Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, December 1956 — page 49: what you’re looking at

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

by Fletcher Flora Breppiz rorty had this soft spot for Maddy Dakin. A soft spot as big as a silver dollar right in the middle of the old ticker. A lot of girls a guy would go for in a big way for one or more of various reasons, like they were really stacked or looked classy in their clothes or were good workers in close, lots of reasons like those, but it was different with Maddy. There just didn’t seem to be any- thing special about Maddy at all. Oh, not that she was a goon or had anything actually wrong with her, and as a matter of fact she was sort of small and neat and pretty enough in a conservative way, but it was just that she didn’t have any- thing special. : Maybe it was because she got next to Freddie young. A guy re- members what happened to him young. He remembers it and builds it up in his mind as being a hell of a lot more than it really was, and he gets to be a sucker for it. Like Freddie. He remembered how he used to take Maddy to these crummy high school football games, and she’d let him feel her knee under the blanket, and how she looked all moist and excited and just too damn happy in her cheezy little voil formal the night — of the senior dance when they were graduating—which he’d thought a A SOFT SPOT FOR MADDY thousand times he’d never make and damn near hadn’t—and most of all he remembered the summer night soon afterward when he’d borrowed a jalopie from a buddy and had driven her out to this place along the river where people parked and the cops didn’t bother you about it. He’d thought she might be sort of scared and reluctant and -have to be coaxed and all, but it didn’t turn out that way, to his surprise, and as a matter of fact she was pretty fierce and aggressive, as if she were afraid he’d change his mind and chicken out at the last minute, and afterward she cried about it. She didn’t cry because she © was scared or sorry or anything — like that, and as far as he could un- derstand it she seemed to be crying because she was happy in the same way she’d been happy at the dance in the cheezy voil, only more so. She huddled against him in the front seat of the jalopie, | crying and crying in this terribly quiet way with the tears rolling down her cheeks and getting into her voice, and she said, “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Freddie, don’t ever leave me. You ever leave me, Freddie, I’ll die, I'll simply die, and I swear to Jesus I will.” The way she sail Jesus like that made a big impression on Freddie, because she didn’t use profane or dirty words like a lot of girls, and it was plain that she wasn’t swear- ing at all, but was saying a kind 47 Gomichooks7eo