The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories

by Otto Penzler

  It was awful watching him try to talk about this. The spots of red in his cheeks were burning now, and the rims of his eyes were almost the same color. The corners of his mouth turned down in little curls.

  Don’t worry, she said. We’ll talk about it. Okay? Wayne? We’ll talk. We’ll take the blueprints with us to the emergency room. But you need stitches. Let’s go.

  I love you, he said.

  She stopped fussing around his hand. He was looking down at her, tilting his head.

  Jenny, just tell me you love me and none of it will matter.

  She laughed in spite of herself, shaking her head. Of course, she said. Of course I do.

  Say it. I need to hear it.

  She kissed his cheek. Wayne, I love you with all my heart. You’re my husband. Now move your behind, okay?

  He kissed her, dipping his head. Jenny was bending away to pick up the blueprints, and his lips, wet, just grazed her cheek. She smiled at him and gathered their things; Wayne stood and watched her, moist eyed.

  She finally took his good hand, and they walked back toward the car, and his kiss, dried slowly by the breeze, felt cool on her cheek. It lingered for a while, and despite everything, she was glad for it.

  Then

  The boys were first audible only as distant shrieks between the trees.

  They were young enough that any time they raised their voices they sounded as though they were in terror. They were chasing each other, their only sounds loud calls, denials, laughter. When they appeared in the meadow—one charging out from a break in a dense thicket of thorned shrubs, the other close behind—they were almost indistinguishable from one another in their squeals, in their red jackets and caps. Late afternoon was shifting into dusky evening. Earlier they had hunted squirrels, unaware of how the sounds of their voices and the pops of their BB guns had traveled ahead of them, sending hundreds of beasts into their dens.

  In the center of the meadow, the trailing boy caught up with the fleeing first; he pounced and they wrestled. Caps came off. One boy was blond, the other was mousy brown. The brown-haired boy was smaller. Stop it, he called from the bottom of the pile. Larry! Stop it! I mean it!

  Larry laughed and said with a shudder: Wayne, you pussy.

  Don’t call me that!

  Don’t be one, pussy!

  They flailed and punched until they lay squirming and helpless with laughter.

  Later they pitched a tent in the center of the meadow. They had done this before. Near their tent was an old circle of charred stones, ringing a pile of damp ashes and cinders. Wayne wandered out of the meadow and gathered armfuls of deadwood while Larry secured the tent into the soft and unstable earth. They squatted down around the gathered wood and worked at setting it alight. Darkness was coming; beneath the gray overcast sky, light was diffuse anyway, and now it seemed as though the shadows came not from above but from below, shadows pooling and deepening as though they welled up from underground springs. Larry was the first to look nervously into the shadowed trees while Wayne threw matches into the wood. Wayne worked at the fire with his face twisted, mouth pursed. When the fire caught at last, the boys grinned at each other.

  I wouldn’t want to be out here when it’s dark, Larry said, experimentally.

  It’s dark now.

  No, I mean with no fire. Pitch dark.

  I have, Wayne said.

  No you haven’t.

  Sure I have. Sometimes I forget what time it is and get back to my bike late. Once it got totally dark. If I wasn’t on the path, I would have got lost.

  Wayne poked at the fire with a long stick. His parents owned the woods, but their house was two miles away. Larry looked around him, impressed.

  Were you scared?

  Shit, yeah. Wayne giggled. It was dark. I’m not dumb.

  Larry looked at him for a while, then said, Sorry I called you a pussy.

  Wayne shrugged and said, I should have shot that squirrel.

  They’d seen one in a tree, somehow oblivious to them. Wayne was the better shot, and they’d crouched together behind a nearby log, Wayne’s BB gun steadied in the crotch of a dead branch. He’d looked at the squirrel for a long time before finally lifting his cheek from the gun. I can’t, he’d said.

  What do you mean, you can’t?

  I can’t. That’s all.

  He handed the gun to Larry, and Larry took aim, too fast, and missed.

  It’s all right, Larry said now, at the fire. Squirrel tastes like shit.

  So does baloney, Wayne said, grim.

  They pulled sandwiches from their packs. Both took the meat from between the bread, speared it with sticks, and held it over the fire until it charred and sizzled. Then they put it back into the sandwiches. Wayne took a bite first, then squealed and held a hand to his mouth. He spit a hot chunk of meat into his hand, then fumbled it into the fire.

  It’s hot, he said.

  Larry looked at him for a long time. Pussy, he said and couldn’t hold in his laughter. Wayne ducked his eyes and felt inside his mouth with his fingers.

  Later, the fire dimmed. They sat sleepily beside it, talking in low voices. Wayne rubbed his stomach. Things unseen moved in the trees—mostly small animals, from the sound of it, but once or twice larger things.

  Deer, probably, Wayne said.

  What about wildcats?

  No wildcats live around here. I’ve seen foxes, though.

  Foxes aren’t that big.

  They spread out their sleeping bags inside the tent and opened the flap a bit so they could see the fire.

  This is my favorite place, Wayne said, when they zipped into the bags.

  The tent?

  No. The meadow. I’ve been thinking about it. I want to have a house here someday.

  A house?

  Yeah.

  What kind of house?

  I don’t know. Like mine, I guess, but out here. I could come out onto the porch at night, and it would be just like this. But you wouldn’t have to pitch a tent. You know what? We could both have it. We’d each get half of the house to do whatever we want in. We wouldn’t have to go home before it gets dark, because we’d already be there.

  Larry smiled but said, That’s dumb. We’ll both be married by then. You won’t want me in your house all the time.

  That’s not true.

  You won’t get married?

  No—I mean, yeah, I will. Sure. But you can always come over.

  It’s not like that, Larry said, laughing.

  How do you know?

  Because it isn’t. Jesus Christ, Wayne. Sometimes I wonder what planet you live on.

  You always make my ideas sound dumb.

  So don’t have dumb ideas.

  It isn’t a dumb idea to have my friends in my house.

  Larry sighed and said, No, it isn’t. But marriage is different. You get married, and then the girl you marry is your best friend. That’s what being in love is.

  My dad has best friends.

  Mine too. But who does your dad spend more time with—them or your mom?

  Wayne thought for a minute. Oh.

  They looked out the tent flap at the fire.

  Wayne said, You’ll come over when you can, though, right?

  Sure, Larry said. You bet.

  They lay on their stomachs, and Wayne talked about the house he wanted to build. It would have a tower. It would have a secret hallway built into the walls. It would have a pool table in the basement, better than the one at Vic’s Pizza King in town. It would have a garage big enough for three cars.

  Four, Larry said. We’ll each have two. A sports car and a truck.

  Four, Wayne said, A four-car garage. And a pinball machine. I’ll have one in the living room, rigged so you don’t have to put money in it.

  After a while, Wayne heard Larry’s breathing soften. He looked out the tent flap at the orange coals of the fire. He was sleepy, but he didn’t want to sleep, not yet. He thought about his house and watched the fire fade.

&nbs
p; He wished for the house to be here in the meadow now. Larry could have half, Wayne the other. He imagined empty rooms, then rooms full of toys. But that wasn’t the way it would be. They’d be grown-ups. He imagined a long mirror in the bedroom and tried to see himself in it: older, as a man. He’d have rifles, not BB guns. He tried to imagine the rooms full of the things a man would have and a boy wouldn’t: bookshelves, closets full of suits and ties.

  Then he saw a woman at the kitchen table, wearing a blue dress. Her face kept changing—he couldn’t quite see it. But he knew she was pretty. He saw himself open the kitchen door, swinging a briefcase that he put down at his feet. He held out his arms, and the woman stood to welcome him, making a happy girlish sound, and held out her arms too. Then she was close. He smelled her perfume, and she said—in a woman’s voice, warm and honeyed—Wayne, and he felt a leaping excitement, like he’d just been scared—but better, much better—and he laughed and squeezed her and said into her soft neck and hair, his voice deep: I’m home.

  LOUISE ERDRICH

  Disaster Stamps of Pluto

  FROM The New Yorker

  THE DEAD OF PLUTO now outnumber the living, and the cemetery stretches up the low hill east of town in a jagged display of white stone. There is no bar, no theater, no hardware store, no creamery or car repair, just a gas pump. Even the priest comes to the church only once a month. The grass is barely mowed in time for his visit, and of course there are no flowers planted. But when the priest does come, there is at least one more person for the town café to feed.

  That there is a town café is something of a surprise, and it is no rundown questionable edifice. When the bank pulled out, the family whose drive-in was destroyed by heavy winds bought the building with their insurance money. The granite façade, arched windows, and twenty-foot ceilings make the café seem solid and even luxurious. There is a blackboard for specials and a cigar box by the cash register for the extra change that people might donate to the hospital care of a local boy who was piteously hurt in a farming accident. I spend a good part of my day, as do most of the people left here, in a booth at the café. For now that there is no point in keeping up our municipal buildings, the café serves as office space for town-council and hobby-club members, church-society and card-playing groups. It is an informal staging area for shopping trips to the nearest mall—sixty-eight miles south—and a place for the town’s few young mothers to meet and talk, pushing their car-seat-convertible strollers back and forth with one foot while hooting and swearing as intensely as their husbands, down at the other end of the row of booths. Those left spouseless or childless, owing to war or distance or attrition, eat here. Also divorced or single persons like myself who, for one reason or another, have ended up with a house in Pluto, North Dakota, their only major possession.

  We are still here because to sell our houses for a fraction of their original price would leave us renters for life in the world outside. Yet, however tenaciously we cling to yards and living rooms and garages, the grip of one or two of us is broken every year. We are growing fewer. Our town is dying. And I am in charge of more than I bargained for when, in 1991, in the year of my retirement from medicine, I was elected president of Pluto’s historical society.

  At the time, it looked as though we might survive, if not flourish, well into the next millennium. But then came the flood of 1997, followed by the cost of rebuilding. Smalls’s bearing works and the farm-implement dealership moved east. We were left with flaxseed and sunflowers, but cheap transport via the interstate had pretty much knocked us out of the game already. So we have begun to steadily diminish, and, as we do, I am becoming the repository of many untold stories such as people will finally tell when they know that there is no use in keeping secrets, or when they realize that all that’s left of a place will one day reside in documents, and they want those papers to reflect the truth.

  My old high school friend Neve Harp, salutatorian of the class of 1942 and fellow historical-society member, is one of the last of the original founding families. She is the granddaughter of the speculator and surveyor Frank Harp, who came with members of the Dakota and Great Northern Townsite Company to establish a chain of towns along the Great Northern tracks. They hoped to profit, of course. These townsites were meticulously drawn up into maps for risktakers who would purchase lots for their businesses or homes. Farmers in every direction would buy their supplies in town and patronize the entertainment spots when they came to ship their harvests via rail.

  The platting crew moved by wagon and camped where they all agreed some natural feature of the landscape or general distance from other towns made a new town desirable. When the men reached the site of what is now our town, they’d already been platting and mapping for several years and in naming their sites had used up the few words they knew of Sioux or Chippewa, presidents and foreign capitals, important minerals, great statesmen, and the names of their girlfriends and wives. The Greek and Roman gods intrigued them. To the east lay the neatly marked-out townsites of Zeus, Neptune, Apollo, and Athena. They rejected Venus as conducive, perhaps, to future debauchery. Frank Harp suggested Pluto, and it was accepted before anyone realized they’d named a town for the god of the underworld. This occurred in the boom year of 1906, twenty-four years before the planet Pluto was discovered. It is not without irony now that the planet is the coldest, the loneliest, and perhaps the least hospitable in our solar system—but that was never, of course, intended to reflect upon our little municipality.

  Dramas of great note have occurred in Pluto. In 1924, five members of a family—the parents, a teenage girl, an eight- and a four-year-old boy—were murdered. A neighbor boy, apparently deranged with love over the daughter, vanished, and so remained the only suspect. Of that family, but one survived—a seven-month-old baby, who slept through the violence in a crib wedged unobtrusively behind a bed.

  In 1934, the National Bank of Pluto was robbed of seventeen thousand dollars. In 1936, the president of the bank tried to flee the country with most of the town’s money. He intended to travel to Brazil. His brother followed him as far as New York and persuaded him to return, and most of the money was restored. By visiting each customer personally, the brother convinced them all that their accounts were now safe, and the bank survived. The president, however, killed himself. The brother took over the job.

  At the very apex of the town cemetery hill, there is a war memorial. In 1951, seventeen names were carved into a chunk of granite that was dedicated to the heroes of both world wars. One of the names was that of the boy who is generally believed to have murdered the family, the one who vanished from Pluto shortly after the bodies were discovered. He enlisted in Canada, and when notice of his death reached his aunt—who was married to a town-council member and had not wanted to move away, as the mother and father of the suspect did—the aunt insisted that his name be added to the list of the honorable dead. But unknown community members chipped it out of the stone, so that now a rough spot is all that marks his death, and on Veterans Day only sixteen flags are set into the ground around that rock.

  There were droughts and freak accidents and other crimes of passion, and there were good things that happened, too. The seven-month-old baby who survived the murders was adopted by the aunt of the killer, who raised her in pampered love and, at great expense, sent her away to an Eastern college, never expecting that she would return. When she did, nine years later, she was a doctor—the first female doctor in the region. She set up her practice in town and restored the house she had inherited, where the murders had taken place—a small, charming clapboard farmhouse that sits on the eastern edge of town. Six hundred and forty acres of farmland stretch east from the house and barn. With the lease money from those acres, she was able to maintain a clinic and a nurse, and to keep her practice going even when her patients could not always pay for her services. She never married, but for a time she had a lover, a college professor and swim coach whose job did not permit him to leave the university. She had always u
nderstood that he would move to Pluto once he retired. But instead he married a girl much younger than himself and moved to Southern California, where he could have a year-round outdoor swimming pool.

  Murdo Harp was the name of the brother of the suicide banker. He was the son of the town’s surveyor and the father of my friend. Neve is now an octogenarian like me; she and I take daily walks to keep our joints oiled. Neve Harp was married three times, but has returned to her maiden name and the house she inherited from her father. She is a tall woman, somewhat stooped for lack of calcium in her diet, although on my advice she now ingests plenty. Every day, no matter what the weather (up to blizzard conditions), we take our two- or three-mile walk around the perimeter of Pluto.

  “We orbit like an ancient couple of moons,” she said to me one day.

  “If there were people in Pluto, they could set their clocks by us,” I answered. “Or worship us.”

  We laughed to think of ourselves as moon goddesses.

  Most of the yards and lots are empty. Foryears, there has been no money in the town coffers for the streets, and the majority have been unimproved or left to gravel. Only the main street is paved with asphalt now, but the rough surfaces are fine with us. They give more purchase. Breaking a hip is our gravest dread—once you are immobile at our age, that is the end.

  Our conversations slide through time, and we dwell often on setting straight the town record. I think we’ve sifted through every town occurrence by now, but perhaps when it comes to our own stories there is something left to know. Neve surprised me one day.

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you why Murdo’s brother, my uncle Octave, tried to run away to Brazil,” she told me, as though the scandal had just occurred. “We should write the whole thing up for the historical newsletter.”

  I asked Neve to wait until we had finished our walk and sat down at the café, so that I could take notes, but she was so excited by the story beating its wings inside her—for some reason so alive and insistent that morning—that she had to talk as we made our way along. Her white hair swirled in wisps from its clip. Her features seemed to have sharpened. Neve has always been angular and imposing. I’ve been her foil. Her best audience. The one who absorbs the overflow of her excitements and pains.