The Best American Mystery Stories 2017

by John Sandford

  She lowered her chin, raised her brow, looked at me, and said, “I have children to get to bed.”

  “Well,” I said, remembering her invitation to “get drunk,” “you okay to drive?”

  She laughed at that, took my face in her two hands, kissed me deeply, and whispered, “It was a euphemism. I’m fine.”

  Every day after that until the end of school, it was as if that night had never happened. She never glanced my way or touched my arm to get my attention or spoke my Christian name. On the last day of school, she didn’t linger by her car as I was walking to mine or say “Have a good summer” or “Have a nice trip,” so I could only conclude that it had been a one-shot deal or perhaps even a disappointment. Driving west, then lying awake in my sleeping bag, I asked myself many questions: Had I been too eager? Too aggressive? Not aggressive enough? Too unimaginative? Too focused on my own pleasure? Had she driven home that night shaking her head and rolling her eyes? Had she since knocked on someone else’s door with a bottle of wine? Was she doing that now, even as I lay there in that tent listening to Greg snore?

  At other times I thought, What the hell do I care? I got a free roll in the hay; she’s an old woman. I imagined being out to dinner with her somewhere and people glancing at us. Mother? No. Wife? No. Sister? Cousin? Aunt?

  When I got home, I started driving by her house until one day there she was in the driveway. I honked and waved, and she waved back, but she didn’t come around, not for a month, not until I’d pretty much given up hope. When she did, she was again carrying a bottle of wine. She held it up. “Wanna fuck?” she asked.

  Women like Sharon Postlewaite didn’t say things like that. Not then. Not yet. Not unless they were trying to impress or unless they were very unusual, and Sharon didn’t seem interested in impressing anyone about anything. It occurred to me that once again Ike had found something interesting in someone that the rest of us had missed altogether.

  That night when she was standing there slipping on and buttoning her blouse, she said, “I can’t get away very often,” answering all my questions at once. That was the last I saw of her until we returned to school. Then it was the same old thing, not so much as a glance. I started driving past her house again. I even worked up the nerve to call her once.

  “Sharon?” I said.

  “Sorry. Not interested,” she said, and hung up. I stayed away.

  Then in October I was called into the principal’s office one day, and Sharon was sitting there. Oh shit, I thought. I’m about to get fired. I’m about to be accused of harassment and shamed right out of town and into the army and Vietnam. Maybe I’m about to be arrested. Have I done something illegal?

  “Mrs. Postlewaite,” the principal said—for he called all women of a certain age “Mrs.”—“Mrs. Postlewaite would like to put on a play, and, well, we were wondering if you might like to help her.” He explained that the school had never produced a play before, sounding as if he was not at all sure it should try it now, and Sharon said that she’d never directed one but had studied drama and directing in college. “Pretty rusty. I could use some help.”

  I said I hadn’t done any drama since high school.

  Sharon said that two heads would be better than one, and I thought of her holding my face and running her tongue into my mouth.

  The principal said that I’d have to give up coaching basketball as if he hoped I’d say I couldn’t or wouldn’t and the whole thing would go away. I asked if I could sleep on it, because I didn’t want to jump too quickly, and the next day it was the principal rather than Sharon to whom I said yes, so I was a little surprised when she knocked on my door that night and held up a bottle of wine. “Celebrate?”

  “Is that a euphemism?”

  “Of course.”

  The play was A Christmas Carol, which, with its chains and ghosts and crippled kid and corny sentiment, was perfect for a junior high school. And of course every theatrical kid in the school tried out. We had lots of histrionic girls and sensitive boys, many tears and scenes and tantrums, but we also had a great deal of fun. We assembled every day after school in the auditorium. Boys would be chasing each other around. Girls would be practicing their lines or consoling one of their number who was weeping. The shop class would be measuring and sawing and hammering. The art class would be painting. I always seemed to get there first and Sharon would then come in and sit in the row behind me. One day when I was tired of turning around, I said, “Why don’t you sit up here?”

  “I prefer to sit here.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can look at you.” I think it may have been the only time that she said something I thought sweet and vulnerable.

  Sharon had sketched out a rehearsal schedule, but neither of us really had any idea what we were doing, so we were scared to death of not being ready on time. This justified more after-hours sessions at my apartment and toward the end a couple of long Sunday afternoons. These in turn involved very little Charles Dickens but a good deal of luxuriating in bed, drinking champagne, eating strawberries, listening to Johnny Mathis, reading The Tropic of Cancer and Lady Chatterley’s Lover out loud, and doing things with and to each other that I’d only dreamed about. I did not know where Sharon had learned about these things, but it seemed unlikely from or with Charles Novak, who seemed to me an engineer in every sense of the word.

  Now I probably don’t need to tell you that I fall in love a lot, nor that I was falling in love with Sharon Postlewaite. I began to fantasize a future for us. I began to do things like suggest plays we might do the next year, even though I’d made it very clear that as soon as I turned twenty-six in June, I was resigning and getting out of town as fast as I could. I began to mention things we might do together, books we might read, trips we might take, and the more I did these things, the more conflicted I felt. This was, after all, the woman with whom Ike had been in love. I kept thinking of an old English folk song about sleeping with a dead man’s girl. And what about Sharon? Didn’t she have a right to know of Ike’s infatuation with her even if it shocked her, even if it horrified her, even if it made her look anew at me and run the other way? It was this last thing that kept me from saying anything for a long time.

  The play was just awful, and everyone loved it, but then it was over and then there was Christmas, and when that was over too, Sharon and I found it hard to go back to the way things had been. There were fewer reasons to get together and less to talk about when we did. With the dull, cold days of winter, the wind seemed to go out of our sails, and I felt her slipping away. I guess I felt that if I could get her attention again, if I could create some of the drama and electricity we’d had before, I could get her back. That’s why I decided to tell her about Ike. It wasn’t to memorialize him or to protect her. It was to take a chance that just might make me seem daring and noble and heroic. The truth is, the more I loved Sharon and the more desperate I felt about her, the angrier I got at Ike for having hurt her, for having sent her world spinning out of control, for leaving her sitting as she was that evening smoking and staring out the window at the rain or maybe at nothing. I guess I was practicing chivalry of a rather fractured, latter-day, and self-serving sort. “He spent hours watching you from his bedroom window. He spent days and weeks watching you. He knew what you put in your coffee, what books you were reading, what laundry detergent you used, what cereal your kids ate, what station you listened to on the car radio. He knew everything about you. He watched you dress and undress.” I went on and on. All this time she sat looking out the window. “I think it’s fair to say Ike Lowell was totally obsessed with you,” I concluded.

  She lit another cigarette and smoked most of it. Just before she spoke, I realized that it was her own reflection in the window she was looking at, not the rain. “In a way,” she said, “it was like being in a movie, someone else’s movie. Probably a French movie—you know, one in which nothing happens. People wash dishes and you watch them wash dishes, but because you’re watching, well, it�
�s somehow different. I’d hang my wash out. I’d stand barefoot with my feet apart and my back arched and the breeze in my hair—my hair was longer then—and I’d wonder what I’d look like from up there in his window.”

  “Wait a minute—you mean you knew he was watching you?”

  “Of course I knew. Don’t you always know when someone’s watching you? Like when you used to watch me across the coffee room at school. You don’t think I just knocked on your door with a bottle of wine that first time by chance, do you?”

  I didn’t answer, and she smiled at me as she might a child. “Of course I knew. I always knew. Sometimes I’d even create little dramas. Tearful phone calls with no one on the other end of the line. Head in hand. Sometimes I’d put on a record and imagine it a soundtrack. I’d do the dishes to it or chop vegetables or paint my toenails. Sometimes I’d dust or vacuum to the music and kind of dance around. Sometimes I’d sing. Sometimes I wrote love letters to no one. Sometimes I had sexy phone conversations with someone or other. Maybe Ike Lowell. Who knows. Sometimes,” she said, raising her brow and watching me now, “sometimes I touched myself.”

  I was flabbergasted. Ike hadn’t been imagining things. It was all true.

  “It was very flattering, you see. Charles had lost interest in me. I had lost interest in me. My life as anything but a mother was pretty much over. I probably would have spent the rest of it taking care of the children and having what Charles thought of as sex once a week and forgiving him his peccadilloes, of which, by the way, there were more than one, and waiting to die unless I didn’t wait. A life of shit. Ugh. Then Ike came along and put me in his movie and I was a star.” She laughed at herself. “Ridiculous, right? Still . . .”

  “What I’m trying to say is that Ike Lowell was in love with you.”

  “I know,” she said brightly. “And I was in love with him. I was in love with Ike Lowell. In fact, I think it fair to say that he was the love of my life.” That pierced my heart, because it so obviously meant that I was not.

  “Tell me, did you . . . did you ever . . . ?”

  “Never. I only really ever had a glimpse of him once or twice. The only mental images I had of him I got from the library. High school yearbooks. Old newspapers. Sports stuff mostly, when he was much younger, and while I didn’t really know what he looked like now, I knew he didn’t look like that. But that was it. I never touched him, never talked to him, never even met him. Except of course . . . and what a way to meet. Talk about a movie. I mean, he saves my life and then sacrifices his, all in about, what, two minutes? I mean, who could live up to that?” This time the challenge to me was more direct and the answer to her question was obvious. Perhaps that’s why in this whole sordid mess, it’s the next moment that I’m a little bit proud of. It’s the one in which I did not tell Sharon Postlewaite that Ike had set the fire that burned her house and almost killed her. I’d intended to. That was to be my coup de grâce, but I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it, and this time it truly was a noble thing, if only slightly. The woman was in love, and so what if it was an illusion? Isn’t all love to some extent? Isn’t it what we insist upon, force into existence, make a mountain of a molehill of only because we need it so badly? Let her have her love; denying it was not going to give me mine.

  That spring I took up running. It helped me pass the evenings as they grew lighter, and it was better than passing them on a barstool watching baseball on TV. It also allowed me to feel good about myself, something I needed, even if I did put a cigarette behind my ear to smoke at the end, and it gave me time to think; I also needed that. One of the things I thought about was my relationships with women. They weren’t turning out very well. They all seemed to end at the lolling-about-and-fucking-six-ways-from-Sunday stage. I thought I might be ready for the how-are-we-going-to-pay-these-bills stage or maybe even the I-think-I-have-a-lump-in-my-breast stage. I wanted something more serious and important, but I didn’t know how to get it.

  Sharon and I weren’t quite finished. We had two more encounters. The first of these was just going through the motions, as if we’d lost something in the bedclothes. The second, her bottle was nearly empty when she showed up, and it was only then that I began to think that maybe she too was a little desperate and trying to salvage something. She stood in the middle of the room and pulled her sweater over her head, messing her hair and losing her balance so that she stumbled. I’d never been so drawn to her nor certain that I should not be.

  “You know what?” I lied. “I’m sick as a dog. You don’t want to get anywhere near me.” I drove her back to her house in her car and walked home. We both knew that it was over even though apparently neither of us wanted it to be. Funny how that works. I’ve known a couple women who I liked so much I wished I could love, and a couple more I liked so little that I wished I didn’t.

  The other thing I thought a lot about on my runs was Ike. He’d done it again. He’d stolen my girlfriend and left me standing there watching them walk away, just like in sixth grade. “I’m jealous of a dead man,” I told Greg. “What the hell did he have?”

  “I wish I knew.” Greg’s former wife, Alice, had taken up with a somewhat older guy who had some money. They had opened a bar and restaurant together, something she and Greg had often dreamed of doing, and it was all the rage. Greg couldn’t go there, and I didn’t because of him. Part of the reason was that I kept seeing parallels to my own situation; it was I, after all, who had cuckolded Ike.

  Greg and I sat in the Blue Moon at the bar or at Office Billiards or on one particularly bleak evening in the bowling alley drinking beer and feeling sorry for ourselves. “I think this guy must have a big wanger. Alice would love that. Did Ike have a big wanger?”

  “Not particularly. Average size.”

  “Course Sharon wouldn’t have known that anyway, would she? That wasn’t it, then.”

  No, what it was was ease. It was certainty and confidence, not in himself but in you. Ike believed in people, just about everyone but himself. That’s what it had been with me from the beginning. He believed that I had saved his life, that I could and would and did save his life one snowy morning when we were kids and I had come along on my sled and quite inadvertently knocked him out of the way of a skidding car. He believed in the inherent goodness of people. He believed in me and Greg and whatever scrawny girl he had his arm around and every black guy from the rural South in Vietnam and Sharon Novak. He believed in us so fiercely that it changed us. It changed us all. And any disappointment he ever felt took the form of concern. “I’m worried about you, Bill,” he said in high school. “We gotta get you laid,” or later, “I’m worried about you; you take things too seriously,” or when I didn’t anymore, “Isn’t anything serious to you?” But it was always because you weren’t living up to your own high standard, and he needed us to. Ike Lowell needed us to.

  That’s what I thought about it until I let myself remember the unsavory fact that Ike had started the fire that burned Sharon Postlewaite’s house, and then I didn’t know what to think. Ike was angry. He was suffering from shell shock. Maybe he thought he was running into battle when he ran into that burning house. Ike was delusional. Ike was hallucinating. Worst-case scenario, things got out of hand. He set the fire so he could save Sharon from her dull life and bad marriage, so he could save the kids, whisk them all away to live happily ever after and escape his demons in the process. He would put the fire out, be a hero, and step out of the shadows like Boo Radley. Okay, misguided and dangerous and desperate, but well-intentioned. No evil or malice involved. And after all, they all had gotten out. No harm came to anyone but himself.

  That’s how I thought about it until Charles Novak died. One morning there was just a little notice in the office at school saying that Sharon would be away for a few days because of “a death in the family.” The secretary told me about it. “Carbon monoxide poisoning, I guess. Colleague came to pick him up to go to the airport. Couldn’t rouse him. Found him inside.”

  That
changed everything. Sure, Charles Novak had been a bum, but now he was a dead bum, and Ike was the reason why. If Ike hadn’t started that fire, the chances were good that Sharon and Ike’s infatuation would have faded or passed. After all, isn’t that what happens to infatuation? Isn’t that what had happened to hers and mine? Ike would have slowly gotten better. Sharon would have realized it was all a fantasy; I thought of a couple of those that I’d had that were as titillating and intense as any of my real-life experiences and a good bit more. Charles’s affair would have ended as it in fact did. Maybe he and Sharon would have gotten some counseling. Probably they would have settled down and grown old together; Sharon said as much herself. Not perfect, but then, what is that isn’t a wet dream or some other fantasy? At least the kids would have a father. At least Charles and Sharon wouldn’t have ended up alone. At least Charles would be alive.

  But he wasn’t alive, and what had only been theoretical now became real. Ike had claimed his first true victim. And while I did not want the reason to be either my anger with Ike or my jealousy of him, I was also no longer comfortable with my secret. Sharon had to know the truth. She had a right to know, and I had a duty to tell her.

  Sharon’s house was dark for four days. Then I waited two more and called. “Can I come by? I need to tell you something.”

  We sat at a picnic table in the backyard while the kids watched TV inside. We could see the flickering images. There was no wine. “I got what I’m about to tell you from Greg,” I said. “He helped to write the story at the Courier; he was on the inside.” I told her about the mysterious substance the fire marshal had discovered, the FBI lab report, the top-secret designation. I told her that the only conclusion anyone could reach was that somehow Ike had brought the stuff home from Vietnam and used it to start the fire. I told her that Ike had no longer been the carefree boy whose photographs she’d seen in yearbooks and newspapers, that he’d lost forty pounds and was weak and washed out, that he was frightened and damaged. I described how he had trouble making eye contact, how his hand shook, how he couldn’t sleep and had nightmares. Some of this I exaggerated. The point I wanted to pound home when I started I now felt I should soften, but then it occurred to me that if I made Ike out to be too crazy, Sharon might think that I was saying that she was crazy too. It also occurred to me that maybe I was saying that, that maybe I wanted her to be, that I at least didn’t mind thinking of her as pathetic and lonely.