In this story Sheriff Willets worries about how to handle the death of Matt Thompson. He was found dead in his kitchen, by his daughter Sue, who claims to have slept through the night and heard nothing. The death was brutal; Thompson was battered to death with a wrench.
Phil Canby, 59 years old, had recently proposed to Sue. Sue is only 19 years old, and her father was determined that she would not marry Phil, who lived with his daughter, her husband, and their infant son on the same street, two houses away. The neighbor who lives between the two families has testified that the infant was crying all evening, and the implication is that Phil left the baby alone while he should have been babysitting, entered the Thompson's house and killed Sue's father.
Sheriff Willets knows that the people of Pottersville have already decided that Phil is the murderer, but he doesn't want to arrest a man just because of the town's consensus. The other obvious suspect is Sue, but it is hard to believe she would kill her father. And the Sheriff knows that there is no real proof that either Sue or Phil committed the crime. As he reviews the case, he looks back to the past for answers.
This was one of four stories that I read this week from Tales for a Stormy Night by Dorothy Salisbury Davis. All four stories were from 1952 or 1953, although the collection has stories written from the 1950s into the early 1980s. Based on the high quality of these four stories, I will continue to read from this collection in the next few months. The Introduction by the author was both interesting and informative, almost conversational in tone.
This story was adapted for TV for Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1960.
