“I’ve been in my room,” Francis said, unnecessarily. “I heard you talking.”
“Did you?” Mr. Etheridge’s voice had an edge. “You shouldn’t listen to conversations that don’t concern you, Francis. It’s bad manners.”
“I’m sorry. I just thought I could help.”
“There is nothing you can do. You had better go back to your room.”
“Help in what way?” the investigator said.
“Well,” Francis said, “I heard you say that it would simplify things if there were someone else who saw what happened, and I saw.”
“What’s that? You saw the accident? You saw your mother fall down the stairs?”
“Yes. I was sitting in the closet down there in the hall. I often sit in there, because it’s quiet and no one knows where I am and it’s a good place to be. The door was open a little bit, though, and I could see right up the stairs, and I saw just exactly what happened.”
Francis looked from the investigator to the face of his father, and his father’s face was just like it had been in the alcove in the chapel, as gray as the drapes, as hard as stone. He did not move, watching Francis.
“All right, son,” the investigator said. “Just tell me what you saw.”
Francis turned his eyes back to the investigator. The eyes were pale blue, complementing his pale hair, the wide remote eyes of a dreamer.
“It was just as Father said. Mother tripped and fell. She just came flying down.”
There was a long, sighing sound that was the sound of Mr. Etheridge’s breath being released in the shadows.
“If you saw your mother fall,” he said, “why didn’t you come out to help her?”
“I don’t know. I was afraid, I guess. It was so sudden and so terrible that it frightened me. I don’t know why. Then you came down, and I heard you calling the doctor, and so I just went out the back way and sat in the mulberry tree.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” The investigator shrugged at Mr. Etheridge. “Kids are odd little animals.”
“Yes,” Mr. Etheridge said, “they are, indeed. Now you will please return to your room, Francis. Thank you for speaking up.”
“You’re welcome,” Francis said.
He went back into his room and closed the door and sat on the floor in a swath of sunlight. There was a large book there that he had been looking at earlier, and he began now to look at it again. It contained thousands of colored pictures of almost every imaginable thing, and Francis was still looking at the pictures about a quarter of an hour later when his father opened the door and came into the room and stood staring down at him.
“What are you looking at, Francis?” Mr. Etheridge said.
Francis looked up from the bright pictures to his father’s gray stone face. His pale blue eyes had a kind of soft sheen on them. The sunlight gathered and caught fire in his pale hair.
“It’s a catalog,” he said. “There are so many beautiful things in the catalog that I’ve always wanted. Are we going to get a lot of money from the insurance company? If we are, maybe we could get some of the things. Maybe even a piano that I could take lessons on.
The soft sheen gave to his eyes a look of blindness. He did not seem to see his father at all.
“Yes,” Mr. Etheridge said. “Maybe even a piano.”
FOR MONEY RECEIVED
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1964.
The rain came straight down into the alley, and I sat with my back to my desk and watched the rain. It was not an afternoon for being out and doing something. Besides, I had nowhere to go and nothing to do. If I had somewhere to go more often, and something to do when I got there, I would be able to watch the rain come down past a front window instead of a back, into a street instead of an alley. Provided, of course, that I went where I went and did what I did for clients who paid me a great deal more than my clients usually paid.
My name is Percy Hand, and I’m a private detective. My privacy is rarely invaded. This makes the rent a problem, but it gives me plenty of time to watch the rain come down into the alley on rainy days.
Someone was coming down the hall. My ears are big and my hearing is acute, so I tried to establish certain facts, just for fun, about the person approaching. It was apparent from the sharp, quick rhythm of the steps that the person was a woman, probably young. I decided from a more esoteric suggestion in the sound that this woman, whoever she was exactly, was a woman of pride and even arrogance. In her purse, moreover, was a checkbook in which she could write, if she chose, a withdrawal of six figures. To the left, I mean, of the decimal point. These last two deductions were wholly unwarranted by the evidence, and probably explain why I am not the best detective in the world, although not the worst. They assumed, that is, that poor women cannot be proud, which is palpably untrue. Anyhow, if she was rich, chances were a hundred to one that she was not coming to see me.
But I was wrong. My reception room door from the hall opened and closed, releasing between the opening and the closing a brief, angry exclamation from a buzzer. The buzzer is cheaper than a receptionist, even though it is not as amusing, especially on rainy days. I got around my desk and out there in a hurry, before this client had time to walk out.
She was wearing a belted raincoat and holding in one hand a matching hat. Her hair was black and short and curling in the damp. She could look over a short
