The Best American Mystery Stories 2020

by C. J. Box

  “Shanty Falls” by Doug Crandell: Dark and mesmerizing. Haunting.

  “Rhonda and Clyde” by John M. Floyd: With a setting in my home state of Wyoming, this is a mini-symphony of misdirection.

  And those are just a few of the notes I made on the selections here. The rest are just as tantalizing.

  Since you’re reading this introduction and holding this book in your hands, it means you don’t hate short stories. Good for you. It means you can live. It also means you have a special appreciation for this form. For that reason, I can safely say that authors, editors, and fellow short story readers hoist a toast in your honor.

  Thank you.

  C. J. Box

  PAMELA BLACKWOOD

  Justice

  FROM Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

  He had not been able to sleep, as usual. Even after a day that had started before sunup and ended in the dark as well, a day that had pitted his muscles against five hundred tons of soil, or so it seemed. Judging from the dull ache in his lower back, the soil had won. He had twisted into every position imaginable in bed to ease the pain, curled in like a spider and straightened out flat like a board, and nothing had helped. He had even considered waking Callie and having her walk on his back like she did sometimes when it was knotting up on him, but it seemed a selfish thing to do, like recalling an angel from heaven to earth. In the long run, it would have made no difference anyway. It was the state of his bed, not his back, that kept him awake for hours each night. No matter how he twisted and turned and shifted, half of his bed was still empty.

  He finally left it, pulled on clothes, and made his way to the door without even lighting a candle. The faint glow from the dying fire gave him enough light to find the heavy wooden bolt, and he lifted it and opened the cabin door without making a sound. Once outside, seated on the stone stoop and breathing in the night air, he felt better. He was in the outside world now, the world of infinity. Hannah’s new world.

  He looked toward heaven, where the preacher said she was, and then looked east, where he knew for a fact she was, at least the part of her he had known on earth. If she were coming home, some evil voice whispered, this is where she would appear to him, stepping out of the forest just beyond the corncrib. Tonight, with his back throbbing, his muscles taut with exhaustion, and his brain unable to rest, William gave in to the wickedness, and his mind set to work. Hannah was coming home again.

  She would find her way out of the grave somehow. That was not his concern. Once freed, she would shake off the soil (for his mind insisted on this grisly detail, proof of the evil in it) and start for home. She would walk the three miles from the cemetery, unaffected by the darkness and the cold, her bare feet treading on sticks, and soon she would reach the edge of the forest, where the senseless separation would end.

  At this point in the fantasy, the details varied. Sometimes she was holding the baby boy who had died with her, cradling him to her chest against the chill of night and smiling because they’d been blessed with another child. Other times she was alone as she stepped from the forest, always pausing a moment beside the corncrib to catch William’s eye, always smiling at the joy of reunion. Then she would come quickly to him and the nightmare would be over.

  Some nights William could see her there as clearly as the creamy moon above. He knew it was evil, twisted thinking to imagine her back in a body no longer fit to house a soul, but most nights he couldn’t help himself. Tonight he found, with some irritation, that he had the opposite problem. He could not lose himself in the fantasy due to a riot of barking dogs.

  He had not given much thought to the racket at first. Since he’d taken to sitting on the stoop at night and thinking about Hannah, he had grown accustomed to hearing dogs barking all around him, at treed possums or the full moon or at some specter of their own creation. It was the lone barkers that he loved, the lonely call into the night of one creature facing the universe, alone. He thought to them across the pine forests and the freshly turned earth, Yes, you’re right, that’s exactly how it feels, and it seemed to him that at least in that, he had some company.

  Tonight was different. The barking was closer, maybe a quarter mile down the road, and it was savage. He held his mind still for a moment and listened. This time it was no midnight loner but what sounded like several hounds working themselves into a frenzy. What made it queer was that’s how it had started, just a few moments after he’d seated himself on the stoop. Not with the usual traveling frenzy that either grew or diminished in volume according to the movements of some prey, but a sudden outburst, beginning and continuing in one spot. William thought he was catching voices mingled in with the barking when he heard a sound coming from inside the cabin. Pushing the door behind him open, he heard disembodied sobs, growing louder as Callie made her way down from the sleeping loft.

  He pushed himself up from the stoop, brushed his hands together and then against his breeches. When he called Callie’s name, the sobbing grew louder and he could hear her bare feet, slapping on each step, hurrying to get to him. Fearful that she would stumble in the dark, he went inside and met her halfway up. Scooping her up into his arms, he returned to the stoop.

  It was not a nightmare this time, although they had been common enough since her mother had died. This time he could see the problem right away. In one hand she was clutching a hair ribbon. One of the pigtails he had so inexpertly braided a few hours earlier had come undone.

  After waiting through the necessary tears and drama, he took the pink ribbon from Callie, set her on her feet, and turned her around. Working more by feel than sight, he began the task of rebraiding.

  His hands, rough and clumsy as a hound dog’s paws, were chilly, and the fine dark hair kept slipping from his fingers. When his handiwork dissolved for the third time, he gave up. No hands would work that were chilled such as his and no eyes in such poor light. Five minutes in front of the fire, after a bit of stoking, and the task would be done. Getting to his feet, he watched Callie sit on the stoop and cross her arms.

  “Let’s go in,” he said, and held one hand down for her to grasp. “Papa’s hands won’t work in the cold.”

  “No,” she said simply, and drew her knees up under her arms. It was her new way, since her mother had died. Not defiance so much as a courtesy, informing him of how things were going to be. William, who never would have tolerated such behavior six weeks earlier, sat back down and put his hands under his armpits.

  Immediately Callie jumped up and ran to the well in the center of the yard. He called her name, knowing all the while that it was a useless exercise, then got up and followed her across the swept ground, keeping an eye that the white nightgown stayed on the outside of the circular rock wall that surrounded the well. When he caught up with her, she had hunkered down in front of it. He sat down beside her.

  “Look,” she called, and one slender arm flew out from the huddle of nightgown and disordered hair and pointed to the sky. “There’s the dipper,” she shouted, and danced the shape of it in the air with her finger.

  “That’s right,” William said, and deciding that he could at least keep her warm even if he couldn’t control her, he stretched out his legs and pulled her onto his lap.

  “But there’s no water,” she said, as if her heart would break, and William sensed the beginning of a storm of vexation over this notion. He had discovered that the only way out of these dark fits of anger was a quick distraction.

  “Callie,” he said in a loud whisper. He ducked his head and looked from left to right and then at her as if he knew a marvelous secret that no one else must hear. Seeing her eyes open wide, he knew the trick had worked.

  “What?” she whispered, and he felt her face turn up to his.

  “You hear those dogs? Those barkers down the road a bit?”

  She nodded her head, enthralled.

  “You know what’s making ’em go on and on like that?”

  She shook her head, lips parted and eyes unblinking, all pa
st traumas forgotten. William had no idea what was coming next, but he had learned to improvise like never before in the last few weeks.

  “Well,” he said, and looking up to the sky, it came to him. He turned Callie outward and lifted her face toward the stars.

  “You see that star up there,” he asked, and aimed her head toward the North Star. At that moment the barking grew to a fever pitch and William imagined that he heard a man shout. But it was all around him now, every dog on every homestead alerted to something in the night, and William, in the cacophony, could hardly be sure of what he heard. He looked back down when he felt Callie tugging on his sleeve.

  “I see it,” she said, slightly piqued, and William knew he was in danger of losing ground if he didn’t hurry on.

  “That’s the North Star,” he said. “But it’s part of something else too. That star makes up part of a bear up there in the sky. That’s what my daddy, your granddaddy, told me when I was little like you and that’s what’s got those dogs all keyed up. They’re barking after that bear up yonder and there’s nothing more they can do than bark.”

  “I don’t see any bear,” Callie said, and stood up, stepping to the left and to the right and all the while squinting upward. “I don’t see a bear,” she said again, her voice smaller this time and closer to tears. William pulled her back on his lap.

  “It’s a dipper too,” he added in desperation, and ran his finger along the trail of stars that made up the Little Dipper. “See there?” he said, trying to cover her with his coat. Her bare feet were ice, even through his trouser leg.

  “Where?” she shouted, and William ran his finger along the sky trail again, pulling his coat closer around her when she threatened to burst out of it.

  Please let her see it, he implored, and finally she saw something, because her head started banging against his chest in an enthusiastic nod.

  At that moment the barking stopped, as suddenly and inexplicably as it had begun.

  William looked away from the sky, stared into the darkness, and wondered at the oddness of it. Callie began pulling on one of his shirt buttons.

  “What’s his name?” she asked, giving all her attention to the button, twisting and turning it and plucking it with her fingers.

  “Stop that, Callie,” William said, sharper than he meant to because he’d be more likely to traipse across the moon than be able to sew a button back onto a shirt.

  “It pushes,” she said in a high-pitched whine, and William opened his shirt where the button was digging into her head and felt a rush of pleasure at the brush of her soft hair against his bare chest. For now, at least, he still had her and her little sister and he would move heaven and earth and hell to keep them alive. Thinking that perhaps the night air was not the best thing for Callie, he decided to begin the process of putting her back to bed. He savored the touch of her for another moment and then hugged her and set her on her feet.

  “What’s his name?” she insisted, stomping one ice foot into the earth and pointing toward the sky.

  “Virgil,” William said, thinking of his father’s name and then thinking faster still. “And he has ordered most of these dogs down here to hush up and go to sleep. You hear how those closer ones have gone quiet?”

  Dogs were still barking in the distance all around them, but William was hoping that for once Callie would not examine the statement for absolute truth.

  “They’ve gone quiet as church mice, haven’t they?” he hurried on, taking her hand. “Most of them, anyway. They know it’s bedtime for dogs and children. And old Virgil up there, he’d like to see them all go to sleep, all dogs and children as well. Think you can oblige him?”

  Some miracle of five-year-old logic stepped in, and Callie nodded. William smiled and counted it as a victory. It was one of the precious few he’d had since being thrust into the uncharted mystery land of children, with scant provisions and no map. He was making his way, but slowly.

  They had turned to go into the cabin when he heard it.

  A pair of riders were coming down the road, pushing their horses until the sound of hooves hitting dirt filled the night. He heard them coming, heard the desperate clomping pass his property, and heard the sound echo off the trees as the riders pressed on into the distance. Any minute he expected an abrupt end to the sound, as pushing a horse like that in the dark was a fool’s game, asking for a misstep that meant death for horse and rider.

  In another moment it was as if the sound had never existed. The hoofbeats that had dominated the dark had faded and then were gone as quickly as they had come, returning the night to the barking dogs.

  William felt Callie’s arms tighten around him and looked down to find her sobbing quietly onto his breeches. When he tried to kneel down, she pressed her face even harder against his thighs.

  “What is it, Callie?” he asked, stroking her hair and wondering if he’d ever be any better at this, at the whys and hows of tending children.

  She mumbled something but it was garbled by sobs. He bent his head closer and asked her to repeat it.

  “Reaper,” she whispered, and he knew in an instant what was in her mind. Like a thief in the night, the preacher had spoken over her mother’s coffin, the Grim Reaper comes and takes what he will and then is gone, but our Heavenly Father . . . William had shut his mind to the rest, having no patience for a justification of Hannah’s death.

  “No, Callie,” he said down to her. “That’s just a couple of men on horses, riding down the road in a hurry. That wasn’t the Grim Reaper. That was just men like Papa. There is no Grim Reaper.” Just as there is no Heavenly Father, his mind continued.

  They’re lying about all of it, but another corner of his mind recoiled in fear at that and still another corner mocked him and said, Speak it aloud and see for yourself.

  “There is no Grim Reaper,” he repeated. “Now let’s fix your hair and then maybe I’ll tell you a story.” She moved her head, which he took for a nod. Lifting her up into his arms, he walked back to the stoop.

  No Grim Reaper, the mocker in his head screamed, and William thought back to the mocker, That’s right. Even so, he shuddered when he saw the cabin door standing slightly ajar, even while knowing that was surely the way he and Callie had left it.

  * * *

  Drying tears he had quickly become adept at, through lots of practice. In order for them to survive, he had also learned to put something like a meal on the table twice a day, on dishes that had at least been scraped clean of the previous meal. Every garment they owned had been washed at least once since Hannah had died, and he was able to keep the girls at least a stage away from filthy. Hair, it seemed, would be his undoing.

  He had started the hair-washing ordeal on the next afternoon, suffering through tears at each stage, from the wetting down to the scrubbing with soap, through the futile attempt at combing out the pair of ravaged birds’ nests. Louisa, who shed silent tears in the company of her thumb, had been bad enough. But when Callie had shrieked at every slight pull of the comb, he had given up and placed them both in front of the fire with their dolls until their hair was completely dry. In this decision, even shrieks were powerless against him. He would not risk them getting chilled and then fevered or worse.

  Now, getting them ready to go to the tavern, he wondered what Hannah would think of her oldest daughter going out into the world looking like a miniature madwoman, her hair hanging about in tangled clumps. If you cared, you shouldn’t have left me, he thought, and then wondered at his own sanity. Settling the girls in front of him on the horse, he dismissed the issue as irrelevant. He would have to carry on whether sane or insane, so why even bother to consider it? Nudging Gus gently forward toward the road, he worried over another matter entirely—​would the girls be quiet long enough for him to get a swallow of gin and a scrap of adult companionship. At this moment in his life, after five days of working alone, it was all he wanted.

  Last time out they had not. Louisa had fretted at the loud men hurting he
r ears, Callie had seen a witch on the ride over and clung to William’s leg the rest of the evening. Tonight, if they could be still at the same time for a slim half hour, he had promised to buy them each a new hair ribbon at the dry goods store. Bribery, he had discovered, was even better than diversion.

  Once there, he set them on the floor in the corner of the tavern with two dolls and a bag of marbles and got himself a glass of gin. Taking a chair at a nearby table, he nodded a greeting to one of his neighbors.

  “So you still haven’t found anybody,” Josh Miller said by way of greeting.

  “Not looking,” William said, stretching his legs out under the table and leaning back. It felt good to sit down, good to be warm, good to have a drink in his hand and a neighborly body to drink it with. “I don’t need anybody,” he continued, and then took a drink of gin to wash his throat clean of the lie.

  “Seems like you do,” Josh said, looking pointedly into the corner at Callie’s matted hair. When William looked daggers at him, he just shook his head. “A man can be too stubborn sometimes, seems like to me. Besides, those two little ones need something better than you to look at.”

  “Can’t argue with that one,” William said, and looked over the other patrons in the tavern. The place was crowded with men and boys, with a stray female here and there. One over near the keg seemed to be the centerpiece of a small throng of boys who were vying for her attention with lively words and gestures.

  William saw them all as potential murderers, for surely one would win her heart and vent his passion on her until she died. That was the way of the world.

  “It’s no use thinking about that one,” Josh said. “Unless you can drop ten years off your body and twenty off your thinking. I doubt she’d be satisfied to tend children, but she might know of—”