The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021

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

  DAY TWO

  By the time Lyla arrives at her country home in the tiny Catskills town of Shady, she hasn’t slept or eaten in more than twenty-four hours. Everything feels blurry and surreal—the brightness and cool of the early spring day, the crunch of her sneakered feet on the gravel driveway as she hurries to the door, Gigi trailing after her. As she runs, she notices two parked police cars and a few dark sedans she doesn’t recognize.

  “God,” she whispers, wanting to pray herself awake. Please let this be a dream. Please let this just be a terrible dream . . .

  She disables the alarm and pulls open the front door, her breath echoing throughout the empty great room, the house heavy and dull from the lack of her, the lack of Fidelity, her Fidelity. Her baby. What would I be without her? What sort of horrible thing would I be?

  She hears her own voice, calling out her daughter’s name. And then another deeper one booming from the kitchen.

  “Ly! Is that you?”

  She follows the voice. He’s here. Nolan’s here. Nolan Carnes, her husband. Her soul mate, she’s called him in the press, which has, in turn, fused their names. Lylan. Nola. McCarnes. Ironic, really, since Lyla and Nolan, the human beings, aren’t fused at all. In fact, they’re rarely in the same zip code.

  The magazines ship you and Daddy, Fidelity told her once last year. Fidelity, fluent in preteen speak, even at the age of seven. When Lyla had asked her what that meant, Fidelity had said, It makes them happy to think of the two of you together.

  Do you feel that way too? Lyla had said. Do you ship me and Daddy?

  Fidelity had just giggled. You sound funny when you say that, Mommy.

  Lyla calls out Nolan’s name. It feels strange on her lips. For the past six weeks, he’s been in the wilds of the Arizona desert, some bleak spot with patchy cell phone service, shooting an as-yet-untitled Netflix movie that takes place after the apocalypse. She hasn’t spoken to Nolan or even texted with him in more than two weeks.

  Thinking about him during the plane trip back to New York, Lyla had wondered if Nolan even knew about Fidelity’s disappearance. She imagined it might have been difficult even for the police to track him down.

  Lyla had pictured her husband with a prop gun in his hands, sweat stains sprayed onto his tight, ripped T-shirt, acting out a pretend crisis as a real one unfolded back at home. She’d texted him herself. Left voice mail messages. But all went unanswered.

  “Nolan,” she calls out again, her voice cracking as she moves into the kitchen, where her husband sits at the long table they’d had custom made from the door of an eighteenth-century barn, the bright pool of the skylight pouring down on him. Nolan is bearded and rangy from the pretend crisis of his movie, and for the briefest of moments, she doesn’t recognize him. But then he looks up at her, his eyes red rimmed and shattered, and he’s Nolan again. The father of her child.

  Also at the table are Fidelity’s nanny, Courtney; two uniformed police officers; Nolan’s bodyguards, Aziz and Jerry; and a staid-looking group of suits Lyla has never seen before—three young men and one young woman, all staring at her as though she’s a bomb about to detonate. By now Gigi is in the room, too, and Lyla feels surrounded. She wants to scream.

  Nolan moves toward Lyla and takes her in his arms. She smells the sweat on him, the panic, and everything shifts focus—from a nightmare to something awfully, unquestionably real. Fidelity is gone. Fidelity is gone. Fidelity is gone. Lyla’s stomach clenches up, her vision blurs, and her head turns swimmy. She feels as though she may faint again but wills herself not to.

  “What happened?” she says.

  Nolan’s breath is warm at her neck. “We’ll find her. She’s our baby. We have to.”

  Lyla pulls away from him and looks at Courtney—pale, wan, by-the-book Courtney, whose only job was to keep Fidelity safe. Out of the knot of emotions tearing at Lyla’s insides, anger emerges. Her hands ball into fists; her teeth clench. She can actually feel the veins pressing against her skin. It’s a relief, really, the anger, compared to everything else. It is, at least, something she’s experienced before. She says it again, directly to Courtney. “What happened?”

  “I went to pick her up at school, and she was just . . . she was gone. No one saw her leave. Not her teachers, not anybody. They think it happened during recess.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “I went to pick—”

  “She was gone when you got there? The teachers . . .” She whirls around to Nolan. “Isn’t that why we moved here in the first place? To keep her safe? Oh my God. Oh my God! Oh dear God I want to . . . Where the fuck is she?”

  “Shhh.”

  “Don’t you dare fucking shush me, Nolan.”

  Lyla can feel dozens of eyes on her. She wants to put her fist through a wall. To break everything in the room and burn it down, burn the whole house down and disappear. Again. “Where is Fidelity?” she says.

  The young woman approaches her. “Ms. McCord, I’m Shelby Martin, and I’m with the state police. These gentlemen are with the FBI, and I assure you, we are doing everything in our power to find your daughter.”

  Lyla blinks at her. She looks about twelve.

  “It’s still very early. The officers here have canvassed the area around your daughter’s school. Every member of the faculty and staff has been questioned. It’s a private school in a very quiet loca—”

  “I know where my daughter goes to school.”

  Nolan gapes at her, but Shelby Martin remains unfazed. “What I’m saying is, there were no reports of any strange people or cars in the area.” She says it very calmly. “It’s possible that your daughter simply walked away from the school of her own accord. We’re spreading out into the woods behind the school. The woods are quite deep, so this may take some time.”

  “She wouldn’t do that,” Lyla says. “She wouldn’t walk away. She wouldn’t do that to us.”

  “That’s what I told Detective Martin,” Courtney says. “It’s not like Fidelity to do something like that.”

  Lyla glares at Courtney. Grits her teeth.

  Nolan says, “She could have gone exploring and got lost.”

  “Fidelity doesn’t explore,” Lyla says. “She stays where it’s safe. She’s been taught that. I’ve—we’ve taught her that. Haven’t we, Nolan?”

  Shelby Martin says something about Fidelity not having a cell phone they can track, and Lyla’s reply sounds more indignant than she intends it to. “She’s eight.”

  Nolan says, “We wanted her to have as normal a life as possible. It’s why we live here and not Hollywood. It’s one thing we’ve agreed on, ever since she was born.”

  This is all press release stuff, none of it true. Fidelity had asked for a cell phone at six, and Nolan, FaceTiming from Madagascar, hadn’t thought it such a bad idea. When Lyla had said no—thinking more of trackers and hackers than preserving her daughter’s childhood—Nolan had called her paranoid, sparking a huge fight over Nolan’s lack of sensitivity and understanding when it came to the very real emotional issues that Lyla had battled, issues that affect many women, many human beings. What’s next? Lyla had yelled at the screen. Are you going to call me hysterical?

  Honestly, there are few things that can make a person feel emptier than arguing with one’s abnormally laid-back husband on FaceTime. And yet he’s here. And Fidelity is not . . .

  Lyla says, “Is there anything we can do to help?”

  Shelby Martin has large doe eyes and full apple cheeks. Even with her hair slicked back into a tight bun and the high-collared gray silk blouse she wears with her black suit, she still looks more like a babysitter than a detective—a teenager, dolled up for a school play. Lyla is probably five years older than she is, at the most. But Lyla feels as though the gap could be measured in decades. Centuries. “Keep communicating with us, ma’am,” Shelby Martin says. “Tell us everything you know about Fidelity. Everything you remember.”

  DAY THREE

  It’s strange how equali
zing fear can be. Lyla and Nolan are stars by any definition, with an Oscar and four Golden Globes between them and a combined net worth of $250 million. But alone in their dark kitchen at 3:00 A.M., their cell phones and the landline as silent as the night, they are a couple with a missing child, like any couple anywhere with any missing child. They have nothing.

  Lyla gazes up at the skylight, the stars shining down on her like mocking eyes. Please bring her back. Please don’t make me live without her.

  “Ly,” Nolan says. “Do you think Fidelity was unhappy?”

  Lyla closes her eyes. “Why would you say that?”

  “Detective Martin said she may not have been kidnapped. She may have run away.”

  “Yeah, well, Detective Martin is a child.”

  “That FBI guy said it too.”

  “Who trusts the FBI? I think we should hire a private investigator.”

  “But she could have,” he says. “Fidelity could have run away. We don’t know what’s been going through her mind.”

  “Fidelity loves us. We’ve given her a great life. She wouldn’t run away. Why would anybody with so much to be grateful for just . . . disappear . . .” Lyla stops herself. She knows what Nolan is going to say.

  “You did, Lyla. You disappeared.”

  Lyla exhales. He’s right, of course. Nine years ago, she walked off the set of a hit teen TV show, ending not only her career but a budding relationship with her sweet and handsome costar. She disappeared, leaving behind reports of addictive behavior and severe mental health disorders, speculation that she’d joined a cult in the California desert, an ashram in Tibet, that she was homeless on the streets of Toronto, that she was dead. There were threats of a lawsuit from the show’s producers, endless speculative items on TMZ and in the tabloids, hundreds of unanswered texts from her manager and her agent and, of course, from the sweet, handsome costar. She never responded to any of it. Instead, she stayed disappeared until all the fuss faded and people stopped caring or even thinking about her, and she realized that it was even worse than being under the microscope, the feeling of being invisible. Only then did Lyla text the costar, whose name, of course, was Nolan Carnes.

  I had a baby. It’s yours.

  Nolan begged her to come back. And when she did, with their baby, he proposed.

  Lyla married Nolan in a private ceremony on the grounds of a French château owned by a music mogul, their six-month-old daughter, Fidelity, the only guest. They took a few photos, which they sold exclusively to People magazine for $1.2 million, donating it all to a charity for orphaned children.

  Before the ceremony, after, and in all the years since, Nolan has never asked where Lyla went for that year or how she managed to stay hidden before and after she’d had the baby. She’s given one short interview about it, to People, the same day as the wedding—and even that contained no specifics. It was the year I found myself, she told the reporter. It was the year I became a mother.

  “Are you saying that running away from a good life is genetic, Nolan?”

  “No, Ly.” The reply is so quiet, she can barely hear it. “I’m just saying that it’s possible.”

  DAY FOUR

  It’s Nolan’s idea to see the psychic, but Lyla is on board. Nolan is Southern California born and bred, the son of a holistic doctor and a yoga teacher, and so he’s always been the woo-woo one in their relationship. But while Lyla has rolled her eyes more than once over her husband’s regular visits to astrologers and crystal healers and Reiki masters, she’s willing to try anything to find Fidelity. At this point, she believes in psychics more than in the growing team of state police detectives, feds, and hired private investigators who have now joined Shelby Martin and company in not finding their daughter.

  Lyla wakes up from an Ambien-induced half sleep just before sunrise, her phone alarm chirping furiously in the midst of a wispy dream about a crystal ball floating in space.

  Without speaking, barely making a sound, she and Nolan throw on their incognito clothes—baseball caps, sunglasses, dark, baggy sweats—and leave the house while their staff is still sleeping. They slip into their most nondescript SUV in the chill of early dawn and drive four and a half miles to the storefront in Woodstock where the psychic resides—a one-story cement eyesore that looks like someone plucked it out of some Florida strip mall and dropped it into arty, picturesque Woodstock, halfway up a forgotten side street, between a vacant lot and a cemetery.

  “Nice.” Lyla is standing outside the building, staring at the plastic bead curtains, the yellow letters on the faded purple sign:

  PSYCHIC READINGS, TEA LEAVES, PAST LIFE REGRESSION.

  There’s something off about the sign, something not entirely trustworthy, like a bottle of pills that’s slightly past its expiration date. Just before they ring the bell, Lyla turns to Nolan.

  “How did you hear about this psychic?”

  “Aziz.”

  “Your bodyguard.”

  He nods.

  “Since when did Aziz get into that stuff?”

  “Keep an open mind, Lyla.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Listen, I spoke to the psychic over the phone. Before I even said my name, he knew I was looking for my daughter.”

  “He?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I was picturing a woman. Aren’t psychics usually women?”

  “Only in movies, Lyla.”

  A man opens the door before anyone knocks, maybe as a display of his gift. He’s short and frail, with stringy gray hair, a beak-like nose, and bashed-in-looking cheeks. “I’m Carl,” he says.

  Lyla frowns. A psychic named Carl.

  Nolan says, “Thank you for meeting us. I know it’s early—”

  “It’s never too early for the truth.” Carl speaks in a cigarette rasp. If he dressed better, he could pass for an aging rock star. But in tattered drawstring pants, bare feet, and an inside-out T-shirt with a faded Nike logo, he looks more like an escaped patient of some sort—most likely mental, though he could have walked out of any hospital ward. “I dreamed of you last night.” He says this to Lyla.

  “You did?”

  “You’re in a lot of pain.”

  Lyla levels her eyes at him, thinking, Of course I am. My kid is missing. Is this supposed to be impressive?

  He holds her gaze. His eyes are watery and bright and strangely riveting. The longer Lyla looks into them, the more uncomfortable she feels—as though he’s trying to page through her brain. “Being Fidelity’s mother,” he says. “Protecting her. It’s why you’re alive.”

  Lyla swallows hard. She’s had this exact thought more than once within the past four days, though she’s never dared say it aloud. Before her lost year, Lyla used to believe she was born to be an actress, that it was the only truly good thing about her, her talent. But then Fidelity came into her life, and the veil lifted, and she could finally see what she was put on this earth to do.

  All the acclaim she’s gotten since then—the plum roles, the magazine covers, the Oscar, even . . . Without Fidelity, it’s meaningless. Without Fidelity, she has no business being alive.

  Carl says, “Why do you feel so guilty, Lyla?”

  “Excuse me?”

  He smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Don’t mean to pry,” he says. “Occupational hazard.”

  “I don’t feel guilty.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No. Why would I?”

  Carl shrugs. “Sometimes my senses fail me.”

  He turns and lets them inside, Lyla staring hard at his back. Who are you? She can feel Nolan watching her, but she pretends not to notice.

  “Excuse the look of the place,” Carl says. “I only returned to town a few days ago after being gone for more than a year. I haven’t had the chance to clean. My clients don’t even know I’m back . . . that is, if I still have any clients.”

  The psychic’s work space is small and gloomy and smells of cigarettes and stale incense. It’s mostly empty
, save for a few folding chairs and a metal table that looks as though it were stolen from an interrogation room, a lineup of multicolored crystals at its center.

  Lyla says, “Where does a psychic go for more than a year?”

  “Here and there. I move a lot. Places don’t matter to me.”

  “What does matter to you? Friends? Family?”

  His gaze burns on Lyla’s face. “I don’t have friends or family,” he says.

  Carl takes one of the folding chairs, Nolan and Lyla two others. Lyla finds herself drawn to the dust motes floating on the light that oozes through the purple-and-gold beaded curtain. She feels as though she’s in a movie, lit by a kind cinematographer. “So what brought you back to Woodstock?”

  “Same thing that’s brought me anywhere. I felt a call.”

  Sunlight strokes the side of Lyla’s face, and she can almost hear the soundtrack swelling. She knows what Carl means. She’s felt that call. It took her out of her life nine years ago, and then it brought her back. Maybe it really is genetic. Maybe Fidelity felt it, too, and that was why she left school, and all they need to bring her back is another call. The right call.

  Carl says, “Did you bring something of hers?”

  Nolan opens his messenger bag and pulls out one of Fidelity’s T-shirts—pale pink, with a glittery Hello Kitty riding a bicycle on the front. Lyla bought it for her in Japan last year. It’s one of Fidelity’s favorites, and seeing it now, the shirt without Fidelity in it, takes Lyla out of the movie.

  It’s been four days. Four days without a ransom note or a reliable sighting or a single lead that’s panned out. Four days without Fidelity. How many times has Lyla gone into her room, praying to find her there scribbling in her diary or playing games on her laptop? How many times has she stood in Fidelity’s closet, inhaling the fading scent of her daughter’s clothes and feeling only the lack of her, a black hole at the center of her chest, swallowing everything else?