The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

by Otto Penzler

  Did she look even a little startled—the least bit taken aback by her prey’s eager welcome? Mattie hoped so. She said brightly, “I was afraid you might not be coming today.”

  “And I thought that perhaps you . . .” Olivia Korhonen very deliberately let the sentence trail away. If she had been at all puzzled, she gathered herself as smoothly as a cat landing on its feet. “I am glad to see you, Mattie. I had some foolish idea that you might be, perhaps, ill?”

  “Not a bit—not when we need to work on our strategy.” Mattie touched her elbow, easing her toward the table where Jeannie Atkinson and old Joe Booker were both beckoning. “You know we need to do that.” It was a physical effort to make herself smile into Olivia Korhonen’s blue eyes, but she managed.

  Playing worse than even she ever had, with foolish bids, rash declarations of trumps, scoring errors, and complete mismanagement of her partner’s hand when Olivia Korhonen was dummy, she worked with desperate concentration—manifesting as lightheaded carelessness—on upsetting the woman’s balance, her judgment of the situation. How well she succeeded, and to what end, she could not have said; but when Olivia Korhonen mouthed I will kill you once again at her as she was dealing a final rubber, she fought down the ice-pick stab of terror and gaily said, “Ah-ah, we mustn’t signal each other—against the rules, bad, bad.” Jeannie and Joe raised their eyebrows, and Olivia Korhonen, very briefly, almost looked embarrassed.

  She left hurriedly, directly after the game. Mattie followed her out, blithely apologizing left and right, as always, for her poor play. At the car, Olivia Korhonen turned to say, evenly and without expression, “You are not spoiling the game for me. This is childish, all this that you are playing at. It means nothing.”

  Mattie felt her mouth drying and her heart beginning to pound. But she said, keeping her voice as calm as she could, “Not everybody gets to know how and when they’re going to die. If you’re really going to kill me, you don’t get to tell me how to behave.” Olivia Korhonen did not reply, but got into her car and drove away, and Mattie walked back to the Bridge Group for tea and cookies.

  “One for the sheep,” Pat said on the phone that night. “You crossed her up—she figured you’d be running around in the pen, all crazy with fear, bleating and blatting and wetting yourself. The fun part. And instead you came right to her and practically spit in her eye. I’ll bet she’s thinking about that one right now.”

  On the extension, Babs said flatly, “Yes, she sure as hell is. And I’m thinking that she won’t make that mistake again. She’s regrouping, is what it is—she’ll be coming from another place next time, another angle. Don’t take her lightly, the way she took you. Nothing’s changed.”

  “I know that.” Mattie’s voice, like her hands, was unsteady. “I wish I could say I’ve changed, but I haven’t, not at all. I’m the same fraidy cat I always was, but maybe I’m covering it a little better, I don’t know. All I know is I just want to hide under the bed and cover up my head.”

  Pat said slowly, “I was raised in the country. A sheep-killing dog doesn’t go for it just once. This woman has killed before.”

  Babs said, “Get in close. You snuggle up to her, you tail her around like she’s been tailing you. That’s not part of the game, she won’t like that at all. You keep coming at her.”

  Pat said, “And you keep calling us. Every day.”

  It took practice. All her instincts told her to turn and run the moment she recognized the elegant figure on the street corner ahead of her or heard the too-friendly voice at her elbow. But gradually she learned not only to force herself to respond with equal affability, but to become the one accosting, waving, calling out—even issuing impromptu invitations to join her for tea or coffee. These were never accepted, and the act of proposing them always left her feeling dizzy and sick; but she continued doggedly to “snuggle up” to Olivia Korhonen at every opportunity. Frightened and alone, still she kept coming.

  She had the first inkling that the change in her behavior might be having some effect when Eileen mentioned that Olivia Korhonen had diffidently sounded her out about being partnered with a more skilled player for the Group’s upcoming tournament. Eileen had explained that the teams had already been registered, and that in any case none of them would have taken kindly to being broken up and reassigned. Olivia Korhonen hadn’t raised the subject again, but Eileen had thought Mattie would want to know. Eileen always told people the things she thought they would want to know.

  For her part, Mattie continued to make a point of chattering buoyantly at the bridge table as she misplayed one hand after another, then apologizing endlessly as she trampled through another rubber, leaving ruin in her wake. She announced, laughing, after one particularly disastrous no-trump contract, “I wouldn’t blame Olivia if she wanted to strangle me right now. I’d have it coming!” Their opponents looked embarrassed, and Olivia Korhonen smiled and smoothed her hair.

  But once, when they were in the ladies’ room together, she met Mattie’s eyes in the mirror and said, “I will still kill you. Could you hand me the tissues, please?” Mattie did so. Olivia Korhonen blotted her lipstick and went on, “You are not nearly so bad a player as you pretend, and you have not turned impudently fearless overnight. Little sheep, you are just as much afraid of me as you ever were. Tell me this is not true.”

  She turned then, taking a single step toward Mattie, who recoiled in spite of her determination not to. Olivia Korhonen did not smile in triumph, but yawned daintily and deliberately, like a cat. “Never mind, dear Mattie. It is almost over.” She started for the restroom door.

  “You are not going to kill me,” Mattie said, as she had said once before in her own kitchen. “You’ve killed before, but you are not going to kill me.” Olivia Korhonen did not bother to look back or answer, and a sudden burst of white rage seared through Mattie like fever. She took hold of Olivia Korhonen’s left arm and swung her around to face her, savoring the surprise and momentary confusion in the blue eyes. She said, “I will not let you kill me. Do you understand? I will not let you.”

  Olivia Korhonen did not move in her grip. Mattie finally let her go, actually stumbling back and having to catch herself. Olivia Korhonen said again, “It is almost over. Come, we will go and play that other game.”

  That night Mattie could not sleep. Even after midnight, she felt almost painfully wide awake, unable to imagine ever needing to sleep again. Don had been snoring for two hours when she dressed, went to her car, and drove to the condominium where Olivia Korhonen lived. A light was still on in the living room window of her apartment, and Mattie, parked across the street, could clearly make out the figure of the blond woman moving restlessly back and forth, as though she shared her observer’s restlessness. The light went out presently, but Mattie did not drive home for some while.

  She did the same thing the next night, and for several nights thereafter, establishing a pattern of leaving the house when Don was asleep and returning before he woke. On occasion it became a surprisingly close call, since whether the light stayed on late or was already out when she reached the condo, she often lost track of time for hours, staring at a dark, empty window. She continued to check in regularly with Pat and Babs in Witness Point; but she never told them about her new nighttime routine, though she could not have said why, any more than she could have explained the compulsion itself. There was a mindless peacefulness in her vigil over her would-be murderer that made no sense, and comforted her.

  From time to time, Olivia Korhonen came to stand at her window and look out at the dark street. Mattie, deliberately parking in the same space every night, fully expected to be recognized and challenged; but the latter, at least, never happened.

  She took as well to following Olivia Korhonen through Moss Harbor traffic whenever she happened to spot the gleaming Prius on the road. In an elusive, nebulous way, she was perfectly aware that she was putting herself as much at the service of an obsession as Olivia Korhonen, but this seemed to have no con
nection with her own life or behavior. She could not have cared less where the Prius might be headed—most often up or down the coast, plainly to larger towns—or whether or not she was visible in the rearview mirror. The whole point, if there was such a thing, was to bait her bridge partner into doing something foolish, even coming to kill her before she was quite ready. Mattie had no idea what Olivia Korhonen’s schedule or program in these matters might be, nor what she would do about it; only that whatever was moving in her would be present when the time came.

  When it did come, on a moonless midnight, she was parked in her usual spot, directly across the street from the condominium. She was in the process of leaving a message on Pat and Babs’s answering machine—“Just letting you know I’m fine, haven’t seen her today, I’m about to go to bed”—when Olivia Korhonen came out of the building, strode across the street directly toward her, and pulled the unlocked car door open. She said, not raising her voice, “Walk with me, Mattie Whalen.”

  Mattie said into the cell phone, as quietly as she, “I’ll call you tomorrow. Don’t worry about me.” She hung up then, and got out of the car. She said, “The people I was talking with heard your voice.”

  Olivia Korhonen did not answer. She took light but firm hold of Mattie’s arm and they walked silently together toward the beach, beyond which lay the dark sparkle of the ocean. The sky was pale and clear as glass. Mattie saw no one on the sand, nor on the short street, except for a lone dog trotting self-importantly past them. Olivia Korhonen was humming to herself, at the farthest rim of Mattie’s hearing.

  Reaching the shore, they both took their shoes off and left them neatly side by side. The sand was cold and hard-packed under Mattie’s feet, this far from the water, and she thought regretfully about how little time she had spent on the beach, for all the years of living half a mile away. Something splashed in the gentle surf, but all she saw was a small swirl of foam.

  Olivia Korhonen said reflectively, as though talking to herself, “I must say, this is a pity—I will be a little sorry. You have been . . . entertaining.”

  “How nice of you to say so.” Mattie’s own odd calmness frightened her more than the woman who meant to kill her. She asked, “Weren’t any of your other victims entertaining?”

  “Not really, no. One can never expect that—human beings are not exactly sheep, after all, for all the similarities. Things become so hasty at the end, so hurried and awkward and tedious—it can be very dissatisfying, if you understand me.” She was no longer holding Mattie’s arm, but looking into her eyes with something in her own expression that might almost have been a plea.

  “I think I do,” Mattie said. “I wouldn’t have once.” They were walking unhurriedly toward the water, and she could see the small surges far out that meant the tide was beginning to turn. She said, “You’re more or less human, although I’ve had a few nasty dreams about you.” Olivia Korhonen chuckled very slightly. Mattie said, “You feed on the fear. No, that’s not it, not the fear—the knowledge. Fear makes people run away, but knowledge—the sense that there’s absolutely no escape, that you can come and pick them, like fruit, whenever you choose—that freezes them, isn’t that it? The knowing? And you like that very much.”

  Olivia Korhonen stopped walking and regarded Mattie without speaking, her blue eyes wider and more intense than Mattie had ever noticed them. She said slowly, “You have changed. I changed you.”

  Mattie asked, “But what would you have done if I had run? That first time, at the Bridge Group, if I had taken you at your word and just packed a bag, jumped in my car, and headed for the border? Would you have followed me?”

  “It is a long way to the border, you know.” The chuckle was deeper and clearer this time. “But it would all have been so messy, really. Ugly, unpleasant. Much better this way.”

  Mattie was standing very close to her, looking directly into her face. “And the killing? That would have been pleasant?” She found that she was holding her breath, waiting for the answer.

  It did not come in words, but in the slow smile that spread from Olivia Korhonen’s eyes to her mouth, instead of the other way around. It came in the slight parting of her lips, in the flick of her cat-pink tongue just behind the white, perfect teeth; most of all in the strange way in which her face seemed to change its shape, almost to fold in on itself: the cheekbones heightening, the forehead rounding, the round chin in turn becoming more pointed, as in Mattie’s dreams.

  . . . and Mattie, who had not struck another person since a recess fight in the third grade, hit Olivia Korhonen in the stomach as hard as she possibly could. The blond woman coughed and doubled over, her eyes huge with surprise and a kind of reproach. Mattie hit her again—a glancing blow, distinctly weaker, to the neck—and jumped on her, clumsily and impulsively. They went down together, rolling in the sand, the grains raking their skins, clogging their nostrils, coating and filling their mouths. Olivia Korhonen got a near stranglehold on a coughing, gasping Mattie and began dragging her toward the water’s edge. Breathless and in pain, she was still the stronger of the two of them.

  The cold water on her bare feet revived Mattie a moment before her head was forced under an incoming wave. Panic lent her strength, and she lunged upward, banging the back of her head into Olivia Korhonen’s face, turning in the failing grip and pulling her down with both hands on the back of her neck. There was a moment when they were mouth to mouth, breathing one another’s hoarse, choking breath, teeth banging teeth. Then she rolled on top in the surf, throwing all her weight into keeping the struggling woman’s bloody face in the water. The little waves helped.

  At some point Mattie finally realized that Olivia Korhonen had stopped fighting her; she had a feeling that she had been holding the woman under much longer than she needed to. She stood up, soaked and shivering with both cold and shock, swaying dizzily, looking down at the body that stirred in the light surf, bumping against her feet. There was a bit of seaweed caught in its hair.

  In a while, in a vague sort of way, she recognized what it was. Something glinted at the edge of a pocket, and she bent down and withdrew a ring of keys. She walked away up the beach, stopping to slip on her shoes.

  She did not go back to her car then, but went straight to the condo and walked up the stairs to the third floor, leaving a thinning trail of water behind her. Entry was easy: she had no difficulty finding the right key to open the doorknob lock, and Olivia Kor­honen had been in too much of a hurry to throw the deadbolt. Mattie wiped her shoes carefully, nevertheless, before she went inside.

  Walking slowly through the graciously appointed apartment, she realized that it was larger than she recalled, and that there were rooms that Olivia Korhonen had not shown her. One took particular effort to open, for the door was heavy and somewhat out of alignment. Mattie put a bruised shoulder to it and forced it open.

  The room seemed to be a catchall for odd gifts and odder souvenirs—“tourist tchotchkes,” Virginia Schlossberg would have called them. There were no paintings on the walls, but countless candid snapshots, mostly of women, though they did include a handful of men. Their very number bewildered Mattie, making her eyes ache. She recognized no one at first, and then froze: a photo of herself held conspicuous pride of place on the wall facing her. It had obviously been taken by a cell phone. Below it, thumbtacked to the wall, was a gauzy red scarf that she had lost before Olivia Korhonen had even joined the Moss Harbor Bridge Group. Mattie pulled it free, along with the picture, and put them both in her pocket.

  All of the photographs had mementos of some sort attached to them, ranging in size from a ticket stub to a pair of sunglasses or a paper plate with a telephone number scrawled on it in lipstick. None of the subjects appeared to be aware that their pictures were being taken; each had a tiny smiley face drawn with a fine-tipped ballpoint pen in the lower right corner. An entire section of one wall was devoted to images of a single dark-eyed young woman, taken from closer and closer angles, as though from the viewpoint of a shark
circling to strike. These prints were each framed, not in wood or metal, but by variously colored hair ribbons, all held neatly in place by pushpins of matching hues. The central photo, the largest, was set facing the wall; there were two ribbons set around it, both blue. Mattie took this picture down, turned it around, and studied it for some while.

  Hurt, still damp, bedraggled, she was no longer trembling; nor, somehow, was she in the least exhausted. Still cold, yes, but the coldness had come inside; while a curious fervor was warming her face and hands, as though the pictures on the walls were reaching out, welcoming her, knowing her, speaking her name. Still holding the shot of the dark-eyed girl, she moved from one new image to the other, feeling with each a kind of fracturing, a growing separation from everything else, until the walls themselves had dimmed around her and the photos were all mounted on the panelings of her mind. She was aware that there were somehow more there than she could see, more than she could yet take in.

  The police will come. They will find the body and find this place. They’ll call her the Smiley Face Killer. The photographs were pressing in around her, each so anxious to be properly savored and understood. Mattie put the dark-eyed victim into her pocket next to her own picture, and reached out with both hands. She did not touch any of the pictures or the keepsakes, but let her fingers drift by them all, one after another, as in a kind of soul-Braille, and felt the myriad pinprick responses swarming her skin, as Olivia Korhonen’s souvenirs and trophies joined her. It was not possession of any sort; she was always herself. Never for a moment did she fancy that she was the woman she had killed on the beach, nor did any of this room’s hoarded memories overtake and evict her own. It was rather a fostering, a sheltering: a full awareness that there was more than enough room in her not for Olivia Korhonen’s life, but for what had given that life its only true meaning. Aloud, alone in that room filled with triumph and pride, she said, “Yes, she’s gone. Yes, I’m here. Yes.”