The Best American Mystery Stories 2014

by Laura Lippman (ed) (epub)

  Michele accepted my first attempt at erotica, published under a pseudonym, and asked for a second when the collection yielded a sequel. My sophomore effort required a heavier editorial hand, but I’ve never minded editing. (And the second story was based in Texas, although told from the point of view of a new arrival. Boo-yah, in your face, former writing teacher, who seems to have disappeared. Hey, I’m the first to admit I hold tight to my grudges. They’re good fodder for short stories, for one thing.) At this point, Michele suggested that I should consider writing a novel. She never specifically told me to write a crime novel, but she did mention that women often found it easier to start a novel when they approached it through the mask of genre, pretending the task was lesser (or at least less presumptuous) than attempting the Great American Novel.

  As it turned out, I had sixty pages that I had scribbled in a black-and-white composition book, about an out-of-work reporter named Tess Monaghan who couldn’t figure out what to do with her life . . . Jump forward twenty years, literally. I’ve written nineteen novels and almost twenty short stories in that time.

  I think I wrote at least two or three novels before anyone suggested I try a mystery short story. My first one, suitably enough, was for a series called First Cases, and it centered on Tess. And you know what? It’s not that good. In fact, it’s a waste of a lovely title, “Orphans Court,” and a decent-enough idea. Maybe I should rewrite it someday.

  But the pattern had been established. I wrote short stories if someone asked me. When I teach, I describe this as writing from external prompts, and it sounds like the antithesis of art, but that’s why I like it. The approach demystifies creativity, which could do with a little demystification. Did I want to write about baseball? Sure. Golf? Why not? Cocaine? You betcha. Dangerous women (twice), jazz, cities well known to me (Baltimore, Washington, D.C.), cities not quite so well known to me (New Orleans, Dublin). Poker, spies, New York City, Sherlock Holmes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. A ghost story with a sport, a Twilight Zone tribute. Senior-citizen criminals. Books themselves. The only subject I ever declined was cars, and the editor hocks me to this day. I keep telling him, “Dude, I drive a Jetta. A Jetta with manual transmission, but a Jetta. I was not the woman for the job.”

  But perhaps my favorite assignment was “a box.” Brad Meltzer approached me with that one, and I said sure. I was getting cocky at that point. Riding high, due for a fall. All of a sudden the deadline was two weeks away and I still had no clue what I was going to write. To complicate matters, I was teaching at Eckerd College’s annual Writers in Paradise conference, which left me with virtually no free time.

  Then my friend and faculty colleague Ann Hood lost her sweater. You think I can carry a grudge? Ask her how she feels about the restaurant where she left her distinctive black cardigan. We called. We went back three times. Finally I asked to see the lost-and-found box for myself, convinced that the staff had overlooked the sweater. No, the black sweater was not there. But pawing through that sad collection of left-behinds, I remembered an assignment from my early days as a reporter in Waco, Texas, when I was asked to write an article about what was in the lost-and-found boxes at summer’s end. I had triumphed over the less-than-interesting findings by writing in what I imagined to be a very good imitation of Philip Marlowe’s voice. (God, I hope that piece never surfaces. RIP, my Waco clips.) But now I began to imagine a more sinister version of this story, one in which a young woman who imagines herself to be sophisticated, perhaps even a libertine, discovers that she’s a real piker when she comes up against a couple of good citizens from Waco, sometimes called the buckle on the Bible belt. In fact, I saw a distinctive buckle on a belt, emerging snakelike from a soft, sagging cardboard box, an item that could be linked to an unsolved murder—and the editor who assigned the story.

  I have two more short stories due right now—right now—and I just wish Ann Hood would lose another item of clothing.

  No discussion of writing short stories would be complete without a discussion of those who edit short stories. I’ve done it exactly once, for the Akashic Books noir series, and found it gratifying yet challenging. Sure, you want all the stories to be perfect upon arrival, but then you have to wonder if you’re even doing your job. As a short story writer, I yearn to believe they’re perfect when they leave my desk—but a little voice in the back of my head tells me when they’re not. Some of my best experiences have resulted from very good editing. Otto Penzler, for example, once told me that a story just wasn’t good enough and explained what he thought the weaknesses were. He gave me a chance to rework it; that story, “Hardly Knew Her,” was nominated for an Edgar and won the Anthony Award. Since the news of the selections for this collection went out into the world, I’ve heard from some editors who say they did nothing—nothing!—to the chosen stories. But I suspect that some outstanding editors are standing behind these stellar stories.

  So we circle back to why anyone writes short stories. One of the writers in this collection, Megan Abbott, told me that her students at Ole Miss, where she was the John and Renée Grisham writer in residence for 2013–2014, become starry-eyed over the occasional unicorn that wanders into the publishing forest—the writer who enjoys a big success with a collection of short stories. Most recently it was B. J. Novak, and George Saunders just before him, but such critically adored bestsellers are rare and almost unheard-of for those who specialize in the mystery story, such as the late Edward D. Hoch. I wonder again: Why does anyone write mystery short stories, with their exacting, exasperating demands?

  I can speak only for myself. The phone rings. Actually, my e-mail box pings. Actually, it makes no noise at all, because my computer is set to mute. I’ll try again: A blonde walks into my office. That’s true and it happens every day, thanks to Marko at Sally Hersh­berger Salon. I check my e-mail, see a request from an editor. Could you write about . . . ? And I say yes.

  Unless it’s about cars.

  I am grateful that the writers of this collection said yes, whether to external or internal prompts, to characters or situations that suddenly appeared, requiring their attention. Because as a reader, when I’m yearning for a short story, nothing else will do. As demanding as the form may be for the writer, it is exceedingly rewarding for the reader. Being guest editor of The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 was like being given an enormous box of very good chocolates and asked to go hog wild. If my final selection veers to the dark ones, preferably with nuts, that’s my personal taste. No, it really is—in chocolates and in stories. Dark, with nuts.

  Dig in.

  LAURA LIPPMAN

  MEGAN ABBOTT

  My Heart Is Either Broken

  FROM Dangerous Women

  HE WAITED IN THE CAR. He had parked under one of the big banks of lights. No one else wanted to park there. He could guess why. Three vehicles over, he saw a woman’s back pressed against a window, her hair shaking. Once, she turned her head and he almost saw her face, the blue of her teeth as she smiled.

  Fifteen minutes went by before Lorie came stumbling across the parking lot, heels clacking.

  He had been working late and didn’t even know she wasn’t home until he got there. When she finally picked up her cell, she told him where she was, a bar he’d never heard of, a part of town he didn’t know.

  “I just wanted some noise and people,” she had explained. “I didn’t mean anything.”

  He asked if she wanted him to come get her.

  “Okay,” she said.

  On the ride home, she was doing the laughing-crying thing she’d been doing lately. He wanted to help her but didn’t know how. It reminded him of the kinds of girls he used to date in high school. The ones who wrote in ink all over their hands and cut themselves in the bathroom stalls at school.

  “I hadn’t been dancing in so long, and if I shut my eyes no one could see,” she was saying, looking out the window, her head tilted against the window. “No one there knew me until someone did. A woman I didn’t know. She kept shou
ting at me. Then she followed me into the bathroom and said she was glad my little girl couldn’t see me now.”

  He knew what people would say. That she was out dancing at a grimy pickup bar. They wouldn’t say she cried all the way home, that she didn’t know what to do with herself, that no one knows how they’ll act when something like this happens to them. Which it probably won’t.

  But he also wanted to hide, wanted to find a bathroom stall himself, in another city, another state, and never see anyone he knew again, especially his mother or his sister, who spent all day on the Internet trying to spread the word about Shelby, collecting tips for the police.

  Shelby’s hands—well, people always talk about babies’ hands, don’t they?—but they were like tight little flowers and he loved to put his palm over them. He never knew he’d feel like that. Never knew he’d be the kind of guy—that there even were kinds of guys—who would catch the milky scent of his daughter’s baby blanket and feel warm inside. Even, sometimes, press his face against it.

  It took him a long time to tug off the dark red cowboy boots she was wearing, ones he did not recognize.

  When he pulled off her jeans, he didn’t recognize her underwear either. The front was a black butterfly, its wings fluttering against her thighs with each tug.

  He looked at her and a memory came to him of when they first dated, Lorie taking his hand and running it along her belly, her thighs. Telling him she once thought she’d be a dancer, that maybe she could be. And that if she ever had a baby she’d have a C-section because everyone knew what happened to women’s stomachs after, not to mention what it does down there, she’d said, laughing, and put his hand there next.

  He’d forgotten all this, and other things too, but now the things kept coming back and making him crazy.

  He poured a tall glass of water for her and made her drink it. Then he refilled it and set it beside her.

  She didn’t sleep like a drunk person but like a child, her lids twitching dreamily and a faint smile tugging at her mouth.

  The moonlight coming in, it felt like he watched her all night, but at some point he must have fallen asleep.

  When he woke, she had her head on his belly, was rubbing him drowsily.

  “I was dreaming I was pregnant again,” she murmured. “It was like Shelby all over again. Maybe we could adopt. There are so many babies out there that need love.”

  They had met six years ago. He was working for his mother, who owned a small apartment building on the north side of town.

  Lorie lived on the first floor, where the window was high and you could see people walking on the sidewalk. His mother called it a “sunken garden apartment.”

  She lived with another girl and sometimes they came in very late, laughing and pressing up against each other in the way young girls do, whispering things, their legs bare and shiny in short skirts. He wondered what they said.

  He was still in school then and would work evenings and weekends, changing washers on leaky faucets, taking out the trash.

  Once, he was in front of the building, hosing down the garbage cans with bleach, and she rushed past him, her tiny coat bunched around her face. She was talking on the phone and she moved so quickly he almost didn’t see her, almost splashed her with the hose. For a second, he saw her eyes, smeary and wet.

  “I wasn’t lying,” she was saying into the phone as she pushed her key into the front door, as she heaved her shoulders against it. “I’m not the liar here.”

  One evening not long after, he came home and there was a note under the door. It read:

  My heart is either broken or I haven’t paid the bill.

  Thx, Lorie, #1-A

  He’d read it four times before he figured it out.

  She smiled when she opened the door, the security chain across her forehead.

  He held up his pipe wrench.

  “You’re just in time,” she said, pointing to the radiator.

  No one ever thinks anything will ever happen to their baby girl. That’s what Lorie kept saying. She’d been saying that to reporters, the police, for every day of the three weeks since it happened.

  He watched her with the detectives. It was just like on TV except nothing like on TV. He wondered why nothing was ever like you thought it would be and then he realized it was because you never thought this would be you.

  She couldn’t sit still, her fingers twirling through the edges of her hair. Sometimes, at a traffic signal, she would pull nail scissors from her purse and trim the split ends. When the car began moving she would wave her hand out the window, scattering the clippings into the wind.

  It was the kind of careless, odd thing that made her so different from any girl he ever knew. Especially that she would do it in front of him.

  He was surprised how much he had liked it.

  But now all of it seemed different and he could see the detectives watching her, looking at her like she was a girl in a short skirt, twirling on a bar stool and tossing her hair at men.

  “We’re gonna need you to start from the beginning again,” the male one said, and that part was like on TV. “Everything you remember.”

  “She’s gone over it so many times,” he said, putting his hand over hers and looking at the detective wearily.

  “I meant you, Mr. Ferguson,” the detective said, looking at him. “Just you.”

  They took Lorie to the outer office and he could see her through the window, pouring long gulps of creamer into her coffee, licking her lips.

  He knew how that looked too. The newspapers had just run a picture of her at a smoothie place. The caption was, “What about Shelby?” They must have taken it through the front window. She was ordering something at the counter, and she was smiling. They always got her when she was smiling. They didn’t understand that she smiled when she was sad. Sometimes she cried when she was happy, like at their wedding, when she cried all day, her face pink and gleaming, shuddering against his chest.

  I never thought you would, she had said. I never thought I would. That any of this could happen.

  He didn’t know what she meant, but he loved feeling her huddled against him, her hips grinding against him like they did when she couldn’t hold herself together and seemed to be grabbing on to him to keep from flying off the earth itself.

  “So, Mr. Ferguson,” the detective said, “you came home from work and there was no one home?”

  “Right,” he said. “Call me Tom.”

  “Tom,” the detective started again, but the name seemed to fumble in his mouth like he’d rather not say it. Last week he’d called him Tom. “Was it unusual to find them gone at that time of day?”

  “No,” he said. “She liked to keep busy.”

  It was true, because Lorie never stayed put and sometimes would strap Shelby into the car seat and drive for hours, putting 100 or 200 miles on the car.

  She would take her to Mineral Pointe and take photos of them in front of the water. He would get them on his phone at work and they always made him grin. He liked how she was never one of these women who stayed at home and watched court shows or the shopping channels.

  She worked fifteen hours a week at the Y while his mother stayed with Shelby. Every morning she ran 5 miles, putting Shelby in the jogging stroller. She made dinner every night and sometimes even mowed the lawn when he was too busy. She never ever stopped moving.

  This is what the newspapers and the TV people loved. They loved to take pictures of her jogging in her short shorts and talking on the phone in her car and looking at fashion magazines in line at the grocery store.

  “What about Shelby?” the captions always read.

  They never understood her at all. He was the only one.

  “So,” the detective asked him, rousing him from his thoughts, “what did you do when you found the house empty?”

  “I called her cell.” He had. She hadn’t answered, but that wasn’t unusual either. He didn’t bother to tell them that. That he’d called four or five times
and the phone went straight to voicemail and it wasn’t until the last time she picked up.

  Her voice had been strange, small, like she might be in the doctor’s office, or the ladies’ room. Like she was trying to make herself quiet and small.

  “Lorie? Are you okay? Where are you guys?”

  There had been a long pause and the thought came that she had crashed the car. For a crazy second he thought she might be in the hospital, both of them broken and battered. Lorie was a careless driver, always sending him texts from the car. Bad pictures came into his head. He’d dated a girl once who had a baby shoe that hung on her rearview mirror. She said it was to remind her to drive carefully, all the time. No one ever told you that after you were sixteen.

  “Lorie, just tell me.” He had tried to make his voice firm but kind.

  “Something happened.”

  “Lorie,” he tried again, like after a fight with her brother or her boss, “just take a breath and tell me.”

  “Where did she go?” her voice came. “And how is she going to find me? She’s a little girl. She doesn’t know anything. They should put dog tags on them like they did when we were kids, remember that?”

  He didn’t remember that at all, and there was a whir in his head that was making it hard for him to hear.

  “Lorie, you need to tell me what’s going on.”

  So she did.

  She said she’d been driving around all morning, looking at lawn mowers she’d found for sale on Craigslist. She was tired, decided to stop for coffee at the expensive place.

  She saw the woman there all the time. They talked about how expensive the coffee was but how they couldn’t help it. And what was an Americano, anyway? And, yeah, they talked about their kids. She was pretty sure the woman said she had kids. Two, she thought. And it was only going to be two minutes, five at the most.