The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

by Jonathan Lethem

  When she looked at Christian again, he was watching her while drinking the last of the water, some of it running down his chin.

  As she tucked herself back into what little shade the roof of the bridge provided, Christian closed his eyes.

  A smell was coming off him, the smell he had when he was angry or excited, and it made her want to gag.

  She had hoped for a lot of things on this trip, but mostly to feel secure in her choice of him and that he took their relationship seriously, but she realized, as she’d suspected after meeting his mother, that he took nothing seriously except his own wants. She could be easily replaced; she doubted he’d spend much time mourning her loss.

  She closed her eyes for a few minutes, fighting back tears, although the hopelessness that had welled up in her as she stared out train windows had worn away. Things had festered for too long. Maud had learned, growing up, that there was a point of no return, when things or people couldn’t be saved.

  Her grandmother had raised her after her parents died in a car accident when she was seven, and although she was good to Maud, she made the girl traipse around the island they lived on to help care for the sick and dying.

  Eleanor healed people, not with a laying-on of hands like a pseudo-Christ but with poultices and ointments, drafts and brews her father had taught her to make. Maud looked at wounds, with their murky gray infections and skin as fragile as tissue paper, and applied hot cloths that allowed the infections to flow out of the skin like undammed rivers. She lifted people’s heads and forced liquid between their lips, and when she protested because of the rattling sounds and the stench, her grandmother’s withering look was worse than anything confronting Maud in strange beds.

  People who could not be saved whispered in Eleanor’s ear, and, nodding, she patted a shoulder or an arm.

  “I will keep them,” she said of the sins they gave her to hold, and the dying fell back on their pillows, relaxing into death.

  The people Eleanor would not save she still watched over until their bodies succumbed to the sickness that marched through their minds. Those people whispered their sins to her too, sweeping the filth from their souls into hers.

  “Some people are diseased long before sickness takes hold of the flesh,” she said. “With them, it’s right to turn a blind eye.”

  When a body had been healed or was stilled by death, Eleanor stripped the bed and then swept the floor.

  It was soothing to see everyday life continue after illness, trauma, or death.

  “These too are part of life, but we pretend they won’t happen until our luck runs out or fate takes hold.”

  Eleanor had been training Maud to take over healing, but Maud wasn’t strong like her, she told her grandmother. She wanted to turn a blind eye to all of it.

  “Sooner or later you won’t be able to do that,” Eleanor said, and didn’t speak to Maud again until she whispered her own sins in her granddaughter’s ear.

  Maud sat forward in her chair.

  “There was no place to sit in the little room downstairs, so we were stuck outside, on that bench. I told Christian we were going to miss the train to Vienna and he ignored me for hours after that.”

  There was a window in the room where Maud and the officer sat. Later she watched another officer at the front desk stand up and press at his hair when Christopher Albrecht arrived. She recognized him from a photograph in Christian’s wallet. Albrecht’s face was red, and for a moment she wondered if this man who talked about collapsing economies might be collapsing himself, but he strode forward in the way powerful people did, aware of and enjoying the fact that others watched them in a guarded, almost frightened way.

  “There are some people it is best not to cross,” Eleanor had said before she died.

  Yes, Maud thought, watching Albrecht advance, there are.

  He wore a pale gray suit, and when he got to the room, Maud noticed the teal-blue loafers on his feet. His fingernails shone. Although he extended his hand to the officer, he didn’t take his eyes off Maud.

  “What do we know?” he said, sitting in a chair, facing them.

  Maud looked away, watching a cleaning woman sweep the hall floor. The sound of corn bristles along the wooden boards was soothing. She knew she should focus on the two men, but the way the woman’s arms moved the broom, just enough to gather the dirt, back and forth, back and forth . . . she wanted to sleep, but Christopher Albrecht tapped his fingers faster and faster on the table until she looked back at him.

  The room that she and Christian had in Zurich was at the end of a hall with tattered blue carpeting. He liked the stark furnishings—a bed, table, and two straight-backed chairs—because they reminded him of boarding school in England, before his father had enough of Labour politics and emigrated to Canada. Even the lumpy mattress welcomed him to sleep when he was done with Maud, while she stayed awake, trying to tamp down the fear that threatened to choke her.

  He had become obsessed with sex, relentless in pushing her to accept his advances at strange moments and in strange places. This trip had unleashed something in him, something that he seemed to keep harnessed at home, although there had been moments back there that the harness loosened and she felt herself shift from excitement to fear. The loosening of what had made him seem gentle and kind made her realize how badly she’d failed at judging him, and this frightened her more than anything.

  In the room next to theirs was a man from Hamburg who introduced himself as Gerhardt. His breath was sour as he leaned close to Maud when he sat down next to her.

  The waitress scowled, struggling to fit breakfast on the table, and Maud thought she saw Gerhardt’s fingers brush against the woman’s skirt before shaking Christian’s hand.

  “He used to make dirty movies,” Christian said later, squeezing Maud’s elbow as they headed out for the day. “Inviting girls back to his apartment and then going at it.”

  Maud pulled her arm away.

  “It’s only sex, for Christ’s sake. If they all wanted to, what’s the problem?”

  “I can’t see women wanting to, with him. He makes my skin crawl.”

  “Well, my uncle liked what he did well enough. He told me he used to get Gerhardt to make movies with him, before the Internet made it so easy to find whatever you wanted. You can see some of the movies online now, although he isn’t too happy about that, since he became interested in politics.”

  Maud felt her stomach lurch.

  “These dark places on the Internet keep all the sins now. They never disappear.”

  “Why is he here?” she said.

  Christian smiled. “I guess to enjoy himself, like me.”

  Christopher Albrecht watched, waiting for a confession or at least an acknowledgment that she hadn’t watched out for his nephew, who had brought her here and paid for everything.

  Well, she had paid too, and that payment was becoming horribly clear as she pieced the fragments together: the sunset reflecting on something metal over by the window in their room, the sudden feeling that her legs would not hold her up any longer, plastic glasses on the bedside table, hands, too many hands, on her arms, fingers undoing the buttons of her sweater, sour breath.

  She closed her eyes.

  “What happened?” Christopher Albrecht repeated, and when she looked at him she wanted to shout, You know what happened, but instead said again, “He drowned in the lake.”

  “But how can that be all you know? Didn’t you see him hanging on to the gate?”

  “I had passed out,” she said and was certain then, from the same eagerness in his eyes that she had seen in Christian’s yesterday at breakfast, that he knew everything that had happened to her. He’d already seen it.

  “Passed out,” he said.

  “Yes, passed out.”

  In the hall, the sweeping had stopped. The cleaning woman sank against the wall and sighed, although it might have been Maud herself sighing.

  Her shoulders ached. She rubbed at the base of her throat
, trying to erase the spot they couldn’t stop looking at.

  “It was a mistake,” Christian had said before she got up off the bench to throw up.

  “What was a mistake?” she asked, but he didn’t answer.

  “When I came to I had to piece together what happened,” she said.

  “And you have now pieced things together,” Christopher Albrecht said.

  “Yes, I have.” Maud stroked the scratches on her hand. “I pieced things together,” she said and stood up, looking at the officer. “I’d like to call my embassy now.”

  The officer nodded.

  “This is not finished,” Christopher Albrecht said, but uncertainty had crept into his voice.

  Maud turned away.

  In the hall, the cleaning woman took Maud’s arm and drew her close, whispering in her ear.

  Maud nodded and followed the officer down the hall.

  The sweeping began again, drowning out Christian’s whispering, his mouth so dry he could hardly speak, begging her for help as she’d loosened his fingers from the gate. By the time she picked up the phone to call the embassy, she couldn’t hear him anymore. He’d quietly floated away.

  REED JOHNSON

  Open House

  from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

  Today her father’s name is Ismail, and he will be second cousin to a Saudi prince. Her name, the one she picked out for herself earlier that morning at the breakfast table as they read over the real-estate circulars, is Scheherazade. She likes the sound it makes. Her real name is Nino, plain Nino, and she is twelve years old, dark-haired, and wears flecked nail polish and low-top canvas sneakers that she’s decorated with a blue ballpoint pen.

  The two of them, father and daughter, are on their way to an open house across town. It’s the first Saturday in March, the weather warm for Massachusetts, and the sun dazzles through the leafless trees. The smell of wet grass and pavement warms the air, and overhead, swallows fly by them, their wings making the sound of cards being shuffled.

  “This one,” her father says, stopping on the sidewalk.

  The house, a brick-fronted Federal with a three-car garage, is flanked by ornamental shrubs that are bound up in burlap for the winter. Two balloons are tethered to the FOR SALE sign out front, bumping and twirling in the spring breeze. As they turn up the walk, Nino’s father seems for a moment to consider taking her hand, then doesn’t. He’s been more tentative than usual with her lately, more uncertain of her likes and dislikes. He sees her only on the weekends, and then not all of them, and she’s grown this year like a time-lapse seedling before his eyes. The days she is with him seem to be a source of both anticipation and anxiety for him. Each Saturday morning, he worries the events section of the local paper like a Talmudic scholar, looking for activities to pass the time with her, various fun things they can do together without spending any money, and this gives their time together a certain desperation, as if their only goal is to avoid becoming washed up on the shoals of late afternoon with the two of them sitting on the couch in his efficiency apartment, looking at each other with panicked blankness. It’s not that father and daughter have nothing to say to each other. But these exchanges, when they occur, tend to have an excruciating artificiality, like the questioning of a prisoner by an awkward and unwilling interrogator. Fun activities are better; on this they are both agreed.

  Inside the house, father and daughter are greeted by the real-estate agent, a large woman with black curly hair who wears a necklace made of flat gold links fitted together like vertebrae. She chats brightly as she shows them through the rooms—the sweep of living room, the Italian marble countertops of the kitchen, the “solahrium”—and Nino’s father casually manages to drop a word or two about his cousins, the Saudi royals, with a sly look in Nino’s direction. In actual fact he’s from outside Tbilisi, capital of the Republic of Georgia, and most of his relatives are farmers and shopkeepers. But something about him makes the story believable: his accent, maybe, the soft-spoken schoolbook English he speaks, or the suit and tie he’s wearing, his dark hair and skin and eyes, which are cupped in mournful circles. He emanates quiet respectability. He’s in the market for a house, he tells the agent, where he can stay when he’s visiting his daughter, Scheherazade, who will be attending a private school in Boston in the fall.

  “Wonderful,” the agent says, then turns to Nino. “Which school is it?”

  Nino stares at her for a second or two, her mind empty. “Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters,” she says at last.

  The agent makes an impressed sound. Which means she must never have had stepbrothers who kept her supplied with X-Men comic books, as Nino does, otherwise she’d know that Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters is an institution for mutant superheroes. Nino feels pleased with her little lie. It gives her a guilty feeling of superiority, the thought that she is smarter for having deceived an adult.

  But it’s not deception, her father would tell her. It’s pretending. Nobody is hurt by make-believe. He makes it seem like a lark, like they are going to these open houses for free entertainment, but Nino understands that they fill some deeper need in him. Back in Tbilisi, before she was born, before he and her mother came to the U.S., he was a cardiologist, a respected man, someone to whom patients came for advice and treatment. Here he works weekday nights as a home nurse for an elderly Dominican woman named Elvira, whose son pays him in cash and doesn’t ask for a Social Security number. All week long he attends to her wants and needs, and when the weekend comes, he wants someone to attend to his. He likes being courted by the real-estate agents, enjoys their hovering attentions.

  The real-estate agent excuses herself to go and greet a young couple who have just come inside. Nino heads for the refreshment table, always the best part of these open houses. She peels back the cling wrap tented over the food trays and eyes the block of marble-veined blue cheese and browning apple slices. She helps herself to a gherkin. Her hunger has lately become bottomless. As she eats, she’s listening to the conversation across the room between the agent and the young couple. The wife, mishearing the agent, wants to know what a Finnish basement is. Does it have a sauna? The man interrupts to ask about a sump pump. Nino doesn’t know what a sump pump is, but she likes the sound of it. She tries it out in her mouth: sump pump, sump pump. One of those mechanical objects whose name is also the sound it makes while operating. What are some others? She’s concentrating on coming up with more, and so she doesn’t hear the lull in the conversation across the room, and that the real-estate agent is now addressing her. She wants to know if Nino and her father have signed the guest book. Nino looks around. Her father is nowhere in sight.

  “Not yet,” Nino answers, spotting the guest book on the table. She sticks a wedge of apple she’s holding into her mouth—it’s too big, and hurts the roof of her mouth when she bites down—and signs their made-up names in the book. Over the column marked ADDRESS, she pauses, pen hovering, then writes down the first address that comes into her mind, which is her father’s. Where is he, anyway? She ducks into the living room. The husband of the couple is inspecting a closet. “Hollow-core doors,” he says to himself, rapping on it with his knuckles in the confident manner of a male evaluating something outside his area of expertise.

  Nino grabs another apple slice from the tray on her way through the dining room, then wanders upstairs to look for her father. She has this habit that she can’t help, this way of moving soundlessly from one place to another. If she had any superpower, it would be this—the ability to creep up on people in total silence. It makes adults nervous. Shane, her stepfather, calls it skulking. But she doesn’t mean to; it’s just the way that she moves.

  She finds her father in the master bedroom. He’s standing in front of the mirror over the room’s dresser.

  “Hi,” she says.

  Her father jumps in surprise at her voice. There’s a strange expression on his face, a flushing of his cheeks, as if she’s caught him doing something he should
n’t be.

  He opens his mouth to say something, but at this moment the real-estate agent comes into the room, out of breath from the stairs.

  “Here you are,” she says. “Have you seen the his-and-hers sinks?”

  The following afternoon Nino is sitting in her father’s galley kitchen and reading a Piers Anthony novel, her socked feet propped up on the hot radiator, when the doorbell rings. “Door,” she says.

  “What?” her father calls from the bathroom.

  “Nothing, I’ll get it,” she says, getting up from her chair and unfastening the door chain. Standing in the spring sunshine outside are two police officers. One is an older white man with a graying mustache and heavy jowls, the other is a small and smooth-faced Latina with her hair pulled back into a bun.

  “Is Mr. Gelashvili in?” the woman asks.

  “He’s in the bathroom,” Nino says.

  “Are you his daughter?” the older man asks her.

  Nino nods. And because she doesn’t know what else to do, and because the outside air is cold against her ankles, she opens the door wider and silently stands aside to let them in. The two officers stand awkwardly in the tiny kitchen, their boots leaking puddles on the yellowing linoleum, their jackets brushing against each other with a rustling sound.

  “Did you say something, Nanuka?” her father calls from the hallway. He comes into the kitchen with shaving cream on his neck and stops short in the doorway.

  “Can I help you?” he says to the officers.

  “Mr. Gelashvili? Were you at an open house the other day?”

  Her father doesn’t move from the doorway. “Why?”

  The woman officer explains. There was a theft during the open house. Some valuable personal items, including heirloom jewelry, were taken from the owners’ bedroom during the day. The police are questioning everyone who was at the event. “We have a search warrant for your home,” she says, unfolding a piece of paper and putting it on the counter.