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

“He’s perfect, Franny.” The older woman was suddenly there between us, hands down on the scuffed tabletop. “He’s not very big but strong enough by the looks.” Then to me, “How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“There you go,” the woman said, “fifteen, and probably not working. That right?”

“I don’t have a regular job, no.”

“Can you rake, mow, clean up this place? She’s looking. Her handyman just up and left her after Sophie died.”

“Jean...” Frances protested.

Jean, ignoring the younger woman, said to me: “What’s your name?”

“Herb... Herbert Sawyer, ma’am.”

“My God,” Jean Pritchard said, standing back. “You’re the son of that woman who tried to kill herself.”

I wasn’t crazy about Mrs. Jean Pritchard. She was nosy, bossy, unsubtle, and outspoken, but it was her I had to thank for my current position. Caretaker. Handyman. One-boy clean-up crew for Miss Frances Carter, who had insisted from the start I call her Frances. I figured she was somewhere near my mother’s age, and my mother was thirty-six, so Frances had to be maybe thirty-three, thirty-four. But she had done everything right, called and spoken to Jake, then my Aunt Clem, and even my school, just to “be on the safe side, you understand.”

“Police detective.” Frances had been impressed by Jake’s credentials.

“Yeah, he’s a friend of my mother’s,” I’d said. “I mean, they dated... for a while.”

“He was kind enough to move in with you,” she’d said. We’d been at her kitchen table; she had insisted I have a cup of tea. It was my first day on the job, one in which I had single-handedly transformed her front and side yards from looking like an overgrown vacant lot to something fairly respectable. But she insisted I needed a break after working so hard. “Because it must be difficult...” she’d said gently, “with your mother... away.”

I hadn’t wanted to talk about my mother. With the preliminary investigation over, she felt safe hiring me. Now I just wanted to talk about scraping down her porch railings and pulling up the rotted floorboards on the front steps. I wanted to ask how she wanted her hedges trimmed and if I should pull up the black-eyed Susans that had overtaken her flower garden. I was the outside help and felt uncomfortable sitting at the worn kitchen table in her grubby little kitchen.

“This is pretty bad, too, isn’t it?” she’d asked unexpectedly. I guess I’d been too quiet, or she sensed my uneasiness. Maybe I’d been looking around at her kitchen too long: at the grease-stained stove, the broken light fixtures. My own home was small and plain, a kitchen-living room combination with two bedrooms down and an unfinished second floor. But it was clean and orderly and there were windows and light everywhere. This kitchen was basic black and white, with an old-fashioned sink with exposed plumbing, an ancient gas stove, and glass-paneled cabinets with many of the panels missing. Years ago, with copper pots gleaming from the ceiling and polished floors and woodwork, the room was probably pretty special, but today...

“No, needs a little work, is all.” I shrugged. I hadn’t wanted to embarrass her. I’d known her only two days but already I had a pretty high opinion of her. Maybe too high.

“I’m not living here yet. I’m staying at a motel,” she informed me. “The house is warm enough, but the furnace is incredibly noisy. I’m looking for someone to come and work on it.” She shook her head and smiled. “Maybe when you’re done with the outside work...” She leaned toward me, one hand on my arm for emphasis. She was so composed; nothing she did or said ever seemed too forward or improper. “Or am I expecting too much?” she asked. “I don’t want to take up all your time, Herbie. It’s just that when Sophie died...” She sighed and sat back, hands in her lap. “My sister left me comfortably well off, but she didn’t take good care of this place, did she? It was her summer home; she hadn’t lived here in years.”

“I’d be glad to help inside,” I’d told her. “Whatever you want.”

Her whole face grew animated. “Oh, you’re too good, too accommodating! And they say the younger generation is selfish. Slackers — isn’t that the current term?”

“It’s one of them.”

So I worked like a bear those next two weeks, every day after school, often long into the evenings. I raked and mowed, trimmed and pruned, scraped and painted. I pushed wheelbarrows of leaves and branches, sticks and weeds out to the back yard where I built a small bonfire and got rid of it all. It was exactly what I needed: hard physical work, and lots of it.

During those two weeks I saw her every day. It was November, cool but good enough weather for outside work. Frances and me, we were all business. That’s the only way it could have been, because even though I was, well, infatuated, I was smart enough to know that I was just a kid. So I had a kind of a crush on her; it was harmless, like the crush Remy had on the student teacher in Spanish.