The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Let’s take a look.”

  When I renovated the bathroom I added a handcrafted sink.

  He pointed at the two oil paintings with his gun. “Tell me about the pictures.”

  The matched set of my niece’s worthless art-camp work gave me a chance to divert attention from the sink. “They are originals. A gift from my mother who passed away last year. Please . . . don’t destroy them.”

  “Ah, okay.” With a step back into the hallway he turned and fired into the sink.

  “No!” I lunged forward toward the sink, but there was no way to repair the damage.

  A large chunk of porcelain cracked and fell to the tile.

  The boy laughed. “Fancy sink, isn’t it? Worth much more than a couple of kids’ paintings.” He pointed at my forehead. “Looks like you got cut.”

  Sure enough, a look into the vanity mirror showed a cut above my left eye. Blood had started to drip down my cheek. I wiped it with my hand, smearing it along my face.

  I tried to hide my anger.

  In an attempt to distract him I asked, “Why were you chasing the dog?”

  He didn’t seem to hear me at first. Something seemed to distract him. Then he directed his attention at me again. “What?”

  “The dog you were chasing down the street. Why were you chasing it and trying to shoot it?”

  The boy ran his palm over the peach fuzz on his chin. “Damn thing barked at my car when I came to a stoplight. We fired a warning shot and he just stood in the middle of the road barking his head off. Wouldn’t get out of the way. I tried to run him down but he took off. What is it to you?”

  “I just wondered. Maybe he thought he was protecting his territory.”

  “He was just a crazy dog.”

  “Who made you mad.” I regretted the mistake as soon as I spoke.

  The boy’s face reddened. “Not as mad as you made me.” He spoke in a calm tone, without emotion but I could hear the threat.

  I had something more valuable than a sink to protect. Maybe if he destroyed enough of my possessions he would leave my family alone.

  He grabbed my arm and pushed me forward. “Show me the rest of the house.”

  At the end of the hall, we entered my office. Here he would think he had found a gold mine of possessions to destroy.

  “Nice monitor.”

  My thirty-four-inch Ultra Apple Monitor dominated my desk. Nabbed on eBay, I did love that monitor. Beside the monitor sat my scanner and an antique Waterford lamp with a large brass base, my first Brimfield Antique Show buy. The Hooker mahogany desk would be another alluring target. Behind the desk, placed against the wall, sat my curled cherry, hand-carved grand upright piano my mother and I had restored over a summer when I was fifteen. On the wall I had a handmade German windup clock with a big pendulum that rang a single chime with a deep, rich sound.

  The boy took his time examining each piece. “Your husband has two pianos?”

  “No,” I admitted. “This one is mine.”

  He fired into the elaborately carved fern in the middle of the piano. “I knew you played. You look like a piano teacher.”

  “I don’t play. I was saving the piano for my daughter.”

  The boy laughed. “Oops!” He turned and fired into the clock, severing the metal spring. Small metal disks clanged as the internal parts broke apart.

  He shot into the desk, then the monitor glass, laughing each time he destroyed something. He seemed to be having such a good time. When he ran out of bullets he reached inside his jeans’ pocket and pulled out a packet. He started to load the magazine without even bothering to watch me.

  I might not get another chance to try to escape and I had to escape before we went upstairs in search of my best-loved possessions.

  I didn’t have much time. I grabbed the lamp. The thing weighed almost ten pounds but it wasn’t too heavy for me to lift. Without trying to unplug it I swung the big brass base at the boy’s head like a baseball bat.

  I missed his head but hit the hand holding the gun and he dropped it onto the desk.

  The boy ducked, covering his head with his hands as I took another swing and missed again. I picked up the empty gun and ran toward the front door. He followed.

  I thought he would catch me, but as I got to the door I remembered he and his friend had left the door open.

  He chased me outside. Standing on the porch he screamed, “Come back or I’ll kill your family.”

  I knew better. To punish me, he needed me. That was my advantage. If I escaped, he would have to chase me and capture me. His game was to make me watch him destroy the things I loved. Without me to watch, he wouldn’t kill my family. He had already proved that by waiting for me to return to the house.

  Without the gun he had no weapon, so for the moment we were an even match. I had the gun. He had the bullets.

  What I needed was a weapon.

  I remembered the nail gun in the backyard. Too far away. Besides, the boy would catch me when I tried to jump the fence.

  In desperation I spun around looking for something, anything I could use to try and stop the boy.

  The only thing I could find was his Porsche.

  Turnabout was fair, right?

  I ran toward the car. “You think a smashed window was bad? You want to play smash things? Let’s smash your things now.”

  Massachusetts has lots of rocks. Plenty of rocks. In the spring they rise out of the ground we have so many. I picked up a good five-pounder and ran toward the Porsche.

  “No, get away from there. I’m warning you.” I could hear the panic in his voice.

  I held the rock over the car. “Get down on the ground. Put your hands over your head.”

  “Fuck you.” The boy ran toward me.

  I dropped the stone on the hood and ran down the driveway without a plan other than to escape. He was a lot faster than me, even in my prime.

  I picked up another stone and waited for him. Just as he reached me I threw the stone toward his foot, hoping to break a bone so he couldn’t run.

  I missed.

  He reached out and grabbed my left hand, then twisted my arm behind me. “So you like to throw stones, huh?”

  Looking past the boy I saw the dog inching forward as if stalking prey. Ears laid flat, hair on his back standing straight up, his snarl showing teeth, the dog took a position just out of reach of the boy.

  He began barking and barked and barked.

  The boy turned around and kicked at the dog, “Get out of here.”

  The dog just barked louder. Maybe he sensed the boy’s fear without the gun.

  It was all the distraction I needed. With my free hand, I reached under my shirt and pulled out my fishing knife, then ran at the boy and sunk the knife in his back.

  On his left side.

  Where I figured his heart should be.

  He sunk to the ground, moaning, then went silent. The dog inched toward the still body, barking louder than before.

  I ran for the open door. Back to my family and to call for help.

  I had thrown a rock to save a dog, and ended up killing two boys. Even as I rushed into the house I knew the boy had gotten what he wanted. He had destroyed something I valued almost as much as my family—that image I had of myself as a good, decent person, incapable of what I had just done.

  I would never look at myself the same, but my family survived.

  That was my payback.

  SUZANNE PROULX

  If You Say So

  from False Faces

  She’s way out of your league, a classy New York woman who would be unapproachable. Yet, remarkably, she approaches you.

  In the park, early spring. You’re out there with your DSLR and your tripod, concentrating on getting scenes with trees reflecting in the water, and the water reflecting the sky, so at first glance it’s a puzzle. The kind of thing someone would look at, and at first wouldn’t know what they were seeing. Maybe they had it upside down—then it would resolve and make
sense.

  It’s a tricky process, and you’re wrapped up in it, so you don’t even sense her presence until she speaks.

  “Are you taking pictures of me?”

  She’s the kind of woman people take pictures of. She’s perfect. She’s dressed probably fashionably, definitely expensively. She even smells expensive. She doesn’t exactly take your breath away, but for a moment she does take your words away.

  After an awkward couple of seconds you manage to answer. “Sure,” you croak. “I mean, I’m not—wasn’t—but I’ll take your picture. If you want me to.”

  “Yeah,” she says, and she smiles at you, a smile that makes you want to jump straight up, but you contain yourself. Then she says, “But you know what? I take better pictures when they’re candid.”

  You stand there dumbly, as if you don’t know what that word means. How are you supposed to take a candid shot of someone who’d just asked for a picture and she’s standing right there?

  “So I’ll just wander over there,” she says, indicating some trees in the opposite direction of the lake. “Do you have one of those big lenses? You look like you might have one of those big ones in your bag.” The way she says this, it sounds—well, provocative. A woman like this, anything could sound that way. But those specific words . . .

  Yeah, in fact you have a couple of different lenses in your bag. You have a lens the size of an elephant’s trunk, but not in this bag. And while you’re standing there, with your elephant’s trunk in your other bag, she walks away. You grab the biggest lens you have and aim the camera at her. At her back. She seems to sense it and turns half around and holds up her hands in a way that says stop! Her sleeves fall back to reveal that her gloves go up at least as far as her elbows.

  “Not yet,” she says. “Wait till I get over there.” She turns and keeps walking. The way a woman walks away from you when she knows you’re watching.

  She goes toward the trees and twirls around once without looking back. Click. She looks into her bag. Click. She aims her face to the sky. Click. She takes the sunglasses off, sits on a bench, crosses her legs, pulls something out of her bag, looks at it. Click, click, click. She stands, picks a piece of trash off the ground, drops it in a trash can. Everything she does, every pose, looks exactly like a picture in a magazine. And then, without even waving at you, she melts away.

  There was supposed to be more. Pictures, then phone numbers, perhaps some more flirting. Instead, it’s like the whole thing never happened. Like a magical interlude that took place only in your head.

  But then, there are the pictures. You stick the camera in the bag and head for where you saw her last, but she’s gone.

  After that you can’t go back to shooting landscapes. You head home, or what’s passing for home this week. As you walk, you think about how, in your mind, the situation had been so full of promise. You fantasized things, simple things to be sure (getting her number), more complex things (walking into a restaurant with her, nibbling on her neck), impossible things.

  Why did she pick you? Of course, it isn’t immediately apparent that when you’re not house-sitting, you crash at your sister’s place in Queens, or that your current job, in addition to house-sitting, consists of walking people’s dogs. Maybe you looked prosperous. Maybe you didn’t look like a twenty-one-year-old with no niche in the world. A person who once wanted to be a tattoo artist, but then realized that would mean you’d have to get a tattoo and you didn’t want one. Or maybe a wedding photographer, only you didn’t think you had the temperament to put up with brides.

  You don’t think of yourself as the type that even normal, ordinary, girl-next-door types would approach, because they never have.

  And if you thought she was flirting with you, you were dead wrong. You’ll probably never see her again.

  Of course you’re going to keep your eyes open. Walking the dogs in the park, you’re going to pass by that bench and look at it, and she won’t be there. Instead there’ll be an old woman, feeding the pigeons. You think you see her in a crowd, but by the time you get close enough to know for sure, either it’s not her, or the person you thought was her is gone.

  When you head to your sister’s to check your mail, you show her the pictures, and you ask her, without going into a lot of detail, if maybe this is somebody famous, recognizable.

  “I’m flattered that you think I can recognize every midlevel celebrity or fashion icon,” Diane says, scrolling through the photos. “But, no.” Diane shakes her head. “But she’s too old for you anyway.” You didn’t even ask that, but she sensed it.

  “I know that,” you say. “Also completely, just stratospherically out of my league. Wait, she’s not that old.”

  “She’s rich,” Diane says. “Did you say she was tall?”

  “Shorter than me.” This makes her not exceptionally tall.

  “So probably not a model. And in those clothes, she’s either, hmm . . . married to an old rich guy, or maybe she has rich parents, but either way . . .”

  “I know. Out of my league.”

  “I was going to say, plenty able to pay for a photo session.”

  You want to protest. But she was coming on to me.

  “Maybe she’s just really good at shopping,” you say. “Like, at thrift stores. Getting things for free.”

  “Sure,” Diane says. “Maybe she’s homeless. Maybe she could crash at your place. Oh wait, no. How were you supposed to get those pictures back to her anyway?”

  “Yeah,” you say. “Good question.”

  “What happens in the Forest of Arden, stays in the Forest of Arden,” Diane says, as if Central Park is a magical forest and the whole episode is only your fantasy.

  Still you go on, looking for her, aware that she’s out there somewhere. She’s changed the way you look at things. Where once you looked for architectural incongruence, or ironic juxtapositions of cityscape and nature, now you look at people. Of course, you’re looking for her and not really at anyone else. Time passes, you lose hope.

  And then, maybe three weeks later, you see her again. You’re just done with your late-morning dog walk. It’s raining buckets, cold drops finding their way under your poncho and sliding down your back. You’re dodging umbrellas and ducking under and then out of canopies, trying not to get too soaked, and she’s under one of the canopies.

  You don’t even know what made you glance up at just the right time. The first thing you register is, she has on gloves again, red ones. You stop abruptly, someone runs into you, curses, apologizes. She looks straight at you. You look back. A moment of shock. And you go on. For half a block. Then, as if she mesmerized you to do it, you go into the drugstore, buy an umbrella—a day like this, they have them right up front—walk outside, and open it before you head back.

  She’s waiting, as if she knew you were going to buy her an umbrella. You pass the umbrella to her under a waterfall of rain, and she takes it and gives you that smile. Which gives you courage to speak.

  “I’ve got your pictures. How should I send them to you?”

  “You have them here?”

  “Not here.” In fact the camera is with you, the camera bag under your poncho making you look like a hunchback, but you don’t want it to get wet. “I could email them to you.”

  “Can you text them to me? I don’t email.”

  “Sure,” you say. “What’s your number?” You pull out your phone. Don’t care if it gets wet.

  “Buy me a beer first.”

  After a bright burst of hope and happiness, you take her to a place on Eighth where you can get a free hot dog with a beer, if you want. She only wants the beer.

  “Took you long enough to find me,” she says, in that same tone she used when she asked if you were taking her picture.

  “You just disappeared.”

  She moves her hands around as if shaping the air. “Well, I figured you’d find me if you were interested, and you seemed interested.” She spirals her hand down and caresses her beer. You note
that she hasn’t taken those gloves off, which seems odd.

  What else is wrong with this picture? Guys like you don’t get to sit in bars with women who look like this. But you’re not going to question it.

  “I didn’t picture you as a beer kind of girl,” you say.

  “Woman,” she corrects.

  “Sorry. I didn’t picture you as—”

  “Oh, so you did picture me.” She gazes into your eyes. You sit up straighter and become aware of your breathing. “You thought about me.”

  You nod.

  “But you didn’t try to find me.”

  “I thought I saw you everywhere,” you say. The words rush out. You didn’t mean to say them, but they keep coming until she stops you.

  “You still haven’t given me your number.”

  “Okay,” you say. “Here, it’s—”

  “Write it down for me,” she says. “I don’t write things down.”

  You pat your pockets, thinking you have a pen somewhere but no paper. In the end you borrow a pen from the bartender and write your number on a napkin. She takes it, stashes it somewhere, and takes a big swig of her beer. You love the way she drinks beer. It’s so unlike the rest of her image.

  “I’ll call you,” she says. As she talks she makes motions with her hands, as if she’s casting a spell. Or weaving a web to catch you in. “Just for what it’s worth, I am a romantic. I like it when people write poetry about me, if they’re so moved.”

  “I—I’m a photographer.”

  “You said you saw me everywhere. That’s the kind of thing I like to hear. It was almost a poem, the way you said that.” She takes another less-than-dainty gulp of her beer.

  “Okay, I—”

  “Should I happen to call you, you can’t call me back,” she says. “I don’t answer the phone. I do read texts. I don’t text back, but I might read them, if they’re worthy. If you sent a poem for each one of the photographs that you took.” She stands, drains her beer. You stand when she does.

  “Oh, finish your drink,” she says. “And thank you for the umbrella.” She picks it up. “Red’s my favorite color. For an umbrella.” And she sweeps out. You start after her, but the bartender reminds you that you owe for the drinks.