The Best American Mystery Stories 2007

Ridley Pearson Queeny

From Death Do Us Part

I last saw her at breakfast.

I work alone, in a room above the garage where a carpenter once told me the wood in the floor dated back pre-American Revolution. He could tell by the lightness of the grain, and the history of the building. People know that stuff. A friend of mine makes guitars. He once saw an instrument at a trade show and knew it had been made out of the same piece of African mahogany that he’d built a guitar out of. He exchanged stories with the luthier responsible, and sure enough he was right: same wood. People know weird stuff.

She’d mentioned it in passing, when I was furiously cooking pancakes for one of our daughters and scrambling eggs for the other; cooking oatmeal for my wife and me. It’s the one real spoil I give our daughters: any breakfast you want, anything you name. But I’m a stickler with them in every other way. We get along well because the boundaries are set. There’s respect and love now, not testing and challenges. There’s harmony, real harmony, and that’s a cherished commodity in a family.

“Some guy turned around running at Queeny Park and caught up to me, and ran with me.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

I think she told me to impress me, to remind me nine years into our marriage that other men still look. It wasn’t news to me — I knew they looked — but I sensed that this was one of those moments in a marriage when you don’t want to say the stupid thing. But she wasn’t asking me if I liked her haircut.

“He say anything?” I ask.

“Yeah, we talked. He asked questions like how often I run. Stuff like that.”

“You talked to him.” I try not to make it sound accusatory, but my concern gets the better of me, and I blow it.

“I can’t talk to a guy?” She goes back to the dishes. I have a pancake I’m burning. I flip it. The color of shoe leather.

She soaps up, runs the water a little louder than necessary.

“It isn’t like that,” I say, when I get a chance.

“No, it isn’t,” she replies.

“I mean… I’m not trying to tell you what you can and can’t do. But it’s a park, sweetie. You’re a single woman, or at least a woman running alone, as far as he’s concerned.”

“You write too many of those books.”

She often blames my occupation on my tendency to see criminal behavior in everyone. She’s right, of course. She knows she’ll always win this one, and she does.

A day passes. Two. It’s breakfast again. It’s crepes this time, and soft-boiled eggs for the youngest, a dish we call Fishies in the Brook — why, I have no idea. Soft-boiled eggs on pieces of torn bread in a bowl. No brook. No fishes. But the girls love it and eat it down to a yellow smear on the walls of the bowl.

“He was there again. Yesterday. He was running in my direction this time. Caught up to me and… and we ran together.”

“I wish I could say something positive.” But I can’t. It’s not that I care about the contact, the attention. Lord knows we can all use it. I get it too, the flattering comments out on book tour, the looks that go beyond a normal look. I don’t act on them, and neither will she. That’s not my worry at all. And if she does act on it, then that’s dealt with then. But there’s not a grain of jealousy spilling out of my shaker. This is straight concern, and I try to disguise it just enough so that I don’t scare her. I’m good at scaring people. I’ve scared millions of readers for a very long time. I know the effect I can have, even when I don’t mean to. I work hard not to scare my family, the kids especially.

“It’s a dark park is all,” I continue. “Long stretches in the woods. A long way from anywhere. Some guy pulls up to you out on Adams and runs along with you, you can at least scream. You scream in Queeny Park and you’ll be lucky to scare off a few birds.”

There’s a hidden message here I’m not sure she gets. She stopped running for about five months — over a year ago now — because a car stalked her at five in the morning. It scared the pee out of her, literally. Slowed down and cruised alongside her before the sun was up, before the neighbors were up. When she hid behind a tree, the guy from the passenger window threw a can of soda at her and nearly hit her. We called the cops. I had the opening of Mystic River running through my head. She had laundry to do. The cop was pleasant and genuinely concerned. He took it around the block to the Bread Company, no doubt, and warmed up his cup and went on with his day. Bottom line: She stopped running. For five months.

Now she’s back at it, and this time the guy’s on foot and she doesn’t see the parallels.

“If he was in a car ‘running’ alongside of you, how would you feel?”

“It’s not the same thing,” she says.

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where’s he live?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s he drive?”

She goes back to the dishes because she can hear me say: “It is the same thing.”

“How much does he know about you?” I ask.

She shakes her head. I sense she’s blown it out on the trail and knows it, and doesn’t have an answer.

We’ve been watching a movie on PBS where the husband is a jealous, controlling freak — it’s Trollope — and I use that as my reference. “I’m not trying to be the guy in the movie. You know that, right? You want to run? Run. You want to talk? Talk. But maybe run with a friend so it’s two against one. Maybe choose a park that isn’t so completely isolated and dark. Queeny Park is so wrong for a woman running alone. It’s totally wrong. You can see that, right?”

She shrugs.

I know that shrug. I’ve come to hate that shrug. It’s the blow-off shrug. We’re done here, and it’s on her terms, and that burns me.

Another day or two. Three, maybe. She comes home that afternoon for lunch and lists the friends she ran with this morning. She doesn’t do it in a way to sting me. She could, but she doesn’t, and I love her for it.

“Thanks,” I say between biles.

A couple days later it’s the same: Laurel and Tracy, four-mile loop at Queeny, Starbucks afterward and a good talk. No mention of Him.

So today when the call comes from school, my first reaction is to be pissed off. Our eldest, at all of seven, wasn’t picked up. Missed the bus and wasn’t picked up. Missed the bus because her mother told her not to take it. Makes sense because it’s Thursday and that’s ballet. I’m on the way there when the BlackBerry rings and it’s the private school. The youngest wasn’t picked up.

Now, for the first time, the tick goes off in my brain. It’s like a Tourette’s misfire of a synapse: a burst of cursing aloud followed by near blindness and the inability to keep any one part of my body still. My seven-year-old is freaking out in the back seat. She’s come out of the shoulder strap, and that really frosts me because she’s been doing this a lot lately, and it isn’t safe, and she knows it. So I brake to a stop rather dangerously, and get a bunch of car horns as my prize.

“Put your strap back on, young lady!” She’s the nearest target and she gets both barrels. My mind is racing now and I’m wondering how much of this is me the writer and how much the husband. I can see it all in my mind’s eye, and I erase it just as quickly. Do not go there! I tell myself. Steady keel.

It has been six days. There’s no such thing as adjustment. I jump every time the phone rings. I hear cars on the street and am convinced she’s pulling into the drive. But her car is down with the police. They found it at Queeny Park. Locked. Parked where she always parks, according to Laurel and Tracy. They never saw the guy. She’d never mentioned him to them. Embarrassed, maybe. Or private. Or a little bit of both.

No evidence. Dogs. Crime scene guy’s. Nothing. The TV shows are all liars. When they’re gone, there’s nothing left. They’re just gone. No hairs and fibers. Not even a scent.

Day ten and a crew of five guys and one woman enters my office above the garage with a search warrant. Their arrival hits me like a fist in my chest. They confiscate my computer, all my bills, my BlackBerry, my car.

I can’t focus on the questions they fire at me. Mainly because it’s at me. The tone is adversarial. There’s no mistaking it. Accusatory. I’m dumbfounded. And I’m pissed, the way they’re dealing with my gear. I’m a freak about my gear. I treat it like most people treat their pets. They’re dragging the server downstairs, wires trailing. I’m burning mad about everything. Just the thought that they would dare do this to me… I’ve written books about it; I’ve interviewed cops who are twice the cop of these guys about it: when all else fails, look pretty hard at the husband.

And now it’s me squarely in the sights.

Day ten and a half. My attorney, a woman with a brain bigger than Texas. I’ve known her five minutes, but she comes as the choice of my New York entertainment lawyer, also a woman, and so well connected that I know this is the right one even before we meet. But now we’ve met and I even like her as well.

There’s four of us in the small room. The cop looks tired, but it feels like an act. I’ve written better characters than this guy will ever be. He’s Kmart to my Bergdorf. But I don’t, I won’t, challenge him. I won’t out-cop him. I’m just alive enough somewhere in my brain to know not to do this. I tell myself to listen. Let the attorney do the talking.

I say, “What’s this all about?” Wondering how my mouth can be so disconnected from my brain.

The attorney’s head swivels like an owl’s. She could have me for breakfast right now.

“When was the last time you visited Queeny Park?” the cop asks.

I look to the attorney. She nods.

“With you guys,” I answer.

“Before that,” he says. “The last time before that?”

I know where this is going. I’m mortified. I nod. “Okay,” I say. “Okay, I see where this is going.”

“Just answer the question, please.”

I lean in to my attorney. She smells nice. I whisper my explanation.

She looks the cop in the eye and says, “Next question.”

The cop’s brow furrows. He’s pissed. I don’t blame him.

My car must have been seen by someone. It was one morning. Only one. I went out there to see if I could see the guy, see the car he climbed into, get something more on what she’d been telling me. Shouldn’t have done it. Never saw a thing. But there it is. And I never mentioned it to them because I thought how stupid it sounded. How bad it sounded. And now it does. It goes unanswered.

“Can you tell me about Magic Movies?” he asks.

I feel my face go red. A home movie website. Voyeurs. All adult stuff. Amateur videos. Soft stuff for the most part. Some of it graphic. They’ll use it to imply a dissatisfaction with our sex life — not true. They’ll use it to suggest something troubled underneath the surface — not true. They’ll spin it into violent acts, and not one of them showed any such thing. They’re building a case. It’s their job. Kmart is having a sale, a banner day. Blue Light Special.

Day ninety-five. A jury of my peers. I don’t think so. Their case is all oblong shapes made to fit a square box. The twelve morons in the real box are nodding and looking at me like I’m Manson. I’m still in grief, still can’t sleep or wrap my mind around her doing the dishes and me cooking crepes and never bothering to get one stitch of factual information. My one act of covert surveillance meant to protect her is used against me, and used effectively. What’s amazing are the looks from laurel and Tracy. Their trust in me is gone. Shot. They’ve bought the story. And if they’ve bought it, then what about the twelve morons? I tell my attorney it’s a twofer: he got her and he got me all in the same act. He’s out there ready to do it again. I’m going down as his surrogate. Mainly because I write this stuff. People know weird stuff; I’m one of the weirdest. Their case keeps heading back there, looping around. Who knows how to pull something like this off better than someone like me? If I decided to do this, would they expect to find much physical evidence? Of course not. Who better than me to make up a story about some guy? It’s all me — but they don’t know me.

They convict.

It’s all me.

Down for the count.

Day six hundred and ninety-seven. Cell block C. My girls arc nine and seven. I’ve seen them once a month for the past two years. They look at me like they want to love me but can’t figure out how to do it.

They found the body. Sixty-three miles out of town, buried alongside an interstate. Two others within fifty yards of it. There’s semen in the remains. DN’A. Day eight hundred and seventy-four and a hearing, and I’m given my walking papers — DNA wasn’t mine. I tried to tell them that. They say they’re giving me my life back. Not true.

Two girls who don’t want to be with me. They’re living with Grandma. I’m told the transition will be difficult. No shit.

I go home and sit down and write.

It’s all I know how to do.

The next Saturday I’m making crepes and Fishies in the Brook. They’re looking at me with empty plates. Empty eyes. I catch myself holding my breath. I laugh. But they just stare.

I think I scare them.