The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories

by Otto Penzler

  He remembered coming out here with Patricia Pike. He hadn’t wanted to, but the mayor told him Pike did a good job with this kind of book, and that—while the mayor was concerned, just like Larry was, about exploiting what had happened—he didn’t want the town to get any more of a bad name on account of being uncooperative. So Larry had gone to the library to read one of Pike’s other books. The Beauties and the Beast was what the book was called, with the close-up of a cat’s eye on the front cover. It was about a serial killer in Idaho in the sixties who murdered five women and fed them to his pet cougar. In one chapter Pike wrote that the police had hidden details of the crime from her. Larry could understand why: The killings were brutal, and he was sure the police had a hard time explaining the details to the families of the victims, let alone to ghouls all across the country looking for a thrill.

  We’re going to get exploited, Larry had told the mayor, waving that book at him.

  Look, the mayor said. I know this is difficult for you. But would you rather she wrote it without your help? You knew Wayne better than anybody. Who knows? Maybe we’ll finally get to the bottom of things.

  What if there’s no bottom to get to? Larry asked, but the mayor had looked at him strangely and never answered, just told him to put up with it, that it would be over before he knew it.

  Larry wrestled the cruiser around the last bend and then stopped. His parking lights shone dully across what was left of the old driveway turnaround and onto the Sullivan house.

  The house squatted, dim and orange. It had never been much to look at, even when new; it was small, unremarkable, square—barely more than a prefab. The garage, jutting off the back, was far too big and made the whole structure look deformed, unbalanced. Wayne had designed the house himself, not long after he and Jenny got married. Most of the paint had chipped off the siding, and the undersized windows were boarded over—the high school kids had broken out all the glass years ago.

  Jenny had hated the house even when it was new. She’d told Larry so at her and Wayne’s housewarming dinner.

  It’s bad enough I have to live out here in the middle of nowhere, she’d said under her breath while Wayne chattered to Larry’s wife, Emily, in the living room. But at least he could have built us a house you can look at.

  He did it because he loves you, Larry whispered. He tried.

  Don’t remind me, Jenny said, swallowing wine. Why did I ever agree to this?

  The house?

  The house, the marriage. God, Larry, you name it.

  When she’d said it she hadn’t sounded bitter. She looked at Larry as though he might have an answer, but he didn’t—he’d never been able to see Jenny and Wayne together, from the moment they started dating in college. He remembered telling her, It’ll get better, and feeling right away as though he’d lied, and Jenny making a face that showed she knew he had, before both of them turned to watch Wayne demonstrate the dimmer switch in the living room for Emily.

  The front door, Larry saw now, was swinging open. Some folks he’d chased out two weeks ago had jimmied it, and the lock hadn’t worked right afterward. The open door and the black gap behind it made the house look even meaner than it was—like a baby crying. Patricia Pike had said that, at one point. Larry wondered if she’d put it into her book.

  She had sent him a copy back in July just before its release. The book was called All Through the House; the cover showed a Christmas tree with little skulls as ornaments. Pike had signed it for him: To Larry, even though I know you prefer fiction. Cheers, Patricia. He flipped to the index and saw his name with a lot of numbers by it, and then he looked at the glossy plates at the book’s center. One was a map of Prescott County, showing the county road and an X in the Sullivan woods where the house stood. The next page showed a floor plan of the house, with bodies drawn in outline and dotted lines following Wayne’s path from room to room. One plate showed a Sears portrait of the entire family smiling together, plus graduation photos of Wayne and Jenny. Pike had included a picture of Larry, too—taken on the day of the murders—that showed him pointing off to the edge of the picture while EMTs brought one of the boys out the front door, wrapped in a blanket. Larry looked like he was running—his arms were blurry—which was odd. They’d brought no one out of the house alive. He’d have had no need to rush.

  The last chapter was titled “Why?” Larry had read that part all the way through. Every rumor and half-baked theory Patricia Pike had heard while in town, she’d included, worded to make it sound like she’d done thinking no one else ever had.

  Wayne was in debt. Wayne was jealous because maybe Jenny was sleeping around. Wayne had been seeing a doctor about migraines. Wayne was a man who had never matured past childhood. Wayne lived in a fantasy world inhabited by the perfect family he could never have. Once again the reluctance of the sheriff’s department and the townspeople to discuss their nightmares freely hinders us from understanding a man like Wayne Sullivan, from preventing others from killing as he has killed, from beginning the healing and closure this community so badly needs.

  Larry had tossed his copy in a drawer and hoped everyone else would do the same.

  But then the book was a success—all Patricia Pike’s books were. And not long after that, the lunatics had started to come out to the house. And then, today, Larry had gotten a call from the mayor.

  You’re not going to like this, the mayor said.

  Larry hadn’t. The mayor told him a cable channel wanted to film a documentary based on the book. They were sending out a camera crew at the end of the month, near Christmastime—for authenticity’s sake. They wanted to film in the house, and of course they wanted to talk to everybody all over again, Larry first and foremost.

  Larry took a bottle of whiskey from underneath the front seat of the cruiser, and watching the Sullivan house through the windshield, he unscrewed the cap and drank a swallow. His eyes watered, but he got it down and drank another. The booze spread in his throat and belly, made him want to sit very still behind the wheel, to keep drinking. Most nights he would. But instead he opened the door and climbed out of the cruiser.

  The meadow and the house were mostly blocked from the wind, but the air had a bite to it all the same. He hunched his shoulders, then opened up the trunk and took out one of the gas cans he’d filled up at the station and a few rolls of newspaper. He walked up to the open doorway of the house, his head ducked, careful with his feet in the shadows and the grass.

  He smelled the house’s insides even before he stepped onto the porch—a smell like the underside of a wet log. He clicked on his flashlight and shone it into the doorway, across the splotched and crumbling walls. He stepped inside. Something living scuttled immediately out of the way: a raccoon or a possum. Maybe even a fox. Wayne had once told him the woods were full of them, but in all the times Larry had been out here, he’d never seen any.

  He glanced over the walls. Some new graffiti had appeared: KILL ’EM ALL was spray-painted on the wall where, once, the Christmas tree had leaned. The older messages were still in place. One read, HEY WAYNE, DO MY HOUSE NEXT. Beside a ragged, spackled-over depression in the same wall, someone had painted an arrow and the word BRAINS. Smaller messages were written in marker—the sorts of things high school kids write: initials, graduation years, witless sex puns, pictures of genitalia. And—sitting right there in the corner—was a copy of All Through the House, its pages swollen with moisture.

  Larry rubbed his temple. The book was as good a place to start as any.

  He kicked the book to the center of the living room floor and then splashed it with gas. Nearby was a crevice where the carpet had torn and separated. He rolled the newspapers up and wedged them underneath the carpet, then doused them too. Then he drizzled gasoline in a line from both the book and the papers to the front door. From the edge of the stoop, he tossed arcs of gas onto the door and the jamb until the can was empty.

  He stood on the porch, smelling the gas and gasping—he was horribly out of shape.
His head was throbbing. He squeezed the lighter in his hand until the pain subsided.

  Larry was not much for religion, but he tried a prayer anyway: Lord, keep them. I know you have been. And please let this work. But the prayer sounded pitiful in his head, so he stopped it.

  He flicked the lighter under a clump of newspaper and, once that had bloomed, touched it to the base of the door.

  The fire took the door right away and flickered in a curling line across the carpet to the book and the papers. He could see them burning through the doorway, before thick gray smoke obscured his view. After a few minutes the flames began to gutter. He wasn’t much of an arsonist—it was wet in there. He retrieved the other gas can from the trunk and shoved a rolled-up cone of newspaper into the nozzle. He made sure he had a clear throw and then lit the paper and heaved the can inside the house. It exploded right away, with a thump, and orange light bloomed up one of the inside walls. Outside, the flames from the door flared, steadied, then began to climb upward to the siding.

  Larry went back to the cruiser and pulled the bottle of whiskey from beneath his seat. He drank from it and thought about Jenny, and then about camping in the meadow as a boy, with Wayne.

  Larry had seen this house being built; he’d seen it lived in and died in. He had guessed he might feel a certain joy watching it destroyed, but instead his throat caught. Somewhere down the line, this had gotten to be his house. He’d thought that for a while now: The township owned the Sullivan house, but really, Wayne had passed it on to him.

  An image of himself drifted into his head—it had come a few times tonight. He saw himself walking into the burning house, climbing up the stairs. In his head he did this without pain, even while fire found his clothing, the bullets in his gun. He would sit upstairs in Jenny’s sewing room and close his eyes, and it wouldn’t take long.

  He sniffled and pinched his nose. That was horseshit. He’d seen people who’d been burnt to death. He’d die, all right, but he’d go screaming and flailing. At the thought of it, his arms and legs grew heavy; his skin prickled.

  Larry put the cruiser in reverse and backed it slowly away from the house, out of the drive, and onto the track. He watched for ten minutes as the fire grew and tried not to think about anything, to see only the flames. Then he got the call from dispatch.

  Sheriff?

  Copy, he said.

  Ned called in. He says it looks like there’s a fire out at the Sullivan place.

  A fire?

  That’s what he said. He sees a fire in the woods.

  My my my, Larry said. I’m on old 52 just past Mackey. I’ll get out there quick as I can and take a look.

  He waited another ten minutes. Flames shot out around the boards on the windows. The downstairs ceiling caught. Long shadows shifted through the trees; the woods came alive, swaying and dancing. Something alive and aflame shot out the front door—a rabbit? It zigged and zagged across the turnaround and then headed toward him. For a moment Larry thought it had shot under his car, and he put his hand on the door handle—but whatever it was cut away for the woods to his right. He saw it come to rest in a patch of scrub; smoke rose from the bush in wisps.

  Dispatch? Larry said.

  Copy.

  I’m at the Sullivan house. It’s on fire, all right. Better get the trucks out here.

  Twenty minutes later two fire trucks arrived, advancing carefully down the track. The men got out and stood beside Larry, looking over the house, now brightly ablaze from top to bottom. They rolled the trucks past Larry’s cruiser and sprayed the grass around the house and the trees nearby. Then all of them watched the house burn and crumble into its foundation, and no one said much of anything.

  Larry left them to the rubble just before dawn. He went home and tried to wash the smell of smoke out of his hair and then lay down next to Emily, who didn’t stir. He lay awake for a while, trying to convince himself he’d actually done it, and then trying to convince himself he hadn’t.

  When he finally slept he saw the house on fire, except that in his dream there were people still in it: Jenny Sullivan in the upstairs window, holding her youngest boy to her and shouting Larry’s name, screaming it, while Larry sat in his car, tugging at the handle, unable even to shout back to her, to tell her it was locked.

  1985

  Patricia Pike had known from the start that Sheriff Thompkins was reluctant to work with her. Now, riding in his cruiser with him down empty back roads to the Sullivan house, she wondered if what she’d thought was reticence was actual anger. Thompkins had been civil enough when she spoke with him on the phone a month before, but since meeting him this morning in his small, cluttered office—she’d seen janitors with better quarters—he’d been scowling, sullen, rarely bothering to look her in the eye.

  She was used to this treatment from policemen. A lot of them had read her books, two of which had uncovered information the police hadn’t found themselves. Her second book—On a Darkling Plain—had overturned a conviction. Policemen hated being shown up, even the best of them, and she suspected from the look of Thompkins’s office that he didn’t operate on the cutting edge of law enforcement.

  Thompkins was tall and hunched, perhaps muscular once but going now to fat, with a gray cop’s mustache and a single thick fold under his chin. He was only forty—two years younger than she was—but he looked much older. He kept a wedding photo on his desk; in it he had the broad-shouldered, thick-necked look of an offensive lineman. Unsurprising, this; a lot of country cops she spoke to had played football. His wife was a little ghost of a woman, dark-eyed, smiling what Patricia suspected was one of her last big smiles.

  Patricia had asked Thompkins a few questions in his office, chatty ones designed to put him at ease. She’d also flirted a little; she was good-looking, and sometimes that worked. But even then Thompkins answered in clipped sentences, in the sort of language police fell back on in their reports. He looked often at his watch, but she wasn’t fooled. Kinslow, Indiana, had only six hundred residents, and Thompkins wasn’t about to convince her he was a busy man.

  Thompkins drove along the interminable gravel roads to the Sullivan woods with one hand on the wheel and the other brushing the corners of his mustache. Finally she couldn’t stand it.

  Do I make you uncomfortable, Sheriff?

  He widened his eyes, and he shifted his shoulders then coughed. He said, Well, I’ll be honest. I guess I’d rather not do this.

  I can’t imagine you would, she said. Best to give him the sympathy he so desperately wanted.

  If the mayor wasn’t such a fan of yours, I wouldn’t be out here.

  She smiled at him, just a little. She said, I’ve talked to Wayne’s parents; I know you were close to Wayne and Jenny. It can’t be easy to do this.

  No, ma’am. That it is not.

  Thompkins turned the cruiser onto a smaller paved road. On either side of them was nothing but fields, empty and stubbled with old broken cornstalks and blocky stands of woods so monochrome they could be pencil drawings.

  Patricia asked, You all went to high school together, didn’t you?

  Abington, Glass of ’64. Jenny was a year behind me and Wayne.

  Did you become friends in high school?

  That’s when I got to know Jenny. Wayne and I knew each other since we were little. Our mothers taught together at the middle school.

  Thompkins glanced at Patricia. You know all this already. You drawing out the witness?

  She smiled, genuinely grateful. So he had a brain in there after all. It seems I have to, she said.

  He sighed—a big man’s sigh, long and weary—and said, I have nothing against you personally, Ms. Pike. But I don’t like the kind of books you write, and I don’t like coming out here.

  I do appreciate your help. I know it’s hard.

  Why this case? he asked her. Why us?

  She tried to think of the right words, nothing that would offend him.

  Well, I suppose I was just drawn to it. My age
nt sends me clippings about cases, things she thinks I might want to write about. The murders were so . . . brutal, and they happened on Christmas Eve. And since it happened in the country, it never made the news much; people don’t know about it—not in the big cities, anyway. There’s also kind of a—a fairy tale quality to it, the house out in the middle of the forest—you know?

  Uh-huh, Thompkins said.

  And then there’s the mystery of why. There’s a certain type of case I specialize in—crimes with a component of unsolved mystery. I’m intrigued that Wayne didn’t leave any notes. You’re the only person he gave any information to, and even then—

  —He didn’t say much.

  No. I know, I’ve read the transcript already. But that’s my answer, I suppose: There’s a lot to write about.

  Thompkins stroked his mustache and turned at a stop sign.

  They were to the right of an enormous tract of woods, much larger than the other stands nearby. Patricia had seen it growing on the horizon, almost like a rain cloud, and now, close up, she saw it was at least a mile square. The sheriff slowed and turned off the road, stopping in front of a low metal gate blocking a gravel track that dipped away from the road and into the bare trees. A No Trespassing sign hung from the gate’s center. It had been fired upon a number of times; some of the bullet holes had yet to rust. Thompkins said, Excuse me, and got out. He bent over a giant padlock and then swung the gate inward. He got back behind the wheel, drove the cruiser through without shutting his door, then clambered out again and locked the gate behind them.

  Keeps the kids out, he told her, shifting the cruiser into gear. Means the only way in is on foot. A lot of them won’t walk it, least when it’s cold like this.

  This is a big woods.

  Probably the biggest between Indy and Lafayette. Course no one’s ever measured, but that’s—that’s what Wayne always told me.