The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

by Jonathan Lethem

  He started to say something but was laughing again—bilious, hot, disgusting, straight from his gut. It was mirthless and too loud and chicken flavored. She was backing away from him now (“You okay, Dennis?”), the wig sliding off her head.

  “Give me the knife,” he said.

  To his surprise, she did, the safe way, gripping the blade and offering him the handle.

  “You said you wanted me to show you,” he said. It was the clown’s voice, not Dennis’s. “I’ll show you, then.” It terrified him what he was saying. He had to stop for breath between each word. I’ll show you. I’ll—show—you.

  All the fun was happening downtown, five minutes from Pinche Taco, five minutes from Cerebral Brewing, about two minutes from Über Dog. There were scarecrows and Wonder Women and Cookie Monsters marauding through the early dark. Med students and waitresses, guised as Amelia Earhart, as swan-Björk, swung arms overhead to taxis, to the songs of passing cars, to friends stepping out of corner liquor stores across the street. A quartet of speeding Harleys ripped a seam in the night. A foam Hulk fist fell from a balcony and bounced into the road. Everyone was hidden in the clamor, welcomed and exalted by it. The clown felt simultaneous with himself. It couldn’t be explained.

  The clown and Lauren waited at the crosswalk with two scanty pirates. They eyed him. He was suspiciously uncostumed. The clown wore just his blazer and slacks, his graying temples, but beside him Lauren was to the nines. The happy tatters ill-fit her even better than they ill-fit him. He’d whited her face and drawn a great big ripping smile, almost to her eyes. Her forehead was smaller than his and the charred eyebrows reached up and tangled in the frizz of the wig. The teeth bulged her lips into a psychopathic grin. The tinsel nails made a little music as they walked.

  Seamus and Eliza’s apartment complex was exactly what he’d imagined, a high cube of condos with mountain bikes on the balconies, fake brick on Tyvek, banners over the office. He could picture the police tape, the office phone ringing, the men encamped in the alley shooing off the sirens and lights.

  What he’d tell Owen, if Owen wanted to hear him, was that it was the scariest thing in the world to let yourself be known. You might not be liked. In fact, you wouldn’t be. There’s plenty in each of us that’s unforgivable, he’d say. In a political world, it would always make a kind of sense to hide yourself away. But, he’d say, I want you to know me, even if sometimes you hate what you see. And I hope you’ll find a way to let me know you too.

  He led Lauren up the courtyard stairs and along the balcony past potted cactuses and airing yoga mats. He gestured for her to listen. Behind the door, Seamus was making original commentary on the Clintons. Lauren seemed nervous. She kept whispering, was she supposed to say something or do something scary? “Do I say trick or treat?” The clown took a deep breath and let it all imbue his smile. He told her to relax. It was going to be great. The knife was in his blazer, his heart was in his smile. He knocked and said, “Don’t worry. Just keep your eyes on me.”

  REBECCA MCKANNA

  Interpreting American Gothic

  from Colorado Review

  Chloe received the first letter in December. She worked at the American Gothic House in Eldon, Iowa, and spent that afternoon helping a middle-aged couple put their golden retrievers into two of the museum’s many replicas of the clothes the couple in Grant Wood’s painting wore—a black dress and colonial-print apron for the woman; denim overalls and a black jacket for the man. Both dogs endured this stoically, much more stoically than Chloe thought she would have been able to do.

  The house looked salmon colored in the fading winter light. It was only four thirty, but with the time change the sun would set soon. She walked toward the visitors center next to the house. Her hands ached from the cold. As she walked, carrying the pitchfork and costumes, she thought about Grant Wood. Was there any way he could have predicted the bastardization of his creation? Bougie people driving from suburbs of Chicago to pose their dogs for an insipid picture they would probably frame and hang above a piano no one played.

  Inside the visitors center, Mark was behind the front desk, listening to someone on the phone. He was in his mid-twenties, a few years older than Chloe, and had worked at the museum longer than she had. He was tall and skinny with pale skin, wire-rimmed glasses, and hair the same color as Van Gogh in Self-Portrait with Palette—hair that was a golden red and seemed to be lit from within. Mark usually answered phone calls from people with questions about the house and its history or teachers who wanted to schedule field trips; he sometimes, however, talked to elderly people who called under the pretense of sharing their story about Grant Wood or the painting but who just wanted someone to talk to. He was always kinder and more patient with those people than Chloe thought she would be, making active-listening statements like I’m sorry. That must have been difficult. I see. Good for you.

  The museum was closing soon, and one visitor remained—a man in his late fifties with graying hair and a long black coat. Chloe left him in front of an exhibit about Grant Wood’s childhood and went into the break room, where she propped the pitchfork against the wall, took off her coat, and grabbed a pile of mail from the counter to sort.

  She heard the documentary about American Gothic playing on repeat in the media room. She always found the name “media room” a little too ambitious for the tiny space with a few wooden chairs and a TV and DVD player. She almost had the documentary memorized: “It is one of the most familiar images in American art, and its story starts here, in Eldon, Iowa, in the year 1930, when a young artist named Grant Wood saw a small white house built in the Carpenter Gothic style.” She found the narrator’s deep voice comforting.

  She threw away a lot of junk mail—magazine-subscription ads and coupons mostly—and then sorted through the remaining letters. One was a thank-you card from a fifth-grade class that had visited the house a month before. Another was a clipping about the house that was in some art magazine recently.

  Finally she got to the last letter. Its Daffy Duck postage was out of step with what was stamped across the back of the envelope in red: NOTICE! This correspondence was mailed by an inmate confined in a facility operated by the Kentucky Department of Corrections. Its contents are uncensored.

  When she ripped it open she found creamy paper, the surface covered with neat, old-fashioned cursive from a pencil. The letter was formal, polite. A man asking what the painting was truly about. Was it a parody of Iowans? Or a tribute? Or something more serious—possibly a mourning portrait? He said he’d read a variety of different interpretations, and he was curious what the “official” interpretation was.

  This may seem silly, he wrote. But as you can understand, I have nothing but time on my hands to ponder these things. I want to understand what Grant Wood’s intentions were. He signed the letter: Peace, Jon Allan Blue.

  The name nagged at her. It seemed familiar, but wouldn’t she remember someone with the last name Blue? She looked up “Jon Allan Blue” on her phone. The number of results surprised her. The media had dubbed him “The Midwest Mangler.” His victims were young women in Iowa, Kentucky, and Nebraska, bodies mutilated beyond recognition, skulls bashed in, bodies stabbed repeatedly. He had been on death row at the Kentucky State Penitentiary for over a decade, since Chloe was ten years old.

  There were photos of him online. He was handsome—even the media commented on his “all-American good looks.” His eyes were gray, his lips full. His forehead was heavily lined, and there were tributaries of wrinkles fanning out from his eyes. There was something appealing and youthful about his smile. He looked more like a CEO than a serial killer, although Chloe had read once that people in both occupations often had psychopathic traits.

  Chloe held a letter written by someone who had stabbed several women to death, and this was terrifying—and the most exciting thing to happen to her. She was desperate to understand how someone who did so many horrific things could write such a polite, reasonable-sounding letter in perfe
ct Palmer script.

  While she read an interview with one of Jon Allan Blue’s lawyers, Mark entered the break room. He sat next to her, his shoulder touching hers, his head craned to look at her phone.

  “What are you reading?”

  Although there was no reason not to tell him, although the letter would have made for an interesting conversation, she darkened her phone’s screen, shrugged, and said it was nothing.

  She did not write back, but she did not throw Jon Allan Blue’s letter away. She took it home and kept it in a drawer in her nightstand. She read through websites about his crimes each night when she got home from work.

  Some of the websites said the women Jon Allan Blue murdered resembled an old girlfriend who scorned him. People pointed to this woman as the reason he began to hate and want to hurt women. This seemed much too simplistic to Chloe. Besides, when she pictured him murdering young women, they were never brunettes like his old girlfriend. They were always blondes like Chloe.

  Then, in January, Jon Allan Blue sent a second letter. It was almost identical to his first letter, asking the same question about the painting’s meaning with the same polite tone. At the end he wrote, I am sure it would be more convenient for you to answer my question through email. Unfortunately, Kentucky inmates are not allowed Internet access, so I would greatly appreciate your written response.

  After work Chloe went to Eldon’s post office, a red brick building on Eldon’s main street, across from the diner and a heating-and-cooling business. She paid thirty-five dollars, not an insignificant sum on her paycheck, to rent a PO box for a year and mailed her first letter to Jon Allan Blue. She kept her response short. She told him she worked for the museum and his question was a valid one. There was no consensus about what the painting meant. All the suggestions he floated were possibilities. Wood himself, however, had always maintained it was a tribute to Iowan life. Before she closed the letter, she encouraged him to respond with other questions he might have. As she drove home, she felt the thrill of expectation, a blooming in her chest. She felt the same way when she was a little girl and stole a candy bar from a gas station—guilty yet buzzed on adrenaline and the satisfaction of doing something inadvisable.

  The next day after work, she and Mark went to Eldon’s only remaining bar. The town’s population was nine hundred, but with each census it continued to dwindle. There were a lot of shuttered businesses, mobile homes with busted windows, and plastic toys left in front yards to bleach in the sun. On the sign in front of Eldon’s high school, the motto “Do No Harm” had been posted, which summed up the school’s aspirations for its students pretty well. The people who did leave for college rarely returned.

  Chloe had never gone to college, never left Eldon at all. At eighteen, she hadn’t known how to afford it and wasn’t sure she was college material. She’d never performed particularly well in her classes, other than art, and was often lost in daydreams when she should have been listening to her teachers. She told herself someday, when she saved some money, maybe she’d study art. But years passed and the day never came.

  The bar smelled like stale beer and cigarette smoke. Other than the Johnny Cash song playing, the only sounds were pool balls hitting one another and the occasional smoker’s cough. She and Mark ordered beers and talked about the girl who’d tried to shoplift from the museum gift store earlier that day.

  “What kind of teenager tries to steal a tote bag printed with a Grant Wood painting?” Mark asked, although to Chloe the answer was obvious—a desperate one. She opened her mouth to say that, but a hand on her shoulder interrupted her.

  “Your mama let you out to play?”

  It was her mother’s ex-boyfriend, Frank. He flashed yellow teeth at her in a smile. He was tall and skinny, and his jeans, work boots, and the hairy backs of his hands were flecked with white paint. She had never liked him—a mean drunk who always looked at her like she was a flank steak rather than a human being. He leaned forward and slurred something else. By his inflection, she could tell it was a question. She did what she often did in such situations—appeased him and nodded and laughed, hoping she could make the interaction end, hoping his beer breath would move out of her face.

  She realized she could have been agreeing and laughing about anything. He could have been asking if she were a dumb cunt, and she would have just laughed and nodded. The realization made her angry.

  Frank leaned back and laughed, too. Then he continued on to the bathroom.

  “Dick,” Mark said, but long after the man was out of earshot.

  Jon Allan Blue responded to her letter a week later, thanking her for her response and asking what it was like to work at the museum. This started a series of short letter exchanges. They wrote about innocuous things—her job, his interest in art and Grant Wood in particular, their shared love of the Midwest landscape. Eventually, he began to write about his daily life in prison.

  His cell on death row was 6 x 9 x 9.5 feet high. He woke at five A.M. to the rattle of the breakfast cart—powdered eggs and toast served on a Styrofoam tray with a plastic spork. At least once an hour a guard checked on him. Other than phone calls, legal visits, or exercise, he stayed in his cell. Death row had a particular smell—body odor and fecal matter. It was better back before 2011 when people were still allowed to smoke, he wrote. The smoke masked the stink. Although, you get used to it after a while.

  He owned a 13-inch TV and said his favorite shows were American Idol and a drama about young lawyers. In another life, I would have liked to be a lawyer, he wrote.

  Multiple prisoners in the wing watched Jeopardy together, each trying to yell out the right answer first. Men in the wing talked to one another, moving to the front of their cells and speaking loudly enough for their voices to echo down the hall. However, the talk was frequently the rambling of isolated, crazed men, so he put on his headphones and listened to the radio. He read a lot: news magazines and, lately, books about regionalist art and Grant Wood.

  I’m not sure why American Gothic interests me so much, he wrote. I guess there’s something funny and sad and disturbing about it—all at the same time. I guess life is kind of like that, too.

  One evening in March, she sat in her apartment reading his most recent letter.

  She lived on the first floor of an old, creaky house sectioned off into apartments. As was often the case, she heard the girl who lived upstairs talking to her mother on the phone, telling her, yes, she was making good decisions, yes, this guy was a good guy, different from the last one.

  Things are much the same here, Jon wrote in his latest letter. The appeals process drags on, but you know I doubt my attorneys’ skills and competence. It’s hard to describe how lonely this place is, especially in the evening. Your letters help make it bearable. It’s strange—I feel like I know you, yet we’ve never met. I would love to talk to you on the phone, if you’d be willing. I’m allowed limited phone privileges each week, and I can’t think of a better way to use them than hearing your voice. Please consider it. If you’re willing, let me know, and I’ll tell you how you can go about getting on my approved callers list.

  As always, I wish you all the best, Chloe, and I think of you often.

  She leaned her head against her futon. She’d bought it at the Salvation Army, and despite her best efforts, it still smelled of onions.

  He was taking up more and more of her thoughts. She was painting again, something she hadn’t done since high school. She was good enough to be decent, but not good enough to be great or ever have a show in a gallery. She found herself sketching Grant Wood photos she looked up online, copies of copies. She mailed them to Jon, who told her he taped them up on his cell walls and complimented her on her proficiency. She started a sketch of him, but every time she worked on it, after about a half hour she realized she was sitting alone in her apartment drawing a flattering portrait of a serial killer. She would close her sketchbook and watch TV instead.

  Chloe drank a beer to calm her nerves. When th
e phone finally rang, she heard an operator asking if she would accept a collect call from an inmate at the Kentucky State Penitentiary. She said yes but had a hard time catching her breath. She was perched on the edge of her futon and found herself staring at her bare feet on the hardwood floor, her calluses and chipped pink polish looking in step with the warped wood, two of the oak boards water stained and bowing like they were inflated.

  She’d already heard his voice from interviews posted online, videos of him in the scarlet-red jumpsuit designating the prison’s death row inmates. In them, he talked like a teacher—someone comfortable with the sound of their own voice, comfortable explaining things to people, and confident they had the knowledge to make people understand. In more recent interviews, he said killing people was like being possessed by a demon. The next day, he felt great remorse for what he had done, and it weighed on him that, “in the eyes of God and in the eyes of the law,” he was responsible for what a “great force” had made him do. He squeezed his eyes shut when he talked like this.

  The lines on his face were deeper than they had been during pictures taken at his trial, and his eyes appeared sunken, with dark circles surrounding them. Although he would spend long portions of the interview looking at his hands, choosing his words with care, when he did look at the interviewers, his stare was intense and penetrating. Chloe wondered what it would be like to be on the receiving end of such a gaze.

  There was a thrill when she heard him say her name. He asked her where she was. After she answered, he said, “You have a lovely voice with just the tiniest bit of a lisp.”

  She blushed. She’d endured years of special speech classes in school because of her lisp. It used to be much worse. She and a girl who couldn’t say her Rs read aloud from books about jungle cats. Both she and the other girl had only slight traces of their speech impediments by the time they graduated from high school.