The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (11 page)

III

Rosalee will be charged with five counts. She will be convicted of three counts, and she will serve four years at a juvenile correctional facility, where she will read Sylvia Plath and ZZ Packer and keep to herself.

When she is released, she will go to community college, where she will major in women’s studies. She will become interested in acting, and join a small troupe at a local theater.

She will be quiet and withdrawn, dark and inscrutable. Men will fall in love with her, or rather, they will try to fall in love with her, but she will not let them. People will try to get close to her, but she will push them away.

In her most acclaimed performance, she will star in the role of Wendy, in
Peter Pan.
She will be most convincing when she plays Old Wendy and her young daughter Jane asks her what it is she sees in the darkness.
Nothing
, Wendy says.
Yes
, counters Jane.
You see when you were a little girl.
And Rosalee says,
That is a long time ago, sweetheart.

For the rest of her life, she will be always doing and going and performing. She will be always remembering.

I

Danielle Dewitt was a happy, occasionally colicky baby.

Her older half-sister Sophia dressed her up in cashmere and anointed her with makeup when Danielle was four; she looked like a painted porcelain doll.

When she was five, her older half-brother Colin taught her how to fish. She caught a small salmon and threw it back, horrified.

At Mimi’s Finishing School for Children, she learned how to read a French dinner menu. At home, she learned how to read people, how to put herself at the advantage.

When she was nine, she stole her sister’s beloved diamond stud earrings and flushed them down the toilet.

She considered herself a good, charitable person; she made her father donate to the whales every Christmas.

Last week she conceived of and forced the girls to carry out the prank on the Mexican girl. Danielle said that each girl had to supply an “item” so that none could be exempted if they got caught, except for Tabatha, because Tabatha was a virgin and so hadn’t begun using tampons yet. She, however, acted as lookout.

II

Danielle, who had stood up and stepped forward a moment ago, made brave by the presence of an adult, steps back again. The barrel of the gun is shaking wildly in Rosalee’s hand; if she pulls the trigger, the bullet could fall harmlessly wide, or it could hit Danielle right between her pretty blue eyes, a fatal blemish above her straight, narrow nose. Rosalee says,
I didn’t kill her, it was an accident
, and behind her Ms. McCreary is nodding her head,
Yes, yes. Of course it was.
Rosalee says to Danielle, motioning with the silver barrel,
Tell her. Tell her it was an accident.
And Danielle says,
It was
while she’s exhaling, so they can hardly hear her.
And tell her
, Rosalee says.
Tell her what you did to me.
Danielle’s eyes flit, imperceptibly, to Ms. McCreary and then back to Rosalee.
We didn’t do anything to you.
Rosalee moves suddenly toward Danielle, the gun at her side. Ms. McCreary is yelling something in the background, but neither girl hears. Rosalee steps up to Danielle, so close their noses are almost touching. They are breathing each other’s heavy breaths. Something passes between them: an expression, a quivering of the pupil, an exchange of molecules? Rosalee drops the gun.

III

Danielle will go to school tomorrow and she will dazzle before the paparazzi. She will be quoted as saying, “I never even spoke to the poor girl before this. She must have been obsessed with us.”

She will go to the eighth-grade dance with Scotty Marlowe, and she will look stunning in a slinky, asymmetrical dress that is “oasis blue.”

She will use what she’ll refer to as “the Tragedy” to get her father to buy her a Hermès Birkin bag, then a Mercedes C-Class when she turns sixteen, and then a shopping trip to Paris at eighteen.

She will go to Sarah Lawrence University, marry a dermatologist, and have three children by cesarean section before she is thirty-five.

She will read
Charlotte’s Web
and
James and the Giant Peach
to her children when they are small, and they will bicker for her affection.

One day, just before her youngest daughter begins high school, Danielle will hire a maid named Rosa. She will pause for a moment as she cuts the stem off the bottom of a tulip, and she will think that maybe she knew someone once by that name.

LEE CHILD

FROM
Belfast Noir

B
IRTHS AND DEATHS
are in the public record. Census returns and rent rolls and old mortgages are searchable. As are citizenship applications from all the other English-speaking countries. There are all kinds of ancestry sites on the Web. These were the factors in our favor.

Against us was a historical truth. The street had been built in the 1960s. Fifty years ago, more or less. Within living memory. Most of the original residents had died off, but they had families, who must have visited, and who might remember. Children and grandchildren, recipients of lore and legend, and therefore possibly a problem.

But overall we counted ourselves lucky. The first owners of the house in question were long dead, and had left no children. The husband had surviving siblings, but they had all gone to either Australia or Canada. The wife had a living sister, still in the neighborhood, but she was over eighty years old, and considered unreliable.

Since the original pair, the house had had five owners, most of them in the later years. We felt we had enough distance. So we went with the third variant of the second plan. Hairl Carter came with me. Hairl Carter the second, technically. His father had the same name. From southeastern Missouri. His father’s mother had wanted to name her firstborn Harold, but she had no more than a third-grade education, and couldn’t spell except phonetically. So Harold it was, phonetically. The old lady never knew it was weird. We all called her grandson Harry, which might not have pleased her.

Harry did the paperwork, which was easy enough, because we made it all Xeroxes of Xeroxes, which hides a lot of sins. I opened an account at a Washington, D.C., bank, in the name of the society, and I put half a million dollars into it, and we got credit cards and a checkbook. Then we rehearsed. We prepped it, like a political debate. The same conversation, over and over again, down all the possible highways and byways. We identified weak spots, though we had no choice but to barrel through. We figured audacity would stop them thinking straight.

We flew first to London, then to Dublin in the south, and then we made the connection to Belfast on tickets that cost less than cups of coffee back home. We took a cab to the Europa Hotel, which is where we figured people like us would stay. We arranged a car with the concierge. Then we laid up and slept. We figured midmorning the next day should be zero hour.

The car was a crisp Mercedes and the driver showed no real reluctance about the address—which was second from the end of a short line of ticky-tacky row houses, bland and cheaply built, with big areas of peeling white weatherboard, which must have saved money on bricks. The roof tiles were concrete, and had gone mossy. In the distance the hills were like velvet, impossibly green, but all around us the built environment was hard. There was a fine cold drizzle in the air, and the street and the sidewalk were both shiny gray.

The car waited at the curb and we opened a broken gate and walked up a short path through the front yard. Carter rang the bell and the door opened immediately. The Mercedes had not gone unnoticed. A woman looked out at us. She was solidly built, with a pale, meaty face. “Who are you?”

I said, “We’re from America.”

“America?”

“We came all the way to see you.”

“Why?”

“Mrs. Healy, is it?” I asked, even though I knew it was. I knew all about her. I knew where she was born, how old she was, and how much her husband made. Which wasn’t much. They were a month behind on practically everything. Which I hoped was going to help.

“Yes, I’m Mrs. Healy,” the woman said.

“My name is John Pacino, and my colleague here is Harry Carter.”

“Good morning to you both.”

“You live in a very interesting house, Mrs. Healy.”

She looked blank, and then craned her neck out the door and stared up at her front wall. “Do I?”

“Interesting to us, anyway.”

“Why?”

“Can we tell you all about it?”

She said, “Would you like a wee cup of tea?”

“That would be lovely.”

So we trooped inside, first Carter, then me, feeling a kind of preliminary satisfaction, as if our lead-off hitter had gotten on base. Nothing guaranteed, but so far, so good. The air inside smelled of daily life and closed windows. A skilled analyst could have listed the ingredients from their last eight meals. All of which had been either boiled or fried, I guessed.

It wasn’t the kind of household where guests get deposited in the parlor to wait. We followed the woman to the kitchen, which had drying laundry suspended on a rack. She filled a kettle and lit the stove. She said, “Tell me what’s interesting about my house.”

Carter said, “There’s a writer we admire very much, name of Edmund Wall.”

“Here?”

“In America.”

“A writer?”

“A novelist. A very fine one.”

“I never heard of him. But then, I don’t read much.”

“Here,” Carter said, and he took the copies from his pocket and smoothed them on the counter. They were faked to look like Wikipedia pages. Which is trickier than people think. (Wikipedia prints different than it looks on the computer screen.)

Mrs. Healy asked, “Is he famous?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “Writers don’t really get famous. But he’s very well respected. Among people who like his sort of thing. There’s an appreciation society. That’s why we’re here. I’m the chairman and Mr. Carter is the general secretary.”

Mrs. Healy stiffened a little, as if she thought we were trying to sell her something. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to join. I don’t know him.”

I said, “That’s not the proposition we have for you.”

“Then what is?”

“Before you, the Robinsons lived here, am I right?”

“Yes,” she said.

“And before them, the Donnellys, and before them, the McLaughlins.”

The woman nodded. “They all got cancer. One after the other. People started to say this was an unlucky house.”

I looked concerned. “That didn’t bother you? When you bought it?”

“My faith has no room for superstition.”

Which was a circularity fit to make a person’s head explode. It struck me mute. Carter said, “And before the McLaughlins were the McCanns, and way back at the beginning were the McKennas.”

“Before my time,” the woman said, uninterested, and I felt the runner on first steal second. Scoring position.

I said, “Edmund Wall was born in this house.”

“Who?”

“Edmund Wall. The novelist. In America.”

“No one named Wall ever lived here.”

“His mother was a good friend of Mrs. McKenna. Right back at the beginning. She came to visit from America. She thought she had another month, but the baby came early.”

“When?”

“The 1960s.”

“In this house?”

“Upstairs in the bedroom. No time to get to the hospital.”

“A baby?”

“The future Edmund Wall.”

“I never heard about it. Mrs. McKenna has a sister. She never talks about it.”

Which felt like the runner getting checked back. I said, “You know Mrs. McKenna’s sister?”

“We have a wee chat from time to time. Sometimes I see her in the hairdresser’s.”

“It was fifty years ago. How’s her memory?”

“I should think a person would remember that kind of thing.”

Carter said, “Maybe it was hushed up. It’s possible Edmund’s mother wasn’t married.”

Mrs. Healy went pale. Impropriety. Scandal. In her house. Worse than cancer. “Why are you telling me this?”

I said, “The Edmund Wall Appreciation Society wants to buy your house.”

“Buy it?”

“For a museum. Well, like a living museum, really. Certainly people could visit, to see the birthplace, but we could keep his papers here too. It could be a research center.”

“Do people do that?”

“Do what? Research?”

“No, visit houses where writers were born.”

“All the time. Lots of writers’ houses are museums. Or tourist attractions. We could make a very generous offer. Edmund Wall has many passionate supporters in America.”

“How generous?”

“Best plan would be to pick out where you’d like to live next, and we’ll make sure you can. Within reason, of course. Maybe a new house. They’re building them all over.” Then I shut up, and let temptation work its magic. Mrs. Healy went quiet. Then she started to look around her kitchen. Chipped cabinets, sagging hinges, damp air.

The kettle started to whistle.

She said, “I’ll have to talk to my husband.”

Which felt like the runner sliding into third ahead of the throw. Safe. Ninety feet away. Nothing guaranteed, but so far, so good. In fact bloody good, as they say on those damp little islands. We were in high spirits on the way back in the Mercedes.

The problem was waiting for us in the Europa’s lobby. An Ulsterman, maybe fifty years old, in a cheap suit, with old nicks and scars on his hands and thickening around his eyes. A former field operative, no doubt, many years in the saddle, now moved to a desk because of his age. I was familiar with the type. It was like looking in a mirror.

He said, “Can I have a word?”

We went to the bar, which was dismal and empty ahead of the lunchtime rush. The guy introduced himself as a copper, from right there in Belfast, from a unit he didn’t specify, but which I guessed was Special Branch, which was the brass-knuckle wing of the old Royal Ulster Constabulary, now the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Like the FBI, with the gloves off. He said, “Would you mind telling me who you are and why you’re here?”