The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (16 page)

Eventually he raps his knuckles on the door as he enters. He sits at the table while she serves him tea and cookies. Green tea because he once said it’s good for his cholesterol and he’s trying to cut down. He’s not heavy, but he can easily blow his good looks if he doesn’t watch out. She knows he and his wife have recently split, that his wife has taken the kids, that her lawyer is riding him hard.

She knows that she and he can never have a future. But that’s not the point. Thinking about him is a nice fantasy for her at this point in her life. And she trusts him. She likes the way he treats her. Like she’s a good person. Like she was simply caught up in something she didn’t know how to get out of.

Which is only half true.

Marshal Fred is good and kind, with somewhat sad eyes. He probably has a million cases like hers, but he behaves as if she is the only one in whom he can confide. She enjoys their time together, even if it comes only once a month.

But today, it’s not his voice she hears coming from the open doorway.

“Callie? Callie Rustan?”

A woman’s voice.

A
woman
calling her by that name. The name she’ll never get used to.

Fear grips her as she stands at the stove. Her eyes flick to the wooden block. She reaches for the chef’s knife.

“Drop it,” the voice says.

The dead, distorted faces of the women and children flash before her, and she thinks,
Oh, my God—they found me.

She whirls to face a short, squat woman in a pantsuit who’s got her hand on her holstered weapon and is holding aloft the shield of a federal marshal.

“Where’s Fred?” is all Callie can think to say.

Callie sips her green tea alone because Federal Marshal Margaret Bryan coldly declines a cup. Already Callie can feel her spirits sinking.

“He’s been reassigned? To where?”

“That’s none of your concern, is it?”

This woman knows Callie all of two minutes and she’s already showing her who’s in charge. Fred was never this way.

“So I’m dealing with you now?”

“That’s right.”

“You read the file?”

The marshal nods.

“So you know I was coerced.”

The woman’s blouse is a little tight. She must be in her mid-thirties, Callie thinks. She’s the kind of slightly older woman Callie and her girlfriends would have mocked when they hit the clubs at night, back when she lived in the city. She regrets that now. Indeed, with each passing day she is beginning to hate the girl, the child, she was only months ago. Especially since the woman in ill-fitting clothes has the power to make Callie’s new life miserable.

“Let me ask you a question,” Bryan says. As she says this, she points at Callie’s teacup. Not so much accusing her as the cup of tea. “Did you know it was wrong?”

Did she know it was wrong to take a briefcase of cash each week from the tieless man in the Armani suit and beautiful chocolate shoes, and run them through the system, and credit each fresh infusion, minus Timball’s cut, into one of the client’s nine accounts? Sort of, yes. She didn’t need an accounting degree to know that. But she had trusted Eddie Timball. He was one of the top men at the brokerage firm, and she’d been rather flattered and awed by the attention he’d paid her when she first came to work for them. He was a slightly older, handsome man, not her direct supervisor. The other girls had said he was divorced but still played the field. The rumors about his wealth, his cars, his apartment, and his homes had seemed so enticing. It was true, of course. The rumor mill just hadn’t factored in that Eddie was in debt up to his slightly receding scalp.

He had said he could not trust just anyone with this, and that if she helped him she would be . . .
rolling in commissions.
His words. He also let her know that if she helped him, she could not breathe a word of this task to anyone. She had seen it as an opportunity. A way to advance. A way to shuck herself of her roommate and get a place of her own. A way to buy nice things for herself. By the time she had figured out what was really going on, she was in too deep. Only later did she realize that the mere act of Eddie’s asking had doomed her.
She could not refuse.
She was sentenced the second the words left the glib fellow’s lips.

“Yes, I knew,” she tells Margaret Bryan.

“But you did it anyway. You did it and you hid it for three years.”

Fred had never been like this. He had a way of making it all seem like some vast, unfortunate tragedy in which she was merely a bit player. Eight months ago, when he’d first confronted her in his office, he’d laid out those terrible photos on the table and pointed to each of the faces of the dead. “People always say that they’re victimless crimes. You slip them some cash. They give you something. You snort it, shoot it, or smoke it. What’s the harm, right? The harm is, it’s funding people who do this. And this. And this.”

One by one, he carefully pronounced the names of the beaten or bullet-ridden men, women, and children in the photos. Most of them foreigners.

Even when she’d accepted, even when she’d said yes to save her own life, Fred had never treated her like a criminal. He had never once suggested that her actions had led to what happened to the people in those photographs. But
she
had made the leap. It was only logical. He’d tucked those images away almost immediately. But she saw them still. She was sure she always would.

And later, when they had relocated her to someplace in the southeast, Fred had sat her down and spoken to her as if she were just a kid at a new school. He read her the rules. Don’t call attention to yourself. Try to fit in. Join groups, but don’t become a leader. Stay off the Internet. Avoid social media. Don’t make waves. Above all, don’t contact friends and family. They’re dead to you.

Fred had sat with her at this table only last month, one hand on a cookie, his other just grazing hers.

She had trusted Eddie Timball. She had trusted Fred. And now both of them were gone.

“In all that time,” Bryan says now, “you could have called someone. You could have notified the authorities.”

“So that’s how it’s going to be, huh?” Callie says. She wants to sound tough, but she’s out of her league.

“Honey, that’s the way it
is
,” Bryan says. “Nothing’s changed. Nothing’s . . .”

She pauses now, lifting her nose to the ceiling.

The smoke detector screams. Persistent, angry, accusatory.

The cookies are burning.

Fred used to say it’s all about trade-offs.

Back home in New York, she could buy whatever she wanted, once the infusions of Eddie Timball’s commissions started rolling in. She’d had the apartment on the Upper East Side. She had grown accustomed to the clothes, the shoes, the parties, and the guys. And all the freedom in the world.

Now she has less freedom. She is staying put for the foreseeable future. She works a desk job in the management office of a department store in a mall in the middle of nowhere. She tries to do as Fred advised: fit in. She has always been a good student. Always. And so she earnestly tries to do this. She studies the sales circulars that the store she’s never heard of puts out, and decides on a new look. She can dress like a young mom, in that outdated preppy look. Loafers and chinos and a bland, sensible sweater. She doesn’t like any of these clothes, but she can stomach them.

There are no clubs here. At least, nothing like the ones she frequented in the city. Nothing like the tapas and downtown wine bars and the chic lounges lorded over by bouncers who sized you up to see if you merited entrance. There are no restaurants here run by celebrity chefs. No places where the music thumps so hard that you can feel it in your heart and a round of champagne costs you and your girlfriends seventy, easy. No—instead they have brew pubs and Irish-themed hangouts and honky-tonk roadhouses she wouldn’t be caught dead in. The main drag in the center of town is populated with women who dress the way she now does, and who prowl the gift shops on weekends in search of ceramic teddy bears and quilted handbags and scented candles.

There are no cute guys. But more and more, she finds she doesn’t even think about this. It’s as if she has banned pleasure from her heart. She cannot bear to think about having a man close to her. How can she? How could she let a man into her bed and tell him that her name is Callie? She can’t.

She cannot bear to think of her family. Her brother out west. Her sister up north. Her two nieces. She cannot bear to think of her mother, who had been growing weaker and weaker, and relying more on her chair to get around. Never again can the girl the feds call Callie escape to Connecticut to regress into childhood for a long weekend, to eat Dad’s chili, to play the baby grand Knabe in the sunroom and watch for the smile to return to her mother’s face.

The MS had eroded her mother’s ability to play. She and her siblings had been close in age, and all three of them had studied business. All three of them had aped their father in this respect. But the other two were already far more accomplished than she, weren’t they? They possessed, perhaps, far more rigorous minds and a slavish knack for industry. While she—well, every time she looked into her brother’s or sister’s eyes, she sensed that they knew exactly what she was: a vapid, unambitious party girl from the suburbs.

But neither her brother nor her sister had ever learned to play. So the piano would one day pass to her. Or it would have, before her name became Callie Rustan.

So: No apartment. No money. No clothes. No clubs. No guys. No family. No music.

It’s as if the world she knows has been annihilated.

She feels like a nun.

But it’s a trade-off, right, Fred? In exchange for all this, I get to live.

There’s a town about forty minutes north of here, high in the mountains, where tourists prowl and locals flee when the heat gets miserable. It’s home to a historic farm with formal gardens and a bike path. In her old life, she would have turned her nose up at such a place, but she’s now beginning to appreciate that her choices are limited. She wants to be a model witness. She doesn’t want to give Bryan grief.

Both marshals have alluded to having counselors available if she ever wants to talk about her situation. She’s tempted. She could use a shrink badly. But she dares not take them up on it. The marshals always speak of reassignment, making it seem as if you can
behave
yourself into a better city. She is beginning to suspect that this promise is a ploy to extract compliance, but she can’t risk having her mental health issues—her loneliness, her anger, her guilt—on the record. She wants to do this right. She wants to be well thought of. She wants to put the past behind her.

She wants to be good.

So she works out. She runs the paths and rides the bikes and paddles kayaks down frothy rivers. And one afternoon, she leaves the bike off at the rental barn and wanders through the historic farm area, watching ladies churn butter, printers crank presses, and bakers turn loaves. Inside the blacksmith’s shop, an emaciated old man is showing tourists how he makes decorative coat hooks. He pumps the bellows and extracts the glowing iron rod and lays it across his anvil.

Pound pound pound
, the hammer beats red iron.

His audience watches transfixed as the rod yields to the old man’s imagination. Here’s the curl of iron. Here, the grooves that denote a tiny leaf. Here, pincers pluck a tiny gargoyle’s face from the rod.

The old man spins the hammer like a gunslinger twirling a six-gun.

The audience ahhs adoringly.

She feels as if she’s seen something like this as a girl, but she cannot remember when or where. She longs to call her mom right now:
Hi, I know you think I’m dead, but
—

But she can never do this.

The smithy tells how his mentor used to play the anvil like a musical instrument. And then, just like that, he raises his hammers to the anvil and begins to tap out a tune.

The audience is rapt.

Amazing grace . . .

Something shifts in her, and she remembers how and why she came to study the piano.

How sweet the sound . . .

She remembers how she’d played in a bell chorus through two Christmas seasons when she was in elementary school. How she’d loved that sound so much—clear, high, tinkling, beautiful.

But her mother hadn’t thought it wise to study the bells. It wasn’t a skill one could be proud of. What was a bell, really? A novelty instrument, good for showing off once a year. No, if she wanted to learn music, she would learn the piano. And so she had, and it had contented her until she’d gotten to high school and began to see that her choice meant she’d never be able to play in the marching band. Back then, she would have gladly switched to the steel drum. God, how she’d loved that high, plunking sound. But her enthusiasm had struck her mother as strange. In their home it was always understood that music was something a young woman did as part of her overall education. The piano was not an end, not a calling, unto itself. At least not for someone like her. Not for someone possessed of such coldly practical parents.

That sav’d a wretch like me . . .

My God, she thinks: The voice of the anvil is like the voice of a bell.

“Who’d like to give it a try?” the blacksmith says.

Already his eyes are upon her.

The complex where she lives was built in the eighties, and everything here is a little run down. The garage door opener should probably be replaced, but she dreads calling the maintenance office. It takes her forever to get the door open so the delivery-men can back the truck in. When they lift the antique anvil from the back of their truck, she can see the muscles straining under their shirts and overalls. Her empty garage suddenly smells of their sweat, of the Appalachian hills themselves, of the barn where she found and bought the relic, of manure and gasoline. They set the blackened object on top of a tree stump. One of them asks if her husband really is intending to do his blacksmithing in such a small space. There just isn’t enough roof clearance, another explains.