Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 38, No. 13, Mid-December 1993

He opened the door. This room, unlike the others, was slightly in disorder. The bed was rumpled, although made. An old fashioned walnut dressing table held a silver mirror and brush and comb, a few lipsticks and other makeup items, a couple of small bottles of perfume and a small cluster of earrings, as if she had been sorting through them, choosing which pair she would wear. Photographs of a couple he recognized as her parents, long dead now, took up most of the rest of the space on it.

Two walnut nightstands, apparently part of the same set as the dressing table, stood at either side of a white, wrought-iron bedstead. The one nearest him was bare of anything but an alarm clock. The one on the other side, nearest Kaylie, held a skewed pile of women’s magazines. On top of the magazines was a familiar-looking volume. Their high school yearbook.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her hands folded in her lap, looking out the window. She hadn’t turned toward him, and now, looking at her profile, he saw not Kaylie Darren but Kaylie Lindstrom, the girl he had known in high school. She wore no makeup, no earrings, no perfume. This room was more her room than any other, and the fact that she had shared the bed she sat on with a man as cold and empty as that other nightstand seemed grossly unfair to Jim Lawrence.

She turned toward him, looked at him and smiled a quick little smile and said, “Am I in your way? Did you need to look around in here?”

He couldn’t make himself ask her what he needed to ask her, at least not yet. So instead he said, “Why don’t you use the air conditioner?”

“It’s broken,” she said with resignation.

“Let me take a look at it,” he said, striding toward the window.

“It’s broken,” she said again.

“Broken things can be fixed,” he said firmly. He bent down to take a look at it, pushing the switches and buttons on the side panel. Nothing.

“Can they?” she was saying. “Surely not all of them. That thing has been broken for years.”

He turned back to her, inexplicably irritated by her lack of faith.

“Did Professor Joseph Darren ever even try to fix this thing?”

Her eyes widened a little, and she smiled again. “No, he just went out and paid someone to put in this ceiling fan. He thought the air conditioner was too noisy anyway.”

“That ceiling fan doesn’t do much to cool it off in here,” he said, reaching into his pocket for his Swiss Army knife.

“No, it doesn’t. But it was cool enough for Joseph,” she replied, watching him open the knife to a screwdriver implement and start to remove the panel.

I’ll just bet it was cool enough for him. The professor apparently had ice in his veins. But was it cool enough for you, Kaylie? His thoughts were brought up short when he pulled the panel away. The problem with the air conditioner wasn’t difficult to find. The power cord had been disconnected from the on/off switch terminals. Deliberately. That son of a bitch.

“Jim?”

He was too angry to reply. He followed the cord back toward the bed.

“What are you doing?”

He looked at her, hearing the alarm in her voice. He must have frightened her somehow. He realized he was scowling and headed right toward her. Did Joseph Darren stalk toward her like this in anger, hurt her? He took a breath.

“I’m just going to unplug it. Your—” He stopped himself. He needed to get a grip. He had just been about to tell her of Joseph Darren’s deception, and here she was, not a widow for one full night yet. “Your air conditioner is going to be easy to fix. I’ll need you to get up for a moment and let me move the bed away from the wall. The outlet is behind the bedstead.”

She was looking up at him again, in that way she had looked at him several times this evening What are you looking for, Kaylie? Tell me. Her lips parted, almost as if she had heard him, and she clutched at the sheets beneath her.

He waited.

“Jim—” she said, but then looked down, away from his eyes. She stood up and walked away from the bed.

“Kaylie?”

She shook her head, still not looking at him.

He shrugged and reached for the bedstead, and heaved it away from the wall. He bent to unplug the air conditioner, and stopped short. There were footprints on the wall behind the bed.

Two footprints, to be exact. From the soles of a woman’s athletic shoes. A little garden dirt, perhaps. Two feet, toes pointing up, slightly apart.