Harlan Coben

by The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

  They were aback his horse, the girl before him on the saddle, holding the baby, and they were headed west. The sun was out and the earth drier, trees on the horizon. Dixie Clay said she was two months shy of eighteen. One of them back there had been her husband.

  “Which one?”

  “The one with the different-colored eyes.”

  “What was his name?”

  She paused. “I’ll say it just this one more time. But don’t never ask me again, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Jesse Swan Holliver.” She brushed away a mosquito from the baby’s forehead. Then she turned her head to look up at him. “I’m better off now.”

  A little while later, facing forward in the saddle, she said it again. “I’m better off now.”

  He rode on, thinking, as she slept within the cage his arms made. He remembered killing the looters in the house in Leland. Killing the baby’s mother. She’d had a gold-plated .45-caliber pistol and she was fixing to shoot him. Instead he shot her. Now in his imagination he shot her again. He shot her and then the man she’d been with and the one before him and the saboteurs in Marked Tree and the Krauts on the Flemish Coast and all the way back through his life of murder and mandolining. He probably should have shot Dixie Clay’s husband and the other two, and might come to regret not doing so. But it was not yet noon and already he’d carried them fifteen miles farther west from the river and closer to land where you could see some stars. Even the horse seemed spry, its head high and pace quickening despite the heavier load.

  The girl nodded in the saddle as she slept. He thought about the Memphis Minnie song, “Gotta leave my baby, and my happy home.” He sang it softly to himself and Dixie Clay opened her eyes.

  “You gone leave me?” She sat up and turned to look into his face.

  He could smell her sour sleep breath, his chest warm from where her back had rested.

  “It don’t look like it,” he said.

  She reached to where his hand lay over the pommel and wove her fingers through his. He wondered if she noticed how callused he was. He wondered was it too late to unlearn being good at certain things with your hands. He wondered about the tiny half-moon scar on her lip that shone white when she smiled as she was doing now. He had time to find out.

  He looked into her lap where she held the baby, his eyelids jerking in sleep, but his breath was easy, his lungs puffing, and Ingersoll knew they were tiny bellows that would play the rest of his days.

  “He’s dreaming,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said, “he must be.”

  A Crime of Opportunity

  Ernest J. Finney

  FROM Sewanee Review

  NO MATTER HOW FAST or how far she ran, she was never going to outrun herself. That was the sorry truth, Delilah thought. She was still here. She slowed on the last stretch through Golden Gate Park and found Mrs. Stowe—no, she had to remember, Renée—waiting where she said she’d be, by the windmill. They crossed the highway to the sidewalk along the seawall that paralleled the dunes. It was already dark at six, a November dark, a West Coast dark, nothing like New York in November, where you always seemed to be in the shadow of the buildings. And not as cold here, as if the wispy fog were insulation against the wind.

  Where were they now? Even after five months in San Francisco she still got lost, running, day or night. She wasn’t sure what direction they were going now—north, south?—though she could hear the waves slap against the sandy beach. She didn’t want to seem anxious; Renée would say, “Okay, Delilah, what is it?” with that hint of impatience in her voice. Once she’d told Renée, “Prepare for the worst and it will never happen,” and Renée had come back with, “Preparation inhibits spontaneity. Forget those maxims, Delilah. You’re no longer in the Girl Scouts.”

  She hadn’t taken her cell phone or her pager. Renée never commented, though, if she got a call from her office; Renée knew her job involved instant decisions at all hours. The plan tonight was that they would walk for a while and end up in a small neighborhood restaurant Renée knew about. She could phone in to the office from there, Delilah thought, to get the new euro high against the dollar.

  Renée was in her storytelling mode, this time about her paleontologist husband’s first discovery in Patagonia. “We lived in one of those white canvas pyramid tents: I remember how the dozen or so guy lines would sing in the night wind. The place where Sonny had chosen to dig was a treasure trove of Pliocene-era fossils. The armadillo, by the way, has hardly changed at all in forty-five million years: it has stayed the same since the Eocene period, a living fossil. We had twenty of the local Indians to work the site. Wonderfully conscientious men and women.”

  Striding along in her British outfit, long tartan skirt, turtleneck sweater, and camel-hair blazer, heavy brogans, her gray hair topped by a beret, Renée was becoming more English with each sentence. Her husband had been born in London. Clothes seemed made for her: she was tall, narrow, long-waisted like the models you saw in magazines. Extremely trim, though she ate like a horse. She was swinging her cane—her English shooting stick, she called it—which turned into a kind of stool when you stuck the metal spike at the end into the ground and opened the handle.

  “Let’s stop for a minute so I can stretch.” She interrupted Renée’s story to steer them to a cement bench under a streetlight. She was warm in her sweats and twisted her fanny pack around so it didn’t stick into her side before she started her stretches. Renée paced in the square of light; she couldn’t sit still either. What was amazing was that Renée looked no more than forty, say, maybe fifty. But she had to be nearly eighty. One of her stories took place in 1939. Her face was almost unlined, though there was no sign of surgery. She had young breasts; she’d seen them when Renée was trying on a dress at Nordstrom’s. There were no liver spots on the back of her hands.

  There had been occasional passersby, a woman walking a dog, but now two men stopped. “Lovely evening,” one said. Renée stopped pacing but didn’t pause in her tale about discovering that she’d been sitting upon four vertebrae of a species never before found in South America. “Why don’t you two ladies hand over your purses and start taking off your clothes.” The one who spoke was wearing a leather jacket like an undercover cop in a TV series. Then he yelled, “You heard me—strip.”

  That got Renée’s attention. “I beg your pardon. Are you speaking to us?”

  In response, the other one, like a conjuring trick, slowly drew a machete from the sleeve of his raincoat. Renée laughed out loud like she had seen something funny.

  It all happened so fast there was no time to be scared. “Run,” Delilah yelled, grabbing for Renée’s hand. But Renée had stepped aside and had raised her shooting stick one-handed, as if she was going to twirl it like a baton: a blade of grass was dangling from the point of the stick. Cell phone, Delilah thought; pretend you’ve got it, and she reached into her pocket and yelled “I’m calling 911” the same instant she saw the blade of the machete catch the light as it came down toward Renée’s head. It was too fast for her to see exactly what happened, but one man screamed, the other fled, and the machete fell with a clang to the sidewalk. She caught Renée’s hand this time, and they ran too.

  After a block and a half they couldn’t hear the screams anymore. Renée slowed a little, still walking so fast Delilah had to jog to keep up. “Renée, shouldn’t we get the police?”

  “No, no; I don’t think so. I just administered a life lesson to that young man. The police would only confuse the issue. Remember now, it’s not the groin or the kneecap you kick. The whole business with karate and jujitsu and the rest is overrated. Too physical. You have to go for the eyes in a situation like that. Car keys are very good. Your thumb will do too.”

  By the end of the block Renée had resumed her Patagonia story in Argentina. But the image of the point of the walking stick spearing the man’s eyeball made Delilah feel dizzy, made her own eyes water. It was the second time she’d heard Renée say l
ife lesson. The first had been on the day they’d met.

  She could admit it now; she was a mess then. Bewildered, was that it? By the move to San Francisco from New York. It was before noon; the restaurant was already packed; they’d lost her reservation. It shouldn’t have thrown her, but it did. Just going to lunch could throw her into confusion. She didn’t like eating alone anyhow, wasn’t used to it yet, especially in a place like this, locally famous. She was ready to flee, and then the maître d’ asked if she’d mind sharing a table. She followed the waitress across the the dining room to a table by the window next to the street, and the woman seated there stood up and introduced herself, Renée Stowe. From the beginning the woman made her feel comfortable, relaxed, talkative. They decided to split a bottle of wine. After they ordered dessert, Delilah heard herself let go, recite line by line her secret, private résumé she didn’t dare go over very often, even to herself. Falling in love that first time in college, graduating, marrying, getting her law degree. Thinking her life would be like her parents’ life, two happy people who loved each other. Was it playing house? Was she fantasizing? Did having sex with the lights on mean you’d love someone forever? People fell in love: how was it they fell out of love?

  And the law: she’d been wrong about that too. The third member of her immediate family to become a lawyer. How could she have thought that being a defense lawyer for the city of Pittsburgh could mean that any of the defendants would be innocent? That she could get them off by her very brilliance after they’d committed and already confessed to some terrible crime? Let them back into society to continue those desperate acts? As part of a team or on her own, she’d lost some twenty-one cases, four capital, in the fourteen months before she quit. Felons at the city jail called her the funeral director. Defendants insisted on another attorney the minute they saw her walk through the door. As her father had always said, there was no correspondence between the law and justice.

  And divorce didn’t end a marriage, she found out. You still heard from your mother-in-law, his favorite niece, the former spouse himself, who wanted to have dinner. To try again. What happened to us? he asked. There were no words to answer that. It was all so sad, like five years of her life had been erased. She fled to New York City. Left litigation, got a job as legal counsel for the Zoological Society; her father had known someone. That was where she’d met her second husband, who was on the board. He was in finance.

  Charming? Intelligent? Witty? Mysterious? Wayne was unaware he was all those things. He’d lived abroad most of his life, much of it in Asia, where his Quaker father, an MD, had developed a number of rural clinics. Hand-to-mouth existence. Not much school, no real formal education. He spoke five languages and two Chinese dialects. Often stopped at the medical school to sit in on a lecture. Took her to a conference in Montreal to look over innovations in emergency-room technology. She introduced him to marathons.

  At the time she’d thought rather highly of herself. Her divorce had improved her image, hadn’t diminished her but made her more experienced, a woman of the world. She didn’t see it as a failure. And she hadn’t seen Wayne as a challenge. He pursued her.

  At this point she embarrassed herself and Renée too. She hadn’t realized she was weeping, but big tears were falling into her water glass with a splash that wet her knuckles. The idea that she would never see Wayne again finished her, melted all her resolve. She must have sobbed out loud next because Renée placed her hand on her wrist and said calmly, “There is no life lesson to prepare us for loss and grief. Get a grip, dear.” Handing her a handkerchief, Renée took over the conversation, chatting away, then excused herself after a comfortable interval to go to an appointment. When Delilah motioned to the waitress for the check, she was told Mrs. Stowe had already taken care of it. A couple of days later—they had exchanged cards at some point—she received a note from Renée: “Delightful time. I lunch at that restaurant at eleven each Wednesday; hope we meet there again.”

  Work was chaotic: the dollar was plummeting; all currencies were careening. Her company, an intermediary between international banks, handled money transfers. Trying to keep ahead of the exchange rates—yen and yuan, pound and peso—was the best part of her job, like trying to count the angels dancing on top of a dozen pins. You had to be fast and right when so much money was involved.

  Wayne had recommended her for the position at his firm; he was the comptroller. She had wanted a change, some excitement. And she turned out to be good. Better than good; within a year she had her own office and secretary. She and Wayne were serious by then, living together. It wasn’t like her first marriage, following the prescriptions for happiness: communicate, compromise, share experiences, always be a generous lover. Flowers and candlelight. Wayne ignored those rules, or better, he wasn’t aware of them. He believed in fidelity, but that was all. Insisted they live in his little apartment in Queens. He couldn’t drive, had never owned a car, used public transportation, sometimes made terrible mistakes, mispronouncing common Engl ish words. She loved him all the more for it.

  Her mother had told her when she was a girl that she was going to be beautiful someday. She’d always thought it just was something mothers said to ordinary-looking daughters. But one day when she was twenty-seven, applying lipstick, she noticed something different. It looked like her nose and chin had somehow decided to join her mouth and eyes and become a whole that was almost striking. Was she seeing things? That’s when she met Wayne. He was the one who put it into words. He was tracing the outline of her lips with his forefinger as they sat at a table in the New York Public Library. “You are beautiful,” he said. And she believed him.

  He’d taken her to a hundred Chinese restaurants so she could learn the regional foods. They had dinner so often at a Hunan place near their Queens apartment that the owners called them by their first names. She’d proofread the daughter’s eighth-grade essays there. One night, when the long table in the center of the room was filled with a large family, Wayne leaned over and said something in Chinese to an old lady at the table, and they traded stories back and forth throughout dinner. Wayne knew the small city the woman was from, and he laughed and laughed at one yarn, which he translated for Delilah. “In a country full of national heroes, from emperors to Mao, we have erected only one statue in my city. Many years ago a tributary of the Yellow River overflowed and left a deep pond in the neighborhood. Two sisters were playing nearby and one fell into the pond and was going under for the third time. A duck that had been living on the pond for years swam over to her, and the girl was able to hold on to the duck and make it to shore. In appreciation the grateful city raised the money for a bronze statue of the duck to be placed by the pond.”

  “Is it a parable? Is there more?” she’d asked him. “I don’t get it.”

  He’d smiled at her then. “Think about it,” he’d said.

  She’d get glimpses of Wayne sometimes in San Francisco, think she saw him crossing Union Square or waiting for a bus as she walked by. She’d stop and go back. It was never he. She never saw him while she ran, though. He never appeared as she sprinted up some famous San Francisco hill, gasping for air. She was running twice a day now.

  In addition to lunch on Wednesday, Delilah and Renée were eating dinner twice a week at an Argentine restaurant Renée had discov ered. Unbelievable grilled steaks. No chemicals, no feedlots; the steers were free-range. According to Renée, the owner had a foothill ranch in the wilds of the San Joaquin Valley. Delilah smiled as Renée ladled more chimichurri onto their steaks. She was working on being cheerful. She often felt that Renée had to restrain herself from reaching across the table and shaking the spit out of her, yelling, “Quit dwelling on your open wounds.”

  She’d almost stopped being morose. She liked hearing herself laugh again. They’d even double-dated: Renée’s nephew and a gentleman from an escort service for Renée. The ersatz nephew was paid too, Delilah was almost sure. It had been hilarious. “Men are such good actors,” she’d told
Renée when they were being driven home in the limo. “Don’t go there, dear,” Renée had said, more sharply than usual. By that time she’d told Renée the rest of the story. Wayne’s disappearance. Scandal. Over $700 million missing. The enormous reward offered. Gone without a trace, both the money and her second husband—the one she thought she couldn’t live without.

  She’d gone home to Philadelphia for comfort, once it was clear what had happened. “It’s not the end of the world,” her mother and father told her. But it was. You could only fall in love like this once, she understood then. It was too hard on you; you’d never survive another loss. The firm had treated her like she had been suddenly widowed, as if Wayne had died tragically. They never so much as suggested she might know where Wayne had gone. She would have told them if she’d had any idea at all, just to see him again. It was too hard to stay in Queens without Wayne. When she asked to be transferred to the West Coast, it was arranged immediately; the firm paid her moving expenses. They trusted her: she’d been told that several times by various executives.

  Sometimes she thought back to the times she and Wayne had gone to Quaker services—meeting for worship, they called it. It had seemed so incongruous, the silence, listening for some transcendent voice in a meeting house in Brooklyn. Was this how it had been in China when he was a boy, these hours of silence, waiting to hear from God? It was so un-Episcopalian: that had been more like playing dress-up every Sunday. She found a Friends meeting listed in the San Francisco phone book and went to it a couple of times on the sly so she wouldn’t have to explain to Renée. In the silence she thought about Wayne. Tried to imagine what Wayne would have been thinking about in those Quaker meetings on Schermer-horn Street.