The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 Read online

“Sounds okay,” she agreed. “I’ll wait for you.”

  He hurried off and while he was gone Carla listened to a dove’s familiar call from the glade. The sun sank low behind the cottonwoods and the last of the wildflowers — so lush in the springtime that they blanketed the hillsides — now filled what remained of the day with their sweet decay. She wondered if someone like Boomer could possibly become her fate: an odd guy, never quite on cue. The money, of course, would make a difference, and she speculated for a moment about a life where sapphires came as easily as Cracker Jack prizes. Awkward endearments would be the routine, not romance, she knew, but romance never worked anyway. And she wanted somebody to love and care for; her mother had sensed the vacuum in her life, so had become too demanding and the only things that moved in her apartment were the mechanical sculptures. Such thoughts — and a chorus of dove calls from the darkening trees — occupied her until Boomer came back with the beach towel, grinned, shuffled his feet, backed away, and excused himself.

  “You just take your time,” he assured her. “I’ll be out front. When you’re all done, you can show me the rest of the house.”

  After he disappeared she stripped off quickly, left her clothes draped over the stall, stepped in, and turned on the tap. A little shriek came out of her when the cold water hit her; skin, then she stood there, getting used to it, and noting that the beach towel said Welcome to Biloxi, so that she wondered how Boomer came to buy such a thing in Galveston.

  She wished she had soap. Then, holding her face up to the spray, her thoughts going nowhere in particular, she felt his arms encircle her.

  “Boomer!” she cried out with another burst of nervous laughter. “You lied to me, you devil!” And to herself: Okay, here it is, deal with it, stupid, because you’re bare-assed and helpless.

  She spoke to him again, but he didn’t answer and she could feel his naked body pressed against her backside, feel his chest rising and falling with excited breathing, and feel, distinctly, his pubic hair pressed against her hip. He turned her slightly, cupping a breast in his giant hand, saying nothing, and she felt him trembling as if all his timid wires had come loose.

  A moment passed, then she said softly, “There, Boomer, steady,” and she felt strangely motherly and helpful as if he hadn’t deceived her, as if he hadn’t circled back and slipped out of his clothes again. She took his free hand in hers and felt its shudder. For all his boldness he was sexually frightened, she sensed, and in this knowledge her own fear lessened.

  “Boomer?” she murmured again, gently, urging him to say something. But he kept his silence. She knew she couldn’t fully express her apprehension: He had stepped over the line into this heavy sexual move, but couldn’t go on. Dozens of times in her life Carla had experienced this, a sad thing, really: The aggressive mating male often boldly lurches forward into an embarrassing sexual paralysis and requires soothing out.

  “Boomer? There, it’s all right,” she heard herself say.

  “Very well,” he said in rasp. And his voice became strangely formal again, clipped, the Texas drawl gone. “Touch me.”

  With this request — or was it a command — she felt curiously in charge and decided to obey. As he bent forward, dipping his head into the stream of water so that his lips touched her shoulder, she let her fingers move down his body. He was limp and pitiful, nothing there at all, and she decided that the cold water pouring over them caused this so began to lead him out of the stall. She even managed a smile and let him gawk at her nakedness, then she saw that her clothes were gone. “Boomer, Honey,” she said gently and carefully, “where are my clothes?” and she managed to still keep her calm although this was definitely a little crazy.

  “You’re very pretty naked,” he told her, and his voice was someone else who used considerably more proper diction. “I knew you would be.”

  “Here, let me get the towel,” she said, and she pulled it off the stall as he led her by the hand. They padded across the deck, leaving wet footprints, passing through the tiled kitchen and into the den where he took the towel from her and spread it onto the plush carpet. Fine, all right, he’s gaining confidence, she told herself, and we’re going to do it now, okay, and she thought about her sexual history — how many boys and men? Fifteen? A husband and two lovers of some duration and all the others — and she decided that she hadn’t been promiscuous, not really, maybe it was sixteen or twenty, it was the way of the world, the adventure and the desperation, and she settled on the towel and pulled Boomer down beside her. Pressed against him, she could still feel his indecisiveness so she tried to kiss him — to say, yes all right, with a kiss — but he wouldn’t have it.

  And where was Mary Beth? And the only sounds now were the distant three-part notes of the dove and his labored breathing, that deep rasp, and he turned her on her side and settled himself against her thigh and began grinding himself against her, so that she thought, no, wait, should 1 help him out here? And from his mouth came a deep n sound, an unexpected, doleful, creepy subtext to his breathing: “Nnnnn, Nnnnn.” She felt her lower lip tremble and knew she might cry, but held on.

  He had no erection, but moved against her thigh in a wild impersonation of the act, and she felt her heart go out to him even as she wanted to weep for herself. She prayed to the wall, oh, God, please, don’t let him be the one, and she didn’t even know what she meant, exactly, but the prayer spilled out of her along with a sob. She clasped her hand over her mouth, so he wouldn’t hear her cry, and his movement went on and on, accompanied by that same “Nnnnn” that he made with his teeth clenched and in what seemed to be a prolonged agony that he couldn’t release.

  At last something in him was finished and he lay beside her, his arm draped across her rib cage, and she fought for control, trying to recover, until finally she managed, to say, “Boomer? If it’s all right now, I’d like to get my clothes. Where are they? You can tell me now.” And she spoke to him as if he were a child, she realized, with a parent’s calm, but it didn’t sound right, he wasn’t stupid, she knew, and the condescension was unmistakable.

  “Go look out that window,” he told her evenly with his strange new voice.

  “Which window?”

  “That one in front of you. Tell me what you see.”

  She got to her feet, wrapping her arms around her breasts, and padded over to the window, bent and covering herself. The final slant of a red sunset touched the trees and for a moment the view comforted her.

  “What?” she asked, looking out. “See what?” He came and stood beside her.

  “Here, put this on,” he said, and she turned to see that he held the sapphire ring. Obediently, she allowed him to slip it on her index finger.

  “There we are. My signature,” he announced, smiling, and his voice, she decided, was like a trained actor’s, a voice that could project or dive into a whisper and that knew exactly its effect.

  “You’re not from Texas, are you, Boomer?” she asked, and her own voice trembled with the question.

  “Sure I am,” he told her. “Same as the Bowie knife. Like the drought in summer or the blizzard in winter. A force of nature. Like the tornado. Like the rattlesnake and scorpion. Same as the blinding dust storm. That’s exactly who I am and where I’m from.”

  It seemed like a practiced speech, one delivered by a curious foreigner, and although her mouth twitched involuntarily and although she wanted to bolt away she gazed out the window yet again to see the sun’s last rays pick up something metallic in the hillside stand of cottonwoods. A car. It was out there in the woods. She looked more closely and knew this was what he had meant her to see. Somebody’s car, green. And then she knew.

  “Come on, we’ll get your clothes,” he told her, leading her away. She embraced his words in hopeless hope, wanting everything to be zany and perfectly all right, wanting Boomer to be the guy at the pinball machine, the big clumsy guy, but she knew better. The ring, she knew, had belonged to some woman before her. His signature. Prayers and memories
fell on her, then, like weights.

  He led her through the master bedroom to an enormous bathroom covered with the remains of Mary Beth and Luke. In a far corner, smeared with blood and casually tossed aside, was the pinstripe baseball cap, and why, she asked herself, why me? I don’t deserve this, nobody does, I’m really a good person, a little lonely, trying hard, and he’s not even named Boomer, he used somebody else’s name, and I don’t even believe he’s from Texas, not at all, he’s lying, he’s not one of us.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  ALAN HEATHCOCK

  Peacekeeper

  From The Virginia Quarterly Review

  Spring, 1993: There were more direct routes to the Oddfellows Hall, on a dry knob north of town, but Helen Farraley could not see below the muddy flood waters, couldn’t risk wrecking the boat on a tree, or chimney, or telephone pole; who knew what was just below the surface? The streets of town were lined with ancient oak, the leafy tops of which stuck out from the water like massive shrubs, and Helen steered the boat through the channel between them. The others in the boat sat silent as they passed their neighbors’ homes, slate-shingled Victorians underwater to the second-floor windows. Helen trolled high above the town’s main street, Old Saints Road, and the treetops dropped away as the land sloped into the valley’s low.

  They passed the Super America gas station, only the hump and peak of the S/A on its road sign visible. The others stared into the muck water as if they might see the pumps or store below. Afloat in the current was random lumber, tree branches and strips of siding, a pair of trundling bar stools, a long metal box Helen believed was either a school locker or a feed trough. Then came Freely’s Diner and Freely’s General, three-story brownstones on opposite sides of the road, water up to the white-stone facing, roofs like rectangular docks. They passed within arm’s distance of the electric sign that read FREELY’S, which usually shone bright red, but was now dark and hung just above the water line. Freda Lawson, who wore a chambray dress over yellow waders and sat beside Helen, ran a finger along the sign’s second E. Helen yanked down the woman’s arm.

  “They’s wires,” she snapped. Then she gently held Freda’s elbow and softened. “Please be careful, hon.”

  They passed high above the converted boxcar that was the old Fox Tavern, and the First Baptist Church, its steeple jutting crooked from the water like the mast of a sunken ship.

  “They’ll steal everything we got,” Jake Tiernen said from the bow, his wife beneath his arm. “They’ll take what all they want.”

  Freda twisted the hem of her dress around her fist. “I wet myself,” she whispered to Helen, crying.

  “Ain’t nobody stealing nothing,” Helen said, and leaned a shoulder into Freda to let her know she’d been heard.

  “To hell,” Jake said. “To hell they won’t.”

  ~ * ~

  Christmas Eve, 1992: Light from Freely’s Diner spilled over the snowy walkway and into the cruiser. Helen checked her face in the rearview mirror. Her left eye was badly swollen, and she tried to hide it by tilting her cap over her brow. She considered driving on. But then Freely stood in the diner’s window, the old man thin and hunched and his hands cupped against the glass. Helen climbed out into the cold. She walked around the car and Freely moved to the door and opened it a crack.

  “I got pecan pie,” the old man said through the crack, then Helen was at the door and he opened it wide.

  Helen stepped in and Freely had his arms around her in a hug. Ten years she’d worked in Freely’s General before becoming Krafton’s first and only law officer. It’d been Freely, longtime mayor of Krafton, who decided any real town had a sheriff, and raised funds to buy an old cruiser from the Boonville force, and called a town meeting in the First Baptist Church. It’d been a joke that Helen, a middle-aged grocery store manager, had been nominated and then elected, and when protests arose — I thought it’d be a goof to vote for her, didn’t think she’d win — it was Freely who declared civilized democracies stuck by a vote.

  The dinner crowd had just left. Ham and potatoes fragranced the air. “I ain’t hungry,” Helen said. ‘Just saw the lights on.”

  “No, no,” the old man said, hustling behind a glass counter. He pulled one of two pies from the dessert case and put the pie in a box. “You coming for Christmas supper? Marilyn said you might.” Helen studied the front window. Jocey Dempsy’s photo was in all the shop windows: her middle-school portrait, a ponytail tied with red ribbon, braces, a blemish on her hawk nose, missing across the top. reward across the bottom. “Don’t know,” Helen said.

  The old man was in front of her again. He held the box with the pie inside and wore a fur-lined coat that was much too large for him. “What you done to your eye?”

  Helen turned toward the door. “Slipped on some ice.”

  “Clumsy girl,” and he took her arm. “Walk me home?”

  They left out onto the walkway. Freely’s hand quivered and he struggled to put the key in the lock. His house was down the road and up a small hill. Warm light shone from the windows, colored lights twined around two large spruce by the porch steps. “Looky there,” he said, pointing across the road. Over the dark field colored sparks burst, rained, faded in the night sky. They sounded far away, maybe miles, the pop of fireworks like a puff of breath in Helen’s ear.

  ~ * ~

  December 19, 1992: The cruiser’s headlights caught the shadows of footprints across the road’s new snow, and Helen pulled to the shoulder. The gravel sky looked heavy, the woods flanking Pent-land Road lost in a fog of flurries. The footprints disappeared through a gap in the brambles. The girl, Jocey Dempsy, hadn’t come home from school, had been gone over a day. Nobody in town had seen or heard from her. Her folks said she often took walks in these woods. Helen retrieved the holster and pistol from the seat beside her. She turned the cruiser’s spotlight on the tree line but could not see through the falling snow. She shut off the engine. The motor ticked in the dark quiet, wet snow piling upon the windshield.

  ~ * ~

  Christmas Eve, 1992: In the glass of the door Helen’s swollen eye looked as if a stone had risen onto her face. Snow curled up the porch steps and over her boots. The door opened. There stood Connie Dempsy wearing a red sweater with snowflakes embroidered in silver thread. She did not say hello but stepped aside for Helen to pass.

  The front hall smelled of popcorn, of cinnamon. A little girl in pajamas, a smiling bear on her belly, hid behind Connie’s leg. She was Jocey’s baby sister and looked like her. Warm light fell into the hall from the kitchen, and then David was in the light, wiping his hands on an apron. Helen did not know where to stand. There was no doormat and she did not want to track snow into their house.

  “Merry Christmas,” she said.

  Connie lifted the girl into her arms, would not look at Helen.

  “Would you like something to eat?” David asked, still down the hall in the kitchen doorway.

  A puddle had formed on the tiles beneath her boots. “I don’t have any news,” Helen said. They did not move. They said nothing. Helen held out the pie box and another package wrapped in green paper with a white ribbon. “Here’s one of Freely’s pies,” she said. “And I got something for the girl. It ain’t much of anything, but it’s something.”

  They went into the family room, an upright piano in the corner, the tree beside it, tiny colored lights flashing. Helen had removed her boots and was afraid her feet stunk; she’d worn the same wool socks five straight days. But she smelled only popcorn and cinnamon. The family sat on a sofa, the girl in the middle. Helen faced them in a high-backed wooden chair, her gun belt awkward against the armrest.

  The little girl did not tear the paper like most kids. She picked at the tape, her mother helping, and carefully unfolded the wrapping to reveal a box. Inside was a tiny pink shirt. Across the front was a golden star and the words junior deputy; krafton, Indiana. Connie and David glanced at each other. Light glimmered off the silver thread i
n Connie’s sweater. The apron hung down between David’s legs. The little girl wrinkled her nose and stared at Helen’s face, and Helen was sure she’d ask about her swollen eye.

  Helen crossed one socked foot over the other. She looked at Connie. “It ain’t much,” she said. “I didn’t know what to give a child.”

  ~ * ~

  December 19, 1992: Helen crossed Pentland Road and pushed through brambles and into the woods. Her flashlight created a tunnel of light, inside of which were the arms of catbrier and low-slung limbs and the occasional shallows of footprints. She pulled her stocking cap to her brow. She felt the immense silence. Helen trudged on, and deeper in, where gray dusk lit the bench above her, she saw tracks of black soil where the snow had been tramped. Helen climbed, her feet slipping as she scaled the slope and stopped on the ridge to examine a scuttle of boot prints.

  Slivers of pink broached the flurries in the western sky. She paused, breathing heavily, and stared down over the valley. A black stream cut the mottled white, powdered trees hunched on their hummocks. In one distant corner of the prairie the last of daylight glinted off a tin roof.