The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (55 page)

Another thing I never told him: before leaving the house in Davis Square, I cut open one of Eve’s boxes and found her gold bracelet in a tiny plastic bag. The chain was tarnished. I popped open the locket; the frames were empty. I took the bracelet and resealed the box with packing tape. I held on to it—never wearing it, always hiding it away, even before there were people to hide it from. My husband found it once, and I said it had been a gift from my mother. I imagined other people discovering the bracelet through the years and telling each one a different story. I would carry it with me to Antarctica, tucked in the side pocket of my suitcase, though I was never able to bring it out into the open.

Not long after Eve’s disappearance, I looked up the name of her abductor on a computer: Randall Smith. I’d only heard her say it aloud once, in the hospital. After a little searching, I found an obituary. He had died the day after our visit, survived by no one. The obituary said it was natural causes, which explained nothing.

It was twilight when we flew over Admiralty Bay. Luiz said that if I watched the water carefully, I might see leopard seals. The pilot was from the Netherlands, hired for a price that would horrify my husband when the check posted. Luiz’s boss had gotten wind of our expedition and wasn’t at all pleased; that morning he’d called from Brazil and told Luiz that he was not in the business of escorting tourists. Soon I would have to get on the plane to New Zealand, as I had promised, but I wasn’t completely out of time.

The landscape was different on the peninsula. The ice was sparser, exposing the rocky peaks of mountains and patches of black soil near the coastline. When the explosion site came into view, it looked like a dark scar on the snow.

The helicopter touched down. Black headsets swallowed our ears, muffling the sound of the propellers. The helicopter swayed as it landed. I could feel the engine rumbling beneath us; it made my skin vibrate inside my many layers of clothes. Luiz got out first, then helped me onto the ice. The pilot shouted something in Dutch, which Luiz translated: soon the twilight would be gone; he didn’t want to fly back in the dark.

Together we approached the wreckage. Luiz still had his headset on. I had taken mine off too soon and now my ears buzzed. Up close, the site was smaller than I’d expected: a black rectangle the size of the swimming pool I took my son to in the summer. Nothing of the structure remained except for metal beams jutting from ridges of ash and debris. The sky was a golden haze.

“I told you there wasn’t much to see.” He slipped off his headset. His face was covered except for his eyes. I was wearing a balaclava too and knew I looked the same.

“Tell me what it was like before.”

The station had been shaped like a horseshoe. He pointed to the empty spaces where the mess hall used to be, the dormitories, the bathroom, my brother’s seismograph. Their base had been smaller than Belgrano. They didn’t have an observation room or heated research tents. Everything had been contained under one roof.

I stepped in the ash and listened to it crunch under my boots. I passed black spears of wood and warped beams. One section of the site was even more charred, the ground scooped in. I stood inside the depression and looked at the bits of metal glinting in the ash. I picked up something the size of a quarter. I wasn’t sure what it had been before; the fire had made it glossy and flat. I slipped it into my pocket and kept walking. I told myself it was evidence; I just didn’t know what kind.

The wind blew flurries of ash around my legs. On the other end of the site, I looked for some sign of my brother’s seismograph. I came across a spoon, the handle melted into a glob of metal, and a lighter. I put those things in my pockets too. More evidence. Luiz was still on the edge of the site. By then I understood he was someone who had no desire to go searching for things. He didn’t even collect the meteorites; his only concern was classifying them. The helicopter would be ready for us soon, but the sky still held a dull glow.

There were so many times when I wanted to tell my brother everything—when, in the middle of the night, I wanted to kneel by his bed and whisper,
I have a secret
. In Cambridge, I’d told myself these were Eve’s secrets to keep or expose; it was her life to walk away from, if that’s what she wanted. And the more time that passed, the more unimaginable the truth seemed. To admit one lie would mean admitting another and then another.

I imagined myself at home in New Hampshire, arranging everything on the living room floor. A map of Antarctica, with stars to mark the bases: McMurdo; here; Belgrano. My brother’s watch. Eve’s empty locket. The photo he mailed, without a note, when he first arrived in Antarctica. He was wearing a yellow snow suit and standing outside McMurdo, surrounded by bright white ice. Around these materials I would place the metals I had collected at the site and try to see something: a pattern, a sign. Or maybe I would just read aloud the last letter I wrote to him. Or maybe, in the helicopter, I would turn to Luiz and tell him everything.

The sky was almost dark. I was back inside the depression. I was sitting down in it and hugging my knees. I had no memory of walking over there and stepping into the hole; I had just done it automatically. Luiz was calling to me. The wind carried his voice away.

Maybe it was just an iguana
, I heard my brother say.

In Antarctica, I did not know if he had denied himself the chance to get out of the burning building. I did not know what he believed I knew, or what would have changed if I’d given him the truth. I did not know if I would ever see Eve again. I did not know what had happened in that hospital room, or in Acton. Some of these things I did not know not because they were unknowable, but because I had turned away from the knowledge. In Antarctica, I decided that was the worst thing I’d ever done, that refusal.

The stars were coming out. Luiz was crossing the site, waving and calling my name. The temperature was dropping. My eyes watered. I sank deeper into the hole.

In Antarctica, I did not know that a month after I left, Luiz would become trapped in a whiteout and lose two fingers to frostbite. I did not know that the tibia would turn out to have belonged to my brother, that it would be shipped back to America in a metal box. I did not know if one day I would disappear and no one except a missing woman and a dead man would be able to tell the people who loved me why.

Megan Abbott
is the Edgar Award–winning author of seven novels, including
The Fever
and
Dare Me
. Her stories have appeared in collections including
Detroit Noir, Best Crime and Mystery Stories of the Year, Queens Noir, Wall Street Noir
, and
The Speed Chronicles
. She is also the author of
The Street Was Mine
, a study of hardboiled fiction and film noir, and
A Hell of a Woman
, a female crime fiction anthology. She has been nominated for awards including the Crime Writers Association’s Steel Dagger, the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the Hammett Prize. She lives in Queens, New York.

• The idea for “My Heart Is Either Broken” came straight from the front page of the
New York Daily News
. The headline of the day was the acquittal of Casey Anthony, the Florida woman charged in the death of her two-year-old daughter. For months the tabloids had been writhing over the case, painting Anthony as a demonic party girl or a down-market femme fatale. The front-page photo that day depicted Anthony, hair pulled back in a prim ponytail, donning the pale pink buttoned-up shirt of a devout schoolgirl. The
News
editors, however, had clearly chosen the image for a reason, because for all the demure restraint of the outfit, Anthony had been snapped smiling in a way that, given the paper’s coverage of her, can only be described as witchy. Dangerous. The actual facts of the case are complicated, the trial was troubled—but what interested me was how Anthony’s behavior was the media focus. She did not “act” as a distraught mother should after her daughter’s disappearance, and she wasn’t performing the role of “unjustly accused” now. I began to think about how much our expectations of how grief, trauma, and maternal love are expressed rule the way we view guilt or innocence. And about the special fear we have of mothers who don’t seem to love their children the way we want them to, or at least don’t know how to play the part for us.

Daniel Alarcón
’s books include
War by Candlelight
, a finalist for the 2005 PEN/Hemingway Award, and
Lost City Radio
, named a Best Novel of the Year by the
San Francisco Chronicle
and the
Washington Post
. He is executive producer of Radio Ambulante.org, a Spanish-language narrative journalism podcast. In 2010
The New Yorker
named him one of the twenty best writers under forty, and his most recent novel,
At Night We Walk in Circles
, was a finalist for the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award.

• This story came together after years visiting the prison known as Lurigancho, on the outskirts of Lima. I went inside for the first time in 2007 and have been returning ever since, never quite knowing what I am doing there or what keeps drawing me back to that place. In 2009 I taught a writing workshop there, and eventually, in 2011, I pitched a piece to
Harper’s
about life in the drug trafficking block. “Collectors” is based on the material gathered on that reporting trip. In this case, the spark was an offhand comment by an inmate, who began musing about the prison’s collection of terrible odors. He said it half jokingly, and then mentioned the worst smell of all: the smell of sex when you weren’t having any. I asked him to explain, and he did. The story was eye-opening. I knew I had to do something with that.

Jim Allyn
is a graduate of Alpena Community College and the University of Michigan, where he earned a master’s degree in journalism. While at Michigan he won a Hopwood Creative Writing Award, Major Novel Division, and the Detroit Press Club Foundation Student Grant Award for the best writing in a college newspaper or periodical. Upon graduation he pursued a career in health-care marketing and communication. He recently retired as vice president of marketing and community relations at Elkhart General Healthcare System in Elkhart, Indiana. His first short story, “The Tree Hugger,” appeared in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
in 1995, and four others have been published by
EQMM
since then. He is a U.S. Naval Air Force veteran, having served aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S.
Intrepid
.

• About 250 miles north of Detroit, on the shores of Lake Huron, sits the tiny village of Black River, Michigan. The mouth of the river, not a major artery but a narrow trout stream, is right there in the village. My family’s 200-acre wilderness retreat in the Great North Woods—known to us simply as “Camp”—is situated about 2 miles upstream on the Black. On the western edge of our property, on the river’s highest bank, is a cemetery, a rustic spot under a tall jack pine fenced off by cedar poles. It is the place where for the past sixty years we have buried creatures with nobler hearts than ours.

An odd assortment of aging small wood and stone markers carry the names of the buried friends, companions, and fellow hunters who made the journey with us. Donda, the matriarch of a clan of blooded German shorthair pointers that we grew up with . . . Misty, Daisy Mae, Tiger Jones, Lady Mike. And other wonderful shorthairs . . . Zipper, Shoshone, Roadie, Bonnie Brown, Max. And there’s Little Dog, aka Sweet Pea, a wonderfully affectionate Manchester toy terrier with a warrior’s heart who waded among the giant shorthairs absolutely unafraid. There’s Jeremy, a little mixed-breed who fiercely defended my son Brodie even if I was just trying to kiss him goodnight. The cemetery’s patriarch is Smokey Joe, a Labrador retriever who romped with us in the big lake on the summer side of life.

But in this quiet resting place on Black River all are not here who should be here. Two are missing: Jenny Wren and McGill. I buried them on a restored farm near Ann Arbor about forty years ago. Sometimes life grabs you by the throat and it’s all you can do just to hold on. McGill and Jenny died during such a time, and I just wasn’t able to make the trip north to Camp. A white-collar nomad, I sold the house and was long gone to Illinois and then Indiana. Over the years I resolved that at some point I would return for Jenny Wren and McGill. That would involve knocking on the door, trying to explain myself to strangers, and, if allowed, seeing if I could even find the graves after all this time. As I contemplated this, it struck me that it was an unusual thing to do and could be a story. But if a beloved pet is really in the grave, it’s not a mystery. So what if something else was buried there, something dark and sinister? What would it be and who would bury it?

The story I will eventually tell to the current occupants of my old farmhouse will resonate very strongly with the story that serial killer Lyle Collins spins out to Derek and Parveen Lane. The motives Collins lies about will be my real motives.

The story’s title, emerging as it does at the end, is how it emerged in real life. I was doing my final edit—the story was done and entitled “Princess Jenny”—when I applied the standard of criminal behavior, which holds that you always look for patterns. Hence a second grave—“Princess Anne.” The story for Jim Howard ends as he’s walking back to his Jeep, parked at the church. The nonfiction story will end when Jenny Wren and McGill come home to Camp.

Jodi Angel
is the author of two collections of short stories. Her first collection,
The History of Vegas
, was published in 2005 and was named a
San Francisco Chronicle
Best Book of 2005 as well as a
Los Angeles Times
Book Review
Discovery. Her second collection,
You Only Get Letters from Jail
, which includes “Snuff,” was named a Best Book of 2013 by
Esquire
and a Notable New Release by the
New York Times
. Angel’s work has appeared in
Esquire, Tin House, One Story, Zoetrope: All-Story
, and
Byliner
, among other publications and anthologies. Her stories have received several Pushcart Prize nominations, and “A Good Deuce” was named as a distinguished story in
The Best American Short Stories 2012
. Angel grew up in northern California—in a family of girls.