Uncle Joe watched Reena slip quakingly to Biff’s side.
Uncle Joe’s eyes raked over them. “But I sort of hoped in vain, didn’t I? And tonight I figured it was high time I got something done — before you let the thought of all that money poison you into doing something really crazy, like murdering me in my sleep!”
Uncle Joe switched his gaze to the doorway. Numbed, hypnotically, Biff and Reena turned their heads. The portly figure of Dr. Barringer loomed before them. Worse, Barringer wasn’t alone. He was followed by two huge fellows in white coats.
Uncle Joe walked over to the doctor. The two giants in white coats advanced. Biff and Reena sagged against each other in a half faint.
Vaguely, Biff glimpsed Uncle Joe and Dr. Barringer leaving the room arm in arm. Barringer was speaking words of comfort to his dearest friend and fiercest golfing pal. A little of what Barringer was saying drifted back:
“Just remember, Joe, you’re not the only fine senior citizen of wealth to have a weirdo family offshoot comfortably and securely ensconced in a discreet private sanitarium. Believe me, right in our golfing gang I could name some names. But of course I never reveal privileged information...”
Stranger’s Gift
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, December 1969.
Detective Shapiro took a personal interest in the case from the start. He was mildly surprised by his reaction. A man doesn’t stay on the police force for twenty-five years without developing the inner armor necessary for the protection of his own spirit. He had dealt with just about every act of violence the human mind could conceive, and prior to the murder of one of the elderly twins, he believed that he could handle any case with detachment.
Perhaps it was the quiet bravery of Miss Nettie, the surviving twin, that got through to him; or maybe in her gracious and fragile personage he glimpsed the last fragments of a genteel world that existed only in memory or storybooks.
Be that as it may, he was not altogether the tough cop when he escorted Miss Nettie home from the hospital, where emergency measures had failed to keep life from leaking from her sister’s broken skull.
The headlights of his unmarked car picked through a neighborhood of large, once-fine homes now suffering the blight of urban decay. The present dreary reality was one of converted apartment and rooming houses, a junky filling station on a corner, faded signs offering rooms to let, a gloomy little grocery store secured for the night with iron-grille shutters.
With Miss Nettie’s tea-and-crumpets presence beside him, it was easy for Shapiro to imagine the street as it had been in forgotten days: well-trimmed hedges, houses proud with paint, limousines and roadsters in the driveways, people enjoying the evening cool in porch swings; here or there a house blazing with light and the activity of a party, with Gene Austin crooning from a Gramophone.
Shapiro could see in his mind’s eye a Sunday morning with two little twin girls ready for church in the rambling house halfway down the block, bright-faced and scrubbed in their starched crinolines, white gloves, Mary Jane shoes, and white sailor straws with ribbons spilling down their backs.
Now one was dead, beaten to death by a mugger who might occupy the very house across the street, dismal as the neighborhood had become.
“This is our driveway, Mr. Shapiro,” Miss Nettie instructed politely.
As Shapiro turned, the headlights swept a two-story frame house with a long front porch. The grounds and structure were in better repair and upkeep than their surroundings. Shapiro’s sharp instincts painted in history. He guessed it was the only home the twins had ever known. It had been theirs after the demise of their parents. Dr. Cooksey, whom Shapiro vaguely remembered by repute from his boyhood, had left his maiden daughters modestly fixed, and they had continued on until one day it was too late for them to move, to change, to shed the tiny habits of endless days.
Shapiro braked the car in the shadows of the porte cochere, got out with an energy that denied his bulk, his sleepy-looking, rough-hewn face, his forty-nine years. He hurried around and opened the door for Miss Nettie. She was a soft, decorous rustling as she got out and laid a slender, waxen hand on the beefy arm he offered. He escorted her to a pair of French doors that glinted in the darkness, and followed as she unlocked and went inside.
She turned on a light and Shapiro glanced about a parlor straight out of a yellowed issue of Better Homes; velour, velvet, and mohair, heavy, overstuffed couches and chairs, lamps with tassels and stained-glass shades, tables with clawed feet resting on glass balls.
Miss Nettie, trim and girlish as a seventy-five-year-old woman could be imagined, brushed a wisp from her forehead. Her eyes were blue pools of grief in a delicately boned face cobwebbed with fine wrinkles, but her control was superb. She remembered the proprieties. “May I take your hat, Mr. Shapiro? Do sit down and make yourself comfortable. Would you care for some tea?”
Shapiro was a coffee drinker, with a cold beer when he was off duty, but he was suddenly aware of the silence and emptiness of the slightly musty house, and of this little woman’s determination to bear up, to hold life on a normal keel. “Some tea would go nicely, Miss Cooksey.”
She seemed to be grateful for the chance to be doing something. Shapiro sank into a chair as she hurried out. He pulled a package of cigarettes from his suit coat pocket, but his glance didn’t locate any ash trays, and he put the smokes back, patted his pocket.
Miss Nettie came in carrying an old and ornate tea service. Shapiro stood up. Miss Nettie placed the tea things on a table before the couch.
As she busied her hands with teapot and cups, she said, “I know there are questions you must ask. Please do so, freely. I’m quite prepared and now in control of myself, Mr. Shapiro.”
His preliminary questions established what he had already guessed. Yes, she and Miss Lettie, her twin, had lived here all alone, except for a yardman who came one day every other week. They entertained rarely, a small tea or game of bridge with the two or three old friends they had left.
“Most of the girls with whom we grew up,” she explained, “have either passed away, yielded to the care of nursing homes, or live a world away from the old neighborhood. Sugar, Mr. Shapiro? One lump or two?”
When he sipped, his distaste for tea was pleasantly soothed. “I didn’t know it could be brewed like this.”
“Thank you, Mr. Shapiro.”
He cleared his throat. “Now about the events of this evening...”
“It all hardly seems real, Mr. Shapiro. Lettie was so kind... so harmless... How could anyone be so bestial as to...” Her cup rattled on its saucer. Perched on the edge of the overstuffed couch, her back stiffened. She looked at her hand as if daring it be unsteady again.
“Nothing that happened during the day warned of what the evening would hold,” she resumed, her sweet maidenly-aunt voice only slightly off-key. “In the afternoon I made a batch of coconut bonbons, with freshly grated coconut. Making the bonbons is a now-and-again hobby with me, Mr. Shapiro. Specialty of the house, you might say.”
She drew in a shallow breath. “A very poor family lives a couple of blocks west, on the same side of the street. A young mother whose husband deserted her and four children. Two of them twin girls, strangely enough... like Lettie and me.”
Shapiro nodded his understanding that an affinity might develop between two little twins and two old ones.