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

Rachel Banner’s farm is across the river from the Fitzmaurice place, the two farms backing on each other. The Fitzmaurice place fronts on North Road, the Banner farm faces South Valley Road. We never think of one without the other, for Charlie Fitzmaurice and George Banner grew up together, close friends since they played together as boys. Rachel Banner had farmed her place for years with her son George, he also having had the veterinary practice for a good number of years. The terrible thing happening to George took us back to what his mother had been through. Widowed young, with three children to raise, faced with the prospect of losing the farm, Rachel had battled on with only the help of a youthful hired hand, and eventually what her own two boys could do. The farm prospered, but when trouble should have been letting up, Rachel’s younger son Alvin ran away after getting Elsie Parker into trouble. Elsie’s parents, overly religious, and poor, put Elsie out of their home with no place to go. It had been Rachel who took Elsie in and cared for her and the baby. Then, Rachel’s own daughter, Penny, had an affair with a married man, causing the breakup of his marriage. The two of them had left Longvalley. Elsie’s eventual departure with the child, a boy she’d called Hiram, was a new grief for Rachel, so attached had she become to both.

“I have to let them go, of course,” Rachel said. “Elsie’s marrying a good man.” He was a butcher in a town some distance away. I don’t recall how Elsie met him, but I think he’d come to the farm buying spring lambs on different occasions. The years set Rachel and Elsie apart, but Christmas always brought a letter and pictures showing how well Hiram was doing with his new brothers and sisters. Still, it was in George that Rachel felt vindicated, he compensating for the way Alvin and Penny had turned out. (But for all that she’d have welcomed them back without reservations.)

The amazing thing was that now Harry was dead and George was up and at work, still enjoying his evening horseback rides about the farm. No taking to bed for him. George’s surprising resilience was bolstered, of course, by Rachel’s good care of him; she gained time for him. If George had a passion for any one thing it was horses. For years he had bred and raised them. To see George seated on one of his fine animals was to see man and beast at their best together. A joy it was, like the best poetry. Try as I might I couldn’t banish the sensation of awe that the mood of the community had been taken note of by a higher authority.

Even so, the one really good thing of the year, for I knew, of course, that we wouldn’t have George for long, was that Reggie Crossland came back from Australia. And now he was in the throes of setting up his own sheep farm where the rocky ridges slope up gradually from the valley to Stoney Mountain.

The last crumb cleaned off the plate of sandwiches between them, Earl and Polly decided it was time for bed. “Busy day tomorrow,” Earl said. Turning into her room Polly said: “They come in threes, you know, deaths.” I’ve often thought that if any one person typified the mood of Longvalley it was Polly. On that sepulchral note we sought sleep.

The news that Nora was being accused of shooting her husband hit us Saturday morning. Beamer Ross was doing the broadcasting in our market, because that’s where he knew he’d find the crowd. And crowd it was, since those who’d been homebound Friday night because of the storm were there with the usual Saturday shoppers. Earl, Polly, and Ron were busy. I helped when no one needed post office business. I close the post office at noon Saturdays.

“I seen her right there at the back of the hotel parking lot, among the trees,” Beamer said. “She’d the gun smoking in her hand. And Harry was there laying shot, dead on the ground. I’d had to come out to... well, I’d had quite a few beers. Tom had bounced Harry a few minutes before. A right nasty mood Harry was in. Just starting to rain it was, thundering and lightning something fierce.”

“Mind your big mouth, Beamer,” Earl said. “Harry wasn’t shot on the hotel parking lot. Across the street from here on the vacant lot is where it happened. You told the chief this tale about the parking lot?”

“Damn right I told him. Down there he is right now checking things out. Across here on the vacant lot, you say. No way. Plain as day I see Nora back in them trees at the hotel parking lot. There’s a flash and I see Harry go down, see him lying there on the ground. The horse, he’d a holt of it by the bridle rein. He’d been trying to mount, but that horse it kept on jumping sideways because Harry’d up with his foot to it. A right nasty mood he was in, which was why Tom had had to bounce him.”

“And you ran over to put him up on the horse, I suppose?” Polly gritted. “Shot dead like he was. And the horse galloped up here and threw him on the vacant lot across the street.”