Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 48, No. 1, January 2003

As we plunged into the labyrinthian ways of the parking lot, Sadd said, “Let me tell you about your Christmas present. It’s a little mystery.”

Oh, Lord. I didn’t know whether to be pleased or not. I said, “Sadd, I’m getting a bit creaky for—”

“Just as I was leaving the house the phone rang. It was—”

“Tell me when we get home. This traffic is insane.”

“And you don’t trust me to drive and chew gum?”

“Chew gum, yes. Talk, no.”

The drive from the mall in Sarasota to Sadd’s home on Santa Martina Island takes about forty minutes. It’s my opinion that nature designed Florida’s west coast barrier islands as shock absorbers. You cross the bridge from the mainland and are hit with the breathtaking expanse of the Gulf of Mexico. You gasp and gape, no matter how many times you’ve done it, all the way to Sadd’s house at the end of the tiny key where the gulf merges, sometimes tumultuously, with the waters of Tampa Bay. The filagree shape of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge is discernable ten miles away.

Today the gulf and the bay lay in a shining sunset embrace and I tore my eyes away to go inside and put parcels in my room. Sadd went into his little galley kitchen with the words “Drinks outside.”

“Can I help?” I asked halfheartedly.

“No. Go out and sit down.”

“I’ve been here two weeks and I haven’t lifted a finger.”

“You’ll be lifting all ten of them next week if you insist on going back to New York. Why you have this bourgeois urge to spend Christmas with your grandchildren is beyond me.”

Since retiring from a publishing house in New York, Sadd has devoted himself to ecology in Florida, has no interest in visiting his daughter’s family in Toronto, and deflects visits from them by, as he puts it, “shipping them off to Europe or the destination of their choice.”

I smiled at him affectionately as he came out bearing a tray of martinis. I accepted one and said, “This mystery of yours better be flat-out simple. Remember my decrepitude.”

He sat down and looked out at the water. “Actually, the thing is more sad than mysterious. There’s been no crime and no one has died. It began with a bizarre accident about three years ago and I guess had been pretty much forgotten. Then suddenly, a few days ago...”

His almost somber face made me say anxiously, “I hope it doesn’t affect you personally, Sadd.”

“No, not at all.” He straightened in his chair. “But it did affect a good friend of mine, the one who called me just as I was leaving to pick you up. So, as I was saying when I was told to shut up and drive...”

Sadd, owing to his many years as an editor, can give an account of an episode that is both concise and compelling. You learn to listen to him without interrupting and his story will unfold with just enough detail to make it edge toward the lengthy, then he will rein you in with a zinger and your glass stops halfway to your lips.

“My friend, Malcom Elder by name, is a retired judge who lives just up the road from here. He has a granddaughter whom he adores and she is indeed adorable. A few years ago when this happened she’d have been about twenty-one, fresh out of college, vacationing with Grandpa and waitressing in a popular restaurant on the island. Enter the villain — do I call him that because I was jealous? — in the person of the restaurant owner, a three-times-her-age, three-times-married entrepreneur: successful, good-looking, and apparently catnip to women. His name is — was? — John Bell. Nobody seems to know if he’s alive or dead.” Sadd sipped his drink and frowned. “My poor friend Malcom. How he loved — loves that girl. He sat where you’re sitting now and told me what she’d said to him, quoting her exactly and smiling a little in spite of himself: ‘Gramps, I love him. Do me a wedding.’ ”

“And of course he did.”

“Of course. And, oh my God, that wedding...”

I was about to ask why he had to call upon his Maker at the mere memory, then a thought interjected.

“Where were the girl’s parents?”

“Who knows? Probably she least of all. As I recall, her mother is Malcom’s daughter, but there were multiple divorces and a general atmosphere of absenteeism.”

I sipped my drink. “Gramps was all, and Gramps was it?” Sadd nodded. “Tell me about the wedding.”

“I’ll need a refill for this.” He got up and went into the house. I sat still and thought about my own granddaughters and said a sort of prayer. Now he was back with his drink and a bowl of pretzels.