Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, December 1956 — page 46: what you’re looking at

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

little grunting noise as she went down on her hands and knees. - Lurline hit her again with the flat of the cleaver, knocking her moth- er over on her side. Then she brought it down hard, pounding Martha’s head into the carpet, like the Major pounding the steak flat to the block. She stood there, breathing a little hard, looking down at her mother. Her mother was dead—one whole side of her skull was soft and squishy. Her left eye had been sprung loose from its socket by the force of the blows and _ hung, dangling like a pendulum. There was very little blood, for which ~ Lurline was grateful. She didn’t think she could have stood it, if it had been messy. Her first thought was, Well, I’ve done it. I’ve really gone and done it! It were almost as if she had been thinking of killing Martha all along. But, actually, she couldn’t remember ever having had the im- pulse before. Her second thought was, | suppose I'd better do some- thing about cleaning this up, though her mother had always protected her from anything that might possibly have been consid- ered menial. She looked at the clock and discovered she still had fifteen minutes before her date with Jonathan. _ She decided to put Martha down the kitchen incinerator. Unless she was awfully unlucky, there was small chance of anyone seeing her. The two girls that shared a room at the other end of the hall were never in after six, and Major Far- well had had liquor on his breath, as usual, when he passed her on his way from the kitchen. So he’d be safe in his room. That left only old Mrs. Paskman, with a room next to the girls. It must have been Mrs. Paskman who had been in the bathroom earlier. Lurline went out and checked, found that the old woman had re- turned to her room. She went back and got her hands under Martha’s shoulders and began pulling her | toward the door. It was awkward, but not as difficult as Lurline had feared it would be. Martha weighed less than a hundred pounds. And though she was small, and the incinerator system an old-fashioned one with a large opening, on each floor, it was a tight squeeze. Lurline got the eau next and hung it in place and then hurried to the bathroom to wash. The phone in the room was ‘ringing when she emerged, and Lurline had to run to answer: it. She hoped the ‘hotel people-hadn’t discovered Martha’s body so soon. For a moment she hesitated, -her hand stopped in®mid-air before the instrument. If she answered, and it was the hotel, it would ruin her date with Jonathan. She could think of nothing worse. As she paused, unable to decide, it rang once again, peremptorily. Thirty- a4 ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE Gomichbooksteo