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

Rube met his eyes with shock that quickly wore to a sad kind of moisture, as though he’d picked up a small piece of dirt in the corner of his eye. At least he explained it to his inner self that way.

“Yeah, was,” Rube said. “Who was she?”

The sheriff’s face went stone hard and cold. “Somebody’s little girl. Somebody’s loved one.” His voice, gruff now and husky, skipped a beat. “Somebody’s... hate. I’m not gonna to tell you who she was; there’s no reason for you to know.”

The sheriff coughed to cover his emotion, as if feeling were a mistake he wouldn’t make again. Not soon.

Rube could only nod and blink his wet eyes as the twilight sun closed in on the tiny tourist town and its evening shoppers.

But Boggert softened then, and a small, friendly smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. “I’ll let you know as soon as I find out more. Meantime, you go home. Get some sleep. Rearrange your furniture or tinker in your garden. But stay outa mine. Okay?”

Rube stayed silent. He felt grim and patronized.

“Sure, sheriff,” he said, stepping out after Boggert stopped the Jeep.

Rube walked away without looking back.

The trouble was... Rube couldn’t sleep.

At first he thought it was his new place, the strange way the night wind blew the tree against the railing on the back deck. The rustling was like a yearning, a soft silky sound, like cloth against flesh. Green dress, tattered dress, rent with the hate of someone’s child. The thoughts were night thoughts, and they chased the real night sounds across the pictures in his mind with a frightening clarity.

He remembered the wound so clearly because it had shocked his middle-class values. Rube had never been to war or done battle in a squared off circle as some men had, and his lifetime of toil had come not in a sweatshop or a factory but a modem day laboratory where he played with chemical combinations that sometimes healed and sometimes — he feared — killed. But that had been his life and he’d cherished those values, and when his boss had shown him the array of harpoons, each designed a bit differently, each with a more vicious type of head to gouge or bite into the flesh of the fish, Rube felt a bit squeamish. He should have shaken it off, would have, eventually, would have accepted the killing as part of everyday living, except the fish wasn’t a fish but a mammal — an intelligent creature. The dolphin had been off the starboard bow, playing, teasing the waves and the sun when his boss blasted him from the water like so much detritus — so much cheap trash.

Rube rolled over. Emotional old man, he chided. In the night his voice sounded cold and lonely and a little creaky.

Someone had tom a hole through that young girl.

Emotional old man?

Rube had no children. And his wife was long dead. And now he had no work. At sixty-two he could see it all stretch out before him, too many good years left and not enough to do. “Good an excuse as any,” he mumbled. He sat up and rubbed his face and strained through the darkness with eyes accustomed to more light. He couldn’t see the tree that sounded so much like cloth against flesh, but he could smell the night, the salty core of it blowing from the ocean. All that life below the waves. Struggling to survive. One big mouth closing over a smaller tail. Eat and thrash and survive because the world made you that way?

But who made a world that harpooned young girls?

“Jesus Jehoshaphat, next I’ll be crying in my beer and going to revival meetings and...” But he couldn’t shake off the image of her body lying in the surf with that big hole through her chest, as though someone had performed an Aztec ritual and ripped her heart loose the hard way.

“Do something else,” Boggert had warned. “Rearrange your furniture or tinker in your garden, but stay out of mine.”

But he couldn’t. He stood by the bed and wobbled for a moment as the feeling returned to his legs, then he reached for his clothes draped over the chair back.

Except for the Salty Dog, the village looked deserted. As Rube walked toward it, the breeze washed his face with a tangy fog as heavy as cigarette smoke. Rube could hear the twang of a steel guitar and the high tinkle of glasses followed by garish laughter. Light, soft and gold and warm looking, seeped through the open door. Rube padded down the sidewalk in his brown chinos and black nylon jacket, rubbing at his stubbled face. He should have shaved, but he’d been too restless and shaky not to cut himself.

Inside, the bar looked like mahogany, running full length from rear to front. Bright red leather sparkled with chrome trim, though only half the seats were full. Rube took a stool near the end and winced as the bartender stuck his big ugly face across the distance between them. His breath was bad — onions and bourbon and cigarettes, with a touch of garlic.

“What’ll it be?”

“Just a draft beer.”