Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 141, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 858 & 859, March/April 2013

Restraint by Alison Gaylin

Alison Gaylin makes her EQMM debut here, but will already be known to many readers for her thriller novels. They include Hide Your Eyes, which was nominated for an Edgar Award, and 2012’s And She Was, an international bestseller that introduced P.I. Brenna Spector, a sleuth distinguished by having perfect autobiographical memory. A new kook in the Spector series, Into the Dark, has just been released. June will see the publication of the author’s first Young Adult novel, Reality Ends Here.

When the woman who killed Kevin Murphy’s daughter walked into Cumberland I Farms to pay for her gas, the first thing Kevin noticed about her was the way she crumpled her money.

There were a lot of other things to notice — the small, smooth hands, the neatly trimmed pink nails that reminded Kevin, briefly, of the polished conch shell he had bought for his ex-wife Candace during a trip to Jamaica. There were the thick blond streaks in the brown hair, the pale lipstick and the pastel clothes and the golden summer tan — all new things. All attempts, no doubt, to soften the hard angles, to make her appear sweeter, to make Kevin, to make anyone think, It wasn’t her fault. She’s a nice woman. She couldn’t help it. She didn’t mean to...

Attempts to hide what she really was.

Above all, there was the fact that it was her at Kevin’s counter. After three years of working this job, of changing twenties and carding twelve-year-olds for cigarettes and filling out intricate and pointless orders for lottery tickets, three years of listening to his manager Chuy bemoan his failed rap career and the lack of “quality tail” up here, four hours north of New York City on the outskirts of a tiny town called Pinekill which Chuy had nicknamed “Pig-Squeal.” Three years of silence — the type of silence that roars in your ears like ocean waves and then recedes, taking a little bit of you away with it each time until you start to feel hollow — a shell, staring out the glass door of a convenience store. An empty thing but for the pain, the waiting.

Three years and then this. The waiting over. The moment here. His daughter’s murderer standing over him and saying, “Thirty-five on pump three,” and yet all he bothered to see was the money... A twenty. A ten. A five. Looked like she’d dug them out of the garbage, blown her nose in them, balled them up and driven her car over them a few times before finally throwing them back into her smudged and overstuffed wallet. The way some people treat their money, Kevin thought. Disgusting.

“Thank you,” the voice said.

Kevin just nodded. He couldn’t lift his gaze from the counter...

...until Chuy glanced up from the Maxim he’d been reading and said, “Sweet Jesus, Mami, put some meat on them bones.” And only then did Kevin notice the familiarity of the money-crumpler’s voice.

Kevin’s head snapped up. The glass door drifted shut behind her. He saw the blond streaks in the brown hair, the jeans and the pale pink T-shirt and the tanned skin — all that artifice and yet still he knew, even from the back, even through the thick glass, he knew. Her. Kevin grabbed the steno pad and pen he kept under the counter. He made it outside just as her black Ford Explorer was pulling out, past the pumps and onto Route 34, just in time to scrawl her license-plate number onto the pad.

When he walked back in, he noticed Chuy staring at him. “Tried to catch her,” Kevin said. “She paid too much.”

“Oh,” said Chuy. “I thought you wanted her digits.”

“Digits?”

“Bony booty call.” Chuy grinned. “Thought maybe you like ’em anorexic.”

Kevin stared at his manager. His face felt hot, and so he turned away. He didn’t want Chuy to see his skin reddening.

“Dude, I was just kidding.”

Kevin couldn’t look at him. He stared at the floor. “I don’t like them that way,” he said. “I don’t like them that way at all.”

Her name was Sarah Jane Ledbetter. Kevin was sure she never used her middle name, but he always did, on paper and in his thoughts. There was something comforting in all three names. The completeness of it, as if she were already dead.

A year after she killed Kevin’s daughter, Sarah Jane Ledbetter had left her job. She had packed up her belongings and sold her large, comfortable house in Larchmont and moved three hundred miles north to her second home — a lake house, Kevin had heard, in the mountains near Pinekill.

“I’m glad she’s gone,” Candace had said, late one night in the quiet of their bed.

“Who?”

“You know. Ledbetter.”

Kevin switched on the light to see Candace turned away from him, as she often was during the year following their daughter’s death. He watched his wife for a long time — the soft honey hair, the round shoulders moving with her breathing.

“Aren’t you glad she’s gone, Kev?” she said, a little louder.

“She’s not gone,” he said. “Not yet.”

Three weeks later, Candace filed for divorce.

Patience was one virtue that Kevin had always possessed. In his previous life, he had supported his family as a food stylist and photographer, but it was in nature photography — his passion — where that patience came into play. Kevin could watch a robin’s nest for hours, waiting for the sun to hit the pale blue eggs in a way that made them glow. He could sit inches away from a mother deer with her fawns, perfectly still, do it long enough for them to think of him as something inanimate, something safe. Once, in the woods surrounding the White Plains Reservoir, he’d experienced such a reward — the mother gently licking pollen from the face of the fawn. The look in the black eyes — so soft, so protective. Love. It was Kevin’s favorite photograph. Perfection took time. Kevin was aware of this, and he appreciated it. He had all the time in the world back then. He liked to let go of it slowly.

Kevin stopped taking his nature photos after his daughter’s murder. He no longer found joy in watching things. Not after all those weeks of watching Rachel in the hospital bed, her little chest rising and falling at the whim of the ventilator. A machine doing Rachel’s breathing, until even the machine couldn’t do it anymore and her heart stopped and her brain stopped and there was nothing left to watch. No more Rachel. Nothing to love.

Kevin tried with Candace. He did. But as much as he wanted his wife to feel cherished, that part of him had stopped breathing along with his daughter. “Let it go, Kev,” Candace would say. “Let it go and just grieve with me.”

But Kevin couldn’t. Not yet. All he wanted was justice, and yet no one wanted to get it for him — not the police, not those lawyers, not even Candace.

He had to go out and get it for himself.

After Candace left him, Kevin sold his photography business. He let his few remaining clients know that he was retiring. “I’m moving upstate,” he said. He was vague about it, though his plan was not vague at all.

Kevin found a six-room cottage on the outskirts of Pinekill with three acres of land and a clean, dry cellar. He bought it upfront, paid in cash.

He located the only gas station within a twenty-mile radius of Pinekill, got a job there. With his usual patience and competence, he made the improvements on the cottage that needed to be made. And then, without joy, Kevin watched. For three years, going home every night to his quiet cottage, he would unlock the door to the cellar. He would stare into its emptiness. He would wait.

“You know why marriage doesn’t work?” Chuy said to Kevin while he was closing out the cash register.

Kevin was trying to add up the bills and get them into the lockbox as fast as he could, so he could go home and put his plan into action. The last thing he needed was Chuy waxing poetic on marriage when, far as Kevin knew, Chuy’s longest relationship had lasted one and a half weeks, with a Poughkeepsie cocktail waitress he affectionately referred to as The Perfect Rack. Still, he was Kevin’s boss and so Kevin sighed and put down the stack of twenties he’d been counting and looked at Chuy, sitting on the stool the shorter clerks used to reach the chewing tobacco, Daily News sprawled open in his lap. “Why doesn’t marriage work?” Kevin asked him.

“Men marry women hoping that they will not change. Women marry men hoping that they will change. Everyone’s disappointed.”

Kevin looked at him. “That’s very insightful, Chuy.” He meant it.

Chuy nodded. “Vaughn.”

“Excuse me?”

“Vince Vaughn.” He thumped his hand against the newspaper.

“The actor?”

“Bet your ass, the actor. He says that right here in this article. Freakin’ genius. Knows marriage, knows life... When I get famous, you know who’s going to play me in the movie?”

“Vaughn?”

“Bet your ass.” He held up the newspaper so Kevin could see the page-sized article he’d been reading — huge picture of the actor on the red carpet at the premiere of his latest film, grinning beneath the thick black headline: I VAUGHN TO TELL YOU. “Vince freakin’ Vaughn.”

Kevin went back to the twenties. Near the bottom of the stack, he got to the crumpled twenty — her twenty — and his breath caught. Soon, he thought. Soon...

When Kevin had finished counting the money, Chuy closed the paper and cleared his throat. “Hey, uh...”

“Yes, Chuy?”

“Nothing. Just...”

“What?”

“Your ex-wife. I bet she wasn’t a skank.”

Kevin looked at him. “No. She was not.”

“Didn’t think so. You seem like a classy dude. I bet you had a nice house too.”

“It was.”

“Did you have any kids?”

“Where is this leading?”

“I guess I’m just... just wondering why you decided to leave all that. Pretty wife, nice house in the ’burbs. If I had a shot like that, I don’t think I’d ever let it go.”

Kevin slipped the locked metal box into the wall safe and worked the combination. “Okay,” he said. “All done.”

“Sorry. I know you don’t like to talk about personal stuff. It’s just...”

“I changed, Chuy. My wife didn’t.”

“Oh.”

“Not to knock Vaughn or anything. That’s just the way it went.” On his way to the door, he checked his wallet, made sure the license-plate number was inside.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

Kevin turned to see the manager pointing at the Hostess display. He put on a smile. “Right.” He took a package of Twinkies from the display, jammed them into his jacket pocket. “My daily treat.”

“Couldn’t imagine you leaving here without taking a Twinkie or a Yodel or whatever.”

Kevin shrugged. “Makes me happy.”

“Bet that’s your only vice, right?” Chuy said. “Bet you don’t drink or smoke weed or screw around or nothing.”

Kevin nodded. “Yep. That’s pretty much it.”

“See? Three years, you tell me jack about yourself. But still, I know you.” Chuy’s face relaxed into a grin. “I’m perceptive like that.”

“You are very perceptive,” he said. “See you tomorrow, Chuy”

“See ya, George.”

Kevin pushed open the glass door. As he got into his car, he glanced back and saw the manager, smiling after him as he left. “Perceptive,” he said.

Sarah Jane Ledbetter had never apologized. Dr. Sheldon, the therapist Candace had forced him into seeing during Rachel’s final months of life, would mention this fact to Kevin frequently during their sessions, often in the form of a probing question: “She never apologized to you, did she, Kevin?” As if this were Sarah Jane Ledbetter’s worst infraction. Not saying “Sorry.”

Sixteen years old, Rachel had a voice like powdery snow under the soles of your boots. So soft and frail that you could barely hear it “I love you, Daddy,” she had said once, with Kevin sitting at her bedside, having hoped and prayed himself into a light sleep. At first he’d thought it was part of his dream. But then he had opened his eyes to find his daughter awake, watching him.

“I’m sorry,” Rachel had said.

Dr. Sheldon was fond of imaginary scenarios. “Put yourself in a room with Miss Ledbetter,” he said during a later session. “What would you do?”

Kevin hadn’t even bothered thinking about it. “Kill her.”

He remembered that now, as he climbed down the cellar stairs, taking in all of his home improvements, making sure everything was where it needed to be. Earlier tonight, when he’d first come home, he’d typed the license-plate number into the search bar of the online service he’d been subscribing to for the past three years, and watched all the information from Sarah Jane Ledbetter’s driver’s license materialize on the computer screen. As it turned out, she lived less than twenty minutes away.

“You don’t mean that, Kevin. That’s just your anger talking. You wouldn’t really kill her, would you?”

“I suppose not, Dr. Sheldon.”

Killing would be too quick. Kevin had just unlocked the cell he’d built. He was gripping the metal bars with both hands, testing their strength. There was a mattress on the floor, a porcelain sink and a bedpan. Outside the bars, across the room, he’d affixed two huge, full-length mirrors to the wall so that, inside the cell, there was no avoiding one’s own reflection. This won’t he quick. It will take time. Kevin pushed against the bars, threw all his weight into them, and without warning he heard his daughter’s voice in his head — a memory of Rachel’s voice at fourteen, loud enough to rattle the windows. “Daddy, want to see my cheer?”

“Not now, honey. I’m busy.”

“But tryouts are in an hour! Come on, Dad. Just watch, okay? It’ll take two seconds...”

Kevin squeezed his eyes shut. He felt hot tears seeping out of the corners. He gripped the metal bars, pressed his face into them, trying to see only blackness, but the image stayed in his head. Rachel at fourteen. The freckles. The ponytail. The wide-open smile...

“We’re the best I forget the rest I we must confess I we pass the test so... go! Bananas! B-a-n-a-n-a-s, just go!”

Kevin was sobbing now, breathing words into the cold bars. “Please don’t go to that tryout. Please, Rachel. Please, honey. Please stay home with Mom and me. Please stay home, you’re too good, Rachel. You’re too good to leave us, honey, please, please...”

“Go, go, go!”

The police didn’t care. The lawyers didn’t care. Nobody cared that Sarah Jane Ledbetter had taken Kevin’s daughter. She’d taken Kevin’s only child and made her into a ghost.

“How was that, Dad?”

“Well...”

“Be honest.”

“Honestly, Rachel?”

“Yes?”

“You’re gonna be the most beautiful, talented cheerleader on the squad.”

“Really?”

“You bet.”

She threw her arms around him and hugged him so tight that for a second, he couldn’t breathe.

Kevin slammed the cell door closed. The metal clanged and echoed. He dragged his hand across his wet face and took a deep, shaking breath, and then he left the basement fast, taking the stairs two at a time. After printing out the map he’d made online, Kevin went into his garage, where he pulled two spools of black duct tape from his toolbox, as well as a length of thick rope and a small burlap sack that used to hold Florida tangerines and still smelled of them. He then packed all the things into a large black duffel that he’d purchased at the same time as this house.

When he threw it all into his car and started driving, the citrus scent was thick in the air — strange and fresh and hopeful. It reminded Kevin of a family vacation, taken years ago and long since forgotten.

“I sympathize with you, Mr. and Mrs. Murphy. I really do,” the last lawyer had said. “But I’m sorry... you don’t have a case.”

She worked for a firm that Kevin had seen advertised during one of the daytime soap operas. “Ambulance chasers,” Candace had called the firm, yet she’d gone with Kevin anyway because he’d assured her that this attorney visit would be their last.

“What do you mean?” Kevin had asked the lawyer. “The woman killed our daughter. Of course we have a case.”

“Not technically. Not in the eyes of the law.”

Kevin felt Candace’s hand gripping his... a gesture not so much supportive as restraining. “What do you mean?” he said again.

The attorney leaned forward. She wore a lot of pancake makeup, a shade darker than it should have been. Under the bright office lights, it looked like paint on a pocked wall. She was wearing eye shadow the color of a fly’s body, and her lips were a deep, angry red. It struck Kevin that this lawyer went through the day wearing a mask, a disguise. How could he trust anyone like that?

“Miss Ledbetter,” she said carefully, “is a very insensitive woman...”

“She’s a lot more than that.”

“...but she isn’t a criminal.”

“She’s a murderer. This is a wrongful-death case if there ever was one!”

“I’m very sorry for your loss.”

Kevin turned to Candace. She stared straight ahead. “Maybe Rachel’s death was our fault,” she said, very quietly. “Ever think of that, Kevin?”

Sarah Jane Ledbetter’s house was much smaller than the one she’d owned in Larchmont. A raised ranch, they called it — a top-heavy cottage with big windows staring awkwardly out of a bloated second story, the smaller story on the bottom shouldering all the weight. Tacky, Kevin thought. But appropriate for a woman who delighted in crushing small things.

It was one of a handful of houses rimming a small lake. Thick hedges bounded her house, shielding her from the neighbors. A vacation home, with privacy. There was a light on in one of the big windows, her Ford Explorer in the driveway, but the houses on either side of hers were completely dark. The days were still warm, but it was September, after all, and there was a very good chance her neighbors had closed up their houses for the season.

Still, Kevin didn’t want to take any chances. It was ten P.M. The neighbors could be home and asleep.

After he’d pulled in behind the Ford Explorer and slid the duffel out of the front seat, he was careful to close his car door very quietly, to walk up the brick pathway that led to her house with the same soft step he used to employ in his nature photography. He glanced at the property as he walked. The small lawn was cut short and bristly. There were sturdy shrubs pressing into the house, but no flowers planted anywhere — nothing that needed nurturing.

He unzipped the duffel bag, placed it next to him on the front step, and rang the doorbell. He hadn’t intended to do this. The one part of the plan he’d yet to come up with was how to get her to open the door, and he had been hoping to come up with an idea first. Too late now.

Kevin heard footsteps approaching the door. He was aware of her studying him through the peephole and raised a hand in a weak wave. He had grown a thick beard since she left town and much of his hair had gone gray. He used to dress differently back then too. The clothes he wore under his new name of George Fisk were all dark and tired-looking. Nondescript. Would she remember?

The door opened, and Sarah Jane Ledbetter was standing in front of him. She was still wearing the pink T-shirt and jeans, and this close, he could see how her collarbones pressed against the cotton, how the sleeves swirled around her bony arms without touching them. The eyes were huge and black in the gaunt face, and they carried within them a hint of recognition. Kevin thought, She remembers.

“What did I leave?” Sarah Jane Ledbetter said.

“What?”

“You’re from Cumberland Farms. I saw you there today. Did I leave something behind?”

Right. Of course. “You didn’t leave anything.”

“Then why are you here?”

Kevin took a breath. “Rachel Murphy.”

“Who?”

Kevin’s jaw tightened. He felt his right hand balling into a fist Stay calm. Don’t let her get you... “Rachel Murphy. Larchmont High.”

Sarah Jane Ledbetter took a step back. She put her hands on her bony hips and cocked her head to one side and peered at Kevin, as if he’d just told her a joke she didn’t get, and she was trying to decide whether or not to admit it.

“She tried out for cheerleading.”

Her eyes went flat. You remember me, Kevin thought. You’ve remembered me ever since I said her name. She said, “You’re the father of the anorexic girl.”

The words pushed into his ears like broken glass. Kevin punched her in the stomach. She doubled over, gasping, and Kevin punched her again. He hadn’t intended to do this. He’d never hit a woman before, but she wasn’t a woman, was she? She wasn’t even a human being.

Ledbetter wheezed. Kevin yanked the small burlap sack out of the duffel and threw it over her head, binding the bottom with duct tape. He duct-taped her hands behind her back and pushed her like a prisoner to the car. She’d found her voice by now, but the thick burlap muffled her screams. Once he’d thrown her in the trunk and gotten it closed, Kevin stood there behind his car for several seconds, listening to the quiet. Well, that was easy, he thought.

It wasn’t until he was driving home that, for the first time in years, Kevin allowed himself to think of that whole, awful day. He stared ahead at the empty road, glowing beneath the spotlight of a nearly full moon. He kept both hands on the wheel and he recalled that day, the day of cheerleader tryouts, the day that Sarah Jane Ledbetter had killed his daughter. All of it. And unlike any other time that he’d recounted that day, Kevin’s eyes stayed dry.

There was a reason for this, Kevin knew. His plan was working. His daughter’s murderer was in the trunk of his car, and the night was clear and cool and beautiful, a night to be photographed. A night to remember.

The Larchmont High gym had held in it the same smell as Kevin’s old high-school gym — antiseptic, sneaker soles, basketball rubber, sweat. It had been a good smell for Kevin in the past. He’d never been a gloating jock but he’d always been good at sports and for Kevin, the gym had been a place to escape that feeling he always had in high school, that sense of being continuously tested — by teachers, by girls...

No more.

“Not everyone can make the cheerleading squad, Mr. Murphy.” The coach’s voice had echoed against the gym walls — the two of them here alone at seven P.M., four hours after tryouts.

“I understand that.”

“Do you?”

“What I don’t understand is why you would want to hurt a child.”

“She’s not a child. She’s fourteen years old, and if she’s going to live in this world, she’s going to have to toughen up.”

“She’s locked in her room, crying. She won’t come out. She won’t speak to me. And then my wife... she told me what you said to Rachel.”

“Mr. Murphy. Your daughter didn’t make the cut. She asked why and I told her.”

“It was cruel.”

“It was the truth.”

“You told a sensitive fourteen-year-old girl that she’s fat. Don’t you understand that children take these things to heart? She won’t eat dinner, Coach Ledbetter. She won’t—”

“I think we’re through now, Mr. Murphy.” Coach Sarah Jane Ledbetter had stood up, her eyes trained on him. “Just so you know. I’m not naturally thin. I watch what I eat. Exercise. If your daughter skips a fattening dinner one night, I don’t see where that’s such a bad thing.” She’d then turned and left the gym, her sneakers squeaking as they hit the gleaming floor. It was the last conversation they ever had.

“You’re crazy,” Sarah Jane Ledbetter said. To Kevin, it felt ironic. She was on the mattress in Kevin’s homemade cell, forced into a sitting position with the burlap sack still over her head. If anyone looked crazy, she did, though Kevin didn’t bother pointing that out. Sarah Jane Ledbetter had stopped screaming around ten minutes ago, once Kevin had gotten her down the stairs, once he’d let her know that he had equipped the whole space with soundproofing tiles. “What is wrong with you?” she said. “Why can’t you just let it go? I didn’t kill your daughter.”

“Do you remember when we spoke in the gym?”

She said nothing. The burlap fluttered with her heavy breath.

“You told me that if Rachel missed a dinner, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing.”

“Yes,” she said. “So?”

“Rachel was a sensitive girl. Cheerleading was supposed to give her confidence. Instead you... you stripped it from her. You killed her spirit.”

“It’s a hard world. If I didn’t let her know, then someone else would have.”

“Let her know what? That she didn’t meet your ridiculous physical standards?”

“If your daughter took constructive criticism too seriously, then that isn’t my fault.”

“Constructive? You told her she was fat.”

“I told the truth.”

“She missed that dinner. She missed every dinner, every meal. After a year she stopped eating altogether. By the time we realized it, she was... We took her to therapy, to nutritionists, brain specialists, eating coaches... Nothing worked. Her hair fell out, her teeth. By the time she was sixteen years old, she weighed sixty-eight pounds. She went into a coma. She died five months before her seventeenth birthday...” Kevin felt a rush of heat into his eyes, his arms, his fists, as if all the hate in his body — endless reserves of it — was racing to the surface, racing there to beat these awful truths. He wanted to sock Ledbetter in the face. He wanted to break her jaw, to stop her from talking forever. But he took a step back, breathed. She would live down here for a very long time, but he would never touch her again. That was part of the plan. He had to stick to the plan.

“I’m not naturally thin,” she was saying, her voice a growl under the burlap. “I watch myself. I have discipline. I have restraint...”

Back at Cumberland Farms, Kevin had, at duty’s urging, taken a Twinkie from the Hostess display. It was still in his pocket — a keepsake from an earlier time of day. As Sarah Jane Ledbetter continued to talk — about diet and exercise, about the power of self-control — Kevin removed the Twinkie from his pocket. He placed it atop the pile that lined the cell — three years’ worth of Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Yodels, Cupcakes, Snowballs, Ring Dings, fruit pies, Little Debbie cakes and Streusel Swirls and countless other prepackaged desserts, not to mention cases and cases of Coke and orange soda, all of it filled with preservatives, with empty calories and refined sugar and synthetic fluff. Food that fattened but didn’t nurture. Food that never went bad. “My daily treat,” he would tell Chuy, when, upon ending his shift, he took one of the bright bundles from the display. “It makes me happy to bring one home.” He hadn’t been lying. There were now over a thousand prepackaged desserts in this cell, climbing the walls, spilling onto the floor. In some places, the pile stood seven feet high.

“What are you going to do to me?” Sarah Jane Ledbetter said.

Kevin undid the duct tape around her hands. He removed the sack from her head and exited the cell, locking it as she stood there, gaping at her surroundings.

“Why... why did you put all this... stuff in here with me?”

Kevin looked at her. “Because you aren’t naturally thin. And eventually, you will get hungry.”

Ledbetter stared at him, her eyes widening, changing. She understood now, Kevin saw. She knew exactly what would happen to her in a week, in a month, in a year. She caught sight of the two enormous mirrors across the room and shrieked, “You can’t do this!”

“See you in two years.”

Kevin turned away from her and headed for the cellar stairs, his shoes scuffing the concrete floor, her screams hurtling after him, desperate as the screams of a child. “You’re a monster! You’re insane! You can’t do this to me, I’ll kill you!”

Self-restraint, he thought.

Kevin climbed the stairs one by one, hoping that his home improvements had worked. She was much louder than he thought she’d be — all that sound coming out of such a spindly body. Who would have thought?

The instant he closed and locked the door, though, the screams evaporated into the soundproofing tiles. It worked, Kevin thought. It all worked. The house was silent once again, and Sarah Jane Ledbetter was nothing more than a bad memory, locked away, growing larger.