The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

by Jonathan Lethem

  The pep rally had started now. On the field, four beefy linemen were performing a skit dressed in drag. They wore flowery dresses and long blond wigs, and as they sashayed around each other, bursts of laughter sounded from the stands. Out past the end zone to Oberman’s right, the bonfire had been lit and was glowing weakly.

  With all the activity across the field, Oberman suddenly realized how strange he must look sitting alone on the visitors’ bleachers. As he stood up, he heard a sharp rustling sound from the shelterbelt behind him. He turned and peered into the dark tangle of trees but couldn’t see anything. Probably a raccoon or a possum. But who knows—maybe Ruth was right and there was a hoard of trolls in the darkness just waiting to swarm out and tear the flesh from his bones. He gave a bitter laugh and then stepped away from the trees and headed back across the field. Although he took a wide angle around the skit, he still noticed several faces from the stands look away from the show and watch him.

  Back on the home side of the field, Oberman stood next to the bleachers and watched his linemen wiggle their hips and address each other in falsetto. That was Sanders, Molovski, Banks, and Jackson. Four fat oafs with no talent. They were all going to get pancaked by the Ashland defensive line. The thought made him angry. If his team got steamrolled, he’d have to spend two hours watching Mike Treadwell grinning at him from across the field. Oberman could feel it already, as if it were happening right now.

  It felt like the end of everything.

  Javi was his only hope. When the kid was locked in, he gave their team a shot against anyone in the league, even Ashland. And there was Javi now, still sitting alone on the front row of the bleachers, a zoned-out look on his face even as everyone around him hooted at the drag show. The two-liter, almost empty, was squeezed between his knees.

  Oberman approached the side of the bleachers and quietly called Javi’s name. When Javi looked up, Oberman motioned for him to follow.

  “What’s up, Coach?” Javi said once they’d stepped away from the stands. He’d brought the two-liter with him. His face was flushed, eyes bleary.

  “Let’s go to my office,” Oberman said. “We need to talk.”

  Javi frowned but followed his coach toward the gym. As they walked, Oberman grabbed the two-liter away from Javi. He unscrewed the bottle, sniffed it, took a swig, and grimaced.

  “Come on, Coach,” Javi said. “It’s the pep rally.”

  “I don’t know how you’re still standing,” Oberman said. They stepped inside the gym, and he tossed the bottle in a trash can by the door.

  “It’s the pep rally, Coach,” Javi said again.

  “And practice. And the Willow Creek game.”

  “Not the Willow Creek game.”

  “I sure hope the Willow Creek game. If that’s how you play sober, we might as well flush the season down the toilet.”

  They passed through the darkened locker room and came to Oberman’s office. He unlocked the door, and they stepped inside. The walls were covered with old team photos and clippings from newspapers announcing the team’s regional titles. Next to his framed bachelor’s degree was a poster of a football player in a three-point stance, two fingers taped together, face splattered with mud, gritting his teeth. Above the player were the words When you win, nothing hurts.—Joe Namath.

  “Have a seat,” Oberman said. When he looked across his desk at Javi, he felt sorry for the kid. At seventeen, Javi already seemed beaten down by the world. But Oberman admired his perseverance, the quiet courage that got him through each day. Seeing Javi sitting there staring down at his hands, his pudgy cheeks flushed and shoulders hunched forward, Oberman felt a sudden tenderness toward him.

  “How are things at home, Javi?” he said.

  “Ah, you know, Coach.” He glanced up and then quickly back down. “Same old crap.”

  “How’s your sister?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “And your dad?”

  Javi shrugged.

  “You’re helping out your mom?”

  “Yeah.”

  Oberman sighed and leaned back in his chair. He looked out the window. The bonfire was blazing now. As a precaution, a fire truck had pulled up twenty yards behind it. On the field, the cheerleaders were performing their routine as a pulsing dance song played from the loudspeakers.

  They sat in silence for a minute, and then Javi raised his head.

  “How are things with you, Coach?”

  The question caught Oberman off guard. No one had asked him that in a while. He looked down at his desk. Next to the playbook, magazines, and grade sheets was a stuffed plush football that had been a birthday gift from Sandra back when they were dating.

  “To tell you the truth, Javi, I’ve been better.”

  “What’s going on?”

  Oberman saw the concern in Javi’s bloodshot eyes. He grabbed the stuffed football, squeezed it, and looked out the window again. Maybe he should tell Javi everything. He trusted him not to go blabbing. And who better to talk to about life’s unfairness, about how the world can be absurd, and painful, and relentless?

  The bonfire was raging. The cheerleaders formed a wobbling pyramid.

  He’d tell him, Oberman decided. He’d get it all off his chest. He opened his mouth to speak.

  And then Lonny Hinkle walked past the window. He was headed toward the bleachers, blowing into his hands, red scarf looped around his neck.

  Oberman sucked in a breath. Unbelievable. What fucking nerve. Was he trying to prove a point, to show he wasn’t rattled by the bullet in his box? As Oberman watched, Hinkle approached a group of teachers, grinning broadly. He gave one of them a jovial slap on the back. If he had the balls to come out tonight, Oberman thought, that meant he’d be there for the game tomorrow, smirking down from the bleachers as the Hornets got pummeled. Oberman dug his fingers into the stuffed football. His head felt like it would burst. He swung back to face Javi.

  “What’s wrong, Coach?” Javi said.

  “What’s wrong?” Oberman said. “What’s wrong?” He leaned forward. “What’s wrong is that you’re trying to sabotage my team.”

  Javi frowned. He shook his head slowly.

  “Listen carefully to me, son. I know things are fuzzy right now, but I want to make sure this gets through to you. Are you paying attention?”

  Javi nodded, eyes wide.

  “If you show up drunk tomorrow, I’ll blow your fucking brains out.”

  Even as he said the words, he felt disgusted with himself. This hadn’t been his plan. He’d meant to chastise Javi, sure, to tell him to get his act together. But not like this.

  Maybe, he thought, Javi would take it as a joke. He watched him carefully, waiting for the slightest sign of humor. They could laugh this off, pretend Oberman hadn’t been seething as he said it, pretend that when the words came out, they hadn’t both believed them.

  But Javi didn’t laugh. He held Oberman’s gaze and then slowly, as the weight of the words settled in, his eyes started to water. He blinked and looked down.

  There was no going back now. A new reality had been established between them. They would both have to accept it and move forward.

  “Are we clear?” Oberman said.

  “Yes, Coach,” Javi mumbled.

  “Then get the hell out of my office.”

  Javi stood up unsteadily, gripping the back of his chair. He didn’t look at Oberman as he left the office and shut the door softly behind him.

  Oberman sat at his desk for a few minutes. He picked up the playbook and set it down again. He stared out the window at the fire. Finally he got up, grabbed the stuffed football, and stepped into the darkened locker room. Far at the back he could make out Javi slumped on a bench, shoulders shaking. Oberman locked his office door behind him and walked out into the gym. On his way to the exit, he tossed the football in the trash.

  He’d already opened the back door, the cool air rushing in, when a thought occurred to him and he stopped and turned around. He came back to
the trash can, peered inside, and reached down. He came up with Javi’s two-liter. In four big chugs he drained the bottle and dropped it back in the can. Then he shoved the door open and stepped out into the night.

  On the field, the cheerleaders were holding up huge cardboard letters while the crowd yelled “H-O-R-N-E-T-S . . . Gooooooo Hornets!” Oberman barely glanced at the stands as he made his way toward the bonfire. There were two students tending the fire, both freshman girls. After the last cheer had finished, the crowd would gather around the fire, and as the grand finale these two girls would throw the papier-mâché buffalo on the flames—glue bubbling, horns turning to ash, eyes bursting from their sockets.

  Oberman stepped up to the girls. The alcohol hadn’t hit him yet, but nevertheless he felt a giddy rush of energy. The girls looked at him nervously. “Hey, Coach,” one of them said.

  Now that he could see the buffalo up close, he could tell what a shoddy piece of work it was. It looked like a deformed dog with horns. He reached down and picked it up. It was so light, he thought. He almost laughed at how light it was. He stepped toward the bonfire and raised the buffalo above his head.

  “Coach, hold on, it’s not time yet!” one of the girls said.

  “Coach O?” said the other, her voice concerned.

  But Oberman wasn’t listening. He was looking past the fire toward the shelterbelt. There in the darkness of the trees he could see them—dozens of red eyes glaring out at him. Above the crackling fire he could hear their gnashing teeth.

  They watched him, unblinking. It was only a matter of time.

  SHARON HUNT

  The Keepers of All Sins

  from Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

  The Albrecht men had a habit of being found floating on water.

  The habit began with the grandfather, Carl, in Vienna in 1944. Alcohol was given as the reason he was floating lifeless in a turquoise-tiled pool, although the fact that he was swimming naked at the house of a man who had disappeared the previous day and that the man’s wife had alerted police to Carl’s demise, her face bearing signs of a fresh beating, gave pause to the idea that his death was simple misadventure. Still, money and the power of Albrecht’s widow ensured that the death was quickly labeled as such. The woman who had alerted the police continued on in her house, draining the pool, then staying mostly in the kitchen, where she made a bed next to the gigantic stove that gave off a fierce heat, saturating the air with moisture. Fifty years later she was found curled up next to that stove, her hair wet and dripping.

  The same year her body was discovered, Carl’s son Caspar drowned in a lake on the opposite side of the world, in northern Ontario, where he owned a summer cottage that rose from the granite like a mountain, on land that was to have remained wild. The construction of the cottage had cost two men their lives after each fell, just days apart, onto the boulders below. Caspar’s body had a softer landing in the water by the dock. Like his father, alcohol was mentioned, but in this case, the woman who found him was his own wife, who always wore long sleeves and never went in the water, although on that day the cuffs of her linen shirt were damp when the police arrived. She said she had tried to pull him out, but his body was too heavy, bloated from years of excess, so she tied his wrist to the dock and let him float until they arrived.

  Christian, Caspar’s only son, died in a lake in Switzerland twenty years after that. He had lost his grip on a ferry gate that came unlatched and from which he dangled until slipping into the cold water. There weren’t many passengers left on the ferry at that point and all of them were below in the little room that smelled of oil. The crew heard nothing until the driver of a speedboat radioed that he’d found a body floating toward shore and scooped it up. There was no mention of alcohol, but Christian’s girlfriend, Maud, had a hazy look, as if something toxic hadn’t left her yet. Christian couldn’t swim, but he liked the water well enough, she told the officer who came to investigate, having spent his summers at the family cottage in northern Ontario.

  “Canada,” she added, since the officer seemed confused.

  He didn’t look as if he traveled, rather like someone content to stay where he had been put, like Maud’s grandmother Eleanor had been. She doubted her grandmother could have located Switzerland on a map any faster than this man would northern Ontario.

  One of the reasons Maud had been so attracted to Christian in the beginning was how easily place-names fell from his lips, money having made travel as common to him as looking for bargains at the grocery store was to her. He had family still in London and Vienna. He would take her to Europe.

  She doubted he thought he would die in Europe, but Christian never thought anything bad would happen—to him.

  “Toronto,” the officer said, pulling the name from somewhere in his head and smiling.

  “Three hours north,” she said, and he nodded as if a map had suddenly materialized on the desk between them and the location of the dead man’s summers had been pinpointed.

  Earlier in the summer, before Christian took Maud to Europe, he’d taken her to the cottage to meet his mother, whose skin was as white as the sweater and trousers she wore. The woman’s black heels made a staccato sound along the granite floor before stopping in front of a sofa in the living room. She motioned for Maud to sit on a chair across from her and tea was brought out.

  His mother’s blond hair was a helmet that didn’t move, but her red fingernails tapped the side of her cup at a pace that made it jump on its saucer. She stared at Maud, whose own fingers caught in her cup’s handle, spilling tea into her lap.

  “You’re very pretty,” the woman said, watching Maud press the napkin into the pool of milky tea.

  “I’m studying history at university,” Maud said, looking up from her lap and then staring at Christian. For once she wished he would interrupt her like he usually did and tell his mother that they met at a lecture and not some bar, which the woman obviously thought, but he stared out the window at the dock and the shining lake.

  “We met at school, at a talk on Queen Anne that a professor from Oxford was giving. She had seventeen pregnancies, but no children survived her,” Maud said, and heard Christian sigh.

  “Queen Anne or the professor?”

  This time Maud sighed. “Well, I mean Queen Anne.”

  His mother stood up. “Aristocratic blood gets so polluted with all that inbreeding. We should have a light lunch before you leave.”

  “I’m sorry,” Maud said, focusing again on the officer’s mouth. “What were we doing in Zurich? Like I told you, we were waiting for the evening train to Vienna. We were going to visit his uncle. Albrecht. He is a banker.”

  “Christopher Albrecht?” The officer suddenly straightened in his chair.

  “Yes. Do you know him?”

  He chuckled. “I know of him. They say he will become Austria’s president in a few years.”

  Maud’s shoulders heaved. She was still dehydrated, despite the water they’d given her at the police station. Neither she nor Christian drank much water all those hours on the ferry. He brought a single bottle with him, saying that since it was a tour boat there would be a canteen. Even when it turned out the boat was a ferry and there was no canteen, Maud had only a few sips of the water. By midafternoon, she told the officer, her head was so thick that she had to focus on every movement.

  Right foot.

  Left foot.

  Walking had become as exacting as marching.

  Everything felt so heavy, she said, and he nodded.

  Now her feet fluttered up from the floor beneath her chair, although he couldn’t see them from where he sat. Besides, he had returned to staring at the shiny red spot at the base of her throat, the size of a thumbprint, although he hadn’t yet asked about it.

  When she’d seen the spot this morning, it reminded her of a bull’s-eye. The other marks, almost lacy on her collarbone, down across her breasts and the sides of her body, mapped out movements she was still trying to recall. Ever
ything had been easily hidden by her sweater and jeans, but having thrown all her scarves in the garbage after seeing the marks on her wrists, she had nothing to cover up the bull’s-eye. It bothered Christian to see it, and she was glad then that she hadn’t made any effort to hide it.

  The officer had said something again, she suspected, because he knit his fingers together the way he did every time he waited for an answer. They reminded her of that game her grandmother played at the kitchen table when Maud was eating her snack before bed.

  This is the church, this is the steeple. Open the doors, there’re all the people.

  In another version, her grandmother kept all her fingers straight, as the officer did now, and asked, “Where’re all the people?”

  Maud would open her own church doors and wiggle her fingers. “There they are.”

  The two of them always laughed.

  Now Maud’s fingers were stretched out, quiet in her lap.

  The officer looked at her with something that might be concern, but she understood now that people’s expressions were as malleable as plasticine and as easily refashioned. Her own didn’t betray the fear she felt, not that she would be blamed for Christian’s death but that she was starting to remember what had happened to her, and once she did, no amount of water would wash that away.

  Maud told the officer that by midafternoon the ferry had already stopped five times to let off people with bags of vegetables and books pressed against their chests and she and Christian realized that this was not a tour boat, as they’d been promised, but a ferry. She didn’t say that the sun pounded into them and the water, which from shore looked that beautiful teal blue, was black as she bent over the railing, waiting to throw up. For a moment she wondered how cold the water was and whether she was a strong enough swimmer to get to shore, any shore.

  That thought left as quickly as it arrived, and leaning on the gate, Maud felt it give a little. She pulled back, but with another wave of nausea, she lurched forward and threw up what remained in her stomach, a sour-smelling liquid that formed an orange circle on the surface of the water.