The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (51 page)

She put away the water and picked up the gun and stood waiting by a mottled white rock that was like the back of some sea creature buried in the hill. He said, “I think when you’re a boy that age, maybe you just need something to be, even if it isn’t real. Every minute you’re play-acting, you know? We’d drive around breaking things, sneaking into places.” His voice got quiet. “And we had a knife. Then we had a gun.”

Carrie stood with the shotgun at port arms, as if ready to stand him off. Her face was so pale in the cold light she looked almost blue. She said, “Did you use them?”

“No, no, but . . .” The dogs went to stand by Carrie, and he sat alone on his stump and felt something clench inside him, some fist that grabbed his heart to be alone, separated from them just that few feet. “I think I knew something was going on. I knew if we kept going out something would happen.”

“Did you want something to happen?”

He was still. “We took a girl, we brought her out here.” He thought about how that sounded. “We didn’t
take
her, you know, we just came out here. We were drinking. She was drinking a lot.”

“You got her drunk.”

“We were all drunk. We started at the Pub, and then we just . . .”

“Did you hurt her?”

“No.” He shook his head, emphatic. His face was hot, sweat running from the hair at his collar though the day was cold and there were circles of gray snow shaped to the shadows of the rocks.

He looked over finally at Carrie, but she faced away, holding tight to Poke’s collar. “Was she afraid?” Her voice was small, thin, and it was strange how she seemed like a very young girl herself, lost in her shapeless parka and holding the outsized shotgun in her small hands.

“No. I don’t think so. We were just kids, getting drunk in the woods. She was older than us, I think. I don’t think she thought, I mean, maybe she thought we were going to fool around, all of us. Hell, I don’t know. But I could see he was thinking about it. Gifford.” He got a flash of his friend standing in the dark, a few feet away from where he and the girl sat with their backs against a tree. The girl laughing, her teeth white. Gifford had been looking off into the black woods and Larocque knew he was wondering if anybody knew where they were. “I couldn’t drink like that, like they were. I went back to the truck and passed out. When I woke up, Gifford was driving me home. He said he’d dropped off the girl at her place.” He had the thought that this was the most he’d spoken to Carrie, the most he’d spoken out loud to anyone in years, and it was just this terrible thing that he thought he’d never tell anyone.

“A couple of days later it was all over the news, the girl. That she was missing. I hid for a few days, but I didn’t know what to do. I was sitting in Lindy’s and in comes Gifford and I could see in his eyes, I could just see it. I had the papers open in front of me and he just stood there looking at me. I never saw anybody look like that. I don’t know how to say what it was like. Like his skull was coming through his skin. Like he wasn’t a regular human being.”

“Did the police talk to him?”

He had to stop looking at her, and turned to see only the trees and the rocks and the gunmetal sky. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I left. I moved out to California to work for my Uncle Ronnie hanging sheetrock. Ronnie went out of business and came home, but I just stayed out there and found work. If Henry hadn’t died, I’d have never come back.”

Carrie started to say something else, but then he heard her make a small noise, a grunt or cough, and turned to see Pelletier standing over her as she fell, the barrel of the pistol in his hands and the butt out, like the bell of a hammer, and one wrist clamped in a steel cuff. Larocque stumbled over the white rock to get to her and Pelletier had the Winchester pump out of her slack hands and he climbed awkwardly away onto the hump of boulder. The dogs whined and barked and the young Belgian made a noise low in his throat. Pelletier pointed the pump gun and Larocque grabbed the dog’s collar and held him down, crouching by Carrie’s body.

Pelletier said, “See? What did you think would happen?”

“You killed her.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Are you asking or telling?”

Larocque said, “That woman from the bar. And more, right? That girl at the campground, Allyson. Didn’t you?” He wanted to touch Carrie’s face but was afraid he would know then she was dead.

Gifford made a noise that might have been laughing, but his eyes were red and full. “You left. How do you know what I did?”

“I knew you. That’s why I had to go. I knew even before it happened. The things we did, it wasn’t enough for you. You were going to hurt somebody.”

“Then why did you come back?”

“I told you. Henry died. I never thought you’d still be here.”

Larocque watched Gifford’s fingers twitch on the trigger and his head swivel crazily around, searching the hill around them. “I can’t find her. The girl I took. I knew it was around here somewhere, but I can’t find it anymore.” He gestured drunkenly with the barrel of the gun. “There was the rock, the trees. Some kind of hollow where she was. It’s all different.”

It was getting darker. Gifford wiped at the sweat above his eyes and left a gritty smear. He pointed the gun at Larocque. “You can make those dogs find her.”

“It doesn’t work like that, Gifford.”

“You left me here with these things in my head. You left me here.” He lifted the gun barrel and awkwardly racked the slide, a bright green shell arcing out into the dirt. “Why didn’t you stop me? You could see what I was going to do. How could you leave me alone with that?” He was crying now. “Wasn’t you my friend?”

“I’m sorry.” Larocque did feel a kind of sorrow in that second, and his breath caught in his throat. Pelletier brought the Winchester to his shoulder and tensed. Carrie jerked upright, her eyes wide and white bark stuck to her bloody hair, and brought her hand up with her service pistol in it. Pelletier started, opened his mouth to say something, but she shot him three times and he stepped back off the rock and collapsed into the dead leaves.

Three summers later a group of young kids from a college in Boston came to shoot a movie. One of the crew was a local girl, and she asked Carrie if they’d bring the dogs and let them be filmed. Larocque came with her to stand at the pickup and drink coffee, but when they saw him getting Masie out of the truck they asked if he’d be in the film. Carrie looked at him and lowered her head to smile, and he said sure and winked at her. The director, a short, skinny kid who wore a suit jacket and vest over faded jeans, told him the movie was called
Satan’s Kingdom
, after the wilderness area down in Northfield, and Laroque said he knew all about it. They wanted him to stand with the dogs at the edge of the forest and pantomime fear when something came out of the woods, some horror that they would put in later through a process Larocque couldn’t understand.

They asked him to walk the dogs up and down John Hill Road and introduced him to a girl, a small, slim girl holding a birch rod who would come through the woods at him. She’d tap the rod against the trees so he would know where to look, and he was supposed to throw his hands up and yell when she reached the tree line.

He ran the Belgians up and down the narrow verge of the road, and when the girl began to tap the stick, Poke came up short and peered into the woods. The kids in the crew looked at each other and nodded their heads, and the tapping got louder, and Larocque stepped close to the dogs and looked nervously past them into the dark trees.

The tapping seemed to come from everywhere, a hollow sound that echoed in the spaces between his ribs and made the hair stand up on his neck like the quills of some startled animal, and he ran his hand over the back of his head and felt sweat at his temples.

The sound grew louder and there was a distinct rustling from the pines. Larocque backed across the road, and the kid in the vest followed him with the camera, murmuring encouragement to Larocque, or maybe to himself. Larocque tripped backing up and went down hard on his haunches. The dogs whined.

When the girl’s stick smacked the base of a telephone pole at the verge of the road, the long white rod poking from the shadow like a disembodied bone, Larocque screamed and covered his head with his hands. He dropped to his knees and sobbed, his mouth open. Masie howled, and Poke took it up, lifting his long head and closing his eyes to sing the man’s grief. A minute went by, then two, and the director stopped filming and lifted the camera away. The girl, who had emerged from the woods with a red leaf stuck in her hair, dropped her stick and crossed the road and put one hand on Larocque’s back. Without lifting his head, he put one hand on hers while his tears and spit darkened the asphalt.

After a minute Carrie reached him, helped him up, and guided him to the truck, where he sat in the passenger seat staring through the glass. No one said a word, and she gathered up the dogs and drove them home.

FROM
Glimmer Train

I
.

I
N
A
NTARCTICA
, there was nothing to identify because there was nothing left. The Brazilian station at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula had burned to the ground. All that remained of my brother was a stainless steel watch. It was returned to me in a sealed plastic bag, the inside smudged with soot. The rescue crew had also uncovered an unidentified tibia, which might or might not have belonged to him. This was explained in a cold, windowless room at Belgrano II, the Argentinian station that had taken in the survivors of the explosion. Luiz Cardoso, the head researcher at the Brazilian base, had touched my shoulder as he spoke about the bone, as though this was information intended to bring comfort.

Other explanations followed, less about the explosion and more about the land itself. Antarctica was a desert. There was little snowfall or rain. Much of it was still unexplored. There were no cities. The continent was ruled by no one; rather, it was an international research zone. My brother had been visiting from McMurdo, an American base on Ross Island, but since it was a Brazilian station that had exploded, the situation would be investigated according to their laws.

“Where is the bone now? The tibia?” I’d lost track of how long it had been since I’d slept, or what time zone I was in. It felt very strange not to know where I was in time.

“In Brazil.” His English was accented but clear. It had been less than a week since the explosion. “It’s not as though you could have recognized it.”

We stood next to an aluminum table and two chairs. The space reminded me of an interrogation room. I hadn’t wanted to sit down. I had never been to South America before, and as Luiz spoke, I pictured steamy Amazonian rivers and graveyards with huge stone crosses. It was hard to imagine their laws having sway over all this ice. It was equally hard to believe a place this big—an entire fucking continent, after all—had no ruler. I felt certain that it would only be a matter of time before there was a war over Antarctica.

“It’s lucky the explosion happened in March.” Luiz was tall, with deep-set eyes and the rough beginnings of a beard, a few clicks shy of handsome.

“How’s that?” My brother was dead. Nothing about this situation seemed lucky.

“Soon it will be winter,” he said. “It’s dark all the time. It would have been impossible for you to come.”

“I don’t know how you stand it.” The spaces underneath my eyes ached.

My husband hadn’t wanted me to come to Antarctica at all, and when our son saw where I was going on a map, he cried. My husband had tried to convince me everything could be handled from afar.
You’re a wife
, he’d reminded me as I packed.
A mother too
.

“Did you know about your brother’s work?” Luiz said. “With the seismograph?”

“Of course.” I listened to wind batter the building. “We were very close.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about him as a boy, many years before everything went wrong: tending to his ant farms and catching snowflakes in his mouth during winter. Peering into a telescope and quizzing me on the stars. Saying tongue twisters—
I wish to wish the wish you wish to wish
—to help his stutter. We had not spoken in over a year.

Luiz clapped his hands lightly. Even though we were indoors, he’d kept his gloves on. I had drifted away and was momentarily surprised to find myself still in the room.

“You have collected your brother’s things, such as they are. There will be an official inquiry, but you shouldn’t trouble yourself with that.”

“I’m booked on a flight that leaves in a week. I plan to stay until then.”

“The explosion was an accident,” he said. “A leak in the machine room.”

“I get it.” Exhaustion was sinking into me. My voice sounded like it was coming from underwater. “Nobody’s fault.”

I had flown from JFK to New Zealand, where I picked up a charter plane to an airstrip in Coats Land. There had been gut-popping turbulence, and from the window I could see nothing but ice. Luiz had been the one to meet me on the tarmac and drive me to Belgrano II in a red snow tractor. I’d packed in a hurry and brought what would get me through winter in New Hampshire: a puffy coat that reached my knees, a knit hat with a tassel, leather gloves, suede hiking boots. I’d had to lobby hard to come to Antarctica; the stations weren’t keen on civilians hanging around. When I spoke with the director of McMurdo, I’d threatened to release a letter that said details of the explosion, the very information needed to properly grieve, were being kept from the victims’ families. I knew Luiz was looking me over and thinking that the best thing I could do for everyone, including my brother, including myself, was just to go on home.

“Are there polar bears here?” I felt oddly comforted by the idea of spotting a white bear lumbering across the ice.

“A common mistake.” He drummed his fingers against the table. He had a little gray in his eyebrows and around his temples. “Polar bears are in the North Pole.”

“My brother and I were very close,” I said again.