The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021

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

  “Well, you found my son. I don’t know how you did it, and I don’t want to know, but I guess you did your job. I have your money in the other room.” Not waiting for me to reply, she marched out to fetch it. I seated myself at the table opposite Arnie, who did not look up.

  It was then, in the heavy silence of the kitchen, that I heard the front door quietly unlatch from outside. Arnie heard it too, and his whole body snapped upright. The boy flung the washcloth aside and sprang to his feet.

  I, however, remained seated. I did not even turn around when Mellish and Ormerod entered the room. Arnie whimpered as the two men approached him. Nobody spoke.

  The two assassins quickly cornered Arnie. The blind man produced a flick-knife and sliced the air with a venomous swing. Ormerod reached out and gripped Arnie around the waist. Arnie shrieked, and it was only then that I got up to leave.

  From nowhere, Mrs. Lukather exploded into the room. Under ordinary circumstances, the two hitmen would have made short work of her as well, but she had caught them off-guard. They were stealthy operators and had not expected a frontal assault. She was waving a baseball bat over her head—I recognized it as the same one Arnie had clutched in the photograph. In the split second Ormerod’s attention faltered, Arnie flung his leg back and kicked him square in the groin. Ormerod crumpled, his face frozen in open-mouthed, silent agony. Arnie broke free of the two killers and darted over to his mother.

  Before Ormerod could struggle to his feet, Mrs. Lukather swung the bat in his direction. The wet crunch as it connected with the side of his head made me cringe. Ormerod keeled over sideways, blood spilling from the side of his head onto the bare floorboards.

  Mellish, meanwhile, still had the knife. Fortunately for mother and son, without his guide dog he was powerless to use it. He swung it out in wild, desperate arcs, grunting like an animal.

  Arnie, finally finding his courage, leapt on the blind man, gripping his wrist and battering it against the kitchen counter until Mellish let go of the blade. Then Arnie punched him in the stomach and watched him double up, panting helplessly. His dark glasses dropped to the ground and cracked.

  Silence. Arnie and Mrs. Lukather looked at each other questioningly, then they turned to me. “What now?” Mrs. Lukather spat.

  “Well, I guess that depends,” I said. “You love your son, ma’am?”

  “Don’t play games.”

  I laughed. “Of course not,” I nodded toward the bat. “Besides, you don’t follow the rules. Now let me ask you again: do you love your son?”

  She nodded.

  I sauntered over to the counter, where the .38 Arnie had stuffed under his mattress now lay. I picked it up—it was cool and sturdy in my palm. Then I turned and placed it in the center of the kitchen table, with the barrel facing pointedly toward Mellish. The blind man still lay jackknifed on the floor, too winded to speak.

  “Maybe you need to decide just how much you love him, Mrs. Lukather.”

  I counted out seventy-five dollars in cash from the woman’s purse, and stepped out of the house before I saw anything I shouldn’t. I waited on the porch for a moment, in case there came from within the startling whip-crack of a gunshot. In that moment I thought about the nameless checkout girl from Thrifty’s Drug Store. I also thought about Roy Moretz. I listened, but there was no sound at all.

  Then I walked shakily back toward my car. I spotted the suitcase on the back seat and, without thinking, pulled it out and left it on the sidewalk. Gripping the steering wheel, I paused and counted to ten slowly until my heart rate steadied. A fresh summer rain speckled the Pontiac’s windshield as I gunned the engine and pulled away from the curb.

  * “Heatwave” is not the kind of story I usually write. Usually, my interest is in golden age detection and locked-room mysteries; this is neither. Here the criminals are stupid and small-time, while the atmosphere is suffocating—hence the title—and punctuated by sudden flashes of violence. But reading the story again, it strikes me that even though it’s set in the ’50s, and is my unabashed attempt to capture the spirit of classic noir, it’s also very much a product of 2020. I find it harder and harder to tell where the story ends and real life seeps back in. In “Heatwave,” you’ll see a corrupt system weighted against the underdog, you’ll see casual everyday violence, Beckettian cynicism, and an atmosphere of pervasive darkness. Sounds rather familiar, don’t you think?

  David Morrell is the award-winning author of First Blood, the 1972 novel in which Rambo was introduced. He has an MA and PhD from Pennsylvania State University and was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. His New York Times bestsellers include the classic espionage novel, The Brotherhood of the Rose, the basis for the only television miniseries to be broadcast after a Super Bowl. An Anthony, Edgar, Ellis, Left Coast Crime, and Thriller finalist, Morrell has Comic-Con, Macavity, Nero, and Stoker awards as well as the International Thriller Writers’ Thriller Master award and a Bouchercon Lifetime Achievement award.

  REQUIEM FOR A HOMECOMING

  David Morrell

  “Did they ever find who killed that female student?” Ben asked.

  Despite the heat in the crowded pub, he still shivered from sitting in the open convertible during the homecoming parade. After twenty years living in Malibu, he’d forgotten how cold autumn nights could be in the Midwest. He took for granted the people he’d waved to hadn’t the faintest idea why he was in the parade. They’d cheered for the actor on the movie poster propped behind him, not the screenwriter whose credit was in fine print at the bottom.

  “Female student?” Howard asked.

  Ben and Howard had been graduate students in the English department back then. Now Howard taught here, and Ben had accepted the guest-of-honor invitation (despite a screenplay deadline) so he could spend the weekend with his long-ago friend.

  “The one that got stabbed in the library,” Ben answered. “On homecoming Saturday. Our final year.”

  “Now I remember,” Howard said, lowering his beer glass. “Of course. Her.”

  “Are you guys okay?” a female voice asked.

  Ben looked at the waitress, who had purple hair and a ring through her left nostril. She gestured toward their nearly empty beer pitcher on the table.

  “We’re good,” he answered. “Thanks.”

  As she pushed her way toward the next booth, the din of the celebrating students gave Ben a headache.

  “So far as I know, they never proved who stabbed her,” Howard said.

  “There was a rumor,” Ben said. “About Wayne McDonald.”

  He referred to an assistant professor, who’d joined the faculty that autumn. A week after the murder, the assistant professor had died when his car veered off a highway and flipped several times before plunging into a ravine. The deaths so close together may have been a coincidence, but after the police discovered that the murdered student had come from the same college where McDonald had recently earned his PhD, there was talk that they’d been connected in other ways, that McDonald had killed her and committed suicide.

  “Nothing was proven,” Howard said. “All of that happened twenty years ago. What made you think of it? Coming back to campus?”

  “Do you remember her name?”

  “After so much time?”

  “Rebecca Markle,” Ben said.

  “How . . . ? You must have looked it up on the Internet.”

  “Didn’t need to. I never forgot how terrified everybody on campus felt after her body was found in the library. When I moved to Los Angeles”—Ben had received a scholarship to the grad-school film program at USC—“I kept thinking she was in a place she could take for granted was safe. How surprised and helpless and afraid she must have been when the attack occurred. The first screenplay I sold began with a version of what happened to her.”

  “I noticed,” Howard said.

  “Do you remember what she looked like?”

  “From photos in newspapers twenty years ago?” Howard shook
his head.

  Ben pulled his wallet from his jacket and removed a photograph. The edges were bent, the color faded. It showed a young, attractive woman, thin, with long blond hair, expressive eyes, and an unhappy smile.

  “You keep her picture in your wallet?” Howard asked.

  “From the yearbook back then. After the college invited me to be guest of honor this year, I cut it out.”

  “What on earth for?”

  “There was a memorial section for the five students who died that year. One drowned at the reservoir. One committed suicide. One had cancer. One got drunk and fell off a balcony at a frat party.” Ben paused. “And Rebecca got stabbed to death in a secluded section of the library. You still don’t recognize her?”

  “No.”

  “She was in the modern-novel course we took that term.”

  Howard sat straighter. “What?”

  The din of the celebrating students seemed louder.

  “Wayne McDonald taught that course,” Ben said.

  “I remember he taught it, but not who was in it. There must have been a hundred students. Why didn’t the police make a big deal about her being in the course? It would have been another connection between her and Wayne.”

  “Are you sure you guys are good?” the female voice asked.

  Ben turned toward their now-weary-eyed server. “I bet you could use this booth for people who drink more than we do.”

  “I hope you don’t mind. Tips can be generous at homecoming. The more people I serve . . .”

  “Here’s something to make up for us hogging the booth.” Ben gave her more than what she’d probably receive all week. “I used to work part-time in the kitchen here. I know how hard it is to pay tuition. Howard, if you’re not tired, I’d like to walk around the campus.”

  After the heat of the pub, the night’s chill stung Ben’s cheeks. He zipped up a jacket Howard had lent him and shoved his hands in its warm pockets. The noise of the crowd remained in his ears as they crossed the street toward the college.

  Arching tree branches obscured a quarter moon. A gentle breeze scraped leaves across a path.

  “The trees are bigger,” Ben said. “But the ivy on the buildings looks the same. How’s your family?”

  “Our daughter graduated from here two years ago.” Howard referred to his stepchild. “She works for an advertising firm in New York.”

  “Great. And your wife?”

  “No better.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Depression isn’t anybody’s friend.”

  Their footsteps crunched through the leaves.

  “The reason the police didn’t make a big deal about Rebecca Markle being in that class is they didn’t know,” Ben said. “Her name wasn’t on the list of students taking the course. She wasn’t registered.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I dated her.”

  Howard turned to him in surprise.

  “She and I sat next to each other at the back of the lecture hall,” Ben said. “We got to talking. I asked if she’d like to go to a movie. We had a few beers afterward.”

  “You never mentioned it.”

  “It didn’t seem important. All she talked about was Wayne McDonald, how brilliant he was, how she could listen to him forever. I never asked her to go on another date. I forgot about her until I saw her photo in the newspaper and realized who’d been killed.”

  “What about the police? Did you tell them?”

  “Working part-time in that pub earned barely enough for my dorm fees. You know how I paid my tuition—selling uppers to guys in our dorm who waited too long to study for exams or write term papers. I helped them pull all-nighters.”

  “I always wondered where you got the pills.”

  “The police would have wondered, too. How long would it have taken them to make a drug dealer a suspect? They could’ve decided I was furious because Rebecca refused to go out with me again after she discovered how I earned money, or they might have decided I shut her up after she threatened to tell the police I sold drugs. Neither would have been the truth, but by the time the police realized it, my reputation would have been dirt. I’d just received a scholarship to USC. I couldn’t risk losing it.”

  The night breeze turned colder. Ben pushed his hands deeper into the jacket’s pockets.

  “And you’ve been thinking about her ever since?” Howard asked.

  “I remember her sitting across from me in the pub we just came from. The same booth, in fact. Tonight, you sat exactly where she did twenty years ago.”

  “You’re creeping me out.”

  “I’m going to write about her again, but this time, it won’t be only a first scene. It’ll be about a man who feels guilty because his ambition might have let a murderer escape twenty years earlier. He comes back for his college homecoming to find who did it.”

  “You’re here doing research?” Howard asked.

  “And to see you again. It’s been a long time.”

  “Yeah, somehow we could never get our schedules to match,” Howard said. “Sounds like an interesting movie.”

  “Well, it has a lot of twists. For example, the main character’s best friend dated the murdered woman also.”

  In the darkness, Howard peered down at the murky leaves. On the street far behind them, car horns blared. Engines roared. Students whooped. The night became quiet again.

  “I didn’t date her,” Howard said.

  “She pointed at you in class. She told me you went out with her.”

  “It wasn’t a date.”

  “She told me she hoped I wasn’t going to try what you did.”

  “It wasn’t what it sounds like.”

  “What was it then?” Ben asked.

  “I often visited Wayne during his office hours. You knew that.”

  “You were his favorite student.”

  “He hadn’t adjusted to being a faculty member,” Howard said. “He missed being in graduate school. He liked hanging out with me. A couple of times, he invited me to his apartment to have dinner with his wife and three-year-old daughter. I said ‘office hours.’ Actually he met students in the cafeteria at our dorm. It was obvious he was avoiding his office. It was also obvious he had something he wanted to say to me. Finally, he told me there was a female student who wasn’t registered for his classes but was showing up for all of them. He told me she’d followed him from his previous college, that he’d given up a job offer there because of her.”

  Another horn blared in the distance. More students whooped.

  “Why did she follow him?” Ben asked.

  “Wayne swore he hadn’t been involved with her. He’d been hired as an instructor in his last year at the previous college. Rebecca Markle had been one of his students. He said he’d treated her like any other student, but she thought he meant more than what he was actually saying in his lectures, that he was sending her coded messages, telling her she was special to him. Remember how he made eye contact with every student as he lectured. He scanned back and forth, making it seem he spoke directly to each of us.”

  “A gifted teacher,” Ben agreed. “What did he want you to do?”

  “To talk to her, one student to another, and persuade her to leave him alone. Not only him. He said his wife had seen Rebecca outside the apartment building where they lived and outside the nursery school where his wife dropped off and picked up their daughter. They were scared.”

  The night’s chill made Ben shiver. “After Rebecca was murdered, did you tell the police about what he’d asked you to do?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “That would have made him a suspect, and I didn’t believe he killed her. Where are you going with this, Ben? Is what I did any different from what you did, keeping quiet because you were afraid the police would suspect you?”

  “Sorry for being intense. You remember how I used to get when we were students and I was working on a story. Where am I going with this? Back to the hotel to g
et some sleep. Tomorrow will be busy.”

  First came an alumni breakfast, where he told good-natured Hollywood gossip about what happened behind the scenes of the films he’d written. Then he gave advice to actors in the theater department. Then he spoke at a lunch for major donors, emphasizing how he wouldn’t have had a career if not for the excellent education he’d received here.

  At the football stadium, he met numerous dignitaries in the college president’s skybox. When he’d been a student, he hadn’t been able to afford to go to a football game. This was the first game he’d ever seen that wasn’t on television. Even from the top of the stadium, he heard the crack of helmet against helmet.

  When the second half started, he pretended to walk toward the nearby men’s room, passed it, descended stairs, and reached the car-crammed parking lot. In autumn sunlight that made him squint, he walked past brilliantly colored maple trees toward the library. Having written a film about electronic surveillance, he noticed cameras on various buildings, cameras that hadn’t been there twenty years earlier and that might have recorded Rebecca Markle’s movements.

  Ben passed the English/philosophy building and climbed the stately steps to the column-flanked doors that led to the vast library building. Inside the echoing vestibule, he needed a moment to orient himself after not having been here for twenty years. Then he shifted to the right, passed through an archway, and entered an area where numerous computers occupied rows of tables. On homecoming Saturday while a football game was in progress, only a few students studied the screens. There were cameras here as well. If they’d been installed twenty years earlier, they’d have recorded Rebecca Markle passing through this room and perhaps have revealed someone following her.

  He went to the back of the room, passed through an arch, and climbed stone stairs. More cameras. He could have used an elevator, but he’d once written a scene in which a character got a nasty surprise when stepping from an elevator, and the intensity of writing that scene had stayed with him ever since.

  On the third landing, he passed beneath another camera, walked along a narrow corridor lined with books, turned a corner, proceeded along a further corridor of books, and entered a small, square, windowless area that had a desk and a wooden chair. He’d visited here several times during his final year. In his imagination, he had returned here many times since.