Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 44, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1999

I knelt down in the muck. Big Tree park was in Spring Hammock, a nature park set aside in the twenties to protect fifteen hundred acres of Florida native vegetation. A few years back they’d improved the area, built a boardwalk path over the marshy land through the palms and oaks and palmettos and ferns and magnolias and bamboo. The killer must have carried the body along that boardwalk. A placard told me it was two hundred fifty winding yards into The Senator’s site.

“Jeez.” George was still reading the plaque at the tree. “It’s got lightning rods all over it, and they figure it’s one hundred and twenty-six feet high and forty-seven feet around. That’s some mother of a tree.”

“Just an estimate,” I told him. “Made in 1946. It’s grown since then.”

“It’s alive?”

“Sure. It gets purple flowers at the top in the spring. Kind of like an Easter hat. And there’s a mate just up along the trail. I used to call that one The Senator’s Lady. Are you through sightseeing? I want to get back to the station and talk to the people who found her.” I climbed back over the rail. My shoes were squishy, my socks mucky.

“How come you know so much about this place anyway? I didn’t even know it was here.”

“I lived in the area, used to come here when I was a kid. Played Davy Crockett. Or Daniel Boone. I had a fringed mock-leather jacket, that was Davy, and an ersatz coon-skin cap turned me into Dan’l.” I looked around. “Most times a place looks smaller when you’ve grown up. Funny, though, this one looks bigger. Taller trees, more underbrush. And after today, kind of eerie. Must be thousands of fingerprints along this wooden railing, so dusting is useless. Looking for footprints, ditto. Except back in the bamboo muck. Trouble is, it’s muck. Too soft for footprints, I figure. We’ll have to start from scratch. Who was she? That’s the big question.”

The pair of Greenpeace types had found the dead lady, a male named Alfred Collins and his female companion, one Lucy Pierce. They were talking to a television crew in the station lobby when we got back. “We’re just visiting, you see, from Ohio. I’m from Cincinnati and Lucy’s from Sharonville, but she works where I do in Cincy...”

The TV interviewer was not particularly interested in Cincy or Sharonville. “So tell us how you came across the unidentified body in Big Tree Park?”

“Well,” Lucy jumped in with her answer, “we’re nature lovers, you know, and we heard about this place, and even though it’s kind of out of the way, we finally found it and we walked along — it’s a kind of tropical jungle, you know, a primeval forest. We were looking at all the trees and Alfred saw a pair of owls up in a tree and we were just going along looking up till we got to the Big Tree, The Senator, that’s what it’s named, you know, but just beyond The Senator is this great big stand of bamboo, really tall and lots of it. I was astounded to see bamboo, especially that big, in the middle of Florida. I always thought of bamboo as coming from India or China or someplace like that...”

“So she pointed it out to me,” Alfred said, “and we went closer and I thought I saw something white like a sneaker and I opened my mouth to say hey, somebody lost their sneakers in there, and then Lucy yelped and I saw the rest of the person, too, and we ran as fast as we could back to the caretaker’s, at least we thought it was the caretaker’s but there wasn’t anybody there...”

“Just restrooms,” said Lucy. “But way over on the other side of the parking lot beyond the park perimeter we saw people. There’s what I guess you’d call a flower farm on the other side of the park...”

“Azaleas, that’s their specialty,” explained Alfred, “and gladioli...”

“Well, thank you very much,” said the TV gal, turning off her microphone and signaling “enough” to her cameraman.

I stepped in. “Ms. Pierce, Mr. Collins, I’m Detective Edison, and this is Officer George. If we could have a few words with you...”

“Oh.” Ms. Pierce looked unhappy. “There’s another TV crew waiting outside. We promised...”

“Later,” I said. “We won’t take long.” We might as well have left them at it. The story they told us had by now been told so often it was almost a standard speech. We got their local address and told them to stay put for a couple of days. We were through with them unless it tinned out they had anything to do with the death of Ms. X. I gave them a doubtful with a capital D.