Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 10, October 1990

“All except Jones. He said for you to try Aesop.”

“Aesop? We got a make on him?”

“Nah, I looked.”

“So what’s Jones talking about?”

“Who knows? He said that, then just shut his mouth and grinned. You know, like he does. He’s queer.”

“You’re not kidding.”

In the small house again, Geblick surveyed the contents of the tiny kitchen cupboard. There was only one object possibly large enough to contain a sheaf of currency. He removed a box of salt and tore it apart savagely, then watched angrily as salt spilled onto a counter. He threw the empty carton against the wall.

Eyes thinned, he moved through the house reexamining. Patty the Milkmaid, he thought. Maybe it didn’t make any sense whatever — because Snider was surely crazy enough to have written anything. Yet he’d been wise enough, Geblick thought, to have left his notes in places where an experienced detective would find them.

He returned to the bedroom and stared at the books there. He’d already gone through them, one by one, opening each to check for a hollow inside. So, no, he found, nothing there...

His good eyes found it then, on the spine of a thin volume bound in black leather. Aesop.

He yanked the book out, opened it, and studied one fable after another, until he reached the one entitled “The Milkmaid and Her Pail.” It was, he slowly discovered, a tale about Patty going to market with a milk pail on her head, planning the rewards she would achieve with the profits from selling the milk — after which she spilled it.

Geblick read the moral of the story at the end:

“DO NOT COUNT YOUR CHICKENS BEFORE THEY ARE HATCHED.”

Geblick blinked. He licked his lips. He hunched his huge shoulders. Then he saw the thin lines which had been drawn under several of the letters. He said them aloud: “OCRERD.”

He went down the block and bought a bottle of whisky and returned to the small living room. After he’d finished his first glass, after his mind had started to function more imaginatively, he began to hear Snider’s high, rasping voice calling to him: “Ocrerd, Geblick! You’ve been ocrerd!”

With three glasses of whisky gone, he got up abruptly an lurched his way to the door. He went to the phone booth down the street and found the number of the city library. He dialed and asked for the reference librarian, who answered in a wispish, precise voice, “May I help you?”

“I want to know what’s happened to me if I’ve been ocrerd,” Geblick said.

“I beg your pardon,” the librarian answered haughtily.

“What I want,” Geblick said, trying to control his temper, “is to find out what it means to be ocrerd. Isn’t that reasonable? Don’t you have a dictionary, lady?”

“Yes,” the librarian said. “But I won’t be shouted at.”

“I’m not shouting!” Geblick said, forcing his voice down. “What does it mean?”

“How do you spell it?”

Geblick told her. There was silence. Then the woman said: “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“What do you mean it doesn’t mean anything?”

“It isn’t a word. I even looked in the slang dictionary, a dreadful book, really. And it isn’t there either. Whatever’s happened to you, it doesn’t mean anything at all.”

“Oh, it doesn’t, doesn’t it!”

“Not in the dictionary it doesn’t.”

“You’re shouting, lady.”

Again silence, then finally: “I do not mean to shout at people who need help. I repeat that it simply does not mean anything. Unless... well, it might be an anagram mightn’t it?”

“How?”

“ANAGRAM. I shall look up the exact definition for you.” Then: “A word or phrase made by transposing the letters of another. That’s Webster talking, sir.”

“Transposing the letters,” Geblick said, frowning darkly, trying to make his brain work better than it was.

“I love them, really. Let’s see now. What could we make?”

Geblick listened to the woman mumbling.

Finally she said, “Droecr?”

“What?” Geblick demanded.

“But that isn’t anything either, is it?” she said. “Wait! There it is! Record!”

“What?”

“That’s all I can see it could be. RECORD. But that doesn’t mean very much either, does it?”

“Oh, the hell it doesn’t.” Geblick said loudly, and slammed down the receiver.

He returned to the house at a run. He locked the door behind him, then knelt in front of Snider’s old phonograph and his collection of records, which were held upright in their wire holder. Feeling his hands begin to shake, he took a record from the holder and placed it on the turntable. He started the machine. In a moment, he heard the sound of Snider’s clarinet — coarse, off-pitch, squeaking — playing a ragged, nondescript melody that made Geblick’s ears hurt.

He played the record through, then started another.

He rubbed his head, which was aching now, and grabbed his whisky bottle.

Another and another. His nerves had begun to hum.

Finally the clarinet stopped and a familiar rasping, high voice, said, “Eh, Geblick?”

Geblick wagged his head, balanced on hands and knees, listening tensely.

“Oh, what say you, Geblick? Eh?”

“Where is it?” Geblick demanded.