Free Black Alibi by Cornell Woolrich

was moving slowly up the main aisle of display, looking about her, assailed from either side by an advancing barrage of shrill, wheedling, poetic, and personally flattering cries that kept pace with her, to die out again forlornly behind her as she passed out of reach into the next vendor’s jurisdiction. Hands reached for her, tugged importunately at her clothing. Marta slapped them down again.
    “Here, nina , roses crying for you!”
    “Look, chiquita , carnations begging to be bought. Ten centavitos. Five. Any price you say. Only take them, take them!” It was late and the market was about to disband.
    Marta halted. “Here are some. Will these do, nina ?”
    Conchita glanced around, but without halting her ascent. “No, up here at the top. I always buy from this one at the end.”
    The stall she indicated, as a matter of fact, had a less sizable assortment to offer than many of those they had just passed. The vendor was an old woman with a face as finely lined as though mosquito netting had been drawn over it.
    “Some of these.” Conchita picked up a single white rose and held it to her face outside the veil, causing a small indentation to appear with indrawn breath.
    “Si, little, angel, si!” the vendor jabbered, bustling to collect them. “White roses, as beautiful, as young, as you are yourself.”
    “And gardenias,” Conchita instructed.
    Marta held out her arms for the unbound accumulation. “I’ll carry them, they may tear your clothes.” She handed the old woman a coin, turned to pick her way down the slippery steps.
    The vendor, however, was not yet satisfied. “Look, a little cluster of white violets to go with them. The last one left.” She laid one finger craftily alongside her nose for a moment, glanced after the retreating chaperon. “I’ve been saving them for you all day. Free! I give them to you free!” She pulled twice at the girl’s skirt, almost as though it were a bell cord.
    The girl took them, moved down the steps in the wake of her companion, holding them close to her face. They were platted together on a single, large leaf of some sort. She had extracted the thinly folded note twined around their stems even before she re-entered the carriage. She opened it with one hand, read it, holding it down out of sight on the side away from Marta, as they jounced back through the narrow, erratically turning streets on their way to the cemetery.
    Just a few words. The oldest message in the world, that said nothing, that said everything. “Sweetness of my life. Will you go there again today? I will be waiting. I have counted the hours all week long, since the last time. Sweetness of my life, have mercy on me.”
    Somehow she got it inside the lining of her glove, refolded, by thumb motion alone. Then she dipped her face to the violets once more. As the Senora Viuda had said, one couldn’t change the world.
    They came out of the older part of town with its tortuous, cobbled streets, where respectable, conservative families like hers lived, into one of the new semi-suburban sections, favored by foreigners and the more flashily prosperous who copied their ways—even to letting their daughters run around without an older woman in attendance. They traversed this along a straight, broad asphalted driveway, and beyond emerged into open country for awhile. Then in the distance ahead a symmetrical line of dark-green poplars began to peer over an intervening rise of the ground and, when they had topped it, suddenly seemed to spring forward to join the road, behind a stone wall that ran back as far as the eye could reach.
    It turned and followed the roadside for a while. All Saints Cemetery was known as the largest in the city, if not anywhere in the world. It was said of it that it was big enough to accommodate all the world’s dead at one time.
    On the opposite side of the road, buildings had sprung up once more, called into being to accommodate the living who on Sundays and certain religious