Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 48, No. 1, January 2003

“When you ‘do’ a wedding in Florida and you live near the beach, you are apt to do it there. The thing can range from a rather nice little ceremony to a circus. This was a circus. The beach teemed with young people in bathing suits and there was a raucus band. The bridal party was disporting itself in the surf when I arrived. There was a row of canvas chairs for fogie friends of Malcom and there we all sat trying to make conversation and not look too disapproving. At one point I said something to Malcom about the sunset and he nodded and kept staring straight ahead. He seemed unable to take his eyes off his granddaughter, who at that moment was riding the shoulders of the bridegroom as he frisked in the water.”

I couldn’t help it; I giggled. Sadd ignored me.

“Finally the bandleader squawked something over his speaker and the happy pair sloshed out of the water as their friends cheered and converged about them. A guruish looking figure came beaming forward across the sand. He was wearing a Banana Republic shirt, jeans, and some sort of peace emblem on a cord. Naturally, he was barefooted.”

This time I burst out laughing. What else can you do? And Sadd grinned. “Clara, you know conventions never meant a great deal to me — you’ve even said I’m a philistine — but damn it, a wedding is a wedding. I would certainly never hold out for a church, but I do think I’d hold out for shoes.”

Now we laughed together. Then Sadd was suddenly sober.

“There began some sort of ritual, which, just before the exchange of vows, ended in a freakish disaster.”

“What...?” I whispered.

Sadd downed his drink. “I must go back in time a bit for you to get the full impact of what happened. Years ago, Malcom had given his granddaughter an enormously valuable ring that had been his mother’s. Given, that is, in the sense that he told her it would be hers someday, and from her childhood he had often taken it out of his safe and allowed her — have I mentioned that her name is Sophie? — to fondle it and try it on. She would say it was going to be her wedding ring someday. He showed it to me once — a magnificent mass of gold and diamonds.”

I drew a breath. “And now it was sure enough about to become her wedding ring.”

“About to become.”

In the house the phone rang. I said, “Don’t you dare answer that. Finish the story.”

The answering machine began a muffled message as Sadd continued on.

“Sophie had pulled a T-shirt over her bathing suit and Bell was struggling into a pair of shorts — God forbid he should cover the array of gold chains about his neck with a shirt. Everybody gathered round and Malcom went to stand beside his granddaughter. The guru started to intone something. I stayed in the rear of the group. There were about twenty persons between me and the bridegroom so all I saw was the back of his head as he went down.”

“Down?”

“On his knees. He’d dropped the ring.”

It must have been the martini. I saw something beautiful and bejeweled drop into the sand — sand, that terrible swallower...

“It only took a few seconds for everybody to realize what had happened; then all hell broke loose. Sophie shrieked and went down beside Bell and the pair of them proceeded to do the worst thing possible when a small object falls into sand.”

“Dig frantically?” I was sitting forward in my chair.

“And scrounge and claw and heave the sand about only causing the thing to disappear more hopelessly.”

My mind was racing. “Didn’t anybody think to get one of those — what are they called? — metal detectors?”

“Oh, yes, several people raced off — it’s quite a hobby here — and soon there were three or four of the things being dragged about, but by then the area had been so trampled and pawed there was no use. The ring was as lost as if de Soto had dropped it when he landed here in 1530.”

“How simply awful.” I almost felt part of the scene. “What about the wedding?”

“There wasn’t one.”

“You mean...”

“After a while Sophie just stood still with her grandfather’s arms around her staring at the scene in a sort of trance. The noisy young crowd was stunned and silent, some of them crying, and one girl offered Sophie her own ring as a temporary make-do, but Sophie shook her head and said she wouldn’t be married till her ring was found and eventually Malcom took her home. People began to drift off sort of unbelieving of what had happened. Don’t ask me about Bell. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the man throughout. I understand he prowled the beach for days, then took himself and his gold chains off somewhere leaving his son to run the restaurant, which, it turned out, was in trouble and has since closed.”

The color had gone from the sky and grayness prevailed on land and water. A boat with a little lighted Christmas tree on its deck chugged by and someone waved to Sadd.

I asked, “Where is Sophie now?”

“Here. She stayed on with Malcom. Works in an art gallery, I think.”