Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, December 1956 — page 14: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

She turned. swiftly, saying over her shoulder, “Go on, hurry be- fore another car comes.” But Cliff felt a fragment of cau- tion stirring in the midst of his relief and his terror. “Maybe we ought to call a doctor,” he stam- mered. “Maybe—” “Have you looked?” the woman said harshly, opening the back of the car. “She’s dead.” “But the police—” “Call the police and you’re done for.” She. paused and looked at him in the dim starlight. “Now do you want out of this or don’t you? Make up your mind fast.” “I—T’ll do what you say.” “All right, then. Here, I'll help. You take her shoulders.” Her arms were like dry twigs again and she weighed nothing at all. Tall as she had been, she dou- bled up easily—with her feet against the spare tire, in the dark cavern of the car. The woman hesitated a moment before she closed the big curved lid. She stooped and put a strand of the straggling black hair aside quite gently from the good: side of the shattered face. Half of it still looked very much like her own. “Get in front,” she said in a con- trolled voice. “We have a long drive ahead.” He didn’t say a word for a long while. He was nothing inside, he thought. Nothing but a quivering and shaking mass. With a part of his mind, he was walking along the dark highway with Anne be- ‘side him and all this-a nightmare that hadn’t ever happened. If he could only go back, he thought with. passion. If he could only go back, say half an hour, and leave her as his instinct had warned him, when they came out of the bar. He remembered how the gun had thumped against his side, never imagining then that it was a gun, and he thought he would never, never be fool enough again to let another human being get that close to him. He sat as far from the woman at the wheel as the seat allowed him. If it weren’t for the shaking inside, he would have jumped from the car at the first stoplight and run until he dropped. But all he could do now was shut himself off, shut out the world. It was late and they made good time. When they hit the freeway, the woman let the car really go, and the rest of the traffic became explosive, shining blurs that shot backward past the windows. As they drove through silent Pasadena, he said, “Are you—-” He licked dry lips and tried again, needing to know. “Were you her sister P” She laughed like a little cough, quick and startled. “Under the skin, maybe.” “T thought— You look alike, and I thought—” “We weren’t Die ” she told 12 ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE CORMICGLOOKKS. EO