Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 38, No. 13, Mid-December 1993
Editor’s Notes
by Cathleen Jordan
Thirty-seven years ago the first issue of AHMM was published, bearing a cover date of December 1956. It was one hundred forty-four pages long, contained eight stories and two “novelettes” (stories of about thirty pages), and cost thirty-five cents. Among the authors in that first issue were Jim Thompson (The Grifters), William F. Nolan (Logan’s Run), and Fletcher Flora (Killing Cousins).
In this thirty-seventh anniversary issue, we have sixteen new stories to present to you, including tales by five authors new to us.
Peg McLaughlin, author of “The Jester’s Foot,” Marty Cann, author of “Outrage at the Short Mystery Club,” and Angela Zeman, author of “The Witch and the Fishmonger’s Wife,” make their fiction debuts in these pages.
Ms. McLaughlin, who temps as a legal secretary and has worked for “(at last count) almost one hundred attorneys,” lives in Washington, D.C., where she learned a good bit about publishing during a stint at a trade magazine. “In my misspent youth, I was a member of the American Puppet Theatre, a group of volunteers who worked at the Library of Congress and spent nights and weekends sewing puppets, painting backdrops and performing our musical show for children in the D.C. area.” She has also written a column for a regional magazine on housing matters.
Marty Cann, now retired, has a column to his credit, too, his on movie trivia for a weekly Long Island paper. He has been an advertising space sales manager, an architectural rep, an overhead door estimator, a print shop owner, and a Long Island Railroad brakeman. A New Yorker who currently lives in Maryland, he has traveled extensively and is an “avid, but terrible, golfer.”
Angela Zeman is the former owner of a business-to-business ad agency in New Jersey. She has also “been a makeup artist, carried newspapers on a rural route, sold mailing machines, run sales seminars for brokers,” and has had a hand in a number of other jobs. “I hold a Dive Master rating in S.C.U.B.A. diving; I won a trophy for trap shooting... I used to love cooking but find I’m turning less domestic the older I get.”
Gene KoKayKo, author of “Late September Dogs,” tells us that he “held many jobs while raising a family and trying to write, from dishwasher to dance instructor to baker to sales rep.” He has published a number of short stories in the fields of espionage, horror, science fiction, and Westerns.
Jan Burke, author of “Why Tonight?” is also the author of (to date) two mystery novels; the second one will be published next year. A number of people have found the opening sentence of her first book, Goodnight, Irene, particularly arresting. She tells us that she began writing the book “after the first line came to me. My husband and I were watching a friend’s band play in an L.A. dive. The line: He loved to watch fat women dance.” Before taking up writing, Ms. Burke “went to work in our family business, making the cutting teeth for oil well and mining drill bits from tungsten carbide. The company was sold to Dresser Industries, and I have been the only woman plant manager in my division... I’m probably the only woman plant manager in the carbide industry.”
Ms. Burke recently resigned her job to spend all her time writing. One reader for sure is President Clinton, who told 48 Hours last March that he was reading Goodnight, Irene.
The Jester’s Foot
by Peg McLaughlin
I was hacking away at the multiflora rose hedge with a pair of debilitated clippers the morning Hal Benson returned to his home on the Cape.
He had junked the vintage Chevy with the scratches on the fins where his kids tested “gold” coins before he caught them at it. Or maybe it had been junked for him, come to think of it. His new set of wheels, a bright yellow VW bug, looked like a rolling halved lemon.
He hobbled down the unpaved track past my clippers and swung into his driveway without a glance my way. I snipped another thorny branch and did a quick mental scamper through my Emily Post. When a man comes home from months of treatment for a nervous breakdown, after a car smash killed his wife and two kids, what’s the neighborly thing to do? Is it too late for casseroles?
I had done the Samaritan bit right after the accident. Forsaking my thesis on Perkin Warbeck, I drove Hal’s sister Claudia out here to Padstow to clear his Cape house of memories. She was convinced the sight of Kelly’s dolls and JoJo’s tennis racket would send him into a tailspin. Neither of us realized then how deep Hal’s well of depression was. I’d nursed a guilty passion for my grandmother’s lanky neighbor in my teens; I suppose that trip was my tribute to a bittersweet memory.
You’d be amazed how much bric-a-brac kids leave behind when they’ve gone for the season — never mind for good. Claudia and Granny Cabral and I cried ourselves dry while we packed away three lives in neat cardboard boxes and arranged for storage. I babysat those kids every summer from the time they were toddlers — and little hellions they could be, to be honest — but they were only eleven and nine when it happened. Life’s stinking sometimes.
My current problem was, all that happened back in the depths of November, and here we were setting sail into May. In the interim I’d lost Gran, my oak post in the gale, and inherited her Cape house. In April, when I came into a tiny trust fund from a half-remembered godfather, I’d finally chucked poor old Perkin in a footlocker and settled out here on Cape Cod. I’d long since cried all my tears. I hoped Hal had, too.
Hal used the side entrance of his cottage. At least, I didn’t see him again, and the blinds in his kitchen twitched open.
Gran’s hedge looked as though Goliath the Rodent had been gnawing at it. High time I got my cousin Sam to sharpen those clippers; besides, I needed supplies. I straddled my aged ten-speed and popped the clippers in the rear basket.
Padstow, our local village, is a few sand-blasted buildings in search of an identity. Cape Cod stabs into the Atlantic like a jester’s foot, toe pointed north. We’re on the high arch of the foot, but you won’t find us on most maps. Our mail says Wellfleet, which is just around the curve of the harbor and popular, I can tell you. Better known and slicker, they suffer the full impact of tourism; we settle for glorious weather and a little peace. Padstow’s natives are descended from Portuguese fishermen; its summer families, like flocks of geese, migrate with the seasons, Boston to Bermuda to Padstow and back again. I’m a rare hybrid, half native, half goose, and move a little uneasily between the two worlds.
I was propping my bicycle against Dulcie’s Market when a blue Checker sedan slid to a halt beside me and Carly Whitehead leaned out.
“Hey, Tess, was that Hal Benson in that awful car?” she demanded through a cloud of cigarette smoke the color of her well-shaped hair. The curious faces of five Abyssinian cats peered around her shoulders.
I was used to that battery of eyes. You rarely saw Carly sans cats. “He just got in,” I admitted. “But—”
“Don’t worry.” She shoved a cat off her shoulder. “I’m not the Welcome Wagon. Did he speak?”
“To say what?” I asked, exasperated.
“Hello would be sufficient,” she said dryly, waving a cat’s whiskers away from her glowing cigarette, “or he might explain who those two drifters are who’ve camped in his boathouse.”
“What two—”
“Saw them yesterday evening, when I was fishing in my dinghy.” She grinned, pleased to be first with the news. “Looked like beach bums — backpacks and cutoffs. Seemed to be setting up house.”