The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

by Jonathan Lethem

  But they would not arrive for a little while, so Rebecca went inside the cabin. Not wanting to waste a match, she pulled a half-burned piece of kindling from the fire and walked to the barn. Nine years, Rebecca thought, remembering how Ezra was already kicking in her belly when she and Aaron had arrived from Buncombe County. The cabin had been here but not the barn. Ira had come first to help build it, then others bringing axes and oxen. In a week the barn had been built. She remembered Aaron’s warning the night before he left for Asheville—Always say Union.

  A thick matting of straw lay in an empty stall. Rebecca dropped the kindling and soon flames spilled into the adjoining stalls before laddering up gate posts and beams. Only when flame blossomed in the loft did Rebecca leave. Frost still limned the ground and that was a blessing. It would keep the fire from spreading.

  When she returned to the cabin, Rebecca opened the firkin and saw Colonel Allen had not put the button back. It could have been placed inside a mud chink where it would have been impossible to find. Not even his button, not even that, she thought as she took out the letters and held them before the flames. Foolish not to have done it before, Rebecca knew, and told herself to open her hand and let them go.

  But she couldn’t, so Rebecca put them in the firkin and placed it back in the cubbyhole. She went back outside and saw that the barn had crumpled except for the locust beams. The thick smoke that had clouded the sky minutes before was now no more, signaling that the Seccesh were now gone.

  By the time Ira and Brice arrived, the fire would be no more than a smolder. The two men would kick the ashes, hoping to find a locust beam with only its surface charred. They’d douse the beam with water from the spring and drag it from the rubble. The Ledford and Hampton men would arrive next and soon after whole families. The Galloways and Smiths, then the Moores and the Sheltons. The remaining chickens would have to be saved for their eggs, so there would be no meat come winter, but the women would bring peas and potatoes enough to get the three of them through the winter. Men would bring axes as well as muskets and rifles. The surrounding woods would sound like a battlefield as the cold metal struck in the early November air. All day the women would cook and tend fires. Children would gather kindling and scuff among ashes for the iron nails that had secured the shingles. Everyone would work until dusk, then return the next day to help more. Ira Wilkey might or might not say We will get through this together but that was understood. They were neighbors.

  AMANDA REA

  Faint of Heart

  from One Story

  I. June, 1969

  That morning, Nora Stevens left a sink full of breakfast dishes and walked outside to investigate the barking of her father’s dog. It was an old dog, one that hadn’t mellowed with age, and many nights it had kept them awake barking at a strip of tin flapping against the barn, or coyotes singing in the distance, their voices carried on the wind. It was a terrible summer for wind, even for southern Colorado. It wailed down the river bottom and blew grit into everybody’s eyes. It made hairdos impossible. Many women Nora’s age still wore bouffants, and she planned to wear one herself at her wedding to Ron Whitehead in the fall—a voluminous updo half-hidden by a shoulder-length veil. She’d planned it down to the last detail. Having reached the age of twenty-six unclaimed and having grown up without a mother to instruct her in beauty and manners, she felt a certain duty to prove herself as a bride, to show Ron’s family she was as sweet and ordinary as any other girl he might’ve wed. In this campaign the wind had begun to feel like a sentient foe. It would rip the veil right out of her hair. It would howl around the church like wolves.

  At her approach, the dog didn’t calm down. In fact, it got louder, interrupting one bark with another until she swatted its head with her open hand.

  “Quiet, Rascal!” she said. Her father’s dogs were always named Rascal—a long line of them going all the way back to his boyhood. This one was barking at its own doghouse.

  Sighing, she bent to look through the little arched doorway. She didn’t expect to find anything inside, really—a cornered skunk at the very worst. But there in the darkness she discerned the form of a huddled child.

  She stood, cinching her housecoat around her. There was no reason for a child to be on the property, much less in the doghouse. There weren’t any neighbors nearby, nobody but old Tobias in his shack at the bottom of the hill, decrepitly tending his long-haired goats. The nearest school was a twenty-minute drive and it was summer besides.

  She hunched down, hoping her eyes had played a trick on her. But there they were again: a pair of muddied knees encircled by plump child-arms, and below that, two small pale feet.

  Nora’s heart was thundering. For a moment, she thought it might not be a child at all but some deformed and naked night-thing, an unearthly being she didn’t even believe existed and yet suddenly feared. The dog nosed at her elbow.

  “Hello?” she managed. “Who’s in there?”

  The child began to cry—a soft, pitiful sound. The dog began barking again, with such alarm that Nora finally took hold of its scruff and dragged it into the house. There she buttered a slice of bread with a shaking hand and as an afterthought, sprinkled it with sugar.

  Back outside, she knelt a few feet from the doghouse.

  “Are you hungry? I’ve brought some bread. There’s water in the house—do you want me to get some water?”

  She waited, but no answer came. She heard shuffling from within the doghouse, and a set of palms appeared on the plywood.

  It was a girl—three or four years old, if Nora had to guess, potbellied and chubby-cheeked, naked except for a pair of dingy white underwear. Her hair was tangled, and on her knees there were streaks of something brown that Nora later would recognize as dried blood. The child crouched just outside the doghouse, rubbing one eye with a dirty fist.

  Slowly, Nora extended the bread.

  The child’s eyes were big and turned down at the edges in a way that might’ve looked merry when she smiled but now gave her an appearance of sad wisdom. She glanced left and right, presumably in search of the dog, and seeing it gone she bolted straight across the dry patch of ground, right through the outstretched bread and into the warm center of Nora’s body.

  Nora gasped. She tried to hold her at arm’s length, and to remind her of the bread, which was now smashed between them, butter on the girl’s neck and in her hair. “Now, now,” Nora said, “stop that—let’s not—you mustn’t—” But the child clung with fierce hands, gripping and pinching and climbing until her legs were wrapped tight around Nora’s waist. It was all Nora could do to regain her feet.

  “My God,” she said, hoisting the child with her forearms. “My God in heaven.”

  She hurried toward the field, where her father’s tractor was making its way along the east fence. He saw her coming and shut the engine off. For once there was no wind.

  Anita Dewey was the girl’s name. She lived two miles south, on a rambling property covered in scrub oak. Her family didn’t farm—her father was a welder, and their acreage was strewn with car parts and metal structures that stuck up out of the weeds like dinosaur bones. You couldn’t see their house from the county road unless you knew just where to look.

  Anita had gone missing, along with her brother Gerald, from a summer barbecue the day before. It was somebody’s birthday and people had gathered to celebrate in the Dewey family’s backyard. Smoke drifted from a charcoal grill fashioned by Mr. Dewey himself. Men in flannel shirts hunkered around a card game, drinking beer, while women shuttled food to a large and shrieking group of children. They were climbing up and rolling down a hill at the edge of the yard, dry grass clinging to their hair. Country music blared from the house—loud when the door opened, muffled when it slammed.

  It was late afternoon when Mrs. Dewey noticed her kids were gone. She stood in the middle of the yard looking all around. She wasn’t worried yet—they were at their own house, after all, and there were plenty of older cousins to look after
the little ones. Surely they were around here somewhere.

  That’s when a little girl tugged her arm. She said she’d seen Anita and Gerald leaving with an older boy.

  “What older boy?”

  A big one, she said. Carrying a green bag over his shoulder. She pointed in the direction he’d gone, down a trail through the tall weeds and over a big log that bridged the creek. He’d had Gerald on one hip, while Anita had walked alongside him, holding his hand.

  As it turned out, the mother of the older boy was sitting nearby. Her name was Linda LeDivic, and when she heard that her son—who owned an army rucksack, and had it with him that day—had gone off with the Dewey children, she stood so abruptly she overturned her plate. Her soda fizzed away into the grass. She was a shy woman with a soft voice people often strained to hear, but that day she spoke up loud so there could be no mistake.

  “We’d better find them quick,” she said.

  All this, Nora learned later.

  She learned the children’s names from the postmistress and heard the rucksack described by the man who helped her father with the farm equipment. She found out about Mrs. LeDivic from a teacher at the school where she worked that summer as a substitute. And she was told the contents of the rucksack (a crushed pack of Pall Malls, a notebook filled with strange drawings, and a noose made from thick rope) from her fiancé, Ron, who’d been called not long after the children disappeared to join the search party. It took the sheriff more than an hour to get there, and by that time half the men in the county had gone vigilante.

  In pairs and groups of three, they fanned out from the Dewey place, shouting the children’s names. But after an hour or two they settled into a grim silence, each man fearing what he might find. Meanwhile, the LeDivic boy’s mother was collapsed on the Dewey’s couch in a fit of hysteria, with a couple of neighbor women trying to help her breathe—behavior that comforted nobody.

  They found the boy’s shirt first, about half a mile from the Dewey’s backyard: small and blue, hanging in the high weeds. The boy was lying a short distance away. Naked in the yellow evening light, he looked so much like a corpse that Mr. Dewey dropped to his knees like he’d been shot. The noose was still thick around the child’s neck, and scattered nearby were bits of bark and splintered wood from the limb that had snapped above him by the grace of God. He was bruised and cold, but he was alive, and there was a great bustle of activity to get him home to his mother, and then on to the hospital in town.

  But as darkness gathered, Anita was still missing. Her father and the other men walked the fields and forests, calling her name. The police were also searching by then, but Mr. Dewey kept apart from them, running ahead, unable to bear their stern and pitying faces, which seemed to say already how it would end, how it always ended. He wanted to be the one to find her, to cover her up, to shield her from their eyes.

  “I still don’t know why you didn’t call me that night,” Nora complained to Ron, a week after she found the girl. “There was a missing child, not to mention a madman on the loose, and you couldn’t be bothered to pick up the telephone?”

  Ron shrugged. They were in the backseat of his old Plymouth, Nora lying with her head in his lap while he sipped from a bottle of bourbon. He had one elbow out the window, which let in the cool evening air, and there were crickets singing in the weeds along the edge of the road.

  “Aren’t too many telephones out behind the Dewey place,” he said. “And like I said, I didn’t get home till half past two.”

  “Well, you could’ve called anyway. You might’ve saved me a lot of worry.”

  “That I doubt.”

  Nora sighed. “I just keep thinking of what a long night it must’ve been for that little girl. I can’t even bring myself to imagine it.”

  But in fact she couldn’t stop imagining it. She thought about the child wandering the dark countryside, stumbling over rocks and through skunkbrush. She heard the crack of the branch that saved the boy from hanging, and the dull thudding of the little girl’s feet as she made her escape. She wondered whether LeDivic had spoken to the children while he tried to hang them, and what he might’ve said, and whether the children had cried for their mother or gone mute with shock. All week, thoughts like these had driven her to distraction. She’d burned herself on the stove and left the front door standing open. She’d pricked her fingers while tailoring her mother’s old wedding dress. Maybe it was the surprise she couldn’t shake—the fact that something so terrible could happen on an average day, like a curtain lifting to reveal some grim other world rubbing up against this one, then falling shut before she could fully apprehend it. She couldn’t forget how the child had clung to her while they waited for the sheriff to arrive, or the way she’d smelled—like creek water and musty earth.

  Now, when she felt Ron fumbling with the buttons of her shirt, she pushed his hand away. She was thinking about the way Mr. Dewey had wept when he came to retrieve the girl, how he’d grabbed her out of Nora’s arms so abruptly you’d have thought Nora was the kidnapper. She wanted to talk about this—about all of it—but she’d already told Ron everything at least twice.

  “Maybe we could forget that deal for tonight,” Ron said. “Give yourself a break.”

  But how could she forget? How could she be expected to return to normal life, to fooling around in the backseat of Ron’s car, as though nothing extraordinary had happened? If finding a kidnapped child in a doghouse didn’t give a person pause, whatever would?

  Not to mention how often people asked about it. Given her role, she was expected to have some insight. “How are you holding up?” the women asked, reaching out to give her arm a gentle squeeze. “You must’ve had quite the scare!” Men were more irreverent, though no less nosy. “Well, if it isn’t the big hero!” Or, “How’s life in the limelight?”

  Nora understood they weren’t really asking after her. What they wanted was the grim particulars. They wanted to hear about the child’s terrible shivering, which started right after Nora and her father got her inside and could not be stopped by blankets or sips of warm broth. They wanted to hear about her underwear stiff with urine and her ankle swelled with cactus needles. They wanted to know what exactly LeDivic had done. What exactly the child had told her.

  The inconvenient fact was this: the child had revealed nothing. Aside from asking for her brother once, she hadn’t spoken at all, and by the time the police arrived she was just staring out the window at the shapes of the trees. The sheriff and his deputy were no more forthcoming, and in the end Nora and her father were left to piece things together from the newspaper, just like everybody else.

  Local Teen Abducts Two Children, Tries to Hang One.

  Hanged Boy Recovering from Injuries.

  Trial Begins in Abduction and Hanging Case.

  Alongside every story, the newspaper ran the same grainy photo of Clay LeDivic. At first glance he looked just like any other young man, smiling for what must have been a school photographer. His forehead was wide and smooth, partially covered by a swoop of sandy hair, but his eyebrows were so blond they looked more like blank places where eyebrows had been peeled away. This gave him a startled appearance and drew attention to his eyes, which were small and dark, like buttons. He was only fifteen, but if Nora stared at him long enough she saw a quiet, adult menace.

  Woman Who Found Escaped Child Speaks Out.

  Of all the articles, this one saw the most wear. Nora cut it out and saved it along with the other clippings in a kitchen drawer, reading it so many times the paper went soft and pliant. It was exhilarating to see her own words in print, and to read them as though she were someone else, an average person picking up the paper, drawn in by her account. I knew there was something wrong from the moment I heard the dog barking. I could just feel it. And when I saw that child, there was no doubt in my mind she’d been running for her very life.

  In the accompanying photo, Nora sat on the porch steps, hands folded in her lap, hair pulled over one shoulder. Sh
e wore a skirt she now regretted, but her expression was appropriately resolute, and the black-and-white gave her a kind of gravity, as though she knew all the world’s tricks and wasn’t about to be taken in by them.

  It was hard to say what Ron Whitehead had seen in her. But whatever it was, he’d seen it right away. They were at a Grange Hall dance, Nora with her girlfriend Marjorie, who was homely to the point of painful but always scheming after this or that bachelor, and Ron playing chaperone to one of his big-boned sisters. He was passing Nora’s table, and then suddenly he wasn’t—he stood there gaping at her, so that the first thing Nora noticed about him, rather than his sunburned nose or his thick farmboy’s hands, was his interest.

  Next to her, Marjorie squealed. Then she commenced whispering wetly into her ear what Nora already knew: that Ron was the eldest son of the Whitehead family, which was large and well-regarded. In fact, they were everywhere you looked, volunteering at church, parading their livestock around the county fair—broad-chested, rosy-cheeked, loud-laughing Whiteheads. Nora had never attended football games in high school, but according to Marjorie, Ron had been something to see on the field. He’d also dated the prettiest girls. His disinclination to marry any of them after graduation had made him all the more popular, and now that so many boys had gone off to Vietnam, he was the most eligible bachelor left.

  It wasn’t long before Nora caught him looking at her again—this time from across the room, with a hopeful expression. Already she wished he’d develop a bit more cunning, but she supposed it might be useful to have a man whose every thought appeared right on his face. He had a ruddy sort of charm, and everybody knew and liked him, which was more than could be said for Nora, who was sallow and shy and bookish, with big gray eyes that tended to water. As a girl, she’d been prone to headaches that kept her confined while other children celebrated Halloween and rode horses and performed in Christmas pageants, and perhaps it was these early absences that had pushed her to the margins. There was something off-putting about her, she knew, some seriousness or intensity that made people’s smiles lose their warmth. At school and at family gatherings she had a sense of being tolerated but not particularly enjoyed, and she often wondered if this was typical of only children, or of motherless daughters, or of women who felt strongly about certain things: tidiness, timeliness, simplicity, composure. She’d learned by now to keep these opinions to herself, but it seemed people could still sense them there on her tongue, as though she carried with her some inextricable air of censure.