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

“That one’s an oryx, and here’s an impala, a nyala, and a sable antelope. Water buffalo, addax, kudu. We even have a bongo.” Frances had walked beneath a long line of animals frozen in time and recited all their names. “And waterbuck, eland, blesbok, and even a springbok.” She’d taken a huge breath and smiled at me across the dimly lit room. “Over there,” she pointed, “an ibex and mountain goat, pronghorn antelope, mule deer, white-tailed deer, and a moose. Did you know there is more than one kind of moose and more than one kind of white-tailed deer? And that one over there is an American bison, which many people call a buffalo. Oh, how he hated us to call it a buffalo.”

The smell was overwhelming, a combination of leather, mothballs, and age. It was like walking into a world of ghosts. Not only were there heads on the walls, arranged from eye level all the way up to the ceiling, but scattered throughout the room were other specimens, full-body specimens. And when I realized what they were, under their plastic capes, I was startled. The dead, orange marble eyes stared at us from every corner of the room: brown bear, polar bear, grizzly bear, South American jaguar, Siberian tiger, African lion, mountain lion, African leopard, cheetah...

“He was a big-game hunter,” Frances told me, both with pride and a subtle longing that I didn’t want to see, hear, or worse yet, feel. Her father had died thirty years ago and still she spoke about him with a sense of loss. She smiled and said: “He did this in the twenties and thirties. He was already an old man when Sophie and I came along. His hunting days were long past. See those photos? He kept a photographic record of everything he hunted and killed.” She was standing near the only window in the room, pointing out a row of framed pictures on the wall, arranged beneath a line of mountain rams, their horns twisted up and outward like spiral knives. She was standing in the light of the window with an eastern exposure, so the light was not direct at this time of day, but in that light she looked faded, not merely pale. It seemed that if she turned, the light would bleach her out altogether. And if that happened, I could see right through her, as though she, too, were a ghost.

“Look at these,” she said, indicating a row of framed photos on the fireplace; in picture after picture a man was shown posed beside a downed elephant. “Forty African elephants he shot and killed in his lifetime. Imagine that.”

I couldn’t, and before I could comment, she said, “And the large white and black cat next to you — that’s this one.” She pointed to a photograph of a man resting a gun barrel on the head of a magnificent spotted cat. But there were many other photos there, dozens of them.

“That’s a snow leopard,” she said, touching one of the frames. “They’re nearly extinct now.”

“Maybe because of your father.”

Her smile never dimmed. “Maybe.” She took no offense. “It was acceptable then.” For her these animals simply were; they existed, but in a separate time. “I don’t know what I shall do with them. I don’t wish to keep them, but would a museum want them? I’m not sure.”

“You could ask,” I suggested.

“It’s a room of death, isn’t it?” she said, staring straight at me. “I often felt it was, even though as a child I liked it in here. Still, it’s not quite fashionable anymore, is it? I mean I could hardly hold a bridge party in here, could I?” And then she’d said, “All our treasure hunts started here.”

“Treasure hunts?” Jake was wandering about the room, looking at the animals, the heads on the walls. On his face was a strange mixture of fascination and repulsion.

“Yeah, her father made up these games for her and her sister. With clues. You know, go here and there’s a clue which takes you to the next, then the next. At the end there’d be a prize or something. But the clues were kind of intricate...”

“He always played upon somebody’s name, or their initials. For example, mine are F and N, for Frances Norma. So perhaps the first clue would be ‘FN’s homeland.’ Of course, I’d have to figure out who FN could possibly be. Sometimes he included an object, or on the slip of paper might be a picture of, say, a nurse’s cap. Then I’d know, of course, Florence Nightingale, and if I didn’t know she was from England, I’d have to look that up. Then I’d have to check the globe, or perhaps my father’s atlas, and there’d be the next clue, under the heading England. Perhaps. That should have been a rather easy one.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“It was. We did a treasure hunt every summer, and then another in the fall. He’d spend days putting it together, writing up the clues at that desk, and then, when we were at school, he’d place them about. Sophie and I would play the game together. That was part of the fun.”

“And the treasure at the end?”

“For Sophie, candy-coated almonds, and for me, chocolate coins in gold foil. Do you know the kind?”