The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 Read online

  Some gentle movement in her periphery made her notice the near trees. Far below, a large white oak still held its autumn leaves, its branches gently waving. Through a gap in its canopy she glimpsed a flash of pale skin. Her breath drew away, and then she was shuffling down the bench, and she slipped and fell hard on her back, sliding in the new snow to the base of the slope.

  The oak towered above her. She shone her light up into it, over the girl’s exposed ribs, her dangling arms, and between her buds of breasts curved a swag of dried blood, dripped from where the rope had torn the skin of her neck. Helen turned on her side and retched. Vomit steamed in the dirt. She took clean snow into her mouth and caught her breath. She stood and unsnapped the latch over her pistol, and approached the darkness beneath the boughs.

  The girl’s toes dangled inches from the ground. She wore only shoes. Clunky black shoes with square heels. Her naked skin glowed white against the dusk. Her mouth hung open and what little light came through the saffron boughs gleamed in her braces. Helen took off her coat. She tried throwing the jacket up over the girl’s shoulders, but it slid off and fell in a lump on the ground.

  It was the girl. Jocelyn Dempsy, who everyone called Jocey. She raced motorbikes on a dirt track by the old mill, played J.V. basketball as an eighth grader. She loved Moon Pies. Loved cherry cola. She’d come to the General and buy them, and Helen would watch her eat alone by the road and return the bottle before riding off.

  Brisk wind whistled through the limbs. Helen stumbled to sit against the trunk of the oak, her legs stretched out before her, pistol drawn in her lap. Dusk had settled. The prairie was tinted blue, shocks of blue sedge stiffly swaying.

  ~ * ~

  Spring, 1993: The current took the boat and she shone the spotlight across the black water and onto the house, the flood up to its second-floor sills. She hooked the tow rope around a window box and the prow knocked against the siding. She pressed her forehead to the window’s cool glass. The room’s red fabric wallpaper had silver stripes that flashed in the spotlight like metal bars. A twin bed lay diagonal in the middle of the room. A cardboard box made a crater in the mattress, a new-looking ball glove atop the box. Alone on a wall above a small dresser hung a poster of three busty women in yellow swimsuits, each suit with two letters that when pressed tightly together spelled yamaha.

  Helen forced open the window. Careful not to sway the boat, she held her holster and stepped down into the room. It was the first time in hours she’d been out of the boat, and her legs tingled. The carpet glistened in the spotlight, a dark line three feet up the wall marking the flood’s highest point.

  The room had not been disturbed, was kept like a museum; Helen had been in the room that winter, putting on a play of sorts, searching the girl’s drawers and beneath her bed and taking notes on what she passed off as evidence — report cards, a menu from the Boston Connection restaurant in Terre Haute, a ticket stub from a motocross event at the Motorhead in Evanston — she knew would lead nowhere. She wrote it all up in a report for the Staties.

  The bedroom door was locked from the inside. Helen opened the lock and door, wiped the knob clean, then walked down the hall. Water splashed with each step. The walls were tiled with Dempsy family photos: Jocey, very young, donning a boy’s shag haircut and straddling a small motorbike; the family in matching cream sweaters with David on a hay bale, the baby on his lap, Jocey and Connie each behind one of his shoulders; Jocey’s school portrait, a ponytail tied with red ribbon, braces, a blemish on her nose.

  At the back of the house Helen entered the master bedroom. A canopy bed filled most of the room. Helen gazed out the bedside window at the flooded world, the dark roofs of houses spread wide like barges on a big river. Everything smelled of soil and fish. So much water, so much washed over, but perhaps when they’d start anew everything could be better, everything forgiven. Perhaps God would allow the girl to be dredged up by the flood and found, her parents granted their closure, yet the unrighteous cause of her death kept a gracious unknown.

  Helen walked to a bureau and searched the drawers, one filled with scarves and nylons, the next with panties neatly folded and separated by color. She moved to the closet and shone her light over the clothes: pants at one end, then blouses, then dresses. Sweaters were on a shelf above the hanging clothes. She pulled the red sweater from the middle of a stack, unfolded it to be sure it was the right one. The silver thread of the embroidered snowflakes twinkled in Helen’s spotlight. She held the sweater to her face; it smelled faintly of Connie’s perfume. It was an impulse, and Helen could not explain why she needed it other than to say it was something clean and lovely in a world of mud. She hugged the sweater to her throat and lay down on the bed, the mattress soft and pulling her in, her boot heels heavy on the waterlogged carpet.

  ~ * ~

  December 19, 1992: Blue smoke trailed from a pipe in the cabin’s tin roof. His footprints had frozen like fossils in the snow, and Helen tracked them down through the prairie. The cabin belonged to Robert Joakes, who came into town once a month for supplies and sold beaver and coon pelts to a coatmaker in Jasper. A dim light came from the cabin’s only window, a small square high up the wall. Helen stood on her numb toes and peered through the window. A lantern on a rough wood table gave a scant circle of light. A figure hunched beside an iron stove. Helen removed a glove and drew her pistol, felt its weight in her hand, adjusted her finger on the trigger. For a good while she watched the dark figure, embers glowing behind the stove grate. Then Joakes moved off into the shadows.

  Helen crouched beneath the window. Whittled gray clouds raced in from the north. The wind tore through her. Her hand on the pistol grew terribly cold. A half-mile away in the tree, Jocey’s body was freezing solid, and Helen felt herself at the center of something enormous and urgent, bigger than her mind could hold, and though terrified, and angry, mainly she felt desperately alone. The urge to flee, to hide, was overwhelming. This is how Jocey felt, she thought, and clicked off her pistol’s safety.

  She eased each step through the crackling snow, past firewood stacked to the roof, on around to the door where a metal bucket gave off the stench of urine. A dog barked inside the door, heavy and loud barking that did not cease.

  ~ * ~

  Christmas Eve, 1992: She followed at a safe distance, as children on inner tubes towed behind a pick-up made wide tracks in the road’s snow. More children huddled in the truck’s bed, sparklers burning in their mittens and gloves. The truck took the curve of Elm Rodd, and the inner tubes swung out, the last in line dropping into the ditch before the whip cracked and yanked it back onto the road. Helen switched on the blue and red lights atop the squad car. The truck did not pull to the shoulder but merely slowed and stopped, the inner tubes sliding forward, one knocking into the next. Helen grabbed her flashlight and walked out into the snow, the kids splayed and breathing hard on their tubes.

  “We ain’t done nothing,” said the boy on the last tube, a boy they all called Knight, his chin resting on his gloves.

  “Not yet, you ain’t,” and Helen stayed the flashlight beam on his face just to get him riled.

  “You’re piss mean even at Christmas,” Knight snapped, and all the other kids laughed.

  Helen passed the kids in the truck bed, their sparklers hissing glitter and glistening in their eyes. “You kids cold?”

  “No’m,” said one boy. “I am,” said a girl, and the boy told her to shut up.

  Then Helen was at the truck’s door, and Willie Sharpton grinned at her, the flaps of his hat down over his ears and a cigarette in the slit between his mustache and beard. Helen put a boot up on the truck’s running board and leaned in the window.

  “Them kids just grabbed hold of my truck,” Willie said. “Don’t know whose they are.”

  “They just lassoed your tailgate?”

  “That’s about right,” and Willie blew smoke back into the truck as to not blow it on Helen. He turned and studied her face and closed one of his eyes. �
�That eye looks like hell.”

  “Our wedding pictures’ll look awful.”

  It was a play on an old joke, one neither smiled at. Knight yelled for them to come on, that his nuts were freezing. Willie patted Helen’s arm and took a drag on the cigarette. He stared ahead where the snow was yet to be tracked by tires.

  “Any leads?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Then they were quiet, and Helen stepped down from the truck’s runner and looked back at the children. The sparklers had burned out and the bed was dark. Drift snow crawled out of the ditch and sidewound over the road. She shone her flashlight on the line of tubes. The kids had their hoods pulled over their faces.

  ~ * ~

  December 19, 1992: Footsteps and a man’s scolding voice came behind the cabin door. The barking ceased. Flat against the weatherboards, Helen tried keeping her frozen fingers from gripping the gun too tight. The door unlatched and swung open, its shadow covering her. A large yellow-haired dog ran into the prairie, stopped, raised its head, sniffed at a briar. Joakes walked out into the snow, shirtless, thick hair covering his shoulders and back. He watched the dog in the prairie. Helen stepped out. She pressed the gun against the dark beard of his cheek and yelled at him to get on the ground.

  Joakes whirled and hit Helen with an elbow, and she slipped to one knee. He paused and glanced over his shoulder, maybe looking for the dog, maybe checking to see if there were others. Helen drove into his legs and took him to the ground. Forearm under his chin, she pulled mace from her belt and doused his eyes. He flailed his fists. She scrambled out of his reach, then stepped forward and sprayed him again. He covered his face, mace dripping down his fingers and chin. The dog charged in, sniffing at the man and barking. Helen approached, both pistol and mace drawn, the dog baring its teeth, yapping, pouncing. She sprayed the dog and it recoiled, pawing its snout, then came at her again, viciously snapping at her legs. She fired the gun. The dog fell in a lump, a hole bore through its neck, hot blood leaching into the snow.

  A knee in Joakes’s back, Helen pressed the gun to his ear and said she figured to kill him for what he’d done. His eyes were shut tight. He sniveled like a child. He did not move.

  ~ * ~

  Spring, 1993: Helen stared at the canopy’s sheer fabric and heard it again; hissing and what sounded like a gunshot. She rose from the Dempsys’ bed and stepped to the window. Again came the hissing. In the northern sky the pop unleashed golden sparks that willowed down. On what she knew was Macey Goff s roof stood a silhouette, another whining flare rising from its arm and exploding high above, green sparks shimmering, falling.

  Helen held the Christmas sweater to her breast, like a child with her blanket. She stuffed it into her jacket, zipped up, and hustled down the damp hall to her boat. She hooked in the oars and began rowing around the Dempsys’ house, making for the Goffs’. The current was strong. To keep the boat straight Helen pulled twice on the right oar for each on the left. Across the bay a silver bass boat hitched to a second-floor window thudded against the house. The man on the roof wore jeans tucked into his boots and a sleeveless flannel shirt unbuttoned to show a mural of tattoos across his chest and abdomen. He dropped a Roman candle into the guttering, drew a fresh wand from his boot. He was Danny Martin, a young strip miner who’d been a great ball player, even had offers to play in college, but then he beat up a girl and it all went to hell.

  Blue sparks fell directly above. Helen brought in the oars and the boat glided. A flashlight beam waggled inside the house. She drew her pistol and switched on the boat’s spotlight. Inside the room a large long-haired man in black waders spun around. The spotlight threw his shadow on the back wall and when he shielded his eyes the shadow took the appearance of a hunchback, then grew larger as he ran to the window. He clanged out into the bass boat, the hull rocking and sliding away from the house.

  “Danny,” the man hollered, furiously yanking the motor’s cord.

  “Stay where you’re at,” Helen yelled.

  A candle shot whistled low overhead. Helen ducked, trained the spotlight on the roof. Danny toed the gutter, the wand aimed down at her. She spun off the bench and onto the wet floor. A shot hissed into the water beside the boat “This is the police,” Helen yelled. The other boat’s outboard turned over and raised an octave speeding away. Then another pop, and Helen looked to the sky. Golden sparks rained down. Held in an eddy, her boat slowly turning, red sparks fell, and moments later the sky bled green. Then the candle was done and Danny gazed into the whitecaps thrashing the house. He teetered, raised his arms. He leapt from the roof, his legs scissoring as he hit the water.

  ~ * ~

  December 20, 1992: Robert Joakes sat tied to a chair in the lantern’s pitiful light; Helen had torn bed sheets and bound his ankles, his thighs, wrists, chest, waist, and gagged his mouth so he could not scream.

  She’d found Jocey’s clothes atop a mound of salted venison in the root cellar and sat thinking on the cellar steps with the girl’s jeans across her lap. Laws on killing, even God’s demands, didn’t allow for peace. Not always. There’d still be pain; missing that child would break her parents’ hearts. But what Helen knew, what she’d seen in those woods, would be too much for them, for everybody.

  She made a plan to hide it all and knew she’d have to be careful. She’d be ruined if Joakes got loose, or if someone found him like this, or if he died too soon. Those in town, and especially those from outside Krafton, might not see grace in her methods; what she’d begun to call in her mind the Big Peace.

  ~ * ~

  Spring, 1993: Danny emerged far downcurrent, pummeling the churning spate, flopping, thrashing. Helen gave chase, but the current was unpredictable and, afraid she’d brain him with the boat’s hull or outboard’s blades, she dare not get close. His body went slack, and he was swept toward the ropey tops of willow trees, disappearing through the curtain of their branches.

  Helen cut the motor and scrambled to the bow. She grabbed several branches as they whisked past and was jerked backwards into the stern. The rush of water was amplified in the blackness. She held the ropes and took her feet and balanced herself, and with her free hand drew around the boat’s spotlight.

  The canopy was a crewelwork of limbs, the water topped with brown froth and swirling as if over a drain. Danny draped one arm over a thick branch, his cheek against the trunk, his shoulders beneath the water. Helen pulled the boat deeper through the mess. Danny lifted his head, managed to tilt his chin into the tree’s crotch. “We was looking for my dog,” he said, gasping.

  The branch forked into the water and Helen could not get to him. She leaned over the branch and reached as far as she could. Danny stared blankly at her hand. His head lolled, his elbow unhooking from the branch, and he held on with just his hand, his body dragging in the current. Helen lunged her entire body onto the branch and grabbed his wrist. She centered her weight and pulled until his elbow was hooked back safely, then dropped her feet down into what she thought would be the boat, but instead was the rush of freezing water. The boat had drifted from beneath her, the spotlight a trailing beacon as the hull curled into the rope branches, was held briefly, then the limbs parted and fell back into place and the boat was gone. Helen hugged the branch and held Danny, the flood whirling darkly around them, Connie Dempsey’s Christmas sweater a lump in the gathers of her jacket.

  ~ * ~

  December 22, 1992: Helen scanned the frozen prairie, worried someone had seen her sneak through the dawn-tinged woods and into the cabin. Behind her, bound to the chair, Joakes stank of urine and shit. She carefully untied his ankles, then his legs, his waist.

  Three days in the chair and his legs had atrophied; they buckled as he stood, and he staggered as she walked him to a snowy swale in the river’s bend. There she took down his soiled pants and told him to relieve himself. He stood shivering, loins exposed, mouth and upper body still bound, head drooped. He fell to his knees, then onto his side, and began to weep. Sunrise washed full
over the eastern hills and burned through shreds of fog in the near woods. Someone’ll see him, Helen thought, and she rushed to him, trying to pull up his pants and get him to stand. But he just wept and shook, and Helen could do nothing with him.

  She dragged him by his armpits, inch by inch, his pants at his ankles, bare legs wet and red with cold, heels leaving ruts in the snow. She dragged him past the pump frozen over with icicles, and past a stack of vegetable crates covered in snow, in which lived brown chickens that did not move and might be dead. The dog’s stiff body lay at the side of the stoop; it would look right that way, Helen figured; a man who kills his dog is a man who’s lost all hope.

  It took half an hour to get him back in the chair. She removed his pants and covered his lower half with a heavy blanket. She carried the pants to the river, stomped a hole through the ice, and dangled the crotch in the water below. She returned and lay the pants over half the stove, and on the other half heated oats in a pot. A square blazon of sunlight flooded the window and covered his face. His eyes, scorched by the mace, were a deep watery red, the skin not covered by beard the color of tin.