The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (22 page)

At dinner our mother pushed her food around her plate. We didn’t bother nagging her to eat anymore. Her hunger strike was for Aida, who she was sure was being starved in some psychopath’s home dungeon. Sometimes she had visions. She saw Aida chained to a radiator crying out for help. She saw her bound and gagged in the back of a van, being driven down some interstate far from us. She saw Aida drugged, captive in a dingy den, man after man forcing himself on her.

Our mother never left home in case Aida returned after escaping her captor, running to our house, where she’d find the door unlocked, our mother waiting with arms open. Even at night our mother insisted on keeping the door ajar. Our father told her it was dangerous, but she said she feared nothing now. Everything she loved had already been taken from her.

A few days into December we got the call that a hiker up in Greenwood Lake found Aida’s boots. They were ruined from months of rain and snow, but the police took them for analysis. Just like with her purse, there were no discernible fingerprints, but Aida’s blood was found in trace amounts. It could have been from before. A cut. A picked-over bug bite that left a smudge of blood on the leather. After all, our mother offered, Aida had that terrible habit of scratching an itch until it became an open sore. Or the blood could have come after.

I slept with my identical pair of boots for weeks after that. I held them to my chest and closed my eyes, waiting for images to burn across my mind, but they never came. I spent hours in bed staring at Aida’s half of the room, still afraid to cry because I told myself you only cry for the dead.

That Christmas passed like any other day. The year before, Aida and I had helped our mother with the cooking while our father fumbled with the fireplace and played old French records, but this year there was no music and the three of us ate reheated food delivered by the townspeople. Our parents floated around the house avoiding each other while I divided my time between them, then alone upstairs in our room with Andromeda. Days earlier, a documentary-style crime show called, asking if they could do a one-hour special on Aida’s disappearance with family interviews and all. They assured us it wouldn’t be tacky or macabre and said that in a few cases their shows had helped witnesses to come forward with information about the disappeared. Our father had agreed, but when he told our mother I could hear all the way in the attic as she cried out, “What do they want from me? There’s nothing left for them to take.”

Our father thought publicity would be good for Aida’s case. The campaign to bring her home, like some POW, was down to its final embers, and the detectives had recently come by to warn our parents with weak, well-meaning smiles that there was a good chance we might never know what happened to her. They encouraged us to join a support group and gave us a list of all sorts of networks for families of missing people. But our mother insisted that because Aida was alive, that kind of publicity would force whoever had her to cause her more harm or finish her off out of fear of being caught. She didn’t trust the media, believing their stories on Aida were meant to sell papers rather than find her. She regularly accused the detectives of incompetence, calling them small-town sleuths who never investigated more than a stolen bicycle and who secretly wanted to abandon Aida’s case because it tarnished the town’s “safe” image. She considered all the neighbors suspects. Every man who’d ever met Aida was a potential kidnapper or rapist, and every woman a jealous sadist. It was a community conspiracy. It was because we were outsiders. It was because Aida was so perfect that people wanted to hurt her. It was because we never belonged here that they wanted to hurt us. Our father didn’t disagree with her anymore. I wondered if it was because he’d given up trying to reason or if it was because he was starting to believe her.

I celebrated our seventeenth birthday twice. Our mother was finally willing to leave the house for hours at a time, so she took me to dinner at an Indian restaurant in town. For dessert the waiter brought me a mango mousse with a candle jammed into its gooey surface. I smiled at our mother. I knew she was making an effort. She held my hand as I blew out the candle. It was strange to see her thin finger free of her wedding band.

When we walked back to the car a group of kids driving fast down Elm shouted, “Hi, Aida!” They did this sometimes when they saw me around; whether it was a sincere error in recognition or just to torment us, I never knew. Our mother pretended not to hear them. She was getting stronger about these things.

That weekend I celebrated again with our father. He took me to Mostly Mozart again, and this time he offered me a cigarette by the fountain. He’d moved out two months earlier. He swore to our mother it wasn’t for another woman but because he just needed to be on his own, to discover who he really was. Our mother turned to him with a stare that was somehow vacant while containing the sum of her life.

“If you don’t know who you are by now, my love, not even God can help you.”

He rented a small, dark studio near the university. It had an interior view, a Murphy bed, and a kitchen with no stove. It was all he could afford as long as he was still paying the mortgage on our house in the suburbs, and there was no way, as long as Aida remained unfound, that our mother would let him sell it.

He admitted to me that he’d been planning to leave our home since long before we lost Aida. He loved us, he said, but he always felt wrong among us, out of place, as if he’d made a wrong turn somewhere. He said there was a time when he thought he and our mother would grow closer from the pain of Aida being gone, but he was tired of trying and tired of hoping.

“You understand, baby,” he said, and I was embarrassed to tell him I didn’t.

“You’re all grown up now. Only another year and you’ll be off to college. There will be new beginnings for all of us.”

We still didn’t know how to talk about Aida. I asked him, because I knew he would tell me the truth, if he thought we’d ever find her, or at least know what happened to her.

“No. I don’t.”

Just like our mother couldn’t go on without Aida, I knew the only way our father could hold on to her was by letting go.

Later that summer some teenagers getting high up on Bear Mountain came across what they thought was a deer carcass and started poking around until they spotted a human skull. When the forensics results came back conclusive, the newspapers decided, as if they were the judges of such things, that our family could get closure now, find some peace in knowing the search was over, and Aida’s broken, abandoned body could finally be laid to rest. The community held a big public memorial at the same spot in the park where they’d held all their vigils, but our mother insisted that Aida’s funeral service be kept private. And so we sat on a single pew before the altar, watching a priest who never knew her bless my sister’s pine casket, the four of us together in an otherwise empty church for the first time since our tandem baptism, though our family was far from religious and, if anything, Aida and I were raised to believe in only what is seen.

A few days before Aida’s remains were found, I walked slowly through the park on my way home from school the way I often did in a sort of meditation, whispering her name with each footstep, wondering what would become of us, what would become of me, all those empty years spread out ahead in which we were supposed to go on living without her. Across the brick path I saw a pair of kids chasing pigeons and I thought of my sister, the way she would have walked over to them and explained with her boundless patience that it was wrong to scare helpless animals, they belonged to nature just as much as two-legged wingless folk did and had the right to live without fear of unreasonable human violence. And then I heard her call my name, loud, with laughter just beneath it, the way she would call to me when we’d meet each other halfway after work, her airy voice rushing through the mosaic of dried leaves on the wilting grass, shaking the naked branches overhead, then departing just as quickly as it came, leaving the park and every breath of life within it entombed in stillness. Anybody else would have called it the wind, but me, I knew it was something else.

FROM
The Sewanee Review

I’
M SITTING AT THE BAR
in the semigloom of the Silver Dollar, as far away as I can get from the loud music. A babe comes through the door. It’s still before nine; too early for anyone else to be eyeing the sign taped to the bar mirror:
NOBODY’S UGLY AT 2 A.M
. I watch her in the mirror. She looks around—a dozen or so patrons, the usual crowd. The Dollar is still a workingman’s bar, no video games, no retro pinball machines, no happy hours, no grill. The clientele comes from the big Basque bakery next door and what’s left of the failed industrial park down the road where I live. About a fourth of the customers are women: after eight hours of unloading ovens in 110-degree heat, they’re here to replace body fluids, and they’re not romantically inclined, but that’s weekdays. Fridays—paydays—like tonight, and Saturday nights are different.

This woman is dressed mostly in white. Blond, probably in her late twenties, shapely. Stunning. If we’re looking her over, she’s looking us over too, unhurried, calm, unaware of the effect she’s having, or maybe just used to it. Her eyes are adjusting to the low fluorescent lights and the kind of alcohol-induced boredom that takes the place these days of outlawed cigarette smoke. The woman walks over and sits down beside me.

I look what I am: a forty-three-year-old tow-truck owner and operator. Tall, like my mother’s brother. I went through the windshield of a Camaro when I was a kid and the scars crisscross both sides of my face. I briefly thought I was tough, and got my nose broken twice while I was in the army. I stay in shape because I’m crawling around wrecked cars night and day. My hair is thinning on top, which I don’t notice too often. Even in my driver’s license photo, I look normal.

I’m still in uniform, my dark blue coveralls with
Dwight
over the pocket and the name
AAACE TOWING
stitched across my shoulders. I don’t stutter; I can spell; it’s
AAACE
so my ad in the yellow pages will be first, stand out. Trust me, it makes a difference. I’m in a competitive business.

I’m thinking this woman might be part of the fallout from the book about the Silver Dollar written eight years ago by a sociology professor at one of the local colleges. We called him Doc; he liked that. He’d bring his seminar class in on Saturday nights. Cellophane-wrapped young women and men, untouched, who turned everyone’s head, as if we’d all got a magic wish: twenty years off our ages, young enough to act foolish again. We learned words like
ambience
and
acculturation
. When the book came out,
Closing Time at the Silver Dollar
, you couldn’t get in the place; it was jammed with gawkers. Local TV kept doing segments, and the newspapers never passed up a chance to mention the place. City officials, politicians, famous athletes—you name it, they were there. Everyone knows the rest of the world wants to come to California, but not necessarily to the capital. A tour bus full of people from Warsaw, Poland, stopped here once. Our part of Sacramento had never seen anything like it. Larry had to hire two more bartenders. We locals from the neighborhood were left outside. It didn’t last; a year, eighteen months. It was like a blackout: the electricity goes, you’re left in the dark, the lights come on, it’s over; and you go back to where you were. A brief interruption. Doc still comes around—misses the camaraderie of the Dollar, he says—and shares his opinions and keeps track of things. He’s the one who taped the other sign on the bar mirror:
NEVER GO TO BED WITH ANYONE WHO’S GOT MORE PROBLEMS THAN YOU. SIGMUND FREUD
. Sex and money are his usual topics.

I’m perplexed. Good-looking babes don’t usually sit next to me or hit on me. If I’m surprised, Larry, the owner and bartender, is in shock. He moves toward us like he’s afraid to come too close. “Give me what he’s having, and hit Dwight again,” she says. She puts down a fifty-dollar bill. The jukebox is still playing, but it’s quiet now, like we’re waiting for someone. I have to look in the bar mirror at our reflection. She speaks to my image in the mirror. “Do you remember me?”

Nowhere in my memory bank do I have this woman. It’s like there are four of us in the conversation, the two in the mirror and the two of us sitting on the stools. I’m confused, and I shake my head.

“You came out when I was rear-ended by those drunks in April. On 99 by the Fruitridge exit.”

I remember. I’d heard the CHP call on the scanner and raced out there to beat out the other tow trucks. Five belligerent drunks, too many for the CHP patrolman. Backup was on the way. The drunks were blaming the woman for being in their way. The cop had cuffed one, but another had jumped on his back, and a third had him around the legs. The two other drunks were chasing the woman. Normally I don’t participate in crashes. I don’t stop the bleeding or console the bereaved. And I never ever subdue the unruly. What I do is tow your car and sweep up the broken glass, an added service for the state. Cops like that. But this time I say to the drunks chasing the woman, “Hey, slow down; you’re just making it worse for yourselves.” The big one pauses to spit a stream of tobacco juice in my face. I lose control and head-butt him. My forehead smashes his nose, and he goes down. The other one lets go of the woman and tries to punch me, and I kick him in the nuts. I’m too pissed off to stop there. I pull the guy off the CHP’s back and punch and kick him into silence. The CHP clubs the other drunk. Quiet. It’s three o’clock in the morning—no traffic, no gawkers slowing down to stare. Between the red glare from the road flares and the smoke, it’s like the blacktop is burning. I back up my wrecker and tow the drunks’ car away. End of story. How could I forget this woman?

“I want to thank you, Dwight. I didn’t get a chance that night.”