The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery MEGAPACK™: 20 Classic Mystery & Crime Stories!

One Enchanted Evening

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, June 1965.

It was almost five o’clock when Ella came out of the theater. Because it was the kind of evening that it was, and because there was no hurry, and because Luke had the car, as usual, she decided to walk the sixteen blocks home. It was such a perfectly natural decision, made with hardly a second thought, that she didn’t for an instant suspect its momentous character or anticipate its consequences. To be exact, it was not really the decision to walk home that could be blamed, if any blame could be attached, for what later happened. It was the decision, impetuous and extravagant, to buy the little music box.

The music box was in the window of a sad and dusty shop of odds and ends, that was tucked tightly between two domineering buildings on the last block of the business district, just before the beginning of homes and grass and trees. She stopped in front of the window and stared at the music box. She had the strangest and most intense desire to possess it. It was a cheap little box, really, but it seemed to have, somehow, a quality of endearing pathos that may have been an effect of the evening, or her response to the evening’s spell. The lid was open and a tiny ballerina had risen from within, and now stood poised on the toes of one foot, on the point of a slender pin. The box was unwound, of course, but it was apparent that it would begin to play, when wound up, just as soon as the lid was opened, and the tiny ballerina would begin to pirouette in time with the tune.

What tune would the box play? The moment she began to wonder, as if the question had been whispered into her ear, Ella understood that it was imperative to know, that the whole evening would be spoiled if she did not. After the briefest hesitation, she entered the shop under a tinkling bell and stood near the window. An elderly man, almost elfin in his diminutive frailty, emerged from the shadows at the rear. His skin seemed translucent, glowing with an inner light, and his hands made a silken sound when he rubbed them together.

“Good evening,” he said. “May I help you?”

“I was attracted by the little music box in the window,” Ella replied.

“Yes.” The man reached into the window and lifted the box tenderly in his thin hands. “A charming thing, isn’t it? It’s designed to hold costume jewelry. The ballerina dances to the music.”

He held the box out, tendering it to her, and she, in the act of reaching for it, held her hands suspended, not touching it, fixed by the sudden fear that it would, if touched, disintegrate into smoke or crumble into dust. It was absurd, of course, another strange effect of the evening, or the promise of the evening, and she felt a spasm of laughter stirring silently in her throat, which she quelled.

“What music does it play?” she asked.

“You shall hear for yourself.” He closed the lid slowly, the tiny ballerina folding back rigidly below it to lie captive in the darkness. A key on the back of the box, turning between the thumb and index finger of the elfin man, made a small, rachet-like sound. “Listen.”

The lid was raised, the ballerina ascended from her dark captivity, and all at once in the shadowed shop, in a rare instance of perfect harmony with the kind of evening it had begun to be, Ella was listening to “Some Enchanted Evening.” The music was made, it seemed, by tiny bells, so fragile and pure and entirely right that she unconsciously clasped her hands together in a gesture of delight and sweet pain. Where laughter had stirred before, a sob stirred now, and she knew certainly, although she could not afford it and had not intended it, that she would buy the music box and take it home with her.

“How much is it?” she asked.

“The price is ten-fifty,” the man said. “For you, because you find it charming, ten dollars even.”

The price itself was a kind of determinant, everything working out perfectly for the purchase, for she had in her purse, besides a few coins, one ten-dollar bill. It was the last of her household money, all there would be until the end of the week, and she dug it out of the purse quickly, refusing with deliberate perversity to think of die skimpy meals and rationed cigarettes that its spending entailed.

“You needn’t wrap it,” she said. “I’ll carry it as it is.”

The bill and the box exchanged hands, and she left the shop and continued on her way home. She should, she supposed, feel guilty for her extravagance, but the extraordinary perversity that had supported the purchase of the box was still working to support her quiet happiness. It was, altogether, the most remarkable evening. Even the light was like a soft blush, as if it had filtered, somewhere up and beyond vision, through stained glass. In the trees along the street she walked, the cicadas were beginning to rouse and sing. Walking, she opened the lid of the music box and listened, head inclined, to the tiny tinkling sounds. Out in the open between the houses, the sounds were almost lost, and she had to listen intently in order to hear them, carrying in her hands her personal secret serenade.

When she reached home, it was time to begin hurrying a little. Luke would be coming soon, wanting his dinner, and as the years passed, depriving Luke of more and more of his pride, the more adamant he became in his insistence upon minor concessions like dinner waiting on the table, or at least hot in the oven, the last exactions left to shore his self-esteem. She had to force herself to hurry, though, for she was loathe to give impetus to an evening that she wished would go on forever. As she worked in the kitchen she kept the music box at hand on the cabinet, and every time it ran down she would pause in her work long enough to wind it and start it playing again. Just before it was time for Luke to arrive, she carried it into her bedroom and put it on the dresser.

The moment she heard Luke come in the door, she could tell that he was in a bad mood. Not that he slammed things or shouted or showed other signs of restrained violence. Luke’s bad moods didn’t work that way. They caused him to become guarded and withdrawn, a measure of the terrible desperation that made it imperative to erect defenses against the insight that would have acknowledged his essential failure. His failure was only the more merciless for being unexpected. In college, years ago, he had been handsome and charming and athletic, his prospects favorable. Since then, he had suffered a series of failures, always charged to bad luck, and now he sold real estate on commission for an agency that was not his own. It had become apparent that he lacked the ability to match his hopes, and he even lacked the knack of exploiting mediocrity. In fact, he was, or had been, an unintentional lie. In all innocence, he had deceived himself and Ella and all his friends. Of these, only he was still deceived.

“Darling, is that you?” she called, knowing very well that it was.

“Yes,” he answered, knowing that she knew.

He did not come directly into the kitchen, as he usually did, but went instead into their bedroom. Setting the table, two places in a house where even children had proved beyond the husband’s capacity, she could hear him moving around on the other side of the wall, and pretty soon she heard water running into the lavatory in the bathroom. The imperative thing, she thought, was somehow to prevent the encroachment of his mood upon hers. The fragile and shimmering spell of the evening must not be shattered for any reason whatever. She had a blind conviction that it could, if only it survived this threat, be sustained forever. She walked through the living room to their bedroom, and found him standing in the middle of the floor buttoning the cuffs of his shirt.

“Such a lovely evening!” she said.

“Is it?” He walked away from her, toward the dresser, without turning. “I hadn’t noticed. I had a bad day.”

“I’m sorry.”

She did not ask him what had been bad about his day. She didn’t want to know, felt a desperate need to avoid hearing it, but she knew immediately, with a first faint feeling of despair and hopelessness, that he was, unasked, going to tell her.

“I missed that sale I was working on,” he said. “I’m beginning to wonder if I’m not wasting my time with real estate. Maybe I ought to try something else.”

“Never mind,” she said. “Tomorrow will be better.”

He didn’t answer, and she saw, the terrible threat to her evening growing darker and more oppressive, that he was staring at the music box on the dresser.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“It’s a music box,” she said. “When you open it, it begins to play, and a little ballerina comes up and dances to the music.”

“Where did you get it?”

“At a shop I passed on my way home. It was in the window.”

“How much did it cost?”

She was tempted to lie, to make her extravagance seem a little less flagrant than it was. But then, before the lie could be told, she understood that evasion was impossible, and that somehow everything must be saved or lost on this issue.

“Ten dollars,” she said. And added, as if impelled to make worse what was already bad enough, “It was almost all the money I had.”

For a moment he did not move or speak. Then, still silent, he reached out and picked up the music box. There was in his movement an awful restraint, a sign that he was exercising the last measure of control, and the effect was to give it a quality of slow-motion and a stark clarity of detail. He raised the lid, and the ballerina arose upon her toes, but the mechanism had run down, and she stood poised and waiting in an absence of sound and motion. Luke’s thumb and index finger, big and brutal and incredibly ugly, began to twist the key. The tiny bells began to ring, the ballerina began to pirouette. He twisted and twisted and kept on twisting...

His name was Hadley. He had come, in response to her call, with two other men. For quite a long time they had remained in the kitchen, and she, sitting quietly on the edge of her bed with her feet primly together and her hands folded in her lap, could hear their movements and the low murmur of their voices. Now, at last, Hadley had come into the bedroom, which had grown dark as the light outside was drawn away by the sun, and he was sitting, after turning on a small bedside lamp, on the edge of a chair just outside the pale perimeter that the lamp cast. His hands were restless, and his voice was troubled.

“I don’t quite understand,” he said. “Please tell me again what happened.”

She stirred and sighed and lifted her eyes to the overcast of shadows below the ceiling.

“He broke my music box,” she said. “He was angry because I spent my last ten dollars for it, and he picked it up and wound it and wound it, and the spring broke inside, and it couldn’t play anymore. It will never play again.”

She was silent, hearing again the dying whimper of the broken spring, the shower of tiny sounds within her mind as her frail fantasy of happiness fell in a thousand glittering shards. The ballerina stood still as stone in a mute world.

“All right,” Hadley said. “Then what happened?”

“Then he put the music box back on the dresser and walked away without a word. Without even looking at me. He went into the kitchen and sat at his place at the table, but he didn’t eat. I think he must have been ashamed.” She paused again, considering his shame. “I sat down on the edge of the bed, just as I’m sitting now, and at first I couldn’t think or feel anything, not even anger; then I began to realize what Luke had done, but more than that, I began to understand what terrible things he must have suffered to make him do it. Poor lost Luke.”

Hadley made an abrupt gesture, seeming to fend off an intangible encroachment from the shadows.

“So you killed him.”

“Yes. I shot him. The gun was in the top dresser drawer. Luke always kept it loaded, and I got it and went into the kitchen and shot him.”

He stood up and rubbed his hands together and leaned toward her from the hips. His voice was curiously dull and deliberate, sustaining a kind of negative emphasis.

“You do not kill a man for breaking a music box,” he said. “You simply do not kill a man for breaking a music box!”

“No.” There was a faint note of surprise in her voice, and she seemed for a moment to be examining a vision of truth. “It’s really too absurd when you consider it, isn’t it? He was so futile, you see. His dying was so hard. It was taking so long.”

She lowered her eyes and stared at her folded hands, accepting a world in which there was no music or dancing or hope.

“Poor lost Luke,” she said again.