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

“I’ll wait,” Nora had told me, grimly. “We’ll marry, Emma, you just wait and see. But I’m not going to sit about mooning in my father’s house. He doesn’t really want me to go away to be a nurse. But it’s what I’m going to be. Then when Reggie comes back and becomes a teacher, I’ll have a profession, too.”

Nora was not only very beautiful, she was spunky as well. I could see why Reggie was so taken. Sure, he loved to look at her, who wouldn’t? But it was a sort of lively fire she had that made her especially attractive. As for Reggie’s becoming a teacher, which his dad, Lionel Crossland, was, that was not at all what Reggie had in mind. He’d be a vet, he said, or a farmer. And that was where he ran afoul of his father, a clash of strong wills.

Lionel Crossland was the best school principal Longvalley has ever had, a rather fierce looking, redhaired man immaculately turned out. Hair brilliantined, mustache waxed, and so neat. Grey suits ranging from charcoal shade to highest grey, with a bandbox look. Mattie and Lionel Crossland had had their troubles with Reggie. Not that the boy was bad; far from it. It was the fights he got into mostly, and being hauled off to the police constabulary for a talking to by the chief. They found it degrading. At least Lionel did. Mattie Crossland had a more philosophical attitude. Except for the red hair Reggie took after Mattie, both of them having a lovely sense of humor. You couldn’t blame Lionel, really, for he did have a standard to maintain in the school. His shining red face seemed to get redder after every one of Reggie’s escapades.

Reggie, both Earl and I liked him a lot; he was our box boy at the time he and Nora were going to high school and right up to the time he left for the war. A goodnatured, curly-haired redheaded young giant he was. Forget-me-not blue eyes twinkled with the devil’s own mischief. His flashing grin was, he said, “To show my beautiful false teeth. Something I have to do for my old man. All that orthodontal work he paid for. I sure wouldn’t have had them if it hadn’t been for my father. He wanted me perfect, you see.” Of course they were no more false teeth than were Nora’s gleaming white ones that made her smile something to see. Three boys we’d had need of to do the work after Reggie went away.

But Reggie could get into trouble without even trying, for he was a bit wild, that is, by some people’s standards. There was the motor bike he bought. Tearing about town with that thing banging and roaring all hours of the night — Nora riding pillion, of course — didn’t do a thing for his popularity. Then there were the fights; but every incident was the outcome of one of Reggie’s good deeds: restraining a wife or dog beater, quite aggressively in some cases, for Reggie never had assessed his own strength; sailing into a group of rowdies tormenting a girl. There were the many pranks, too, some with disastrous results. “That Reggie Crossland fighting again,” you’d hear. The constable going for Reggie, seldom for the provocative source. Reggie suffering further in the inevitable row with his father.

When the bike folded, literally, on impact with a tree as Reggie pushed it to ninety on a stretch of open highway, miraculously with but minor damage to himself, he put fifty dollars of his hard earned money into an old jalopy, which, with the aid of stalwart friends, he parked in our back yard and in off hours took completely apart. “We can be thankful,” Earl said, staring at the wreckage strewn about the yard, “that he’ll not injure himself or anyone else driving that. For never is he going to get that lot together again.”

But in a short time Reggie had it chugging rhythmically and, after equipping it with a Klaxon horn, he drove all hours of the night through the quiet town. Two A M. he’d chug past our front, the Klaxon tootling, “Pom-pom-poom-pah.” I’d turn over in bed and laugh. Earl, he’d sit up and yell: “I’ll fire that kid first thing in the morning.” He never did, for if there was one person who loved Reggie — that is, apart from his parents, yes, both of them, and Nora — it was Earl.

Then came Hitler, and the war. And Reggie went “over there.” The atmosphere of Longvalley changed overnight: our town was suddenly a peaceful place, and sad. Only then did many recall the helpful hand of Reggie Crossland in day to day affairs. Along with Nora, Earl and I wept.