Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 34, No. 13 & 14, Winter 1989

Once more. Gently. And the spade brought up bones that were once a human hand and released a faint stench into the cool, clean night air. “Oh-my-God.”

Covering her mouth, Amanda fled to the car and braced herself with hands on the hood.

He threw the spade aside and joined her.

Her voice was a hoarse whisper. “Why didn’t anyone—”

He knew what she meant. “The sod was cut and lifted, the grave dug and the sod replaced. Within a week it would have been unnoticeable. It took a little time to settle, but now we know why Randy didn’t want me mowing on this side of the lane. It has to tie in with what happened to Zeigler.”

Her voice was still hoarse. “Who can it be?”

“Don’t ask me. I’m just a poor fool who had a hunch. Ask Randy. And Mrs. Zeigler. You can start proceedings to have her escorted back from San Francisco on Monday.”

“Monday? Monday?” Her voice trembled with sudden fury. “Try dawn. Try two hours. Try one hour. Dammit, how can anyone—”

Denbow took her in his arms and held her trembling body tightly, her face against his cool and clammy from shock.

“Take it easy,” he whispered. “Remember your job. Start earning that generous salary they’re paying you by setting the wheels of law and order in motion.”

If the day before had gone fast, this one had gone slowly. The sun was low before his processor-driven typewriter had chattered through the last page of his report.

Up on the hill, the grave was now a gaping hole surrounded by yellow tape, and much of Zeigler’s golf-green lawn had been trampled by a horde of lawmen and an army of news-people, from whom Denbow escaped by locking the doors and drawing the drapes.

The straining sound of the four cylinder engine drove him to the kitchen to fix two drinks. When Amanda came through the open patio door, he handed her a glass. She slumped into a chair and kicked off her shoes.

“Mind if I use our intimate relationship to elicit police information again? Did Randy talk or not? Who was in the grave—”

She took a long drink. “It’s all very weird and senseless.”

“When a body gets buried in a front yard, it can’t be anything else.”

“The corpse was a twenty-two-year-old kid named Grover, who worked for Zeigler. Nice, bright kid. From a small town upstate. Late that afternoon, Grover received a call. His mother was in the hospital. He went to Zeigler to tell him he had to leave and why. Randy was in the office at the time. Zeigler asked if he needed money. Grover said he had bus fare, but that was about all. Zeigler gave him a hundred dollars.”

“That’s the Zeigler I knew.”

“Four hours later, Randy was working at the plant, alone, when the night bell rang. There was Grover. He’d been mugged in the men’s room at the bus station in Philadelphia. All he had left was his commuter pass. He didn’t know what else to do, so he came back and walked to the plant, hoping someone would be there and he could borrow some money. Like a lot of people today, Randy doesn’t carry much cash. He uses credit cards. The banks were closed, of course, but there are those cash machines. He drove Grover over, intending to use his cash access card. Either the machine malfunctioned or it had run out. He couldn’t get a dime out of it.”

“What else is new?” murmured Denbow.

“Zeigler wasn’t available. He was having dinner in town with a supplier, but Randy knew he kept cash for emergencies in a safe at the house, and as far as he was concerned, this was an emergency. He drove Grover there. But Zeigler wasn’t in town after all. Since you were away, he’d hidden his car in your garage and was waiting in the dark to see who his wife was entertaining when he wasn’t at home.” She took another long drink. “If this doesn’t make much sense, be patient. It gets worse.”

“I assumed it would.”

“Randy parked in the lane at the front of the house, in the dark, where the light over the garage didn’t reach, because he said it was easier to back down to your driveway and turn around rather than go all the way up to the garage apron at the side of the house and maneuver around up there.”

Denbow nodded. “I’ve seen him leave the car there when he visited.”

“It was too dark for Zeigler to recognize the car or see there were two men. He waited by the side door. Grover was first to come around the corner into the light. Zeigler leaped to the fastest wrong conclusion in history. There could be only one reason for the kid he’d given a hundred dollars to that afternoon, supposedly to visit a sick mother, to drive up to his house. Talk about adding insult to injury. He hit him. Grover fell back into Randy just as he came around the corner. They both went down. Only Randy got up. Grover was dead, skull fractured by one of the stones edging the driveway.”

The taste had gone out of the drink. Denbow set it aside.