The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (18 page)

And then it hits her. She knows the truth.

Oh God. This isn’t—

She backs away.

The ball-peen hammer hanging at her left hip comes to her hand almost without thinking. She flings it. The steel catches him in the chest. Knocks him back against the door and halfway out of the house. She’s not around to see it. She’s already down the hall, heading for the garage.

If she can get to the steel-clad security door.

But when she gets to the garage she realizes that the security door locks from
inside
the house. And when she hits the switch to raise the garage door, all she hears is a futile groan from the automatic door opener. Dammit. She has never gotten it fixed.

No time.

She hears him calling her. Trying to reassure her. Trying to reason with her.

She kills the lights.

When he enters the garage, his hair disheveled, his eyes wild, she hits him hard across the wrist with the music stand. He half drops. The gun clatters. She tries to leap over him to run inside. But he catches her and throws her to the concrete. Mounts her. Grabs her by the neck.

All light, all air, seems to shrink to pinpricks.

Her hands scrabble frantically to scratch his face, scratch his eyes. But he ably dodges her.

She tries to claw his arm with one hand.

Her other hand is over her head.

Reaching.

Her hand touches wood. It comes to her hand like an old friend.

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

She’s forgotten that the other tool is still in the loop at her hip. Her right hand reaches for it now. Her eyes are nearly blind, her ability to think is seconds from being squeezed away, but somehow she doesn’t have to think. Her hands do it all.

The hammers rise together in unison.

They drum their way down the man’s skull, chasing away sin, chasing away evil. The sound is nothing like a bell. It is terrible, awful, fatal. Not at all beautiful but immensely satisfying.

Sirens make terrible music. She lets that sound and the flashing lights wash over her when the authorities come to take the body. Later that night she is bundled in a blanket as the car rockets south toward Atlanta. Margaret Bryan sits close to her in the back seat, another marshal driving. Maggie is remarkably kind; keeps trying to explain to her what will happen next. A safe house for a few days. A debriefing. A reassignment, for sure.

Maggie’s voice is soft, tinged with anger. “I’m so sorry it took us so long to figure it out. We didn’t believe what we were seeing—hearing. He cut a deal with the guy who was looking for you and Timball. You probably didn’t know, but Fred had some . . . money problems. He and his wife, they’re going through some issues.”

The divorce. I know.

Callie thinks she has said these words but she has not. She has merely nodded. The words are echoing inside her.

He sold me out. For money.

The marshal is talking about making plans. About seeing the counselor in Atlanta. About needing to make new arrangements. About how it’s going to be fine. Like starting over again in a new school.

“I know you probably aren’t up for this right now,” Bryan says. “But I want to make this clear. We’re pulling you out. A new city. A new home. A new identity. Everything.”

Callie forces herself to speak. “I need my things. My tools.”

“We’ll get what we can. But make no mistake: you’re starting over, you understand? You can’t take anything from your old life.”

My new old life, you mean.

Once, she was a foolish young girl. Then she became a woman named Callie. But now she is not even that.

I’m starting over all over.

Again.

Beside her, Maggie relaxes. Looks at her quizzically. “Yeah. What was that back there? Did you take up woodworking or something?”

She wants to explain but can’t find the words. Maggie pats her blanket. She means it to be reassuring. Comforting. It’s a big gesture for her.

But the woman they once called Callie takes no comfort in any of it. She has lowered the volume on Maggie’s voice, the car engine, the road, the shush of the falling snow. She has hied herself over to an inviolable place. A cocoon of steel, where only the patient fall of the hammer can keep her safe.

JEFFERY DEAVER

FROM
In the Company of Sherlock Holmes

S
OMETIMES IT’S OVERWHELMING
: the burden of knowing that the man you most admire isn’t real.

Then the depression that you’ve fought all your life creeps in, the anxiety. The borders of your life contract, stifling, suffocating.

And so slim Paul Winslow, twenty-eight, was presently walking into the neat, unadorned office of his on-again, off-again therapist, Dr. Levine, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

“Hello, Paul, come on in. Sit down.”

Dr. Levine was one of those shrinks who offered basic armchairs, not couches, for his patients. He spoke frequently during the sessions, wasn’t afraid to offer advice, and asked, “How do you feel about that?” only when it was important to know how his patients felt. Which was pretty rare.

He never used the verb
explore.

Paul had read Freud’s
Psychopathology of Everyday Life
(not bad, though a bit repetitive) and the works of Jung and Horney and some of the other biggies. He knew that a lot of what brain docs told you was a crock. But Dr. Levine was a good man.

“I did the best I could,” Paul now explained to him. “Everything was going along okay, pretty much okay, but over the past couple of months it got worse and I couldn’t shake it, you know, the sadness. I guess I need a tune-up,” Paul added, smiling ruefully. Even at the worst times, his humor never wholly deserted him.

A laugh came from the mouth of the clean-shaven, trim physician, who wore slacks and a shirt during the appointments. His glasses were unstylish wire-rims, but that seemed to fit his casual style and friendly demeanor.

Paul had not been here for nearly eight months, and the doctor now glanced through his patient’s file to refresh his memory. The folder was thick. Paul had seen Dr. Levine off and on for the past five years and had been to other shrinks before that. Diagnosed from a young age with bipolar and anxiety disorders, Paul had worked hard to control his malady. He didn’t self-medicate with illegal drugs or liquor. He’d seen therapists, attended workshops, taken medicine—though not regularly and only those run-of-the-mill antidepressants ingested by the ton in the New York metro area. He’d never been institutionalized, never had any breaks with reality.

Still, the condition—which his mother also suffered from—had sidelined him. Never one to get along well with others, Paul was impatient, had little respect for authority, could be acerbic, and never hesitated to verbally eviscerate the prejudiced and the stupid.

Oh, he was brilliant, with an IQ residing well up in the stratosphere. He’d zipped through university in three years, grad school in one. But then came the brick wall: the real world. Teaching at community colleges hadn’t worked out (you don’t necessarily have to get along with fellow professors, but a modicum of tolerance for your students’ foibles is a requirement). Editing for scientific publishers was equally disastrous (the same problem with his bosses and authors). Recently he’d taken up freelance copyediting for one of his former employers, and this solitary job more or less suited, at least for the time being.

Not that money was important; his parents, both bankers, were well off and, sympathetic to their son’s condition, established a trust fund for him, which supported him nicely. Given these resources, he was free to live a simple, stress-free life, working part-time, playing chess at a club in the Village, dating occasionally (though without much enthusiasm), and doing plenty of what he loved most: reading.

Paul Winslow didn’t care much for real people, but he loved the characters in fiction. He always had.

Lou Ford and Anna Wulf and Sam Spade and Clyde Griffiths and Frank Chambers and Mike Hammer and Pierre Bezukhov and Huck Finn . . . a hundred others made up Paul’s circle of intimates. Harry Potter was a good friend, Frodo Baggins a better one.

As for vampires and zombies . . . well, better not to get Paul started.

Yet no fiction, high-brow or low-, captivated him like the short stories and novels of one author in particular: Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

Upon his first reading, some years ago, he knew instantly that he’d found his hero—a man who reflected his personality, his outlook, his soul.

His passion extended beyond the printed page. He collected Victorian memorabilia and artwork. Sitting prominently on the wall in his living room was a very fine reproduction of Sidney Paget’s pen-and-ink drawing of archenemies Holmes and Professor Moriarty grappling on a narrow ledge above Reichenbach Falls, a scene from the short story “The Final Problem,” in which Moriarty dies and Holmes appears to. Paul owned all of the various filmed versions of the Holmes adventures, though he believed the old Grenada version with Jeremy Brett was the only one that got it right.

Yet in recent months Paul had found that spending time in the world of the printed page was growing less and less comforting. And as the allure of the books wore off, the depression and anxiety seeped in to fill its place.

Now, sitting back in Dr. Levine’s bright office—shrink contempo, Paul had once described it—he ran a hand through his unruly black curly hair, which he often forgot to comb. He explained that the high he got from reading the books and stories had faded dramatically.

“It hit me today that, well, it’s lame, totally lame, having a hero who’s fictional. I was so, I don’t know,
confined
within the covers of the books, I’m missing out on . . . everything.” He exhaled slowly through puffed cheeks. “And I thought maybe it’s too late. The best part of my life is over.”

Paul didn’t mind the doctor’s smile. “Paul, you’re a young man. You’ve made huge strides. You have your whole life ahead of you.”

Paul’s eyes, in his gaunt, narrow face, closed momentarily. Then sprang open. “But how stupid is that, having this hero who’s made up? I mean, they’re only books.”

“Don’t dismiss the legitimate emotional attraction between readers and literature, Paul. Did you know tens of thousands of Victorians were inconsolable when one character in a Dickens book died?”

“Which one?”

“Little Nell.”

“Oh,
The Old Curiosity Shop.
I didn’t know about the reaction.”

“All over the world. People were sobbing, milling around in the streets, talking about it.”

Paul nodded. “And when it looked like Sherlock Holmes died in ‘The Final Problem,’ Doyle was so hounded, one might say, that he had to write a sequel that brought him back.”

“Exactly. People love their characters. But apart from the valid role that fiction plays in our lives, in your case I think your diminished response to Sherlock Holmes stories is a huge step forward.” The doctor seemed unusually enthusiastic.

“It is?”

“It’s a sign that you’re willing—and
prepared
—to step from a fictional existence to a real one.”

This was intriguing. Paul found his heart beating a bit faster.

“Your goal in coming to see me and the other therapists in the past has always been to lead a less solitary, more social existence. Find a job, a partner, possibly have a family. And this is a perfect opportunity.”

“How?”

“The Sherlock Holmes stories resonated with you for several reasons. I think primarily because of your talents: your intelligence, your natural skills at analysis, your powers of deduction—just like his.”

“My mind does kind of work that way.”

Dr. Levine said, “I remember the first time you came to see me. You asked about my wife and son—how was he doing in kindergarten? But I didn’t wear a wedding ring and had no pictures of family here. I never mentioned my family and I don’t put any personal information on the Internet. I assumed at the time you were just guessing—you were right, by the way—but now I suspect you deduced those facts about me, right?”

Paul cocked his head. “That’s right.”

“How?”

“Well, as for the fact you had a child and his age, there was a tiny jelly or jam fingerprint on the side of your slacks—about the height of a four- or five-year-old hugging Daddy at breakfast. And you never have appointments before eleven
A.M.
, which told me that you probably were the spouse who took your child to school; if he’d been in first grade or older you would have gotten him to school much earlier and could see patients at nine or ten. You did the school run, I was assuming, because you have more flexible hours than your wife, working for yourself. I was sure she had a full-time job. This
is
Manhattan, of course—two incomes are the rule.

“Now, why a son? I thought the odds were that a girl of that age would be more careful about wiping her fingers before hugging you. Why an only child? Your office and this building are pretty modest, you know. I guessed you weren’t a millionaire. That and your age told me it was more likely than not you had only one child. As to the wife, I suspected that even if you had had marital problems, as a therapist you’d work hard to keep the marriage together, so divorce was very unlikely. There was the widower factor, but the odds seemed against that.”

Dr. Levine shook his head, laughing. “Sherlock Holmes would be proud of you, Paul. Tell me, that comes naturally to you?”

“Totally natural. It’s kind of a game I play. A hobby. When I’m out, I deduce things about people.”

“I think you should consider using these skills of yours in the real world.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’ve always thought you were misplaced in academia and publishing. I think you should find a job where you can put those skills to work.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe the law. Or . . . Well, how’s this: you studied math and science.”

“That’s right.”