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

He reached inside his jacket, pulled out two sheets of ordinary copy paper, and placed them down on top of my history text. On one was the familiar outline of a small yellow square shape about two and half inches on each side. On the other was a picture of a chain with a small curved object hanging from it. If this were to true size, the object was about three inches long and looked like a miniature horn. It was off-white in color.

“So Frances Carter left a little treasure hunt for your amusement. What are the chances her sister did the same thing with Dan Church?”

I looked up at Jake, then back at the first paper. On it, written in plain block capitals, was: IV S H E D CELLAR. The letters H E D had been underlined and were written in a different handwriting.

“Is it clue number four?” Jake asked.

“I don’t — where did these come from?”

“The small piece of paper and this object, which is probably a key chain, were both found in Dan Church’s clenched fist. The clues Frances Carter left for you were numbered, correct?”

“Yeah.” I felt like something was stuck in my throat.

“It looks like someone might have wanted Dan Church to go down into that cellar.”

“Or he had a list, Jake, and the fourth thing on that list was to... well... do some work...”

“In an empty root cellar? Because that’s what it is. Nothing down there but some rotten wooden shelves and a few empty Mason jars. Where are your clues, Herbie? We need to look at them.”

He took them all away, the four I had and the books I’d found them in, even the two movie tickets. But after he’d gone, I found a notepad in the kitchen and from memory wrote down exactly what Jake had shown me on the photocopy: IV S H E D CELLAR. It was unmistakable. Someone had given Dan Church, or Dan Church had found, a slip of paper, or maybe he had written it himself, or maybe...

“If this is one of those initial games, then the initials are SC,” I told the cat as he studied me contentedly from the kitchen table.

“Sophie Carter, or Sophia Clara. So this game probably wasn’t made for Dan Church. But if it was a clue, then it’s too easy. Dan Church filled in the letters to make ‘shed cellar.’ Which is where he went, looking for the next clue. But this is clue four, so where are the first three, and did Dan find this one? Or is this the one Frances said her sister found? Or is it a fake, a game Sophie made up, a game that went wrong...” I was so confused by then and it was getting late. I walked to the back door and looked out toward the shed. It was wet and dark out there now, and just a thin ribbon of police tape flapped in the wind. “They’ll check the handwriting, find some copies of Dan Church’s and see if he wrote that clue, if that’s what it is. Or maybe they’ll check it against Sophie Carter’s.” I turned around, studied the room I was in, the ancient rafters overhead, the countertops I’d scrubbed and cleaned, the gas stove sparkling with its copper kettle boiling on top. I’d been given custody of this house, and even if it weren’t mine, it felt like it was.

“And as for that key chain, maybe it was his and has nothing to do with anything.”

“All our treasure hunts started here.”

It was like she was there, like I could really hear her voice.

“The trophy room, Sammy. That’s where they began.”

It occurred to me then that I shouldn’t touch anything in the room. Though I’d effectively destroyed any evidence of Sophie Carter or Dan Church that might once have been in the other rooms of the house, here in this room their fingerprints and their presence might still be preserved. It was one thing to know that this house’s former owner had killed herself, but to know the man who had worked for her was also dead, accidentally or otherwise, lent a kind of awful chill to the house. Maybe I had felt it the day I brought Jake here, when I’d wanted to leave. For the last few weeks I’d loved this house despite the weirdness of this room filled with dead animals. But now it seemed large and strange and very dangerous, and if the house had a heart — an evil, blackened heart — then it was centered here in the trophy room.

“They all start here,” I said as I squeezed the paper in my hand. “He was working on clue four, so where are the first three? If he’d had them on his body, Jake would have told me.” I stood at the door and turned on the lights. “Save this room for last, she said.” I hesitated before walking in, but instead of looking at the heads, or the full-body mounts under their plastic coverings, I walked over to the wall of photographs. Lyman Carter kneeling over an African lion; Lyman Carter posing between a pair of antelope with scimitar-shaped horns; Lyman Carter...

Lyman Carter everywhere posing with death. I wondered then where he’d killed himself, and with what weapon. One of the same guns he’d used to kill all these animals?