Plot It Yourself

It checked. The half a mile of dirt was uphill, winding, narrow, and stony. The mailbox was at the mouth of a lane, even narrower, through a gap in a stone fence, no gate. I turned in and eased my way along the ruts to where the lane ended in front of a little house painted blue, one story. There was no car in sight. As I climbed out and shut the door a little bicoloured mutt trotted up and started to growl, but his curiosity to see what I smelled like close up was too much for him, and the growl petered out. I reached down and scratched the back of his neck, and we were pals. He went with me to help knock on the door, and when, after knocking got no response, I tried the knob and found it was locked, he was as disappointed as I was.

With my years of training as a detective, I reached a conclusion. Dogs have to be fed. There was no other house in sight, no nearby neighbour to pinch-feed for Alice Porter. Therefore she would return. A top-drawer detective, say Nero Wolfe, could have found out exactly when she would return by looking at the dog’s teeth and feeling its belly, but I’m not in that class. I looked over the grounds-four young trees and half a dozen shrubs scattered here and there-and then moseyed around to the back. There was a neat little vegetable garden, no weeds, and I pulled some radishes and ate them. Then I went to the car and got a book from my bag, I forget what, but it wasn’t The Moth That Ate Peanuts, sat on one of two garden chairs in the shade of the house, and read. The mutt curled up at my feet and shut his eyes.

She came at five-twenty-eight. A ’58 Ford station wagon came bumping along the ruts and stopped back of the Heron, and she scrambled out and headed for me. The mutt went bounding to meet her, and she halted to give him a pat. I shut my book and stood up.

“You looking for me?” she asked.

“I am if you’re Miss Alice Porter,” I said.

She knew who I was. It’s easy to make a mistake on a thing like that, I had made plenty in my time, but it was in her eyes that she had recognized me or I had better quit the detective business and take up truck-driving or window-washing. That was nothing startling; it happened now and then. My picture hadn’t been in the papers as often as President Eisenhower’s, but it had once made the front page of the Gazette.

“That’s my name,” she said.