The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

by Jonathan Lethem

  She and Ron made an odd fit. But he was proud to have her on his arm, and he beamed when he introduced her to people at dances and at the feed store. He was impressed by what he considered her great intelligence, and he also found her funny, which nobody else ever had done. He had a great big laugh that expanded his already sizable chest and further reddened his wind-chapped face. He had a tendency to grab her up and spin her around. His hugs were warm and sudden and crushing.

  They went to dinner and spent time with friends, but what Nora remembered most were those hours alone in his Plymouth, after the public part of their dates was over. Then, they haunted the backroads and darkened oil field sites, lounging in the dashboard lights, listening to Ron’s eight-tracks. They paid to park at the drive-in movie but saw very little of the screen. Often they didn’t even hang the speaker in the window, and John Wayne’s head would materialize silently in front of them, filling up the windshield like a storm cloud, and Nora would feel his look of disgust aimed at her. It was thrilling to defy him and allow Ron’s hands in her hair and under her clothes. Passion came to her slowly, and at first she didn’t quite know what to do with it, aside from narrate the experience to Ron, telling him how warm his body felt and how much she liked his shoulders, and asking him questions about his previous sexual experience—until he suggested she shut up and enjoy herself for once. They grappled for hours in that old car, fogging up the windows, inadvertently honking the horn, forgetting all possibility that someone might see them. He was a different Ron then—not the grinning man who shook hands with everyone they met, but serious and single-minded, growling with desire. His back was so broad Nora could barely get her arms around it, and she felt crushed beneath him, erased, subsumed. She made noises it embarrassed her to remember later. When at last she stumbled out of his car in front of her house, she could not have told you what day it was, or named a single constellation in the sky.

  When they announced to his family their engagement, Nora had the sensation of being surrounded by a herd of curious cows: parents, aunts, uncles, and sisters all crowded around, looking at her, chewing on their impressions. Finally, they smiled and clapped Ron on the back. His mother, a sentimental woman with ponderous hips, alternated between crying and squeezing Nora’s hands, looking down at them beseechingly, as if an agreement might be forged within her grasp.

  Nora’s father only said, “It’s about time, at the rate you two have been going.” He pretended to be indifferent, but she knew he was relieved. A widower who had yet to live alone, he’d long ago given up hope that anybody would ever take this sad, strange daughter off his hands.

  Even in a small town, news doesn’t stay fresh for long. People move on. And that summer, the LeDivic kidnapping was only one of several alarming events. On the same day as the Dewey boy was released from the hospital, a disagreement over communism spilled out of the dancehall and somebody was stabbed, staining the cement with blood. Elsewhere in the country, college students took over campus buildings, shouting about civil rights and the war. They stomped and chanted until their anger was heard in the smallest backwaters, and by the least involved citizens, including Nora’s father, who’d never paid much attention to anything save for his crops. Now he spent evenings listening to the radio with his chin on his fist. Society itself seemed ready to blow apart, but it was hard to pinpoint the danger—whether it was the Viet Cong or the black radicals or the women tearing off their bras. And in the midst of it all, an astronaut stuck an American flag into the moon. The event was broadcast on every television across the country, into every hushed living room. Nora didn’t understand why anybody would want to go to the moon in the first place, and seeing two puffy men meander over the surface clarified nothing at all. Her father would accept no part of it. “It’s a damned fake,” he said, and would continue saying for years. “It said ‘simulated’ right there on the screen. Am I the only person in this goddamned country who can read?”

  In the newspaper, Nora learned of a pregnant starlet who’d been killed in California. Her murder was described as “ritualistic,” and Nora shuddered to think of LeDivic, with his notebook of bizarre drawings and his carefully tied noose. Was LeDivic a sadist, like the hippie they suspected in the Tate murder? And how many sadists were there in any given town, driving down any given road? For every missing person there was someone who knew where they could be found, in flesh or in bones, and it bothered Nora to think the culprits walked around with this dark knowledge, hiding it, possibly even treasuring it. As a girl, she’d seen a boy disembowel a toad that had been lured onto the playground by spring rain, and perhaps what was most disturbing—she explained to Ron as they sat eating in a local diner—was the boy’s glee, his obvious enjoyment of the toad’s suffering.

  “Woman,” Ron said. “You sure know how to throw a man off his feed.” He wiped his mouth and dropped his napkin onto his plate.

  “I think everybody is capable of cruelty, don’t you?” she went on. “Given the right circumstances, anybody could be. But it’s different when people enjoy it. That’s the part I don’t like to think about, whether Clay LeDivic enjoyed what he did to those kids.”

  “So quit thinking about it.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. None of it happened to you.”

  Ron made a noise in his throat. “None of it happened to you either, Nora. You’ve made too much of it. I think you’re the one who’s enjoying it, if you want to know the truth.”

  This stung so badly that she stood up from the table and stared at him through brimming eyes, unable to speak. Then she fled the diner for the parking lot, where she roamed for a while but ultimately had nowhere to go but Ron’s Plymouth, since home was too far to get to on foot. She sat fuming in the passenger seat for a chilly half hour, and when Ron still didn’t emerge, she had no choice but to go back inside the diner to get him.

  She hadn’t even reached the door when she saw he wasn’t alone. Through its big rectangular window she could see two girls sharing his booth. One she recognized—a cheerful Italian girl who went to Grange Hall dances. But the other was unfamiliar. She had a head of springy blond curls, and she was sitting so close to Ron their shoulders touched. Rather than coming out to find her, he was telling a story or a joke, gesturing with his hands, regarding the girls with a serious, confidential expression. When he finished, the blonde laughed wildly, throwing her head back so that the overhead lamp made her throat look smooth and white as marble. Ron seemed pleased with himself, and while Nora watched from the darkness, he leaned in to plant a kiss on the strange girl’s neck.

  Woman—that’s what he’d taken to calling her in the months leading up to the incident in the diner, as though they were the only two humans on earth. Don’t sass me, woman. Or, woman, don’t give me any more of your lip. He was making fun of a certain type of man, she realized, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t also making fun of her. He sometimes called her Neither Nora, and Nora Noreen. And he had a habit of twisting the lyrics of songs that came on the radio, making them dirty and about her and belting them out the truck window. He had a strikingly good voice, and it was a shame he wouldn’t just sing the songs as they were meant to be sung. Sometimes, when she cooked Sunday supper, he tried to lure her into dancing by the stove.

  “I’m cooking,” she’d protest.

  “Ah, well. It doesn’t look too complicated.”

  “It’s Beef Wellington!”

  “I’ll beef your Wellington.”

  This he’d say loudly enough for her father to hear, if he was in the next room. He’d take her hands and shuffle her around the creaky old floor. Rarely could Nora bring herself to enjoy it. She was busy with the details of the recipe, or thinking about the book she was currently reading, or some scrap of gossip she’d overheard, or just nothing, a comforting blankness.

  Of course, these were differences they might’ve worked out between them in the course of forty or fifty years. Married, they might have grown toward each other, she becoming loose
r and softer, Ron growing quieter, more contemplative, losing some of his boyish imprudence. They might’ve had children that combined their natures, a smiling daughter and a tall, gray-eyed son.

  But she never spoke to Ron Whitehead again. Not during the long drive home from the diner, or any day after. He wrote letters, but she didn’t read them. He showed up at her house, but she wouldn’t come downstairs. His mother came by with a homemade lemon cake and tried to say what a misunderstanding it had all been, how sorry Ron was, how miserable he was without her, all the weight he’d lost. She said the two of them would look back on this as a minor bump in the road if they could only get past it.

  Nora barely heard her over the roar of her own blood. What a fool she’d been to make herself vulnerable in the first place, and to such a ridiculous man! How vain she’d been to believe the things he said, how weak! Her fury formed a barrier around her, and deep in the middle of it Nora felt an icy calm, a pain so deep it was almost gratifying. She sent a handwritten card to everyone they’d invited: We regret to inform you that the Stevens-Whitehead wedding will not take place as planned. She stuffed her mother’s wedding dress down into the garbage barrel in the backyard and stood back from it while it burned.

  In December, everybody was glued again to the television, this time to watch the first draft lottery for Vietnam. It was all anybody talked about for a while, those dates. Any mother who had borne a son on April 24th had to promptly send him off to war; any mother who’d held off until April 25th could keep her boy at home.

  Ron’s was the third birthdate drawn.

  “See?” she told her father over dinner. “He’d have left me regardless.”

  II. August, 1987

  For ten years, she taught the fourth-and-fifth-grade combo class as there weren’t enough students to make a whole class of each. Governing a classroom suited her, and the children found her a strict but reassuring presence. But then her father got sick and she stayed home to nurse him. He needed care around the clock, and the days stretched into years, eight of them before he died frail and indignant in his bed. Now that the old farmhouse was hers alone, Nora opened the windows for a week to let the stale air out. She got rid of all the furniture and bought new. Big floral sofas. The kitchen wallpapered in a pattern of ducks.

  Saturdays she went into town for groceries. If the weather was nice, she made a day of it, buying the local paper to read on the bench in front of the store. Framingham was a growing town but largely peaceful, so there wasn’t much to read about aside from the odd spectacular car accident, mostly caused by drunks. There were funnies in the back of the paper, and she read these too, wondering if anybody really found them funny, and if so, what they were smoking.

  Mostly, she watched the other shoppers come and go. She looked for people she recognized, taking particular note of who was getting fat and who was getting old, though she supposed the latter wasn’t entirely their fault. Her sharpest attention was reserved for the young ladies, who’d taken to ratting their bangs and wearing boxy unflattering clothes and looked every bit as frightful as the hippies, only more self-consciously so. She looked for Anita Dewey among them, wondering if she’d recognize her crescent eyes, even under some tumbleweed of hair. She would be a young woman now, and Nora often wondered where she lived and what she did and what she remembered about her night in the wilderness. It aggrieved her that she’d been prevented from knowing the girl. Twice she’d tried to bring food to Mrs. Dewey—a meatloaf, a casserole—only to be stopped at the door. “We appreciate your interest, Ms. Stevens, but we’re trying to put that whole thing behind us.” And later, when the children were in Bible study and she saw them getting out of their car in front of the church, she’d rushed over to say hello, perhaps a bit more breathlessly than she’d meant to, and was met with “Ms. Stevens, please.”

  Now the little boy would be a junior in high school. Nora knew from one of the teachers that he’d fallen behind a grade or two, and that he struggled with his schoolwork, his head drooping and eyes fluttering like a narcoleptic. Brain damage of some kind, apparently. People said he was lucky to be alive, and Nora agreed, though she thought luck was a strange thing to ascribe to a person kidnapped, stripped naked, and hung—all before the age of four.

  She folded the newspaper on the bench beside her. All around, the parking lot had begun to fill with cars—doors slamming, engines starting, shopping carts rattling over asphalt—and she had to admit that some small, stupid part of her lingered in the vain hope of seeing Ron. She’d heard from Marjorie (married now, and a mother of three) that Ron had made it home from Vietnam in one piece and had moved to a suburb of Phoenix, more than four hundred miles away. Still, he came back every summer to visit his sisters, accompanied by his Asian wife, whose named sounded to Nora like someone spitting—Pa-tooey or Hi-yuck. They had several children themselves—oriental-looking, like their mother—so Nora figured if they ever stopped in for groceries they’d be hard to miss.

  But today the parking lot was full of tourists from Texas and California, lumpen people in khaki pants. They came to see the mountains, and to ride a coughing old train, and sometimes you could see them wading around in the river downstream from the old uranium mine, where the water was radioactive. That very morning she’d seen someone fishing, and she was thinking about this when a gust of wind lifted a page from her newspaper and tumbled it down the sidewalk.

  A passerby caught it with a quick stride. He was a young man with broad shoulders and baggy Hawaiian shorts. He had two children with him, girls preoccupied with lollipops.

  “Oh, thank you,” Nora said. “This wind! Can you believe it?”

  The man didn’t answer. He went on, one hand on each of the girl’s heads, steering them toward the store. There was a briskness in his movements, a kind of mustered pluck, and Nora felt the same compassion she always felt when she saw a man tasked with childcare. “Samantha,” she heard him say as they approached the automatic doors. “No running off. You hear me? I want you right here by me the whole time, both of you.” He straightened his shoulders and Nora saw that he was older than he’d looked at first, probably in his mid-thirties, with a potbelly pushing against his T-shirt. His blond hair was cut short as a soldier’s, and he had a tattoo on one of his calves, a large compass in black ink.

  It was only after the automatic doors swooshed shut, and the three of them disappeared inside, that Nora realized who it was. LeDivic. The name rose in her throat like bile.

  How could he be walking around, completely free? A regular man, with errands to run? With children?

  She gathered her purse and stood, breathing hard, watching the doors through which he’d passed. She didn’t know what to do but had a sudden, strong conviction that she should keep an eye on him, at least, so she took a cart with a wobbly front wheel and followed him inside.

  The store smelled like fried chicken, and Nora was aware of the drippy saxophone music being piped in from overhead. Her cart thumped and squealed past the pharmacy and the movie-rental kiosk. At last she found him in the dairy aisle, chewing a thumbnail, contemplating the cheese. One of the girls sat in his shopping cart, posing what sounded like questions, while the older one had wandered a few yards away, stepping heel-to-toe, following the pattern of the floor tiles. She wore a bright yellow sundress, and her hair had not been combed.

  Nora turned to examine some premium charcoal briquettes. Why they were sold in the dairy aisle she couldn’t imagine, but she lifted the bag into her cart and pushed it closer to LeDivic.

  “You like watermelon flavor,” he was telling the child in the cart. “You liked it last week.”

  “But, Daddy, my head grew, and so did my tongue, and now my taste buds don’t like watermelon anymore.”

  “Well, I’m not getting you another sucker. You’ll have to live with the one you’ve got.”

  The child let out a shriek of protest and threw something over her shoulder. Nora flinched; she didn’t know what had caused the sting of
pain until she reached up and felt the lollipop hanging from her hair. She could smell it too. Sickly sweet and tart, nothing like real watermelon.

  LeDivic gasped.

  “Oh, Jesus. I’m sorry.” He turned the child around by the shoulders. “Jenny, look what you did! Apologize to this lady. Tell her you’re sorry for throwing your sucker.”

  The little girl scowled, refusing to speak. But Nora didn’t care. She was too shocked by LeDivic’s nearness, by his casual demeanor, by the deep timbre of his voice. It felt as though a silent marching band was parading through her head, the way she sometimes felt when she drank too much coffee and went out to weed the garden in the heat. She looked at the hairs on his forearms and the brown bag of potatoes in his cart. Slowly, she reached up and pulled the lollipop from her hair.

  “Here, let me help you.” LeDivic took the lollipop from her. Then he pulled a napkin from his pocket and, before Nora could stop him, dabbed her hair where the lollipop had been. She felt his touch just above her ear, two quick movements before he made a hopeless noise.