I don’t mean Miss Lucretia no disrespect, but I sensed a kind of theatrical character to her recitation that was, well, in poor taste. She thought my dumbstruck expression meant I didn’t believe her.
“I assure you, it’s God’s own truth. ‘I’ve settled all my accounts,’ she kept saying. ‘I’ve settled all my accounts.’ Those were her last words. Next thing I know, she falls into a comalike state—our poor father went the same way—and I sent word to Miss Polk to come sit with me until the end. Comforting as any angel, that’s our dear Miss Polk!” Miss Lucretia rose, her languid movement accompanied by a sustained, three-note sigh.
“Would either of y’all like some coffee while we’re waiting for Mr. Penrose? I’ve got with chicory and without.”
I guess she took our being speechless as assent and started out of the room with an airy step. But she stopped in the doorframe and twirled around. “I feel I share her guilt, at least a teensy bit, because I forgot to wind her watch that morning. I thought about needing to do it, then I thought I had done it, instead of just thinking about needing to do it, and then she was out of the house. I didn’t realize my oversight until later. If she hadn’t been on that bridge when the train was coming, Mr. Farley wouldn’t have rushed to her assistance and he’d still be alive. It’s all so tragic, it’s, well, Shakespearean.”
I don’t think I ever in my life took part in a conversation quite as peculiar as that one. If Iris hadn’t arrived about then, I’d have been more than a little uneasy about going outside to answer a call of nature, leaving Miss Haseltine Polk alone with a corpse and a crazy woman. Iris’s arrival meant I could escape to the outdoor privy for several forms of relief, including fresh air.
When I returned, Miss Polk was patting Miss Lucretia’s hand and saying Miss Lucretia had no cause to torment herself.
“The last thing she required of me and I failed her.” Miss Lucretia was sniffling into a little lacy wad. “That watch will haunt me!”
Miss Polk, gentle as May rain, tried to shift the conversation.
“You needn’t stay in this big house by yourself, Miss Wainwright. Perhaps . . .”
Now, I expect Miss Polk was thinking about that particular day and the next, but Miss Lucretia had her eye set on a more distant object. I swear I thought I saw her toes start tapping under that long black skirt.
“Well, now that you broach the subject, I have always wanted to travel. The Holy Land, of course. And the Ziegfeld Follies.”
“Ma’am?”
“Ever since I was a girl, I’ve wanted to go see that Broadway. Ziegfeld Follies. I know I sound foolish as all get-out, but before I die, I want, just once, to hear people telling naughty stories and laughing out loud and see women wearing spangled stockings and headdresses with plumes tall as Christmas trees.”
Speaking of plumes, you could have just about knocked me over with a hummingbird feather. Miss Lucretia Wainwright must have noted the staggered expressions Miss Polk and I were exchanging.
“Oh, I have every intention of seeing my sister laid to rest with proper dignity and sacrament. Don’t give that a moment’s worry. But I must confess, after all these years, not even being able to utter the words New York without being accused of every perversity known to mankind, I do feel a certain iota of . . . release. I couldn’t even look at Papa’s stereoscope slides of Niagara Falls when she was in the room. I finally determined to put all thoughts of personal satisfaction out of my mind. It’s amazing how quickly they’re all popping out again.”
Miss Polk and I climbed into the pony trap in silence, seating ourselves by necessity close to each other, going extra slow on account of my horse being tethered to a hitching eye at the back end. The silence continued until she suddenly swiveled toward me and gasped.
“Oh, Deputy Stickley! Something perfectly chilling just occurred to me.”
I looked at her in mock disappointment. “We’ve shared two dead bodies and a box lunch. Can’t you bring yourself to call me Jervis, leastwise when it’s just the two of us?”
She didn’t appear to hear me.
“It’s the wickedest thought you could ever imagine.”
“Share it and it’ll be only half so wicked.”
“All right. What if Miss Lucretia forgot to wind Miss Beryl’s watch . . . on purpose? Miss Beryl knew that train schedule by heart. Checked at the depot almost every day for any changes. She knew she had to get it right, because she wouldn’t hear the train coming. And Miss Lucretia knew the schedule too. What if she . . . planned for Miss Beryl to get hit by a train? What if all that caregiving had just gotten to be too much, what with Dr. McQuinney saying Miss Beryl could live forever? Plumes, my foot!”
I couldn’t help myself. Her expression was so indignant and adorable, I had to slip my free arm around her waist. She didn’t pay it no mind.
“But look here, Miss Polk. She didn’t have to conjure up a plot fittin’ for Edgar Poe in order to get away. If she was tired of being a nursemaid to her sister, she could have just divvied up their money, stole away on a Seaboard sleeper heading north, and spent the rest of her days chasing down bawdy jokes and spangles.”
Miss Haseltine Polk cocked her head in my direction. It brought her face so near to mine, a strand of that fine dark hair skittered over my mustache. Did I detect a coquettish little gleam mixed in with all that bitters-bottle sparkle?
“Why, Jervis Stickley, you know better than that. There’s some kind of devilish plotting goes on in the best of families. But abandonment?” She drew her dark-crescent eyebrows together. “There’d be no end of talk.”
DENNIS TAFOYA
Satan’s Kingdom
FROM Needle
LAROCQUE GOT A CALL when his father died. This was when he was living in the desert, in a trailer on the edge of Banning. He couldn’t remember giving out the number, but one day in December the phone rang and it was his father’s girlfriend, telling him that Henry had died of cancer. She said he had to come decide what to do about the property, the dogs. She was moving to Florida, to Del Ray. After he hung up the phone Larocque put a hand on his chest, feeling a tightness there as if she had called to tell him about a bill he owed.
He stood for a long time in the open door of the trailer, feeling the heat, watching the trucks go by on 10. After a while he began to carry his few possessions to the truck: the fan, the microwave with the taped door. He left a pile of things in the middle of the floor with a note for Jed and Marie thanking them for the use of the place and saying they should sell what they could. They were gone, visiting Jed’s son in Kanab, and the two Mexican kids whose names he had never learned were working the station, so he just stood at the edge of the broken asphalt thinking about the difference between this place and Cheshire County. Here the bright yellow and red of the desert was everywhere, even when you closed your eyes, even in a dream. He remembered New Hampshire as a wilderness of dark blue and black so that even at noon it seemed like twilight and it was hard to feel that what was happening was real.
He had liked the trailer, the descending shelf of brown dust that led to the highway, the heat that he felt held him hard against the ground. Around the lot were scattered desert plants that gave off bright, medicinal smells. Marie said that each one could cure a specific disease and was always pushing some tea at Larocque that she said would clear up his cough or stop his nightmares. She made sweet, grainy cookies and bread from mesquite and sold them from a little display Jed built in front of the station to the families on their way to Palm Springs or Marines from Twentynine Palms. The young Marines were quick and lithe and seemed to Larocque tense with the coiled and watchful energy of people capable of great violence. He wondered what he looked like to these travelers and would take pains to smile at everyone, especially the cars full of young girls heading to weekends in the desert, to parties he’d imagine in night-lit casinos he’d never seen except on television.
Jed said he liked knowing Larocque was there by the station after hours in case so
mething happened, though nothing ever did. Days he worked landscaping for Bermudez Triangle, and after dark he sat looking out at the highway through the trailer’s open door as if from a cave and sipping White Horse. On his last night he watched a truck burning out on the highway, the police and fire trucks going by in showers of red light, and he realized that all the years he’d been in the California desert, he had been hiding.
It took him four days to get home. He stopped at a motel in Joplin off 44 and slept one night in a bed. He got breakfast in a diner and pulled a heavy coat off the rack as he was leaving. He was running out of money, wondered how fast he could sell the property, the furniture. His father had guns that would be worth something. A Lefever 10-gauge with a Damascus barrel, a prewar Marlin. He had kept them locked up against Larocque and his friends, would make a show of slapping the big padlock on the gun safe with an open hand to make it rattle.
He’d been running with Gifford Pelletier then, and would pass through his father’s house at dawn, stinking of hash oil and beer after being out all night on the roads between Keene and Manchester. He’d been big early, Larocque, wide in the shoulders and more than 6 feet at fifteen. The old man would loom over him at the table, jerk back his arm as if to hit him with the open hand that had dogged him since he was small. Larocque would cut his initials into the soft, pale underside of the pine coffee table or throw pinecones at the blue heelers Henry had been raising then.
The old man’s feints made him flinch for a while, and then one day they didn’t. He and Gifford stole the sign from the park called Satan’s Kingdom across the border in Northfield, and Larocque hung it in his room and waited for his father to say something. By then the old man was ignoring him, other than to snort like an animal at a watering hole when Larocque high-stepped through the living room with a drunk’s exaggerated care at three in the morning, his eyes red as coals. The knowledge that he was beyond his father’s control had made him feel weightless, almost nauseous, the way he thought an astronaut loosed from gravity must feel. That was one of his nightmares, flying away from the earth, the sky turning from deep blue to black at the edge of the void.
Lying in the back seat of the Le Mans in the parking lot of a Denny’s just west of Wheeling, he remembered being sixteen and driving all night, him and Gifford making wider and wider circles, 202 south to 119, west to 10. Fitzwilliam to Richmond to Winchester and up to Marlborough in the dark, and a hard white rime on the windows that shed flakes of frost onto their shoulders. Pelletier had an Italian pistol not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes that he’d take out of the glove compartment and stick in his belt. They’d walk through gas stations and Dunkin’ Donuts in the early hours, the Mr. Mike’s on 202, Pelletier sticking candy in Larocque’s pockets and flashing him the butt of the little .32, watching for the cameras. They’d try the locks on the doors of the bank in Jaffrey, a metals shop in Keene that somebody said processed gold. Pelletier would read him stories from the Union Leader about robberies in Boston, a double murder in Etna. Pelletier would put a CD in, some garage band he’d heard in Manchester, and they’d watch a young girl through the windows of a convenience store, her Wildcats hoodie riding up on her slim hips when she reached to get a pack of Marlboros. They had been trying to think of themselves a certain way. They had been working up to something.
When he got to his father’s house, there was a card stuck in the frame of the screen, a woman’s name and the seal of the county sheriff. He froze when he saw it, took it out and stuck it fast in his pocket and looked around him, as if a quarter mile down the dirt track off Peg Shop Road there was anybody watching. Behind the house the dogs keened and howled and wanted out of their pens. He went to a moldering planter at the corner of the porch and found an envelope from Henry’s girlfriend and a key to the door. There were complicated instructions about the woodstove and phone numbers for a lawyer and for people his father had known.
The dogs watched him when he came out the back door, what looked to be two shepherds, one still a splay-footed puppy, and something else he didn’t recognize with a blaze of white on its face and wolfish green eyes. They looked to his hands, his face, the house behind him. Larocque hefted a spade that had been leaning against the door of the shed and trapped it awkwardly against his neck while he picked through keys on the ring until he realized the locks hung open on the latches. He went to the youngest dog’s pen first, feeling a little thrill of fear as he opened the door. He let each one out, the dogs standing patiently until all three had been released and then running in tight circles around the yard. After a minute he let the shovel go, realizing that he had seen the dogs not as things in themselves but as some wild extension of his father’s dark will, spirits standing in for his anger and disapproval. Under his breath he said, They’re just dogs, you idiot.
He found rags and bottles of pine cleaner and Simple Green, and threw away moldering food and swept out the first floor. The gun safe had stood empty when he came in, whatever had been in there taken by the girlfriend or his cousins from Vermont. The first night he ate a can of macaroni in red sauce he found in the cupboard and watched a tape in the ancient, whistling VCR about making lures, a man with thick glasses and tufts of gray hair at his ears carving and painting crankbait bodies. When the wind picked up, he went out and let the dogs out of their pens and brought them into the house, and from the way they settled companionably on the couch he figured it was something Henry had often done. He had scoured the cabinets and found nothing to drink but some old grape juice, and he sipped at that, watching the man on the tape work in near silence, stopping to show off a stripe of vivid red, a spray of green dots. Something in the hissing and popping of the dry wood in the stove reminded him of his father’s voice.
The next morning Larocque came out of the shower and cracked a window against the steam. While he was standing there feeling the narrow blade of cold air on his arms, a sheriff’s car pulled up outside and the dogs began barking and pawing at the windows. He got dressed fast and stepped outside, pulling at his shirt and wishing for something to carry, to have something to do with his hands. It was the woman who had left the card, Carrie Milgram, and she introduced herself and shook his hand and waved at the puppy that was pushing at the screen with one long paw. She pointed at the dog, asking permission, and he nodded, so she let her out and the dog danced and pantomimed joy and prodded her hand to be stroked, which the woman did, giving each dog in turn a treat from one of her pockets.
She told him their names, pointing to each in turn. “The Belgians are Masie and Poke, the border collie is Halley. I was helping Henry train them for the county.” She explained that they paid Henry a little money to use the dogs for tracking. Search and rescue when hikers got lost on Mount Pisgah. The dogs watched her closely while she told Larocque about tracking, finding lost kids and old people who had wandered away from family outings by the lake in Otter Brook. Her face was wide and plain and open, like a girl’s, and the brown parka and gunbelt obscured her shape.
“We were all real sorry about Henry,” she said. “We took up a collection for the funeral. He was real well thought of.” Larocque nodded, not knowing what to say. “He said you were out west? A contractor, he said?”
“Oh, you know. A little, you know, just small jobs.” He had no idea what his father would have said about him, how he would have explained him, and he watched her face for some sign that she was lying or being polite, but she had the same open expression as the young dog and he thought she wasn’t much given to hiding what she thought. He nodded as if she had made some comment and felt a little dizzy, as if he were impersonating somebody, creating an identity by just standing on his dead father’s porch and having a civil conversation with somebody in authority. Somebody in a uniform. He wanted to say, Don’t you know who I am? What I’ve done? But nobody knew, nobody but Gifford Pelletier, and he figured Gifford must have run even farther away than he had, must be locked up or dead.
Carrie began to come over after her s
hift with the sheriff’s office. The dogs would stand up just before he heard her car, the young Belgian throwing his head like a horse. The first few times Larocque had nodded from the porch, his hands in his pockets, and then he began to follow them down the trail behind the house where she ran them through the woods. There was always something in her pockets for the dogs, and they watched her hands, her eyes. One Monday afternoon she brought a short, round man in khaki overalls gobbed with pine sap out to the house, and Larocque felt a pang, a bright flash of jealousy, until she explained that the man was a contractor looking for a backhoe operator. He shook hands with the man and felt himself standing taller. When he left, Larocque asked Carrie to have a drink with him, and she said yes.
One night when he’d been back a month he went to pick up cigarettes at Jake’s in Keene. He was standing by the glass doors looking at the beer when Gifford Pelletier walked in with a boy. Larocque watched them together, the boy a smaller, blonder version of Pelletier. His son, maybe. He could hear a conversation about ice cream, Pelletier saying it was winter and ice cream was for the summer. Larocque waited until the boy went to stand by the candy and then walked out, Pelletier turning to look at him and then back at the cashier. Larocque didn’t know what to do with himself, so he kept walking, out to the parking lot, working his keys in his hand. He was standing by his father’s pickup when a shadow fell on the truck and he turned to see Pelletier standing behind him. Larocque covered his eyes against the glare from the lights. His breath glowed white in the cold.
“I thought that was you.”
The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 Page 39