The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (45 page)

Martin lay curled in a ball on the slats of the pine floor, blood seeping into the cracks and meandering in different directions like raindrops dancing on a windshield. A couple of cats scurried away, taking cover. Patricia ran from her corner, the frying pan gripped in both hands above her head, and brought it down with all her weight on Martin’s left ear. For good measure. It landed with a dull, solid thud but hadn’t been necessary. It only caused the inevitable to happen a little quicker.

Johnny stood against the wall, the gun still pointed at his father, his shoulder aching from the kickback.

“You just killed your daddy, Johnny.” She didn’t say it in accusatory fashion. She didn’t say it happily either. Just matter-of-fact.

“I’m sorry, Ma. I thought he was going to hurt you. Hurt me.”

“That son of a bitch has been dead to me for years, baby.” She kneeled over the body and surveyed it but still held the handle of the skillet at the ready. When she was satisfied, she looked up. “Now where’d you hide that money?”

Johnny hesitated, still holding the gun, now realizing it was pointed at his mother as much as it was at Martin.

“You’re not in trouble,” she said, her voice soothing. Calming. The same way she purred to the cats. “Just tell me.”

He hesitated again. “It’s in my room. In my closet.”

“Good,” said Patricia, nodding and smiling almost imperceptibly as she stood up and set the skillet on the stove. “Now let’s find a better hiding spot. Then we’ll figure out what we’re going to do with him.”

Len had been a young teenager when the huge snowstorm hit McPeak Mountain shortly before Christmas. One morning, a day or two after the storm, he was told by his father that he needed to go cut down a Christmas tree for the family. Being the oldest of the three children and the only boy, he obliged and was thrilled to do so. It was his first time going out on his own with such an important job, and it made him feel like his father recognized that he was becoming a man. He relished that feeling, proud of the responsibility, and he didn’t want to disappoint.

So he bundled himself up, took an apple-butter sandwich his mother had made, and along with a canteen and an oiled crosscut saw he procured from the horse barn, he set off slogging through the deep snow. The sun was out, the sky a deep blue, telling Len that the front had indeed passed.

Len knew exactly where he was going. He often spent time in the woods, sometimes hunting, more often just hiking to see what he could see. But he knew that if he crossed the pasture behind the farm and then climbed the formidable wooded hill, there was a nice stand of white pine running along the ridgeline. The ridge that marked the end of his property line. The ridge that separated the land he lived on from several other families that were sparsely located in that little section of Pleasant Grove. Right on the other side of the ridge, and nestled down at the foot of McPeak Mountain, almost a direct shot as the crow flies, was another small farmhouse, where a mother and her son lived, the father having run off years ago.

By the time Len made it to the top of the ridge he’d already unbuttoned his jacket and let it flap open at his hips. He’d removed his watchman’s cap and stuffed it into his back pocket as sweat trickled along his neck. He took a drink of water and then decided that he’d explore a little before he cut the tree down. It was going to be an all-day affair, what with the depth of the snow and having to drag the tree nearly a mile back to home, so he had no reason to rush. Besides, the longer he was gone, the more chores his sisters would have to do for him. Len was no fool.

There was an old, abandoned woodcutter’s cabin that he frequented from time to time when he was out in the woods. A place he and his sisters would sometimes play. A place that Len thought of as his own. The foundation was made of granite, with a fireplace made from similar stone, while the structure itself had been built with roughly hewn poplar logs sometime around the turn of the century. When his sisters weren’t around, Len still enjoyed going there by himself, mainly because he’d stashed a pile of girly magazines beneath some rotted floorboards. And they weren’t just standard run-of-the-mill magazines, where women might be scantily clad but certainly didn’t show any nipples. No, these were underground magazines, because they showed women in all their glory. And not only women, but men too. Men who were doing unspeakable things to these women. Things that Len and his school buddies had often talked about when they were far away from the ears of adults, but certainly not things that he’d ever seen or been a part of.

So that’s where he was headed. It was an easy walk of about a half mile along the ridgeline. At least it was easy when there wasn’t high snow to slog through. But a boy’s urges are strong at that age, and an extra half mile of trudging through snow was a small price to pay.

He’d made it about halfway there, keeping his eyes down and following a set of deer tracks, when he heard something at the bottom of the slope. The slope that fell away from his house. Len had spent enough time in the forest to know the difference between the natural sounds of the woods and those that were manmade. And this sound was definitely human. He couldn’t discern it exactly, but whatever it was, there was the distinct sound of metal occasionally glancing against something hard. Maybe it was another piece of metal, or rock perhaps. Regardless, Len knew it was a sound that wasn’t supposed to be there, and it disappointed him because it might disrupt his plans.

With every step he took, the sound seemed to get louder. A rhythmic sound that kept an almost perfect cadence. Len slowed and walked as quietly as he could. Before long, by keeping his eyes trained down the mountainside, he was finally able to locate the noise. At the base of the hill, smack in the middle of the forest, were two figures. One was a hunched-over woman wrapped in a shawl, and the other was a thin young man, about the same size as Len, standing by her side as she worked at a bare patch of ground, dropping mounds of dirt onto the otherwise white blanket of the woods. The sound was slightly delayed as it carried up the hillside, but Len saw that the woman was diligently digging a hole. After a few more shovelfuls, she passed the handle off to the boy, and he took over.

Len stopped and kneeled in the snow, hiding behind the large trunk of a pine. He was thrilled and exhilarated, and it took no time before the cabin and magazines no longer mattered, because once he settled in, he realized that there was a third figure among the other two. But this third figure was slightly off to the side, lying in the snow, motionless and, from what Len could tell, facedown. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on down there. And of course Len knew exactly who the people were. At least, at that time he knew who the two people still
alive
were. It would take another week of reading the newspapers and asking innocent questions of his parents about what had ever happened to Johnny’s father, over on the other side of the hill, before Len put it all together.

But at that moment he was mesmerized. A dead body. Two people, a mother and son, obviously trying to get rid of that body. Judging by the trough in the snow that ended at the man’s feet, the trough that wound through the trees and back toward Johnny’s farmhouse, the man certainly hadn’t walked into those woods on his own. It wasn’t like Johnny and his mother had found the man lying there while out looking for their own Christmas tree. No, he’d been dragged, and whatever they were up to, it was sinister.

Len watched the rest of the process with that same exhilaration. The pair struggled mightily to pull the body toward the hole, each grabbing an arm as if it were a heavy piece of furniture with no good holds, and finally rolled him into the rectangle they’d excavated. They both collapsed next to the grave once they’d dropped him in, not out of any grief, it seemed, but simply out of pure exhaustion. There was no telling how long they’d been working, but considering they’d dragged him through the snow a good half mile from the farmhouse—assuming that’s where he’d died—then dug a deep hole in frozen ground, it was no surprise they were worn out.

They rested for only a few minutes, each of them taking snow and stuffing it into their mouths like handfuls of popcorn at the picture house. Len couldn’t discern their words as they talked, but he imagined the conversation. Before too long they slowly got up and labored at refilling the hole. When they were close to finished, Johnny reached down and grabbed something about the size of a large cigar box. He opened the lid, took a peek inside, then carefully placed the box in the grave. He and his mother finished filling in the hole, then covered it with soggy leaves before finally tossing snow over top and smoothing it out as best they could. As if frosting a cake.

If Len hadn’t witnessed it with his own eyes, he’d have never noticed the area looking strange or out of the ordinary, except maybe the trough of snow that snaked through the trees. But a little wind or another snowfall would take care of that in no time. No, all things considered, Len thought they’d covered their tracks pretty well.

He waited until they’d both walked away and headed home before he left his perch behind the tree. He immediately dashed to cut a Christmas tree as quickly as he could. He’d learned early on that being privy to other people’s secrets could work to his advantage. He’d used the method repeatedly when he had dirt on his sisters. Dirt that they didn’t want their parents to know. So he could never be too sure when he might be able to use Johnny’s secret, but he knew he’d keep his mouth shut. Having a secret as big as this one, he felt sure, was something he could certainly use someday. Not to mention, as soon as he felt it was safe, he planned on finding out what was in that buried box.

That winter had been an especially brutal one for Johnny and his mother. It seemed that every time the snow had almost melted away, another storm would dump another foot. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. With every storm, the fresh snow helped hide the secret.

Before they’d buried Martin, along with the money, Johnny’s mother had decided to keep four hundred dollars, which they could use for expenses—unpaid bills, groceries, getting the car fixed. They had no idea if the money had been marked by the bank, but by using a twenty here or there down at Henry’s General Store, they didn’t figure they were in much jeopardy of getting caught. The sheriff had stopped by a couple of times—the first time only three days after Johnny had shot his father—to inform them that they hadn’t been able to locate Martin. He said he imagined Martin had probably either frozen to death or bled to death (or a combination of both) and his body would most likely be found in the spring melt.

By mid-March the snow had indeed disappeared, but his mother advised that they leave the money where it was for the time being. They were in no need at the moment, and the longer they let things settle, the safer they’d be. But that all changed after the engine on the recently repaired car seized in late April. It had to be towed down the mountain to a mechanic in Floyd, who informed Patricia that the car was ruined and beyond repair. Since she had to have a car to get to and from work, the solution was obvious.

“You need to go out there and dig the box up,” she informed him after he’d gotten home from school. “I think we’re safe now anyway. Besides, I’d rather have it hidden in the house than all the way out there in the middle of the woods. Or maybe we could stash it under the chicken coop. Doesn’t matter. We’ll figure that out. What’s important is that we have it nearby.”

He grabbed a shovel from the shed, slung it over his shoulder like a hobo with a bindle, and set out through the woods. It was a perfect spring day, warm with blue skies and a bit of a breeze rustling the tops of the mostly leafless trees. The poplar leaves were as big as squirrels’ ears, and the oaks had already formed their pollen-filled strings, reminding Johnny of pipe cleaners, which drifted to the ground when the wind gusted. Johnny enjoyed the walk, loving the woods as they came back to life after the winter. He even loved the mud and muck of a bog he had to tramp through to get to his father’s burial site. The beginnings of skunk cabbage had sprouted, their little green heads starting to poke through the mud, and Johnny stamped on every one he saw, sending off a strong, pungent odor.

When he made it to a dumping ground where old-timers had tossed their steel beer cans, brown medicine bottles, and rusted appliances, Johnny took a left and headed toward the foot of the hill. He’d always been fascinated with the dumping ground, wondering who had put all that garbage there. There were no houses around, other than an abandoned cabin on the ridge, so he’d never been able to figure out why anyone would have chosen that place to dump their trash. Regardless, as a younger boy he’d enjoyed rummaging around the dump site, imagining in his boyhood fantasies that he might discover some sort of hidden treasure.

But today, as he left the dump behind, he was in search of an actual hidden treasure. He was excited to uncover the iron lockbox, open it, and run his fingers all over that beautiful cash. The cash that would buy him some decent clothes so he wouldn’t get made fun of at school every day. The cash that would enable him to purchase candy bars and maybe even the occasional T-bone steak. The cash that would send him to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and get him out of the poor, depressed confines of Pleasant Grove. Confines that offered no sort of future. In short, the cash that would insure that he and his mother would escape poverty once and for all.

So he was excited to dig up the money, get back home, and count it. Over and over. Just sit there and stack each and every bill into little piles, the same as he’d done that day on his bed. The events of those few days, of the truck crashing, of him taking the money, of finding out the man’s identity, of then blowing the guts out of that same man, his father, of dragging him through the snow and burying him in a makeshift grave, all of those events had haunted him. But it had gotten better with every passing week. The memories weren’t quite as sharp, the guilt subsided, and there was always that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. That’s what really made it easier to deal with. That, and knowing that his father would have most likely killed him and his mother if he hadn’t pulled the trigger. That’s certainly the way his mother had rationalized it to him on those cold nights when they’d huddled around the woodstove and the subject had come up. They’d talked about it often for the first few weeks, until finally his mother had laid down an ultimatum, saying it was time to move forward. What was done was done and they had to try to forget about it. To be thankful that Johnny’s sorry excuse for a father had at least been able to provide them with something before he died, especially considering that for the past fourteen years he’d never given them as much as a penny.