The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Oh, God,” she said. “That’s embarrassing.”

  “No, no,” he said. “It’s endearing. It’s sweet.”

  She felt profoundly grateful to him in that moment. He had only twelve minutes of phone privileges. They talked about his daily routine—apparently the prison gym’s treadmill was broken—and she talked about her job.

  “I saw the painting in person once,” he told her. “In Chicago. It was,” he laughed drily, “before all this happened. It’s an amazing piece.”

  Chloe told two lies to get her job at the center. The first was that she liked American Gothic, when in fact she found it hideous. The second was that she had seen it in person. The truth was, although she had lived in the Midwest her entire life, she never had the opportunity or funds to travel to Chicago.

  Still, she found herself nodding, even though he couldn’t see her. “Amazing,” she agreed. “I felt the same way.”

  Finally, when they had to hang up, he said, “Thank you for this. You don’t know how much I looked forward to talking to you.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said. Once they were off the phone, she sat on her futon and continued to stare at her feet. She wondered what she was supposed to feel. Possibly guilt? Possibly conflicted? Instead, she tried not to smile.

  Several phone calls later, he asked her to tell him something she hadn’t told anyone.

  “I’m not that interesting,” she said.

  “That’s obviously not true,” he said. “You were willing to become my friend. Not everyone would do that.”

  She felt pleased he considered her a friend, and slightly unsatisfied—like when someone gave a hungry person only a bite of chocolate when they craved the whole bar.

  “I guess there’s one story,” she said. “But it’s kind of weird.” Even thinking of it made her feel queasy.

  “I like weird,” he said. So she told him.

  She told him how her real father left when she was a baby. How he returned only once—when she was fourteen he came through town and asked to take her to dinner at a steak house in Fairfield, so they could catch up. Her mother hadn’t wanted to let her go, but Chloe wheedled until she got her way. The meal was good, a nice change from peanut butter sandwiches and ramen noodles. She learned he had done okay for himself, starting his own construction business in Illinois. He was ready to pay the back child support, to try to support her as best he could.

  “You deserve that,” he said while they chewed their steaks. While he was paying the bill, she thought how lucky she was to have this man as her father and not her idiot stepfather, the father of her half siblings.

  They had so much to talk about he drove down by the Des Moines River once they got back to Eldon, and they parked and sat and talked. It happened naturally. First he hugged her. Then he kissed her forehead. Then he kissed her neck. And then he reached up her skirt. The water lapped at the riverbanks. She put her hands where he told her, but she didn’t allow herself to think about anything. She kept her eyes closed, kept listening to that rushing water, kept letting it drown everything else.

  When he dropped her off at her house, he kissed her on the forehead. He never visited again, but the child support payments continued coming until she turned eighteen.

  When she finished her story, Jon cleared his throat. “It makes me regret I’m in here and not able to find your father and give him some nice whacks with a crowbar. That often does wonders for a person.”

  That was the first night Chloe started fantasizing about Jon murdering people she knew.

  She couldn’t deny his phone calls were becoming less a curiosity and more a thing stilling the loneliness beating inside her. The darkest thing he had ever done was out in the world for everyone to see. There was something comforting about that.

  She didn’t fantasize about having sex with him. She didn’t know why, but she didn’t. Maybe because she had never enjoyed sex? Maybe because it always hurt in all the wrong ways? Instead, she pictured him putting a choke collar around her neck and leading her into the woods. She pictured him cutting off her clothes and making her kneel, naked, in the leaves. He would pull on the choke chain and grab a handful of her hair, yanking hard. For a while, that was the extent of the fantasy, and it was enough to get her off late at night, her fingers moving between her legs. But eventually, it changed. After he yanked at her hair, she would grab a sharp stick from the forest floor. She’d wait for him to let go of her hair, for him to give her chain some slack. Then she’d stab him in the neck with the stick, his warm blood flowing out across her hands and her naked chest until she was sticky with it.

  “I think about stabbing you,” she told him once on the phone, surprising herself by saying it aloud.

  “Do you?” he said, as though this amused him. “What else do you think about?”

  She told him in precise detail, and when he finally spoke, his voice sounded deeper than before. “The first part of that sounds just fine,” he said. “But if you tried the second part, you would regret it.” He said this almost cheerfully.

  “Would I?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said, this time more firmly. A few moments later, the operator cut in, signaling their time was up.

  “How would you kill someone and get away with it?” she asked Mark.

  “What?” They were in the break room, eating sandwiches during lunch. He was sitting so close she felt the heat of his arm.

  She repeated the question. He stared at her. “You’ve never thought about it?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “I can honestly say I never have.” They lapsed into silence. The subject was all Chloe thought about. Killing and those who were capable of it. She wasn’t the only one fascinated. She couldn’t be. There were too many TV shows and movies and books all based around it. Too many fictional serial killers who were memorable in pop culture. But they couldn’t give her what Jon Allan Blue could. They were glamorized, flashy, unreal—pretty actors covered in corn syrup and red dye. They knew nothing about what it really felt like to take a life, what allowed you mentally to ascend to that ultimate assertion of power, erasing another person’s existence.

  Mark bumped her shoulder with his and smiled. “What are you thinking about? The perfect crime?”

  She smiled and shook her head.

  “I think I’ve figured it out,” Jon said. It was early June, and Chloe was drinking a beer and sitting in front of her window air-conditioning unit, trying to dry the sweat that collected between and under her breasts.

  “Figured what out?” she asked.

  “The painting,” he said. “I think I understand what it means.” Jon told her Grant Wood lived in the attic of a funeral home’s carriage house and had replaced his front door with a coffin lid. He talked about the reaction to American Gothic—how one Iowan woman was so incensed by the painting, she threatened to bite Wood’s ear off. He started talking faster and faster, and Chloe struggled to follow what he was saying. He talked about all the black in the painting—the man’s black jacket, the woman’s black dress. He talked about the symbolism of the farmer’s pitchfork and of the plants on the doorstep—the geranium for melancholy.

  “Look at the people in the painting,” he said. She had never heard him so agitated before. “Really look at them. These are people seething with repressed violence. These are people fixated on death.”

  She pulled the painting up on her computer and stared at the expression on the man’s face. She studied how his bushy eyebrows came to points, how his long face and pinched mouth added to how sinister he looked. The woman, on the other hand, just looked lost. Chloe had read that originally Wood said the woman was the farmer’s wife, but after the age difference scandalized people, he began telling people she was the farmer’s daughter.

  Despite what Jon said about it, Chloe saw something sad about the painting. Despite their severe expressions, the two figures looked powerless and defeated, like people who had felt small their whole lives, standing in front of a
cheap farmhouse with fancy windows.

  After five minutes, Chloe ended the conversation, much to her reluctance. The collect calls from the prison cost five dollars a minute. “It’s a racket,” Jon told her once. “And the prison gets a cut of the money.” After saying goodbye to Jon, she walked to the bar to meet Mark.

  It was hot, and they were thirsty. Instead of pacing themselves with waters in between rounds, they both downed beers quickly, getting much drunker than usual.

  After their fifth round, Mark leaned toward her. “I think you’re beautiful,” he said, and kissed her. She let him. She felt dizzy and light and took his bottom lip between her teeth and bit. At first he moaned as if he were aroused, but a second later, the moan changed to one of pain, and he pulled away from her. She tasted blood.

  “What the fuck?” he demanded, dabbing his bloody lip with a cocktail napkin.

  She stared at him. She liked the way he was looking at her—as if she were some fearsome creature he had never seen clearly until now.

  He rose from his stool and threw some cash on the bar. “Look, we’re both drunk. I’m going to go.” She didn’t stop him.

  She saw Frank, her mother’s ex-boyfriend, facing away from her, resting his arm on the edge of the pool table. The adrenaline flowing through her, coupled with the alcohol, made her feel like she took up all the space in the bar. She finished her beer and stood to grab a pool cue.

  JENNIFER MCMAHON

  Hannah-Beast

  from Dark Corners/Amazon Original Stories

  Halloween 1982

  Please, Hannah, please, come out with us tonight.

  It won’t be like before, we promise.

  Please, please, please, please, say you’ll be our friend again and come with us.

  We’ll get candy. So much candy. Whole pillowcases stuffed full of KitKats, peanut butter cups, Mars bars.

  So much sugar, we won’t sleep for a week.

  Trust us, Hannah.

  Come with us, Hannah.

  It’ll be a night you won’t ever forget.

  Halloween 2016

  “There’s no way you’re leaving the house like that.” Amanda spoke in her flat, level I’m-the-mom-here tone, doing her best to hide the shaking in her voice. Really, she wanted to scream. Scream not in fury, but horror. She wanted to run from the kitchen and hide in her bedroom, slamming the door maybe, like she was the teenager. Her skin prickled with cold sweat. Her stomach churned. She worked to steady her breathing as she made herself look at her daughter, take in the whole grotesque costume.

  It was like some hole had been ripped in time, and Amanda was twelve years old again, dressed in her lame cat burglar costume with a striped shirt and pillowcase money bag, handing her mask over so that Hannah-beast’s costume would be complete. Thanks, Manda Panda!

  Erin’s face was painted blue with thick greasepaint. There was a black plastic eye mask held in place by elastic. A pink feather boa. A silver cape. Topping it all off was a rainbow clown wig.

  Jesus, how many rainbow clown wigs did the drugstore in town sell each Halloween?

  The costume was spot-on; a near-exact replica with the exception of the face paint—it was the wrong shade of blue and too thick. The real Hannah-beast had worn makeup that was thin, patchy, a dull pale blue that had made her look cyanotic.

  “That is totally unfair,” Erin said.

  “I thought you were going as a cat.”

  “I’m a cat every fucking year, Mom.”

  This was a new thing for Erin, the swearing all the time. She’d never done it back when Jim was here. He wouldn’t have stood for it. But Amanda had decided to ignore it. To ride it out and let Erin blow off steam by dropping a few f-bombs here and there.

  Pick your battles, Amanda told herself. And besides, didn’t letting the swearing slide make her the cool mom as opposed to the uptight dad? The dad who had walked out on them four months ago, claiming Amanda was too distant, too walled off, and he couldn’t live his life with a woman he didn’t know how to reach.

  “You know the rules,” Amanda said to her daughter. “You are not going out like that.”

  “Your rules suck and make no sense,” Erin said with disgust. “They’re totally arbitrary.”

  Erin always thought she could win an argument if she used big words. Jim had often let himself be distracted or amused. Not Amanda. Amanda said nothing.

  “It’s my last year of trick-or-treating,” Erin whined. Next year she’d be a freshman in high school. “Why do you have to ruin it?” Her voice broke a little bit, and Amanda thought Erin might start crying.

  She cried a lot lately, mostly while fighting with Amanda over perceived unfairnesses. It had been so much easier when she was younger, crying over a scraped knee or some hardship she’d endured at school—not getting enough turns on the big slide or her teacher saying she hadn’t shown her work properly on a math worksheet. Then, all problems could be solved with a hug—Give me one of your boa constrictor hugs, Mommy, real tight like you’ll never let me go!—and a trip to the ice-cream shop, where they’d split a cookie-dough sundae with extra whipped cream.

  Now Amanda took in a breath, forced a smile. “That’s my job. Fun ruiner.”

  Erin stared at her through her mask, her eyes angry and a little desperate. They could have been the real Hannah-beast’s eyes.

  Manda, the eyes pleaded. Manda Panda, please. Don’t let them do this to me.

  Amanda had to look away, glancing over at the kitchen island, where the pumpkin they’d bought last week at the farmers market still sat, uncarved. Pumpkin carving had always been Jim’s job, a task he’d taken seriously, downloading templates from the Internet, spending hours cutting out perfect cat faces, witches flying on brooms, and one year, a raven with intricate feathers and glowing eyes.

  “Go change,” Amanda told her daughter. “Now.”

  Erin sighed dramatically. “Can you just explain why? Can you be that fair?”

  Every year since she was in third grade, Erin had asked to go as Hannah-beast. She’d seen the older kids doing it, a handful each year, and she’d heard the stories. How the real Hannah-beast came back each year at Halloween, came back with a box of matches in her pocket, so you better look out, better be careful, better hope you didn’t run into her. She was a crazy ghost girl, Hannah-beast was. She’d killed in life and she’d kill again in death, given half a chance.

  But the stories were just that: stories. Myths with pieces of truth hidden inside.

  Over the years, Erin had seemed eager for these nuggets of truth.

  “But Hannah-beast was a real girl, right?” Erin would ask.

  “Yes,” Amanda would tell her.

  “A girl who died a long time ago.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she set a fire?”

  Amanda would nod, always having to look away. “Yes,” she’d say, the same reply she’d given hundreds of times, beginning back when she was Erin’s age and the police first questioned her about it.

  “And people died?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know her, Mom?” Erin would ask, eyes wide and hopeful. “Did you know the real Hannah-beast?”

  “No,” Amanda would say, the lie so practiced it rolled off her tongue in a loose and natural way. “I didn’t know her at all.”

  She looked at her daughter now in her blue face paint—thirteen years old, gangly as a scarecrow.

  “Please, Mom,” Erin said, voice quiet and pleading now. “Seriously, it’s not fair. At least tell me why.”

  “Because,” Amanda said, pausing for a moment to breathe and keep her tone calm. “Because I said so.”

  Erin shook her head to express her utter contempt, the bright rainbow wig slipping slightly. She stomped off, out of the kitchen and up the stairs to her room, slamming the door with impressive force. Amanda went into the living room and sank down into the couch, eyes focused on the overflowing bowl of brightly wrapped candy in a plastic pumpkin bowl.
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br />   Erin came downstairs half an hour later, face cleaned of blue makeup, replaced by cat whiskers drawn with eyeliner, cherry-red lipstick. She wore black leggings, a black hoodie, and a headband with furry black ears gone mangy from one too many Halloweens. She had on her school backpack, which would soon be stuffed with candy, popcorn balls, and glow sticks given out by the police officers who were out in full force each Halloween, as if by sheer numbers they could ward off what was coming: the small army of Hannah-beasts, the little fires all over town—dumpsters, trash cans, vacant buildings, the old salt shed. And somehow, they never managed to stop a stuffed effigy of Hannah-beast from being hung by a noose from the town gazebo each year, cloth body stuffed full of newspaper and rags, pillowcase face painted blue, rainbow wig stapled on, pink boa ruffling in the breeze as the creepy doll swung in circles from the thick rope.

  Erin went straight to the front door, passing Amanda in the living room without a word. There was a rapid-fire knocking, and she flung the door open. Her friends were gathered on the front porch—they must have texted Erin that they were there. Two Hannah-beasts, Wonder Woman, and a red devil in a too-tight, too-short dress.

  Erin walked out and slammed the door behind her, but not quickly enough to drown out the first words she spoke: “I fucking hate my mother.”

  1982

  “Please, Hannah, please, come out with us tonight,” the three girls cooed like sweet little doves, funny partridges, as they stood gathered outside her first-floor bedroom window. They knew better than to come to the front door, deal with Daddy and his fire-breathing bourbon breath telling them they weren’t good girls, they were trash, little dipshit whores.

  Girls like that, they’re going straight to hell. That’s what Daddy said. You stay away from them unless you want to get burned.