The Best American Mystery Stories 1998

Janice Law Secrets from Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

My first and only failing grade in school came in sixth grade, when Miss Solway asked us to write a paragraph about a secret. Patty Tolliver set to work about a surprise birthday party for her dad. I could see “birthday party” and “hiding presents” and the rest of the story emerging in her big curling script. Eric Rodriguez printed something about fireworks in steeply angled lines. His letters grew smaller and messier as they approached the right edge of his paper, then swelled again into big, assertive words with each new line. Even Jon Hansem, the slowest kid in the class, was hard at work, but my mind refused to function. I sat sweating at my desk and turned in a blank page. At the end of the period Miss Solway called me up to her desk. She looked disappointed and asked if I was feeling all right. I said I was fine; I just didn’t have any secrets worth writing about. Miss Solway was unconvinced: I was considered a good, even an imaginative, student.

“I just couldn’t think of anything,” I wailed, and though Miss Solway was one of my favorite teachers, I added, “It was a dumb topic anyway.” I was almost twelve years old, and I already knew that there are some secrets too big to tell, like the one about my mother and Mr. Conklin and what happened the July that I was ten years old.

That summer was hot, dreadfully, dreadfully hot. We should have been used to it after three years in Hartford, but we weren’t. Days when the thermometer crept up into the eighties and then the nineties, my mother would wipe her face and say, “What I wouldn’t give to be back in Ireland now. It was never imagined to be this hot in Ireland.”

Of course other days Mother “wouldn’t have had Ireland as a gift,” as she’d say, not with my dad dead. “Not an honest day’s work to be had. Nothing but pride, poetry, and ignorance. It’s bad times here, but worse there. You remember that and work hard in school, my girl.” I would promise, of course. I liked school and did well, even though I was in the public school and not with the sisters, who provided a really good education. But Catholic school was out of the question, an unimaginable luxury. Although Mother worked hard, cleaning at the motel and the restaurants, we still lived from week to week. Her pay was usually owed from the moment she got it, and we ate cereal or beans for supper most Wednesdays and Thursdays.

I don’t suppose we’d have managed at all if it weren’t for Mr. Conklin, our tyrant and savior, who was a distant relative of my late father. Mr. Conklin owned a triple-decker house near his “Irish pub.” He also owned a motel and a snack shop at the shabby end of Park Street where the Puerto Rican section stopped and the Portuguese, new immigrants like ourselves, were moving in. Their children went to the big, frightening city schools — rough and full of black people, Mr. Conklin said — while we had the top apartment of his triple-decker just over the city line in an old Irish-Italian neighborhood. The schools in the suburb were much, much better Mr. Conklin said, as “they damn well should be, considering the taxes.” Both the apartment and my admission to the local elementary school were the direct result of Mr. Conklin’s intercession. It was understood that either could be withdrawn at a moment’s notice.

Stout and redfaced with a pug nose and a loud, jovial voice, Joseph P. Conklin was a sentimental bully with unsettling moments of gaiety and kindness. He brought me a doll once — and occasionally chocolates for Mother — and he sang “Danny Boy” every St. Patrick’s Day as the restaurant was closing. But even in his best moments I was leery of him. I hated it when he wanted me to sit on his knee and tell him how I was doing in school. Fortunately his interest was usually focused on his property: the restaurants, his triple-decker, and his motel. He hiked his profits and kept his costs down by employing illegal immigrants like Mother, for whom he had originally gotten a visitor’s visa.

As relatives, Mother and I occupied a privileged position; we were given the apartment and protected from the school authorities. In exchange, Mr. Conklin paid Mother less than the minimum wage and visited every Saturday around five o’clock on his way to the restaurant. If it was nice weather, Mother would send me out on the big front porch of the triple-decker, where I would watch the traffic and try to spit on the drooping heads of the hydrangeas that flanked the front steps far below. If it was bad weather, Mother would tell me to go down and see Annie on the first floor. Annie was a stooped, arthritic old lady with a close and cluttered apartment and a fat gray neutered cat. She was lonely for company and never minded my visits. We would sit companionably, watching her old black and white TV or crocheting, until I heard Mr. Conklin’s smart patent leather loafers descending the stairs. Then I would tell Annie I had to go to dinner.

Upstairs, Mother would set the table and lay out dishes without saying much. When we first came, she’d cried and talked to her saint and said Aileen — this was Mr. Conklin’s wife, who’d had polio and was in a wheelchair — would put a stop to it; later on, she was flustered and ashamed; finally she was bitter. That was when she realized we were trapped. Mr. Conklin relied on that. “You’re nobody,” I heard him say to her once. “Nobody knows you’re here. You’re invisible and be damn glad you are or Immigration’ll have you back on the blessed Old Sod before you can pack your bags.”

Working in the restaurant and the motel and being visited by Mr. Conklin changed my mother. She lost the prettiness I can see in her old photographs, and she lost the playfulness and sweetness that she had when my dad was alive. She grew tired and silent and tough. I was not tough — not then and not for many years. That July I was still afraid of the dark people at the far end of the street and of the sirens and night noises and of Mr. Conklin, who held our lives in his clean, meaty hands.

Since Mother was out working during the day, I spent afternoons in the local park, where there was a pool, picnic tables, a playground, and an organized recreation program. Whenever the swim team or adults had the pool, the rec department supervisors encouraged us in messy arts and crafts and group singing. Eventually, some of us formed a chorus, and the plan was that we would sing for our parents and for the local convalescent home at the end of the summer.

Everything about the chorus was wonderful: the rehearsals under the maple trees during the hot afternoons, the schmaltzy songs like “It’s a Small World” and “Frere Jacques,” the giggling groups of gossipy, self-important little girls. The only difficulty came when the chorus voted to wear dresses for our concerts. I had a skirt for Mass, of course, but for the concerts a dress, preferably a pretty sundress, was essential, and for weeks I teased Mother and scoured the newspaper ads for sales. Finally she announced that she’d gotten some material. Secretly I would have preferred something from Caldor’s or Ames, but the material she pulled out of the bag — light blue with small pink and yellow flowers — was soft and pretty.

“With a ruffle,” I asked. “Can we have it with a ruffle?”

Mother smiled. I look at her pictures now and think how pretty she was, how very pretty before she grew tired and overworked and tough. Once she had liked nice clothes, been flirtatious, carefree, popular; she understood the importance of a ruffle. Mother started the dress early the next morning, before she went off on the bus to clean at the motel, and she finished it late the same week, after she came in from mopping up the snack bar. On Saturday morning, I found the dress waiting for me, a pinafore style with ruffles around the arm holes and two pockets on the skirt.

I put it on. It was not just a perfect fit but a perfect, transforming dress. I was undersized, bony and plain. In the dress, I seemed dainty; the effect was charming; I was enchanted.

“Take it off and hang it up,” said Mother. “You’ll have it dirty before the day’s out. It has to be kept for good.”

I hung the sundress up in our closet, but as soon as I came back from the park, I ran to look at it, to stroke the ruffles and spread out the skirt. And when, just around four, the phone rang and Mother had to go out on an errand, I could not resist trying on my dress again.

I dragged a kitchen chair into the bathroom and climbed up to look in the mirror of the medicine cabinet. I was standing there admiring myself when I heard the knock on the door followed by the sound of a key turning in the lock.

“Are you home, Patsy?” Mr. Conklin was the only one who ever called my mother Patsy.

“Patsy?” I heard him walking softly through the living room and down the hall. For a fattish man he had a light tread.

I didn’t want to see him, and if I hadn’t been afraid of dirtying my dress, I’d have slipped under the bed. In my moment of hesitation he appeared in the doorway.

“Where’s your mother?”

“She had to go to the store,” I said.

“Don’t you answer the door when someone knocks?”

I shook my head.

“Where are your manners?” he asked. “Who else visits you every Saturday?” Then he laughed. “But there’ll be boys around soon enough,” he said, looking at me more closely. “Very pretty.” He reached out and touched the ruffle. “I must be paying Patsy more than I thought.”

I flinched away from him. “Mother made this for me,” I said, almost in tears. His remark spoiled my happiness. I wished I’d never put on the dress; I wished Mother would come home; I wished he was dead.

“There there now,” he said, hitching up his light summer pants and sitting down on the edge of the bed. “Who’s your pal, eh? Who brought you that Barbie doll?”

I bit my lip and didn’t answer.

He ran his finger along the ruffle again, then smoothed the front of my dress. “I don’t have a little girl of my own, you know,” he said. “Wouldn’t have been as pretty as you anyway. Your mother now, there’s a pretty woman. I met her on a visit to the Old Country. She wasn’t much older than you, and she was one of the prettiest girls in Belfast; that’s the truth.”

He took my arm although I tried to ease away. “Come sit here for a minute,” he said. His voice sounded different, soft and sort of sticky, like something Mother would say was “too sweet to be wholesome.”

“Since your mother is out.”

“You called her,” I said, frightened by sudden knowledge. “You asked her to get something for the snack shop.”

“Did I now? And me with a car and going out anyway as I always do on a Saturday evening? Would I do such a thing?”

“You called her,” I said, stubborn despite my fear.

“You’re a clever girl,” he said, settling me on his lap. “Maybe we should send you to the sisters at St. Bridget’s. Would you like that? Wear a nice little uniform, they do. Gray blazer,” he said, running his hand down my dress again, “little maroon tie, little maroon and gray kilt, little gray kneesocks. Just to here. Wouldn’t you like that? Lots of nice Irish boys and girls at St. Bridget’s.”

I stopped trying to squirm away from him. “I like my school,” I said, “but I’d like St. Bridget’s better.”

He laughed. “I just bet you would. I just bet you would. Well, it depends if you’re good.” He was stroking my knee, and I both did and did not know what he meant. I’d heard a fair bit out on the porch on those warm evenings.

“We’d have to ask my mother,” I said.

“Oh, your mother can’t afford St. Bridget’s. Never in this life! Don’t imagine your mother can afford to send you to the sisters.”

“My mother decides,” I said.

He laughed. “Does she now?” I could see the veins in the whites of his eyes; I could smell his aftershave, and something else, a raw, dangerous smell.

“I want to get down now,” I said.

“Not yet,” he said, sliding his meaty red fingers under my dress. “Not if you want to get to St. Bridget’s.”

A minute later I started to scream.

“Shhh,” said Mr. Conklin, and when I didn’t stop, he yelled, “Shut up, shut up, you little bitch!”

I wasn’t tough like my mother. The scream wasn’t under my control, it went echoing around my head and burned between my legs and poured out like blood from a wound. I couldn’t stop, not even when he slapped me. The scream was so independent, so beyond my control, that at last it even frightened Mr. Conklin, who did up his pants and hurried down the hall and out the door.

Mother came home just minutes later. I was sitting on the bed. My dress was torn, and there was blood on my legs. Mother took one look at me, and her face went white. She wrapped her arms around me, cursing and sobbing at the same time. When she stopped, she said, “I’ll fix that bastard. He’ll never hurt you again.” Taut with anger and pain, her face was almost unrecognizable, and I was nearly as frightened of her as of Mr. Conklin. “I promise,” she said. “As God is my witness.”

“No,” I said, “no!” I had an intimation of disaster, loss, some terrible punishment. Good or bad, Mr. Conklin was the chief power in our small universe.

“You’ll see,” Mother said. “I won’t bear this.” Then she sat back on her heels and looked at me. “It’s got to be a secret. God forgive me, you’ve got to keep this a secret. The police would tell Immigration. Do you understand that? We can’t tell anyone what that bastard did.”

I nodded my head. I didn’t want to tell anyone. I had no words for what had happened. “A secret,” I said.

“A deep, dark secret,” Mother said grimly.

Sometime after ten P.M. the next Friday Mr. Conklin died behind his fast food restaurant. A stab wound stopped his heart so suddenly that he was dead before he hit the pavement. The papers made much of the speed of his passing, and for years I carried an image of Mr. Conklin tumbled like a large, ungainly bird from the sky and dying in mid-fall.

That night my mother was late coming home from work. The city sounds made me nervous — the sudden shrieks and eerie lights of police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances, the accelerating hot rods with their booming radios, the hoarse, quarrelsome voices of men drifting back from the bars — and I was still awake at eleven o’clock when I heard her footsteps. I ran to unlock the door.

Mother’s weary face was bloodless. “I’m sorry I’m so late, darling,” she said. “I had to wait and lock up. Mr. Conklin didn’t come back from making the night deposit.”

“I hope he never comes back,” I said.

Mother gave me a sharp look. “Be careful what you wish for,” she said, then she went into the bedroom and began to pack our cases.

Mr. Conklin looked out at us from the morning paper. His picture made him seem younger and more benevolent than he ever looked in life. The accompanying story told us about his violent end. I was thrilled and horrified by his death, by the unlooked-for fame of one of our acquaintances. These were sensational and superficial emotions, but I was genuinely sorry and frightened about leaving our apartment.

“My job’s gone,” Mother explained. “We don’t exist. There never were any papers, agreements.”

I asked about school, about the park chorus, our concerts; Mother looked me in the face and shook her head. I felt suspicion dawn in a shiver of anxiety that grew stronger when we caught the morning bus to Boston without saying goodbye to anyone, not even to Annie. Once in Boston, the MTA took us to the South End, where we started calling ourselves Malloy instead of O’Brien and quietly disappeared into the Irish community. We put down a security deposit on a shabby apartment, and a very distant relative of Mother’s found her a job in a sweatshop sewing curtains.

That fall I attended a real urban school, where I learned to smoke and swear and became outwardly tough. Inside I was frightened of a lot of things, all related to secrets and to July: men, sex, sudden death, Immigration. Underneath were even deeper fears, more terrible because unacknowledged: the fear of guilt, police, and discovery; the fear, worst of all, of being separated from Mother, whose protection, I sensed, was both sure and terrible.

It was several years before I learned that my particular horrors were not unique. Fear and loss were the common experiences of my classmates, and the art of keeping secrets was so essential to our survival that, though we could not forget old fears, we could push them down relentlessly. I put away my suspicions and learned to live with ambiguity. When I graduated from high school, I joined the army, where I became a citizen and trained as a nurse. Amid the suffering of others I at last grew really tough, tough enough to ask Mother the question that had haunted my youth.

It was on another summer day, and tough or not, I would probably not have dared ask if we hadn’t gone to Hartford. I had to attend a lecture at the medical center, and Mother said she’d ride along and visit a friend who lived nearby in Farmington. When I picked her up after the program, she suggested driving down to Park Street to see the old triple-decker. At once my childish fears returned. I stopped in the parking lot and looked at her.

“If it’s not out of the way,” said Mother, handsome in her dark navy dress. For years she had worn only dark colors, black, navy, deep purple, somber shades that gave her a vaguely European air. The rich ladies who patronized the bridal salon where Mother worked thought her taste distinguished and sophisticated.

I shook my head. “Is it wise?” I asked.

Mother gave nothing away. “Who do you think will notice us?” she answered.

Of course she was right. I parked near the house, and Mother got out on the sidewalk and looked up at the big solid building with the flaring eaves and the prowlike porches. Blue-gray vinyl siding covered the dark wood shingles, and Mother approved. “Saves the painting,” she said. “Clean-looking. Young Joe must be up on all the latest.”

“Young Joe?”

“Mr. Conklin’s son. He must be just a few years older than you are. Aileen’s probably turned everything over to him by now. It was her money, part of it anyway. Her people owned some grocery stores, you know.”

I did not know, and I thought Mother might say more about the Conklins, but she took a last look up at the apartment and got back into the car. “I’ve never been so hot as in that third floor flat,” she said. “Remember how hot it used to get?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Go on down Park,” Mother said. “We might as well stop by the snack shop, too.”

She spoke so casually that I felt guilty for all the years of suspicion and apprehension. Nonetheless, I drove downtown carefully, nervously alert for stop signs, traffic lights, and squad cars. Next to me, Mother looked out the windows and remarked on changes in the neighborhood. The Portuguese shops had mostly gone, leaving a mix of Indian and Southeast Asian businesses: Bombay Foods, a Vietnamese market, shops that promised to speak Khmer, Vietnamese, Hindi, or Laotian. The old snack shop had been transformed into the New Thai Palace Restaurant, and Mother said, “Turn in. There’s room for you to park.”

I pulled next to a van labeled NEW THAI PALACE — RESTAURANT, CATERING, TAKEOUT and shut off the motor. The late spring evening was mild and pleasant. The sun turned the bricks of the restaurant to gold, and the sky was a peachy shade of pink. Mother stepped out of the car and walked around behind the restaurant where a big exhaust fan whirred out the smell of hot oil and spices. Beyond a brown board fence, children were shouting and playing, and on the sidewalk two women in saris and dark sweaters pushed their children in strollers. Mother studied the restaurant, the garbage cans, the little open porch that led into the kitchen. Long ago Mr. Conklin had been seized by some swift and terrible force right at the foot of those steps.

For years I had wondered about the precise agent. Now that I was on the verge of discovery, I found I’d rather not know. “Please let’s go,” I said.

Mother seemed surprised that I was nervous. She herself was perfectly composed, a fine looking woman somewhere in middle age, her hair still dark, her face only faintly lined, old hardships and weariness visible only in her eyes. The days of sweatshops and exploitation had eventually ended in Boston, where she had turned her toughness into such elegance that men admired her and were afraid of her. Six years ago she had married a brave one who owned a fancy funeral home and had become comfortable and happy.

“There is no danger,” she said as she walked back to the car. “I told you that years ago.”

I remembered the hot apartment, panic, fear, and pain — and Mother’s contorted mask-like face. “You said you’d fix Mr. Conklin.”

“I wanted to comfort you,” my mother said, looking at me calmly. “But people are different. You would have been happier not knowing. You lack the taste for vengeance. It is a shame you never went to the sisters. They would have approved.”

“I would have suspected anyway,” I said. “We packed right up and left.”

Mother gave a slight shrug. “We’d have gone immediately in any case. Aileen hated me; she’d have had us out of the apartment before his funeral.”

“I was terrified you’d be questioned,” I said. “For years I worried that someone would come, that you’d be taken away, that somehow…”

“We didn’t exist,” said Mother. “If he told me that once, he told me a hundred times.”

“But the knife, the fingerprints, the other workers? There must have been evidence. Look at this place — where was there to hide anything?”

Mother got back in the car and fastened her seatbelt before answering. “I didn’t have a plan,” she said. “I’ve been told that makes a difference, not planning I mean. I don’t even know all that was in my mind when I went out the door after him. It was around ten fifteen. He was going to the night deposit, but first he stepped out for a smoke — one of those vile cigars. There was a boning knife on the counter, sharp as a razor. I picked it up because I wanted him to know I was serious. I was desperate and hot and sick, and my heart was breaking. He’d gone too far. I wanted to tell him that he was never, ever to touch either of us again.”

“What did he say?”

Mother’s face grew dark and reflective. “He laughed,” she said. “He had trampled my heart; he had hurt the one person I had left, my only treasure, and still he laughed — you see what it is to be rich and powerful. Then he said that I was looking older, and I understood everything. We were nothing to him, nothing at all, and he was thinking of you for a replacement.”

“I was ten years old,” I said in a small voice.

“There was really nothing else to do,” Mother said. “I was surprised he took such a long time to fall.”

I imagined the night parking lot with the moths swirling around the security lights, the long shadows, the urban smells of hot asphalt, exhaust, and garbage cans, and my mother, young then and frightened, standing by the stair with a knife in her hand. “Everyone thought it was a robbery,” I said.

“So it was: the day’s taking from two restaurants,” Mother said with a slight smile. “The police blamed the gangs, the Puerto Ricans, wild kids from the project. What else could they do? He’d managed very carefully, and very few people knew me.”

“But the knife?” I asked. “What about the knife?”

“You don’t know restaurants,” she said. “Restaurants are full of knives. I rinsed off the boning knife in the sink and threw it in the dishwasher. As far as I was thinking at all, I figured the staff would unload it the next morning and put it back in the rack as usual.”

“Of course,” I said. I realized that my brave and decisive mother was untouched by fantasy. While I had been tormented for years by fears of discovery and loss and guilt, failure had never crossed her mind. She was a woman without imagination. “But didn’t he have a wallet? Didn’t he used to carry something for the money?”

Mother opened her pocketbook and pulled out a battered green leather zippered purse that I’d seen a thousand times without recognition. “No matter where you discard things, they’re apt to be found,” she said calmly.

I was dazzled by the simplicity of her strategy, which had required only nerve and silence. Until now. I could not decide whether her guilty secret had finally and irresistibly resurfaced — as guilty secrets are supposed to do — or whether she felt a satisfaction that demanded recognition. I realized uneasily that the parish gentlemen who admired and feared my mother were right. Life had made her desperate, and then it had made her remarkable. Mr. Conklin had been hit by a force quite out of his reckoning.