The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021

by The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021

  Robert’s sermon that evening was a variation on Matthew 5:39, where believers are admonished to turn the other cheek, even though the anger he felt inside demanded the exchange of an eye for an eye as advocated in Exodus 21:23–25.

  He still felt that anger when the anonymous caller phoned the next day. Robert demanded, “What do you want?”

  “Your cooperation,” said the voice. “You know we can get to your wife anytime we want.”

  Robert repeated his question. “So, what do you want?”

  “We’re going to give a lot of money to your church, pastor. We just want to ensure that it gets spent wisely.”

  “The money comes in dirty and goes out clean?”

  “Nothing’s cleaner than God’s hands.”

  “What does the church get out of it?”

  “The church keeps ten percent,” said the voice, “and we don’t touch your wife.”

  Robert said nothing.

  “We can push as much as a million dollars a year through Union Revival,” said the voice. “Imagine the good you could do with an extra hundred grand each year.”

  “You know I can’t do this alone.” He started to explain that every check issued by the church for more than one thousand dollars required two signatures, Robert’s and—

  “Have a private conversation with your treasurer,” the voice said before Robert could finish. “We know where his daughter attends college, and he knows that we know.”

  “Harvey wouldn’t—”

  “Who contracted with the roofer and the asphalt company?”

  Harvey Johnson had made the recommendations to the board. “And the refrigerator?”

  “We didn’t make a cent on your refrigerator.” The man on the other side of the conversation laughed. “We don’t run an appliance store.”

  Retired for almost ten years, Harvey Johnson had served as Union Revival Baptist Church’s treasurer for almost thirty, and Robert cornered him after the monthly trustee meeting that evening.

  “Why didn’t you warn me at the wedding reception?”

  “About what?”

  “The man I asked you about, the one who spoke to me just before you did.”

  “I didn’t see him,” the treasurer insisted.

  “He threatened my wife,” Robert said. “He may have threatened your daughter.”

  “Alison’s all I have.” The church treasurer’s only child had been born late in his life to a wife ten years his junior. Cancer had claimed Harvey’s wife before his daughter ever entered kindergarten, and he had raised Alison on his own.

  “Has he harmed her?”

  Harvey didn’t answer Robert’s question directly. Instead, he asked one of his own. “Is that what happened to your wife?”

  Robert nodded.

  “I’ve never seen the man who threatened my daughter,” Harvey explained. “He first approached me at Alison’s high school graduation. He said I had a beautiful daughter and that it would be a shame if anything happened to her. By the time I turned to see who had spoken, he had disappeared into the crowd.”

  High school graduation ceremonies had been held two weeks before the pastor’s wedding. “One other unusual thing happened that day,” Harvey continued. “We held a little reception afterward, with family and friends. My daughter received several nice graduation gifts, including an unsigned card containing ten one-hundred-dollar bills. We never knew who to thank for the money, but we used it as a down payment on a used car for Alison.”

  Harvey hesitated so Robert prompted him to continue.

  “Nothing happened all summer, so I forgot about everything. Then, just after the school year began, I received a call from campus police. My daughter had been mugged, her purse stolen. She wasn’t hurt—not like your wife—just a few scrapes from being knocked down.”

  Harvey looked around to ensure they were still alone. Then he lowered his voice and leaned forward, as if sharing a secret with Robert. “Alison called later that night to say that when she returned to her dorm room, her purse was on her desk, as if she had left it there, even though she knew she hadn’t. Then she told me one thing she hadn’t told the campus police. She said her mugger told her he was sending a message to me.”

  “That he can get to your daughter anytime, anyplace.”

  Harvey nodded. “I’ve done what he wanted ever since.”

  “The roofer and the asphalt company?”

  “He told me who to hire for those jobs. They weren’t the lowest bidders by any stretch of the imagination.”

  “Have you talked to the police about any of this?”

  “No. Have you?”

  The two men stared at one another for a moment. Then Robert held Harvey’s hands and said, “Let us pray for God’s guidance.”

  “The man who had you mugged wants to launder money through the church,” Robert explained. He was sitting with his wife at the kitchen table in the parsonage, and he had to explain what it meant to launder money. “He threatened to hurt you if I didn’t do what he said.”

  “He already hurt me, Bobby.” Heather pushed her chair back and stood. “I thought you were my protector.”

  Robert reached for his wife’s hand, but she turned away and left him sitting alone as she climbed the back stairs. He leaned back to stare Heavenward, but he did not pray. Instead, he followed the sound of his wife’s footsteps until he heard the creak of their bed as she settled into it.

  Then he took his cell phone from his pocket and dialed a number he memorized years earlier and had hoped to never dial.

  Thanks to its location near the heart of the city, its attention-getting imposing stone architecture, and its historical significance as the first church built in the valley, the Union Revival Baptist Church drew several visitors each Sunday. Some became members, some became regular attendees but never formally joined the church, and some were just passing through on their spiritual path. Regardless, all were welcome.

  From the pulpit that Sunday, Robert barely recognized Kenny Gilbert when he slipped in at the last moment and, surprisingly, found an open seat in the back pew. Robert kept one eye on Kenny during the service and Kenny kept both eyes on everyone else. When they’d been released from juvenile detention, their lives diverged. With a fear of God not nearly as overpowering as a fear of his father, Robert straightened up, graduated high school a year late, and squeaked into college, where he majored in history and minored in English before attending seminary. Kenny traveled a different path into adulthood, one that found him solving physically the problems Robert attempted to solve spiritually.

  Until Thursday evening, they had spoken only once since the day they walked out of juvie together. When Robert graduated from seminary, Kenny called to offer his congratulations and his personal cell phone number, a number Robert had memorized but hesitated to dial until he believed he had no other choice.

  Though he barely listened to himself, Robert’s message, inspired by Romans 12:19 and contradicting what was in his heart, was particularly inspiring that morning, and three people answered the call, publicly expressing their desire to devote their lives to God by joining him before the congregation. After speaking quietly to each of them, Robert introduced them to the congregation and then handed them off to a trio of deacons who silently joined them at the front. He closed the service with a prayer and then joined his wife in the vestibule.

  Though Heather had been sleeping with her back to Robert since Thursday night, none but the most astute among the congregation could have ever suspected a rift between the pastor and his wife. In public they were still the bubbly, doe-eyed newlyweds, and they stood beside one another greeting parishioners as they exited the church.

  Kenny held back, not approaching the pastor until most everyone else filed out. The two men shook hands, Robert introduced his childhood friend to his new wife without telling her the nature of their relationship, and then let Heather know they would have company at Sunday dinner.

  “Pleased to make your acqu
aintance, Mr. Gilbert,” Heather said. “I trust you like pork chops and mashed potatoes.”

  “Ma’am,” Kenny said. “I’ve not eaten a home-cooked meal in a great many years.”

  Before she could ask why, Robert directed his guest away from his wife, and the two men made their way to Robert’s office. With the door closed, he repeated everything he’d told Kenny on the phone a few days earlier.

  “It has to be an inside job,” Robert explained. “Someone’s using the offering envelopes to slip the money into the offering boxes. Each Sunday since the first call we’ve found ten crisp one-hundred-dollar bills folded neatly inside one of the envelopes.”

  A rap on the door interrupted their conversation, and then the church treasurer stepped into the office. He saw the pastor’s guest and apologized. “But you wanted to know as soon as I collected the money from the offering boxes. There were two envelopes today.”

  “Thanks, Harvey.”

  After the treasurer backed out and closed the door, Robert said. “He’s escalating.”

  “You said he could push a million dollars a year through the church,” Kenny said. “Who has that kind of juice?”

  “No one I know.”

  The two men talked a while longer, and then they walked to the parsonage, where Heather had set the dining room table with their wedding china.

  After she carried the food to the table and the three of them settled into their seats, Robert said grace.

  They ate in silence until Heather asked, “How do you know my husband?”

  Kenny glanced at Robert before answering. “We grew up together.”

  “Really?” Heather asked, surprised. “He’s told me so little about his childhood.”

  “There isn’t much to tell,” Kenny said. “We spent a lot of time indoors.”

  Imagining only one possible reason why her husband might have spent his teen years indoors, Heather looked at Robert and said, “You played a lot of video games?”

  They had, in fact spent hours doing nothing but playing video games, and a great deal more time reflecting on the capriciousness of justice that led to their incarceration in a juvenile detention center for violent offenders but had not protected Kenny’s little sister from the molester they crippled. When they were released they chose different paths to combat evil.

  “We did.”

  Robert interrupted before his wife could further question Kenny. “He’s going to be staying with us for a while.”

  “Here?”

  “No,” Robert said, “in the garage apartment.”

  Then he asked his wife about the previous afternoon’s Women’s Auxiliary meeting, and soon she was telling the two men about the group’s plans to expand membership. “We need to recruit more young women, and to do that we need an active social media presence.”

  Robert agreed, their conversation continued, and Heather never returned to questions about Robert’s past or his relationship with Kenny.

  When they finished the meal, Kenny thanked Heather and told her how much he enjoyed her cooking. “Robert’s a lucky man.”

  As Heather cleared away the dishes, Robert gave Kenny a key to the empty garage apartment intended for the church’s assistant pastor, and he didn’t see Kenny again until morning service the following Sunday when he sat in the last pew watching the worshippers. At the end of the service he slipped out to follow a nondescript man who had been attending services at Union Revival Baptist Church since well before Robert and Heather’s wedding.

  Later, the church treasurer told Robert that anonymous tithing was up to five thousand dollars that morning. “Five envelopes, a thousand dollars in each.”

  “Did anyone see who put them in the collection box?”

  “Most of the parishioners use the offering envelopes, so it’s impossible to tell one from another.”

  “But five envelopes at once?”

  Robert was home Tuesday evening when a police detective visited his wife and showed her a photograph. “Is this the man who attacked you?”

  “Yes,” she said. She had previously identified her assailant from police mug shots. “I think so. It all happened so fast, but—yes. Have you arrested him?”

  The detective shook his head. “He’s been killed.”

  Heather’s eyes went wide and she glanced at her husband.

  “Do you know anything about it?”

  Heather shook her head.

  “What about you, pastor?”

  “God works in mysterious ways, detective,” Robert said.

  Satisfied, the detective left the parsonage. As the unmarked police car drove away, Robert gathered his wife in his arms and held her. “He can’t ever hurt you again.”

  That night Heather stopped sleeping with her back to her husband.

  There were other deaths in the city that week, including that of the nondescript man Kenny followed from church service Sunday morning, but Robert paid attention to the obituaries when he scanned the newspaper each morning only if he had reason to believe he might be called upon to prepare a eulogy.

  He returned to his office Friday afternoon, after lunch with his wife in the parsonage, and he was feeling rather full after finishing off the leftover roast beef, mashed potatoes, and gravy. He was considering the impropriety of taking a brief nap at his desk when his phone rang.

  “Pastor Bob.”

  “We appear to be at an impasse,” said a voice that had become all too familiar since his wedding many months earlier.

  “How’s that?”

  “A friend of yours has asked me to place this call. He’s under the impression I had something to do with your wife’s unfortunate—”

  Robert heard the nearly inaudible pop of a silenced automatic, though he did not recognize it as such. Then he heard Kenny’s voice.

  “It’s done.”

  The line went dead.

  Robert did not see Kenny again, and when he visited the garage apartment, it had been wiped clean.

  During the following weeks, church trustees were disappointed that tithing had dropped to its previous level.

  Police investigating the murder of a man with alleged mob ties never connected the dead man to Harvey Johnson or Robert Connelly, acting on the assumption that it was a hit by a rival mobster. However, after reading news stories about the murder and subsequent stalled investigation, Robert’s wife finally put it together.

  “I don’t know what you and Kenny did,” Heather told Robert one night after they slipped into bed, “and I don’t want to know.”

  He pulled his wife into his arms and held her tight as she whispered, “My protector.”

  *Temple and I married the day after Thanksgiving about seven months before I began writing “Blest Be the Tie That Binds,” and we spent our honeymoon—brief as it was—in a cabin in Brownwood, Texas. Saturday afternoon, during a brief respite from the rain, we took a leisurely walk through the woods, and a large dog of indeterminate breed came charging at us. I’m no hero, but I stepped in front of my new bride and shouted at the dog until it finally turned and ran back the way it had come. That’s when I began pondering how far a man might go to protect his wife.

  James Lee Burke has published thirty-eight novels and two collections of short stories. He has won a number of literary awards. His work has been adapted for four films and a fifth is in progress. He and his wife Pearl live on a ranch in Montana.

  HARBOR LIGHTS

  James Lee Burke

  It was in late fall of ’42, out on the Gulf of Mexico, just off the Louisiana coast, the water green and cold and sliding across sandbars in the sunset, when we saw the bodies bobbing in a wave, each in life vests and floating belly-down, their arms outstretched, their fingers touching, like a group of swimmers studying something on the floor of the Gulf.

  My father was standing behind the wheel in the cabin. He wore a fedora and a raincoat, the redness of the sun reflecting off the water, flickering on his face, as though he were standing in front of a fire.
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  “Come here and hold the wheel for me, Aaron,” he said.

  “Are those dead people out there?”

  “Yes, they are.” There was no change in his expression. At age eighteen he had been at Saint-Mihiel and the Somme, and had been buried alive during an artillery barrage. He still had dreams about the war, but denied their seriousness, even after my mother and I had to shake him awake and put a cold towel on his face lest he injure himself or others.

  “They look burned, Daddy,” I said.

  “Just keep the boat steady. Don’t look at these poor fellows.”

  He went out of the cabin and picked up a long-handled boat hook from the deck, then worked his way up on the bow and probed the figures floating in the waves. He was bent over, his raincoat flapping in the wind, peppered with spray from the waves bursting against the hull, his face sad, as if he knew these men, although I was sure he did not. He put down the hook and gazed at the horizon through a pair of binoculars, then came back into the cabin and picked up the microphone to our radio, his eyes empty. The sun had dipped out of view, leaving behind a sky that seemed filled with soot and curds of black smoke. A solitary piece of reddish-yellow flame wobbled on the horizon, so bright and intense my eyes watered when I looked at it.

  “Mayday, Mayday,” my father said into the microphone. “Tanker capsized and burning south of Terrebonne Bay. Four visible casualties, all dead.”

  He laid the microphone on the console and turned off the radio, then looked at the radio blankly.

  “You didn’t tell them who we are,” I said.

  He took over the wheel and reversed the engine, backing away from the bodies. “You mustn’t tell anyone about this, Aaron.”

  “Why not? It’s what happened.”

  He cut the gas and squatted down and wrapped me inside his raincoat and held me to his chest, the boat rising on a wave, dropping suddenly into a trough. I could feel the warmth of his breath on my neck and cheek. “There’s a great evil at work in the world, son,” he said. “All kinds. We mustn’t bring it into our lives.”