The Best American Mystery Stories 2003

Hannah Tinti Home Sweet Home

From Epoch

Pat and Clyde were murdered on pot roast night. The doorbell rang just as Pat was setting the butter and margarine (Clyde was watching his cholesterol) on the table. She was thinking about James Dean. She had loved him desperately as a teenager, seen his movies dozens of times, written his name across her notebooks, carefully taped pictures of him to the inside of her locker so that she would have the pleasure of seeing his tortured, sullen face from East of Eden as she exchanged her French and English textbooks for science and math. When she graduated from high school she took down the photos and pasted them to the inside cover of her yearbook, which she perused longingly several times over the summer and brought with her to the University of Massachusetts, where it sat, unopened, alongside her thesaurus and abridged collegiate dictionary until she met Clyde, received her M.R.S. degree, and packed her things to move into their two-bedroom ranch house on Bridge Street.

Before she put the meat in the oven that afternoon, Pat had made herself a cup of tea and turned on the television. Channel 38 was showing Rebel Without a Cause, and as the light slowly began to rise through the screen of their old Zenith she saw James Dean on the steps of the planetarium, clutching at the mismatched socks of a dead Sal Mineo and crying. She put down her tea, slid her warm fingertips inside the V-neck of her dress, and held her left breast. Her heart was suddenly pounding, her nipple hard and erect against the palm of her hand. It was like seeing an old lover, like remembering a piece of herself that no longer existed. She watched the credits roll and glanced outside to see her husband mowing the lawn. He had a worried expression on his face and his socks pulled up to his knees.

That evening before dinner, as she arranged the butter and margarine side by side on the table — one yellow airy and light, the other yellow hard and dark like the yolk of an egg — she wondered how she could have forgotten the way James Dean’s eyebrows curved. Isn’t memory a strange thing, she thought. I could forget all of this, how everything feels, what all of these things mean to me. She was suddenly seized with the desire to grab the sticks of butter and margarine in her hands and squeeze them until her fingers went right through, to somehow imprint their textures and colors on her brain like a stamp, to make them something that she would never lose. And then she heard the bell.

When she opened the door Pat noticed that it was still daylight. The sky was blue and bright and clear and she had a fleeting, guilty thought that she should not have spent so much time indoors. After that she crumpled backwards into the hall as the bullet from a .38-caliber Saturday Night Special pierced her chest, exited below her shoulder blade, and jammed into the wood of the stairs, where it would later be dug out with a penknife by Lieutenant Sales and dropped gingerly into a transparent plastic Baggie.

Pat’s husband Clyde was found in the kitchen by the back door, a knife in his hand (first considered a defense against his attacker and later determined as the carver of the roast). He had been shot twice — once in the stomach and once in the head — and then covered with cereal, the boxes lined up on the counter beside him and the crispy golden contents of Captain Crunch, Corn Flakes, and Special K emptied out over what remained of his face.

Nothing had been stolen.

It was a warm spring evening, full of summer promises. Pat and Clyde’s bodies lay silent and still while the orange sunset crossed the floors of their house and the streetlights clicked on. As darkness came, and the skunks waddled through the backyard and the raccoons crawled down from the trees, they were still there, holding their places, suspended in a moment of quiet blue before the sun came up and a new day started and life went on without them.

It was Clyde’s mother who called the police. She dialed her son’s number every Sunday morning from Rhode Island. These phone calls always somehow perfectly coincided with whenever Pal and Clyde had just settled down to breakfast, or whenever they were on the verge of making love.

Thar she blows, Clyde would say, and take his hot coffee with him over to where the phone hung on the wall, or slide out of bed with an apologetic glance at his wife. The coffee and Pat would inevitably cool, and in this way his mother would ruin every Sunday. It had been years now since they frolicked in the morning, but once, when they were first married and Pat was preparing breakfast, she had heard the phone, walked over to where her husband was reading the paper, dropped to her knees, pulled open his robe, and taken him in her mouth. Let it ring, she thought, and he had let it ring. Fifteen minutes later the police were on their front porch with smiles as Clyde, red-faced, bathrobe bulging, answered their questions at the door.

In most areas of her life Clyde’s mother was a very nice person. She behaved in such a kind and decorous manner that people would often remark, having met her, What a lovely woman. But with Clyde she lost her head. She was suspicious, accusing, and tyrannical. Her husband had died suddenly a few years back, and once she got through her grief her son became her man. She pushed this sense of responsibility through him like fishhooks, plucking on the line, reeling him back in when she felt her hold slipping, so that the points became embedded in his flesh so deep that it would kill him to take them out.

She dialed the police after trying her son thirty-two times, and because the lieutenant on duty was a soft touch, his own mother having recently passed, a cruiser was dispatched to Pat and Clyde’s on Bridge Street, and because one of the policemen was looking to buy in the neighborhood, the officers decided to check out the back of the house after they got no answer, and because there was cereal blowing around in the yard the men got suspicious, and because it was a windy day and because the hinges had recently been oiled and because the door had been left unlocked and swung open and because one of them had seen a dead body before, a suicide up in Hanover, and knew blood and brain and bits of skull when he saw them, he made the call back to the station, because his partner was quietly vomiting in the rosebushes, and said, We’ve got trouble.

Earlier that morning, as Little Mike Findleman delivered Pat and Clyde’s Sunday Globe, the comics straining around the sections like wrapping on an inappropriate gift, he noticed that the welcome mat was gone. It had been ordered out of an expensive catalog and said, Home Sweet Home. Every day when Little Mike rode up on his bicycle and delivered the paper, he looked at the mat and thought of his own home. It was not sweet.

Little Mike’s father had recently returned from a minimum-security prison, where he had spent the past three years doing time for embezzlement. With her husband back in the house, Little Mike’s mother, a charismatic redhead, was now on antidepressants, and had cooked spaghetti for dinner twenty-eight days in a row. To top it off, Little Mike had not made the cut to junior league baseball, as his friends Norman and Greg Kessler had, and the shame he felt when he checked the list posted outside the gym and later as he told the twins, who squinted into the sun and shrugged their shoulders together as if they were brushing him off their lives like a bug, struck him deeply and confirmed his suspicions of his own lack of greatness. Little Mike enjoyed getting off of his bicycle and kicking Pat and Clyde’s welcome mat as he dropped off their paper just after dawn, leaving it askew and glancing back at it as he walked down the front porch steps. It made him feel less alone.

Each morning he would return and find the welcome mat back in place. He wondered sometimes if they complained about their delivery, but Pat and Clyde never said anything, and when the money was due for the paper they left a check in an envelope taped above the doorbell, usually with a few extra bucks for a tip. So when he walked up the porch steps and found the door shut tight and no Home Sweet Home, Little Mike paused. Later, when he was interviewed by Lieutenant Sales, he would say that he had sensed that something was wrong. But in that moment, standing on the porch in the smoky light of early morning, he felt angry and cheated, as if this small pleasure of kicking the mat had been plugging up a large and gaping hole inside of him, and now that it was gone he saw through it to all the other empty places in his life. Little Mike threw the Sunday Globe off the porch into the bushes with a vengeance, where it would later be found by Buster, the Mitchells’ Labrador retriever, and buried in another part of the yard along with some abandoned Kentucky Fried Chicken rummaged from the local barrels. Little Mike did not tell the police that he had done this. He claimed that he had left the paper on the front porch as always. He did not want anyone to think he was a bad delivery boy.

Buster was the kind of dog who knew how to feel at home. He treated all the yards on Bridge Street as if they were his own, making his way leisurely through flower beds, pausing for a drink from a sprinkler, tearing into garbage bags and relieving himself among patches of newly planted rutabagas. When he discovered Pat and Clyde’s Sunday Globe caught in the low branches of a rhododendron it was after eight. Mrs. Mitchell had let him out that morning with an affectionate pat on his behind. Don’t get into too much trouble, she said. He had left her with his nose to the ground.

The Kentucky Fried Chicken was a gift. Half a bucket of wings and drumsticks left in an open trash can by a teenager on his way home after a night of near misses. The dog fell upon it like a drunk on whiskey, without remorse or pause or reason, with no more than the sense of get this in me now. Be he also caught a whiff of melancholy left on the bucket from the teenager’s hands, and the smell told the dog to save some bones for a time when he was not so lucky.

Buster was already digging a hole in Pat and Clyde’s yard when he noticed a small golden flake on the grass. It was food, and he followed the promise of more across the lawn, through the back door, and over to Clyde, stiff and covered with flies, the remaining cereal a soggy wet pile of pink plaster across his shoulders. The rug underneath the kitchen table was soaked in blood. Buster left red paw prints as he walked around the body and sniffed at the slippers on the dead man’s feet.

The dog smelled fear in the sweat of Clyde’s last moment. It had curled in the arch of his foot as he listened to his wife answer their front door. The bell rang just as he pierced the roast with the carving fork, releasing two streams of juice, which ran down the sides of the meat until they were captured by the raised edge of the serving plate. He paused then, as he lifted the knife, waiting to hear and recognize the voices of his wife and whoever had come to their house. When he heard nothing, an uneasiness tightened at the base of his stomach. Their home contained his life, and he realized, suddenly, that he could not imagine something that could not be greeted by name, could not easily become a part of everything they had inside: their potholders in the shape of barnyard animals; the creak in the third stair; the way their bedroom door stuck in the summer heat. When the shot exploded, he felt it all at once and everywhere — in the walls, in his eyes, in his chest, in his arms, in the utensils he was holding, in the piece of meat he was carving, in the slippers that placed him on the floor, in the kitchen, before their evening meal.

Buster pulled off one of the slippers and sank his teeth into it. It was rank, worn, and sour-tasting, cutting the sweetness of the Captain Crunch. He worked on removing the stuffing of the inner sole and kept his eye on the dead man who used to shoo-shoo him away from garbage bags, from munching the daffodils that lined the walk, from humping strays behind the garage. Once, after catching the dog relieving himself in the middle of the driveway, Clyde had dragged him by the collar all the way down Bridge Street. Listen to me, pooch, Mr. Mitchell had said after Clyde had left, one hand smoothing where the collar had choked and the other hand vigorously scratching the dog’s behind. You shit wherever you feel like shitting.

On his way out of the yard Buster found the Sunday Globe that Little Mike Findleman had tossed. It held the same scent he’d picked up over the body — anger, fear, and disconnectedness — things that cried out to be buried. He dragged the paper over to the hole he’d already started and threw it in with the slipper and the leftover chicken. The earth had a way of settling things. The dog walked back and forth over the spot once it was filled, then lifted his leg to mark it. He shook some dirt out of his ear and used four paws to lake himself home.

The Mitchells had moved into the neighborhood five years before. They brought their dog with them. Three years later, a son arrived — not a newborn baby decked out in bonnets but a thin, dark boy of indiscriminate age. His name was Miguel, and it was unclear to the people living on Bridge Street whether he was adopted or a child from a previous marriage. He called the Mitchells his mother and father, enrolled in the public school for the district, and quietly became a part of their everyday lives.

In fact, Miguel was the true son of Mr. Mitchell, sired unknowingly on a business trip with a Venezuelan prostitute some seven years before. The mother had been killed in a bus accident along with fifty-three other travelers on a road outside Caracas, and the local police had contacted Mr. Mitchell from a faded company card she had left pressed in her Bible. After a paternity test, the boy arrived at Logan airport with a worn-out blanket and duffel bag full of chickens (his pets), which were quickly confiscated by customs officials. Mr. Mitchell drove down Route 128 in his station wagon, amazed and panicked at his sudden parenthood, trying to comfort the sobbing boy and wondering how Miguel had managed to keep the birds quiet on the plane.

When they pulled into the driveway, Mrs. Mitchell was waiting with a glass of warm milk sweetened with sugar. She was wearing dungarees. She took the boy in her arms and carried him immediately into the bathroom, where she sat him on the counter and washed his face, his hands, his knees, and his feet. Miguel sipped the milk while Mrs. Mitchell gently ran the washcloth between his toes. When she was finished, she tucked him into their guest bed and read him a stack of Curious George books in Spanish, which she had ordered from their local bookstore. She showed Miguel a picture of the little monkey in the hospital getting a shot from a nurse and the boy fell asleep, a finger hooked around the belt loop of her jeans. Mrs. Mitchell sat on the bed beside him quietly until he rolled over and let it go.

Mr. Mitchell had met his wife in Northern California. They pulled up beside each other at a gas station. He had just completed his business degree, and was driving a rented car up the coast to see the Olympic rain forest. She was in a pickup truck with Oregon plates. They both got out and started pumping. Mr. Mitchell finished first, and on his way back to his car after paying, he watched the muscles in her thick arm flexing as she replaced the hose. She glanced up, caught him looking, and smiled. She was not beautiful, but one of her teeth stuck out charmingly sideways. He started the car, turned out of the station, and glanced into his rearview mirror. He watched the pickup take the opposite road, and as it drove away he felt such a pulling that he turned around and followed it for 150 miles.

At the rest stop, he pretended that he was surprised to see her. Later he discovered that many people followed his wife, and that she was used to this, and that it did not seem strange to her. People she had never met came up and began to speak to her in supermarkets, in elevators, in the waiting rooms of doctors, at traffic lights, at concerts, at coffee shops and bistros. Even their dog, a stray she fed while camping in Tennessee, came scratching outside their door six weeks later. Mr. Mitchell was jealous and frightened by these strangers, and often used himself as a shield between them and his wife. What do they want from her? he often found himself thinking, but he also felt, What will they take from me?

His wife was a quiet woman, in the way that large rocks just beyond the shore are quiet; the waves rush against them and the seaweed hangs on and the birds gather round on top. Mr. Mitchell was amazed that she had married him. He spent the first few years doing what he could to please her and watched for signs that she was leaving.

Sometimes she got depressed and locked herself in the bathroom. It made him furious and desperate. When she came out, tender and pink from washing, she would put her arms around him and tell him that he was a good man. Mr. Mitchell was not sure of this, because sometimes he found himself hating her. The door was in front of him but the knob wouldn’t turn. He wanted her to know what it felt like to be powerless. He found himself taking risks.

When he got the call from Venezuela telling him about Miguel, he was terrified that he might lose his wife and also secretly happy to have wounded her. But all of the control he felt as they prepared for his son’s arrival slipped away as he watched her take the strange dark boy into her arms and tenderly wash his feet. He realized then that she was capable of taking everything from him.

The three of them formed an awkward family. Mr. Mitchell tried to place the boy in a home but his wife would not let him. She did this to punish him. He had now been an accidental father for two years. He took the boy to baseball games and bought him comic books and drove him to school in the mornings. Sometimes Mr. Mitchell enjoyed these things, other times they made him angry. One day he walked in on Miguel talking to his wife in Spanish and the boy immediately stopped. He realized then that his son was afraid of him. He was sure his wife had done this too. Mr. Mitchell began to resent what had initially drawn him to her, and to offset these feelings he began an affair with their neighbor, Pat.

It did not begin innocently. Mr. Mitchell walked over to Pat one afternoon as she was planting bulbs in her garden and slid his hand into the elastic waistband of her Bermuda shorts. He leaned her up against the fence, underneath a birch tree, right there in the middle of a bright, spring day where everyone could see. He didn’t say anything, but he could tell by her breath and the way she rocked on his hand that she wasn’t afraid.

He hadn’t known that it was in him to do anything like this. He had never been attracted to Pat; he had never had any conversation with her that went beyond the weather or the scheduling of trash. He had been on his way to the library to return some books. Look, there they were, thrown aside on the grass, wrapped in plastic smeared with age and the fingers of readers who were unknown to him. And here was another person he did not know, panting in his ear, streaking his arms with dirt. Someone he had seen bent over in the sunlight, a slight glistening of sweat reflecting in the backs of her knees, and for which he had suddenly felt a hard sense of lonesomeness and longing. A new kind of warmth spread in the palm of his hand and he tried not to think about his wife.

They had hard, raw sex in public places — movie theaters and parks, elevators and playgrounds. After dark, underneath the jungle gym, his knees pressing into the dirt, Mr. Mitchell began to wonder why they hadn’t been caught. Once, sitting on a bench near the reservoir, Pat straddling him in a skirt with no underwear, they had actually waved to an elderly couple passing by. The couple continued on as if they hadn’t seen them. Who knows, maybe they were half-blind, but the experience left the impression that his meetings with Pat were occurring in some kind of alternative reality, a bubble in time that he knew would eventually pop.

Pat told him that Clyde had been impotent for years — a reaction, it seemed, from witnessing his father’s death. The man had been a mechanic, and was working underneath a bulldozer when the lift slipped, crushing him from the chest down. The father and the son had held hands, and the coldness that came as life left seemed to spread through Clyde’s fingers and into his arms, and he stopped using them to reach for his wife. Since the funeral she’d had two lovers. Mr. Mitchell was number three.

There were rumors, later on, that the lift had been tampered with — that Clyde’s father had owed someone money. Pat denied it, but Mr. Mitchell remembered driving by the garage and sensing he’d rather buy his gas somewhere else.

Mr. Mitchell’s desire increased with the risk of discovery, and he’d started arranging meetings with Pat that were closer to home. In his house he fantasized about the dining room table, the dryer in the laundry room, the space on the kitchen counter beside the mixer. He touched these places with his fingertips and trembled, thinking of how he would feel later, watching his wife sip her soup, fold sheets, mix batter for cookies in the same places.

On the day Pat was murdered, before she put the roast in the oven or reminisced about James Dean or thought about the difference between butter and margarine, she was having sex in the vestibule. The coiled rope of Home Sweet Home scratched her behind and dug into Mr. Mitchell’s knees. He had seen Clyde leave for a bowling lesson, and as he waited on the front porch for Pat to open the door, something had made him pick up the welcome mat. When she answered he’d thrown it down in the hall, then her, then himself, the soles of his shoes knocking over the entry table.

Mrs. Mitchell would soon be home with Miguel. Mr. Mitchell brought Pat’s knees to his shoulders and listened for the choking hum of his wife’s Reliant.

The following day when Lieutenant Sales climbed the stairs of Pat and Clyde’s porch he did not notice that there was nothing to wipe his feet on. He was an average-looking man: six feet two inches, 190 pounds, brown hair, brown eyes, brown skin. He had once been a champion deep-sea diver, until a shark attack (which left him with a hole in his side crossed with the pink, puckered scars of new skin) pulled him from the waters with a sense of righteous authority and induced him to join the force. He lived thirty-five minutes away in a basement apartment with a Siamese cat named Frank.

When Sales was a boy, he’d had a teacher who smelled like roses. Her name was Mrs. Bosco. She showed him how to blow eggs. Forcing the yolk out of the tiny hole always felt a little disgusting, like blowing a heavy wad of snot from his nose, but when he looked up at Mrs. Bosco’s cheeks, flushed red with effort, he knew it would be worth it, and it was — the empty shell in his hand like a held breath, like the moment before something important happens. Whenever he began an investigation he’d get the same sensation, and as he stepped into the doorway of Pat and Clyde’s house he felt it rise in his chest and stay.

He interviewed the police who found the bodies first. They were sheepish about their reasons for going into the backyard, but before long they began loudly discussing drywall and sheetrock and the pros and cons of lanceted windows (all of the men, including Lieutenant Sales, carried weekend and part-time jobs in construction). The policeman who had thrown up in the roses had gone home early. When Sales spoke to him later, he apologized for contaminating the scene.

Lieutenant Sales found the roast on the counter. He found green beans still on the stove. He found a sour cherry pie in the oven. He found the butter and the margarine, softened tubes of yellow, half melted on the dining room table. He found that Pat and Clyde used cloth napkins and tiny separate plates for their dinner rolls. The silverware was polished. The edges of the steak knives turned in.

He found their unpaid bills in a basket by the telephone. He found clean laundry inside the dryer in the basement — towels, sheets, T-shirts, socks, three sets of Fruit of the Loom, and one pair of soft pink satin panties, the elastic starting to give, the bottom frayed and thin. He found an unfinished letter Pat had started writing to a friend who had recently moved to Arizona: What is it like there? How can you stand the heat? He found Clyde’s stamp albums from when he was a boy — tiny spots of brilliant color, etchings of flowers and portraits of kings, painstakingly pasted over the names of countries Lieutenant Sales had never heard of.

He found the bullet that had passed through Pat’s body embedded in the stairs. He found a run in her stocking, starting at the heel and inching its way up the back of her leg. He thought about how Pat had been walking around the day she was going to die, not realizing that there was a hole in her pantyhose. He found a stain, dark and blooming beneath her shoulders, spreading across the oriental rug in the foyer and into the hardwood floors, which he noticed, as he got down on his knees for a closer look, still held the scent of Murphy’s Oil. He found a hairpin caught in the fringe. He found a cluster of dandelion seeds, the tiny white filaments coming apart in his fingers. He found a look on Pat’s face like a child trying to be brave, lips tightened and thin, forehead just beginning to crease, eyes glazed, dark, and unconvinced. Her body was stiff when they moved her.

There were dog tracks on the back porch. They were the prints of a midsized animal, red and clearly defined as they circled the body in the kitchen, then crisscrossing over themselves and heading out the door, fading down the steps and onto the driveway before disappearing into the yard. Lieutenant Sales sent a man to knock on doors in the neighborhood and find out who let their dogs off the leash. He interviewed the paperboy and Clyde’s mother. He went back to the station and checked Pat and Clyde’s records — both clean. When he finally went to sleep that night, the small warmth of his cat tucked up behind his knees, Lieutenant Sales thought about the feel of satin panties, missing slippers, stolen welcome mats, dandelion seeds from a yard with no dandelions, and the kind of killer who shuts off the oven.

A month before Pat and Clyde were murdered, Mrs. Mitchell was fixing the toilet. Her husband passed by on his way to the kitchen, paused in the doorway, shook his head, and told her that she was too good for him. The heavy porcelain top was off; her arms elbow deep in rusty water. The man she had married was standing at the entrance to the bathroom and he was speaking to her, but she was not thinking about him, and so she did not respond. She was concentrating on the particular tone in the pipes she was trying to clear. It was this same ability to turn her attention into focus, like a lighthouse whose spinning had unexpectedly stopped, that made people follow her.

Mr. Mitchell went into the kitchen and began popping popcorn. The kernels cracked against the insides of the kettle as his words settled into her, and when, with a twist of the coat hanger in her hand beneath the water, she stopped the ringing of the pipes, Mrs. Mitchell sensed in the quiet that came next that her husband had done something wrong. She had known in this same way before he told her about Miguel. A breeze came through the window and made the hair on her wet arms rise. She pulled her hands from the toilet and thought to herself, I fixed it.

When Miguel came into their home, she had taken all the sorrow she felt at his existence and turned it into a fierce motherly love. Mrs. Mitchell thought her husband would be grateful; instead he seemed to hold it against her. He became dodgy and spiteful. Her mind was full of failings, but all she understood was that her husband was having difficulty loving her, because it seemed as if she didn’t make mistakes. It was the closest she ever came to leaving; but she hadn’t expected the boy.

Miguel spent the first three months of his life in America asking to go home. When the fourth month came he began to sleepwalk. In the dark he wandered downstairs to the kitchen, emptied the garbage can onto the floor, and curled up inside. The next morning Mrs. Mitchell would find him asleep, shoulders in the barrel, feet in the coffee grounds and leftovers. He told her he was looking for his mother’s head. She had been decapitated in the bus accident and now she stepped from the corners of Miguel’s dreams at night and beckoned him with her arms, tiny chicks resting on her shoulders, pecking at the empty neck.

Mrs. Mitchell suggested that they make her a new one. She brought materials for papier-mâché. The strips of newspaper felt like bandages as she helped Miguel dip them in glue and smooth them over the surface of the inflated balloon. They fashioned a nose and lips out of cardboard. Once it was dry, Miguel described his mother’s face and they painted the skin brown, added yarn for hair, cut eyelashes out of construction paper. Mrs. Mitchell took a pair of gold earrings, poked them through where they’d drawn the ears, and said, heart sinking, She’s beautiful. Miguel nodded. He smiled. He put his mother’s head on top of the bookcase in his room and stopped sleeping in the garbage.

Sometimes when Mrs. Mitchell checked on the boy at night she’d feel the head looking at her. It was unnerving. She imagined her husband making love to the papier-mâché face and discovered a hate so strong and hard it made her afraid of herself. She considered swiping the head and destroying it, but she remembered how skinny and pitiful the boy’s legs had looked against her kitchen floor. Then Miguel began to love her. She suddenly felt capable of anything. She thumbed her nose at the face in the corner. She held her heart open.

Mrs. Mitchell was raised by two of her aunts in a house near the Columbia River. Her mother had her when she was sixteen, then died a few years later of a botched abortion. Mrs. Mitchell kept a picture of her mother next to the mirror in her room, and whenever she checked her reflection, her eyes would naturally turn from her own face to that of the woman who gave birth to her. The photo was black and white and creased near the edges; she was fifteen, her hair in braids, the end of one strand stuck between her lips. It made Mrs. Mitchell think of stories she’d heard of women who spent their lives spinning — years of passing flax through their mouths to make thread would leave them disfigured, lower lips drooping off their faces; a permanent look of being beaten.

The aunts who raised her were expert marksmen. They built a shooting range on an area of property behind the house. As a child, it was Mrs. Mitchell’s job to set up the targets and fetch them iced tea and ammo. She kept a glass jar full of shells in the back of her closet, shiny gold casings from her aunts’ collection of .22-calibers and .45s. They made a shooting station out of an old shed, two tables set up with sandbags to hold the guns, nestling the shape of heavy metal as the pieces were placed down.

When she was twelve years old the aunts gave her a rifle. She already knew the shooting stances, and she practiced them with her new gun every day after school. She could hit a target while kneeling, crouching, lying down, and standing tall, hips parallel to the barrel and her waist turned, the same way the aunts taught her to pose when a picture was being taken to look thin. She picked off tin cans and old metal signs and polka-dotted the paper outlines of men.

Mrs. Mitchell remembered this when she pulled into her driveway, glanced over the fence, and saw her husband having sex in the doorway of their neighbor’s house. She turned to Miguel in the passenger seat and told him to close his eyes. The boy covered his face with his hands and sat quietly while she got out of the car. Mrs. Mitchell watched her husband moving back and forth and felt her feet give way from the ground. She had the sensation of being caught in a river, the current pulling her body outwards, tugging at her ankles, and she wondered why she wasn’t being swept away until she realized that she was holding on to the fence. The wood felt smooth and worn, like the handle of her first gun, and she used it to pull herself back down.

Later she thought of the look on Pat’s face. It reminded Mrs. Mitchell of the Tin Woodman from The Wizard of Oz — disarmingly lovely and greasy with expectation. In the book she bought for Miguel she’d read that the Woodman had once been real, but his ax kept slipping and he’d dismembered himself, slowly exchanging his flesh piece by piece for hollow metal. Mrs. Mitchell thought Pat’s body would rattle with the same kind of emptiness, but it didn’t; it fell with the heavy tone of meat. As she waited for the echo Mrs. Mitchell heard a small cough from the kitchen, the kind a person does in polite society to remind someone else that they are there. She followed it and found Clyde in his slippers, the knife in the roast.

Hello, she said. I just shot your wife. The beans were boiling; the water frothing over the sides of the pan and sizzling into the low flame beneath. Mrs. Mitchell would not let the dinner be ruined. She turned off the oven and spun all the burners to zero.

The aunts never married. They still lived in the house where they raised their niece. Occasionally they sent her photographs, recipes, information on the NRA, or obituaries of people she had known clipped from the local newspaper. When a reporter called Mrs. Mitchell asking questions about Pat and Clyde, she thought back to all the notices her aunts had sent over the years, and said: They were good neighbors and wonderful people. I don’t know who would have done something like this. They will be greatly missed. The truth was that she felt very little at their loss. It was hard to forgive herself for this, so she didn’t try.

She waited patiently through the following day and night for someone to come for her. On Monday morning she woke up and let the dog out. She made a sandwich for Miguel and fit it in his lunchbox beside a thermos of milk. She poured juice into a glass and cereal into a bowl. Then she locked herself in the bathroom and watched her hands shake. She remembered that she had wanted to cover Clyde with something. Falling out of the box, the cereal had sounded crisp and new like water on rocks, but it quickly turned into a soggy mess that stayed with her as she left him, stepped over Pat, and picked up the welcome mat with her gloves. She could still see her husband moving back and forth on top of it. She wanted to make Home Sweet Home disappear, but the longest she could bring herself to touch it was the end of the driveway, and she left it in a garbage can on the street.

She found that she could not say good-bye. Not when her husband pounded on the door to take a shower and not when Miguel asked if he could brush his teeth. She sat on the toilet and listened to them move about the house and leave. Later, she watched a policeman wrap her neighbor’s house in yellow tape. To double it around a tree in the yard he circled the trunk with his arms. It was a brief embrace and she thought, That tree felt nothing.

In the afternoon, when the sun began to slant through the western windows, Lieutenant Sales crossed the Mitchells’ front yard. He was carrying a chewed-up slipper in a bag, jostling the dandelions and sending seeds of white fluff adrift. Mrs. Mitchell saw him coming. She turned the key in the lock, and once she was beyond the bathroom she ran her fingers through her hair, smoothing down the rough spots. The bell rang. The dog barked. She opened the door, and offered him coffee.

Miguel turned nine years old that summer. In the past two years he’d spent with the Mitchells the boy had grown no more than an inch, but with the warm weather that June he’d suddenly sprouted — his legs stretching like brown sugar taffy tight over his new knobby bones, as if the genes of his American father had been lying dormant, biding their time until the right combination of spring breezes and processed food kissed them awake. He began to trip over himself. On his way home from baseball practice that Monday, he caught one of his newly distended feet on a trash can, just outside the line of yellow police tape that closed in Pat and Clyde’s yard. Miguel fell to the sidewalk, smacking his hands against the concrete. The barrel toppled over beside him and out came a welcome mat. Home Sweet Home.

Miguel was not the best student, but he had made friends easily once he hit several home runs in gym class. Norman and Greg Kessler, the most popular kids in school, chose him for their team and for their friend, replacing Little Mike Findleman, who had never been that good in the first place. Norman and Greg helped him with English, defended him against would-be attackers, and told him they had seen his father naked.

The boys claimed they had looked down from the window of their mother’s minivan and seen Mr. Mitchell drive past, stripped bare from the waist down. There was a woman in the car with him and she was leaning over the gearshift. It’s true, said the twins. Miguel made them swear on the Bible, on a stack of Red Sox cards, and finally on their grandfather’s grave, which they did, bikes thrown aside in the grass and sweaty hands pressed on the polished marble of his years. At dinner that night the boy watched his father eating. The angle of his jaw clenched and turned.

Miguel felt a memory push past hot dogs, past English, past Hostess cupcakes and his collection of Spiderman comic books. He was five years old and asked his mother where his father was. She was making coffee — squeezing the grounds through a sieve made out of cloth and wire. He’d collected eggs from their chickens for breakfast. He was holding them in his hands and they were still warm. His mother took one from him. This is the world and we are here, she said, and pointed to the bottom half of the egg. Your father is there. She ran her finger up along the edge and tapped the point with a dark red nail. Then she cracked the yolk in a pan and threw the rest of the egg in the garbage. He retrieved it later and pushed his fingertips back and forth across the slippery inner membrane until the shell came apart into pieces.

Miguel picked up the doormat and shook it to get the dust off. It seemed like something Mrs. Mitchell might be fond of. That morning he had kept watch through the bathroom keyhole. She was out of sight, but he caught the scent of her worry. He knew she needed something.

In Caracas he had gone through the trash regularly, looking for things to play with and at times for something to eat. Ever since he heard about his father being naked on the highway, he had been remembering more about his life there, and even reverting to some of his old habits; as if the non sequitur of his father’s nudity had tenderly shaken him awake. He lay in bed at night and looked into the eyes of the papier-mâché head for guidance. He had two lives now, two countries, and two mothers. Soon he would find another life without his father, and another, when he went away to college, and another life, and another, and another, and another; each of them thin, fragile casings echoing the hum of what had gone before.

The boy walked into the kitchen and found his American mother sitting with a strange man. They both held steaming mugs of coffee. Buster was under the table, waking from his afternoon nap. He saw Miguel and thumped his tail halfheartedly against the floor. The adults turned. Now what have you got there?

Lieutenant Sales took Home Sweet Home in his hands. He felt it was what he had been looking for. The twisted pink skin where the shark had bitten him began to itch. It had been tingling all afternoon. He hadn’t had sensation there for years — the buildup of scar tissue had left him numb — but there was something in the look of the boy and the feel of the rope that held possibility, and excitement rose like fear within him, alongside the memory of closing teeth. Later, in the lab, the welcome mat would reveal tiny spots of Pat’s blood, dog saliva, gunpowder, dead ants, mud, fertilizer, and footprints — but not the impression of Mr. Mitchell’s knees, or the hesitation of his lonely wife on the doorstep, or the hunger of his son in the garbage. All of this had been shaken off.

Lieutenant Sales would leave the Mitchells’ house that afternoon with the same thrill he’d had when the shark passed and he realized his leg was still there. He was exhilarated and then exhausted, as though his life had been drained, and he knew then that he had gone as far as he could go. Home Sweet Home would lead him back to the beginning of a murder he could not solve. There would be no scar, just the sense that he missed something, and the familiar taste of things not done. For now, he reached out with a kind of hope and accepted the welcome mat as a gift.

Mrs. Mitchell put her arm around Miguel’s shoulders and waited for Lieutenant Sales to arrest her. She would continue to wait in the weeks ahead, as suspects were raised and then dismissed and headlines changed and funerals were planned. The possibilities of these moments passed over her like shadows. When they were gone she was left standing chilled.

Clyde’s mother arranged for closed caskets. In the pew Mrs. Mitchell sat quietly. Her husband cracked knuckles beside her. He was thinking about the way Clyde’s father died — his chest pressed hard into the nothing of concrete. Mr. Mitchell was sure whoever rigged the lift had killed Pat and her husband. He worried that he could be next. He thought, Who would hold my hand? He reached for his wife and her fingers were cold.

When Mr. Mitchell first learned what had happened to his lover he had opened his closet and started to pack. His family listened to suitcases being dragged down from the attic, the swing of hangers, zipper teeth, the straps of leather buckles. Things from their home began to go missing. They reappeared when Lieutenant Sales came by. They disappeared again after the funerals. Then Mr. Mitchell said he was leaving, and his wife felt her throat clutch. She wanted to ask him where he would go; she wanted to ask him what she had done this for; she wanted to ask him why he no longer loved her but instead she asked for his son.

She had watched Miguel hand the welcome mat to the detective, and as it passed by her she felt an ache in the back of her mouth, as though she hadn’t eaten for days. Lieutenant Sales turned Home Sweet Home over in his hands. He placed it carefully on the kitchen table and Mrs. Mitchell saw the word Sweet. She remembered the milk she had made for the boy when he arrived, and sensed that this would not be the end of her. She could hear the steady breathing of her sleeping dog. She could smell the coffee. She felt the small frame of Miguel steady beneath her hand. These bones, she thought, were everything. Hey sport, Mrs. Mitchell asked. Is that for me? The boy nodded, and she held him close.