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

I was the caretaker, which meant it was my job to take care of things, right? Probably an old root cellar. Storage. We were far enough from the ocean to make cellars possible and the house itself had a cellar, so I didn’t think much of it when I leaned over, scooted the cat off the door, and pulled up on the handle.

“Well, looks like we found Dan Church,” the medical examiner said in passing to me and Jake. His gray eyes took me in severely. “Not a word, Herbie, until we notify next of kin.”

Jake had made some tea, then spent the next half hour making a swift round of phone calls, one of which was to Frances in New York.

The rain was coming down in a steady torrent. The medical examiner owed me nothing, but he was drinking Frances’s tea and I was the caretaker, and even if I was only fifteen, I deserved some explanation. Besides, this man knew me, and if he was going to fill Jake in, then he had to fill me in, too.

“Looks like the door hit him in the head. That’s my first guess. He doesn’t seem to have been shot, and there are no apparent wounds on the body, but he’s been down in that hole a while, at least four, five weeks, or more. He was reported missing when?” He looked at Jake.

“About six weeks ago.”

“Well,” the man wasn’t ready to make any hard and fast pronouncements, “it might be accidental death. He was going down into the cellar and the door fell forward on his head, and then he tripped, broke his neck. But then again, someone might have...”

“Dropped it deliberately on his head.” I refused to be sick, despite the odor, despite the awful knowledge that had hit me with that odor.

“Won’t know anything definite until the autopsy. Until then...” He looked at Jake, then to me. “Thanks for the tea,” he said.

“No way Frances had anything to do with this,” I found myself saying. “No way she even knew. She told me he had just left, that her sister said...” I clutched my arms to myself and stood in the front room where it was dark except for the candles in the windows. “No way. She’s completely... she wasn’t even here when he disappeared. She... he was her sister’s handyman.”

“No one’s under any suspicion,” Jake cautioned. “This investigation has just begun and if the autopsy shows it was an accidental death...”

“Except the cat knew he was there,” I said. I felt sick again. Okay, not the first dead body I’d ever found, or seen; I’d been unfortunate enough to come across a few. But this was different, and unexpected, and suddenly I felt like I couldn’t breathe again. I turned to look at Jake. “Can we go home? I got a test tomorrow. I need to study.”

“Hey, I heard a body was found on the Carter property in one of the sheds,” the senior said to me, actually leaning over my desk. I didn’t turn my head, just my eyes, to look up at the jerk who’d stopped to talk to me. There are always a few like him, a kid who has to repeat a subject so many times he takes most of his classes with sophomores and freshmen. But since I hadn’t said a word, he worked his face into a kind of smirk and speaking up louder (so everyone would hear, including the teacher writing on the board), said, “So what does this make, Sawyer? An even dozen? You just kick up dead bodies wherever you go, don’t you?”

“Take your seat, mister...” the math teacher barked suddenly; he was all of five foot two, but he spoke with the unchallenged authority of a veteran teacher. The kid jerked a little, then moved away from me.

Jake wasn’t surprised to get the call, but he didn’t come get me at school. He sent Officer Abe Andersen, who drove me straight out to the Carter house, as I’d requested. That didn’t surprise Jake either.

“Jerks at school,” I tried to explain. “I took my test and then told the school nurse I was sick.” I stood at the back door of the house, staring out at the shed as the rain came down.

“The cycle of flies, maggots, and reinfestation indicates six weeks.” Jake cringed; for a tough cop, he had his weaknesses. “Or so the preliminary findings suggest. There won’t be an official report for a few days more, but it looks like he had the door propped open, and when he was going down, it fell forward on him. The top of his head was caved in. Literally. Death was instantaneous.”

“My fingerprints are in that shed,” I reminded Jake, though he knew; he’d probably already given orders to screen me out. I’d been fingerprinted before, part of my unusual legacy — and one to which the kid in math class had referred when he mentioned my “kicking up dead bodies.” “They’ll be on the door, the handle, the ladder, and some of the tools out there.”

“We’ve taken care of that,” Jake said.

“You’ll need a precise date of death, won’t you?” I asked. “So you can tell if, well, Sophie Carter was still alive when he...”