The Best American Mystery Stories 1998

by Otto Penzler

  Her daddy has gained weight. His cheeks have grown round, the backs of his hands are plump. He’s not getting any exercise to speak of. On Tuesday and Wednesday nights, he tells her, the prisoners who want to keep in shape are let out of their cells, one at a time, and allowed to jog up and down three flights of stairs for ten minutes each. He says an officer sits in a straight-backed chair down in the courthouse lobby with a rifle across his lap to make sure that the prisoners don’t jog any farther.

  Her daddy is sitting on the edge of his cot. He’s wearing blue denim pants and a shirt to match, and a patch on the pocket of the shirt says Loiing County Jail. The shoes he has on aren’t really shoes. They look like bedroom slippers.

  Downstairs, when she checked in with the jailer, Jim Wheeler heard her voice and came out of his office. While she waited for the jailer to get the right key, the sheriff asked her how she was doing.

  “All right, I guess.”

  “You may think I’m lying, honey,” he said, “but the day’ll come when you’ll look back on this time in your life and it won’t seem like nothing but a real bad dream.”

  Sitting in a hard plastic chair, looking at her father, she already feels like she’s in a bad dream. He’s smiling at her, waiting for her to say something, but her tongue feels like it’s fused to the roof of her mouth.

  The jail is air conditioned, but it’s hot in the cell, and the place smells bad. The toilet over in the corner has no lid on it. She wonders how in the name of God a person can eat in a place like this. And what kind of person could actually eat enough to gain weight?

  As if he knows what she’s thinking, her father says, “You’re probably wondering how I can stand it.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “I can stand it,” he says, “because I know I deserved to be locked up.”

  He sits there a moment longer, then gets up off the cot and shuffles over to the window, which has three bars across it. He stands there looking out. “All my life,” he finally says, “I’ve been going in and out of all those buildings down there and I never once asked myself what they looked like from above. Now I know. There’s garbage on those roofs and bird shit. One day I saw a man sitting up there, drinking from a paper bag. Right on top of the jewelry store.”

  He turns around then and walks over and lays his hand on her shoulder.

  “When I was down there,” he says, “scurrying around like a chicken with its head cut off, I never gave myself enough time to think. That’s one thing I’ve had plenty of in here. And I can tell you, I’ve seen some things I was too blind to see then.”

  He keeps his hand on her shoulder the whole time he’s talking. “In the last few weeks,” he says, “I asked myself how you must have felt when I told you I was too busy to play with you, how you probably felt every time you had to go to the theater by yourself and you saw all those other litde girls waiting in line with their daddies and holding their hands.” He says he’s seen all the ways in which he failed them both, her and her mother, and he knows they both saw them a long time ago. He just wishes to God /^had.

  He takes his hand off her shoulder, goes back over to the cot, and sits down. She watches, captivated, as his eyes begin to glisten. She realizes that she’s in the presence of a man capable of anything, and for the first time she knows the answer to a question that has always baffled her: why would her momma put up with so much for so long? '

  The answer is that her daddy is a natural performer, and her momma was his natural audience. Her momma lived for these routines, she watched till Watching killed her.

  With watery eyes, Dee Ann’s daddy looks at her, here in a stinking room in the county courthouse. “Sweetheart,” he whispers, “you don’t think I killed her, do you?”

  When she speaks, her voice will be steady, it won’t crack and break. She will display no more emotion than if she were responding to a question posed by her history teacher.

  “No sir,” she tells her daddy. “I don’t think you killed her. I know you did.”

  In that instant the weight of his life begins to crush her.

  Ten-thirty on a Saturday night in 1997. She’s standing alone in an alleyway outside the Loring County Courthouse. It’s the same alley where her father and Jim Wheeler and the deputy had their pictures taken all those years ago. Loring is the same town it was then, except now there are gangs, and gunfire is something you hear all week long, not just on Saturday night. Now people kill folks they don’t know.

  Chuckie is supposedly at a deer camp with some men she’s never met. He told her he knows them from a sporting goods store in Greenville. They all started talking about deer hunting, and one of the men told Chuckie he owned a cabin over behind the levee and suggested Chuckie go hunting with them this year.

  Cynthia is out with her friends — she may be at a movie or she may be in somebody’s back seat. Wherever she is, Dee Ann prays she’s having fun. She prays that Cynthia’s completely caught up in whatever she’s doing and that she won’t come along and find her momma here, standing alone in the alley beside the courthouse, gazing up through the darkness as though she hopes to read the stars.

  The room reminds her of a Sunday school classroom.

  It’s on the second floor of the courthouse, overlooking the alley. There’s a long wooden table in the middle of the room, and she’s sitting at one end of it in a straight-backed chair. Along both sides, in similar chairs, sit fifteen men and women who make up the grand jury. She knows several faces, three or four names. It looks as if every one of them is drinking coffee. They’ve all got styrofoam cups.

  Down at the far end of the table, with a big manila folder open in front of him, sits Barry Lancaster, the district attorney, a man whose name she’s going to be seeing in newspaper articles a lot in the next twenty years. He’s just turned thirty, and though it’s still warm out, he’s wearing a black suit, with a sparkling white shirt and a glossy black tie.

  Barry Lancaster has the reputation of being tough on crime, and he’s going to ride that reputation all the way to the Mississippi attorney general’s office and then to a federal judgeship. When he came to see her a few days ago, it was his reputation that concerned him. After using a lot of phrases like “true bill” and “no bill” without bothering to explain precisely what they meant, he said, “My reputation’s at stake here, Dee Ann. There’s a whole lot riding on you.”

  She knows how much is riding on her, and it’s a lot more than his reputation. She feels the great mass bearing down on her shoulders. Her neck is stiff and her legs are heavy. She didn’t sleep last night. She never really sleeps anymore.

  “Now Dee Ann,” Barry Lancaster says, “we all know you’ve gone through a lot recently, but I need to ask you some questions today so that these ladies and gentlemen can hear your answers. Will that be okay?”

  She wants to say that it’s not okay, that it will never again be okay for anyone to ask her anything, but she just nods.

  He asks her how old she is.

  “Eighteen.”

  What grade she’s in.

  “I’m a senior.”

  Whether or not she has a boyfriend named Chuckie Nelms.

  ‘Yes sir.”

  Whether or not, on Saturday evening, August 2nd, she saw her boyfriend.

  ‘Yes sir.”

  Barry Lancaster looks up from the stack of papers and smiles at her. “If I was your boyfriend,” he says, “I’d want to see you every night.”

  A few of the men on the grand jury grin, but the women keep straight faces. One of them, a small red-haired woman with lots of freckles, whose name she doesn’t know and never will know, is going to wait on her in a convenience store over in Indianola many years later. After giving her change, the woman will touch Dee Ann’s hand and say, “I hope the rest of your life’s been easier, honey. It must have been awful, what you went through.”

  Barry Lancaster takes her through that Saturday evening, from the time Chuckie picked her up until the moment when s
he walked into the kitchen. Then he asks her, in a solemn voice, what she found there.

  She keeps her eyes trained on his tie pin, a small amethyst, as she describes the scene in as much detail as she can muster. In a roundabout way, word will reach her that people on the grand jury were shocked, and even appalled, at her lack of emotion. Chuckie will try to downplay their reaction, telling her that they’re probably just saying that because of what happened later on. “It’s probably not you they’re reacting to,” he’ll say. “It’s probably just them having hindsight.”

  Hindsight is something she lacks, as she sits here in a hard chair, in a small room, her hands lying before her on a badly scarred table. She can’t make a bit of sense out of what’s already happened. She knows what her daddy was and she knows what he wasn’t, knows what he did and didn’t do. What she doesn’t know is the whys and wherefores.

  On the other hand, she can see into the future, she knows what’s going to happen, and she also knows why. She knows, for instance, what question is coming, and she knows how she’s going to answer it and why. She knows that shortly after she’s given that answer, Barry Lancaster will excuse her, and she knows, because Lou Pierce has told her, that after she’s been excused, Barry Lancaster will address the members of the grand jury.

  He will tell them what they have and haven’t heard. “Now she’s a young girl,” he’ll say, “and she’s been through a lot, and in the end this case has to rest on what she can tell us. And the truth, ladies and gentlemen, much as I might want it to be otherwise, is that the kid’s gone shaky on us. She told the sheriff one version of what happened at the grocery store that Saturday night when her daddy came to see her, and she’s sat here today and told y’all a different version. She’s gotten all confused on this question of time. You can’t blame her for that, she’s young and her mind’s troubled, but in all honesty a good defense attorney’s apt to rip my case apart. Because when you lose this witness’s testimony, all you’ve got left is that dog, and that dog, ladies and gentlemen, can’t testify.”

  Even as she sits here, waiting for Barry Lancaster to bring up that night in the grocery store — that night which, for her, will always be the present — she knows the statement about the dog will be used to sentence Jim Wheeler to November defeat. The voters of this county will drape that sentence around the sheriffs neck. If Jim Wheeler had done his job and found some real evidence, they will say, that man would be on his way to Parchman.

  They will tell one another, the voters of this county, how someone saw her daddy at the Jackson airport, as he boarded a plane that would take him to Dallas, where he would board yet another plane for a destination farther south. They will say that her daddy was actually carrying a briefcase filled with money, with lots of crisp green hundreds, one of which he extracted to pay for a beer.

  They will say that her daddy must have paid her to lie, that she didn’t give a damn about her mother. They will wonder if Chuckie has a brain in his head, to go and marry somebody like her, and they will ask themselves how she can ever bear the shame of what she’s done. They will not believe, not even for a moment, that she’s performed some careful calculations in her mind. All that shame, she’s decided, will still weigh a lot less than her daddy’s life. It will be a while before she and Chuckie and a girl who isn’t born yet learn how much her faulty math has cost.

  Barry Lancaster makes a show of rifling through his papers. He pulls a sheet out and studies it, lets his face wrinkle up as if he’s seeing something on the page that he never saw before. Then he lays the sheet back down. He closes the ijianila folder, pushes his chair away from the table a few inches, and leans forward. She’s glad he’s too far away to lay his hand on her knee.

  “Now,” he says, “let’s go backwards in time.”

  Contributors' Notes

  David Ballard was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio, the son of two teachers. He majored in English at Miami University, and he received his law degree from the Ohio State University. He lives in South Bend, Indiana, with his wife, Jeanne, and his son, Jack. “Child Support” is his first published story.

  ■ I am addicted to games. I also love reading suspense stories where a character encounters some sort of contest or wager, whether by choice or coercion, and naturally the stakes are high. My earliest influences are the stories of Roald Dahl, Richard Matheson, and the early nonsupernatural stories of Stephen King.

  “Child Support” is that kind of suspense story. The idea began as a “what if’ scenario while I was throwing Frisbee in the park with Jake, our black Labrador, and Jack was watching in his stroller. I began playing a mental game of how many Jake could catch in a row, and then it struck me just how secluded we really were in that park as it was getting darker.

  I listen to movie soundtracks as I write. I’ll pick a certain one to set the right mood for a particular story, and then I’ll play it over and over until the story is finished. For “Child Support,” I must have listened to the soundtrack for Pulp Fiction at least three hundred times.

  Charles Raisch at New Mystery Magazine accepted my story and published it as an “author debut,” something he tries to accomplish in each issue. I cannot imagine any better care and handling of a new writer than what the folks at that magazine gave me.

  Scott Bartels is a graduate of the University of North Florida, where he won the North Florida Young Writers Award. This is his first published piece. He doesn’t use the “F word” nearly as often as this story might lead you to believe.

  ■ “Swear Not by the Moon” started with nothing more than a title (“Creole the Killer”) and the last sentence. Then I set about crossing the twain that separated the two. It was never a matter of wanting to see how the title and that last line intersected, but a matter of needing to. I paced the streets of the Quarter with Creole, rattled about in his empty house, traversed I-ioona shared pilgrimage.

  So you can imagine my consternation when Tamaqua offered to publish the piece but asked me to change the title to “almost anything else.” For whatever it says about me, I agonized over this as much as I did the names of my children. I finally settled on Juliet’s admonition about pinning one’s love to things variable, although I ultimately disagree with her since we all wax and wane.

  This story is about a number of things, among them, reconciling obligations with addictions. Creole’s is heroin, and I’d like to think that he beats it. Mine is writing, and I hope I never do.

  Born in Buffalo, Lawrence Block has lived in New York City most of his adult life — though he travels almost as much as Keller, if to less purpose. His fifty-plus books range from the urban noir of Matthew Scudder to the urbane effervescence of Bernie Rhodenbarr, and include four volumes of short stories. An MWA Grand Master, Block has won a slew of awards, including three Edgars, and been presented with the key to the city of Muncie, Indiana.

  ■ Short stories, I’ve come to feel, ought to speak for themselves; writers, on the other hand, probably shouldn’t. I’ll just say that Keller first saw the dark of day in a short story called “Answers to Soldier.” I never thought I’d have more to say about him, but what do I know? A few years later I wrote “Keller on Horseback” and “Keller’s Therapy” and realized I was writing a novel on the installment plan. The novel, Hit Man, consists of ten short stories, of which “Keller on the Spot” is the eighth. It is, like its fellows, a variation on a theme.

  And it was written by hand, with a ball-point pen and a yellow pad, aboard the SS Nordlys off the coast of Norway. I don’t know that Norway got into the story at all, and the only water’s in the swimming pool, salt-free but heavy on the chlorine. But it seemed like an interesting thing to mention.

  Mary Higgins Clark is the author of fifteen novels, beginning with Where Are the Children ?, and three short story collections, each of which has been an international best-seller. She is the mother of five and lives in Saddle River, Newjersey. *

  ■ I took my first writing course when I was twenty-one
. The professor gave our class the best advice I’ve ever heard. “Take a dramatic situation,

  one that appeals to you, ask yourself two questions, ‘Suppose?’ and ‘What if?’ and turn that situation into fiction.

  That was a long time ago, and I’ve been doing it ever since. I did add a third question, “Why?” because a strong motive is vital.

  Last year when I was doing publicity for my newly released book, I was in the Midwest and read about a man who had been arrested for breaking into his neighbor’s home by cutting the cinderblocks in the common basement wall between his townhouse and hers.

  The situation made me feel creepy, and I began to ask myself the three questions. Suppose? What if? Why?

  “The Man Next Door” is my answer.

  Merrill Joan Gerber has published five novels, among them King of the World, which won the Pushcart Editor’s Book Award for “a book of literary distinction,” and The Kingdom of Brooklyn, which was awarded the Ribalow Prize from Hadassah magazine “for the best English-language book of fiction on a Jewish theme.” She has also published four volumes of short stories; the most recent, Anna in Chains, was published in 1998 by Syracuse University Press. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Redbook, The Sewanee Review, The Chattahoochee Review; The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. “I Don’t Believe This” was included in the O. Henry Prize Stories, 1986. A recent essay was published in Commentary magazine. She studied writing with Andrew Lytle at the University of Florida, held a Wallace Stegner Fiction Fellowship at Stanford, and now teaches writing at the California Institute of Technology. (More about Merrill Joan Gerber can be seen on her website at http://www.cco.cal-tech. edu/~mjgerber.)

  ■ There are all kinds of mysteries in life and one of the most puzzling to me is the failure of friendship, or worse, the betrayal of friendship. In “This Is a Voice from Your Past” I examine the circumstances of such a failure and its terrifying consequences.