The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 Read online

  ~ * ~

  School made Shelley feel as if she were already dead. It took her forever to get dressed to go there, and then it took her forever to walk the six long blocks that got her to its front door. To pass the time, she went looking for Miss Caroline Edgerton on Main Street, through the front window in the offices of Carmeth, Brane, and DeVoe, where she worked. Sometimes Miss Edgerton sat at the front desk there and answered the phone for hours. When she had the cat with her, the cat sat on the desk near the phone and looked up every time it rang. Sometimes the cat draped itself over the phone, as if it were a chicken and the phone was its egg. When it was like that and the phone rang, Miss Edgerton would lift the cat gently so that she could pick up the phone. She was never angry or impatient with the cat. She was better to Edelweiss than most parents were to their children. She was certainly better to Edelweiss than Shelley’s parents were to Shelley. This morning, though, neither Miss Edgerton nor the cat was anywhere to be seen. The woman behind the front desk was young and weighted down under a cascade of falls and hairpieces. Shelley went around the back to make sure Miss Edgerton’s car was in the parking lot — it was, right next to the bright red Porsche that belonged to Mr. DeVoe — and then she went to school, thinking about palm trees as she went. Amanda came from New York State someplace. She’d never seen a palm tree in person until her parents had moved here when she was still in junior high. Palm trees were the first thing she and Shelley had talked about, in Shelley’s backyard, on the day they met.

  “They don’t look like real trees at all,” Amanda had said, and then she’d seen Miss Caroline Edgerton come out her back door to potter around in her yard.

  Shelley went to her locker and stowed away most of her books in it. She brought books home every night, because if she didn’t, her parents screamed at her, her mother especially. They gave her lectures about how she would never amount to anything, and how she’d end up like those homeless people who slept every night on Segovia Avenue. She brought the books home, and she laid them out across the desk in her bedroom, but that was all she did with them. If she had homework and knew about it, she ignored it. Mostly she didn’t have homework, because if you weren’t in the college track, the teachers didn’t see any point in giving any. She did go to class. Not going was the surest way to get the principal to call your parents, and Shelley lived to make sure she wasn’t bothered by her parents.

  She got her English book — Explorations in Literature, a complete bore — and headed down the hall to her homeroom. She would have skipped homeroom if she could have. It was nothing but sitting in a sea of people who didn’t want to talk to her and listening to announcements about things she wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Chess Club. Glee Club. Future Teachers of America. Homeroom, though, was the one thing she could not skip, not ever. If you skipped that, you were counted absent for the entire day.

  She was just adjusting the strap on her shoulder bag for the fiftieth time when she saw Amanda in the hall, and for the first few moments she didn’t pay attention. Amanda didn’t much like talking to her in school. Usually, they passed each other in the halls without even saying hello, and saved their conversations for after school, in their own bedrooms. Their houses were only across the street from each other. Shelley started to go on by and take her seat in Room 122, but Amanda snaked out her hand and grabbed her elbow.

  “Go to the girls’ room,” Amanda said. “I’ll meet you there.”

  Shelley hesitated. It really wasn’t all right to miss homeroom, although having to go to the bathroom was usually a good enough excuse for being tardy. She looked through the window in the door at Miss Carroll, who was wearing a sleeveless dress and a crucifix. She wore the crucifix because somebody’s father objected to the school board that they had a “Satanist” teaching in Matahatchee, by which it turned out he meant a Catholic. Shelley prodded at her hair. The school’s air-conditioning was only half working. Her hair was full of sweat.

  “Go ahead,” Amanda said. “This is important.”

  Miss Carroll looked up and saw Shelley standing outside the door. Shelley made hand motions meant to explain that she was heading to the bathroom. Miss Carroll nodded. In Shelley’s imaginary universe — the one where she and Amanda were masterminds, committing murder after murder, whenever they felt it was necessary — Miss Carroll was the second to go.

  In the girls’ room, Amanda was standing near the sinks, putting on lipstick. She put on makeup four or five times a day. Her hair never looked full of sweat. Today she was wearing the short little kick-pleat skirt that was practically the uniform of the Key Club. If anybody wore one just like it who didn’t belong, the Key Club girls ganged up on her on the athletic field and made sure it would never happen again.

  Shelley put down her books on a corner of the sink. She didn’t want to put on makeup. She didn’t want to look in the mirror at all. Mirrors made it impossible to forget that she had acne running all across the ridge of her jaw.

  “What is it?” she asked, folding her arms across her chest. “I thought I wasn’t supposed to talk to you here. I thought it would compromise the operation.”

  “You aren’t supposed to talk to me in public,” Amanda said. “It would compromise the operation. If everybody knew we were friends, they’d guess right away.”

  “They’d guess about Miss Edgerton? Why? Why would our being friends mean we’d done something to —”

  “Shh,” Amanda said. She abandoned the lipstick for some kind of powder. When Shelley put on makeup, it seemed to clot up on her skin. In a few hours, she looked as if she were walking around with pieces of plaster clinging to her face. Amanda’s makeup didn’t even look like makeup. When Amanda’s makeup had been on Amanda for a few hours, it just seemed to disappear.

  “I don’t think it has anything to do with Miss Edgerton,” Shelley said. “I think that’s just a big cover so that you don’t have to talk to me in front of your popular friends. I mean, for God’s sake. What is that? Amanda the supercheerleader.”

  Amanda had gone from powder to something for her eyebrows. “You could be popular, too, if you put in a little effort. I don’t know what’s wrong with you that you want to be by yourself all the time.”

  “I don’t want to be by myself all the time. I want to be with you.”

  “Well, that wouldn’t make much sense, under the circumstances. Especially today. Did you see her? She’s here.”

  “Who’s here?”

  “Miss Edgerton,” Amanda said. “Mr. DeVoe is here doing something or the other, and she’s come with him. She brought her cat, too. It’s in with Miss Lazio in the secretaries’ place, you know, the big room in front of the principal’s office. Anyway, she’s here, and I hung around the office for a little and from what I heard, she’s going to be here until noon.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Some legal thing having to do with the school, I’d guess. Mr. DeVoe is a lawyer. She’s a lawyer’s secretary. What does it matter?”

  “That’s what I want to know,” Shelley said. “What does it matter? Why should we care where she is or what she does?”

  Amanda stopped putting on makeup. “You must be joking. You know why we care.”

  “I meant why should we care where she is or what she does today?” Shelley said. “I’m not a complete idiot, Amanda. I know why we care in the long run. But what does it matter if she’s here today?”

  “Well,” Amanda said. “I was thinking. It might be the perfect chance.”

  “The perfect chance for what?”

  “For us to do what we want to do. Think about it. You live next door to her, right? She knows who you are?”

  “Of course she does,” Shelley said. “She knows who you are, too. You live right across the street.”

  “But she doesn’t know me that well. We only moved here a couple of years ago. She’s known you forever.”

  “So?”

  “So, you could ask her for a ride. You could go out to the
parking lot, and run into her, and ask her for a ride somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.” Amanda sounded impatient. “Make something up. Make somewhere up. How about out to Grandview Park?”

  “It’s a swamp,” Shelley said.

  “So?” Amanda said.

  “Why would I want to go there? Why would she go out of her way to drive me out there? You aren’t making any sense.”

  Amanda’s makeup things were spread all across the stainless steel shelf under the face mirror above the sinks. She opened her bag under the shelf and swept all the jars and tubes and bottles out of sight. She looked angry, the way only Amanda could look angry— as if she had every right to expect you to do what she wanted you to do, and you were being evil to refuse her.

  “Listen,” Amanda said. “This was your idea as much as mine. You wanted this as much as I ever did. If you’re not interested anymore, just tell me.”

  “Of course I’m interested,” Shelley said.

  “Well, then. I’m going to be out at Grandview Park at twelve thirty this afternoon. You ask Miss Edgerton for a ride and get her out there and meet me. I don’t care what you tell her. Just be there. Or we can call the whole thing off.”

  “You couldn’t do it without me,” Shelley said. “If you tried, I’d know it was you. I could go to the police and say it was you.”

  “Meet me out there,” Amanda said again. Then she tossed her hair against her back, picked up her shoulder bag, and flounced out of the girls’ room. If the door hadn’t been on an air hinge, she would have made it slam.

  Once she was gone, Shelley took a look at herself in the mirror. There really was a line of acne along her jaw. Her cheeks really were as puffy and round as a chipmunk’s. Everything the other girls said about her was true, except that she wasn’t actually stupid. If Amanda couldn’t do it on her own, she couldn’t, either, and she wanted to do it very much. She very certainly didn’t want to give it up.

  ~ * ~

  Still, for a while there that morning, Shelley did think she’d give it up. At least, she’d give it up for now, and lay low for a year or two, until she was old enough to get out of Matahatchee, and go someplace where nobody had ever heard of her or of Amanda Marsh. It was depressing to walk through school all day watching Amanda in the middle of crowds of people, all of them looking like they’d just stepped off the cover of Seventeen magazine. It was even more depressing to hear Amanda’s name called out in homeroom for the honor roll the third time already this year. It seemed to Shelley that there should be some kind of balance. Pretty girls should be stupid girls. Not-so-pretty girls should be smart girls. That was the way it was in the movies, except that in the movies even the not-so-pretty girls were prettier than Shelley was, and they always blossomed into beautiful girls as soon as anybody paid any attention to them.

  Shelley was not blossoming into beautiful, and by third period, she was already in trouble with three different teachers. She had forgotten her business math homework for the third time this week. She got caught talking in English class when the teacher was trying to read a poem. She got caught walking in the hall chewing gum, which had recently become verboten at Matahatchee High School, along with guns, knives, and charm bracelets. Charm bracelets were suspected of being vehicles for carrying gang symbols, although there had never been a gang of any kind at Matahatchee that anybody could remember. The trouble in English was stupid, too. The poem was this thing called “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” and if anybody had ever been able to make sense out of it, Shelley would gladly eat cow dung. Holding the pink slips that meant she was due in the office during lunchtime to discuss the “appropriate discipline,” wandering through the west wing corridor on the way to her study hall, Shelley found herself thinking about Miss Edgerton again. Miss Edgerton, who always wore the right thing at the right time. Miss Edgerton, who was always organized and polite. Miss Edgerton, whose car was always clean and whose clothes were always pressed. In some odd way that Shelley could not pin down, Miss Edgerton seemed to be at the root of all the trouble in the world, of all the trouble for people like Shelley. For some reason, she reminded Shelley of Amanda, all grown up.

  It was the pink slips that decided it, in the end. Shelley had the pink slips and had to take them to the office. Miss Edgerton was in that very same office, doing some kind of work for the lawyer who was working for the Board of Education. Something. Shelley couldn’t remember. She only knew that as she made her way toward the center of the building, she felt better than she had in hours. She felt lightheaded and secure.

  She’d expected to have to look around to find Miss Edgerton — in a back office, maybe, or closeted with the principal — but Miss Edgerton was right out front at a desk, next to Miss Lazio, and the cat was with her. Or rather, the cat was lying across a pile of papers, curled around a crystal paperweight that Shelley didn’t remember ever seeing before. Maybe it belonged to Miss Edgerton, or the cat, and Miss Edgerton had brought it along to keep the cat happy. Miss Lazio was certainly happy. She reached across to Miss Edgerton’s desk every once in a while to stroke Edelweiss’s back, and Edelweiss curled around to nuzzle the fingers when they came close. It was, Shelley thought, completely nauseating. They treated that cat the way they should have treated a child, except that neither of them had children. They probably didn’t even want them. Maybe Amanda was right. Maybe Miss Edgerton was a lesbian. Maybe Miss Lazio was her lover. Shelley seemed to be full of maybes today. It made no sense. She wished she could take off for the rest of the day and spend her time downtown, where there was nothing to do, but where nobody was watching her.

  Miss Edgerton and Miss Lazio both looked up when she came into the office. Miss Lazio looked at the little clutch of pink slips with a frown. Miss Lazio was nowhere near as annoying as Miss Edgerton, because she was younger, and not so perfect. Her hair was forever falling out of the clips she used to try to hold it back.

  “Well,” she said, as Shelley pushed her way up to the counter that separated the desks from the waiting area. “You seem to have been busy today. Let me see what you’ve got.”

  She got out from behind her desk and came to where Shelley was standing. At the desk with the cat on it, Miss Edgerton sat still, staring. The cat was snaking around as if it were trying to rub itself rich. It was so white, it made everything near it look darker.

  “I know you, don’t I?” Miss Edgerton said finally. “You live next door to me.”

  “That’s right,” Shelley said.

  Miss Lazio had gone through each of the pink slips. “I don’t want you to think she’s some kind of juvenile delinquent,” she said. “These are all minor enough. They always are, with Shelley.”

  “That’s right,” Miss Edgerton said. “Shelley Altman. When you were younger, you used to play the piano.”

  “I gave it up in fifth grade,” Shelley said.

  “That’s a pity. It’s a fine talent, playing the piano. When I was younger, almost every girl learned. You should have had more ambition.”

  “I like your cat,” Shelley said.

  Miss Edgerton brightened and put out a hand to let Edelweiss nuzzle against it. The two of them together looked like some kind of joke: the old maid and her cat. Miss Edgerton had long fingers with blunt, well-tended nails. Her nail polish was clear and uneventful. Shelley wondered, suddenly, which of the Victoria’s Secret underwear sets she was wearing today.

  “It can’t be helped,” Miss Lazio was saying. “Shelley? Are you listening? It can’t be helped. We’ve got the curricular plan for next year to get out of this office today. I’ve got Caroline here to help us with the legal documents we have to file. There’s just not going to be anybody free to talk to you about these until tomorrow. It would be different if you’d done something really serious. I could have sent you to Mr. Borden if you’d vandalized some property or threatened another student with bodily harm. But this —” Miss Lazio waved it all away with one hand. “This is barely wort
h talking about. You’ll have to come back tomorrow and talk to somebody then.”

  “All right,” Shelley said.

  “I don’t think it would have been better if she had vandalized property,” Miss Edgerton said.

  Miss Lazio brushed hair out of her face. “Just let it go,” she said. “I’ll charge these off on the book. You can forget all about them. Except the homework, of course, and that’s up to your teacher. Why you girls don’t do homework is more than I can understand. But then, I don’t understand anything anymore, do I? We didn’t have air-conditioning when I went to high school. We got hot, that was all, and we learned to live with it. They never learn to live with anything.”

  “I like your cat,” Shelley said again.

  Miss Edgerton smiled. Then she leaned over and picked up Edelweiss and laid her across her shoulder. The cat purred and stretched and yawned.