Lucille Fletcher
Published: 1975
Total Pages: 162
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In the daily life of a New York cabdriver almost anything is possible, but what happened to David Marks was a horror story that could only have been devised by a master villain, one who combined brilliance with desperation. David Marks, twenty-eight, the bereaved father of two young boys, taught English by day in a junior high school. At night he moonlighted by driving a cab through the streets of New York City, still filled with grief over the death a few months earlier of his young wife. The story began with an act of chivalry, or so he regarded it. On a moonlight night in spring he is hailed by a beautiful girl who asks him to take her to Stamford, Connecticut. If he would get her there by eight o'clock and keep the trip a secret, she would pay him eighty dollars. Intrigued, David consents and carefully omits the entry from his trip log. He went that night, again a few nights later, and finally a fateful third time. The destination was a large white Colonial house set back from the road in an exclusive small settlement near Stamford. The house was always dark and its grounds deserted. Each time he was asked to park out on the road and stay with the cab while the girl disappeared inside for exactly one hour. She volunteered nothing about the nature of her mission, and when he asked, she was evasive and begged him again each time to keep the trip a secret. When he drove her back to the city, she would make him drop her at some street corner and disappear just as mysteriously as she had originally appeared. On the third trip to Stamford, she did not come out after the specified hour had passed, and David felt impelled to look for her. He went into the silent house, and began to search. He did not find the girl, instead he discovered a dead man, murdered, shot through the head. Most horrible of all, he recognized the corpse and realized that he himself would be the major suspect. He has a motive to murder the man who had been the hit-and-run killer of his wife. David has been framed, and now he must find the killer. Could it have been the girl--the beautiful, mysterious girl? Now he knows he must find her.
