The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

by Jonathan Lethem

  I still had unfinished business.

  Big Lou was lounging in Jonny’s place when he let me in. She took one look at me and got up and left.

  “Hey, girl,” Jonny said when I came in. “How’d it go? Ya do good?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “That Doc is somethin’ else, ain’t he?”

  “He is now,” I said.

  “I knew’choo comin’ back to me,” Jonny said, purring. “That Doc, he showed ya the error of ya ways, now he broke ya in, made’choo a woman.”

  “That what you wanted, Jonny? For him to—how’d you put it?—break me in?”

  He grinned, full of himself. “I knew, once ya broke yer cherry, ya’d get over being like that. I got big plans for ya. This yer new home, li’l Shiv.”

  “I’d like that,” I said, cuddling up to him. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the remote. “Of course, I could live uptown.”

  Jonny’s eyes narrowed. “Wassat? Where ya get it?”

  “This?” I gave Jonny one of my rare smiles. “Oh, this is just a little thing I picked up. Jones called it his remote. You ever see one before?”

  “A remote? Sure. But the Doc? Don’t he need it—?”

  I watched the expressions chase themselves across his face as I said, “Not anymore, he doesn’t.”

  His expression settled into anguish. “You didn’t—”

  “What did you think I’d do? The bastard raped me. Drugged and raped me. No man does that.”

  “You did him?”

  “And set his place on fire. Poetic justice. Burned him out.”

  “Gawd,” Jonny said. “I never thought—”

  I interrupted him. I slid the blade of my knife—which I’d taken out while distracting him with the remote—into his side, just under his rib cage. He didn’t have his protective vest on, relaxed in his own place. The knife is very sharp and I don’t think he even felt it at first. Then I twisted it viciously, rotating it and scrambling his insides.

  Jonny gave me a look of disbelief and great disappointment, opened his mouth and coughed out blood. He tried to pull away from me, but he didn’t hit me or try to attack me.

  I told him I was sorry, and I really was. We’d shared a lot together, grown up together. “I knew you got money from Jones for me, for connecting us up. But you shouldn’t have sold me out, Jonny. You knew what he was going to do. You wanted him to. You betrayed me.”

  I’m not sure he heard that last. His eyes got a glassy look and he folded over on himself, clutching his gut, doubled up.

  He didn’t make much of a mess. I got it cleaned up. Then I thoroughly searched his place and found his money stash. I used very little of it to pay two juiceheads to take his body out and dump it in an alleyway. I knew it would be found first by the locals, and what it would tell them.

  I’ve taken over his place. I live there now. It’s better than my old place—there’s electricity for one thing—but he had no books. I’m going to have to start a new collection.

  He did have a newscreen. I turned it on and watched a report on the fire and murder uptown. Tiny surveillance holos of me with Jones in the big lobby, and me by myself leaving. I looked like a boy, and that’s who they think it was. Apparently Jones had brought boys up to his apartment before. Both boys and girls. I was far from his first victim, but I didn’t find that news reassuring.

  I’m running Jonny’s girls now. Big Lou has been a real help. It’s not the life I wanted for myself, but you take what you can get and I need to survive.

  I guess I’m really grown up now. Next week I turn fifteen.

  Contributors’ Notes

  Robert Hinderliter’s short stories have appeared in Columbia Journal, Sycamore Review, New Ohio Review, Fugue, and other places. He grew up in Haviland, Kansas (population 600), and now lives in Gwangju, South Korea, where he teaches English literature at Chosun University.

  • “Coach O” is one of many stories I’ve written set in Haskerville, Kansas, a fictionalized version of my hometown, Haviland. Haskerville is like Haviland in many respects, although home to slightly more weirdos, degenerates, and unfathomable mysteries.

  The idea for “Coach O” came when my wife and I were having drinks and brainstorming story ideas. I wanted to write about a football coach in the biggest game of his life, but my wife suggested a more unique angle: a sports story in which no actual sporting occurs. So the setting switched from the game to the pep rally, and I started to think of all the ways Coach Oberman’s life could be unraveling, and how it might all come to a head. One aspect of small-town life that interests me is the impossibility of keeping secrets. The answer to the question “Who knows what?” is usually: “Everyone, everything.” In a half-square-mile town with six hundred people, there’s nowhere to hide. So I wanted Oberman to feel that all his secrets and failures would soon be on public display. He’s surrounded, boxed in, and therefore increasingly desperate.

  Sharon Hunt’s first published mystery story was in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. “The Water Was Rising” was nominated for the Arthur Ellis and International Thriller Writers’ awards. Additionally, her stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, on the mystery site Over My Dead Body, and are forthcoming in other publications. She has also written a lot about food and the memories it evokes. A novel she is reworking was nominated for a Crime Writer’s Association Debut Dagger Award. “The Keepers of All Sins” is her first story selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories anthology. She lives and writes in Ontario, Canada.

  • An image usually prods me into writing a story and it was no different with “The Keepers of All Sins.” For that story, the image was of a young woman on a ferry, growing more and more dehydrated. In reality, that young woman was two, my sister and me. Touring Europe, we had an afternoon to kill in Geneva and decided to take a boat tour. Somehow we ended up on a ferry instead and for seven hours were stuck on deck with little shelter from the sun and no water, because we assumed there would be a canteen onboard. I had experienced severe dehydration before and knew the signs—“feeling dried out like a prune” as my Newfoundland grandmother would say, the fuzziness that blankets your brain and how your limbs eventually take forever to do the most basic things. People boarded and debarked, but no one noticed our growing distress. When finally we stumbled back onto land and into our train, we were distraught, not about taking the wrong boat but because we were so ill prepared. For the rest of the trip, I was obsessed with water, which became central to this story.

  Also central is the man from Hamburg whom the young couple meets. He was fashioned after a man from that same city we met on a train on that European trip. Our man, nameless but not forgotten, was aggressive and slimy although no doubt thought himself charming and we two naïve enough to fall for his lines. I could hear my grandmother’s warning: “Stay away from men who watch you too closely.”

  This man did. He was a photographer, he said, and invited us to stay at his place in the red-light district for as long as we wanted. He was at our command. Other girls “not as lovely as you” who stayed with him had an unforgettable experience and we would too.

  The train was full and we couldn’t change seats so did our best to ignore him.

  Realizing he wasn’t getting anywhere with us, he grew sullen and before disappearing into the night, bent close to me. “This city can be dangerous for stupid girls.”

  “Then it’s good we’re not stupid,” I remember saying, but not being stupid doesn’t always save you from harm, as my main character sadly discovered.

  Reed Johnson is a fiction writer, translator, and scholar who holds an MA/PhD in Slavic languages and literatures along with an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia, and currently works as a preceptor in the Harvard writing program. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in journals like New England Review and online at The New Yorker, and he is writing a mystery novel set in Russia, where he spent nearly a decade of h
is life.

  • When I was growing up, our family didn’t have much money, and we were often on the lookout for things to do that didn’t cost anything. One such free weekend activity was the open house. No doubt many of us have been to an open house with no intention of buying, and so we understand that there might be nothing real about this sort of real estate: the open house is a space for the imagination to roam, a place to picture alternate selves and alternate lives spent living there. At the same time, it’s rare that these houses turn out to be completely blank rooms on which we can project these imagined selves. The open house almost always contains the remainders and reminders of another set of lives—the lives, that is, of the current inhabitants. And in turn, these traces suggest other sets of dreams (or, as is sometimes the case with families moving out, failed dreams) that might collide with one’s own, creating interesting echoes and patterns of interference. In this sense, the open house is a lot like the story: a structured space that both constrains and spurs the imagination, an armature that gives shape to thoughts about how our lives might otherwise unfold.

  Arthur Klepchukov found words between Black Seas, Virginian beaches, and San Franciscan waves. He adores trains, swing sets, and music that tears him outta time. Art contributes to Writer Unboxed and has hosted Shut Up & Write(!) meetups since 2013. His literary fiction appears in journals like The Common, Necessary Fiction, and KYSO Flash. His crime fiction debuted in Down & Out.

  • A few years ago, I reached out to my oldest friend, Kyle Stout, about catching up in San Francisco. He didn’t want to come to the city when it was about to rain. But it’s a damn fine town in the rain. I jotted down what could be a phrase or a title. After Kyle and I made a short film in an Oakland coffee shop, we were inspired to find other limited settings for our stories. BART, the Bay Area’s subway system, somehow felt appropriately grungy and fitting. With a setting in mind, “A Damn Fine Town” took shape at The Lemon Tree House Residency in Tuscany. The irony of writing abroad about traveling without traveling seeped into my character’s attitudes. I’d still love to make a short film version. So on your next train to the airport, keep an eye out for Mr. Suitcase or Kid Cape. And keep an eye on your luggage.

  Harley Jane Kozak was born in Pennsylvania, grew up in Nebraska, completed NYU School of the Arts Graduate Acting Program, and migrated to Los Angeles. She starred in a few dozen films (Parenthood, Arachnophobia, The Favor, etc.), three soaps (Texas, Guiding Light, Santa Barbara), countless plays, and a lotta TV before taking a fifteen-year maternity leave and turning to crime fiction. Her first (of five) novels, Dating Dead Men, won the Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards. Her short prose has appeared in Ms. Magazine, The Sun, Santa Monica Review, and eight anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories of 2019.

  • When Les Klinger and Laurie R. King invited me to contribute a story to their Sherlockian anthology series, I jumped at the chance, although not without trepidation. Fans of Watson and Holmes are a rabid bunch, rivaling those of Star Trek, Star Wars, and Shakespeare, and a writer ventures into those territories at her own risk. Probably that’s why I had a hard time coming up with a premise, plot, character—any doorway into a story. One night, a voice woke me from a dead sleep with the words “This is the first line of your Sherlockian short story.” I grabbed a pen and paper and wrote down what the dream voice dictated. The next morning, I stared blankly at the scrawled words. It’s not every day you walk into your apartment to find your cat has turned into a dog. My big nocturnal “aha!” by daylight had all the literary weight of a grocery list. However, it’s not like I had any competing ideas, and also, I don’t like to argue with the voices in my head, so I started typing. The result was “The Walk-In.”

  Preston Lang is a native New Yorker and a product of its public schools. He’s published four crime novels so far.

  • This story was written specifically for an anthology to honor the terrific journalist and crime writer William E. Wallace, so it seemed appropriate to focus on a struggling reporter getting into trouble. I realize now that in the first sentence, I boldly called out the hitman subgenre as unrealistic but then went on to write something much less believable than the average assassin story. It was fun to write.

  Jared Lipof’s short fiction appears in The Los Angeles Review, The Emerson Review, and Salamander. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where he’s at work on a novel.

  • Rendering an actual human being in fictional form can be tricky. Even more so when it’s family. Relatives will read your work and say the events in the fiction did not occur exactly as described. They’ll remind you how it really went down, as if that was even the point. But when you use your recently deceased father as a template for a character, whatever pressure is relieved by his inability to give you notes is offset by the fact that you really wish he could read it. At which point you realize you were just trying to perform a magic trick. “He’s not dead if he’s in the story,” you tell yourself. And even though you’re wrong, it was worth a try. Special thanks to Jennifer Barber at Salamander, whose editorial instincts brought out the best possible version of this story.

  Anne Therese Macdonald is the author of the novel A Short Time in Luxembourg. Her short stories have been published in various journals and anthologies, including Blue Earth Review, Belletriste, Dublin Quarterly, Matter: A Journal of Art and Literature, Words on the Waves, and most recently the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ anthology False Faces: Twenty-Six Stories About the Masks We Wear.

  • “That Donnelly Crowd” evolved from a culmination of several events in my life, especially the years I hitchhiked through Ireland during the Troubles and my return during the Celtic Tiger. In the story, a young American woman is attracted to Joe Donnelly, a man caught between these two eras. He is from a family of terrorists but claims that he’s in Ireland to build a modern factory. Against this, I explore the tendency of Americans to cling to the fantasy of an ancestral Ireland over the reality of today’s modern country. Colleen, the American woman, is a troubled soul. Like so many of us, she succumbs to her own fantasy. She sees in Joe Donnelly what she wants to see, unencumbered by the reality before her, ignoring the little signs that tell her to run the other way.

  Mark Mayer has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. From 2012 to 2014 he lived at Cornell College’s Center for the Literary Arts as the Robert P. Dana Emerging Writer. His first book, Aerialists, won the Michener-Copernicus Prize. He lives in Paris with his wife and two rabbits.

  • I wrote “The Clown” immediately after Trump was elected president. Many new stories justifying the Trump voter were suddenly in circulation, and I was feeling fretful about how fiction writers are told to create empathy for ill-doing characters by presenting their inner lives and stories—by making the evils they commit products of situation and circumstance. I was asking myself whether literary fiction always absolves its criminals and whether there was a limiting case. The story is part of my collection Aerialists (2019), in which every story reimagines and reinvents one of the acts or characters of the circus.

  Rebecca McKanna is the recipient of Third Coast’s 2018 Fiction Prize. Her writing has appeared in Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Joyland, and other journals and was published as one of Narrative’s Stories of the Week. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Indianapolis. She lives in Indiana, where she is finishing her debut novel about a young woman uncovering the dark truth about her mother’s childhood. Visit her at rebeccamckanna.com.

  • When I grew up in Iowa, Grant Wood’s American Gothic was everywhere. Despite or maybe because of its ubiquity, it wasn’t until my mid-twenties when I started thinking about what the painting said about midwestern life. Around this time, I was writing a series of stories about different women who had been impacted by the same serial killer. When I was back in Iowa visiting my parents for Christmas that year, my mother and I drove to Eldon to see the American Gothic House and Center. I was startled by how small t
he iconic house seemed in person. As we walked through the museum, I imagined an employee receiving a letter from the serial killer, and the story took shape from there.

  I’m indebted to the editors at Colorado Review for originally publishing this story, especially Stephanie G’Schwind and Steven Schwartz. Thank you to Otto Penzler and Jonathan Lethem for giving it a home here.

  Jennifer McMahon is the New York Times best-selling author of nine suspense novels, including Promise Not to Tell, The Winter People, and The Invited. She lives in Vermont with her partner, Drea, and their daughter, Zella.

  • I was on vacation with my family a couple of years ago, doing lovely touristy things during the day. But one night I had a terrible, vivid dream.

  I dreamt that I was a twelve-year-old girl, an outsider, the one others teased, and they were playing a wicked sort of trick on me. A whole series of tricks that ended in fire and death. I was wearing an absurd costume they’d dressed me in. I was Hannah-beast.

  But then, the dream shifted—I wasn’t the victim, I was one of the girls playing the trick, laughing at poor, stupid Hannah, thrilling at how clever my friends and I were. Knowing it was wrong, but going along for the ride anyway, telling myself it was just a joke.

  The dream stuck with me throughout our pleasant family vacation, and it was obvious why—in real life, hadn’t I been both girls at one time or another?

  I’m a big believer in ghosts but sometimes what I find most frightening are the ghosts of my own past. The things that haunt me most are the choices I’ve made. Like Amanda, they’re the things that have me looking over my shoulder, jumping at shadows, sure I hear some long-ago voice taunting, teasing: