The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (44 page)

My mother was the one who told her. While Bill was on the phone confessing to the sheriff exactly what had he’d done down that oil lease road—
I’ve killed Harold Timms
—my mother went next door and pounded on the frame of the screen until the radio music stopped and Connie came to see what the fuss was all about.

I watched from the window of my bedroom. My father was sitting on our porch steps. Soon Bill would come out and sit beside him, and after a while I’d hear my father say, “I should have walked out on this a long time ago. Then it wouldn’t have been yours to deal with.” Bill let a few seconds go by, and then he said in a flat, worn-out voice, “R.T., I think I’ve been looking for something like this ever since I got out of the army and came back to the world.” He’d go on in letters that came first from the county jail and then Vandalia Prison in the months to come about how he’d gotten out of Vietnam, but he hadn’t been able to let loose of the rage that filled him.
If it hadn’t been Harold Timms
, he wrote,
it would’ve been someone else. I was just pissed off, R.T. I wanted someone to have to pay for something. I guess that’s the best I can put it.

That Sunday I watched my mother reach out her hand to Connie as if she were about to touch her face. The she said, “Honey, can I come inside?”

Connie had on cutoffs with frayed threads dangling down and a white T-shirt. She had cotton balls between her toes. She’d been painting her toenails a bright red, and it made me wonder how she imagined her life being the next day and the next one after that—if she was thinking that she was glad to be rid of me so she could have a boyfriend she wouldn’t have to sneak around to see. However she saw her life unfolding, she didn’t know that my mother was there to let her know that it was all going to be different now.

“It’s about your daddy,” my mother said, and then she stepped inside the house, and I couldn’t hear any more.

I couldn’t watch that silent house and the little shaded porch with the wooden swing bolted to the ceiling. So many nights I’d seen Connie in that swing and heard her singing to herself. All those love songs that were popular then: “Let’s Stay Together,” “Precious and Few,” “Puppy Love.” She was a girl without a mother, and I was a boy who felt abandoned, so it was easy for us to love each other. But I knew Connie wanted a boyfriend she could show off, parade around with on Friday and Saturday nights, maybe go to a movie at the Avalon Theater in Phillipsport and later drive out to the Dairy Queen to see who was sitting around on the hoods of their cars before heading to the state park or the gravel pits for that alone time in the car, that baby-oh-baby time, secretly hoping that some of the other kids would happen by, so come Monday there would be talk all over school. That was the sort of gossip she wanted to be part of—the kind that said you were part of the cool crowd—not the kind I could give her, the kind filled with shame.

Soon the sheriff’s car pulled into my driveway, and I heard Bill say, “Well, I guess this is it.”

I went to the other window of my bedroom, the one that looked out over the front yard, and I saw my father and Bill get up from where they were sitting and walk across the grass to meet the sheriff, a tall, lumbering man with a dark mustache.

“I’m going to have to take you in,” I heard the sheriff say to Bill. “I’ve got deputies headed down to that oil lease road.”

“I’m ready,” said Bill.

And like that he got into the back seat of the sheriff’s car, and then it was just my father and me and my mother and Connie, whom we would watch over until her grandparents could arrive from Indianapolis to see to her.

“Go over and sit with Connie,” my mother told me when she came back to our house that afternoon. “I want to talk to your father.”

What they said to each other when they were alone, I don’t know. I only know that later that night he packed a bag and got into his Galaxie and drove off to find a motel in Phillipsport until he could locate a more satisfactory arrangement. My mother told me all of this later.

“It’s going to just be the two of us,” she said. She put her arm around my shoulders and squeezed. “Just you and me, Roger. Can you believe that?”

I couldn’t believe anything then, and I knew she couldn’t either. It was that sort of day, a day that felt like it should belong to someone else, the way so much of my life would seem from that point on. It would be a long, long time before I’d let myself trust anyone who said they loved me.

That night I couldn’t say I loved my mother, or Bill, or my father, who had gone without saying a word to me. I could only say that I felt sorry for them—sorry for all the trouble they’d found—and I felt sorry for Connie, who didn’t deserve to be on the other side of that trouble. It would be a while before I’d be able to say that I didn’t deserve it either.

“You’ve always been nice to me,” Connie said to me that evening when we sat on her bed, not saying much at all, waiting for her grandparents to come.

She wasn’t crying, as she’d eventually done on the night her mother died. She was sitting with her legs crossed under her on the bed, rocking back and forth, and she let me put my arm around her waist, and then she laid her head over on my shoulder, and we sat there for the longest time, not saying a word.

The Philco radio sat on the table by her bed, but we didn’t turn it on. She had a bulletin board on the wall above her desk, and from where we sat I could see it was covered with things I’d never known had meant that much to her—a wrapper from a Hershey bar I’d bought for her once when we were out and she was hungry, a book of matches that we’d used to light a candle on our blanket at my grandparents’ farm, the plastic rings from the candy pacifiers we liked. Just little things like that. Nothing that mattered at all, but they did to her, and now, given what was about to happen, they did to me too.

“They won’t let me live here anymore,” she said.

I told her Indianapolis was only three hours away. “Not far at all,” I said.

“Not too far,” she said.

The sun was going down and the light in the room was fading. Through the window I could see lights going on in the houses on down the street. I couldn’t see my own house on the other side, and I was glad for that. We sat there in the twilight, not saying a word. She let me hold her, and I smelled the strawberry shampoo in her hair and the fresh nail polish on her toes, and there was nothing really we could say because we were in a world now that wasn’t ours. It was run by people like my parents and her grandparents and Bill, who sat in jail waiting for what would come to him.

“You’ll come see me?” she finally said.

I told her I would.

“I won’t forget you.” She tilted her head and kissed my cheek. Then she settled her head back on my shoulder and I felt her eyelashes brush my neck. “And I won’t blame you for any of this. Never. Not ever.”

Then we sat there, and finally we lay down on the bed. She turned her face to the wall, and I slipped my arm around her and fit my legs up against hers. She let herself cry a little then, and I told her everything would be all right. I’m not sure I believed it, but soon she stopped crying and then she said, “I wish we were the only people in the world right now.”

“I wish that too,” I told her, and it was true. I did.

We stayed like that a good long while. Maybe we even drifted off to sleep. Then headlights swept across the wall, and we heard a car door slam shut outside and frantic steps on the porch and her grandmother’s voice calling, “Connie, oh Connie, oh my precious girl.”

“Shh,” Connie said. “Don’t move.”

And we had that instant longer—that instant alone—at the end of a story that was never meant to be ours.

She was in my arms and then she wasn’t. Her grandmother was there, and I let her go. Connie Timms.

I walked out of her house and stood on the porch. I looked across the way to my own house, where a single light was on, and I saw my mother’s shadow move across the closed drapes. I thought how strange it was that I lived in that house, how strange it was that my uncle had killed a man and my mother and father, as I would soon learn, were at the end.

Connie’s grandfather, a short man with a big chest and a blue sport coat, came up the steps.

“Who are you?” he said.

“No one,” I told him.

“Young man, I asked you who you were.”

I just shook my head, already moving down the steps. There was too much to say, and I didn’t know how to say it.

“Come back here,” he said.

But I kept moving. I still think I should have had a choice, but I was sixteen. What else could I do? I went home.

JAMES MATHEWS

FROM
Iron Horse Literary Review

O
N THE AFTERNOON
I met my new neighbor, a woman others in the cul-de-sac would dub “Ramba,” I wasn’t looking for trouble. In fact, I wasn’t looking for anything other than to enter my first full month of retirement with a small military pension and dreams of a hop to Florida or Hawaii once a year until my expiration date arrived. My immediate goal was a peaceful night of sipping Stella Artois, catching up on baseball scores, and making a list of things I needed to do to the lawn the next day.

I had just taken a seat in my favorite club chair when the knocking started. I muted the television and glowered at the clock on the wall. I wondered whether to just wait it out. But the knocking continued and grew more insistent. I finally shot up, galloped across the room, and flung open the door in a way I hoped would signal deep emotional instability, which I imagined to be a staple of retirement.

“I’m your new neighbor,” the woman announced through a smile of perfectly aligned and pampered teeth, “and I was wondering if you knew how to change a flat tire?”

I stared with disbelief at the woman, who seemed oblivious to the fact that I was irritated. She was young, upper twenties tops. Her complexion was fever-pale, her red hair pulled back and tied off in a ponytail or braid, and her big, goofy smile was more an event than an expression. She wore faded jeans and an olive-drab T-shirt. The shirt was standard grunt issue, although I would never have associated her with the military except for the way she was standing, at parade rest, hands behind her back, rocking slightly on her heels, waiting for me to answer her idiotic question. Somewhere on the other side of the neighborhood, a lawnmower started up on the first pull.

“Call a mechanic,” I told her. And for good measure: “Which is what you should have done when you first got the flat.”

“Oh, it’s not
my
car,” she said. “It’s yours.”

I blinked a few times and stuttered stupidly, “Excuse me?”

“That’s right,” she said, and from behind her back she produced a Buck knife the size of a billy club. “It’s how I’ve introduced myself to all the neighbors. So that you each know I’m serious. And that I’m not going anywhere.”

Her smile was gone now, traceless on her pale skin, as if it had been wiped from her face by the glimmer of the steel knife. I retreated a step and swallowed hard, fully expecting her to move toward me. Instead she executed a textbook about-face and stalked down the walkway and across the lawn, the blade swinging side to side like a machete hacking through an imaginary jungle.

She’d gotten to my tire all right, one of the $229-a-pop Michelin 3000 Weather Breakers on the right front side of my Ford pickup. I had parked ass-end in, with the grille facing the cul-de-sac, and it appeared as if, on her way up the sidewalk to introduce herself, she’d taken the blade and carved a clean line through the top of the treading. This wasn’t going to be a patch job.

Harold Cummings, the neighbor to my right, wasn’t as lucky. She had slashed the two rear tires of his Volkswagen Gallant. The Popovs, an older husband-and-wife team, escaped altogether because their car had been in the garage. They rarely went out anyway.

For a long time I stood looking at my tire and then walked a full circle around my truck, inspecting it for additional damage. Every few steps, I would glance over at the house to my left, a simple bungalow design with a shadowy porch and grizzled yard spangled with dirt patches. The only evidence that it might be occupied was a black
POW You Are Not Forgotten
flag hanging dead and heavy outside the brick porch. The
FOR SALE
sign was still sitting out front, where it had been for the last several months. In all that time I had seen no potential buyers come or go. In fact, Harold and I had even taken turns mowing the grass, since no one else seemed at all interested in doing so. We had always prided ourselves in our quiet little cul-de-sac, a place of calm and reflection, filled with residents whose principal occupation was minding their own damn business.

In the entire four years I had lived there, I think the biggest issue had been a complaint or two about the Popovs’ pet dachshunds running loose and dumping on other people’s yards. As I looked over at the bungalow, I realized we had moved far beyond the scourge of doggie droppings.

“How goes your day, sergeant?” Harold called from behind me. He was standing at the front of my truck, arms crossed, grinning. Harold was a retired professor of psychology and dressed the part to a T. In fact, if he
were
masquerading as a retired professor, he couldn’t have found a better outfit—lightweight, rimless spectacles, a two-toned sweater vest, khakis, Birkenstocks, and a curved alabaster pipe. He looked like he’d just walked off a campus movie set.

The Popovs shuffled up and huddled behind him like a pair of eager students.

“Has anyone called the police?” I asked, fumbling for my cell phone.

“Hold on now,” Harold said. “We were just talking about that, and the consensus is that it will only make things worse.”

“Please,” Anna Popov said. She was clutching one of her two long-haired dachshunds across her chest.

Her husband, Vlad, had the other dachshund tucked under his arm like a newspaper. “Yes, no police,” Vlad said. “This is to be no good.”