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

He said it as if he expected to be recognized, and he usually was. He would have been recognized, by name if not by sight, by almost anyone in the state, and by many people outside it. The boss of the dominant political party, he had never run for office or been appointed to one, but he was the man who controlled the men who did, and he exercised an incredible power and authority that had been developed through violence and a kind of magical persuasiveness and managed to survive by a complex system of alliances and loyalties and threats that no one could quite analyze or understand.

“I was expecting a Mr. Boniface,” I said.

“Ira’s in the wagon,” he said.

He turned half around toward the wagon from the hips, and this was apparently a sign for the others to move, for they got out of the wagon and came toward us, two women and two men. One of the men was as tall as Grimes, but not so heavy in the shoulders nor quite so broad in the hips, and he moved like a big cat. The other man was short and slight by comparison, though not much shorter or slighter than I, and there was about him an odd and incongruous effect of force and frailty that made you instantly aware of him. Both of the women were attractive, each in her own way. One of them was a brunette with a clear brown skin, and the other was a blonde with a clear brown skin.

Grimes began without preface to introduce the four, and it turned out that the big catlike man was Ira Boniface, the one who had made the reservations, and the brunette was his wife and was called Rita. She had the kind of looks that hit you at once and hit you hard. She was wearing a red cashmere sweater tucked into the waistband of a pair of fancy black pants that fit her a little looser than her clear brown skin.

The other couple, the slight man and the blonde woman, were Mr. and Mrs. Jerome Quintin. Her Christian name was Laura. Her head was bare in the bright sun, her hair so pale that it seemed in the light to be almost white. It was sleeked back without a part and held in a knot on her neck, and it seemed naturally the pale color that it was. She was very slender, almost thin, and she had the special and rather gaunt seductiveness of a high-fashion model. She nodded to me without speaking or smiling, and afterward she looked immediately away, down the slope behind me to the blue lake glittering in the sun. In her face, I thought, there was a kind of petulance that was not actually an expression but only the suggestion or shadow of one.

After the introductions, I pointed out the three cottages that had been reserved for them. They stood in a line along the lake shore about twenty feet apart and about fifty feet up the slope from the water, and they were the best three of the four that I had to rent. The fourth cottage was considered not so good because it was farther up the slope with the others between it and the lake, and it was not at this time either reserved or rented.

Grimes moved off toward the cottages, the others following, and I unloaded the luggage and tackle boxes from the rack on top of the Chrysler and separated it according to the identification tags. While I was doing this, I kept watching to see how the cottages were claimed. Ira and Rita Boniface went into the first, Grimes into the second, and the Quintins into the third, the last on the far end of the line near the point.

I gathered up the Quintins’ luggage, a leather bag and a metal tackle box and a long aluminum rod case, and carried it down past the first cottage and the second cottage to the third cottage on the end. I kicked against the screen door lightly, and someone said to come in, and I pushed the door open with a shoulder and went inside and set the luggage down on the concrete floor of the screened-in porch. Laura Quintin was sitting in a chair on the porch, staring out through the screen and down through the scrub oaks on the slope to the lake. Jerome Quintin came to the door and stood leaning against the jamb.

“Thanks,” he said, looking at the luggage.

“I think this is all of it,” I said.

“Bag, tackle box, rods,” he said. “That’s it.”

There was a feeling of suspension on the porch, an uneasy hiatus between something before and something that would come after, and I had arrived, I felt, between two parts of a conversation that had been bad and might become worse.

“If there’s anything you need, let me know,” I said.

“We’ll do that,” Quintin said.

He shoved a hand into a pocket and looked uncertain, but apparently he decided that a tip would not be appropriate in my case, and after a moment he pulled the hand out of the pocket and put it behind him.

“Do you own this place?” Laura Quintin asked suddenly.

She did not look at me and did not sound as if she really cared if I owned the place or not. Her voice was quiet and curiously flat.

“The bank and I,” I said.

“Do you live here by yourself?”

“Yes. Except for the guests.”

“I wonder why.”

“It’s a pretty good way to live,” I said. “A man’s life is pretty much his own.”