The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

  “Comfy in there last night?” he asked. I nodded and he went on. “That was John on the phone. He’s going to plead out tomorrow and take two years.” Robert shook his head. “Anyway, you’ve got tomorrow off. I’m going up to Concord to be at the sentencing.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills. He handed it to me.

  “What’s this for?” I said.

  Robert narrowed his eyes and looked at me. “Do you need it or not?” His voice was the hardest love I’d ever felt. I nodded. He turned around and started walking back to the shed. I watched him close the door. I climbed back in the Bronco and headed out onto the highway. I drove north, and crossed over into Vermont. There was still a huge black cloud in the sky over the oxbow. I drove up Route 5 and looked out over the burnt fields, still smoldering, scorched dead. Lord’s farm looked gray from the smoke. I drove up into the Northeast Kingdom. I never did find the courage to turn myself in, and things got worse. I spent the winter at a logging camp in Quebec.

  ~ * ~

  I called once, when I hit a jam out in North Dakota. I called from a phone booth outside a diner. I recognized John’s voice the second he spoke. I hung up. Later, much later, in another life, with another name, we were driving and someone handed me a road atlas. I flipped through it and found Vermont and New Hampshire were together on the same page. I started tracing their shared border, the Connecticut River, north toward Canada. I dropped the atlas when my finger reached the oxbow. For just that split second, right on the tip of my finger, the surface of the map was scorching hot. I heard the roar of the fire, the little white house burning. The air rushing to be eaten by the flames. I smelled the gasoline. Riding across the top of the fire on a black horse was Bill Allen. Three dark shapes followed swiftly after him, the burning wasps in their long black hair, chasing him. Catching him and dragging him down into the fire, screaming.

  ~ * ~

  Years later, on the security ward at Western State Hospital near Tacoma, I saw a man in a straitjacket, strapped to a gurney. I walked over to him and spoke.

  “I didn’t know they used straitjackets anymore.”

  He could barely move his head. “Well, they do.” The smell of ether was everywhere. He was quiet as a white-jacketed doctor walked by. “Say, Mac, scratch my shoulder, will you?”

  I slowly reached down and began scratching the outside of the thick canvas that bound him. Solid steel mesh covered the ward windows.

  “Harder,” he said. “I can barely feel it.” He looked up at me. “I think they’re trying to save on the heat. Aren’t you cold?” I shook my head. “I’m cold all the time,” he said.

  I dug my nails into the canvas on his right shoulder. “My name is John Wilson,” I said.

  He looked at me, his eyes wide. “That’s my name,” he said softly.

  I stopped scratching the straitjacket. “What’s your middle name?” I asked.

  He shook his head slightly and closed his eyes. “Same as yours,” he said. He shivered. It was cold. But my paper gown was soaked with dry sweat and my face was hot. I could smell smoke.

  >

  ~ * ~

  MONICA WOOD

  That One Autumn

  from Glimmer Train

  That one autumn, when Marie got to the cabin, something looked wrong. She took in the familiar view: the clapboard bungalow she and Ernie had inherited from his father, the bushes and trees that had grown up over the years, the dock pulled in for the season. She sat in the idling car, reminded of those “find the mistake” puzzles John used to pore over as a child, intent on locating mittens on the water skier, milk bottles in the parlor. Bent in a corner somewhere over the softening page, her blue-eyed boy would search for hours, convinced that after every wrong thing had been identified, more wrong things remained.

  Sunlight pooled in the dooryard. The day gleamed, the clean Maine air casting a sober whiteness over everything. The gravel turnaround seemed vaguely disarranged. Scanning the line of spruce that shielded the steep slope to the lake’s edge, Marie looked for movement. Behind the thick mesh screen of the front porch she could make out the wicker tops of the chairs. She turned off the ignition, trying to remember whether she’d taken time to straighten up the porch when she was last here, in early August, the weekend of Ernie’s birthday. He and John had had one of their fights, and it was possible that in the ensuing clamor and silence she had forgotten to straighten up the porch. It was possible.

  She got out of the car and checked around. Everything looked different after just a few weeks: the lake blacker through the part in the trees, the brown-eyed Susans gone weedy, the chairs on the porch definitely, definitely moved. Ernie had pushed a chair in frustration, she remembered. And John had responded in kind, upending the green one on his way out the door and down to the lake. They’d begun that weekend, like so many others, with such good intentions, only to discover anew how mismatched they were, parents to son. So, she had straightened the chairs — she had definitely straightened them — while outside Ernie’s angry footsteps crackled over the gravel and, farther away, John’s body hit the water in a furious smack.

  She minced up the steps and pushed open the screen door, which was unlocked. “Hello?” she called out fearfully. The inside door was slightly ajar. Take the dog, Ernie had told her, she’ll be good company. She wished now she had, though the dog, a Yorkie named Honey Girl, was a meek little thing and no good in a crisis. I don’t want company, Ernie. It’s a week, it’s forty miles, I’m not leaving you. Marie was sentimental, richly so, which is why her wish to be alone after seeing John off to college had astonished them both. But you’re still weak, Ernie argued. Look how pale you are. She packed a box of watercolors and a how-to book in her trunk as Ernie stood by, bewildered. I haven’t been alone in years, she told him. I want to find out what it feels like. John had missed Vietnam by six merciful months, then he’d chosen Berkeley, as far from his parents as he could get, and now Marie wanted to be alone. Ernie gripped her around the waist and she took a big breath of him: man, dog, house, yard, mill. She had known him most of her life, and from time to time, when she could bear to think about it, she wondered whether their uncommon closeness was what had made their son a stranger.

  You be careful, he called after her as she drove off. The words came back to her now as she peered through the partly open door at a wedge of kitchen she barely recognized. She saw jam jars open on the counter, balled-up dishtowels, a box of oatmeal upended and spilling a bit of oatmeal dust, a snaggled hairbrush, a red lipstick ground to a nub. Through the adjacent window she caught part of a rumpled sleeping bag in front of the fireplace, plus an empty glass and a couple of books.

  Marie felt a little breathless, but not afraid, recognizing the disorder as strictly female. She barreled in, searching the small rooms like an angry, old-fashioned mother with a hickory switch. She found the toilet filled with urine, the back hall cluttered with camping gear, and the two bedrooms largely untouched except for a grease-stained knapsack thrown across Marie and Ernie’s bed. By the time she got back out to the porch to scan the premises again, Marie had the knapsack in hand and sent it skidding across the gravel. The effort doubled her over, for Ernie was right: her body had not recovered from the thing it had suffered. As she held her stomach, the throbbing served only to stoke her fury.

  Then she heard it: the sound of a person struggling up the steep, rocky path from the lake. Swishing grass. A scatter of pebbles. The subtle pulse of forward motion.

  It was a girl. She came out of the trees into the sunlight, naked except for a towel bundled under one arm. Seeing the car, she stopped, then looked toward the cabin, where Marie uncoiled herself slowly, saying, “Who the hell are you?”

  The girl stood there, apparently immune to shame. A delicate ladder of ribs showed through her paper-white skin. Her damp hair was fair and thin, her pubic hair equally thin and light. “Shit,” she said. “Busted. “ Then she cocked her head, her face filled with a defiance Marie had s
een so often in her own son that it barely registered.

  “Cover yourself, for God’s sake,” Marie said.

  The girl did, in her own good time, arranging the towel over her shoulders and covering her small breasts. Her walk was infuriatingly casual as she moved through the dooryard, picked up the knapsack, and sauntered up the steps, past Marie, and into the cabin. Marie followed her in. She smelled like the lake.

  “Get out before I call the police,” Marie said.

  “Your phone doesn’t work,” the girl said peevishly. “And I can’t say much for your toilet, either.”

  Of course nothing worked. They’d turned everything off, buttoned the place up after their last visit, John and Ernie at each other’s throats as they hauled the dock up the slope, Ernie too slow on his end, John too fast on his, both of them arguing about whether or not Richard Nixon was a crook and should have resigned in disgrace.

  “I said get out. This is my house.”

  The girl pawed through the knapsack. She hauled out a pair of panties and slipped them on. Then a pair of frayed jeans, and a mildewy shirt that Marie could smell across the room. As she toweled her hair it became lighter, nearly white. She leveled Marie with a look as blank and stolid as a pillar.

  “I said get out,” Marie snapped, jangling her car keys.

  “I heard you.”

  “Then do it.”

  The girl dropped the towel on the floor, reached into the knapsack once more, extracted a comb, combed her flimsy, apparitional hair, and returned the comb. Then she pulled out a switchblade. It opened with a crisp, perfunctory snap.

  “Here’s the deal,” she said. “I get to be in charge, and you get to shut up.”

  Marie shot out of the cabin and sprinted into the dooryard, where a bolt of pain brought her up short and windless. The girl was too quick in any case, catching Marie by the wrist before she could reclaim her breath. “Don’t try anything,” the girl said, her voice low and cold. “I’m unpredictable.” She glanced around. “You expecting anybody?”

  “No,” Marie said, shocked into telling the truth.

  “Then it’s just us girls,” she said, smiling a weird, thin smile that impelled Marie to reach behind her, holding the car for support. The girl presented her water-wrinkled palm and Marie forked over the car keys.

  “Did you bring food?”

  “In the trunk.”

  The girl held up the knife. “Stay right there.”

  Marie watched, terrified, as the girl opened the trunk and tore into a box of groceries, shoving a tomato into her mouth as she reached for some bread. A bloody trail of tomato juice sluiced down her neck.

  Studying the girl — her quick, panicky movements — Marie felt her fear begin to settle into a morbid curiosity. This skinny girl seemed an unlikely killer; her tiny wrists looked breakable, and her stunning whiteness gave her the look of a child ghost. In a matter of seconds, a thin, reluctant vine of maternal compassion twined through Marie and burst into violent bloom.

  “When did you eat last?” Marie asked her.

  “None of your business,” the girl said, cramming her mouth full of bread.

  “How old are you?”

  The girl finished chewing, then answered: “Nineteen. What’s it to you?”

  “I have a son about your age.”

  “Thrilled to know it,” the girl said, handing a grocery sack to Marie. She herself hefted the box and followed Marie into the cabin, her bare feet making little animal sounds on the gravel. Once inside, she ripped into a box of Cheerios.

  “Do you want milk with that?” Marie asked her.

  All at once the girl welled up, and she nodded, wiping her eyes with the heel of one hand, turning her head hard right, hard left, exposing her small, translucent ears. “This isn’t me,” she sniffled. She lifted the knife, but did not give it over. “It’s not even mine.”

  “Whose is it?” Marie said steadily, pouring milk into a bowl.

  “My boyfriend’s.” The girl said nothing more for a few minutes, until the cereal was gone, another bowl poured, and that, too, devoured. She wandered over to the couch, a convertible covered with anchors that Ernie had bought to please John, who naturally never said a word about it.

  “Where is he, your boyfriend?” Marie asked finally.

  “Out getting supplies.” The girl looked up quickly, a snap of the eyes revealing something Marie thought she understood.

  “How long’s he been gone?”

  The girl waited. “Day and a half.”

  Marie nodded. “Maybe his car broke down.”

  “That’s what I wondered.” The girl flung a spindly arm in the general direction of the kitchen. “I’m sorry about the mess. My boyfriend’s hardly even paper-trained.”

  “Then maybe you should think about getting another boyfriend.”

  “I told him, no sleeping on the beds. We didn’t sleep on your beds.”

  “Thank you,” Marie said.

  “It wasn’t my idea to break in here.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t.”

  “He’s kind of hiding out, and I’m kind of with him.”

  “I see,” Marie said, scanning the room for weapons: fireplace poker, dictionary, curtain rod. She couldn’t imagine using any of these things on the girl, whose body appeared held together with thread.

  “He knocked over a gas station. Two, actually, in Portland.”

  “That sounds serious.”

  She smiled a little. “He’s a serious guy.”

  “You could do better, don’t you think?” Marie asked. “Pretty girl like you.”

  The girl’s big eyes narrowed. “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-eight.”

  “You look younger.”

  “Well, I’m not,” Marie said. “My name is Marie, by the way.”

  “I’m Tracey.”

  “Tell me, Tracey,” Marie said. “Am I your prisoner?”

  “Only until he gets back. We’ll clear out after that.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Canada. Which is where he should’ve gone about six years ago.”

  “A vet?”

  Tracey nodded. “War sucks.”

  “Well, now, that’s extremely profound.”

  “Don’t push your luck, Marie,” Tracey said. “It’s been a really long week.”

  They spent the next hours sitting on the porch, Marie thinking furiously in a chair, Tracey on the steps, the knife glinting in her fist. At one point Tracey stepped down into the gravel, dropped her jeans, and squatted over the spent irises, keeping Marie in her sights the whole time. Marie, who had grown up in a different era entirely, found this fiercely embarrassing. A wind came up on the lake; a pair of late loons called across the water. The only comfort Marie could manage was that the boyfriend, whom she did not wish to meet, not at all, clearly had run out for good. Tracey seemed to know this, too, chewing on her lower lip, facing the dooryard as if the hot desire of her stare could make him materialize.

  “What’s his name?” Marie asked.

  “None of your business. We met in a chemistry class.” She smirked at Marie’s surprise. “Premed.”

  “Are you going back to school?”

  Tracey threw back her head and cackled, showing two straight rows of excellent teeth. “Yeah, right. He’s out there right now paying our preregistration.”

  Marie composed herself, took some silent breaths. “It’s just that I find it hard to believe —”

  “People like you always do,” Tracey said. She slid Marie a look. “You’re never willing to believe the worst of someone.”

  Marie closed her eyes, wanting Ernie. She imagined him leaving work about now, coming through the mill gates with his lunch bucket and cap, shoulders bowed at the prospect of the empty house. She longed to be waiting there, to sit on the porch with him over a pitcher of lemonade, comparing days, which hadn’t changed much over the years, really, but always held some ordinary pleasures. Today they would have wonder
ed about John, thought about calling him, decided against it.

  “You married?” Tracey asked, as if reading her mind.

  “Twenty years. We met in seventh grade.”

  “Then what are you doing up here alone?”

  “I don’t know,” Marie said. But suddenly she did, she knew exactly, looking at this girl who had parents somewhere waiting.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” the girl said.