The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021

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

  “Just think,” she said. “It’s been doing that since before we were born and it’ll keep doing it until the end of the world.”

  There was no answer. Grace was sleeping. Etta kicked her shoes off and buried her feet in the warm sand. There was nobody in the world who knew where she was or what she was doing. Nobody in the world to tell her to do something different.

  She dozed some herself and was startled when Grace suddenly spoke. “You just here on vacation?”

  “Sort of,” Etta said. “I’m on my way to Key West. Thought I’d make it today, but there’s nothing wrong with tomorrow.”

  “What’s in Key West?”

  “The end of the world,” Etta said. She dug up a scalloped white shell, no bigger than her thumbnail but exquisite and perfect. She turned it over in her fingers. “It’s the last island in this group of islands that hangs off the end of Florida. It’s where the road ends. Where all the roads end. My parents honeymooned there, sixty years ago. My mother said until the day she died that if you hadn’t seen the sun set in Key West you hadn’t lived a complete life.”

  “That’s nice,” the girl said. “Now you’re finally gonna see it.”

  “That’s the plan,” Etta said. She dug into her backpack and found a rolled pair of socks and carefully put the shell inside them. She tucked the socks back into the bottom of the bag, near the other pair of socks concealing what had been Tyler’s emergency stash of hundreds and twenties. “What about you?” she asked. “You said Tone is here for business?”

  Grace was quiet for so long that Etta was sure she’d fallen asleep again. “Sort of business,” she finally said. Etta waited.

  “His name is Tony,” Grace said. “He makes people call him Tone because he thinks it makes him sound tough. Gangster.”

  “And is he a gangster?”

  “He wants to be.” Grace rolled over on her stomach. “He works for my daddy. Now my daddy, he’s a gangster. Runs meth labs around the whole state.”

  Etta wanted to ask if Grace should be talking about this, but she bit her tongue.

  “Daddy wants to branch out,” Grace said. “So Tony is down here to buy coke. He set up a deal where a guy is supposed to meet him at a spot a couple of miles out on the water, but the guy says he has to wait for a day when he’s sure it’s clear. So Tony’s been going out and waiting for the last four days. He’s in a pretty bad mood when he gets back to the room.”

  “And he takes it out on you,” Etta said. Grace didn’t answer, but it wasn’t really a question. “Grace, why are you with this guy? What do you see in him?”

  Grace barked out a laugh. “See in him? Jesus. I hate him.” She pushed her fingers roughly into the sand. “Daddy gave me to him. Said I’m a useless shit like my mother but maybe I can make a grandson to carry on the business.”

  Etta sat silently for several minutes. She thought about patting the girl’s shoulder, making comforting noises, but that would have taken something she didn’t quite think she had. She thought about all the ways the girl might be playing her, about the fact that she could go back to the hotel right this second and leave. Eventually she surprised herself by speaking.

  “You’ve got better taste than me,” she said. “My husband Tyler was like Tone. A crook, somebody who wanted everyone to know how tough he was. My parents tried to warn me about him, but I fell for it. God, I thought he was everything.” She stared out at the water. “I thought I must deserve the things he did.” She didn’t look, but she knew Grace was listening.

  The waves came in, the waves went out. They’d been doing it long before Etta was born. They’d be doing it long after she was gone.

  Etta stood up. “I passed a library yesterday,” she said. Grace looked up at her and Etta held out a hand to help her up. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

  The library, a couple of blocks off the beach, was a low-slung stucco building with pastel awnings and red terra-cotta tiles on the roof. Etta couldn’t help but wish it were just a plain old concrete black. Jesus, Florida, she thought. We get it already.

  The few people inside were dressed as casually as those they’d seen on the beach. Etta found the computer stations and chose one in a private corner. Grace stood next to her, hip cocked against the desk, looking around from behind her pitch-dark shades. Etta had the feeling she didn’t spend much time in libraries.

  It took her only a few minutes to find the article she was looking for in the online version of the Quad-City Times. “Here,” she said. She stood up and steered Grace into the chair. “Read this.”

  Grace took off the sunglasses and began scanning the article. After a few seconds her eyes opened wide. Etta didn’t need to look; she’d read it at another library, in Georgia, two days ago. Local man Tyler Hession found dead in his home of a single gunshot wound. Troubled history. Grand theft, domestic abuse. Wife, Etta, missing and being actively sought by police as a person of interest. If you have any information . . .

  “Holy shit,” Grace hissed. She looked up at Etta. “Did you do that?”

  “Yeah,” Etta said. She pulled over another chair and perched on the edge, leaning forward. “Tell me something. Does Tone shower when he comes back at night?”

  That night Etta sat in the chair in her room. She’d cleaned and reloaded the gun, every step reminding her of Tyler’s impatient lectures, his warnings about a gun that jams at the moment when you need it. As though he’d ever done anything with a gun other than wave it around. She put the gun on the nightstand and forced herself to leave it alone. She turned on the TV with the volume all the way down so she’d have something to look at. She nibbled on cookies and drank soda to stay alert. A hospital show. Lots of very earnest, very serious young men and women in scrubs, frowning at helpless-looking people in beds.

  After a while they were replaced by the local news. From what she could tell without any sound, it was exactly the same as the local news in Iowa. She’d come here because Florida felt like the end of the world, but there were people who lived here every day. They’d probably find a few miles of unbroken cornfields as bizarre as Etta had found the beach.

  The talk-show host who came on after the news was on his second guest when Etta heard a door open and the mumble of voices through the wall behind her. She turned off the TV and listened. She still couldn’t make out words but it didn’t sound like he was hitting her this time, though he still sounded angry. Probably pleased to have his Jack. She listened to the two voices rising and falling, the indistinct movements around the room. It was hard to be sure what was happening. Was that Tone throwing himself onto the bed? Grace moving around to get him a drink? What was she going to do if Tone decided not to shower tonight? Grace had said he always did, that he couldn’t stand sleeping coated in the sweat and sunscreen of a long day out on the water, but now, sitting alone in her room, Etta didn’t think that sounded like much to base a plan on. Maybe they should have gone with their first idea, having Etta hide under the bed, but she hadn’t been able to stand the idea of being under there in God knows what filth for God knew how long.

  The bedsprings in the next room creaked again. Tony said something that had a nasty edge to it and laughed loudly. Then footsteps, then a moment of silence, and then a pipe somewhere creaked to life and three soft but distinct knocks came against the wall.

  So this was it. Etta seemed to watch herself from a distance as she picked up the gun with her right hand and covered it with a folded towel held in her left. Moving quickly, she went out the door and turned and came to the door of the next room, which was cracked open. She pushed through. Grace was on the other side, her eyes wide. She closed the door behind Etta and put the chain on, just as they’d rehearsed, and Etta dropped the towel and walked to the bathroom, seeing nothing but what was immediately in front of her.

  The shower curtain was not quite closed. She could see Tone, facing away from the door, scrubbing at his crotch. He was a small man, shorter than Etta, but his frame was wiry and muscu
lar. He had more body hair than any man she’d ever seen.

  He must have heard something or caught a glimpse of something because he started to turn and raise his hand and the shot Etta had intended for the back of his head, the same place she’d shot Tyler, instead hit the corner of his jaw. His head jerked back and his eyes widened and she shot him two more times, both in the head, and now he dropped and she saw the tile behind him spattered with blood.

  Tyler always had said she was a good shot.

  She kept the gun raised and watched him not moving. There was quite a lot of blood but the running shower was swirling most of it away down the drain. She replayed the three shots in her head and thought about the people in adjoining rooms, imagined them jerking awake or suddenly looking up from the TV, wondering about the bangs. They’d sit still, like she had after the thud last night, waiting to see what else would happen, convincing themselves that it was a car or something equally meaningless. Nothing they needed to be involved with.

  After she had counted off five minutes in her head and heard no sirens she lowered the gun to her side. There was no new blood coming from Tone and the one eye he had left was milky and unfocused.

  She stepped out the bathroom door. Grace was sitting cross-legged on the bed, clutching a pillow to her chest and shaking. “It’s over,” Etta said. “Go get the stuff.” Grace nodded and jumped from the bed and ran outside. In a minute she was back with the plastic bags holding the supplies they’d bought this afternoon. Cleaning solution, paper towels, plastic bags, duct tape, flashlight, and, just because Etta had damn well wanted some, Oreos.

  “You don’t have to look,” Etta said.

  Grace shook her head. “I didn’t have the balls to do it,” she said. “Least I can do is look at it.” Etta stepped aside and Grace dropped the bags on the bed and walked into the bathroom. Etta let her take her moment, let her make it whatever it needed to be for her, as she ran through a list of everything that needed to be done. Clean up the bathroom. Use the duct tape and plastic bags to cover any part of Tone that might leave a blood trail. In a few hours, when it was the deadest part of the night, shove his body through the bathroom window, then go around the building and move him as far as they dared into the wooded lot. If there were gators, they were in for a nice breakfast. Then, hopefully just before dawn, take off. They would leave Etta’s stolen car in a parking lot with the keys in it. Tone’s Mustang would be a safe ride for a while. It wasn’t like Grace’s father was going to file a missing person report on his drug mule.

  Grace came out of the bathroom. For the first time since Etta had met her she looked completely composed. “Thank you,” she said. “Let’s get started.”

  The sunset in Key West was everything Etta’s mother had promised, fantastic bands of pink and orange remaking the sky continuously, the colors edging into the impossibly vibrant. Seemingly just to keep living up to the postcards, Florida was even kind enough to provide a couple of magnificent sailboats perfectly silhouetted against the spectacular sky. Etta couldn’t even bring herself to resent it.

  She and Grace watched from a restaurant on a boardwalk thronged with tourists and street performers. They seemed to be the only people actually watching the sky, as opposed to filming it on their phones. Etta had left hers in Iowa, and Tone had never allowed Grace to have one. It was hard to feel they were missing anything. Between Tyler’s stash and Tone’s unspent coke money, they could always get a burner phone if they needed to. Or a dozen.

  When the sky was finally dark she lifted her margarita glass and clinked it against Grace’s diet soda. “I have to say that was worth the trip,” she said.

  “It was fantastic,” Grace said. She was still looking out over the water but now she turned to look at Etta. “So what were you going to do after the sunset?”

  “I hadn’t decided,” Etta said. She leaned back in her chair. “I was either going to blow my brains out on the beach or walk into the water and wait to drown.”

  Grace looked shocked. “You wanted to die?”

  Etta shrugged. “I thought that’s what you came to the end of the world to do.”

  “And now?”

  “Why rush?” Etta said. “It’ll happen sooner or later. Might as well go for later. Why, do you have any plans?”

  Grace looked down at the table. “I thought maybe we could go see my daddy.”

  Etta smiled and drained the last of her drink and set the glass down.

  “Why the hell not?” she said.

  *Every tourist has had the experience of going to some long-anticipated destination and being disappointed, but some things do live up to their advance billing. One is the sunset at Key West, which I got to see when my wife Mary and I vacationed in the Keys in 2017. It was every bit as spectacular as I’d heard, painting the sky in bands of colors many times richer and more vibrant than any film could capture. A happy, raucous, mostly drunken crowd watched from the beaches and bars, as silhouetted sailboats drifted by. It was all so transcendent, and to my Midwestern eyes so unreal, that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Travis McGee pulling up to the dock in the Busted Flush.

  Something that struck me forcefully about the experience was the sense of being at the end of every road, and I started thinking about the kind of person who might risk a great deal to get there to see it, perhaps with the expectation that it would be the last thing they’d ever see at all. By the time we flew back to Indiana a few days later, Etta was already beginning to talk to me. I’m grateful to Linda Landrigan (who, back in 2011, gave me my first professional fiction sale) for letting me tell Etta’s story in the pages of Alfred Hitchcock, and to Otto Penzler and Lee Child for giving her another home in this volume. I’d be remiss if I didn’t also thank my wife, my parents, and the many friends (hi, Leslie, Angel, Penny, and Eric!) who have been endlessly encouraging of my writing.

  Of course, by the time “Etta” was published it read like historical fiction, with its mobs of innocently unmasked people traveling about at will, and the very notion of the end of the world had become considerably less figurative than it was when I was writing. Living through this strange, dark, closed-down time has made me very grateful for the friendship and society I’ve found among the community of mystery writers and readers. In particular, the members of the Short Mystery Fiction Society (and especially the heroic Kevin R. Tipple) are unfailingly generous in their advice and support, and many of my stories would never have found their way into existence without them.

  Here’s hoping that, like Etta, we can all find a way to keep going beyond what at times seems like the end of the world.

  Andrew Welsh-Huggins is a reporter for the Associated Press in Columbus, and the author of seven novels featuring Andy Hayes, a former Ohio State and Cleveland Browns quarterback turned private eye, including the Nero Award–nominated Fatal Judgment. Welsh-Huggins is also the editor of Columbus Noir from Akashic Books, and his short fiction has appeared in publications including Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mystery Weekly, and Mystery Tribune. Andrew’s nonfiction book, No Winners Here Tonight, is the definitive history of the death penalty in Ohio.

  THE PATH I TOOK

  Andrew Welsh-Huggins

  Any hopes I’d had of a peaceful morning of work that day evaporated the instant I opened my email and saw the single word in the subject line.

  Ireland.

  My heart raced. Was this the moment I’d dreaded for so long—the unmasking of the truth? The beginning of the end of the journey I’d begun so long ago?

  I calmed down after a moment, scrolling through the body of the message. The writer was a student reporter for The Beacon Star, the paper at the small, liberal arts college in Ohio where I teach. An Irish politician was coming to speak on campus, she explained. A former member of the Irish Republican Army turned peace activist. A controversial figure at home whose tour of the United States featured protests outside several of his appearances.

  I believe you studied in Ireland in the 1980s, when t
he IRA was active, the student wrote. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions for my article.

  A new thrill of panic. How had she known? It was hardly something I advertised. I do my best to maintain a low profile without gaining a reputation as a recluse—easier said than done as a teacher of Greek and Latin. After a moment I relaxed again. I realized my long-ago sojourn abroad was on my CV—how could it not be?—and likely inserted on a faculty bio someplace. The Internet takes unkindly to the preservation of secrets like that. This tech-savvy student no doubt located it in the time it takes me to make my morning cup of tea.

  Yes, I wrote back carefully. I was in Ireland then. What would you like to know?

  Anything you’d like to tell me, she replied.

  Like the day I found the body? I said to myself, leaning back in my chair and collecting my thoughts.

  It all began in the fall of 1983, when I found myself living in a village on the far west coast of Ireland where Irish—Gaelic—was still the predominant language. A Gaeltacht, as such enclaves are known. Next Parish Boston went the saying in that part of the world, which boasted of being at the tip of the westernmost point of Europe. I settled there thanks to a fellowship I’d secured for postcollege research. I’d been to Ireland briefly in high school, and was captivated by the fact that people still spoke Irish in certain isolated communities. I put off graduate studies in Greek at the University of Illinois for a year and instead pursued the romantic notion of immersing myself in the literature and legends of old Ireland by gaining fluency in the island’s first language.

  My parents were skeptical, to say the least. If anything, they thought I should have gone to France to improve my already near-fluent language skills in that idiom. Still, they couldn’t argue with the generosity of my stipend, some multiple thousands of dollars, or the fact that, unlike many of their peers’ children, I would be immediately self-sufficient after graduation. With their half-hearted blessing, I flew into Shannon Airport in early July. After a few false starts, I rented a vacationer’s cottage a few kilometers west of Dingle in County Kerry and settled down to pursue my unlikely project on the outskirts of a tiny town called Baile na Farraige, literally place of the sea, known more generally by its prosaic English pronunciation, Ballynafarragy.