The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021

by The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021

  Turned out he was right, of course, his cousin Oscar never did bludgeon anybody to death, as we found out a few months later with the blue inkwell and all. When we found out it was Smokey Bowersox who’d killed her all along. But at the time all Radaker said was, “Let’s go up to the graveyard. I want to show you where I buried her at. It’s a real nice spot.”

  The cemetery is on top of a hill on the north side of town, and from where they’d laid Gwenda to rest you could look out across and see the steeple of St. Mary’s poking up out of the trees on the one hill, and the hospital perched on the top of another. Radaker pulled over to the side of the dirt drive, under the branches of a big old shade tree, and they walked across toward Gwenda’s plot. The dew on the long grass soaked Radaker’s boots and Huffman’s sneakers. Birds were fussing and chirping and flitting about from one tree to the other, none too happy about the intruders. It was early, and they were surprised to see someone across the way, Myrna Sayers, visiting her parents’ grave. They gave her a wave, but she never looked up, her head bowed down.

  “I sometimes wonder where my parents ever ended up buried,” Radaker said.

  Huffman didn’t have anything to say to that.

  Radaker said, “You ever wonder where your mum’s buried at?”

  Huffman shook his head. “Naw,” he said, “I don’t. I buried her a long time ago.”

  “You done what?”

  Huffman looked at his friend like he was just a little bit surprised. “In my head, Earl. In my head, she’s dead and buried.”

  Radaker nodded in relief. “Probably ain’t the only place,” he said.

  When they got to Gwenda’s plot, they took deep breaths and stared down at the stone. Myrna Sayers had disappeared from sight, but the flittering, chirping birds were just as suspicious as ever. Huffman shook his head and sighed again and said, “That’s just not right.”

  “You know what they say,” Radaker said. “Here today, there tomorrow.”

  Two names were carved into the fancy stone, three years: Gwenda Radaker / 1941–1995 and Earl Radaker / 1930 –. Huffman pointed at the stone. “Lookee there—you’re missing a date. You ought to go and get your money back.”

  “I was going to have ’em go ahead and put it on,” Radaker said. “I was thinking 2036.”

  “Yep,” Huffman said. “Only the good die young.” Radaker had a chuckle.

  They looked up and all around the graveyard and Huffman put his hand up to the back of his neck. A blue bird with yellow wings fluttered down to a nearby limb that was bright in the morning sunlight and chirped straight at them. The fussing of the other birds had settled down to a regular melody. “Sure is pretty up here, anyways,” Radaker said.

  On a rise a little ways off, three big, black crows thudded down to strut among the stones like soldiers, cawing at the top of their lungs, like bullies and braggarts. “Listen to them,” said Huffman, nodding, “look at ’em—nothing pretty about that.”

  “Sure there is,” Radaker said, “if you don’t take it personal.”

  “That’s your wife laying there. You can’t help but take it personal.”

  Radaker let that sink in, looking back down at the stone. He wasn’t convinced. “Some leafs fall off the tree in September,” he said, “some of ’em hold on all winter long.”

  “So what? They’re dead on the limb already. They’re dead the minute they’re born.”

  Radaker looked over. Huffman’s face was clenched up like a fist, angry, sure, but he couldn’t be sure he didn’t see a tear in there too. He went over to him. Huffman looked away from Gwenda’s marker, away from Radaker, who put his arm on his friend’s back, his hand on the back of his neck so he wouldn’t have to. In forty years they’d hardly ever touched. Huffman took a deep breath and held it, and they looked down across the town to where the church steeple was poking up through the trees like the blade of a knife.

  Turned out Gracie Wolfgang had her own tale of woe, damn near as bad as what Henry Huffman had lived through. Some folks had to shake their heads, tisk, tisk, tisk, and whisper about star-crossed lovers and the like, about being born under some kind of a hex sign. They wondered why does God forsake some of his children while he so richly blesses others, and not always the most deserving ones at that. Some just chalked it up to dumb luck. Some figured they must have had it coming, Henry and Gracie. They must have somehow got what they deserved.

  Elva Plotner dropped Gracie a note and then drove on down to Cranberry to see her. A pretty long haul for a woman pushing eighty, but she didn’t want to just call her up on the phone, not with news like that. She’d been Gracie’s only friend in town—they were both nurses up at the hospital at the time—the one Gracie confided in during her short spell in Hartsgrove. The one she told about her crush on Henry Huffman, the one she revealed her horror to after she found out his cousin had murdered her aunt. The only one she said goodbye to. Elva and her had kept in touch a little, but the Christmas cards had tailed off over the years.

  They met at a little lunch counter in an old storefront on Cranberry’s broad Main Street. Gracie was a good bit younger than she was, and Elva was bothered by how old she looked—the years hadn’t been very kind to her. She was still tall, but her shoulders weren’t back near as far as they used to be, her back was a little bit stooped, and her beautiful black hair was turning a dusty color of gray. When they hugged—Elva had to reach up, she was so much shorter—Elva thought she felt almost fragile. That surprised her, worried her. Wasn’t until later we found out Gracie was suffering from a bad heart.

  “My goodness,” Elva said through a great big smile. “Look at you!”

  “Yes,” said Gracie. She was smiling too, but kept her teeth hid. “Look at me.”

  They sat in a wood booth that was probably as old as Elva. Over the years kids had carved their initials in it and hearts and such. There was a high tin ceiling and the light coming in through the windows in front threw shadows across the scuffed white tiles on the floor. Elva was hungry and ordered a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich and a cup of coffee. Gracie just got hot tea. They talked and talked, or at least Elva did, at first. She wanted to blurt right out with the news about Henry Huffman and Smokey Bowersox and how Henry’s cousin had been put to death for a crime he didn’t commit, but she decided to wait a little, hold it back till they caught up on everything else. Such big news.

  Elva knew Gracie’d never married after she left Hartsgrove, but she had a son not long afterwards. Elva couldn’t be sure what kind of eggshells she might be tromping on. There’d been pictures of the little boy in the earlier Christmas cards, a note or two about him, but that all stopped a while back, about the same time Gracie quit reaching out to Elva much at all. But what it came down to was this: Elva figured Henry Huffman had to be the only man she ever really fell for. She remembered the glow on Gracie’s face, a once-in-a-lifetime glow, talking about him way back then. And when she gave birth just a year or two after she left town, it was proof enough, in Elva’s mind, of a broken heart and an unhappy rebound.

  Elva told her about Jacey (just as quiet and stubborn as ever) and about her son, Jimmy (doing fine in upstate New York). “He comes down to see us almost every month,” Elva said. “You ought to see his granddaughter, Emma—she’s just the cutest little thing.”

  Gracie didn’t say anything. She tried to smile sweetly, but it came out kind of sour.

  “How’s your boy?” Elva said. “I haven’t heard much about him in a while. What was his name? Luke?”

  “Yes, Luke.” Gracie’s face was pale and drawn, like old parchment paper. “He’s dead.”

  “Oh, how awful! How? What happened?”

  “He got killed,” Gracie said.

  He’d been found in his girlfriend’s apartment, his head bashed in—right about here, Elva started getting a sense of déjà vu, once removed. Luke’s girlfriend, a waitress, was arrested and tried for the crime, but she was turned loose when her alibi seemed to hold up.
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br />   “I’m so sorry,” Elva said. “I can’t even imagine—first your Aunt Lucy, then your son.”

  Gracie sighed, gave her head a little shake, and took a sip of her tea. “Some people just have all the luck,” she said.

  Some folks might have been at a loss for words, but not Elva. Elva never was. “Well, I have some news,” she said, “It’s about Oscar Huffman. And about Henry, too, for that matter.”

  Henry’s cousin Oscar had not killed Gracie’s aunt, Lucy Wilson. It had been another man, a man named Smokey Bowersox. She doubted Gracie even remembered who he was.

  She told her about Edna and Beesie Harriger and the blue inkwell, all about Smokey Bowersox. About the rest of it, too, things Gracie already knew about, if she remembered, about poor George, Killer George, about his wife running off and leaving him with the addled brain she’d inflicted, all on account of Oscar and Lucy Wilson, and about Henry having to live his whole life with the stain of it all over him. All of it so unfair, so undeserved. Poor Henry.

  While she was listening, Gracie’s face started to change. The color came back. She seemed to come alive again. When Elva was coming to the end of her story, the questions started tumbling out of Gracie. How did Henry take the news? What did Henry have to say? Elva told her she couldn’t say for sure. Earl Radaker—did she remember him?—he’s the one who told Henry, and all he said was Henry didn’t seem too excited about it. She didn’t tell Gracie that it seemed to her—it seemed to all of us—that Henry didn’t seem to much care. It was almost like he’d given up.

  Gracie had another question, but she didn’t ask it at first. Instead she asked how Henry was after all these years. He must be, what, close to seventy by now? Is he still working in that women’s clothing store, oh what was the name of it? Is he still living in the same house? Did he rebuild it after the fire? Elva told her no, he left Siebert’s a long time ago, worked for the county, or the state, maybe it was DMV, for a lot of years before he retired. Yes, he still lived in the same house, up on Hastings Street. He had it rebuilt.

  Then Gracie held her breath like somebody tiptoeing up to the edge of a high cliff. Did he ever get married? she said. Does he ever talk about me?

  Before she passed away, Lulu Hidinger used to say Elva Plotner, her neighbor up in the Queen Anne Apartments, was never at home because she was always out somewhere building up her obituary. Besides being a Senior Warden in her church, Elva was also the Senior Citizens Advocate to the Hartsgrove Borough Council, real active in her bowling league, and a member of the VFW Ladies’ Auxiliary. Just the opposite of her husband, Jacey, maybe figuring she ought to make up for what he lacked in sociability. She was also President of the Senior Citizens Association of Hartsgrove and it was mostly that bunch of us who got together and decided we ought to do something for Henry Huffman. After everything he’d been through, the injustice him and his family had suffered, we figured the town owed him something.

  Huffman Family Day was what we came up with. None of us felt any real personal responsibility for what had happened to Oscar Huffman—that was all our parents’ generation’s doing—but we figured we ought to at least try and clean up some of their mess. None of us figured they did it on purpose, but we figured they weren’t real diligent either. Blaming an innocent man, the first dumb palooka they came across—the Huffmans being German probably didn’t help, being between the wars and all—and letting the real killer keep on swaggering and bullying and terrorizing folks around town for another fifty years ought not to have happened. Something ought to be done. We got to work. Elva and Annie Westphall talked to the Mayor and went before the Borough Council and got them on board. Ron Bullers got Buster Clover aside up at the Rod and Gun Club and talked him into running a piece in the paper—Clover ran the Hartsgrove Herald. Everybody pitched in, even if it was only tearing down the old red, white, and blue crepe paper in the Harvest Senior Center, and putting up new decorations, maroon and black, maroon being one of the school colors. We picked a date a month off, in early October. Buster Clover got a picture of Oscar Huffman from the front page of the paper in 1936, taken the day they arrested him, and we got it blown up to poster size. We worked with the Mayor on his Proclamation of Huffman Family Day, and helped the Borough Council draft a Resolution with a bunch of whereases and therefores and resolved-that’s declaring Oscar Huffman was an innocent man unjustly put to death. Joe Milliron talked to his old hunting buddy, Harry Jameson, Esq., who’d been Borough Attorney for a number of years, about going down to the Court House and filing a brief, or whatever they call those things, whatever it was they needed to go about getting a posthumous pardon for Oscar Huffman.

  We were all set. Now the tricky part would be to get Henry Huffman to show up. And Gracie too.

  Earl Radaker wasn’t so sure Huffman would go for it. He’d been a loner so long, an outcast, he couldn’t picture him being the center of attention, let alone guest of honor, at least not willingly. It seemed like something Huffman would shy away from.

  As for Gracie, well, Elva was working on her. She called her up a couple of times to tell her what we were planning. Gracie was real interested. She was nibbling, Elva said, but whether or not she’d be able to reel her in was another story.

  In the end it didn’t work out as good as we hoped.

  Gracie wouldn’t come. She just couldn’t face Henry after what she’d done to him, she told Elva, especially not after so much time had passed, after forty years. She’d like to see Henry again, she was curious as all get-out, but what if he just took one look at her and turned around and walked away? Would he even recognize her, she’d got so old? Did he even remember her? A lot of water had gone under the bridge. There was more than one of us who’d fallen in and out of love a few times in the last forty years, some of us who’d fallen out of love and never back in it again. Wasn’t life like that? What were the odds they’d still be crazy about each other, that they could pick right up where they left off? Some of the more hopeful souls among us liked to think it might happen that way, but for the most part we knew real life was not like any fairy tale. Happy-ever-afters are damn scarce.

  In the end we didn’t even get a chance to see.

  Neither one of them showed. Radaker went up to his place the day before Huffman Family Day to try to talk him into it one last time, at least to get an answer out of him one way or another. When he didn’t answer the door, Radaker walked right on in, headed down to the cellar where Huffman was busy tying his flies. Huffman looked up from his table and vise, looked up at his friend with a not real friendly look, magnified by the glass he was wearing over his eye to tie the tiny threads. Radaker knew he didn’t especially like him coming down to his cellar—he figured he was real fussy about his fly-tying setup, the way he had everything all neat and laid out right where he wanted it—but he needed to get an answer. We were putting a lot of pressure on him to get one.

  Huffman said, “I’m not going.”

  “Why not?” said Radaker.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” Huffman said. Radaker was fine with that. It was dark in the cellar and the air tasted like it had already been breathed in and out over and over. The cement floor was always cold, and the curtains on the windows up high on the walls, just under the low ceiling, heavy, dark curtains, were always drawn tight. The only light was the bright splash on the table from the gooseneck lamp over the vise.

  Upstairs in the kitchen, Huffman said, “I’ll tell you what—you tell ’em if they can get Oscar there, I’ll come too. He’s the one they owe.”

  “That ain’t real likely.”

  “Then it ain’t real likely I’ll go either. It’s not real likely.”

  “They’d sure like to see you. We’d sure like to see you.”

  “You want a cup of coffee?” Huffman said, but Radaker didn’t smell any coffee brewing. “Listen, I know they mean well—you all mean well—but I just can’t quite see it. They’re just trying to ease their guilty consciences over what happened to Oscar.” />
  “You ask me, I think you ought to forgive and just let live.”

  “Easier said than done.” Huffman put his hand on the back of his head. “All their lives most of those folks can’t look at me without looking like they’re biting into a lemon. And now they want to kiss and make up like nothing ever happened. I don’t think so.”

  “Did you know Elva’s been in touch with Gracie Wolfgang? Your old flame?”

  That caught his attention. “No. Is that right?”

  “Yep. Told her all about it. About Smokey Bowersox and about poor old Oscar going to the chair for something he never done. She told her about the shindig we been planning, too, trying to talk her into coming up for it.”

  “And is she? Coming up for it?”

  Radaker swallowed hard, wishing he could backtrack, realizing he’d dug the hole deeper. “I ain’t exactly sure.”

  Huffman leveled his gaze. “You’re not prevaricating here, are you, Earl?”

  “I sure hope not. I just got my blood pressure checked.”

  “She’s not coming up, is she?”

  “I don’t think Elva quite got her talked her into it. Yet.”