The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

  There were dog tracks on the back porch. They were the prints of a midsized animal, red and clearly defined as they circled the body in the kitchen, then crisscrossing over themselves and heading out the door, fading down the steps and onto the driveway before disappearing into the yard. Lieutenant Sales sent a man to knock on doors in the neighborhood and find out who let their dogs off the leash. He interviewed the paperboy and Clyde’s mother. He went back to the station and checked Pat and Clyde’s records — both clean. When he finally went to sleep that night, the small warmth of his cat tucked up behind his knees, Lieutenant Sales thought about the feel of satin panties, missing slippers, stolen welcome mats, dandelion seeds from a yard with no dandelions, and the kind of killer who shuts off the oven.

  ~ * ~

  A month before Pat and Clyde were murdered, Mrs. Mitchell was fixing the toilet. Her husband passed by on his way to the kitchen, paused in the doorway, shook his head, and told her that she was too good for him. The heavy porcelain top was off; her arms elbow deep in rusty water. The man she had married was standing at the entrance to the bathroom and he was speaking to her, but she was not thinking about him, and so she did not respond. She was concentrating on the particular tone in the pipes she was trying to clear. It was this same ability to turn her attention into focus, like a lighthouse whose spinning had unexpectedly stopped, that made people follow her.

  Mr. Mitchell went into the kitchen and began popping popcorn. The kernels cracked against the insides of the kettle as his words settled into her, and when, with a twist of the coat hanger in her hand beneath the water, she stopped the ringing of the pipes, Mrs. Mitchell sensed in the quiet that came next that her husband had done something wrong. She had known in this same way before he told her about Miguel. A breeze came through the window and made the hair on her wet arms rise. She pulled her hands from the toilet and thought to herself, I fixed it.

  When Miguel came into their home, she had taken all the sorrow she felt at his existence and turned it into a fierce motherly love. Mrs. Mitchell thought her husband would be grateful; instead he seemed to hold it against her. He became dodgy and spiteful. Her mind was full of failings, but all she understood was that her husband was having difficulty loving her, because it seemed as if she didn’t make mistakes. It was the closest she ever came to leaving; but she hadn’t expected the boy.

  Miguel spent the first three months of his life in America asking to go home. When the fourth month came he began to sleepwalk. In the dark he wandered downstairs to the kitchen, emptied the garbage can onto the floor, and curled up inside. The next morning Mrs. Mitchell would find him asleep, shoulders in the barrel, feet in the coffee grounds and leftovers. He told her he was looking for his mother’s head. She had been decapitated in the bus accident and now she stepped from the corners of Miguel’s dreams at night and beckoned him with her arms, tiny chicks resting on her shoulders, pecking at the empty neck.

  Mrs. Mitchell suggested that they make her a new one. She brought materials for papier-mâché. The strips of newspaper felt like bandages as she helped Miguel dip them in glue and smooth them over the surface of the inflated balloon. They fashioned a nose and lips out of cardboard. Once it was dry, Miguel described his mother’s face and they painted the skin brown, added yarn for hair, cut eyelashes out of construction paper. Mrs. Mitchell took a pair of gold earrings, poked them through where they’d drawn the ears, and said, heart sinking, She’s beautiful. Miguel nodded. He smiled. He put his mother’s head on top of the bookcase in his room and stopped sleeping in the garbage.

  Sometimes when Mrs. Mitchell checked on the boy at night she’d feel the head looking at her. It was unnerving. She imagined her husband making love to the papier-mâché face and discovered a hate so strong and hard it made her afraid of herself. She considered swiping the head and destroying it, but she remembered how skinny and pitiful the boy’s legs had looked against her kitchen floor. Then Miguel began to love her. She suddenly felt capable of anything. She thumbed her nose at the face in the corner. She held her heart open.

  Mrs. Mitchell was raised by two of her aunts in a house near the Columbia River. Her mother had her when she was sixteen, then died a few years later of a botched abortion. Mrs. Mitchell kept a picture of her mother next to the mirror in her room, and whenever she checked her reflection, her eyes would naturally turn from her own face to that of the woman who gave birth to her. The photo was black and white and creased near the edges; she was fifteen, her hair in braids, the end of one strand stuck between her lips. It made Mrs. Mitchell think of stories she’d heard of women who spent their lives spinning — years of passing flax through their mouths to make thread would leave them disfigured, lower lips drooping off their faces; a permanent look of being beaten.

  The aunts who raised her were expert marksmen. They built a shooting range on an area of property behind the house. As a child, it was Mrs. Mitchell’s job to set up the targets and fetch them iced tea and ammo. She kept a glass jar full of shells in the back of her closet, shiny gold casings from her aunts’ collection of .22-calibers and .45s. They made a shooting station out of an old shed, two tables set up with sandbags to hold the guns, nestling the shape of heavy metal as the pieces were placed down.

  When she was twelve years old the aunts gave her a rifle. She already knew the shooting stances, and she practiced them with her new gun every day after school. She could hit a target while kneeling, crouching, lying down, and standing tall, hips parallel to the barrel and her waist turned, the same way the aunts taught her to pose when a picture was being taken to look thin. She picked off tin cans and old metal signs and polka-dotted the paper outlines of men.

  Mrs. Mitchell remembered this when she pulled into her driveway, glanced over the fence, and saw her husband having sex in the doorway of their neighbor’s house. She turned to Miguel in the passenger seat and told him to close his eyes. The boy covered his face with his hands and sat quietly while she got out of the car. Mrs. Mitchell watched her husband moving back and forth and felt her feet give way from the ground. She had the sensation of being caught in a river, the current pulling her body outwards, tugging at her ankles, and she wondered why she wasn’t being swept away until she realized that she was holding on to the fence. The wood felt smooth and worn, like the handle of her first gun, and she used it to pull herself back down.

  Later she thought of the look on Pat’s face. It reminded Mrs. Mitchell of the Tin Woodman from The Wizard of Oz — disarmingly lovely and greasy with expectation. In the book she bought for Miguel she’d read that the Woodman had once been real, but his ax kept slipping and he’d dismembered himself, slowly exchanging his flesh piece by piece for hollow metal. Mrs. Mitchell thought Pat’s body would rattle with the same kind of emptiness, but it didn’t; it fell with the heavy tone of meat. As she waited for the echo Mrs. Mitchell heard a small cough from the kitchen, the kind a person does in polite society to remind someone else that they are there. She followed it and found Clyde in his slippers, the knife in the roast.

  Hello, she said. I just shot your wife. The beans were boiling; the water frothing over the sides of the pan and sizzling into the low flame beneath. Mrs. Mitchell would not let the dinner be ruined. She turned off the oven and spun all the burners to zero.

  The aunts never married. They still lived in the house where they raised their niece. Occasionally they sent her photographs, recipes, information on the NRA, or obituaries of people she had known clipped from the local newspaper. When a reporter called Mrs. Mitchell asking questions about Pat and Clyde, she thought back to all the notices her aunts had sent over the years, and said: They were good neighbors and wonderful people. I don’t know who would have done something like this. They will be greatly missed. The truth was that she felt very little at their loss. It was hard to forgive herself for this, so she didn’t try.

  She waited patiently through the following day and night for someone to come for her. On Monday morning she woke up and let the d
og out. She made a sandwich for Miguel and fit it in his lunchbox beside a thermos of milk. She poured juice into a glass and cereal into a bowl. Then she locked herself in the bathroom and watched her hands shake. She remembered that she had wanted to cover Clyde with something. Falling out of the box, the cereal had sounded crisp and new like water on rocks, but it quickly turned into a soggy mess that stayed with her as she left him, stepped over Pat, and picked up the welcome mat with her gloves. She could still see her husband moving back and forth on top of it. She wanted to make Home Sweet Home disappear, but the longest she could bring herself to touch it was the end of the driveway, and she left it in a garbage can on the street.

  She found that she could not say good-bye. Not when her husband pounded on the door to take a shower and not when Miguel asked if he could brush his teeth. She sat on the toilet and listened to them move about the house and leave. Later, she watched a policeman wrap her neighbor’s house in yellow tape. To double it around a tree in the yard he circled the trunk with his arms. It was a brief embrace and she thought, That tree felt nothing.

  In the afternoon, when the sun began to slant through the western windows, Lieutenant Sales crossed the Mitchells’ front yard. He was carrying a chewed-up slipper in a bag, jostling the dandelions and sending seeds of white fluff adrift. Mrs. Mitchell saw him coming. She turned the key in the lock, and once she was beyond the bathroom she ran her fingers through her hair, smoothing down the rough spots. The bell rang. The dog barked. She opened the door, and offered him coffee.

  ~ * ~

  Miguel turned nine years old that summer. In the past two years he’d spent with the Mitchells the boy had grown no more than an inch, but with the warm weather that June he’d suddenly sprouted — his legs stretching like brown sugar taffy tight over his new knobby bones, as if the genes of his American father had been lying dormant, biding their time until the right combination of spring breezes and processed food kissed them awake. He began to trip over himself. On his way home from baseball practice that Monday, he caught one of his newly distended feet on a trash can, just outside the line of yellow police tape that closed in Pat and Clyde’s yard. Miguel fell to the sidewalk, smacking his hands against the concrete. The barrel toppled over beside him and out came a welcome mat. Home Sweet Home.

  Miguel was not the best student, but he had made friends easily once he hit several home runs in gym class. Norman and Greg Kessler, the most popular kids in school, chose him for their team and for their friend, replacing Little Mike Findleman, who had never been that good in the first place. Norman and Greg helped him with English, defended him against would-be attackers, and told him they had seen his father naked.

  The boys claimed they had looked down from the window of their mother’s minivan and seen Mr. Mitchell drive past, stripped bare from the waist down. There was a woman in the car with him and she was leaning over the gearshift. It’s true, said the twins. Miguel made them swear on the Bible, on a stack of Red Sox cards, and finally on their grandfather’s grave, which they did, bikes thrown aside in the grass and sweaty hands pressed on the polished marble of his years. At dinner that night the boy watched his father eating. The angle of his jaw clenched and turned.

  Miguel felt a memory push past hot dogs, past English, past Hostess cupcakes and his collection of Spiderman comic books. He was five years old and asked his mother where his father was. She was making coffee — squeezing the grounds through a sieve made out of cloth and wire. He’d collected eggs from their chickens for breakfast. He was holding them in his hands and they were still warm. His mother took one from him. This is the world and we are here, she said, and pointed to the bottom half of the egg. Your father is there. She ran her finger up along the edge and tapped the point with a dark red nail. Then she cracked the yolk in a pan and threw the rest of the egg in the garbage. He retrieved it later and pushed his fingertips back and forth across the slippery inner membrane until the shell came apart into pieces.

  Miguel picked up the doormat and shook it to get the dust off. It seemed like something Mrs. Mitchell might be fond of. That morning he had kept watch through the bathroom keyhole. She was out of sight, but he caught the scent of her worry. He knew she needed something.

  In Caracas he had gone through the trash regularly, looking for things to play with and at times for something to eat. Ever since he heard about his father being naked on the highway, he had been remembering more about his life there, and even reverting to some of his old habits; as if the non sequitur of his father’s nudity had tenderly shaken him awake. He lay in bed at night and looked into the eyes of the papier-mâché head for guidance. He had two lives now, two countries, and two mothers. Soon he would find another life without his father, and another, when he went away to college, and another life, and another, and another, and another; each of them thin, fragile casings echoing the hum of what had gone before.

  The boy walked into the kitchen and found his American mother sitting with a strange man. They both held steaming mugs of coffee. Buster was under the table, waking from his afternoon nap. He saw Miguel and thumped his tail halfheartedly against the floor. The adults turned. Now what have you got there?

  Lieutenant Sales took Home Sweet Home in his hands. He felt it was what he had been looking for. The twisted pink skin where the shark had bitten him began to itch. It had been tingling all afternoon. He hadn’t had sensation there for years — the buildup of scar tissue had left him numb — but there was something in the look of the boy and the feel of the rope that held possibility, and excitement rose like fear within him, alongside the memory of closing teeth. Later, in the lab, the welcome mat would reveal tiny spots of Pat’s blood, dog saliva, gunpowder, dead ants, mud, fertilizer, and footprints — but not the impression of Mr. Mitchell’s knees, or the hesitation of his lonely wife on the doorstep, or the hunger of his son in the garbage. All of this had been shaken off.

  Lieutenant Sales would leave the Mitchells’ house that afternoon with the same thrill he’d had when the shark passed and he realized his leg was still there. He was exhilarated and then exhausted, as though his life had been drained, and he knew then that he had gone as far as he could go. Home Sweet Home would lead him back to the beginning of a murder he could not solve. There would be no scar, just the sense that he missed something, and the familiar taste of things not done. For now, he reached out with a kind of hope and accepted the welcome mat as a gift.

  Mrs. Mitchell put her arm around Miguel’s shoulders and waited for Lieutenant Sales to arrest her. She would continue to wait in the weeks ahead, as suspects were raised and then dismissed and headlines changed and funerals were planned. The possibilities of these moments passed over her like shadows. When they were gone she was left standing chilled.

  Clyde’s mother arranged for closed caskets. In the pew Mrs. Mitchell sat quietly. Her husband cracked knuckles beside her. He was thinking about the way Clyde’s father died — his chest pressed hard into the nothing of concrete. Mr. Mitchell was sure whoever rigged the lift had killed Pat and her husband. He worried that he could be next. He thought, Who would hold my hand? He reached for his wife and her fingers were cold.

  When Mr. Mitchell first learned what had happened to his lover he had opened his closet and started to pack. His family listened to suitcases being dragged down from the attic, the swing of hangers, zipper teeth, the straps of leather buckles. Things from their home began to go missing. They reappeared when Lieutenant Sales came by. They disappeared again after the funerals. Then Mr. Mitchell said he was leaving, and his wife felt her throat clutch. She wanted to ask him where he would go; she wanted to ask him what she had done this for; she wanted to ask him why he no longer loved her but instead she asked for his son.

  She had watched Miguel hand the welcome mat to the detective, and as it passed by her she felt an ache in the back of her mouth, as though she hadn’t eaten for days. Lieutenant Sales turned Home Sweet Home over in his hands. He placed it carefully on the kitchen tabl
e and Mrs. Mitchell saw the word Sweet. She remembered the milk she had made for the boy when he arrived, and sensed that this would not be the end of her. She could hear the steady breathing of her sleeping dog. She could smell the coffee. She felt the small frame of Miguel steady beneath her hand. These bones, she thought, were everything. Hey sport, Mrs. Mitchell asked. Is that for me? The boy nodded, and she held him close.

  >

  ~ * ~

  SCOTT WOLVEN

  Controlled Burn

  from Harpur Palate

  It was a bad winter and a worse spring. It was the summer Bill Allen lived and died, the sweltering summer I landed a job cutting trees for Robert Wilson’s scab-logging outfit near Orford, New Hampshire. June boiled itself away into the heavy steam of July. Heat devils rose in waves off the blacktop as timber trucks rolled in. By the end of July, we switched gears and started cutting stove wood. I was cutting eight cords a day while Robert worked the hydraulic splitter. Then we’d deliver it in one of our dump trucks. Some men drove to the woodlot to pick up their own. Some of them had white salt marks on their boots and jackets from sweat — some of them smelled like beer. Most of them smelled like gasoline. They didn’t say much, just paid for their wood and left with it in their pickup trucks. They were either busy working or busy living their lies, which is work in itself. I knew about that. The hard work crushed one empty beer can day after another, adding to my lifetime pile of empties. Summer moved on, gray in spite of the bright sun.