The Best American Mystery Stories 2005

Kent Nelson Public Trouble

From The Antioch Review

We should have been more alert, all of us, more aware. Those closer to the circumstances, like Ivo Darius and his wife, Frieda, might have figured out something was wrong, but they were busy feeding cattle and had used the downtime in winter to build an aluminum storage shed. The dental hygienist, Sara Warren, who also lived out there, could have said more, but why would she? Of course Emily Jefferson’s silence was understandable, but she didn’t enter the picture until later, when it was too late to change the course of events. We have all pointed at social services, but they can’t be involved until someone comes forward, unless there’s public trouble — malnourishment, truancy from school, a suspicious bruise. And there wasn’t. But even with full knowledge in advance, could we have done anything? Even if all of us together had been vigilant for the signs, even if someone had spoken up, could we have prevented it from happening?

Everyone knew the Olshanskys. The father, Del, worked part-time at the loading dock at Wal-Mart, and we often saw him in town at the Silver Nugget on Main Street or on the town’s embarrassing highway strip at the bowling alley, or Taco Bell, or the Branding Iron. He was a handsome man — dark eyes, a strong nose, chin and jaw unshaved, the way movie stars appear these days. If he’d cared at all for appearances, he might have been called dashing. He looked like the sort who’d lose his temper and get into bar fights, but no, he was calm, offhand, halfway pleasant, no matter what he’d had to drink. His appearance was rough — his jeans had holes in the knees, and his shirts were torn — and he didn’t have much ambition. That isn’t a crime. The sheriff, all of us in town, had seen a lot of men worse than Del, lots of couples worse than Del and Billie Jean.

The Olshanskys lived out past the landfill in the piñon-juniper foothills where there wasn’t much water. They had dug a well and watered a patch of grass bordered by rocks worn smooth by the river. There was an Elcar-fenced pen for a dog, too, though when we were there — in the winter, when this all happened — there wasn’t a dog. The house was really a trailer they’d added on to. In front they’d built a porch with a green plastic snowshed roof slanting to one side, and a façade of cinder blocks to hide the cheap vinyl siding. In back, they’d cobbled on two bedrooms with views of the Sangre de Cristos. Billie Jean was a nurse’s assistant at the hospital, just a hundred beds, but apparently she had time for a garden because there was a raised bed inside railroad ties and hauled-in topsoil. We don’t know what she grew because the plants were black and draped in snow.

Most of us don’t blame Del and Billie Jean. We think it started at that school, though who knows whether a beginning to such a thing can be deciphered. Even if it didn’t start at the school, the place was a catalyst. It had to be. Before that, for the first several years they were around, the Olshansky kids had gone to the public school. They lived in town most of that time, and even for two years after they moved to the trailer, the kids took the school bus in. Danielle, the oldest, was Billie Jean’s daughter from a former marriage. She was a smart kid, and one of the English teachers, Mary Padua, thought Danielle had a photographic memory, because she recited “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and often wrote answers on exams in the exact same words that were in the texts. If she’d wanted to, she could have gone to college, but college wasn’t an ambition for most high school students here, and after graduation she moved upriver to Nathrop and worked as a scheduler for raft trips.

Six years younger was Marya, Del’s first. She was the athlete. A lot of us had kids in school, and all through junior high and high school we saw Marya play basketball. She was not just good, she was great. She leaped higher than any other girl we’d seen, and her jump shot floated to the basket. She was pretty, too, tall and lithe, and ambitious. Often when we delivered our children to school in the mornings, Marya had ridden her bike six miles in from the trailer and was at the playground shooting baskets.

The youngest was Carlos, two grades behind Marya. No one understood naming a child Carlos when he wasn’t Hispanic, but, as someone said, it’s no different from naming a child Danielle or Kurt. The thing about Carlos was — how do you say it about a boy? — he was easy to look at. He had long blond hair, high cheekbones, a perfect nose. His eyes were deep set, shadowed, and such a pale shade of blue that when you saw them in a certain light, they reminded you of sky. Many of us, when we first laid eyes on him, said, “There is the most beautiful boy in the world.”

During the school year we heard about Carlos every day. Our children came home saying Carlos this, Carlos that, how good he was at sports, how pretty he was. When he walked by in the hall, apparently everyone, all grades, boys and girls both, stopped whatever they were doing and watched him pass.

He wasn’t a big kid, but he played halfback and ran track, and he was a good student, all A’s. The girls loved him, and the boys admired him, too, though they were all a little afraid of him. Because of his beauty, he wasn’t one of them.

“He doesn’t choose one girl.” That’s what all our kids said. That’s what the parents heard. “He likes everybody,” they said. Or, “He barely talks. We can’t tell what girl he likes.”

“What would you like him to say?” we asked.

The kids didn’t know what Carlos should say. Silence was power. It made them uneasy he was so quiet. He went days without saying anything. He wouldn’t even answer questions in class.

The Olshanskys came from up north, Wyoming or Montana, no one knew for sure. Del was pretty vague on the subject. When we first knew them, they lived on River Street, right downtown, six blocks from the water, in a rented house barely big enough for a couple, let alone a family. At that time, Del did home repair, mowed lawns, worked freelance as an auto mechanic. We all gave him work. When Fred Larsen put a garage on his split-level, he hired Del for the crew, and when Jerry Matuzcek’s Blazer broke down, he paid Del to fix it. Del was quiet but personable, and talked if he was spoken to. They lived in that house on River Street for several years, and there was never any trouble. Nedda Saenz owned the house, and she said they were late every month with the rent, but eventually they got the money to her. “I don’t know why it wasn’t on the first,” Nedda said, “but at least they paid.”

They weren’t first-of-the-month people. They had a way about them that made people unsure. They looked unreliable. Billie Jean, for instance, never looked right at you when she spoke, and she was frequently late to work at the hospital. Once there was a dispute about some missing money. Everyone thought she’d taken it — she never denied it — but it was later proved to be a clerical error. Why wouldn’t she have said she was not guilty? And though Del never had enough money for new clothes, he had enough to buy beer. They never saved for another car, or a newer used one, but Del managed to keep their ‘81 Dodge truck running, even if it wasn’t the most efficient vehicle. They weren’t shiftless, exactly, but no one would have been surprised if one day the whole family was up and gone. We thought of them as about to disappear.

At first we admired them, reluctantly perhaps, for buying the trailer and settling in. At the same time, it was foolish because the land was glacial moraine, and they had to put in a deep well. They had payments to make every month on the land, and in general it cost more to live out of town. Telephone and trash pickup was more expensive; appliance repairmen and plumbers charged mileage; Billie Jean had to drive farther to work. And you’re isolated — that’s a hidden cost. There weren’t many neighbors if you needed help.

For a few years there, we in town were less attentive to them. Ivo and Frieda Darius and Luther and Sara Warren lived farther west up the gravel road where the creek came out of the mountains, and they saw the Olshanskys more often than anyone else. Sara worked in a dentist’s office, and she drove by every morning. She frequently saw the Olshansky kids at the bus stop — the three of them standing alone on the highway. In warmer weather, coming home late in the day, she sometimes saw Del working on the facade of the trailer or Billie Jean digging in the garden. Ivo Darius was older, a rancher, and was frequently laid up with real or imaginary illnesses. He said he had heard gunshots a few times — target practice, he assumed — out in the arroyo. There was nothing unusual about that. Ivo owned two rifles himself and sometimes shot marauding skunks or coyotes.

The only occasion anyone had close contact with one of the Olshanskys was on a spring morning when Sara Warren saw Carlos running to the bus stop. Carlos was twelve or thirteen then, and the Olshanskys had lived in the trailer more than a year. At the bottom of the hill, the bus was pulling away, and Carlos accepted a lift to school. Sara asked the predictable general questions — how was school? How do you like living out here? What are you doing this summer? But Carlos made no reply beyond a few guttural sounds. Carlos stared straight out the windshield as if he were fixated or drugged, or so focused inward he hadn’t heard the questions. Sara said later she wasn’t sure Carlos could speak. Sara remembered that particular morning because an eagle had dived down right next to the gravel road into the piñons and killed a fawn, and Carlos never looked.

The Christian school started three years ago. We knew there were splinter sects in our town, groups besides the Episcopalians and the Lutherans and the Catholics. (We don’t have many Jews here.) Most of these groups met in people’s houses until they got enough members to build a cinder-block church somewhere on cheap land. They were fringe people. They didn’t attend city council meetings or the beerfest or the high school football games. They were both secretive and proselytizing. Their churches spread by word of mouth, and none of us knew exactly who these people were.

Warren Nixon started one of these groups, the Church of the Major Prophecy. He was divorced, forty-something, and had a large nose and a crewcut. He sold home, car, health, and life insurance out of a one-man office on First Street. For years he’d been a member of the Presbyterian church across from the Safeway, and one day out of the blue, on the golf course on a Sunday afternoon, he had a vision to start his own church. How he had this vision and what it entailed didn’t concern or excite most of us. Who believed in such miracles? But over a couple of years he attracted enough people of like mind to build a church out on the highway. He sold his house in town to do it and rented an apartment above the Gambles’ dry-goods store.

None of these developments had anything to do with us, and if we’d thought about it, we’d have assumed they had nothing much to do with the Olshanskys, either. None of us had ever heard Del mention God or Jesus Christ, except as swear words. Billie Jean might have been more of a churchgoer — we learned later from her sister she and her ex-husband had been in the Living Springs Church in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, but what difference did that make? She hadn’t been in a church here, and she wasn’t a member of the Church of the Major Prophecy.

But Del and Billie Jean sent Carlos to the church school. By then Danielle had graduated, and Marya, to pursue her basketball career, was boarding with a family in Colorado Springs. Carlos was in ninth grade, and when he was taken out of the public school, we heard about it. Carlos was the star the other children looked to, the one whose existence made theirs hopeful. He was the boy about whom they would talk the rest of their lives. “I knew this boy once,” they’d say, “Carlos Olshansky, who was the most beautiful boy in the world.”

And then he was gone.

We all admit that was one of the signs. When he was sent to that school we knew something was wrong, but we couldn’t see it clearly. Perhaps we were afraid to look. The social service agencies, the sheriff for all his vigilance, the community volunteers — the people you’d expect to observe such things — didn’t notice anything particularly wrong. Carlos went to the church school. It was the Olshanskys’ choice. They had the right to send him there.

Of course, there were small details we thought about later — Danielle’s missed appointment at the dentist, Billie Jean’s not showing up a day here or there at work (though she called in sick each time), Marya’s coming home for two weeks in the middle of basketball season. But what should we have read into these things? What did they mean, separately or taken together? A family in chaos, a dissolving of a psyche, a catastrophe about to unfold? Besides, we had our own lives to lead, our own grocery shopping, mortgages to pay, children to raise.

It was the fire through the snow that first caught Frieda Darius’s attention out her kitchen window. She was making soup for Ivo, laid up in bed. It was February, a Thursday, early dark. The wind was hurling snowflakes sideways, and when she saw the flames, she thought the pinon trees were on fire. Ivo couldn’t get out of bed, so she investigated in her Jeep, getting close enough to see the Olshanskys’ trailer burning.

By the time the fire trucks got there — they carried their own water — most of the trailer had melted. There were two bodies burned beyond recognition in the kitchen, and one in the neighboring bedroom. The fire chief said chicken grease had ignited on the propane stove. But when the forensics experts identified the bodies — Billie Jean and Danielle in the kitchen, and Marya in the nearer bedroom — we learned they’d all been shot beforehand.

We couldn’t find Del or Carlos. The truck wasn’t there, so the first theory was that Del had done it and had taken off with his boy. The sheriff put out an all-points bulletin on Del and the Dodge, but almost before the APB had circulated, Claudia Reese, the rural mailperson, found Del’s truck, with Del’s body in it, parked in front of the Jeffersons’ house on County Road 268. He was slumped against the passenger door with a single gunshot wound in his forehead.

The sheriff dusted the wheel for fingerprints, but it was cold, and whoever shot Del was probably wearing gloves. The window on the driver’s side was open, and snow had blown into the cab. Whatever footprints there might have been were obliterated by snow, and underneath the snow, the ground was frozen rock-hard. Being on the passenger side, Del could have been shot anywhere and driven there, but of course then there would have had to have been at least two of them, two perpetrators, because they’d have needed another car to get away.

The Jeffersons’ ranch house was the only house within a quarter of a mile of the truck, the original homestead on the mesa, where a five-acre subdivision had been recently approved. Emily Jefferson was home that night — Larry was in Pueblo at a seminar on computer programming — but she hadn’t seen or heard anything. It had been windy and snowy, and she’d built a fire in the stove.

Random chance: That was the next predominant theory. A couple of psychos had turned off the highway — that explained the extra car — and the first place they’d come to was the Olshanskys’. They’d wanted money. In what was left of the trailer there were signs of a hurried search. In the back bedroom, drawers had been ripped open, and a purse was opened. But why kill everyone? Why was Del in his truck two miles away? Why had they kidnapped Carlos? Or had they killed him too? We searched for Carlos’s body in a half-mile radius around the trailer, but found nothing but deer scat and rabbit tracks in the snow.

So there we were without clues. No insight. Nothing. All that weekend we talked about the Olshanskys — who they were, why they’d come to town, why anyone would want to kill them. So far as we could ascertain, they were ordinary people, like other families everywhere, nothing special.

Del had no relatives we could find, but Billie Jean had mentioned to Agnes Day at the hospital she had a sister in Rapid City, so the sheriff called her. We learned their mother was still alive in a nursing home, and from the way the sister reacted, we understood there were hard feelings between the sisters, apparently because Billie Jean had run off with Del. Billie Jean had married into evil.

Then late Saturday it came to light from Wilferd Barkley that Del’s truck had been parked at that same turnout several times before. Wilferd was a stonemason who lived farther out the country road in an A-frame built thirty years ago in the hippie days. He kept a few sheep and goats, and he poached deer that wandered into his yard (he’d been fined for it twice). He wasn’t the most trustworthy of witnesses — he drank up his disability check every month — but he knew Del’s truck, and why would he lie?

After a few inquiries, Emily Jefferson admitted seeing Del, though she denied anything was going on, and Wilferd couldn’t contradict her. Nobody believed it, though. Anyway, a possible motive was established for Larry Jefferson to have killed Del, and, in a rage, perhaps, the whole Olshansky family. So that evening the sheriff drove to Pueblo and hauled Larry out of his seminar. It was obvious right from the start Larry had no idea who Dei Olshansky was. He’d heard of Marya, the basketball star, but that was the only family name he knew. He didn’t know Emily was seeing Del, but it didn’t surprise him. She was cold as ice to him. He called her a mousy woman with bad teeth.

That threw the situation into the same muddle as before, back to the idea of random chance.

Then on Sunday, another body turned up — Warren Nixon. He hadn’t appeared at church, and when his phone was busy for half an hour, Jeff Bates, the assistant minister, went to look for him. Warren was in his apartment, face-down, bludgeoned with one of his own golf clubs.

In this day and age, with kids shooting other kids in the schools, oil spilling into the oceans, and people flying airplanes into buildings, nothing is bizarre anymore, but for our town this was bizarre. Warren Nixon had photos of boys lying around, a computer full of child pornography, movies. All young boys. Beautiful boys like Carlos Olshansky.

Just like that, Carlos became both a victim and a suspect.

That Warren Nixon lived in this community so long and kept his predilection hidden surprised us. We discovered he had gone to Denver, to Chicago, to Los Angeles to gratify his base desires, but here, he must have been tormented because right in front of him, practically handed over, was the most beautiful boy any of us had ever seen. He had to be careful; he had to work slowly, to curry favor. But something had gone wrong.

We imagined this scenario: there was another lover, a visitor, perhaps, with similar perverse tastes. This hypothetical person was in league with Warren Nixon, a disciple, a fringe character none of us noticed. This unknown person fell in love with Carlos, and, in a moment of rage and jealousy (who knew what Carlos felt?) beat Warren to death. The man took Carlos back to the trailer to get Carlos’s things, and Billie Jean intervened. There was an argument, and the lover happened to have a pistol and shot everyone. It was at that moment Del drove up in his truck.

Was Carlos involved? Who else but Carlos could have driven the second car? Or was there a second car? Had Carlos acted alone? He might have killed Warren Nixon and then his family, driven his father’s truck to Emily Jefferson’s, and then walked to the highway, it was less than a mile. He could have hitchhiked from there.

Most of us think Carlos must have been drugged or otherwise coerced into participating. Perhaps there were two other men, or another couple. Carlos was the innocent casualty of someone else’s perversions, the prey. He was frightened and threatened by someone bigger and stronger, a person in a position of power, a church person. Beautiful Carlos, still to be looked for.

Since these events, in their divorce, Emily Jefferson admitted to an affair. She confided to a friend Del insisted on making love every which way — in a chair, against a wall, from behind. Had he abused Carlos? Or had Billie Jean? Or one of the sisters? It came to light Marya had been expelled from her school in Colorado Springs for punching a teammate at practice. Marijuana was found in Danielle’s room at the back of the trailer, and her raft company friends said she was a heavy user. Who knew about this family?

It is hard to inquire after the dead. Only Carlos might tell us the truth. And where is he?

There is one recollection we’ve wondered about, a story several people have come forward with — Arne Bullard, Donna Snow, Linda Sayles — all of whom have businesses downtown. They remember the day eight years ago, Carlos was five or six, when Danielle and Marya dressed him up as a girl. They had put makeup on him — eyeliner, rouge, and lipstick — that’s what Donna Snow recalled. “He was a girly boy,” she said, “with his hair curled and fixed up in blue ribbons. He was walking in a pink dress, and so pretty. They paraded him up and down Main Street, past all the shops and stores.” Arne remembered it, too, seeing them through his barbershop window. “He was having a good time,” Arne said. “He was holding the girls’ hands and laughing, not resisting in the least. Of course, what did he know? He was a little kid.”

Now there are other things people remember about Carlos, like his teachers at school and the boys on the football team and the girls who watched him in the halls. He was a smart kid, but so quiet, shy, and respectful. Though he was friendly with everyone, he had no girlfriend. He let people come to him.

Maybe Carlos is dead. That would explain why no one has found him in the year since this happened. The town has moved past the killings; people don’t talk about it so much. The remains of the Olshanskys’ trailer have been removed and the land sold to a developer, though Luther Warren and Ivo and Frieda Darius are protesting the rezoning to one-acre lots. Marya’s class graduated from the high school, and in another two years, Carlos’s will be gone, too, dispersed with their stories. The Church of the Major Prophecy has disbanded and the sign’s been taken down. No other church has seen fit to establish itself there, so the cinder-block building is empty, the spire tilted a little to one side. Recently a cabinet company has been interested in the site.

In our town businesses go on, children are born, the old people get sick and die: there’s nothing new about that. And in the wider world, the space shuttle has broken apart, the war in Iraq is past, the suicide bombings continue. No one can change what happens, but the events recede, especially now when we know so much. We are lucky, aren’t we, that in the history of our town and our country, in the history of the world even with its wars and famines and plagues, no one has been able to stop time.