The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 Read online

  She unbound his mouth and pushed oatmeal on a wooden spoon between his lips. He took the oats into his cheeks and she pushed in another spoonful. He stared through her, his red eyes narrowed in the sunlight, and for a moment Helen remembered what he’d done and stood frozen before him.

  Joakes spat the oats into her face. He licked his lips. “I’m a Christian man,” he said, hoarsely, oats in the beard beneath his mouth. “I’m forgiven.”

  ~ * ~

  Christmas Day, 1992: Freely sat in a lounger by the fireplace, a blanket over his lap, his eyelids batting, closing. Helen sat on the hearth, the fire warming her back. She’d not worn her uniform for the first time in a long while, and found her old jeans to be loose in a way she greatly missed. On the floor by the tree a circle of children played a game where they rolled dice and moved tiny farm animals around a board. The adults sat around a long table, drinking hazelnut coffee and discussing a foundry opening in Jasper. Helen’s feet prickled with pain, and she worried they were frostbitten. Her swollen eye gave a headache aspirin could not help.

  The front bell rang. Freely’s wife, Marilyn, walked to the foyer, wiping her hands on the back of her dress. She opened the door and in rushed the cold and the children sat upright to see who was there. Pastor Hamby, a bear of a man in a black overcoat, filled the doorway. Marilyn stepped aside to let him in, but he stayed where he was. He leaned down and talked quietly to Marilyn and glanced into the house at the same time. Then Marilyn turned, and they both looked at Helen, and Pastor Hamby waved her over with a gloved hand.

  Helen stepped gingerly out on the porch and closed the door behind her. Four men in parkas, the First Baptist Deacons, stood at different levels on the steps, colored lights in the spruce reflecting in tracks of ice on the porch. Helen did not have her coat, and hugged herself with one arm and sipped her coffee.

  Pastor Hamby’s cheeks were flushed, his thin lips drawn tightly over his teeth. “We were delivering care baskets out in the knobs like we always do,” he said, and looked back at the deacons.

  They’d found Joakes’s body, this Helen knew by their faces. She tried to still her own face, her heart, to quiet the guilty part of her that wanted to confess and be forgiven. Frank Barker, a squat man in glasses, stepped a boot on the porch and leaned over his leg. “The holidays is hard on some,” he said. “It ain’t joy and cranberries for everyone. For some it’s only lonesome pain.”

  ~ * ~

  Spring, 1993: Willow limbs hung limply in the brightening morn, the current’s froth filling with light and bending prisms where black branches emerged. All night Helen had listened in darkness to the flood’s drone, and in a waking dream she’d seen the girl’s body float up from the quarry depths, drift and drift in the murky current to be caught in the high branches of one of the town’s ancient oaks, and as the water receded, her neck wedged in a crook, there the girl dangled above Old Saints Road for all to see.

  Now Helen sat high in the willow and tore away limbs until she could see out over the water. A single ridge humped out in the east. Her boat was nowhere to be seen. Danny was in a sort of sleep. She’d given him Connie Dempsy’s Christmas sweater and handcuffed his wrists to a branch overhead so he would not fall. His head hung in the hammock of his arms, the sweater too small and the sleeves far up his wrists.

  To the north sunlight winked off the hull of a bass boat. Helen screamed and screamed, but with the rushing water she knew she would not be heard. She drew her pistol and fired into the gap of sky. She fired twice more before the boat veered their way, then fired again to keep the boat on track. Once it was close enough, she began to holler. She glanced below at Danny, who picked up his head and stared up at her, the sweater stretched tight across his chest. He too began to scream, and Helen could see the boat was steered by the long-haired man from the night before. He cut the motor, the hull piled high with bodies of dogs, and shaded his eyes to see into the tree.

  The prow parted the canopy, and Helen stared down between her legs, the long-haired man watching her as he passed below. Danny called out to his friend, and the boat bumped against the trunk. The long-haired man held the tree with one hand, and with the other lifted a shotgun and aimed it up at Helen.

  “No, Ray,” Danny said. “She’s all right,” and Danny stared up at her. “You all right, ain’t you?”

  Helen nodded, held her hands out where he could see them.

  “She’s all right, Ray,” Danny said again, and the man in the boat let the gun fall to his side.

  Helen uncuffed Danny and they both climbed carefully into the boat and had to sit on the same tiny bench to avoid the dogs. Dogs filled the hull; a collie atop a German shepherd, and several hunting dogs, blueticks and grays. Stacked in an orderly way, heads at one end, tails the other, stacked like firewood. The boat drifted from beneath the tree, willow branches washing over them, and then the sun was warm.

  Wisps of clouds feathered out above. Ray stuffed his lip with chaw and stared Helen down. “I found a body,” he said, then turned away and wrapped a cord around the outboard flywheel.

  ~ * ~

  Christmas Eve, 1992: Joakes quietly sobbed, lips smacking as if from thirst, and asked to smoke just one cigarette. Helen considered it a moment, then untied his right arm. She carried the lantern to the cupboard and pushed aside ajar of pickled eggs, and there was the thin wooden box. The smell of tobacco came out strong. She kept the lid open, hoping the smell would overtake the odors of Joakes himself. She even held it beneath Joakes’s nose. He shut his eyes and seemed to take solemn pleasure from the scent. Then he opened his lids and his red eyes drew onto her.

  Like trap jaws sprung, he snatched the lantern from her and Helen was struck in the face and fell hard to the floor. The lantern light was gone. Moonlight through the tiny window lit a back wall where skinning tools hung on metal pegs. Sharp pain pierced Helen’s eye, shot deep into her skull. Chair legs thumped as Joakes rocked and fumbled with his free hand to untie his bindings. Helen’s eye swelled quickly; within seconds the eye was closed to sight. Dizzily she took her feet and drew her pistol. She stayed still until she found the pale skin of his bald spot in the moonlight, then Helen struck him and Joakes shrieked. With all her weight she struck him once more. Joakes’s head bobbed violently, and he made no sound.

  Helen staggered into the yard, clutching her gun, and broke an icicle off the pump’s handle. She lay back in the snow, dim stars turning in fractured tracks, the frozen ground beneath her seeming to turn, and though she meant to hold the ice to her eye, she brought up the pistol, and it was cold and soothed her just the same.

  ~ * ~

  December 20, 1992: Parked on the quarry’s service road, the cruiser growing cold with the motor off, Helen sipped peppermint schnapps and considered the world made of her design. My religion is keeping peace, she thought. It hadn’t begun that way, was nothing she’d planned, but now she saw that’s how it was. I just ran a grocery, she thought. I don’t want this. I ain’t the one to make the world right. She swallowed more schnapps, then capped the bottle and put it away in the glove box.

  Helen stepped out onto the road and popped the trunk. The air had warmed, the boreal wind stilled. Like ashes from a furnace, thick and gentle snow began to fall. She’d taken the clothes from Joakes’s root cellar, washed them in the river, dressed the girl, and wrapped the girl in a green canvas tarp. Helen struggled lifting the body from the trunk. But she tugged the torso out over the fender and the rest followed and flopped down to the road. Helen had needed a sled, and without knowing its use Freely sold her one at half-price, and now she turned the canvas parcel onto the sheet of red plastic tethered with rope.

  She dragged Jocelyn Dempsy on the sled, the girl’s weight breaking the undercrust of old snow and new snow collecting in wet mounds about her head. Helen pressed onward, eyes closed to the cold, legs plodding into drifts.

  At the quarry’s rim she paused to unfasten the tarp. She did not look at the girl. She moved behind the sle
d and shoved it all over. From her knees she watched the sled and tarp flutter and the body turn and break through the film of ice with barely a sound.

  Flakes fused to flakes and piled on her thighs and gloves. The quarry would soon be thick with ice, and what was below would be held for a time. In spring the body would rise through the gray slush and be found. The town told stories of children who’d fallen to their deaths in this quarry. Teenagers were drawn to its danger. They would all believe Jocey had just drowned, and it would be over. Helen gazed into the quarry. This is how I’ll be, she thought. I’ll be this icy hole, this season, this falling snow. I’ll just freeze myself over.

  ~ * ~

  Spring, 1993: In the flume between hillocks the floodwaters converged, dammed by logs and mud, a kitchen chair, a section of roof, a child’s plastic slide, refuse thick and high and brown water sluicing through random gaps. A riot of gulls hovered, filling the sky, the refuse wall alive with white birds. Ray ran the boat onto the grassy hillside and hopped out and stomped the anchor into the earth. Helen climbed cautiously over the mound of dogs, a glove to her nose. Scum-water churned at the dam’s base. The torrent on the other side, the swollen Little Squirrel River, charged madly east. Helen feverishly scanned the refuse. The tan face of a mare, what looked like a carousel pony, stuck out from beneath what might be a green tarp. Helen’s hands trembled; she’d lost control of her hands. She stuffed them in her pockets and clenched them into fists, thinking of Jocey’s school portrait on the Evansville news, remembering Freely, only weeks ago, taking down the same picture from his diner window.

  They climbed the hill where rail tracks split the ridge and stood on the wooden ties. Down by the river lay swine, black-faced sheep, more dogs. Helen thought of Haley Winters’s cattle. Where’d all those cattle gone?

  Ray pointed at an outcropping of rock. A body lay on a slab of limestone, fully clothed, feet spread apart. A gull roosted on the body’s shoulder, and Helen could not see the face. “I seen that boy some in the Old Fox,” Ray said. “Don’t know his name. Never said so much as hey to me.”

  Helen rushed down the hillside, her momentum carrying her in a reckless sort of run. Wind blew the long grass flat. She followed the grass down with her eyes and then she was falling and landed hard on her side. The gull on the body raised its wings and glided downshore. It was Keller Lankford, a hay and bean farmer who lived south of town, nearly three miles from the river. His face was the blue of his overalls, his blackened fingers clawed into a fence slat clutched to his chest. Then Danny was over Helen pleading, don’t do that, oh come on now, and pulled her into his arms.

  Helen shoved him away. She tried taking her feet, only to crumble. Her ankle was badly hurt. She wiped sweat from her eyes and face, and noticed small cuts had brought blood to her palms. “Take off that sweater,” Helen screamed at Danny, blood streaked across her cheeks. “Throw it in the river. It ain’t yours to be wearing.”

  Ray was at the water’s edge breaking twigs and tossing them into the current. “Get rid of them dogs,” she screamed at Ray. “Nobody wants to see them dogs. Just let ‘em be gone. You hear what I say?” Ray snapped a twig and brought it to his mouth. He waved up his middle finger.

  Danny ran past Ray, and thigh-deep into the raging flood he tore the red sweater off over his head and hurled it into a rush of gulls.

  ~ * ~

  Christmas Morning, 1992: Helen held the lantern to Robert Joakes’s swollen face. Faint plumes of breath trickled from his lips. With a wooden spoon she pried opened his mouth, then pushed the spoon and his head tipped backwards. She considered, as she had many times before, to ask him why. Instead, she inserted the barrel of a shotgun into his mouth. He made noises, not words, gagging on the metal. She sat the lantern on the cold stove and closed tight her eyes.

  The explosion in the small room made the pots in the cupboard rattle. A ringing pulsed in her ears. Joakes had toppled in his chair and lay in the dark of the floor. She worked fast, looking only when she had to, untying his legs and thighs, his hands and chest, blood pooling blackly over the uneven planks. She worried momentarily as to which hand was his shooting hand, then chose his right, and worked his thumb onto the trigger.

  She piled the bindings into a garbage bag and left the lantern burning on the table. She hurried outside, careful with her footprints, stepping sideways into drifts so the snow would collapse, then on the exposed rocks behind his house, up the hill, breaking the ice and splashing through a tiny brook, then down the bluff to the frozen stream, where she paused atop a granite boulder.

  The moon was in its descent, the stars fading. She’d wait for dawn, for pale light to arise and cover her. She thought of Freely’s grandchildren tearing pretty paper from gifts, and singing “Away in a Manger” in church. She thought of families gathered around tables thick with holly. In her mind she tasted honey-glazed ham, scalloped potatoes, macaroon cookies. But she could not wait for dawn. Her feet were wet and the night was bitterly cold. She clutched her collar and limped along the stony banks, and stepping up to enter the prairie she slipped and fell onto the garbage bag of rags and slid until she was out on the frozen stream. The ice popped, but held. Thistles of pain stabbed her toes. She lay on the brittle black ice and could hear water flowing beneath her.

  ~ * ~

  Spring, 1993: The men had come down the hill from the shelter and gathered around the boat. They were solemn, unshaven, shirts rumpled, the pits of Pastor Hamby’s white shirt stained with sweat. The farmer’s body lay in the hull where once had been dogs, Helen’s jacket shrouding his face. The sun was high, the air damp. A new wall of thunderheads and the fur of rain bulged forth in the west.

  “You’ll tell the others?” Helen said.

  Pastor Hamby nodded. “What can we do for you?”

  “I need rest,” Helen said, wilting, and almost began to cry from tiredness. “Let me rest a while.”

  Suddenly came the wind, full and strong, and Helen’s coat blew off Keller Lankford and tumbled onto the hillside, exposing his blue bloated face. Helen lunged after her coat. Her ankle gave and she caught herself as she fell. A deacon, Jerry Timlinson, clambered into the boat and covered the dead man’s face with his own jacket, then squinted up at the approach of weather. Spatterings of rain fell sideways in wind and sunshine. Pastor Hamby and Frank Barker lifted Helen, each with a hand beneath her thigh and another at her back. Slate clouds rowed forward over the sun, its light dappling the hill and then the sun shower was a storm.

  The men entered the lightless hall, shirts transparent with rain, Helen riding their arms. “Put me down,” she said, clutching their sleeves. Pale faces emerged from the darkness: Walt Freely and Marilyn, Connie and David Dempsy, the little girl held to his shoulder, everyone she knew, grimly nodding, touching her pant legs, stroking her wrists, some speaking her name with quiet reverence. “Let me down,” she repeated, but they did not, and Helen began to cry. Rain drummed the masonry. Light from the storm lay a greenish glow in the hall. She could not stop herself from crying. They huddled around Helen, silent in the gloam, then the pastor raised his pulpit voice and called for them all to just clear out and leave her be.

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  ~ * ~

  EMORY HOLMES II

  A.k.a., Moises Rockafella

  from The Cocaine Chronicles

  1.

  “You said I could have water. I want some water,” Fat Tommy asked again.

  “You can have water, Moises, after you tell us how it went down. Understand? That’s our deal,” Vargas reminded him.

  Fat Tommy’s big shoulders slumped. He was having a really bad day. His business was gone. His money was gone. His high was gone. And the cops weren’t buying his story. He laid his arms tenderly across his knees. He tried to sleep, but the cops kept butting in. He narrowed his eyes in the harsh light and squinted down at his arms. Still, he had to admit... he certainly was well dressed.

  “Don’t give those white folks no excuses, Tommy,” h
is wife, Bea, had advised. “We ain’t gonna get kilt over this asshole.”

  Bea had borrowed her mother’s credit card and bought him two brand-new white, long-sleeve business shirts from Sears for his interrogations and, regrettably, for the trial. That was such a sweet thing for Bea to do. Buy him new shirts that the cops would like. He loved his Queen Bea — she had been his sweetheart since grade school, way back when he was skinny and pretty. Bea was sexy, street-smart and loyal to him. After he’d knocked her up, twice, he had started to hang with her, help her with his sons, and had grown to love her.

  Gradually, she had helped him develop his posh sartorial style: his dazzling Jheri curl (forty bucks a pop at Hellacious Cuts on Crenshaw); his multiple ropes of gold, bedecked with dangling golden razors, crucifixes, naked chicks, powerfists and coke spoons; his rainbow collection of jogging suits and fourteen pairs of top-of-the-line Air Jordan sneakers (and a pair of vintage Connies for layin’ around their new pad). He had restricted himself to only five or six affairs after they got married. The affairs were mostly “strawberries” — amateur whores who turned tricks for dope.