“But... but there might be something valuable inside, Martha. It’s an expensive suitcase, you can see that. Suppose it contains fancy clothes, or an expensive camera, or important papers. Or even money!”
“Jason, either you return that suitcase this minute, or you take it out behind the barn and bury it. I’m not going to have it here. I’m not going to have you opening it and going through it. I don’t want the man’s ghost coming and haunting us for your awful crime!”
He knew it was useless when she got in one of those moods. And yet his will was torn between her commanding words and the questioning suitcase that rested now on the floor between his feet. “Martha...”
“Bury it! Get it out of my sight, Jason!”
“All right.” He went out with bowed head, carrying the heavy suitcase beyond the faded red barn to the little animal graveyard. While Martha watched from a distance he dug a shallow hole and buried the pigskin bag between the old cow and last year’s cat. “All right. It’s done.”
But as he followed her into the house there was a sort of sadness in his heart.
The following morning a car stopped on the road and a tall young man walked back to the barn where Jason was busy with his daily chores. “Hello there,” he called out. “Got a minute?”
Jason set down his milk pails and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Sure, mister. What can I do for you?”
“We’re investigating yesterday’s plane crash over on the hill. We thought you might have seen something that could help us.” The man had taken out a little notebook. “You’re Jason Lean, correct?”
“That’s me, and I saw it, all right. Plane came in too low. Hit those power lines. Was just at dawn, and I suppose the sun might have blinded the pilot for a minute. It hit the lines and that was the end of it.”
“Did you go over to see the wreckage?”
“I... No, I started to, but then turned back. I was afraid of those fallen power lines.”
“Just as well,” the investigator said, making a brief note in his book. “You couldn’t have done anything. They were all killed instantly.”
“Yes. Horrible.” Jason turned to stare out across the valley, toward the hillside scar which would take many seasons to heal.
“Thanks for your time,” the man said. “I may be back to talk to you again.”
“Certainly. Anything I can do...”
The man nodded a smile and started back to his car. He hadn’t asked about the suitcase, Jason thought. They’d never missed it. Burnt to ashes, they probably supposed.
And that night, in bed next to the cold flesh of his wife, Jason imagined it all again. Opening the suitcase, finding a lifetime’s treasure nestled there waiting. What would it be? Money? A woman’s wardrobe and jewels? A salesman’s sample kit of fine furs? Something for Martha, perhaps. Or himself. Even a fine new suit that could be made to fit him.
The next day, in the late afternoon, while Martha was cleaning in the front of the house, his uncertain footsteps took him once more to the animal graveyard beyond the barn. Perhaps, if he could only dig up the suitcase and look — then bury it again before she ever knew the difference. Yes, that was what he would do. Must do.
He retrieved the old spade from the barn and started to dig. After a moment’s work he could feel the familiar leather hide as he scraped the dirt from it.
“Jason!”
“Martha. What are you...?”
“Jason, you were going to open it! Cover it up this instant! Don’t you realize it will bring us nothing but tragedy? Don’t you realize it belongs to a dead man?”
“All right, Martha. I was just...”
“Cover it up, Jason. And don’t do that again.”
He covered it up.
But still, as the days passed and the memory of the crash itself drifted further to the back of his conscious mind, there was still the shape of the sealed suitcase to obsess him. He saw it in his waking and sleeping hours, saw it closed as first he’d met it, and open with all its treasures exposed. It became, in various fantasies, a spy’s hoard of secret plans, an embezzler’s final crime, a businessman’s stock of everyday valuables. He imagined all the hundreds of things that might come tumbling out if only he looked. The things he’d never owned; like an electric razor, or a portable radio, or a fine camera.
No, decided Jason with finality, after a week of torment. Whatever was in that suitcase, it was not going to rot in the ground behind the barn. He found Martha in the kitchen and told her of his decision.
“I’m going to dig it up and open it,” he said.
“Jason...”
“Nothing you can say will stop me, Martha, I have to know what’s inside it.”
“Jason, there’s death in that suitcase. I can feel it in my bones.”
“I have to know!” he screamed at her. And when she stepped heavily into his path he brushed her aside as he would some animal in the field.
“Stop, Jason!”
He hit her, only to shut that refusing mouth, only to silence her for a few important moments. She fell heavily, her head catching the edge of the old stove. He sucked in his breath and bent over her, chilled now to the bone. She wasn’t moving and he knew in some fantastic manner that he’d killed her.
But he didn’t stop. He hurried on to the barn, with a speed born now of nameless panic. The spade, digging in the familiar earth, uncovering, revealing.
Yes, the suitcase. Still there like some Pandora’s box awaiting him. His hands fumbled with the straps, teeth biting into lips, forehead sweating a chill moisture.
But it was locked.
Into the barn, carrying it gently now, with clods of earth falling from it. Into the barn, and a few careful blows with the pitchfork, prying the lock apart until it snapped under the pressure. Finally.
He opened the suitcase.
The government inspector found them, some time later, when he stopped by the Lean farmhouse to ask some further questions about the airliner crash. He found Martha Lean on the kitchen floor, and she looked so peaceful it was hard to believe she was dead.
And he found Jason Lean in the barn, kneeling in a sort of daze over an open suitcase. It was a salesman’s sample case. It was filled with leather-bound Bibles.
Copyright © 1962 by Edward D. Hoch. First published in The Saint magazine.
Good Intentions
by Michael Z. Lewin
The first character Michael Z. Lewin created, back in 1969, was Albert Samson. Samson’s debut case was intended to be a short story but grew into a novel. The Indianapolis private eye most recently featured at novel length in 2004’s Eye Opener, but he was last seen in the December 2011 EQMM story “Who I Am,” with a client who claimed to be an extraterrestrial. Samson and his eccentric client are back this month, in an adventure that’s laced with Michael Z. Lewin’s wry humor.
1.
It seemed like the rain would never stop. I was getting cabin fever and I wasn’t even in a cabin. Had I ever been in a cabin? I mean, a cabin? I couldn’t remember one. I wanted to go to a cabin. Experience Cabinness. Be thoroughly cabined. The rain seemed like it would never stop.
I was bored. There is only a certain amount that a private investigator can do constructively when he is without clients, even in a fascinating, action-packed city like Indianapolis. I’d done it and it wasn’t even noon yet. We do get rains like this here, but not usually in November. Or is it common in Novembers? Had the incessant rain washed my memory away?