The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 Read online

  “I was so mad at you for losing that umbrella.”

  “What if he’s still out there, Mom?”

  “After all these years? Judy, he’s dead by now. Or he’s as old as I am.” She was ninety-three. “He could have Alzheimer’s. He could be in prison.”

  “I think he was about thirty. That would put him near ninety now. He could still be in pretty good shape. Look at you. You’re as smart as you ever were, and you’d still be walking a mile a day if your back didn’t hurt so much.”

  “I want him to be dead,” her mother said. “Judy, tell me the truth, are you sure he didn’t hurt you?”

  “He never touched me. Truly, Mom. He never got close.”

  “You were smart.”

  “I was lucky.”

  She didn’t tell her mother there was another Judy, an imaginary one who had developed in her mind over the years, a little girl who obeyed him even though she didn’t want to, a child who did go up that walk, who entered the dark hallway and started to climb the ladder, a little girl he grabbed when she was halfway up. Judy thought of her as Alternate Reality Judy. Sometimes Alternate Reality Judy made it home and told her parents and they got him arrested and thrown in jail, sometimes she bit him and hurt him, and sometimes nobody ever saw that little Judy again. She’d had nightmares about imaginary Judy. And now she realized there could be real children, other Judys out there, and maybe she could have saved them.

  “How’s your job?” her mother asked.

  “Okay,” Judy lied, and then quickly got off the phone.

  Two more glasses of wine later, she looked at her calendar, and then she looked up airfares to Kansas City.

  This is crazy.

  But it wasn’t only that she hadn’t told her parents about a child molester. It was that she had kept silent about a lot of things throughout her life. She didn’t say a word when a popular boy in high school mocked an old black man and called him nigger. Cringing on the inside wasn’t courage, and neither was shame. Sympathy, alone, was not integrity. Moving to Detroit, where she was in the minority, wasn’t anything noble either; she’d been chasing jobs, not racial equality. She hadn’t ridden a Freedom Bus or marched in Selma, or even in Kansas City. She hadn’t crossed lines, not literal ones like Twenty-seventh Street, nor metaphorical ones. Once she’d had a boss who cheated customers, but she’d never reported him. She’d seen car accidents where people could have used a witness, and she’d driven on. She felt as if she’d spent her life with tape over her mouth, one word written on the tape in black and permanent ink—coward. It was why she liked mystery novels with strong female detectives; she could feel their courage without having any herself.

  “Little girl! Don’t you want to help me?”

  “I did help you,” she murmured as she clicked her payment through for a flight. “I helped you to keep doing it.”

  In a rental car she picked up at the Kansas City airport, Judy drove into downtown and then cut east to Paseo, where she turned south toward Linwood. What she saw along the way seemed to confirm what she’d heard: the city of her birth was still segregated. She drove past her old address, but the building was gone. The Presbyterian church was still there on Linwood, but it stood empty, truncated, half of it vanished, leaving only bare ground in the place of three stories of brick that she would have sworn could never fall.

  And then, there it was—the corner with the church where he had stood in the doorway calling to her. It was an African American Methodist congregation now, she saw from its sign. It looked as deserted as her own old church. She parked anyway, and walked over to the side door. How many times had she sent Alternate Reality Judy up this walk? she wondered. How many other children had crossed that distance?

  “That church is closed.”

  She turned and saw an elderly black woman coming slowly down the sidewalk. Judy walked toward her.

  “Hello. I used to live around here,” she said, “back in the fifties.” She wanted to defend herself: I was just a child. “This was a different church then, and I can’t remember the name of it. You wouldn’t happen to know what it used to be, would you?”

  “Well, it wouldn’t have been like this one,” the woman said. It wouldn’t have been African-American, she meant. She looked permanently tired; the circles under her eyes were twice as dark as the rest of her face. “It’s been a lot of different churches.”

  “Do you remember any of them?”

  She appeared old enough to remember when she herself wouldn’t have been allowed to sit in the pews of any church along the boulevard.

  “Not from when you would have lived here. Sorry, I can’t help you.” She started again on her slow perambulation over the buckling cement. But then she turned back: “You might try looking it up on the Internet, honey. That’s what I’d do.”

  “I did look it up, but I couldn’t find it.”

  “This where you went to church when you were young?”

  “No. It’s where a man tried to molest me.”

  It felt liberating to say it out loud to a stranger.

  “Lot of that going around,” the woman said, with a headshake and a look of disapproval. “Good luck to you, although I don’t know why you’d want to find that man again.”

  “I want to stop him.”

  That felt good to say, too.

  “A little late, aren’t you?”

  Judy felt herself flush, the good feeling dissolving into shame.

  “If it was that long ago,” the woman said with a shrug, “then I expect God’s already stopped that man by now.”

  Judy glanced up the impoverished block and saw no sign of any deity’s beneficence to children.

  “Do you know where the nearest police station might be?”

  “Police? We don’t need no police around here,” the woman said, in the tone of a wry joke. But then she raised her right arm and pointed. “Go on up west on Linwood, honey.”

  At the police station, a young black female officer sent Judy back north to the Crimes Against Children Division. The detective who took her to an office there was also Afro-American, also a woman. Changes, Judy thought, and was grateful for them. The expression in the cop’s brown eyes blended wary attention with a willingness to listen. “I don’t know if the archives go back that far,” she said, “but I’ll check.” Her tight-lipped smile reminded Judy of salespeople who didn’t have what she wanted but promised to let her know if anything came in, and then she never heard back from them.

  “Why now,” the cop asked, “after all these years?”

  “It finally dawned on me there might be other kids that he did worse things to than what he did to me. He only scared me. I don’t think that was his first time. I doubt it was his last time, either. I just thought, maybe I can still do something. Maybe he’s a grandfather now, maybe he has grandchildren...”

  The cop nodded. “If I find out anything, I’ll call you.”

  Judy felt her hope fall.

  They traded cards with phone numbers.

  Judy got into her rental car, knowing nothing was going to come of this. She had thought she’d feel better for the effort, even if it was too little, too late, but she only felt worse for trying and failing.

  Why did I waste all this money I don’t even have?

  She was sixty-six years old, alone, out of work, at the limit on her credit cards, soon to be out of her house.

  Feeling despairing and adrift, she checked her cell phone and saw there’d been a call from her mother.

  “Judy, I’ve remembered the name of that babysitter,” her mother said when Judy called. “Or, rather, I didn’t remember it, but I’ve found it.”

  Judy felt queasy in the hot car. “I didn’t know you were looking for it,” she responded slowly, and then tried to swallow away the sick feeling in her mouth. She turned on the ignition and the air conditioning, rolled down all the windows, and waited for a chance to tell her mother goodbye.

  “Well, the more I thought about how she
didn’t tell me, the madder I got. So I looked for my old phone directory, and there it was. I guess personal phone books have gone out of style now that people have those fancy cell phones to keep track of everything, but I’ve still got mine from every place we ever lived. So, if she’s still married to the same man, her name is still Mary Lynn Whelan, and his name was Sidney, and their daughter’s name is Sue.”

  “Wait. What? She had a daughter?” With her free hand, Judy plucked at her lower lip.

  “A year younger than you.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I’m not surprised. She didn’t have much personality, and what little there was of it wasn’t all that great.” Her mother laughed a little. “We called her dishwater girl, because she had a kind of bland and dirty look.”

  “That was mean of us. Mom, I’d better go.”

  “If you talk to Mary Lynn Whalen,” her mother suddenly blurted, “you tell her that she should have told me!”

  “I won’t be talking to her, Mom.”

  But after Judy got off the phone, a breeze kicked up. She was still depressed, though her stomach had calmed down. Curiosity got the best of her, and she looked up Sidney Whalen on the Internet on her cell phone—thinking that the old black woman would approve—and shocked herself by finding the listing: Sidney and Mary Lynn Whalen. While she stared at it, she got another call, this one from the local area code, 816.

  The detective.

  “I made a call,” she told Judy, “and I’ve got you some information on a cop who used to cover that beat, back in the day. Do you want it?”

  Judy felt her pulse jump with surprise and anxiety.

  “Oh. I... sure... yes. Thank you!”

  “I probably should tell you...”

  When the detective didn’t say anything for a moment, Judy said, “What?”

  “He’s a mean old bastard, and he says there were other children.”

  He was old, fat, bad-tempered, cancerous, and unreasonable, and he lit into her the moment she entered his room in his nursing home. He was in a wheelchair, and he said, “Come over here where I can see the person who might have saved those children and didn’t. It was you, was it? You knew what he was doing, you could have been a witness. All I needed was a witness, somebody he’d molested or tried to molest, some kid to say what he did and how he did it, and you could have been that girl, but you didn’t do it. Why didn’t you? Do you know how many children he hurt after you? Before you? Because of you?”

  “You can’t blame me for what he did—”

  “Of course I can, you goddamned little coward.”

  She recoiled. He was her own conscience reviling her.

  “I was eight years old, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Well, you’re not now, are you? And you haven’t been that young for how long? Fifty years, sixty years? All that time you could have come forward. All that time you could have done some good. Go away. I don’t even want to see your goddamned face. Now you come? Now you say there was a bad man in that church? What the hell good did you think this was going to do?”

  “Who was he? Is he still—”

  “His fucking name is James Marway, and he is a senile old pervert, vegetating away in the Greenly Nursing Home, and they treat him nice and gentle instead of poking him with hot irons the way they ought to do, and he doesn’t even know what he did to those little kids. I kept hearing about it, rumors, and I finally figured out it was him, but nobody would talk, nobody would accuse him, and there wasn’t anything I could do to get him. With you, maybe I could have got him. I could have stopped him, or at least got him moved out of my streets. Get out of here! You’re too late, you’re too damn many years late!”

  She fled, and it felt familiar.

  “I’m surprised you remember me.”

  “My mom asked me to say hi.”

  Judy didn’t know why she was sitting in Mary Lynn Whalen’s living room. She barely remembered driving there, ringing the doorbell, stumbling over “Hello, I’m Judy Harmon, and you used to be my babysitter.” Maybe I want a babysitter right now, she thought. Maybe I want somebody to take care of me and sing me a lullaby and tell me I’m not a horrible person.

  “Well, that’s so nice of her.”

  Mary Lynn looked a little confused as she sat at the opposite end of her very nice couch. Sidney must have done all right over the years, Judy thought, thinking of how her own parents had been upwardly mobile, too. In her own generation, people were only moving on down.

  Mary Lynn said, “How are your folks?”

  “Dad died ten years ago. Mom lives in Arkansas, and really likes it. I’m in Detroit. I had a job in accounting with General Motors.”

  “I can’t believe a girl I babysat is old enough to be retired.”

  Judy didn’t correct the impression. She wondered if she looked as wild-eyed, shocked, and besieged as she felt. Probably not, or this woman, this stranger now, wouldn’t have let her inside. “What about your family?”

  “Oh, Sid and I are okay, I guess. We lost our daughter—I doubt you’d know about that.”

  “Sue? No, oh, I’m so sorry. When did she die?”

  “Oh, not that kind of lost, although honestly sometimes I think it might be better. I mean lost as in meth addict, all kinds of problems, prostitution, in and out of jail.”

  “Sue?” This time the single syllable held a new world of shock.

  “I know, who’d have suspected she would turn out like this...” She trailed off, stared down at the carpet.

  “I’m so sorry, Mary Lynn. I had no idea.” After a moment she said, abruptly enough to feel rude, “I want to ask you about one of the times you babysat for me.”

  “Okay.” Mary Lynn looked up, clasping her hands in her lap.

  “I came in late one day, from Bible school. It was raining really hard, and I’d lost my umbrella. And I told you that a man had scared me. That I’d run away from him because he tried to get me to go inside his church.”

  “What?” Her hostess seemed to pull herself together, and then she startled Judy by laughing. “Oh my gosh, I do remember. Didn’t I tell you not to worry?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Well, I should have, because that was just Sue’s uncle.”

  “Sue’s uncle?”

  “No, wait, I wouldn’t have told you that, come to think of it.”

  “Excuse me. It was some man I’d never seen before.”

  “No, I suppose you hadn’t ever met him, but yes, that was my husband’s brother. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you. I should have, so you wouldn’t be scared. He was custodian at that church, and we didn’t like to tell people that. So silly. We should have been open about it, but we were embarrassed. If we’d only known the humiliating things we’d have to tell people about our own daughter later... Sue wasn’t supposed to tell anybody about him, either.”

  “About him?”

  “That he was a janitor.”

  “Are you sure we’re talking about the same man? What was his name?”

  “Well, it still is his name, though he has forgotten it.” She shook her head. “James Marway was, is, his name, because he had a different father from my husband. Sidney’s dad died in World War II and his mom got remarried to Jim’s dad. I never liked him very well, to tell you the truth. Jim, I mean. There was just something about him, you know? He always loved children, though. So that was a point in his favor. His own kids are incredibly screwed up, though, so it wasn’t just us that ruined our kid.”

  Her eyes had endless regret and bafflement in them. “I think that’s why Sue didn’t come home with you that day, wasn’t that right? I think she stopped off to help her Uncle James with something.”

  “Changing a light bulb,” Judy said, her mouth dry.

  “Was that what it was?” Sue’s mother smiled, breaking Judy’s heart. “You really do have a good memory, to be able to recall a little thing like that.”

  Judy told her everything else she remembe
red of that day.

  She had to see him.

  “I’m his niece,” she told the nurse in his room.

  The overhead light was on, making the room unpleasantly bright, but it allowed her to see clearly the old man under the sheets. He wore white pajamas, and the blanket and sheets were tucked up neatly under his armpits, as if the nurse had just performed that service and then placed his long arms over the top of them. He looked grizzled, with white whiskers and long strands of white hair over his skull. “He needs a shave,” the nurse said, sounding apologetic.

  “Don’t worry,” Judy said, thinking of straight-blade razors.

  The nurse walked out of the room.

  Judy went up to the bed and stared down at him. His eyes were closed, and she wanted him to open them, so she said his name several times.

  “James. Jim Marway!”

  When he didn’t respond, she raised her hand and slapped his face so that his eyelids popped open and he looked around, confused.

  “That was for your niece,” she told him.

  He seemed to peer into her face without seeing her.

  “Sue,” she repeated.

  She was shocked at herself, and then momentarily scared that somebody might have seen her slap him. She turned to check if anybody was in the hallway and shielded her eyes from the overhead light. The part of her that was still scared and reticent felt as if it was crawling to the back of her being, and a new, bolder, furious Judy seemed to be taking over.