The Best American Mystery Stories 2018

by Louise Penny

  “I know the name of my wife,” he said. “I just don’t care to share it with you.”

  “Do you know if she’s alive or dead, Mr. Hank?”

  “Well, she’s not here, is she?”

  That much he was sure of. If she were here, she’d be here, in this fifteen-by-fifteen square. But no matter where his eyes darted, there was no sign of another. He interrogated the remote control resting by his foot. The pair of reading glasses, slightly bent, on the bedside table. The row of tan Sansabelt slacks hanging in his closet. Over by the door, the pair of galoshes that sat waiting for him day after day (though he rarely went outside and never in the rain). Each object irretrievably and ruinously his.

  Hank palmed his eyes shut. He thought, If I concentrate hard enough, I can make this woman go away. I can make this whole thing stop. I can . . .

  “Silly me!”

  Her voice in that moment was so different from what it had been—so sweet and disarming—that his eyes immediately sprang open, as if seeking reprieve. And there she was, smiling as sweetly as any woman had ever smiled.

  “You didn’t get a fighting chance, Mr. Hank.”

  “How . . . how’s that?”

  “You didn’t take your meds.”

  Instinctively his gaze swerved back to the medication dispenser on the coffee table. There, in Friday’s chamber, lay the usual troika: white, yellow, and blue. Untouched. Unconsumed.

  “Well, Christ!” he shouted. “I could’ve told you that!”

  Before she could stop him, he snatched the pills and dry-swallowed them. “There!” he cried, shoving the container away.

  Dr. Landis had already averted her eyes, as if he had just started to undress himself. She was still looking away when she said, “Why don’t we give it a few minutes to kick in?”

  “Why the hell not?”

  Here, he decided, was one benefit of getting old. You weren’t obliged to make conversation. You could just sit in silence. Indeed, as the minutes passed, the only sound was the pattering of his Timex quartz on the bathroom washbasin. (Why hadn’t he worn it?) If anything, it was the light that was making noise. Bright one moment, gray the next. He could’ve sworn he was nodding off, but every time he looked over at Dr. Landis, she was exactly as he had left her, patient and abiding.

  “You don’t remember me,” she said at last.

  “Sure I do.”

  “Then you remember what we talked about. The last time we talked.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Then you won’t be surprised to learn how sorry I am.”

  His confusion registered now as a dull ache, rising up from his extremities and gathering in the joints.

  “What’ve you got to be sorry for?” he demanded. “I’m the one ought to be—”

  “When it comes to this part,” she said, “I’m always sorry.”

  There was, in fact, a new warmth in her hazel eyes. A warmth too in her white hand, pressing on his.

  “We only have a few minutes,” she said.

  For what? he was going to ask, but she was speeding straight on.

  “Now if you promise not to get up or cry out, I’m going to show you a piece of paper. Is that all right with you?”

  “Like I’ve got a choice,” he grumbled.

  “It’s a piece of writing, okay?”

  She drew out a sheet of taupe stationery, folded in half. With soft fingers, she spread it out on the coffee table.

  “Hank, I’m going to ask if you recognize the handwriting.”

  But he misunderstood. He thought she was asking if he knew how to read. As if he could forget that! D. E. A. R. Dear. H. A. N. K. Hank. Dear Hank.

  Why, it was a letter to him. Of course it was.

  “You should keep reading,” she said.

  This is you talking, Hank. YOU.

  He frowned down at the words. Noted the strange curlicue of the h, the heavy dot over the i, the rather showy underswoop of the y. It was his own cursive, staring back at him.

  “This . . . this doesn’t . . .”

  But as his fingers glided across the page, he realized they were moving in perfect synchronicity with each letter. Forming each word as it came.

  With an inrush of air, he heaved his head back up. “I don’t . . .”

  “Keep reading, Mr. Hank.”

  You failed the test, Hank. Which means we’re calling it a day, you and I.

  I know this will be hard for you.

  Living’s a tough habit to kick, I get that. But long ago I—we—decided we didn’t want to hang around past our due date. Not if it meant being a burden on the kids.

  Kids. Kids . . .

  You don’t remember their names, I know. But the worst part is you don’t remember HER name. And that’s why it’s come to this. Because long ago we decided that if we couldn’t call her back anymore, life wasn’t worth living.

  Stop reading, he told himself. Stop.

  But his eyes, without his volition, kept scanning, and his brain, that fevered contraption, kept interpreting, and the words rolled on. . . .

  We gave it a good run, didn’t we? We’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. And nothing to fear. It’s just . . . quiet . . . from here on out. You won’t even know we’re gone.

  And if we’re lucky, if we’re really lucky, we’ll get to see her. Trust me. That would be nice.

  Say goodbye . . .

  His breath was growing ragged now as he raised his eyes to the woman on his bed.

  “You . . . you don’t work here at all.”

  She smiled softly, shook her head. “I work for an organization called Timely Endings. You don’t remember, but you contacted us two years ago.”

  “But . . . but who gave you this letter? Who told you to—”

  She pointed to the bottom of the page. There, like some childish prank, lay his own name, in his own hand.

  Hank Crute

  As real as anything could be. So real that everything around him grew more preposterous the more he contemplated it. Corned beef and Mrs. Sylvia and Stewart Granger. Bingo Night and hair styling with Miss Desdemona. The cord that bound him to Morning Has Broken, to waking and sleeping, had without another thought been severed. There was nothing to do now but drift.

  From somewhere in the slipstream he could hear Dr. Landis’s not-unsympathetic voice. (“We always make sure our clients write their own letters in advance. Just so they know it was their idea. It’s always their idea.”) He could see—just barely see—her soft white hands refolding the stationery, returning it to her leather satchel. (“Your account is paid in full, and there won’t be any problem with medical examiners.”) He could feel the air vibrating around her slender alabaster form as it rose. (“And of course your children will know nothing. We are the soul of discretion.”) For a time she seemed to be floating away with the rest of his world, until suddenly, shockingly, she was kneeling beside him.

  “Hank,” she whispered. “This is what you wanted. When you still knew what you wanted.”

  “I didn’t . . . I didn’t . . .”

  I didn’t want this.

  But what was this? What was not this? There was no way of separating one from the other.

  “It’s all right,” she said, her breath stirring against his cheek. “I’ll stay with you.”

  In that moment, how beautiful she loomed (though he could no longer see her, though he had forgotten her name). Her creamy white hands, pressed snugly over his. Her face, soft and plangent, parting now before another face. A face he recognized from the moment he saw it . . . parting now by the tiniest of fractions to emit a name . . .

  Celia.

  Dear God, it had been there all along. Her name. And with it a whole caravan of sensory data. A smell of sage. A crimson mouth. A drily tickled voice. Hair feathered across a pillow.

  Celia. Celia.

  If he could just speak it, he might yet stay tethered to the here and now. He might buy himself another month, another year. But his tongue had thickened
into a slab, and his throat had dried to flint, and his lungs were crouching like beggars over their last remnants of air. So that when the end came for Mr. Hank Crute, his wife’s name was nothing more than soundless drops, bathing his stilled brain.

  Among the Morning Has Broken residents, no one took the news of Mr. Hank’s death harder than Mrs. Sylvia. She told anyone who would listen that she and the late gentleman had enjoyed a special rapport. Only minutes before he died, he had promised to escort her to the Stewart Granger movie and then to dinner. How sad, and at the same time how fitting and beautiful, that hers should have been the last face he saw.

  In the ensuing weeks Mrs. Sylvia went on at such length about Mr. Hank that one of her dinner cronies was moved to crack, “If he liked you so much, why didn’t he put a ring on it?” Not long after that, Mrs. Sylvia’s bridge club, weary of her exhibitions, replaced her with a less tiresome fourth and suggested she try her hand at blackjack or canasta. Mrs. Sylvia took the more dignified course of retreating to her room, where she sat in silence for hours at a time, conjuring memories of her departed lover, whose name and face were already blurring into something satisfyingly indeterminate.

  In this pose she was interrupted one day by a visitor, who stood over her (had she forgotten to close the door?) with a leather satchel and an air of cool but not chilly professionalism.

  “Mrs. Sylvia? I was wondering if you had a moment.”

  Andrew Bourelle

  Y Is for Yangchuan Lizard

  from D Is for Dinosaur

  “What’s the Y stand for?”

  We were staring at the package on Fender’s glass coffee table, a quart-sized zip-lock bag full of gray-white powder. It looked like cocaine cut with fireplace ashes. There was a red sticker on the package with a black Y scrawled with a Sharpie.

  “I’m not sure,” Fender said. “That’s just the street name.”

  Fender said it was the newest thing in Asia, some kind of opiate mixed with cocaine alkaloid and crushed dinosaur bones. Not just any dinosaur—one specific skeleton that was stolen from a Hong Kong museum. Fender couldn’t remember the name of it. He said it was supposed to be like China’s version of the Allosaurus, but I didn’t know what the fuck that was either.

  Because Y came from only one skeleton, that meant it was just short of impossible to get. Which is what made it attractive to Fender—who was a collector as much as he was a dealer.

  “Have you tried it yet?” I said, but I could tell from the package that he hadn’t touched it.

  “Nope,” he said. “I’m a businessman. Each snort is probably worth ten grand. But I am curious,” he added.

  Fender and I were sitting in the living room of his spacious penthouse apartment. He had a nice view of Lake Erie out his window. The sky was overcast, the water gray.

  Collector guitars decorated the walls of Fender’s apartment. An acoustic guitar reputedly owned by Johnny Cash. An electric from Eddie Van Halen. One with burn marks on it that was supposedly from that Great White concert where the pyrotechnics got out of control and killed a bunch of people.

  Fender once joked that it was hard to know what was more valuable in this apartment, the guitars or the drugs. But I was as skeptical of the stories about the guitars as I was about the origins of Y.

  We shared a joint and each had a bottle of beer, and talked about whether we thought the dinosaur-bone story had any truth to it. Fender said he believed there were real dinosaur bones in there—that much was probably true—but he doubted they contributed to the high.

  “It’s like a rhinoceros horn,” he said. “People think it contains magical qualities, but that’s all bullshit. The real rush is that you’re snorting something rare. Exotic. We’re talking about a supply so finite that it’s practically nonexistent.”

  Fender was wearing a silk robe with silly leather slippers, and his shoulder-length hair was pulled back into a ponytail. He had a soul patch and hoop earrings and looked quite a bit different from the kid I shared a room with when we were freshmen in college.

  I told him I didn’t think the drug was going to go over well here. This was America. People here didn’t believe in that crap about rhinoceros horns, and they wouldn’t buy any mumbo-jumbo about mystical dinosaur-bone dust.

  “I already got a buyer lined up,” he said. “We’re just haggling over price.”

  “Speaking of buying things, I need to get a move on.”

  He took me back to his study and unlocked the safe. I turned away so I wouldn’t see the combination. It made me uncomfortable how leisurely he was about opening it in front of me. Did that mean he was like that with other people? I hoped not.

  The safe was the size of a small refrigerator. A series of shelves lined the left side, some stacked with cash, others with every kind of drug you could think of. On the right side were guns: a shotgun, some kind of military rifle, a handgun. There was also a pearl-handled switchblade, which I’d seen Fender open lots of bags of drugs with.

  Fender reached in and brought out a brick of marijuana.

  I handed him a stack of bills.

  I shoved the marijuana into my knapsack, and we headed back to the living room.

  I excused myself to his restroom before I left. When I came back, Fender and my backpack were sitting on the couch, but the bag of Y was gone.

  “Why isn’t there a Chinese symbol on the package instead of a Y?” I said.

  At the bar I managed, I used rat poison that was from China—poison that I’m sure was illegal as hell here in the U.S.—and there were Chinese symbols all over the packaging. I would think that whether Y was the real thing or someone was just pretending it was an exotic Chinese drug, either way it would make sense to use a Chinese character instead of an English letter.

  “Beats me, man. Maybe they’re trying to Americanize it.”

  I smirked at Fender and shook my head.

  “I think you’ve been had,” I said. “Someone cremated a fucking dog and put it in a bag and you just paid God knows what for it.”

  “Ye of little faith,” Fender said, clapping me on the back.

  He opened the six deadbolts on his door, led me into the foyer, and opened the six deadbolts on the exterior door.

  “See you,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t want to be you,” I said.

  “Bullshit,” he said, just like every time we said goodbye. “You wish like hell you were me.”

  I went directly to the bar to open up. It was important that I get there before Theresa because I had to clean up the dead rats before she arrived. She’d come in once before me and was gagging her whole shift.

  Each night before I left, I’d set out the poison in the storage room. Each day when I came in to open, I’d find three or four dead rats. Today there were only two, which meant maybe I was finally making a dent in the population.

  They were lying on the concrete, their bodies twisted into stiff, strangely contorted poses, like they’d been convulsing until their muscles finally locked up. Their tongues hung out of their mouths, clamped between their teeth, and a strange bloody foam spilled from their clenched jaws like dyed beer froth.

  I always wondered if the rats ate the poison at the same time, or if they were so fucking stupid that they went ahead and ate it even after they could see that one of their brethren had died. I’d considered hooking up some kind of camera to watch, but that was too much effort. I didn’t care that much.

  I put the two dead rats in a plastic bag and was outside tossing it into the dumpster when Theresa came walking up.

  “Hey, handsome,” she said, and gave me a smile that was better than any drug.

  “Hey,” I said.

  I wanted to call her beautiful or good-looking or something like that, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I wasn’t sure what Fender would think about me flirting with his kid sister, but I didn’t figure he’d be too happy about it.

  I was a decade older than her, for one thing. And I wasn’t exactly what you’d c
all a good catch. My name was on the bar’s deed, but it was really owned by Ramzen Akhmadov, the head of the Chechen mafia in Cleveland.

  That’s what happens when you borrow money from the mob for your drug problem. The vig is too steep. You get in over your head. Instead of getting your legs broken, you make a deal.

  And then you’re stuck. You can’t walk away. Ever.

  “Did you go see my brother today?” Theresa asked as she started taking chairs off the tables.

  “Yep.”

  She grinned. If I saw Fender, that meant I had dope.

  “You want to smoke a jay before we open?” she asked.

  Theresa was a cute girl—how could I say no?

  I didn’t tap into the new brick of marijuana. I left that in my backpack behind the bar and went to the stash I kept in the freezer. I rolled a joint while Theresa finished setting up the chairs.

  We sat at a table like a couple of regular customers and passed the joint back and forth. The funny thing about pot is that the best stuff in the country comes from Colorado, where it is legal. I figured it was just a matter of time before it was legal everywhere and my little side business would be defunct. I was trying to figure out a plan to get out from under Ramzen by then, but I hadn’t come up with any ideas yet.

  I’d been smoking so long now that smoking a joint was kind of like smoking a cigarette to me. I didn’t get much of a buzz. Theresa had done some hard drugs in her day, but she didn’t have as many years of smoking weed on her résumé as I did. Her eyes quickly turned glassy and she couldn’t stop smiling.

  Theresa had dirty-blond hair that wasn’t nearly as well cared for as her brother’s mane. She wore low-slung jeans, a tight T-shirt, and no bra underneath. Her breasts were small, but I liked looking at her nipples poking against the fabric.

  I was sure she noticed.

  I was sure she liked me looking.

  It was just a matter of time before we hooked up. That would probably mess things up with Fender. And if I didn’t have him supplying me anymore, then that would mess things up with Ramzen, who expected the cut I gave him every week and wouldn’t like it if I went back to just being a bar manager.