The Best American Mystery Stories 2018

by Louise Penny

  It was intense, this dream, so lucid that I didn’t want to open my eyes and risk dissolving it.

  I don’t know if it was the power of suggestion making me see what I was seeing and feel what I was feeling. Just knowing the story behind Y could have been enough to tell my brain what dream to have. Opiates can work that way.

  But it didn’t feel that way at the time. I felt like whatever was in the Y had transported me back—mentally, telepathically, supernaturally—to a time millions of years ago. When the world was embryonic and the animals were primal, instinctual, murderous. I could feel the stardust in my bones, the atoms that were once plants or animals or water. I was the world and the world was me.

  In the dream I killed some smaller creature, a feathered, four-legged little dinosaur. I ripped it apart with my sharp teeth, and I woke up with the coppery taste of blood in my mouth.

  I staggered to the bathroom, unsure how to walk without a tail. I slurped water from the sink and looked at myself in the mirror.

  There was a little splotch of dried blood around my nostril.

  I checked the time. Six hours had passed.

  I rushed out the door and headed for the bar. Theresa and I were both scheduled to work tonight, and I needed to find people to cover for us. The employees’ numbers were tacked up behind the bar. I didn’t have them with me.

  There was no way I was working, and I wasn’t leaving Theresa alone either.

  I didn’t feel any closer to having a plan about what to do, and I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to tell Theresa how powerful the stuff was, given her drug history. But I felt like I should tell her. Her brother had died for this stuff. She had a right to have a say in what happened. And if I’m honest, I pictured us snorting the stuff together. It was that good.

  I called her, but there was no answer.

  When I walked into the alley behind the bar, Zakir’s black BMW was sitting there idling.

  His arm was sticking out the open window, holding a cigarette.

  “Hey,” I said, acting as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening.

  “Where’ve you been?” he said. “You need to open soon.”

  “Having a rough morning,” I said. “You heard about Fender?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Tragic.”

  He said the words as unemotionally as if he was reporting on some crime on the other side of the planet.

  He pitched his cigarette into the alley and followed me inside.

  I poured him his single-barrel bourbon on the rocks, like always—when he wasn’t accompanied by Ramzen, that is.

  He threw it back and slurped it all down.

  “Another?”

  “No.”

  He reached into his sports jacket. I thought he was going to pull out a pistol, but instead he pulled out a switchblade.

  The same pearl-handled one from Fender’s safe.

  He poked around in the ice of his glass. There was blood on the blade, and tendrils of red spread into the liquid remnants at the bottom of the glass.

  He fished out a piece of ice and popped it into his mouth. He crunched on it like candy. Then he folded the knife and stuck it back in his coat. His hand came out with a plain white envelope.

  “Open this after I leave,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “I’ll be back when you close tonight,” he said. “You give me what I want. I give you what you want.”

  I scrunched my nose to pretend that I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  As he walked toward the door, he called over his shoulder, “Don’t get any smart ideas. Don’t call the cops. Don’t call Ramzen.”

  I said nothing. But I understood. He was going behind Ramzen’s back.

  When he was gone, I tore open the envelope. Inside was a small plastic sandwich bag, and inside that was a tiny severed toe.

  With ugly purple paint on the nail.

  I called in a waitress and a bartender, and I made them do most of the labor while I sat in my office. I let them each go an hour early, and then I told the few remaining customers that I needed to close early.

  When Zakir came in with Theresa, I was sitting at the table she and I had used the day before, first to share a joint, then to talk to the cop.

  Theresa was limping. She had on black Nike running shoes, and it looked like the toe area on one foot was wet.

  Zakir shoved her roughly into a chair and sat down across from me.

  His bourbon was already poured, sitting next to the bag of white powder.

  “It looks like you opened it,” Zakir said as he took his seat.

  I nodded.

  “And?”

  “It gave me a bloody nose,” I said. “It burned like a son of a bitch. But it was the best high I’ve ever had.”

  No need to lie about that.

  He grinned widely. He picked up his bourbon and twirled it around, spiraling the ice cubes, which had started to melt while I waited.

  “You didn’t think of poisoning me, did you?”

  “I thought about it,” I said.

  He laughed. Then he threw back the glass and slurped out the bourbon. Like before, he pulled out the switchblade and dug around in the glass. He fished out a piece of ice and crunched it in his teeth.

  He left the switchblade sticking out of the glass, the tip bleeding into the puddle of bourbon at the bottom.

  “So what happens now?” I said.

  “What do you mean?” he said. “You get the girl. I get the Y.”

  “I mean with you and Ramzen. You trying to take over? Coup d’état?”

  “Just a little side business,” Zakir said. “You can keep your mouth shut, no?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And you?” He looked at Theresa, his eyebrows arched.

  “She can,” I said.

  “Good.”

  He grabbed the bag of powder and headed for the door.

  “What do all these Chinese letters mean?” he said.

  “I think it’s supposed to be the name of the dinosaur whose bones are all busted up in there,” I said.

  He gave me a hard stare, and I wondered if he could see my pounding heart shaking my chest from where he was. His eyes drifted over to Theresa.

  “You coming?” he said.

  She looked at me, and in a second her demeanor changed from fear to a look of guilty pleasure. She gave me a smile that was part apology, part delight.

  She stood and kissed me on the cheek.

  “I did have fun,” she whispered, and walked toward Zakir with no limp.

  Zakir was grinning, his mouth full of white teeth, so pleased with himself that he couldn’t contain his elation.

  I glowered at Theresa. “You should have just taken it from me this morning after you fucked me.”

  She shrugged. “I was going to check to see if you had it with you. But you wouldn’t fall asleep.”

  She turned to go and I didn’t know what to say, so I blurted, “Your brother loved you.”

  She huffed and said, “My brother loved his stupid guitars.”

  They left and I sat alone in the bar for a long time. Then I collected the switchblade and my backpack and walked home. On the way I took a detour down to the lake’s edge and tossed the baggie with the toe—whoever it belonged to—into the gray water.

  I locked the door and spent the day with the switchblade in my hand, nodding in and out of sleep.

  When evening came and no one had broken down my door, I went over to Theresa’s apartment. The door was unlocked. She and Zakir were both there, Zakir doubled over on the futon, Theresa lying on the floor. The bodies were contorted, frozen in positions of agony. Their noses had hemorrhaged a pink foamy blood. Their eyes were bloodshot and bulging from their sockets, their faces locked in a rictus of pain. Theresa had bitten her tongue between her clenched teeth.

  I had hoped that Zakir would go first and that Theresa would be smarter than the rats. But they must have done their lines together. />
  I took off Theresa’s shoes just to be sure. She had all ten toes.

  There was a framed photograph on the counter of Fender and Theresa. They were a few years younger, both smiling enthusiastically. I wondered if they were actually happy or just acting. I’d never really known Theresa at all.

  “See you,” I said to their smiling faces, my voice a hoarse, haunted whisper that I didn’t recognize. “Wouldn’t want to be you.”

  I called Detective Williams and spent the rest of the night at the police station answering questions.

  “Turns out this drug called Y is nothing more than Chinese rat poison,” he said.

  He looked at me skeptically, wondering what I knew and wasn’t telling him, but he seemed to be satisfied that the case was closed. He never searched my backpack.

  I walked toward home, a zombie, in the early morning hours. I had hardly slept in three days. I’d lost my oldest friend and a girl I loved, even if only briefly, even if she never really existed. A fog rolled in and I stood at the edge of the lake, looking out into the smoky gray air, imagining a world on the other side with dinosaurs running around with eternity pulsing through their veins.

  I called Ramzen.

  “Zakir tried to blackmail me for the Y,” I said. “He was going behind your back.”

  “You had the Y?”

  “I gave him rat poison,” I said. “He’s dead.”

  Ramzen was quiet for a long moment, then he said, “Someone else will be making the collection next week.”

  “I figured.”

  “And what of the Y?” he asked. “Where is it?”

  I knew the Y would buy my freedom. I had been looking for a way out for years, and this was it.

  “I don’t know,” I said, and hung up.

  In my apartment, I pulled out the bag of Y, opened it, breathed in its primordial scent.

  I wanted to escape.

  To disappear.

  To go back in time to a prehistoric world where Fender hadn’t died yet and Theresa hadn’t revealed her true self.

  I poked the knife, sticky with dried blood, into the Y and came out with a heap of bone dust on the blade. I lowered my nose to the tip and inhaled as quickly and deeply as I could.

  T. C. Boyle

  The Designee

  from The Iowa Review

  The Boredom

  What he couldn’t have imagined, even in his bleakest assessments of the future, was the boredom. He’d sat there in the hospital while Jan lay dying, holding her hand after each of the increasingly desperate procedures that had left her bald and emaciated and looking like no one he’d ever known, thinking only of the bagel with cream cheese he’d have for dinner and the identical one he’d have for breakfast in the morning. If he allowed himself to think beyond that, it was only of the empty space in the bed beside him and of the practical concerns that kept everything else at bay: the estate, the funeral, the cemetery, the first shovel of dirt ringing on the lid of the coffin, closure. There was his daughter, but she had no more experience of this kind of free fall than he, and she had her own life and her own problems all the way across the country in New York, which was where she retreated after the funeral. A grief counselor came to the house and murmured in his direction for an hour or two, people sent him cards, books, and newspaper clippings in a great rolling wave that broke over him and as quickly receded, but nobody addressed the boredom.

  He got up at first light, as he always had. The house was silent. He dressed, ate, washed up. Then he sat down with a book or the newspaper, but his powers of concentration weren’t what they once were, and he wound up staring at the walls. The walls just stood there. No dog barked, there was no sound of cars from the street—even the leaky faucet in the downstairs bathroom seemed to have fixed itself. He could have taken up golf, he supposed, but he hated golf. He could have played cards or gone down to the senior center, but he hated cards and he hated seniors, especially the old ladies, who came at you in a gabbling flock and couldn’t begin to replace Jan anyway, not if there were ten thousand of them. The only time he was truly happy was when he was asleep, and even that was denied him half the time.

  The walls just stood there. No dog barked. The water didn’t even drip.

  The Letter

  The letter came out of nowhere, a thin sheet of paper in a standard envelope that bore a foreign stamp (England: Queen Elizabeth in brownish silhouette). It was buried in the usual avalanche of flyers, free offers, and coupons, and he very nearly tossed it in the recycling bin along with all the rest, but it was his luck that at the last minute it slipped free and drifted in a graceful fluttering arc to the pavement at his feet. He bent for it, noticing that it was addressed to him, using his full name—Mason Kenneth Alimonti—and that the return address was of a bank in London. Curious, he wedged the sheaf of ads under one arm and pried open the envelope right there in the driveway while the sun beat at the back of his neck and people drifted by like ghosts out on the street.

  Dear Mr. Alimonti, the letter began, kindly accept my sincere apologies for contacting you out of the blue like this, but something very urgent and important has come to our notice and we seek your consent for the mutual interest of all.

  His first thought was that this had something to do with the estate, with Jan’s death, more paperwork, more hassle, as if they couldn’t leave well enough alone, and he glanced up a moment, distracted. Suddenly—and this was odd, maybe even a portent of some sort—the morning seemed to buzz to life, each sound coming to him separately and yet blending in a whole, from the chittering of a squirrel in the branches overhead to a snatch of a child’s laughter and the squall of a radio dopplering through the open window of a passing car. And more: every blade of grass, every leaf shone as if the color green had been created anew.

  The letter was in his hand still, the junk mail still tucked under one arm. When Jan was alive, he’d bring the mail in to her where she’d be sitting at the kitchen table with her coffee and a book of crosswords, and now he was standing there motionless in his own driveway, hearing things, seeing things—and smelling things too, the grass, jasmine, a whiff of gasoline from the mower that suddenly started up next door. I am Graham Shovelin, the letter went on, Operations & IT director, Yorkshire Bank PLC, and personal funds manager to the late Mr. Jing J. Kim, an American citizen. He died recently, along with his wife and only son, while holidaying in Kuala Lumpur, and was flown back to England for burial. In our last auditing, we discovered a dormant account of his with £38,886,000 in his name.

  This is a story, he was thinking, a made-up story, and what did it have to do with him? Still, and though he didn’t have his glasses with him so that the letters seemed to bloat and fade on the page before him, he read on as if he couldn’t help himself: During our investigations, we discovered that he nominated his son as his next of kin. All efforts to trace his other relations have proved impossible. The account has been dormant for some time since his death. Therefore, we decided to contact you as an American citizen, to seek your consent to enable us to nominate you as the next of kin to the deceased and transfer the funds to you as the designated heir to the deceased.

  There was more—a proposed split of the proceeds, 60 percent for him, 38 percent for the bank, 2 percent to be set aside for expenses both parties might incur (if any) during the transaction. At the bottom of the page was a phone number and a request to contact the bank if the abovementioned transaction should be of interest, with a final admonition: Please also contact me if you object to this proposal. Object? Who could object? He did a quick calculation in his head, still good with numbers though he’d been retired from the college for fifteen years now: 60 percent of 38,886,000 was 23 million and something. Pounds, that is. And what was the conversion rate, one point two or three to the dollar?

  It was a lot of money. Which he didn’t need, or not desperately anyway, not the way most people needed it. While it was a sad fact that the bulk of what he’d set aside for retirement had been sw
allowed up in treatments for Jan the insurers had labeled “experimental” and thus nonreimbursable, he still had enough left, what with Social Security and his 401(k), to live at least modestly for as long as he lasted. This offer, this letter that had him standing stock-still in his own driveway as if he’d lost his bearings like half the other old men in the world, was too good to be true, he knew that. Or he felt it anyway.

  But still. Thirty million dollars, give or take. Certainly there were places he’d like to visit—Iceland, for one, the Galápagos, for another—and it would be nice to leave his daughter and his grandson something more than a mortgaged house, funeral expenses, and a stack of bills. There were stranger things in this world—people won the lottery, got grants, prizes, estates went unclaimed all over the place, and it wasn’t as if he was desperate. A voice warned him against it, but what did he have to lose? The cost of a phone call?

  The Phone Call

  The phone picked up on the third ring, and the first thing he heard was music, a soft trickle of music that was neither classical nor pop but something in between, and for a moment he thought he was being put on hold before the music cut off abruptly and a deep crisp voice—so deep it surprised him—swelled inside the receiver. “Yorkshire Bank, PLC, Graham Shovelin speaking. How may I help you?”

  He’d rehearsed a little speech in his head, along the lines of establishing his authority as the person solicited rather than soliciting, but it deserted him now. “Um, I,” he stuttered, “I, uh, received your letter?”

  There was the faintest tick of hesitation, and then the voice came back at him, so deep he couldn’t help thinking of Paul Robeson singing “Ol’ Man River” on one of the old ’78s his grandmother used to play for him when he was a boy. “Oh, yes, of course—delighted to hear from you. We have your number here on the computer screen, and it matches our records . . . Still, one can never be too careful. Would you be so kind as to identify yourself, please?”