The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 Read online

  The wrecked automobile, a 1977 Mercedes-Benz, was registered in the name of Gordon Parrish, Desmond’s father.

  Desmond Parrish had been driving without a license. At the time of the crash, his parents had not known where he was: he’d been “missing from the house” since the afternoon.

  Again it was stated, “Death is believed to have been instantaneous.”

  New York State Police would be investigating the crash, which occurred outside the jurisdiction of the Strykersville police department.

  Soon after, a woman who identified herself as a detective with the New York State Police came to our house to speak with me and my parents.

  The detective informed us that a “cache” of photographs and “journal entries” concerning me had been recovered from the wrecked car.

  Police were investigating the possibility that Desmond Parrish had committed suicide. The detective asked me if I had been intimate with Desmond Parrish; how long I had known Desmond Parrish, and in what capacity; when I had seen him last; what his “state of mind” had been when I’d seen him.

  Calmly I replied. Tried to reply. I was aware of my parents listening to me, astonished.

  Astonished and disapproving. For I had betrayed them, in not sharing with them all that had passed between my boyfriend and me.

  Never after this would they trust me wholly. Never after this would my father regard me, as he’d liked to regard me in the past, as his little girl.

  For instance, my parents hadn’t known that Desmond had been stalking me—that he’d left a threatening message in my locker at school. They hadn’t known that I’d seen Desmond so recently, on the very day of his death.

  They hadn’t known that he’d wanted me to come with him in that car, to drive to Little Huron Lake.

  I would give a statement to police: Desmond had confronted me behind our school building at about 5:20 P.M. By 9:20 P.M. he had died.

  The vocational arts teacher who’d come up behind us, who’d surprised and frightened Desmond away, would give a statement to police officers also.

  There’d been an “altercation” between Desmond Parrish and the sixteen-year-old high school sophomore Lizbeth Marsh. But Ms. Marsh had not wanted the teacher to call 911, and Mr. Parrish had driven away in his father’s Mercedes.

  It was believed that prior to the crash he’d “ingested” a quantity of alcohol. He had been driving without a license.

  The detective told us that the Parrishes refused to believe that their son may have caused his own death deliberately. At the present time, they were not speaking with police officers and were “not accessible” to the media.

  It would be their theory, issued through a lawyer, that their son had had an accident: he’d been drinking, he had not ever drunk to excess before and wasn’t accustomed to alcohol, he’d had “personal issues” that had led to his drinking and so had “lost control” of the car and died.

  He had not been suicidal, they insisted.

  He had so much to live for, since moving to Strykersville.

  He was seeing a therapist, and he’d been “making progress.” He had not ever spoken of suicide, they insisted.

  He’d had a “brilliant future,” in fact. A scholarship to Amherst College, to study classics.

  “You know, I hope, about Desmond’s background? His criminal record?”

  Criminal record?

  We were utterly stunned by the detective’s remark.

  She told us that Desmond had been incarcerated from the age of fourteen to the age of twenty-one in the Brigham Men’s Facility for Youthful Offenders in Brigham, Massachusetts. He’d pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the death of his eleven-year-old sister in August 1970.

  All that was known of the incident was that Desmond, fourteen at the time, had been canoeing with his sister, Amanda, on Lake Miskatonic, where the Parrishes had a summer lodge, when in a “sudden fit of rage” he’d attacked her with the paddle, beat her about the head and chest until she died, and tried without success to push her body into the lake without capsizing the canoe. No one had witnessed the murder, but the boy had been found in the drifting canoe, with his sister’s bloodied corpse and the bloodied and splintered paddle, in a catatonic state.

  Desmond had never explained clearly why he’d killed his sister except she’d made him “mad”; he’d had a quick temper since early childhood and had been variously diagnosed as suffering from attention deficit disorder, childhood schizophrenia, Asperger’s syndrome, even autism. He’d been “unusually close” to his sister and had played violin duets with her. His parents had hired a lawyer to defend him against charges of second-degree homicide. After months of negotiations he’d been allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of manslaughter and was sentenced to seven years in the youth facility, which contained also a unit for psychiatric subjects, from which offenders were automatically released at the age of twenty-one.

  This was a ridiculous statute, the prosecution claimed—anyone who’d committed such a “vicious” murder should not be released into society after just seven years. But Desmond was too young at fourteen to be tried as an adult. He’d been diagnosed as undeniably ill—mentally ill—but in the facility he’d responded well to therapy and was declared, by the time of his twenty-first birthday, to pose no clear and present danger to himself or others.

  The family had relocated to Strykersville, within commuting distance of Rochester. It was hoped that the family, as well as Desmond, would make a “new start” here.

  The Parrishes had never lived in Europe. Mr. Parrish had never helped to establish branches of Nord Pharmaceuticals in Europe. His position with the corporation was director of research in Rochester, exclusively.

  The detective showed me a photograph of Amanda Parrish. Did she resemble me, did I resemble her? I don’t think so. I heard my mother draw in her breath sharply seeing the photograph, but I did not think that we looked so much alike; this girl was very young, really just a child, with a plain sweet hopeful face, unless you could call it a doomed face, those eyes, haunted eyes you could call them, that set of the mouth, a shy smile for the camera which might even have been held by her murderous older brother.

  I thought of Desmond’s warning about smiling for the camera. How foolish, how sad you will appear, when the smiling photograph appears posthumously.

  The child/sister murder had been a celebrated case in the Miskatonic Valley since the Parrish family was well known there, had owned property in the region since Revolutionary times.

  “A tragic case. But these cases are not so rare as you might think.”

  It was a curious remark for the New York State Police detective to make to us, at such a time.

  My father became livid with rage. My mother was upset, incredulous. They wanted to immediately confront the Parrishes, to demand an explanation.

  “Those terrible people! How could they have been so selfish! They allowed their sick, disturbed son to behave as if he were normal. They must have known that he was seeing our daughter! They must have known that the medications he was taking weren’t enough. They couldn’t have been monitoring their son...”

  It was chilling to think that the Parrishes had been willing to risk my life, or to sacrifice my life, the life of a girl they didn’t know, had never met but must have known about—their son’s girlfriend.

  They would never consent to speak with us. They would consent only to communicate through lawyers.

  At that time I could not answer any more of the detective’s questions. I could not bear my parents’ emotions. I ran away from the adults, upstairs to my room.

  I hid in my bed. I burrowed in my bed.

  So often I’d dreamed of Desmond Parrish in this bed, it was almost as if he were here with me: waiting for me.

  I thought, He wanted to take me with him. He loved me—he would not have hurt me.

  In Strykersville today there are too many memories; I never remain more than a night or two, visiting my parent
s.

  I try to avoid driving in the vicinity of Fort Huron Park. Never would I revisit Little Huron Lake.

  The remainder of my high school years is a blur to me. In the summer I went to live with my grandmother in White Plains, and there I took summer courses at Vassar; my senior year, I’d transferred to a private school in White Plains, since my parents thought it might be best to remove me from Strykersville, where I had “emotional issues.”

  My old life was uprooted. My old “young” life.

  I thought of wasps in our back lawn, their nests burrowed into the ground into which my father would pour liquid insecticide. In terror, wasps would fly out of the burrow, fly to save their lives, dazed, desperate. I wondered if the wasps could reestablish a nest elsewhere. I wondered if the poison had seeped into their frantic little insect bodies, if mere escape were enough to save them.

  I missed my friends, my family. I missed the life we’d had there, our sleepy old dog stretched out on the redwood deck at our feet. But I could not have remained in Strykersville, where there were too many memories.

  The other day I saw him. Across a busy street I saw his hand uplifted and in his face an expression of reproach and hurt, and without thinking I began to cross the street to him, and at once horns sounded angrily—I’d stepped off the curb into traffic and had almost been killed.

  So near any time always.

  Rollo’s body was never recovered.

  NANCY PICKARD

  Light Bulb

  FROM Kansas City Noir

  The Paseo

  It took judy harmon fifty-eight years to wonder about the other children. Maybe it was the deluge outside her apartment that reminded her of the flooding that summer in Kansas City back in the ’50s. Maybe it was the lightning flashing over downtown Detroit that jogged her memory. Whatever the cause, the epiphany struck her all of a nasty sudden while she was doing nothing more than watching a crime show on TV and drinking her supper of wine and more wine.

  Oh my God, there must have been other children.

  Judy sat up so fast that she spilled wine and didn’t care: pink blotch on white pants, new stain on her conscience seeping through to soak her in dismay. Only now, fifty-eight years later, did her unconscious pull a light cord to force her to look—Over here, Judy!—at the decaying fly in the spidery corner of her psyche’s forgotten basement.

  How could I have failed to realize it for so long?

  It felt like her boss coming in to tell her she was fired, which he had done last week. It felt like not being able to pay her mortgage, which she couldn’t next month. It felt like watching her retirement slip away as CEOs bought yachts and stockbrokers sent their kids to private schools. It felt like when she’d realized that she was never getting married, or having children, or doing anything but working all of her life, and it felt like not even being able to do that now. It was a sinking in her stomach, a sick feeling in her heart, a setting of a match to an unburned pile of regret.

  I was a child myself! I couldn’t have known!

  She defended herself to herself and to the other—possibly other, probably other—children who might have been hurt, might have been scarred, by the man.

  Outside, rain plunged down her windows in the same waterfall way it had poured that July in Kansas City. That summer, the Missouri River drowned the industrial districts of both Kansas Citys—the Missouri one, where she spent her childhood, and the smaller, poorer one in Kansas. She remembered staring at the frightening water from the back seat of her parents’ ’47 Chevy. The river made a washing sound, like surf where there wasn’t supposed to be a beach. Judy remembered a green car, brown water, and a dull bright sky that looked like the dirty chrome on the car’s bumpers before her daddy washed them in the parking lot behind their apartment on Paseo. The air that summer smelled wet—not the fresh, clean wet of ordinary summers, but the wet of dirty dishrags, drowned rats, overflowing sewers. She’d been excited to see the flood, wanted to get near enough to watch it rising up the floors of the buildings, and then got scared when her father inched the car close enough to spy the river’s currents. They bubbled ugly brown and sudsy white; they surged and swirled in boat-sucking eddies.

  “Back up, Daddy! Back up!” she had yelled in panic from the back seat. That had made her father smile, but he slid the gearshift into neutral and didn’t tease the Chevy any closer.

  “I swear that river could shoot us all the way to St. Louis!” her mother had said.

  Now, fifty-eight years later, Judy berated herself: I should have told them about that man. Why didn’t I tell my parents?

  Judy Harmon picked up her cell phone to call her mother.

  Judy was eight years old that summer.

  While the two Kansas Citys were flooding, she went to Vacation Bible School at a Presbyterian church on Linwood Boulevard near their home. She and her parents lived six blocks south, on the white side of the city’s “color line,” Twenty-seventh Street. Blacks who ventured in that direction generally needed the passport of a job.

  Theirs was a block of red-brick apartment buildings and old homes converted into rentals. There was a synagogue catty-cornered to their building. It was safe to play outside or walk home alone from school in her neighborhood, even though it wasn’t a rich one. The only bad things that had ever happened to her on her own block were getting stung by a wasp and falling off her bike. Once she’d watched her mother give a hobo a half-empty box of powdered doughnuts after he knocked on their door and asked for something to eat. When he left, he had confectioners’ sugar on his whiskery chin, as if he’d dipped it in a snowdrift, but she didn’t have the nerve to tell him.

  There were many things she’d never had the nerve to say.

  That day, when she walked to the babysitter’s by herself from Bible school, Judy carried an umbrella that was too big for her. She had to fight it to keep it up. Judy remembered feeling nervous when she started out—it was five blocks to the sitter’s and she’d never walked so far alone. Her father was at work at the factory; her mother had a summer job at Katz Drug Store. Usually Judy went with a little friend; years later she couldn’t remember why she walked by herself that day. She remembered hearing thunder rumble, though. Her too-big umbrella was black with a wooden handle, and it didn’t keep her dry. The backs of her calves got spotted with raindrops, her dress clung to her legs, her fingers got wet and slipped up and down the handle so she had to carry it in both hands.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  Judy’s mother lived in a retirement home in Arkansas. Judy had just told her about that day in the rain.

  “I told the babysitter, didn’t she tell you and Daddy?”

  “She never said a word.”

  Her mother was angry, as if it had happened only yesterday. Judy remembered her mother as she’d looked in those years—young, harried, smelling of cherry-scented Jergen’s hand lotion and dressed in a cotton shirtwaist, with hose and pointy high heels that caused bunions and bent her big toes sideways.

  “Nobody would have believed me, anyway,” Judy said.

  “I would have! Your dad would have gone over there.”

  “But then what would have happened? People would have hated us.”

  Her mother fell silent.

  “You know they would have, Mom, for saying bad things about a churchman. Maybe that’s why I didn’t tell you—because I didn’t want to cause you and Daddy any trouble.”

  Her mother couldn’t let it go. “I can’t believe she didn’t tell me. You were just a child, and she was the grownup. And I’m your mother. She should have told me.”

  The man was white, tall, and thin.

  In Judy’s memory, he wore black trousers, a white dress shirt buttoned to his neck, with a thin black tie, although she might have invented the tie. As she walked home alone from Bible school she passed another church, where she heard someone call out to her.

  “Little girl!”

  Startled, she paused and looked left. The rain
had slowed a bit, so she could see the man from under her umbrella. He stood just inside an open door. He could have been the minister or janitor, he could have been a deacon. She didn’t know who he was, but she had a sense of what he was even though she couldn’t name it.

  She saw a ladder in front of him.

  “Little girl, come help me change this light bulb.”

  She glanced up and saw a light fixture above the ladder.

  She was an obedient child, respectful to grownups, but something inside of her didn’t like this. Nobody had ever warned her; nobody ever warned any children about anything like this in those days, but still, she knew.

  She shook her head and gave him a small, stiff smile.

  “Come in here and help me,” he called out to her. “Don’t you want to come in out of the rain?”

  He wasn’t attractive. He had dark hair that looked thin and greasy, which was how his voice sounded to her, too. She had a crush on the handsome husband of one of her mother’s friends, but this man didn’t look like that. She wouldn’t have wanted to laugh at his jokes, or take any lemonade he handed her.

  She shook her head again. “I have to go.”

  “What? Come closer so I can hear you!”

  “No,” she whispered, her heart pounding as she started walking away from him. “No thank you.”

  “But I need help. It will only take a minute. You should help me, little girl. Don’t you want to help me?”

  He wasn’t much of a salesman, she thought years later, or he’d have known never to ask a question that could be answered no.

  She walked faster. Why would a grown man need to have a little girl help him put in a light bulb? She felt shaky and afraid and embarrassed without knowing exactly why. Nobody had told her anything about sex, but she’d seen her parents kiss, she’d been to an Elizabeth Taylor movie, and she blushed when her mother’s friend’s husband was nice to her. She didn’t know anything, and yet she knew. She wanted to run, but she had an instinct like a little animal that knows that if you run you’ll look even more like a rabbit. She walked awkwardly, as if she’d forgotten how to move her legs; she walked quickly, longing for the end of the block, longing to turn the corner and get out of his sight, afraid to look back. She kept her face pointed straight ahead, as if nothing were amiss, as if she didn’t think he was scary. When she was sure he couldn’t see her any longer, she finally did run, releasing the handle of the umbrella when it pulled against her hand, letting it fly off behind her.