The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (40 page)

I readjusted my brain. The captain was speaking, not Tom, but his words made no sense.

“A free ascent,” he said, nodding his head. “Quick thinking. Thought you’d panic, lass. Well, I can still make this work.” He tugged on a pair of heavy rubber gloves, the kind oyster scrubbers use to scrape off algae and bacteria.

I tried to speak but couldn’t.

“You didn’t wait long enough after the scuba accident, Kashiko. You passed out from nitrogen poisoning. You fell, hitting your head against the rocks. A tragedy.”

“Wait,” I croaked. “First tell me what happened to Shinju.”

He shook his head. “She was a pretty little thing when she was young. The first time I saw you and your sister was the day I decided to buy the house across the street from your family. I made up my mind then and there I’d have you both. Just once was all I wanted. There were a few other young girls in the neighborhood as well. That was a lucky chance. I got Shinju, but I guess she figured she’d save you by ruining your looks. She was right about that. Those stitches, that hideous scar turned my stomach.”

“You raped her!”

“Let’s not bring up the past. Shinju tried that, and look what happened to her.”

“You killed Shinju, didn’t you?” I said, scraping up every smidgen of courage to keep the terror from my voice. “I have a right to know why.”

“Shinju was blackmailing me. Needed big bikkies for her habit. But I couldn’t keep up the payments. She threatened to ruin me. A rape charge by BSSP’s favorite model? I’d lose everything—my pension, my reputation . . .”

“Your freedom. You belong in jail.”

“You don’t understand. My wife’s cancer bills wiped out our savings. I sold the house, but it wasn’t enough.”

My mind battled to make sense of things. “That poor diver, Simms, offered Crowe the stray, didn’t he? Whose idea was it, yours or Crowe’s, to get rid of him?”

The whites of the captain’s eyes glistened in the sunlight. “We both fancied the idea of a two-way split instead of a three. Later I brought Shinju to the island and showed her the pearl. She fell in love with it. Agreed to be the hand model for the pearls we stole. But later that day the pearl was missing from Crowe’s office.”

“You found her here at Sunset Point.”

“High on cocaine. She opened her fist and flashed the pearl at me. I demanded it back. She just laughed. Said she’d left a note at your bungalow about the rape so there was nothing I could do. The next moment I thought I saw her throw the pearl over the cliff.” He snorted under his breath. “But she tricked me. She must have thrown a shell.

“I lost control. That pearl was worth a mint. I wrestled her to the ground. Pressed her head into the sand. I had to kill her, don’t you see? But I didn’t figure it out until I read the newspaper. She’d put the pearl in her mouth and choked on it!”

He took a step closer. I shuffled back, teetering on the edge of the rock. The waves crashed on the ancient formations below, sending a fine mist high into the air and onto my bare legs. I bent slightly and pulled my knife from its sheath.

“Now, Kashiko, don’t be difficult.”

I waved my weapon back and forth, hoping he wouldn’t come any nearer. Instead Captain Lafroy lunged at me. I yanked the knife arm high, above his head. He grabbed my other arm, but I twisted, coming around the back of him, slicing off his ear. Howling, he stumbled backward off the edge of the rock. But he still had me in his grasp. In the next moment we were both falling through the air.

In his panic, Lafroy released me. I grabbled for the rock face sliding past me. My thigh bounced off a protruding rock and momentarily slowed my fall. My hands, scraped and bleeding, found purchase and my body slammed into the cliff. Every nerve in my body lit up in pain. A second later I heard the captain’s body hit the limestone below with a gruesome crack.

I refused to look down, but the view above did little to console me. I was a full body length down from the ledge. There were no roots or niches to help me climb back up, and my arms were on fire.
Down, down, down
, sang Johnny Cash. Down to the blue below, swarmed by box jellyfish. My body mottled with stings. My death a diver’s nightmare.

I noticed a narrow fissure in the rock face above me. My knife angled out from it. I reached for it, shoving the blade deeper into the slit, the metal grinding against the rock. My broken ribs screamed in protest. Placing both hands on the handle, I pulled myself two feet higher.

A shadow fell over me. Tom Jr.’s face twisted as he stared beyond me to where his father’s body surely tossed in the surf, surrounded by jellyfish. The anguish I saw stopped my heart.

His eyes shifted to me, then he fell to his knees and gripped my wrists. “Let go of the knife, Kashiko.”

“No!” I screamed.

He grasped my wrists harder. “Trust me.”

I hated to place my faith in Tom, but my grip was weakening. I took a deep breath and released the knife. He dragged me up and over the ledge, my ribs wailing.

Tom rocked me in his arms. “Oh, God, oh, God. I’m so sorry, Kashiko.” He said it over and over. I wished he’d shut up. I couldn’t handle the pain in his voice. But he kept rambling. “I knew Shinju was getting money under the table from somebody in Broome. It had to be Crowe, all Crowe, I told myself. But Da acted strange when I asked him about it. Nervous, suspicious. Still, I had no idea about . . . about what he’d done to Shinju.”

“You stopped calling me after my face was cut.” It was all I could think to say.

“I was fifteen. I was an ass. I’m sorry.”

He started to cry, but I wondered if sorry would ever be enough. For any of us.

“Miss Nakagawa?”

I awoke from my drug-induced nap. The two detectives were sipping coffee at the foot of my hospital bed. But my lids were heavy and shut without any help from me. When I inhaled, a jolt of pain reminded me I had three broken ribs.

“Miss?” Suit Number One repeated.

I kept my eyes shut. But I talked. About Shinju, Crowe, and the captain. About the pearl. The unfortunate diver, Simms. But I didn’t tell them everything—that the night I slept with Tom, the captain raped my sister. That she cut my face to save me from the same fate. The suits didn’t need to know. At least not right now.

My parents drove me home and Mum offered to stay. I think she was a little surprised when I told her she could. She helped me get into an old nightgown and we sat on the small patio behind the bungalow. A full moon glowed overhead.

A few blocks away, the Staircase to the Moon shimmered on the mudflats. When we were little, Shinju and I imagined skipping up those steps to escape the rows at home. Sadly, she found heaven dust a better way to escape her nightmares.

Mum’s lids drooped and she slumped sideways in her patio chair, palms lying limply on her lap. Her shoulders seemed narrower than I remembered. When had her skin become so thin across her cheeks?

Slipping one hand into my nightgown pocket, I drew out Shinju’s necklace. Each pearl looked unearthly, as if an angel’s halo had been captured in a glass ball. I grasped Mum’s fingers and gently wrapped Shinju’s pearls around our clasped hands. I’ve never believed in anything as ethereal as a soul. But if there are such things, I hoped my sister’s was now free, skipping those amber stairs to the moon.

LEE MARTIN

FROM
Glimmer Train Stories

M
Y UNCLE WAS
a man named Bill Jordan, and in 1972, when I was sixteen, he came home from Vietnam, rented a small box house on the corner of South and Christy, and went to work on a section gang with the B & O Railroad. If not for my mother and her romance with our neighbor, Harold Timms, perhaps my uncle would have lived a quiet and unremarkable life, but of course that’s something we’ll never know.

“He’ll do all right,” my father said one night at supper. He looked out the window and nodded his head. It was the first warm day of spring, and the window was open. I smelled the damp ground, heard the robins singing. “I’m glad he’s back,” my father said, and I believe now, for just an instant, my mother and I let ourselves get caught up in his optimism, a gift we desperately needed, although we were the sort of family that never would have admitted as much.

“How’s your pork chop?” my mother asked.

“Bill’s going to be aces,” my father said.

Then we all sat there, chewing, not saying much of anything else at all. Bill was home, safe, and for the time that’s the only thing that mattered.

By summer, though, he was fed up with Harold Timms, who happened to be his foreman on the section gang. It was generally known throughout Goldengate that Mr. Timms was keeping time with my mother, a fact that rankled Bill day in and day out, because on the job he was tired of acting like he didn’t know better. My father, a withdrawn man who kept his troubles to himself, had apparently decided to ignore my mother’s adultery.

“I have to do what Harold Timms tells me every day,” Bill said to my father one Sunday afternoon when they were in the shade of the big maple alongside our house, changing the points and plugs on our Ford Galaxie. “And all the while everyone in town knows he’s getting it steady from your Annie.”

I lay on my bed, listening. Out my window, I could see Bill leaning over the fender of the Galaxie. The hood was open above him, and he was going to town with a spark plug wrench. He had on a black bowling shirt with a print of a teetering pin wearing a crown and the words
King Pins
across the back. He’d rolled the short sleeves tight on his biceps. From where I was lying, all I could see of my father, who stood on the other side of the Galaxie, was his hand on top of that fender. His long, narrow hand. The face of his Timex watch seemed enormous on his slender wrist. A brown leather band wrapped around that wrist with plenty of length to spare. I knew he’d had to punch an extra hole in it so the watchband wouldn’t be too loose.

“Dammit, R.T.” Bill banged the spark plug wrench against a motor mount. “You need to put a stop to that monkey business. For Roger’s sake if for no other reason.”

My name came to me through the window and caught me by surprise, as if my father and Bill knew I was eavesdropping, even though I was sure they didn’t. My father’s hand pulled away from the fender, and I imagined him, outside my view, fuming.

The leaves on the maple rattled together. It was August, the start of the dog days, and we were grateful for every stir of air. Next door at the Timms’s house, a radio was playing. The curtain at the window lifted and fell back with the breeze. I could hear the faint strains of “Too Late to Turn Back Now,” and the chorus—
I believe, I believe, I believe I’m fallin’ in love
—annoyed me because I knew it was Connie Timms listening to it, and I was fretting about her because she’d told me after church that she and I were through.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she said. We were outside on the sidewalk, and people were coming out of the church and down the steps. “I want a boyfriend I can tell the world about. I don’t want some . . .” Here she struggled to find the words she wanted, the ones that would describe what she and I had been up to that summer. “I don’t want an affair,” she finally said.

Now I can almost laugh at the way that word sounded coming from a girl her age. At the time, though, my heart was breaking. I watched Connie run down the sidewalk to her father’s Oldsmobile ’98, fling the door open, and get inside. I knew she didn’t mean for me to come after her. I wanted to, but I didn’t have the nerve.

If not for my mother and Mr. Timms, everything between Connie and me might have been fine. Bill and my father weren’t saying anything I didn’t already know. My mother and Mr. Timms. Like my father, I tried to ignore what was going on between them, but it was impossible.

Earlier that summer, Connie and I began to take note of each other, and as we got cozy, we agreed to keep our hey-baby-hey a secret. What would people think if they knew?
Apples didn’t fall far from the tree.
Why did that concern me? I suppose there was a part of me that believed I was betraying my father by throwing in with the daughter of the man who was coming between him and my mother.

How could Connie and I make our affections known when her father and my mother were the subjects of so much gossip? I’d like to say we wanted to be better than that gossip, but I suspect the truth was we were embarrassed. We were afraid the town was watching us, and every time we were together on the sly, I felt guilty. I wanted to think that we’d found each other solely from our two hearts syncing up, but as long as there was the story of my mother and her father, I wasn’t sure. Maybe we were just following their lead.

We couldn’t have said any of this at the time. At least I couldn’t have. I won’t presume to speak for Connie. I only know this: no matter what we could say then, or what we knew by instinct, one fact was plain—whatever was happening between the two of us could never be separated from the fact that her father and my mother were lovers.

“We can’t let anyone find out,” I told Connie early on. “We can’t be trashy like them.”

“My father’s not trashy.” She had a pageboy haircut and her bangs were in need of a trim. We were talking over the wire fence that ran between my backyard and hers. She had on Levis and white Keds sneakers and a T-shirt that advertised Boone’s Farm, a soda-pop wine popular in those days. She brushed her bangs out of her eyes and stared at me. “He’s lonely. He’s a very lonely man.”

I loved her brown hair and her blue eyes. I loved the smell of her perfume—something called Straw Hat, which was all sweet and woodsy and made me want to press her to me and breathe in that scent. She could have said anything to me at that moment and I would have taken it as gospel. So I let that statement about Mr. Timms’s loneliness absolve him, and with my silence—much to my shame now—I allowed my mother to become the wicked one in the story of their affair.

Mr. Timms was a widower. His wife, a nervous, fretful woman, took sick one winter night when a heavy snow was falling. It started around dusk, and before long the streets were covered. The snow kept coming down as night crept in. My father and I went into our living room to watch it out the window. By that time the snow was up to the top of the drainage ditches that ran alongside the street.