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

He looked at Kaylie, then back at the footprints. He bent down. While the wooden floor under her side of the bed was dusty, something had slid along the floor under his side. He looked more closely and saw white paint chips missing off one slightly bent rung of the bedstead. The paint chips were on the floor, in the area between and beneath the footprints. He gripped the top of the bedstead, thinking of the single wineglass, picturing her beneath the bed, bracing her feet against the wall, straightening her legs as she pulled... the way the direction of the rope marks on the neck would match up with a suicide by hanging. He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, it was all still there before him. He slowly straightened.

“He came home one day about twenty years ago and announced that he was going to get a vasectomy,” he heard Kaylie say behind him. He couldn’t bring himself to look at her. He bent down again and unplugged the air conditioner cord, then walked back to the window.

“He had decided that I wasn’t going to have any children. He had his child. Lillian. Did you know that child hated me? Not so much any more, but it was awful when she was growing up. I don’t think she would have hated me so much if Joseph hadn’t told her that I was the reason he didn’t marry her mother. He lied. To me and to Lillian and to God knows how many other women. He lied all the time.”

“Yes, I know he did,” Jim said wearily, and knelt to begin replacing the wiring Joseph Darren had undone.

“Today he told Lillian that she should get rid of the baby.”

The screwdriver stopped for a moment, then went on.

He finished replacing the panel and got to his feet, looking out the window at the smoke, which had turned the moon blood red.

Without looking back at her, he knew she hadn’t moved. She stood there, silent now.

“Kaylie, I’m an officer of the law.” For the first time, his chest felt tight as he said that.

“Yes,” he heard her say.

He walked over to the outlet, plugged the air conditioner in, listened as it hummed to life, giving off a dusty smell of disuse.

“You fixed it!”

He looked over at her, at the way her face was lit up in approval and admiration.

“Yes,” he said, and moved the bed back against the wall.

He walked back to the air conditioner, adjusted its settings. He closed his eyes and bent his face to it, letting the cool air blow against him; felt it flattening his eyelashes and buffeting his hot skin.

“Kaylie.”

“Yes?”

“Go turn the clothes dryer off.”

She hesitated, but then he heard her leave the room, heard her going out into the garage. He looked out the window and saw the headlights of other cars coming toward the house. He stood up straight, lifting his fingers to his badge, feeling the now-chilled metal beneath them.

Fifteen years as a deputy sheriff, only to come to this.

Why tonight, he wondered.

Late September Dogs by Gene KoKayKo

Standing in the waves, Rube figured everything he had had gone south already — his hair and his chest and the arches in his feet. So why should he, Barney Rubekowski, follow them? His friends had gone south, too, most to Florida, and Rube had wanted to start over somewhere new, somewhere warmer than the East Coast but not quite so far south... so retired. Somehow southern California still seemed too south and too much a copout, so Rube had settled for the central coast of California, west but right in between. This way he could see the big O, the Pacific, not that dribble the Atlantic, or some Gulf of Something, but the big P, the real ocean.

And so what if he couldn’t swim? And so what if he no longer looked quite so good in a bathing suit? He could wade, couldn’t he? He could wade and splash a little way into the great surf. He had his pension and his new apartment and his number fifteen sunblock; and the sun was bright and not too hot and the world belonged to him and the big old dog who was the only other creature on the beach this early in the morning. He had beaten the odds, made it out of the rat race, found home — in spite of what old what’s-his-name had said you couldn’t do again — and by damn he was going to—

What did that dog have in his mouth?