The Best American Mystery Stories 2016

Brian Tobin Entwined

From Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine

On September 12, 1994, in my second week of college, I killed Russell Gramercy.

In the last eighteen years, how often have I gone over it all? Pearl Jam, the orange traffic cones, the young woman in white short shorts, the sound of kids playing, and then...

I had been driving alone back to my dorm from the lake. Despite what people claimed later, I had not been drinking — not one drop. I want to be clear about that. Even though there were coolers full of beer at our blanket, I was not intoxicated. It was about five-thirty on a beautiful balmy afternoon, the last twinge of summer in upstate New York. I wasn’t speeding, nor was I driving in a “careless, reckless, or negligent manner,” which is the criteria for negligent homicide.

A song I loved, Pearl Jam’s “Alive,” came on the radio, and I took my hand off the two position of the ten-and-two driving stance I had so recently been taught in driver’s ed. I reached down and turned the volume up from loud to really loud. I was barely aware of the pedestrians on the sidewalk; they were indistinct, background. Vaguely I registered the sign ROAD WORK AHEAD. However, my registering Daria Gramercy’s ass was anything but vague. She was wearing white short shorts; seen from behind, she was breathtaking. This figure of lust (I can’t describe it in any nicer way that reflects better on me) was walking with two males. All three had been forced to abandon the sidewalk that paralleled Beach Road because of construction — for fifty yards the sidewalk had been jackhammered and it was cordoned off with orange traffic cones and yellow caution tape. Later, when I went back to the scene, I saw the clearly marked signs that warned pedestrians to cross to the other side of the road, that clearly told them not to walk on the shoulder. Weren’t those signs implicit — no, definite — warnings that to proceed was dangerous?

At the time, I have to admit, I didn’t notice those signs. Even though the radio was blaring “Alive,” I could also faintly hear children playing: a Pee Wee League soccer match was just beginning.

If only it could have stopped there. If only I could go back in time and slam the brake pedal, so that nothing more would have happened except Pearl Jam, the orange traffic cones, the young woman in white short shorts, the sound of kids playing. Then it all would have just faded, one of millions of trivial sense memories that disappeared.

But time didn’t stand still.

My car — actually, the 1979 Impala my father had handed down to me — was going around forty miles per hour. I know I lied about it later to the police, telling them that I was doing the posted thirty-five, but I can honestly say I was going about forty. At that speed, a car travels fifty-nine feet a second. (In my support group, everyone, every last person regardless of education, has done the calculations, the feet per second, the reaction times.) The three figures on the road outside the cones and caution tape, one with an extremely sexy sashay, were approaching rapidly. (I know they weren’t approaching, that in fact I was overtaking them, but that’s how it seemed to me.) And then the largest of them, a man in khaki shorts, a navy blue T-shirt, and Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers, stumbled beyond the white line into the road. Into the path of my thirty-five-hundred-pound lethal weapon going fifty-nine feet per second.

What happened took only milliseconds. There was a sickening jolt to the car; Russell Gramercy flew up over the hood. His shoulder and head shattered my windshield, then he disappeared over the roof of the Impala. I did not slam on the brakes until he had already landed on the highway behind me.

There was a faint whiff of something burnt — my tires on the asphalt — and Pearl Jam was still playing on the radio. Behind me someone was howling in pain and grief. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” Daria Gramercy.

Everything seemed in a heightened sense of unreality. I got out of the Impala, but immediately someone yelled, “Hey, put your car in gear.” So I got back in the car, which was slowly rolling, and did so, also turning off the engine. I noticed glass on the passenger’s side seat; in the next moment I realized that little shards of glass, almost festively decorative, covered my shirt as well.

The body lay in the road fifty yards away — I had traveled half a football field after hitting him. Another pedestrian stood in the middle of the road behind Daria and the victim, waving a hot-pink beach towel to stop oncoming traffic.

Racing back, I thought, He’ll have some broken bones. He may have to go to the hospital. Daria was leaning over her father, whimpering.

Then I got a clear view of Russell Gramercy’s body. This wasn’t a case of some broken bones. His entire body was broken. One shoulder and arm were tilted at an impossible angle away from the rest of him. Blood was pooling behind his head, which also seemed... broken. Daria said, “Hold on, Dad. Hold on.” But it was obvious to me that he could not hear, would never hear again.

And... I’m not proud of this, but I want to tell you exactly what it was like. Daria, in an attempt to stanch the ever-expanding pool of blood behind her father’s head, took off her pale green sleeveless T-shirt and used it to compress the wound. She wore a white bikini top underneath. My eyes were drawn to her full breasts.

I had just killed a man, and I was ogling the daughter I had made an orphan.

There was probably a gap of time, but it seems to me now that the police cruiser arrived very quickly with short yelps of the siren and strobing of the Visibar. Walkie-talkies squawked, an ambulance came; someone shifted the cones from the sidewalk construction to the road. Daria was sobbing in the arms of her older brother, Chris. With a start, I realized I knew Chris; I had played baseball against him. Which meant I knew the victim as well.

Russell Gramercy was the coach of the Verplanck American Legion League baseball team of which his son, Chris, was the star pitcher. Russell Gramercy was also a chemistry professor at Howland College, the school I had just started two weeks earlier, though I wasn’t in any of his classes. The previous year, the American Legion team I was on had played against Verplanck. Chris had been pitching, and he struck me out twice. He was by far the best player in our area, and scouts from the majors as well as LSU and Arizona State had shown interest in him. His father coached him that day, and I remembered Russell Gramercy putting his arm around Chris’s shoulder with pride as he came off the field with another victory.

“Are you okay?” the paramedic asked me at one point. “Are you injured?”

“No, I’m fine,” I replied, knowing even then that it was a lie, though there was nothing physically wrong.

Later, as the first ambulance took Russell Gramercy away, I asked the same paramedic, “He’s going to be okay, isn’t he?”

He stared back at me, then, masking his true feelings, said, “Well, we can only pray.” After that, on instructions from one of the cops, he took my blood for a blood alcohol level test.

I gave my statement to three different police officers. The last one, a detective named Dave Pedrosian, interviewed me for a long time.

Pedrosian also questioned Chris and Daria. She had not seen the actual impact because she had been walking a few feet in front of her brother and father on the narrow shoulder. “I just heard this awful crunch, and by the time I turned around my dad was landing on the pavement,” I overheard her say. And then she lost control and gave loud gasping sobs. Her brother put his arms around her.

At some point I also heard Chris being interviewed. “We were walking and my father sort of stumbled. I don’t know if he twisted his ankle or what. But he veered into the road. I reached out to grab him, but then... just this unbelievable impact with that car...”

What I remember most were his next words. “The car just slammed him. It was so fast. My dad never had a chance. And neither did the driver. It would have been impossible to react. It wasn’t his fault.”

Right after a cop gave me my second field sobriety test and first Breathalyzer, Chris came up to me. I was wary and I half expected him to take a swing at me. But in a dazed voice he told me, “There was nothing you could have done. Don’t beat yourself up. It was just a horrible accident.” He turned and walked back to his sister, who glared at me with eyes filled with anger and hate.

Detective Pedrosian came by in a while and said, “You’re not going to be charged at this time. All the preliminary statements support yours. A collision-reconstruction unit will continue to investigate. If everything holds up, you will not be charged. Your father is here to drive you home.”

On the ride home, back to my childhood bedroom, not my new dorm room, I kept saying, “It happened so fast. There was nothing I could do.”

Russell Gramercy was declared DOA at Verplanck Hospital at about that same time.

The next few days I spent in my bedroom or, when my parents went to work, roaming the house. I couldn’t eat, sleep, watch television. Both my parents kept telling me that it wasn’t my fault, that it had been an accident. I shouldn’t blame myself.

My father initially insisted that I go to the Gramercy family home.

“And do what? Upset them more? Apologize for killing their father?” I did not want to face them, in particular Daria.

“Just tell them how sorry you are for their loss,” my mother replied.

I had already put on my suit and was waiting for my parents to drive me to a condolence visit that I wasn’t sure I could endure when the phone rang. A few minutes later my father came into the living room and said, “We’re not going.”

The relief I felt was immense.

“Of course we are,” my mother said.

“The insurance adjuster just called. He said we’re not to have any contact with the victim’s family.”

The victim. His name was Russell Gramercy. He was a beloved father, a husband, a coach, a teacher. And we weren’t using his name. He was the victim. And I was the person who had killed him.

“That’s just not right,” my mother complained.

“He’s on our insurance policy,” my father said, nodding toward me. “We could lose the house, our savings. Everything. Even a frivolous case could cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

So in the end we didn’t go. And I did not apologize.

The funeral was private, so I didn’t go to that either. But when I returned to Howland College two days later, one of the first things I noticed was a flier about a memorial service.

Howland College is a small liberal arts college in Verplanck, New York, twenty miles from my hometown. Its academic reputation is slight, its campus charmless — buildings of red brick and glass, dormitories that look like singles’ apartments. In my area it was the ultimate backstop school, the place you wound up when your other scholastic plans didn’t pan out.

That next weekend hundreds of students milled about in the quad. I was handed a slender white candle that reminded me of a fencing foil. People kept glancing my way, it seemed to me with disgust or pity. Right before the service I overheard two students in front of me talking.

“I heard the kid who ran over Gramercy goes to school here.”

“Yeah,” his companion replied. “A freshman. Apparently some pathetic loser.”

Hymns were sung. Speakers came up to a makeshift stage and talked about Russ or Professor G. It was heartfelt, moving, filled with the inadequate words we use when confronted with death. Some were amazingly articulate, others spoke badly, but their clichés and boilerplate emotions were overlooked because of a collective goodwill and understanding. One person read a poem that somehow felt familiar, and it was only years later that I realized he had cribbed the W. H. Auden work from the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral.

One speaker stood out for me. “I’m a doctor,” he began. “And last week, on the day that Russell died, I saved a life.” He went on to recount that if it hadn’t been for the extraordinary work of Russell Gramercy, he would never have passed his organic chemistry course, the bane of all premed students. Gramercy had tutored him, made clear the obscure, gone way above and beyond for him. “It’s a simple calculus for me. If it wasn’t for Professor Gramercy, I wouldn’t be a doctor. If I wasn’t a doctor, that patient would not have been saved. That spared life, and everything good in it, can be toted up to Russ.

“There are connections in our lives that we’re often not aware of. We’re entwined. We intersect, like chains, or strands of DNA.”

I did not speak at the service.

By November I had left college. I eventually moved to New York City; it is a place where not driving a car is the norm. My driver’s license expired when I was twenty-one; I did not renew it, nor have I ever driven a car again after that day I killed Professor G.

Nightmares plagued me for a decade, though they diminished over time. For years I had to wear an orthodontic device because I ground my teeth in my sleep.

In my early twenties I aimlessly worked boring, dead-end jobs. Then, when it became clear that I was not going to resume my education, my father gave me the fifty thousand dollars he claimed he would have spent on tuition. So I started a small business, a frozen-yogurt shop in the West Village that I can walk to. It is a modest success.

I never married. Relationships never seemed to survive the moment I had to confess to the accident. The fault for these failed courtships, I’m sure, is mine. For the most part, the women I’ve been involved with were understanding, compassionate. (Though one woman got so angry that she slapped me.) But no matter the degree of their empathy, I always sensed in their eyes a change. In how they viewed me.

Years ago, at one of my lousy, mind-shriveling jobs, a coworker asked all the people gathered around the break table, “What’s the most memorable or important moment of your life?” The answers were predictable: When I met my husband; When I gave birth to my daughter. Or humorous: When I felt up Gina Simmons in sixth grade, or It hasn’t happened yet, but it will be when I get fired from this job. When it was my turn, I was set to lie: It was when the Giants won the Super Bowl. Instead, I shocked myself by replying, “When I killed a man.”

There was laughter around the table, and my questioner added, quoting Johnny Cash, “When you shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die?”

“Yeah,” I answered, relieved. Although I knew that, unlike most people, I actually had a moment in my life that had irrevocably changed me.

So that was my existence. Constrained, nowhere near having fulfilled a potential. I always thought that there had been more than one victim that day, though I would never say that aloud. And certainly not to the family, not to the woman who had whimpered and sobbed by the side of Beach Road. Nor to her tall, athletic brother, who had once struck me out.

In April 2011 the first body was discovered.

Russell Gramercy’s widow had sold the lakeside cabin months earlier. In upstate New York, the small vacation homes that dot the many lakes are called camps. The Gramercy camp, sheathed with cedar clapboards, was small, only sixteen by twenty-four, and had a half loft. It had been in the family for generations. Russell Gramercy winterized the structure himself early in his marriage. He liked to go there to unwind, he said, to write academic articles and prepare lessons and presentations. Except for a week or two in the summer when he was accompanied by his family, he went to the camp alone.

The new owners had no interest in rustic simplicity or outdoor showers. An architect drew up plans for some garish monstrosity. It was a backhoe operator digging trenches for the McMansion’s new septic system that had uncovered the skeleton.

(A rumor went around that the new owners, with visions of construction delays and permit problems, tried to talk the construction workers out of reporting the discovery. I’m not sure I believe this. What is true is that they sued the Gramercy family.)

In the weeks after the grisly find, the police dug up eight other corpses. All but one were identified, and I can reel off the eight names by memory. I find it ineffably sad that the ninth victim could not be named. Had nobody in his short life felt connected enough to report him missing?

There were eight male victims and one female. Four of them were runaways. Two were thought to have been hitchhiking, a boyfriend and girlfriend, who had been on their way to a bluegrass festival. One was reported to have been a male hustler at truck stops, though his parents vehemently deny it. But one of the victims had also been a National Merit Scholarship winner. So there didn’t really seem to be a pattern except the youth they had all shared.

Forensics teams found traces of dried blood inside the cabin. Most of it was too degraded, but one sample proved a DNA match with one of the victims. I’ve heard that incriminating and very disturbing photos were found, though I don’t know for a fact that they exist. But other objects that had belonged to the victims were discovered in a hiding place in the cabin.

The conclusions were inescapable, and a grand jury agreed. The victims had all been murdered by Russell Gramercy. They had been murdered by Russ. By Professor G. By the man I had killed with my car.

On the hottest day of the following summer, my phone rang just as I was about to go to work. “Hi, this is Daria Gramercy. Do you remember me?”

Startled, I replied, “Yes, I remember.”

“Your parents gave me your number. I hope I’m not disturbing you,” she said uncertainly.

“No, you’re not.”

“I’d like to talk with you. About the accident and everything. If you don’t mind. I’d prefer in person, but if you’d rather we could do it over the phone.”

I had been hoping for and dreading this call for decades. We made plans to meet at a coffeehouse around the corner from her midtown hotel.

Daria had changed from the sexy teenager I had encountered briefly one fateful day. She had gained considerable weight, I saw as she entered the Starbucks. And her hair was cut in an unflattering style and frizzy from the equatorial humidity that day. Immediately I felt guilty and somehow disloyal for forming these unkind impressions. Given what she had been through, it was an achievement just to be walking around at all. I searched her eyes for anger or recrimination. My entire body seemed clenched with tension.

“Thanks for seeing me,” Daria said, shaking my hand and sitting down. She took a deep breath and seemed set to start a prepared talk.

“I want to apologize to you,” I interrupted. “I never did... back then.”

“You sent a sympathy card,” she replied noncommittally.

“I wanted to visit your family, but our legal advisers told us not to. They were afraid of liability.” Legal advisers? Some insurance company guy and my father’s fraternity brother who was the family lawyer?

She nodded. “I understand.”

“I wanted to,” I repeated, protesting too much. Then I blurted out, “Actually, that’s not accurate. I was dreading the visit; there was nothing I wanted to do less. When my father told me we couldn’t, it was like I had gotten a reprieve.”

Daria gave a knowing sigh. “Believe me, I understand how you felt.”

And then I let everything out. I told Daria exactly what I remembered. Everything: my inattention, the lies about my actual speed, my creepy, lascivious stares as she comforted her dying father. I’m not a Catholic, but I imagine it was like the sacrament of confession. “I’m just so very, very sorry,” I ended, and then, to my horror but yet relief, for the first time since the accident I broke down and cried.

She gave me a few moments, then said, “It wasn’t your fault. Even with everything you’ve told me, there was nothing you could have done to prevent it. You didn’t have time to react. I understand that.” Daria handed me a tissue.

When I had regained my composure, she gave me a rueful smile and said, “Well, you’ve sort of stolen my thunder. The reason I’m here is to apologize to you.”

Daria had been going to the families of all her father’s known victims and asking forgiveness. From how she described it, it sounded a bit like making amends in a twelve-step program. “After I had seen all the victims’ families, I knew I also needed to talk with you. My father caused so much pain and horror. If I can do anything to lessen that legacy, then I want to.”

We talked for a while. For years I had imagined just this, I told her. In my daydreams I had talked with her: I had explained, I had been succored. And remarkably, something like those fantasies had just happened.

Near the end of our conversation, I asked, “How is your brother, Chris?”

She was momentarily taken aback. “Oh, I thought you knew,” Daria said uncomfortably. “Chris died in 2004.”

“I’m so sorry,” I replied, mortified. “How?”

“A traffic accident.”

I flinched.

“He was living in Arizona. It was a one-car accident, late at night. Alcohol was involved.”

I must have seemed shaken.

“It had nothing to do with you,” Daria said. “Believe me. If you’re tempted to see this as some sort of delayed collateral damage from what you did, don’t. My brother had his own demons.”

We were silent a moment, then I said, “I went to the memorial service for your dad at Howland. The one speaker I remember most was a former student who your father helped become a doctor. And what he said was that our lives are inexplicably entwined. That many of the good things that the doctor had done could be added up in your father’s column in this sort of cosmic ledger. I thought about that when I heard about the... incidents.”

“You thought that by killing my dad,” she said gently, “even though inadvertently, you had saved other young people from being brutally slaughtered... Let’s call it what it is.”

“Once again, it’s not something I’m real proud of. But yeah.”

“I understand. More completely than you’ll know. And I think you’re right. I think what happened that day did spare others from my father’s... evil.”

We stared at one another for a moment, then she stood. There ensued one of the most awkward hugs in the history of farewells. Then she went out into the street and disappeared.

I discovered the tape by a fluke.

For the first time in years, I returned to Verplanck. A cousin was getting married. At the rehearsal party at my aunt’s house, a bunch of my younger cousins were watching videos of their childhood in the family room. I was barely paying attention: the charms of children mugging for the camera is quickly lost if you’re not the one doing the mugging.

“Oh, let me show you this one of Barry playing soccer,” the brother of the groom said to the bride. “He falls right on his face.”

Suddenly my aunt strode into the room from the kitchen and said, “Tim, that’s enough of the videos.” Her tone was brusque.

Tim seemed confused. “What?”

Flustered, my aunt said more insistently, “I asked you to do something. Turn off the TV. Not all our guests may be as enthralled as you.”

Her last words seemed to have some special meaning, one that her son belatedly understood.

“Okay, Mom, sorry.” He darted a glance my way, then looked away, embarrassed.

It was only an hour later that it clicked. I took my aunt aside and asked. “That videotape of Barry playing soccer. It was taken that day, wasn’t it?”

Pained, she sighed. “I’m sorry. Tim just wasn’t thinking. I could smack him sometimes.”

“I’m not upset,” I assured her. “But I’d like to see that tape. Not now, not this weekend.”

I returned to New York with the DVD transfer of the VHS tape. It was in my DVD player even before I had taken off my coat.

Seven-year-olds are playing soccer. Way to go, Kyle. Way to go, some woman keeps calling out. Another faint but discernible conversation is a woman telling a friend about what a bitch her boss is. And then.

A small thunk. The tinny sound of screeching brakes. Oh, my God, did you see that?

The first time I watched the tape, I didn’t really notice the accident at all. But on the second, I could see the tiny figures in the upper left corner of the frame. Pedestrians walking, a hazy blue car approaching. Then one of those figures flying high into the air, over the car. One detail, however, didn’t quite fit.

Obsessively, I watched the tape over and over, at times my face just inches from the screen. And every time I thought I saw that troubling blur.

You can find almost anything on the Internet. Two days later I was in Irving Beckstein’s workshop in Astoria, Queens. Beckstein is a forensic video analyst. He has worked for the Defense Department and often testifies as an expert witness at trials.

Beckstein had cropped and blown up the footage of the accident. “Forget what you see on TV. Our software can’t miraculously sharpen an image so it looks like a thirty-five-millimeter movie. But we can do quite a bit.” He went on to explain what he had done. His words seemed well burnished, as if he had given them many times in front of juries.

Then he played the images for me on a large, sixty-inch monitor. Though heavily pixilated, it showed Chris Gramercy shoving his father into the path of my oncoming car.

Over the years I’ve attended a number of support groups. Most of the people there are like me: someone who has caused a fatal accident. Most have not been charged because it was determined that they were not at fault. That it was all a tragic accident. A few of the group members had slightly different stories. One was a police officer who had been involved in a suicide-by-cop incident. Another was a train engineer who ran over and decapitated a suicidal man who had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s who threw himself in front of his train. You would think that they would somehow feel less guilty. But they didn’t. Maybe, the cop said, it was because it brought home how vulnerable, how much at the mercy of unseen forces, we all are.

As far as I know, no member of the groups ever was an unknowing instrument of a murderer. Except me.

I did nothing with the information I discovered from the tape. But a month ago Daria Gramercy called me late at night.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” she said after apologizing for calling. “I somehow feel that we have unfinished business.”

“And why is that?” I asked carefully.

“I have nothing definite to go on, but my brother may have been more involved in the accident.”

“How?”

“I really don’t know. It was just this impression... After the accident, Chris was never really the same.”

“Were any of us?”

“I remember times when he was drunk — and he was drunk a lot near the end. He kept coming back to one theme. Was it ever justified to kill someone? Stupid stuff about would you go back in time to kill Hitler. Would I kill my husband to protect my children?” She sighed, then added plaintively, “My husband is the kindest, gentlest man in the world.”

There was a long silence on the line, then I heard, “When everything came out about my father, Chris’s words gained a different meaning.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” I said, though of course I did. “Are you saying that Chris somehow caused your father to fall in front of my car?”

“I don’t know what I mean,” she wailed. “I hope to God that’s not what happened. But I thought you had the right to know.”

I considered what she had told me, then said, “I really appreciate your calling me. And your contacting me has helped me in countless ways, so I’m grateful to you. But I can tell you definitely that your brother did not cause your father’s death. I could clearly see them both, and Chris was a good two or three feet away from him. Your father stumbled. That image is etched in my mind permanently.”

I heard her crying softly and then, “Thank you.”

Did I do the right thing? I like to think I did, but who knows?

The nightmares and my obsessive thoughts about that day have lessened. I don’t know. Maybe I’m getting better.