The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (32 page)

Clay was only seventeen, and he wasn’t clear on how he was supposed to attain perfection, but the guidelines he’d been given last night had been pretty clear.

He saw the principal again that day, when she came to watch the team practice. That wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. While Clay was waiting to come up to bat, he saw Coach Halsey look at Mrs. DeWitt. It made Clay shiver. Clay’d been scared he’d pitch poorly that day, but now that he knew there’d be a price to pay if he failed, his focus was amazing.

After practice, Principal DeWitt drifted over to talk to Coach Halsey. After a second Coach beckoned Clay over. He trotted over to the two adults.

“I hear you need a recruitment film,” Coach Halsey said.

“My parents say I need one to send out next year, yessir,” Clay said.

“I’m willing to help you make it, but I won’t do all the work,” Coach said. “You’ll have to put in some hours helping me do other things, so I’ll have some free time.”

The old Clay would have been sullen about giving up anything to get something that was his due. The new Clay said, “Yessir. Just say when.” He turned and went into the locker room.

“I think he’s been turned around,” Anne said.

“At least for now.” Coach Halsey looked down at her. “Want to get dinner Saturday night?”

“I think so,” she said after a pause. “There are a few things we might want to talk about.”

“Oh?”

“Sarah Toth’s dad is hitting her.”

“Well,” Holt said. “We can’t have that. She won’t get the high test scores if she’s being beaten at home.”

“If she scores two points higher the next time she takes the SAT, it’ll be a state record.”

He smiled. No one else would have enjoyed that smile but Anne. “Then we’d better get cracking.”

They both laughed, just a little. “By the way,” Holt said. “What happened to the principal before you? You became assistant here the year before she killed herself, right?”

Anne nodded, her expression faintly regretful. “Mrs. Snyder was having sex in her office with a married teacher, Ted Cole. Christy overheard a conversation between them and came to me with it.”

“Then it would have been all over the school in short order.” He smiled. “Good job. Proactive.”

Anne smiled back before she glanced down at her watch. “I have to be at my house to let the handyman in,” she murmured. But she lingered for a moment. “Snyder almost didn’t hire me. She was not a fan, from the first interview until the last. But the school board liked me. And the minute I saw Travis High, I knew it was a place where I could make a difference. Now . . .” She looked up at him and away, almost shyly. “Now there’s no limit.”

“No limit,” he agreed, and they stood silent in the lowering sun, their long shadows streaking across the practice field.

FROM
The Strand Magazine

T
HE COFFEE WAS GONE AGAIN
. Mercer swore softly, tiredly, and carried the coffeepot to the basin. He moved slowly. His eyes were red and he ground them mercilessly with the heels of both hands while the percolator was filling. He needed a shave now, and the total relaxation of his heavy face gave him the hopeless, stupid, waxen look of a drunkard. Carter sat limply at the large pine table and watched him, scarcely seeing him in his own fatigue. It had been a long night, he was thinking, a fantastically wicked, confused, and diabolical night, and it was only just beginning.

He watched Mercer start back across the room and stop at the window to stare out glumly at the entrance to the hospital across the street. The chill fog outside had streaked the glass with drippings of mist that gleamed like cheap jewelry in the light from the naked yellow bulb in the room. The window was dirty, and each time that Carter’s eyes fell on the coarse patterns of grime he was reminded of photographs of diseased tissue that he had seen a long time before in
Life
magazine. They had been drinking coffee for hours, and the warm odor was thick and stale in the air and made him nauseous.

“Is anybody out there?”

“A few men,” Mercer replied, after a full minute had gone by. “Men from the railroad, probably.”

He turned from the window and set the coffeepot on the electric burner. For several seconds there was a quiet fury of hissing and sputtering as the water on the outside of the can boiled off.

Only Henney was in the room with them now. Beeman and Whitcombe had gone to the hospital to wait for news of the Wilson boy. There were no prisoners in the jail downstairs, and there was little for Henney to do. There never was any real need for a night porter, but Henney was Mercer’s cousin, a consumptive, simpleminded man with very weak eyes who could not hold down a job anyplace else, and Mercer maintained the sinecure for him. Henney was reading the newspaper. He had been reading the same eight pages all night. Suddenly he began humming aloud, unconscious of the annoyance he was creating.

Mercer stood it as long as he could, and then said, “Henney, go down to the diner and get some chicken sandwiches. Don’t let him put any butter on.”

Henney came to his feet with a start and hurriedly folded the newspaper. “Sure, Jay, sure.”

“Cigarettes,” Carter said moodily.

Mercer gave his approval, and Henney walked out. The coffee was bubbling already, sending rapid puffs into the air. Mercer brought the pot to the table. Carter shook his head, but he filled both cups anyway and poured condensed milk into them from a can. There was no sugar. Carter stirred the brew and took a quick gulp. The coffee scalded his throat but left his body cold. Mercer sat down facing him.

“Why don’t you go home, Carter?” he said slowly. “Get some sleep. Get up early and go away for a few days. Stay out of town awhile. They may get after you also.”

Carter shook his head, although he knew Mercer was right. His eyes were stinging with rawness, and there was a stabbing ache in his temples, his jaws, and in the back of his neck. He had caught cold during the chilly vigil. His eyes were tearing, and he wiped them with his hand every few minutes. He needed sleep badly. He rested his head in his upright hands, massaging his face torpidly against his fingers. The contact brought a fleeting relief, but soon the points of his elbows were sore against the rough, unvarnished wood.

He had a busy schedule the next day. He had classes all through the morning and into the afternoon, the first one at eight, and after that the football team to coach until dusk. His puzzlement increased at the thought of the football team. If anyplace, it was there, with all the physical contact that the game required, that he would have expected an outbreak, but that had gone smoothly, better than even he had dared to hope, and then, just as he was beginning to relax, to triumph, abruptly, fiercely, irrevocably, everything that had been accomplished, everything for which he had toiled so long, with a suddenness that left him dazed, was rudely, cruelly, decisively, and insensately obliterated by the primordial brutality of an alley fracas.

His consciousness was throbbing now with the dim recognition of atavistic pressures that were emerging uncontrollably all about him. He could see but not understand them, and they were horrifying in their mute and immutable finality. All afternoon he had been watching the terrible recrudescence of savage animal passions, and he was tormented by the helpless despair of being unable to arrest it, of being unable, even, to try. His confusion rose suddenly, filling him with panic, and he dug his nails painfully into his forehead and shivered.

The sound of footsteps roused him to attention. His eyes went hopefully to the door, but it was only Henney returning with the sandwiches. He stepped into the room spryly, swinging the door closed behind him, and delivered a brown paper bag to Mercer. There was no stop on the door, and it slammed shut with a sharp, reverberating boom that rattled hollowly through the walls of the building and seemed to shake the foundations. Carter winced and Mercer frowned, and Henney, himself surprised by the report, shifted uneasily and smiled at Mercer with apology.

Mercer pushed a package of cigarettes to Carter and began tearing the bag along the seam, doing it slowly, with very deliberate caution. His thoughts were obviously elsewhere, but the intense preoccupation they gave his manner solemnized the act, and for a moment he seemed like a surgeon making a careful incision. There were four sandwiches inside, each wrapped sturdily in thick wax paper. Gazing at them, Mercer spoke to Henney. He said, “Did you see Beeman?”

Henney shook his head. “No, Jay. They said he was still in the hospital.”

“Who said?”

“The men outside.”

Mercer sighed with exhaustion and looked up at him.

“Henney, what’s going on outside?”

“Nothin’, Jay,” Henney said quickly. “Just a few men waitin’ around to see what happens.”

Mercer regarded him steadily for a moment and then stared down at the table. He had large hands, Carter noticed, with strong, callused, fleshy fingers. There were spots of dirt on each of the big knuckles and in the folds of skin between them.

“I spoke to Whitcombe,” Henney said suddenly. He glanced significantly at Carter, and then went on in an excited voice that kept rising gleefully with a shrill, whinnying, malicious hysteria. “He says we’re goin’ up tomorrow an’ burn ’em all out. He says we’re gonna get rid of ’em for good. He says it doesn’ matter what happens to the Wilson boy. He says we’re goin’ up anyway an—”

He might have continued indefinitely had not Mercer interrupted.

“Did you let him put butter on these sandwiches?” he demanded.

The sudden inquiry caught Henney by surprise, and he blinked his eyes in confusion.

“What’s ’at, Jay?” he stammered.

“Nothing, Henney,” Mercer said, in a softer voice. “It’s not important.”

He pushed a sandwich to Carter. Carter pushed it back.

“You’d better eat something,” said Mercer, with rough solicitude. “You look like hell.”

“So do you,” Carter replied sullenly.

He took the sandwich and bit into it. The gums on one side of his mouth were inflamed, and he moved the food over with his tongue and chewed it slowly. He drank some coffee and then took another bite and washed that down with more coffee and then, even while he was reminding himself that he had eaten nothing since lunch and was telling himself that the chicken tasted good, he laid the rest of the sandwich aside and forgot it.

“I tol’ ’im no butter,” Henney said defensively, finally understanding. “I didn’ watch ’im, but I tol’ ’im not to put any butter on.”

Mercer was silent, and Henney picked up his newspaper and resumed reading.

Soon Beeman and Whitcombe returned. Whitcombe was a brash young man of twenty-six who wore his uniform with a careless insolence. Beeman was older, almost forty, and hard as nails. He had a pale, gaunt, angular face, with very thin lips, strong bones, and a small, round, wrinkled scar high up on one cheek, and he was the coldest and most efficient-looking man that Carter had ever seen. He wore black leather gloves, thin, black, tight leather gloves that gave him a menacing air of competence.

“He’s going to die,” Beeman said, when he had crossed the room and was standing by the window.

“Did he say anything?” asked Carter.

“He’s in a coma.”

“Did he say anything before that?”

“He don’t have to,” Whitcombe drawled placidly from the side. “There are witnesses.”

“But did he say anything?” Carter implored vehemently.

“He said that Jess Calgary did it,” Mercer said, without looking up.

“Is that all?”

“That’s all.”

Carter cursed silently. Beeman had poured out a cup of coffee, and he came to the table for the can of condensed milk and the wet spoon that lay at Carter’s elbow.

“They know you up there, Carter,” he said, in his dry, precise voice. “You could bring him in for us.”

“I’m a schoolteacher,” Carter said. “Not a policeman.”

“Not for long,” said Whitcombe. “I guess this puts you out of business.”

Carter saw the wink he sent in Henney’s direction and the unsuccessful effort Henney made to repress a chuckle. He was too weary to resent it.

“We’ll pick him up in the morning,” Mercer decided. “It’s too late to do anything now.”

“He may be hard to find,” Carter argued.

“There’ll be enough people helping us,” Beeman replied.

“There sure will,” echoed Whitcombe.

Henney, encouraged perhaps by Whitcombe’s manner, took a bold step toward Carter.

“Yes,” he exclaimed broadly, his pale eyes glinting with a vindictive light. “You’re goddamn right there will. You an’ your smart college ideas. Puttin’ ’em all in the same school like that. We all knew this would happen, but you wouldn’ listen. No, you were too smart. Well, it’s all your fault, goddammit, an’ it serves you right!”

Carter sat without looking at him, listening to his voice as if to some incomprehensible noise in the distance. When he finished, Mercer let out a long breath and spoke to Whitcombe.

“Find something for him to do downstairs.”

Henney followed Whitcombe out docilely, glancing back at Carter with dogged emphasis. He was very careful with the door this time, too careful, and after he had gone it swung open with a creaking moan and wavered there slightly in the draft from the hall. Carter stared at it morosely. It distracted him terribly, like a crooked picture hanging on the wall, and he rose finally, swearing, and slammed it shut. Every bone in his back gripped him with pain, and when he sat down he could do nothing but curl forward over the table like some monstrous fetus.

“Go get him, Carter,” Mercer said. “It’ll be better that way.”

“Will you take care of him if I do?”

“We’ll do what we can.”

“How much will that be?”

Mercer was honest. “You know how it is, Carter,” he said regretfully. “We’re all relatives here.”

Carter laughed scornfully and shook his head.

“Be smart, Carter,” said Beeman. “They’re your friends, not ours. If we go, every car in town will go with us.”

Carter gave no reply. The coffee was making him sick. He carried the cup to the basin and turned the faucet on to rinse it. The force of the water almost tore it from his hand. When he drank finally, the water was tepid and colored slightly with the faint shadow of rust and still tasted strongly of coffee.