain’t no explosives expert neither!”

Robideau heard a sharp bang

and the door of the chute burst open, striking Overberg under the shoulder blades, driving him forward on a blast of expanding gasses and black soot straight into the chief’s arms. The chief dropped the bar, snatched the gun away, spun Overberg around, and hustled him out of the room.

“So you never did find that poor girl — I knew you wouldn’t.”

Robideau glanced up from his paperwork, miffed.

“I found out what happened to her. Doesn’t that count?”

Mrs. Robideau gave a grudging sigh.

“Oh, I imagine it does. In a way. But what I had in mind, you’d bring the girl back, all smiling.”

“She won’t be smiling, ever again. Teddy Tozer saw to that. But then Teddy won’t be smiling either, compliments of Roald Overberg, so there’s some justice to it, I suppose.”

“And you figure Overberg will get ten years? If that’s justice, you can keep it!”

“Well, he didn’t kill the girl — not directly. And a jury may buy his self-defense argument after they hear about Tozer’s history and view what we pulled out of the furnace grate.”

“That pewter bracelet.”

The chief nodded. He added, uncomfortably, “And... a few other things.”

“He should get life!”

“He will. He’s in his seventies.”

Mrs. Robideau was not mollified. “They could stick a few more years on him if they tried. What about those bylaws he broke? They should be good for an extra six months. I mean, what’s the good of having bylaws if you’re only going to use them against ordinary citizens?”

“I don’t make the laws, I only enforce them.” Robideau set down his pen. “At the risk of quoting Leonard Boski, I just work here.”

“Is that what you call it?”

He looked at her. “You do tease me unmercifully, don’t you?”

“Never. Now, come on home and get some sleep. No telling what tomorrow will bring.”

They put out the lights and went out of the building together. As they disappeared around the corner, arm in arm, Mrs. Robideau’s voice came floating back, saying, “When we get home, I’ll make you a nice lunch for tomorrow. You might want something to throw out later in the day...”

The Horse with White Stockings

by Anne Weston

The day got off to a bad start when Efraín spilled the tin cup of salt into the cookfire.

He could have salvaged most of the salt from among the coals if he hadn’t snatched at the falling cup, trying to save it, and knocked the pot of water into the fire, too.

That put the salt beyond rescue and also extinguished the fire.

“You shouldn’t have left the salt there,” he snapped at Sulema.

She didn’t reply, just picked up some kindling and built a small fire to one side of the wet area. She refilled the water pot from the big bucket and set it on the new fire.

Efraín ate his saltless beans and rice in silence, then stood up. “I guess now I have to go to the store for salt,” he muttered.

Sulema glanced up. “The water’s boiling,” she said. “There’ll be coffee in a moment.”

“I can’t wait. I don’t want to waste any more of the day.” He started down the trail.

“Yes, you’d better hurry in case there’s a big run on salt this morning,” Sulema called after him.

The aroma of fresh coffee followed Efraín along the rain forest path. He could picture Sulema sitting on the log he’d cut into a chair, sipping her coffee in peace and playing with the baby. The farther he walked, the more he wished he’d stayed a few minutes longer and not been so short-tempered.

The reason he was angry had nothing to do with spilled salt, of course. Their cow was dying, and he couldn’t bear to tell Sulema.

Efraín had taken the older cow over to their new neighbors a few days before. The neighbor, Soto, planned to raise cattle on the farm he was cutting out of the rain forest. He was expecting a fine bull to be delivered from the big Ramos ranch on the other side of town. Efraín had arranged with Soto to leave the cow at Soto’s place to be bred when the bull arrived.