The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021

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

  She did not take this hint about old-time gambling. “It wouldn’t be hard for you to find out what he does, though, would it?”

  “Time and money, Edith. I can ask around, but real surveillance means time and money.” I hated to charge her for what I was sure was nonsense, and I feigned busyness, although my big-box job had been successfully concluded. Certain folk in their shipping department had serious legal troubles, and tough new policies were in place.

  She produced her checkbook. “I want to know if he is working, if he has an interest in some business—legitimate or otherwise. In short, is he is living an ordinary life?”

  “He’s sixty-four, Edith. He may well have a heart condition and emphysema.”

  “Archie? You must be kidding.” Indignation got the better of discretion for an instant. “Fitness obsessed. You be careful with him.”

  She wrote a check for a high three figures and passed it across the table. “And some cake,” she added, once again my charmingly eccentric client. “I’ll wrap a piece for you to take home.”

  Thus obligated, I worked the phones for a bit and met an old colleague for a late breakfast at the roadside joint on the fringe of Brockton Heights. Result? The Ox was not gainfully employed. He had a room with kitchen privileges just off the state highway, and so far as he went anywhere, he visited the two big casinos.

  “A creature of habit,” I told Edith. “Just an old guy passing the time.”

  “Did you get a look at him?”

  I’m not good at lying to clients; I confessed I had not.

  “Take a photo,” she said. “I know he’s been in town. I know it.”

  Why this was important, she did not tell me, but her checks were good and, as I didn’t see another big job coming up any time soon, I spent a couple of uncomfortable days in my Jeep Cherokee keeping an eye on The Ox. Edith was right: He was an impressive specimen, six feet of heavy bone and muscle with a shaved head and the slightly pigeon-toed gait of a man who could move fast when he needed to.

  He was alert too. Checking the area whenever he left his apartment, I swear he sensed me around because on the third day he departed from his usual route to the Mohegan Sun, his preferred casino, in what looked to me like an attempt to lose a tail. I let him think he’d succeeded. I had his routine down. I had photos, too, and as per instructions, I printed them out and took them to Edith.

  She was interested in his trips to the casinos, the location of his apartment, and especially the fact that he liked to take a couple of beers and drink in the state park off Route 6. “And he shops here?” she asked.

  “Yes. The market and the smoke shop.”

  She raised her eyebrows. The smoke shop is on Main Street, two blocks from Edith’s house. “I knew it.”

  “He went straight back to the highway,” I said, but when she pressed me, I had to admit that he had taken the longer route, which passed her street.

  “Well,” she said. “Thank you, Ray. Now about Mark Keane in Pawtucket. I think you should get me the same information.”

  I balked at this. I felt that I was exploiting a lonely old woman’s fears.

  “Please,” she said. “You’re the only one I can trust with this. I wouldn’t know how to go about finding a reliable detective in Pawtucket.”

  I was not deceived by this show of helplessness, but if she was determined, I might as well get the profit. I said that I would start the next week when I had wrapped up some loose ends on other investigations. Edith said that would be fine; there was no immediate hurry.

  Very good. It was actually two weeks later before I got up to Pawtucket, where Keane proved to be a regular at a shabby Irish pub near the ballpark. He was as thin as his former associate was muscular, with a hatchet face and a long, horsey jaw. Though he had a slight limp, he favored long walks, moving through town with a surprisingly rapid gait. He walked in the early morning and quite late at night. “An unquiet spirit,” I told Edith, who nodded her head with what seemed to be satisfaction.

  She took the information and thanked me. “You’ve been such a comfort.”

  “I’m sure you have nothing to worry about.”

  “Not anymore,” she said.

  Just over a week later, I picked up the morning paper. Here in the east, we don’t get much coverage, but I like to keep an eye on the rascals in the legislature and to read the latest about the big college teams. The murder in Brockton Heights made the front page, just one column with the runover inside. I knew the face. Archie “The Ox” Shaunessy had been killed with a single shot while communing with nature at the state park. No details were forthcoming, but every sign was that this was a professional job, one of those belated hits that are a drawback of the mob life.

  “A guy with plenty of old enemies,” said my contact on the Brockton Heights force.

  “I’d heard he was some scary guy,” I said, but I really wished I had never asked any questions about Shaunessy, because now he said, “And your client? What exactly was his interest?”

  “She. Her interest. A nervous old lady who reads too many crime novels,” I said, and with a flash of inspiration, added, “I think she’s going to try her hand at one herself.”

  “She sure picked a winner with Shaunessy. I tell you Ray, this is a case of addition by subtraction, if you know what I mean.”

  I did, but I’ll admit I was not entirely easy, although Edith remained gracious, eccentric—and secretive. I turned to the Web, but there Edith Wing had stepped lightly. She was not on Facebook, she didn’t tweet, and as far as I knew she’d refused email and Tumblr and all the rest of the electronic time wasters.

  No one else mentioned her either, except for our local mill preservation society, which listed her as a board member, and the website of the local diocese, which thanked her for the chairmanship of the annual rummage sale at St. Mary’s. What she had done before she landed in our town was a closed book, and I soon realized she was not about to enlighten me, not when her worries seemed to have lifted. Except for the delivery of an excellent batch of fancy cookies around the holidays, I didn’t hear from Edith for half a year.

  As for her “old school friends,” they were forgotten until the day Richard “Dicky Boy” Ahern had his demise splashed across the front page of every paper on the news rack. Ahern had been residing at the fed’s expense for twenty years, but he’d maintained a long reach. Some said it extended from the federal pen at Otisville all the way to the backstreets of Boston where he’d been a mob kingpin since his early twenties.

  The old monster died in his bed at eighty-three, which was more than you could say for his associates. The story provided a list of colorful names, stretching back to the “old days,” including a few I recognized. Others, foot soldier casualties of more recent mob warfare, meant nothing to me until I came across Shaunessy and Mark Keane, the sallow-faced old crook who’d walked obsessively in Pawtucket. Shaunessy was old news, but Keane’s death hadn’t made our local papers. A little research in the Pawtucket Times and The Providence Journal revealed he’d also been a victim of what was termed a “mob style” hit, dispatched with a single shot as he walked home one night from his favorite watering hole.

  That afternoon, I paid a visit to Edith Wing, carrying a copy of The Boston Globe. The Globe had done its native son proud, recounting his life from cradle on its mean streets to power and influence, before betrayal, incarceration, and death. Better than most novels, I had to say.

  “Ray, how nice to see you.”

  Was it my imagination or did Edith look a decade younger? Certainly there was a spring in her step and a cheerful note in her voice that had not been there during the months—years, actually—that she’d been my client.

  “Come in. It’s been too long.” She seemed completely at ease, adding, “Oh, you read the Globe too. I try for it at the gas station, but delivery’s not reliable since the newsstand closed. A big loss.”

  She insisted on tea, apologizing that the cake was yesterday’s. “I didn
’t expect you.”

  “No? I thought with the story this morning you might. I just learned about Mark Keane. You’d been concerned—for some reason.”

  She let that hang in the air.

  “Ahern’s life,” I said after a moment. “An epic of massacres and assassinations.”

  “His reputation for ruthlessness was surely well known in law enforcement circles.” Edith poured the tea, her hand steady.

  “He might have been gunned down, too, had he not been in prison,” I suggested.

  “Very true. Odd how things work out. I suppose one could say his companion saved his life by turning him in. Of course, he’d betrayed her first—according to the story. The classic case of a younger, prettier woman.”

  “She disappeared, his longtime mistress, I mean. Vanished. Maybe into witness protection with a new identity?”

  “She’d have needed to, wouldn’t she?” Edith turned the paper that I’d set on the table and looked at the illustrations. “From what I read, Ahern would have murdered her in a heartbeat.”

  Her hand rested beside the big photo of “Dicky Boy” Ahern somewhere warm and fancy with Patricia Burns, his longtime companion. Ms. Burns looked svelte in a two-piece swimsuit with a wraparound skirt. She had a lot of fair hair above a wide forehead and even features. Not a beauty, exactly, but her firm chin and perfect posture suggested a strong and able character such as I’d come to know.

  “He was residing at the fed’s expense in Otisville, New York,” I said.

  “But according to the papers, he still had serious mob connections. I’d hate to think the Globe isn’t strictly accurate.”

  “His connections, as you call them, have been decimated over the years.”

  She tapped the paper. “A costly division of the spoils, I’d imagine.”

  “Yet supposedly Ahern was calling the shots, even from his cell.”

  “Plenty violence to go around with one thing—and another.” Her face hardened. “He would have died rather than concede defeat. And sacrificed his faithful lieutenants for his revenge. He had lines to corrupt officials, even within law enforcement, even within witness protection. You can take my word for that.”

  “Shaunessy and Keane?”

  She hesitated before she said, “The last throw of the dice, so to speak.”

  “You could have moved on instead, Edith.”

  “I was tired of moving on.” She paused and looked reflective. “In certain lives, the only dignity lies in loyalty and courage. If loyalty is lost—or rejected—courage is all that’s left.” She was silent for a moment, before she once again became the woman who made superior cakes and helped with church fundraisers. “Besides, I like Edith Wing, don’t you? She is perhaps what I was meant to be.”

  I couldn’t quite see that but I said, “Perhaps what you could have been—with other choices.”

  “Poor girls in South Boston didn’t have many choices and few of those were good. But this is a fine place to be old. I’m here for the duration.”

  I could see that she meant every word.

  “Don’t feel too bad about your part—which you need to remember, Ray,” she continued. “Questions are more likely to be asked about a private investigator, former cop, and crack shot than an elderly volunteer, aren’t they? Besides, you’re a public benefactor. Although you surely couldn’t anticipate it, defeat most likely killed Richard Ahern.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “He couldn’t stand to lose. Not to anyone, especially not to a woman. I think losing one more time just finally stopped his heart.”

  “So this is the end?”

  “I do believe so. The rest are sheep without a leader. But,” she added, putting another slice of cake on my plate, “old habits can die hard. I’ll keep an eye open, and I’ll be sure to let you know if anyone suspicious turns up.”

  *I always find the genesis of a story mysterious, but in the case of “The Client,” I can point to two houses, both in an old mill town near where we live. The great water-powered textile and thread mills of eastern Connecticut created prosperity well into the twentieth century. Their loss brought hard times to the area and to Ray Wilde, the first professional detective I have written about since I ended the Anna Peters series.

  Ray was actually devised for an anthology edited by Paul D. Marks, Coast to Coast, Private Eyes from Sea to Shining Sea. Geographic variety was imperative, and a little story-and-a-half house behind our bank’s parking lot provided not only a venue for my half-formed plot but suggested a weary ex-cop sitting through a boring surveillance.

  The resulting story was about mostly decent people caught in small crimes, and I figured one and done for Ray. Still, I liked his style and his turn of phrase, and another house, a large, imposing home gently going downhill, gave him a client.

  Edith Wing, a courteous eccentric, pillar of the library board and the local church, is an unlikely person to lead Ray into deep water. He likes her and I like her too. Although the mystery genre may be kinder to older females than it used to be, women of a certain age are still usually victims or accessories if they appear at all. Edith Wing gave me an opportunity to create an intelligent, morally ambiguous character, an elderly woman who, as she puts it to Ray, knows that sometimes there are few good choices.

  Dennis McFadden, a retired project manager, lives and writes in a cedar-shingled cottage called Summerhill in the woods of upstate New York. His collection Jimtown Road, winner of the 2016 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, was published in October of that year; his first collection, Hart’s Grove, was published by Colgate University Press in 2010. His fiction has appeared in dozens of publications including The Missouri Review, New England Review, The Sewanee Review, Crazyhorse, The Antioch Review, The Saturday Evening Post, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and The Best American Mystery Stories. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he was awarded a Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in 2018.

  THE TRUTH ABOUT LUCY

  Dennis McFadden

  This happened in Hartsgrove a long time ago. A middle-aged spinster by the name of Lucy Wilson was raped and murdered one night in the railyard signal tower at the edge of town where she worked all alone. A man named Oscar Huffman, stout as a bear but nowhere near as smart, was arrested and sent to the chair, although a good number of people believed his uncle, George, smaller, smarter, and greasier, was the real killer. That number included George’s wife, Elsie. She ended up braining George with an iron skillet and running away a few years later with a barnstorming pilot who barnstormed right on out of the area and into history.

  None of it would wash off George’s and Elsie’s son, Henry. It clung to him like a bad smell. Memories are long and suspicions run deep, and nearly sixty years later there were few of us old-timers in town who could look at Henry Huffman without a shiver, without feeling a creepy-crawly sense of bloody murder, of sudden, violent death in the middle of a lonely, black night. Poor Lucy. Poor Henry.

  That wasn’t even all of it. Henry’s papa, George, ended up burning himself to death (or so it was ruled) a few years later in a house fire of suspicious origin. Around the same time, the only girl Henry Huffman had ever fallen for dropped him like a rotten spud the minute she found out his cousin, big, dumb Oscar, had been executed for the murder. The girl’s name was Gracie Wolfgang. It turned out that Oscar’s (or George’s) victim, Lucy Wilson, was her dear auntie—small world! Gracie had come from out of town, the same as her Aunt Lucy had, and that was the reason she hadn’t known it right from the get-go, like everybody else in town did. We almost felt sorry for Henry. Almost.

  One thing we’ve learned, us old-timers, is that on your way to oblivion—or to heaven, as the hopeful souls among us like to think—you first have to pass through invisibility. You reach a certain age—not measured in years so much as in gray hair and age spots, turkey skin and wrinkles, loose flesh and a slower step—when the youngsters of the world no longer see you. When they look straight through y
ou, like the ghost you’re bound to soon become. Not so for Henry Huffman. Huffman was lucky, or unlucky, enough to skip the invisible stage on his way to oblivion. Word had been handed down from generation to generation, and he could never shake loose from the shadow of his family’s reputation. Him, the young people of Hartsgrove could see. Him, they tried not to stare at.

  When Henry Huffman wasn’t taking long walks up and down the hills of Hartsgrove in the early morning hours, or wasn’t in his basement tying flies, or out along the creeks and streams in the deep woods using the flies he tied—he seemed to like to be alone, mostly—he sometimes joined us for Bingo or canasta or some other nonsense at the Harvest Senior Center, or a bus trip down to a Pirates game, usually with his buddy, Earl Radaker. Earl’s wife, Gwenda, had passed away a few months before, and, after Gracie’d taken off like a spooked colt, Henry’d never got around to marrying. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy; he’d stayed in decent shape over the years. He had a head that protruded a bit in back, and he kept his hair—still mostly red, sprinkled with a little gray by now—close-cropped, a buzz cut, like he always had. He had a habit of putting his hand on the back of his neck, as if to rest his head—or, when he was walking around town, like he was pulling himself forward to take another step, getting himself through another mile, another day. Seldom did more pass between us than a hello-how-are-you or two, the odd harmless jibe, the usual complaints about bowels and bladders and joints and hearts. We almost felt sorry for him, some of us did. We tried to like him. But when you tried to make the connection, when you tried to look into his eyes that were brittle and brown, there was always something there that ran away. And if it wasn’t Lucy Wilson all battered and butchered up in that dark signal tower, what else could it be?

  Most of us have lived in Hartsgrove all our lives, and most of us wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s a pretty, leafy little town on seven rolling hills, and the pinks and blues of sunrise, the fog lifting out of the trees on a far hillside, make a body as content as can be to live in this place at this time. Three creeks converge at the bottom of town where the ball fields sprawl out in the afternoon sun, and Main Street looks pretty much the same as it did a hundred years ago, although the horses, wagons, and buggies have been replaced by cars, trucks, and pickups. The stately red brick courthouse and its tall white dome with the four clocks on the four sides can be seen from just about anywhere in town. So can the hospital perched up on the highest hill, and the green steeple of the Catholic church like tarnished brass sitting high on a southside hill. It’s not a place where crime feels at home. The streets are safe enough to stroll down in the light of the streetlamps and moon, or in the early morning hours. Every decade or two though, every generation or so, along comes a crime that makes you sit up and take notice, a crime like the killing of Lucy Wilson, to remind us that we’re not, after all, immune. That they’re still out there, even in small, pretty towns.