The Best American Mystery Stories 2016

by Elizabeth George

  “You thought that by killing my dad,” she said gently, “even though inadvertently, you had saved other young people from being brutally slaughtered . . . Let’s call it what it is.”

  “Once again, it’s not something I’m real proud of. But yeah.”

  “I understand. More completely than you’ll know. And I think you’re right. I think what happened that day did spare others from my father’s . . . evil.”

  We stared at one another for a moment, then she stood. There ensued one of the most awkward hugs in the history of farewells. Then she went out into the street and disappeared.

  I discovered the tape by a fluke.

  For the first time in years, I returned to Verplanck. A cousin was getting married. At the rehearsal party at my aunt’s house, a bunch of my younger cousins were watching videos of their childhood in the family room. I was barely paying attention: the charms of children mugging for the camera is quickly lost if you’re not the one doing the mugging.

  “Oh, let me show you this one of Barry playing soccer,” the brother of the groom said to the bride. “He falls right on his face.”

  Suddenly my aunt strode into the room from the kitchen and said, “Tim, that’s enough of the videos.” Her tone was brusque.

  Tim seemed confused. “What?”

  Flustered, my aunt said more insistently, “I asked you to do something. Turn off the TV. Not all our guests may be as enthralled as you.”

  Her last words seemed to have some special meaning, one that her son belatedly understood.

  “Okay, Mom, sorry.” He darted a glance my way, then looked away, embarrassed.

  It was only an hour later that it clicked. I took my aunt aside and asked. “That videotape of Barry playing soccer. It was taken that day, wasn’t it?”

  Pained, she sighed. “I’m sorry. Tim just wasn’t thinking. I could smack him sometimes.”

  “I’m not upset,” I assured her. “But I’d like to see that tape. Not now, not this weekend.”

  I returned to New York with the DVD transfer of the VHS tape. It was in my DVD player even before I had taken off my coat.

  Seven-year-olds are playing soccer. Way to go, Kyle. Way to go, some woman keeps calling out. Another faint but discernible conversation is a woman telling a friend about what a bitch her boss is. And then.

  A small thunk. The tinny sound of screeching brakes. Oh, my God, did you see that?

  The first time I watched the tape, I didn’t really notice the accident at all. But on the second, I could see the tiny figures in the upper left corner of the frame. Pedestrians walking, a hazy blue car approaching. Then one of those figures flying high into the air, over the car. One detail, however, didn’t quite fit.

  Obsessively, I watched the tape over and over, at times my face just inches from the screen. And every time I thought I saw that troubling blur.

  You can find almost anything on the Internet. Two days later I was in Irving Beckstein’s workshop in Astoria, Queens. Beckstein is a forensic video analyst. He has worked for the Defense Department and often testifies as an expert witness at trials.

  Beckstein had cropped and blown up the footage of the accident. “Forget what you see on TV. Our software can’t miraculously sharpen an image so it looks like a thirty-five-millimeter movie. But we can do quite a bit.” He went on to explain what he had done. His words seemed well burnished, as if he had given them many times in front of juries.

  Then he played the images for me on a large, sixty-inch monitor. Though heavily pixilated, it showed Chris Gramercy shoving his father into the path of my oncoming car.

  Over the years I’ve attended a number of support groups. Most of the people there are like me: someone who has caused a fatal accident. Most have not been charged because it was determined that they were not at fault. That it was all a tragic accident. A few of the group members had slightly different stories. One was a police officer who had been involved in a suicide-by-cop incident. Another was a train engineer who ran over and decapitated a suicidal man who had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s who threw himself in front of his train. You would think that they would somehow feel less guilty. But they didn’t. Maybe, the cop said, it was because it brought home how vulnerable, how much at the mercy of unseen forces, we all are.

  As far as I know, no member of the groups ever was an unknowing instrument of a murderer. Except me.

  I did nothing with the information I discovered from the tape. But a month ago Daria Gramercy called me late at night.

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” she said after apologizing for calling. “I somehow feel that we have unfinished business.”

  “And why is that?” I asked carefully.

  “I have nothing definite to go on, but my brother may have been more involved in the accident.”

  “How?”

  “I really don’t know. It was just this impression . . . After the accident, Chris was never really the same.”

  “Were any of us?”

  “I remember times when he was drunk—and he was drunk a lot near the end. He kept coming back to one theme. Was it ever justified to kill someone? Stupid stuff about would you go back in time to kill Hitler. Would I kill my husband to protect my children?” She sighed, then added plaintively, “My husband is the kindest, gentlest man in the world.”

  There was a long silence on the line, then I heard, “When everything came out about my father, Chris’s words gained a different meaning.”

  “I’m not sure I follow,” I said, though of course I did. “Are you saying that Chris somehow caused your father to fall in front of my car?”

  “I don’t know what I mean,” she wailed. “I hope to God that’s not what happened. But I thought you had the right to know.”

  I considered what she had told me, then said, “I really appreciate your calling me. And your contacting me has helped me in countless ways, so I’m grateful to you. But I can tell you definitely that your brother did not cause your father’s death. I could clearly see them both, and Chris was a good two or three feet away from him. Your father stumbled. That image is etched in my mind permanently.”

  I heard her crying softly and then, “Thank you.”

  Did I do the right thing? I like to think I did, but who knows?

  The nightmares and my obsessive thoughts about that day have lessened. I don’t know. Maybe I’m getting better.

  SARAL WALDORF

  God’s Plan for Dr. Gaynor and Hastings Chiume

  FROM Southern Review

  DR. GAYNOR WAS on the move again, walking briskly into town on her lunch break, just what she did most days in the dry season. She wished to pick up the blouse being made for her by Mr. Pherri, who held two jobs, one as tailor running his old foot-pedal Singer sewing machine on the raised wooden porch of Mrs. Tsembe’s general store, the other as scrivener, or mlemba, who, moving to a rickety table at the other end of the porch, wrote letters or filled out documents for those illiterate.

  As Dr. Gaynor moved along, wondering if Mr. Pherri had finished her blouse as he so earnestly promised to do, she had no premonition that today in town, on the way to her tailor, she would have a brief encounter with the young man who would kill her two weeks later.

  Some of Dr. Gaynor’s staff, watching her leave through the small hospital’s back gates—gates seldom used because of the morgue next to them—also had no premonition of their boss’s impending death. At best, they had noted some blackbirds chattering in a tree, which might mean visitors coming, and that could include death and his minions. However, since the three-times-a-week bus was always dropping off visitors or relatives in Chitipa, these sightings of blackbirds seldom reached an ominous level. On this day, no one saw anything unusual about Dr. Gaynor’s decision to go into town; they only thought her quite crazy as usual, quite kerezeka, to want to walk anywhere when, as boss, she had at her disposal the hospital’s Land Rover, her driver growing fat as he sat in the tiny transport office eating and drinking and wait
ing to take her somewhere.

  The very fact her staff members made these same remarks about their boss and her noon walks into town showed how, in general, nothing much did happen in Chitipa, this the last district town in the mountainous northwest corner of Malawi before the Zambian border, a town reached only by a wide and winding bulldozed-dirt road the government kept promising to pave.

  In truth, it was this main dirt road from the lakeside town of Karonga to Chitipa, high on a plateau, that offered the best chance of excitement, because even during the rainy season, when bushes and wild grasses sprang up in its middle, the three-times-a-week, blue-and-white government-owned bus always got through—sometimes on time, most of the time not, but it got through. Gears grinding, up it made its way, goats, sheep, and suitcases piled on its top, batteries and auto parts packed inside, as well as expensive items, like toilet paper, for the local elite. There were also the days-old newspapers in both English and Chichewa, the cooking oils and salt and sugar, the many cartons of cigarettes and matches that vendors bought to resell in allotments of one, two, or three, the large bars of yellow lye-looking soap sold in wholes or halves, and always at least two sacks of incoming mail, for electricity was still too irregular for people to depend on the new cell phones used in the cities or even the old land phones, of which the hospital had three.

  Most importantly, the white-and-blue bus brought people, people returning from matoling, from visiting relatives or friends elsewhere, or from attending marriages and funerals—especially funerals, because all government and privately employed workers got three paid days off for any family funeral, wherever in the country. It also brought people the police might be looking for, or people who could turn dirt into gold, and its arrivals and departures were pretty much the biggest events of the week, coming Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, leaving the next day on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Usually the same bus, usually the same driver.

  Of course events happened locally too, people being born, people dying, people getting sick, some brought immediately to the hospital but most waiting it out at home or seeing Mr. Chimbalala, the traditional healer, at his camp nearby. For not until about to die did people actually go to the hospital, because no one wanted to die at home. Dying at home meant pollution and ghosts and the home had to be abandoned or purified in elaborate rituals, which were expensive and time-eating.

  So it went: bus days overlapping with the local birth days, sick days, funeral days, school days, harvest days, church days, and then the big-drama days, the days when someone stole one of the hospital’s two motorcycles and tried to sell it in Mzuzu, or when someone snuck into the home of Mrs. Kondowe and took her disabled TV set, or when the young husband in Vwaza killed his wife with his machete because he thought she was having an affair, which she was. Then there was that big-drama day, just six months after Dr. Gaynor had come to the hospital, when a government helicopter from Zomba landed at the now-abandoned airfield near the hospital to deliver the body of a high-ranking government official for transportation to his village, Lufita, his arrival causing much excitement. After harvest days, there was also the drama of the big-fire days, when fields were burned at night, men keeping the fires moving like cattle, penning them on the edges with big flat sticks and brooms. Crime was down on these nights because the town and surrounding farms were so lit up no one was stupid enough to take a neighbor’s chickens or beat a wife.

  However, this Tuesday, a departure-bus day, was turning into a low-drama day, like the low-drama, arrival-bus day before, and Dr. Gaynor hadn’t much on her mind as she approached town, where the bus was waiting for its early-afternoon departure. She walked quickly and efficiently, eyes forward, not swiveling her head side to side slightly as so many of the female vendors did, the women who sat under the large, shady mango trees of the town’s dirt parking lot, their wares laid out before them on overturned wooden crates.

  Dr. Gaynor felt, as head of the hospital, she had to maintain a professional if not severe air when dealing with the townspeople, and not show, as they so often did through their turned-sideways heads and fluttering eyelids, this calculating curiosity, as she saw it, a curiosity ever-vigilant for something from which a profit might be made.

  She felt herself no fool when it came to the motives of her fellow townspeople and knew vigilance was needed on her part too. Her demeanor had to be pleasant but professional, her dress modest, her white doctor’s coat worn over her black polyester skirt even when she went into town, nothing to inflame the minds of the male locals, as had happened apparently with the low-cut-dressed wife of her expat predecessor.

  Dr. Gaynor had no ambition to stir interest in herself, and, as was to be written up at her autopsy, she wasn’t the sort who would stir up male interest, being an unexceptional, white-skinned, thin, middle-aged female of thirty-eight years who had borne no children. She had no signs of recent sexual intercourse. She carried marks of two surgeries: one old, perhaps done in adolescence, where the appendix had been removed; the other, on her left leg, more recent: titanium screws holding together the fibula. Maybe she shattered it in some accident. Her body type was recorded as thin, ectomorphic—or what the female vendors called nkuku, chickenlike, when the breasts are flat and empty of milk after nursing.

  Passing the Ladies of the Ladles, as Dr. Gaynor called them, for the vendors were always stirring or picking things from their boiling iron pots, she knew many disapproved of her. This came with the territory, as her predecessor, the English doctor Jamie Swain, now working at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Lilongwe, told her (he later supervising her autopsy, since she was a white woman and he the only white doctor in the city). However, if Dr. Gaynor’s mind was anywhere on this day, it was on her assistant, Robinson Tmembo, and the alacrity with which he had just said he would guard over her office—something he often said when she left for hospital rounds or surgeries or for town errands—but this time there had been some added eagerness that made her wonder just how trustworthy Robinson was, given the young man’s frequent quest for her office key so, he said, he could come early and sweep, or stay late and clean up. There was no question he was a hard worker and fervent member of his Living Waters Pentecostal Church, telling her how God in his infinite wisdom had led him to her, but was it her or her property?

  She itemized the current status of her office: a laptop she had to run mostly on batteries or have charged up by the hospital’s Land Rover’s engine, so she didn’t use it very much; her green manual Olivetti typewriter, on which she wrote up schedules, requests, and monthly statistics that were then given to the ladies in the typing room who did the official, clean copies on their heavy manuals. There was also the copier some nonprofit had given to the hospital before she came, and again she used it only occasionally, since it didn’t run on batteries and instead relied on the town’s erratic electricity. There were also her many medical books and personal medical kit, and the two wooden file cabinets made by the hospital carpenters that contained files by past administrators (others were kept in the small file room near the men’s ward, an office piled up to the ceiling with paper folders). Then on her desk rested a framed photo of her father and mother when they were young, for while she was divorced with no children, Dr. Gaynor had so far refused to display photos of her brothers’ children, her nieces and nephew, as if she had maternal instincts. Ticking off all these items, she couldn’t think what Robinson could steal without the theft being very noticeable, and, in terms of generating income, quite useless.

  With these thoughts, Dr. Gaynor walked past the former general store once owned by Mr. Gupta, an enterprising Indian who had now shifted into the up-and-coming video business, as the more prosperous local businessmen and government employees bought home generators to run their TVs. The wooden building of his emptied store had been bought by another new evangelical church, the New Church of the Prophet Hosea, which seemed to be holding a noontime service.

  She had paused briefly to listen to the loud, enthusia
stic singing coming from inside when out from the storefront came the very recent arrival Hastings Chiume, the only and spoiled son of the widow Mrs. Makela Chiume, also mother of six daughters, four married, two not. Before bumping into the doctor as he escaped his mother’s eye and left the service, Hastings had been sitting on one of the wooden pews of his mother’s breakaway church with the other delinquent sons and husbands, while across the aisle, in their section, sat his mother, sisters, and fellow women, singing lustily, “O living Lord from heaven, how well you feed your guests!”

  It was after the song’s end, while everyone was praying with eyes closed under the pastor’s exhortations to “God bless everyone, no exceptions,” that Hastings exited swiftly, passing Mr. Mwale, who was standing in the rear, head bowed, as he waited to pass the collection basket, in which sat already the two kwachas belonging to the pastor to encourage parishioners to do the same. However bowed his head, Mr. Mwale saw Mrs. Chiume’s son’s defection and would be one of the older men who later nodded sympathetically when Dr. Gaynor’s murder was announced on the radio and in the government newspapers, although Mr. Mwale had no reason to link it to Hastings’s hasty departure on this day.

  Hastings, paying no attention to Mr. Mwale except to note the money in the collection basket, slipped through the front door of the church and out into the sunshine, and this is where he collided with the white female head of the chipatala. This forced Dr. Gaynor, on contact, to step back, annoyed. She made a curt motion to indicate he could go ahead of her on the narrow, chipped-cement sidewalk. But in the ingratiating way many of the town’s young men had, he bobbed his head up and down, saying, “Pepani! Pepani!”—how sorry he was. When he just stood there, nodding away, smiling, as if to indicate she should go first, she did so with a shrug, leaving the young man in his rope-tied khaki pants and secondhand white shirt just standing at the church’s door, watching very alertly her continued passage down the sidewalk that paralleled the small, one-room stores.