The Best American Mystery Stories 2007

John Sandford Lucy Had a List

From Murder in the Rough

This was the way you won the Open.

This was the way you won a million dollars.

This is what you did.

Lucy had a list, and she was sticking to it.

Every morning, in the back bedroom, braced on the tinny, oil-canning floor, looking into a full-length mirror she’d bought at the Wal-Mart, Lucy did a hundred grips and a hundred turns. She’d grip the club and check alignment, start the turn and check her intermediate position in the mirror. When she was satisfied, she’d continue, let her wrists cock, hold at the top and check the final position. Then she’d start over.

She was on the eighty-fourth turn when the screaming started. The screaming didn’t affect the drill. Strange sounds came off a golf course, and besides, she’d do a hundred reps if the trailer burned down around her. At ninety-nine she hadn’t even paused to look out the blinds.

On her hundredth turn, she checked her form in the mirror, nodded at herself and relaxed. She was a middle-sized girl, lean from walking and working out, deeply tanned, dishwater blonde with a pixie cut. She was sweating a little, and wiped the side of her nose on her shirtsleeve. She was dressed in a navy-blue golf shirt and khaki shorts, with a Ping golf hat. Her blond ponytail was threaded through the back of the hat.

She put the weighted club in the corner of the bedroom and walked down the central hall to the kitchen. Her mom was digging in a toaster with a fork, talking to it around a lit Marlboro, letting it know: “You piece of shit-ass junk, you let that outta there.”

By some mistake, the television was turned off, so the screaming outside sounded even louder than it had in the back. Mom, still talking sticky-lipped around the cigarette, glanced sideways at the screen door and said, “Goddamned golfers,” and turned the toaster upside down and banged it on the counter.

Lucy looked out through the screen, across the six-foot strip of grass that served as the front yard, past the corner of the Tobins’ double-wide and over the fence, across the end of the driving range and the east corner of the machine shed, and judged the screams as coming from the first fairway. “Don’t sound like drunks,” she said. She corrected herself. “Doesn’t.”

“Yeah, well, fuck ’em anyway,” Mom said. Lucy’s mother knew about golfers, having had a number of hasty relationships with them over the years, including one with Lucy’s father. Lucy knew little about him except that he was a 6-handicap and, under pressure, had a tendency to flip his hands at the beginning of his downswing.

“Duck-hooked me right into the county maternity ward,” her mother told her. “Not that I didn’t love you every minute, sweetheart.”

Lucy would have liked to know more, but never would. She had two photographs of him, taken with a small camera, reds and greens in the photos starting to bleed: her mom and dad in their golf clothes, standing near the ball machine on the driving range, squinting at the camera, sunlight harsh on their faces. Her father had been murdered by a man named Willis Franklin, who at that very moment was probably sitting on a barstool at the Rattlesnake Golf Club, not five hundred yards away, having gotten away with it.

“How did this happen?” her mother asked, peering into the toaster. “That sonofabitch is welded in there.”

“I told you, you cannot put frozen flapjacks in a toaster; it don’t work,” Lucy said. “When they thaw out they get sticky and they sink down and grab ahold of them little wires at the bottom… Ah, shit.” She was tired of hearing herself talk about it; and a little tired of correcting her own grammar. She did it anyway: “Doesn’t work,” she said. “Those little wires.”

Her mom looked up: “You been pretty goddamn prickly lately.”

“I’m headin’ out; see what’s going on,” Lucy said. She rattled through the golf bags stacked in the corner and pulled out her putter.

“Dinner at five thirty,” Mom said.

“Yeah.” Like it made any difference what time they fired up the microwave. “I’ll be back before then, probably for lunch. I got a couple of lessons; then I gotta run into town.”

Lucy took her putter, which she called the Lizard, and stuck five balls in the pocket of the golf vest she’d designed herself and produced on Mom’s pedal-driven Singer — a sports-activity vest that sooner or later would be stolen by those sons of bitches at Nike, she didn’t doubt, and somebody would make a million bucks, but it wouldn’t be her. She went out the door, the Lizard over her shoulder, the new Titleists clicking in her vest pocket. On the step, she automatically touched her pocket again, didn’t feel the book. “Shoot.”

She went back inside: “Forgot my list,” she said.

“Heaven forbid,” Mom said. She’d given up on the toaster and was looking through the litter in the kitchen for her Marlboros. “Got to clean this place up,” she muttered.

Lucy went back to the bedroom, got the little black book from the dresser and headed out again, out the door, past the Tobins’ place, through a hole in the fence and past the machine shed, where Donnie Dell was poking around the mower blades on an aging orange Kubota tractor. He called, “Hiya, Luce,” and she raised the putter and called back, “What’s all the hollerin’ about?”

He shook his head: “I don’t know. Too early to be drunks.” She kept going and he called after her, “You gonna be around?”

“Maybe tonight,” she called back. “Right now, I got a lesson with Rick Waite and his wife.”

“Okay. Maybe, uh, I’ll stop by. Later.”

She smiled and kept moving. Donnie Dell was taking some kind of ag course over at UW-River Falls; a college boy. She knew exactly what he wanted; he’d been coming around for a month, ever since he got hired. What he didn’t know, but that she did, was that he was going to get some, but not for a week. That’s when he came up on her list, and she’d hold to it.

But tonight, tomorrow, the next day — uh-uh. She was busy.

She was passing the end of the machine shed, heading toward the putting green, when she saw one of the Prtussin brothers trotting down the first fairway. The sight stopped her. Dale Prtussin was forty-five years old and weighed upwards of 250 pounds. None of it was muscle, and seeing him run was like watching a swimming pool full of Jell-O in an earthquake. He’d once eaten one of his own salads and come down with food poisoning. The major symptom was projectile vomiting and she’d seen him walk to the john in mid-spasm.

Up the fairway, at the top of the hill, just shy of the 185-yard marker, a half dozen golfers were gathered around the sand trap that guarded the inside elbow of the dogleg. They were all looking into the trap. Lucy went that way, twirling the putter like a baton.

One of the golfers, an older guy named Clark who always pretended to be taking an avuncular interest while he peered down her blouse, frowned when he saw her coming, held out a hand, and said, “This isn’t for you, young lady.”

“Don’t make me hurt ya,” Lucy said, pointing the putter handle at his gut. Harley Prtussin said, “Howya, Luce?” as she came up and looked in the sand trap. The first thing she saw was the ball that somebody had driven into the lip of the bunker; then she saw the nose in the divot.

“Holy shit,” she said. She was gawking. “What’s that?”

“Stevie,” Prtussin said.

“Stevie? Is he dead?” All right, that was stupid. “How’d he get in there? Who found him?”

“Somebody must’ve put him in,” the avuncular golfer said.

A golfer named Joe said, “I found him. Swung at my ball and felt the club hang up; I guess, Jesus… I guess it was his nose.”

She looked again at the ball in the lip of the bunker. “What’d you use, a 7-iron?”

“Yeah.” They all looked down toward the green.

“Never gonna clear that lip from there with a 7-iron, not with your ball flight,” Lucy said.

“I played it a little forward in my stance,” Joe said.

“Good thing,” Prtussin said. “If you’d dug in hard with a wedge, you’da really fucked up his face.”

They all looked back in the hole where Stevie’s nose stuck up, like a picture of the Great Pyramid taken from Skylab. One of the golfers shook his head and said, “Boy,” and another one said, “Not something you see every day.”

Prtussin said to Joe, “After you’re done here, come on back to the clubhouse and I’ll give you a rain check.”

“You closing the course?”

“No, no…” Couldn’t do that.

“Well, I’ll just go on…”

“I think the cops are gonna want to talk to you, Joe.”

Joe scratched his head and looked down toward the first green. Nothing but blue sky and light puffy clouds and maybe a one-mile-an-hour wind. The fairway was freshly mowed and smelled like spring golf “Ah, heck. You think?”

They all stood around looking at the nose, and then a cop car turned in the drive, stopped for a minute at the end of the parking lot, so the driver could talk to Dale Prtussin, who’d just come out of the clubhouse. Dale got in the backseat and the car bucked over the curb and headed up the hill through the rough.

The nose sticking out of the sand looked austere, Lucy thought, plucking a word from her pre-sleep vocab list. White and semi-plastic. Like a priest’s nose when the priest is pissed off at you. The cop car rolled up and Jamie Forester got out of the car, hatless, remembered Dale in the back, popped the back door, and they both got out and Jamie said, “Everybody move back.”

Everybody took a step back and he looked in the trap, nodded, said, “Everybody stay back.” He had his hands on his hips, looked at the nose for another five seconds, then shook his head and said, “Man-oh-man,” walked back to the car and called in.

Mitchell Drury arrived five minutes later. Drury was a member of the club and the lead investigator for the St. Croix County sheriff’s office. Half the people around the bunker said, “Hey, Mitch,” when he got out of his brown Dodge. He looked around, then said to Forester, “Everybody who wasn’t here when he was found, get them out of here.” To Dale Prtussin, “You and Harley better stay.” He caught Lucy’s eye, showed a half inch of grin and said, “Heard about the Ladies’. Congratulations.”

Lucy nodded, and Drury turned back to the sand trap, all business again. Forester shooed them all away from the trap and back down the fairway to the first tee. At the bottom of the hill, Wade McDonnell, a retired mailman who worked as a ranger, was waving people off the tee. When Lucy went past, he asked, “They take him out yet?”

“Nope. Can’t see nothing but the nose.” She corrected herself “Anything but the nose.” The Businesswoman’s One-Minute Guide to English Grammar and Usage.

“You taking off?” McDonnell asked.

“Got the Waites.”

McDonnell looked sympathetic. “Good luck.”

“That ain’t gonna help,” Lucy said. Corrected herself: “Isn’t going to help. Rick’s got the reflexes of a fuckin’ clam.” Thought about deleting the fuckin’, but decided to let it be; that was just golf talk.

The Waites were unloading their fly-yellow Mustang when Lucy came up, and wanted to know what was going on; and then both of them had to walk up to the first tee to look up the hill and bitch at McDonnell about not being able to go on up to the bunker to look at the nose.

“It’s a free goddamn country,” Rick Waite argued.

“Tell that to Mitchell Drury,” McDonnell said.

“Fuck a bunch of Mitchell Drurys,” Waite said.

“Tell that to Mitchell Drury,” McDonnell answered.

More cops arrived and drove up the rough to the trap; then a panel van from the St. Croix County medical examiner’s office. Everybody from the bar was milling around the first tee by that time; and as players came off the ninth green and eighteenth, they joined the crowd.

Then nothing happened for a long time, the crowd waiting in the sunshine and the vanishing morning dew — always a few of them bleeding off to the bar, returning with beers and rum-Cokes. Lucy wandered off to the practice green, pushed a white tee into the ground three feet from one edge, and began practicing lag putts across the width of the green. Sixteen of twenty had to stop past the hole, but not further than seventeen inches past. Twenty minutes later, Rick Waite came over, his wife trailing, and said, “Might as well do that lesson,” and Sharon Waite said, “Dale told us you shot a 68 up at Midland Hills in the Minnesota Ladies’.”

Lucy said, “It shoulda been a sixty-seven, but I lost discipline on number eight and three-putted.”

“That happens to everybody,” Sharon Waite said.

“Fuckin’ shouldn’t,” Lucy said.

“But you won going away,” Waite persisted.

“The Ladies’ isn’t the Tour,” Lucy said. “They don’t give you that stroke on the Tour.” She turned away, and behind her back, Sharon Waite looked at her husband and shook her head.

Halfway through the lesson, Lucy told Rick Waite that “Your biggest problem, you’re sliding your hips. Every time you go to swing, you slide your hips to the right. Then you got to slide them back to the left, for the club to come down at the same place that it started. That’s too hard. You gotta rotate your hips instead of slidin’ ’em. Like you’re standin’ in a barrel.”

She demonstrated, but Waite shook his head. “I can’t feel that,” he said. “I gotta feel that before I remember it. Gimme a tip that’ll make me feel it.”

Lucy looked at him for a minute; behind him, his wife — who was a better natural golfer than her husband, but didn’t much care for the game — shook her head.

“I’ll give you a tip,” Lucy said. “When you set up, your dick is pointing at the ball. Keep it pointing at the ball. If you rotate, it’ll point at the ball. If you slide, it’ll point at your right shoe. Think you can feel that?”

Behind him, Waite’s wife was biting the inside of her cheeks to keep from laughing. Waite looked at his shoe and said, “Shit, honey, my dick is usually pointing at my left kneecap.” His wife made a rude noise.

From the range, they could see up the hill to the crowd around the sand trap. People — cops — were crawling around the trap, and then a couple of guys hauled a black bag out of it. “Body bag,” Rick Waite said.

“Poor old Stevie,” Sharon Waite said. “Must’ve put it in the wrong place one time too many.” Her eyes cut to Lucy: “Don’t mind my mouth, honey.”

“No big deal to me,” Lucy said. “Stevie and me didn’t get along all that well.” She caught herself: “Stevie and I,” she said.

The medical examiner’s van went by a minute later, but the cops stayed up on the hill. Lucy finished the lesson, got the twenty bucks from the Waites and walked back to the trailer, twirling the Lizard. Her mom was around to the side in a lawn chair with a reflector under her chin and a damp dishcloth over her eyes. “I’m taking the truck,” Lucy said. “Back in an hour.”

“Get some oranges at County Market,” Mom said. “Them real tart ones.”

“I’ll put it on my list,” Lucy said. She took the notepad out of her vest pocket, clicked the small ballpoint and added “Oranges” to her list for Tuesday.

Shamrock Real Estate was located on First Street in the town of Hudson, along the St. Croix River, in a flat cinder-block building that had been painted brown. Lucy parked in front and went in through the front door, the screen slapping behind her. The reception area smelled like nicotine, and held a desk, chair, computer and a beat-up faux-leather couch that might have been stolen from an airport lounge; there was nobody at the reception desk, and never was, because there’d never been a receptionist. Two small offices opened off the reception area. One was dark because nobody worked out of it. A light shone in the second, and Michael Crandon, who’d been reading a free paper with his feet up on his desk, leaned forward to see who’d come in.

“Me,” Lucy said, leaning in the office doorway.

“How you feeling?” Crandon asked. He dropped his feet to the floor. He was too old for it, but his brown hair was highlighted with peroxide and gelled up.

“You got it?” Lucy asked.

“You got the cash?”

She dug it out of her shorts pocket, a fold of bills: “Two hundred dollars.” She dropped it on the desk, as though she were buying chips in Vegas.

He handed her two amber pill bottles and a slip of paper. “Pills are numbered,” he said. “Take the big one the first day, the small one the second day. Read the instructions.”

“Better be good, for two hundred dollars,” Lucy said.

“They’re good.”

“Be back if they aren’t,” she said.

“Have I ever sold you any bad shit?”

Lucy shook her head: “You don’t want there to be a first time,” she said, her mouth shifting down to a grim line.

Crandon gave her his square-chinned grin; but he wasn’t laughing.

When she left the real estate office, she put the pill containers in the truck’s glove compartment and headed back up to Second Street and then out onto I-94, across the St. Croix Bridge into Minnesota, off at the first exit and south to the Lakeland library, which was in a strip shopping center a mile south of the exit. She parked in front of the post office, got a clipboard off the truck seat and carried it down to the library.

The library had a couple of small computers tucked away in the back. She brought one up, typed for a few minutes and printed out the paragraph. Then she took out a couple of rubber Finger Tips, the kind used by accountants and bank tellers, fitted them on her thumb and index finger, pulled the envelope out of the clipboard, printed that, wiped the screen and shut the computer down. Handling both the paper and the envelope with the Finger Tips, she slipped them back in the clipboard and carried them out to the car.

The town of River Falls was back across the St. Croix and another fifteen minutes south of Hudson. She drove on down, elbow out the window, the wind scrubbing the fine hair on her left forearm, past all the golf courses and cornfields and dairy farms and yuppie houses. She went straight to the post office, sealed the envelope using a corner of her shirt dampened with Chippewa spring water, stamped it with a self-sticking stamp and dropped it in the mailbox.

Looked in her book, at her list.

Good. Right on schedule.

Back home, Lucy put the oranges in the refrigerator; Mom yelled from the back of the trailer, “Lucy? That you?”

“Yeah.”

Mom came out of the back, her face wet, as though she’d been splashing water on it. “Why didn’t you tell me about Steve?”

“I figured you’d find out soon enough,” Lucy said. “Didn’t want to make you unhappy.”

“Jesus Christ, Lucy, I needed to know.” Her voice was coarse; she’d been crying.

“So you know,” Lucy said. “I got the oranges.”

“Jesus Christ, Luce…”

Lucy brushed past Mom and went into the bathroom, closed the door and looked at the two yellow pill bottles and the piece of paper. The paper carried handwritten instructions, which looked as though they’d been xeroxed about a hundred times. She read the instructions, then read them again, then opened one of the bottles, took out the pill, looked at it, bent over the sink, slurped some water from the faucet, then leaned back and popped the pill.

Everything would be better now. She flushed the toilet and went back out into the hall, could hear her mother in the bedroom; she might have been sobbing. “I’m taking my clubs,” Lucy called out.

Mom blubbered something, and Lucy picked up her clubs, then put them back down and went to the bedroom door and spoke at it.

“Can I come in?”

More blubbering, and she pushed the door open.

“I thought… I’m sorry, Mom, but I thought you were all done with that man.”

“Well, I was all done,” Mom said; her eyes had red circles around them. “Mostly. But I wouldn’t want that to come to him. Being killed like that.”

“Is there anything I can do about this? For you?”

“Naw, I’m just gonna sit around and cry for a couple of days. You go on.”

“I mean, you aren’t… pregnant or anything.”

Now a tiny smile: “I ain’t that stupid, honey. He never was a good bet.”

“All right.” Lucy nodded. “I’ll be back for dinner.”

The first fairway was empty, except for some yellow tape around the bunker. Lucy swerved away from the course and the practice green and crossed the driveway to the clubhouse. She dropped her bag in the office and looked out into the restaurant area. Jerry Wilhelm was sitting alone at the bar, smoking a cigarette and staring at a glass of beer; Perry, the bartender, was standing in the corner looking up at the TV, trying to tune it with a remote. Lucy drew herself a Diet Coke, then went around and slid up on a stool next to Wilhelm.

“You talk to the cops yet?” she asked.

“Waitin’ right now,” he said. “Mitch is downstairs with Carl Wallace.” He looked at the stairs that went down to the basement party room. “Jesus, Luce, you shoulda seen him when they took him out of that sand trap. Stevie. Like to blew my guts. He was all… gray.”

“Glad I didn’t see it,” she said, and tipped back the glass of Diet Coke.

“Rick Waite told me about your dick-pointing tip. You get that from Stevie?”

“Shoot no; the only way Stevie’s dick ever pointed was straight out.”

“How would you know about that?” Wilhelm asked.

“He used to tell me about it,” Lucy said. “Though I didn’t believe but half of what he said.”

“Shoulda believed about a quarter of it.”

“About old Satin Shorts? Guess you’d know about that.”

“Mary? Really? No, I didn’t hear that one.”

“Shoot, Jimmy, it was all over the club,” Lucy said. “Give me some of those peanuts, will ya?”

As Wilhelm pushed the bowl of complimentary peanuts at her, he said, “I thought him and your ma…”

“That was over two months ago.” Christ, they couldn’t think Mom did it? Of course they could, she thought — Mom and Stevie… “Two months ago… Where you been, boy?”

Wilhelm shrugged. “Working, I guess. Heard about your scholarship. You’re going to Florida?”

“Yup. I’ll give it two years anyway.”

“Well, good luck to ya. You’re the only person ever come out of this club might make it as a pro,” he said.

“I’m gonna try,” she said.

“It’s on your list?” Her lists were famous.

She finished the Diet Coke and touched her vest pocket: “Yup. It’s on my list,” she said. She pushed away and touched his shoulder. “Good luck with the cops; Mitch is a pretty good guy.”

“Thanks,” he said. She could feel his eyes on her ass as she walked away. Nothing to that, though. That was just normal. And the mission had been definitely accomplished.

If Lucy let it all out, held nothing back at all, and was hitting on a flat surface without wind, she could drive one of her Titleists three hundred yards, and maybe a yard or two more — not to say that she knew exactly where it would go under those conditions. Backing off a little, she could average 272 yards and keep the ball in the fairway.

Good enough for the Tour.

But the Tour didn’t pay for long drives; the Tour paid for low scores. So though she hit her three buckets of balls each morning and evening, she’d devoted most of her practice in the last year to the short game — and specifically, the game within thirty to sixty yards of the pin. Anytime you were standing in that gap, one of two things happened: you screwed up, or you were a little off, or a little short, on your second shot to a par 5.

So the next shot would either make par, if you’d screwed up, and therefore keep you in the game; or give you a birdie on the par 5. Both of those things were critical if you wanted to win on the Tour, and in the calendar in the back of her list book, she’d blocked out two months of thirty-six practice, two-and-a-half-hour sessions on Rattlesnake’s par 3, twice a day. Get up and down every time from thirty to sixty, she thought, and you rule the Tour.

As she walked out to the par 3, she let her mind drift to the coach at the University of Florida. He’d come up to see her, and they’d played a couple of rounds at Bear Path, over in the Cities. At the end of the second round, he’d given her a notebook and said, “Write this down.”

“A list?”

“A list,” he said. He was a tough-looking nut, brown from the sun with pale blue eyes and an eye-matching blue Izod golf shirt buttoned to the top. “This is what I want you to do.”

Over a Leinenkugel for him and a Diet Coke for her, and cheeseburgers with strips of bacon, he’d given her thirty putting drills and thirty more short-game drills.

“How long?”

“At least two hours a day,” he said.

“I do six now,” she said.

He looked at her, saw she was serious and said, “Then don’t quit, if you can stand it.”

“If it’d put me on the Tour, I’d do ten,” she said.

“We’re gonna get along just fine, Lucy,” he said through a mouthful of cheeseburger. “You do two hours a day, I’ll put you on the Tour. You do six hours and I’ll put you on the leader board in the Open. Whether you win or not… that depends on what you were born with.”

She looked flat back at him: “I been playing” — she didn’t say for money, but rubbed her thumb against her fingers in the money sign — “since I was twelve,” she said. “You give me a six-foot putt for two hundred dollars with forty-three dollars in the bank, and I’ll make it every time.”

He leaned back in his chair and smiled at her: “You’re giving me wet panties,” he said.

She’d decided on this day to work on the ninth green on the par 3. The ninth was slightly raised all around, a platform, with steep banks climbing six feet up to the green. The pin was near the back, and she walked around behind the green so she’d be coming in from the short side; and she’d use nothing but the 7-, 8- and 9-irons, punching short shots into the bank, letting the bank and the rough slow the ball down, so it’d trickle over the top and down to the pin. This was not a common approach. Most people would try to flop the ball up to the pin, as she would, most of the time. But sometimes you couldn’t do that — like if there was a tree nearby — and then you needed something different.

She was hard at it, punching an 8-iron into a spot two and a half feet down from the top of the platform, trying to control the ball hop, when she realized somebody was coming up behind her. She turned and saw Mitchell Drury.

Mitchell. He must’ve been forty, she thought. But you sort of thought about him anyway, looked him over, even if you were seventeen. That weathered cowboy thing, with the shoulders and the small butt.

“Lucy,” he said. His face was serious; usually he’d do a movie-star grin when he was talking to her — he knew women liked him. Not this time. “Gotta talk to you.”

“Sure thing. About Stevie?” She sat back on the bank next to the green and he plopped down beside her.

“Yeah… um. You know, I mean, everybody knows, he was seeing your mom.”

“C’mon, Mitch. That was over two months ago.”

“Over for your mom?” His eyebrows went up.

“Yeah, over. It ain’t the first time she’s had a romance out here — Christ, she’s only thirty-eight. I’m surprised you ain’t been knocking on the door.”

“Hmm,” Mitch said, his eyes cutting away.

Lucy thought, Holy cow. “Mitchell,” she said.

“Don’t ask,” he said. “But besides that… you’re sure. About Stevie.”

“I’m real sure,” she said. “That motherfucker dropped her like a hot rock and she cried for four straight days. She’s crying right now. But she never would have done anything about it.” She looked up the hill toward the bunker. “Nothing like that.”

“All right… She been out playing lately?”

Lucy shook her head. “Not much. Didn’t want to run into Stevie, I think. Take the chance.”

“All right,” he said. He stood up. “I gotta talk to her, though.”

“How was… umm, I mean, was he shot? Stabbed? What?”

He shrugged. “I’ll tell you, it’s gonna be in the paper anyway… but I’d be a little happier if you didn’t pass it around.”

“Sure.”

He looked both ways, as though somebody might be sneaking up on them, then said, “His skull was crushed.”

“Crushed?” She shook her head. “Like with a car crusher? Like squashed?”

“No, no. Like somebody hit him in the temple with a driver.”

She sat back. “Oh.”

“What, Oh?”

“Nothing. I was just trying to think who I’d seen him playing with. But when I think about it, I ain’t seen him playing with nobody, much. Mary Dietz a couple times, John Wilson last week.”

“He have something going with Mary?”

Lucy shrugged: “I don’t know. Might of just been playing lessons.”

“Somebody else mentioned… I thought Mary was seeing Willie Franklin.”

“Don’t know about that, either,” Lucy said. “Tell you the truth, Mitchell, I been a little out of it, ever since that letter come in from Florida. Gettin’ ready.”

Drury nodded. “Good luck on that, Luce,” he said. Now he gave her the grin. “You’re the best to ever come out of here. I think you’ll go the whole way.”

“That kinda talk’ll get you a free lesson,” Lucy said, grinning back.

Drury laughed and said, “May take you up on that.”

Lucy stood up, brushed the grass off the seat of her pants and said, “Mom didn’t have nothin’ to do with it, Mitchell. Not a fuckin’ thing. She’s too kindhearted. I think you probably know that.”

He might have blushed and he said, “Well, yeah, that’s sorta what I think. See you later, Luce. Don’t worry too much about your mom.”

Lucy went back to hitting balls at the embankment. The first four or five hit too hard and trickled past, and she observed herself for a moment. Adrenaline. She had this feeling, this much adrenaline. Had to remember it: this much would get you nine feet past the pin…

Her mind drifted away from golf, just for a second or two. She’d made a lot of grammatical and usage errors when she spoke to Mitchell.

And that was good.

She thought about going back home. Mom probably could use some diversion. But she tarried at the putting green, trying again to make a hundred six-foot putts in a row. The drill was simple enough — you putted all the balls from the same spot, and after five or six, you could see a little pathway developing in the turf. If you could keep the balls in the pathway, you had a chance. But as the number went up, the stress built…

After two false starts, she made forty-eight, and missed on the forty-ninth when she saw Dale Prtussin hurrying toward her. “Howya, Luce? Did I make you miss?”

“Nah. Lost my focus.”

“How far did you get?”

“Forty-eight in a row. Forty short of my record.”

“I’m sorry… Listen. I hate to talk business like this, with Stevie not even in the ground, but do you think you could take over for him? For the rest of the summer, until you get to school? I mean, you aren’t that experienced, so I couldn’t pay you everything I gave him—”

“How much?”

“Six hundred a week, salary. You’d have to run the cash register in the mornings, starting at six o’clock, seven days a week. And you know, all the group lessons and supervise the school tournaments, but shit, it’s not nothing you haven’t done.”

She nodded: “Start tomorrow?”

“That’d be good. I’ll have Alice put you on the regular payroll, and you got a group lesson tomorrow at four in the afternoon. The ladies from 3M.”

She poked her putter handle at his gut: “You got it, Dale. And thanks. It’ll help me out at Florida, having a little bankroll of my own.”

“Glad to do it,” he said. But his tiny eyes were worried: “This is a bad day at Rattlesnake, Luce. Old Stevie was sorta an asshole sometimes, but nobody ought to go like that.”

“Who’s the hot name in the suspect pool?”

He shook his head. “Isn’t any pool… yet. But, uh… never mind.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Come on, you got somebody in mind?”

He looked both ways, like Mitch had earlier, and said in a hushed voice, “I’d like to know where Willie Franklin was Saturday night.”

She looked away. “Didn’t see him — and I wouldn’t even want to say anything about that. You know, my daddy.”

“I know; but I say the sonofabitch did it once, and if he can do it once, he can do it twice.”

That night, Lucy did her vocab list, then lay in bed and thought about Willis Franklin, the man who’d shot her daddy. A group of men from Rattlesnake had been deer hunting, the weekend before Thanksgiving, up in Sawyer County. Out of tree stands. Franklin came running into the hunting shack, late in the day, and said he’d just found Lucy’s dad dead on the ground, under his tree stand. Shot in the heart.

The body was taken into the coroner’s office, and when it was examined by some state medical people, it was found to have a broken neck and small debris punched into the skin of the face — he’d been knocked right out of the stand.

Unusual. You’d have to be shooting up to hit him.

Then, blind luck, they’d found the remnants of a bullet in the tree, and metallurgical tests matched it to the fragments of metal found in the dead man’s sternum. There was just enough of the slug left to match rifling marks made by Willis Franklin’s gun. Franklin had denied shooting the rifle at all during the afternoon, but then admitted it, saying he was afraid of what he might’ve done. Said he wasn’t even sure he’d done it — he’d been driving deer toward the stand, had one jump up close by, a buck with a big rack, and snapped an uphill shot at it… missed… and found Lucy’s dad five minutes later.

That was all fine, except that Franklin had been after Lucy’s mom like a bloodhound, until her dad stepped in and took her away. And Willis was a man known to have a foul temper and was not a man to forget. There was a trial, but nothing came of it: just not enough evidence, and the jury cut him loose. A tragedy in the woods, a few people said. A few more said, darkly, murder… And that was how Lucy learned the story.

Lucy thought about it all — her dad, Willis Franklin and Stevie — and allowed herself to snuffle over it for a few minutes. She tried to switch her mind over to the Tour, as she usually did, but it didn’t work: she just kept seeing the dark shape of her father falling out of a tree stand, a bullet in his heart.

She’d never known him. By the time she first heard the murder story, she was seven years old, and her daddy had been moldering in the ground for seven and a half years.

Lucy did the early morning cash register, and when Dale Prtussin came in at ten o’clock, walked back to the trailer, found her mom reading the paper. “Gotta do my grips,” she said, and went on back to the bedroom. The grips and turns took a half hour, and then she was back in the kitchen. “You’re still going to the Pin-Hi’s this afternoon, aren’t you?” she asked.

Her mom nodded. “Yeah. No point in hanging around here.” The Pin-Hi’s were a group of women golfers who played a circuit of eight courses during the summer. “Half the girls will have known Stevie — a couple of them in the biblical sense — and that’ll be all the talk.” She tried a smile again. “I got to protect my back.”

“Did you talk to Mitchell?”

Mom nodded: “We had a good little heart-to-heart. Stevie was fooling with somebody, but it wasn’t me. I’d heard maybe Satin Shorts—”

“That’s what I heard. Mary.”

Mom frowned. “And I heard a couple of weeks ago that Willie Franklin… Ah, shit, I’m not even going to think about that.” She forced a bright smile. “So what are you doing, dear? With your new job?”

Lucy shrugged: “Usual stuff. Pretty much run the place in the early mornings, until the Prtussins show up. Stevie’s job.”

“So that’s something you can cross off your list,” Mom said.

“What?”

“Getting a bankroll together for Florida. A month ago, you were talking about getting a night job with UPS.”

“Yeah, well. Stevie wouldn’t mind, I guess. If he’d known it had to be this way.”

Mom snorted, poured two tablespoons of sugar into a new cup of coffee. “Bullshit. I’ll tell you something about Steve, honey — knowing that you were going to the pros was eating him up. He had a half year on the Tits Tour and that was the best he’d ever do. No way he’d ever make it on the regular Tour, make it through Q school. He hated every move he saw you make. He hated you out there practicing every day.”

“C’mon. He was always helping…”

“Baby, I’ve known a lot more men that you have, and I knew Steve for fifteen years,” Mom said. “That man would have run you over with his car if he thought nobody would catch him. Some goddamn chick stealing his glory at Rattlesnake? I don’t think so.”

“Then how come you were… seeing him?” Actually, Stevie’d come over and bang Mom’s brains out on the other side of a sixteenth inch of aluminum wall.

Mom shrugged. “Company. He was a good-looking man, and he could make me laugh. I don’t got that many years left, with men coming around.”

Lucy fished the Lizard out of the bag in the corner. “Maybe you ought to look for somebody steadier. Somebody who doesn’t play golf.”

Mom snorted again. “Like that might happen.”

Lucy did the group lesson at noon, then two private lessons and then went back in and pushed Dale Prtussin out of the cash register station, even though she didn’t have to. At three o’clock, she walked home. Mom was gone, and she went back to her bedroom, found the second pill case, blanked her mind and went into the bathroom, looked at the second pill, took a breath, bent over to suck water from the faucet, looked at the pill and popped it.

At four o’clock, she had the 3M women. They liked her, but they were all talking about Stevie. At five, she went into the bar, got a salad out of the refrigerator, ate it and then walked back home, twirling the Lizard.

At the trailer, she lay down, waiting for the pill to work; fetched Dan Jenkins’s Dead Solid Perfect from her rack of golf books and giggled through the best parts, though Jenkins sometimes cut a little close to home — a little too close to the way she and Mom lived in their little trailer off Rattlesnake.

She was waiting for the pill when she heard a ruckus out by the fence line, and then somebody started banging on the door, the whole trailer trembling with the impact. She climbed out of bed and went to look. Donnie Dell, the boy from the machine shed, the college student she was going to sleep with in a week, stood at the bottom of the steps. His straw-colored hair was sticking out wildly from beneath his ball cap, like the Scarecrow’s in The Wizard of Oz.

“What?”

“You hear?” he croaked.

“Hear what?”

“The cops arrested Willie Franklin.”

Lucy stepped out the door. “You’re shittin’ me.”

“I’m not shittin’ you,” Donnie said. His eyes glowed with the excitement of it. “They found blood in the trunk of his car. And a hair, is what people are saying. Jim Doolittle got it straight from the cops.”

“How would Doolittle know?”

“Works up with the hospital… I’m tellin’ you, he knows. Jim’s over in the bar right now. The cops found blood in Willie’s trunk, and they matched it. He’s absolutely fuckin’ toast.”

That was a moment that Lucy knew she’d remember forever.

She might someday be an old lady with a mantel full of Open trophies, and maybe a big scroll from the Hall of Fame, and maybe five kids and twenty grandkids — but she’d always remember standing outside the trailer door with somebody playing a Stones record off at the other end of the park, and a car accelerating away from the club, and the crickets in the cinder-block foundations, and the smell of cut grass and gasoline coming off the course, the best smell in the world. The moment she’d heard.

“Thanks for coming, Donnie,” she said.

“You coming over to the bar?”

“I’d like to, but I’m feeling not so good. I ate one of them fuckin’ salads…”

“Aw, Jesus,” he said. “You know better than that.”

“I know, I know, but I was hungry… So… see you next week?” She touched his shoulder.

“Maybe catch a movie,” he said.

“That’d be cool, Donnie,” she said.

She went back to the bed, but ten minutes later, a car pulled into their parking space, the lights sweeping over her window. Too early for Mom, unless something happened.

“Goddamn it,” she said. She pushed herself up, went to the door. Mitchell Drury.

“Mitch?”

“Hi, Luce. Is your mom home?”

“No, she’s got the Pin-Hi’s over at the Hollow tonight. Donnie Dell was just here, said you arrested Willie.”

He nodded: “I was coming to tell her. ’Cause it’s so much like what happened with your dad.”

“How’d you catch him?” Lucy asked, crossing her arms and leaning on the door frame.

“Got a note from somebody at the club — said they saw him running off the course with his bag the night Stevie disappeared. Looked like he was panicked…”

“A note? From who?”

“We’re trying to figure that out,” Mitchell said. “Anonymous. Kind of think it might be one of the schoolteachers. One of the profession guys. The language was… high-level.”

“No shit,” Lucy said.

“Had access to a computer and a laser printer. We’ll find him, one way or another.”

“What’s Willie say?”

“Same thing he did with your dad — that he didn’t have anything to do with it. Now he’s got an attorney, and he’s not saying anything.”

“Well, fuck him,” Lucy said fiercely. “Two people? Fuck him.”

“That’s sort of what I think. I was talking to…” Drury paused and took a half-step back. “You feel okay?”

“Ah, I got an upset stomach from one of the Prtussins’ fuckin’ salads,” Lucy said.

“Well, uh, you got…”

He looked down, and Lucy looked down and saw the dark spot near her crotch. “Oh, Jesus.” Her hands flew to her face. “Oh, God, I’m so embarrassed, Mitch. My period, I, God, it’s early, God…”

“That’s all right,” he said hastily. “You go take care of it, honey. Tell your mom to call me at home whenever she gets in. I’ll be up till midnight or later.”

“Aw, jeez, Mitch…”

He was still backing away. “Take care of it, honey…”

She shut the door and got a Kotex from the box under her bed, strapped it on, pulled on a fresh pair of pants, then squirted ERA all over her stained underpants and shorts and threw them in the washer. She grinned at the thought of Drury’s face: men would generally cut off their arms rather than have to deal with something like that, she thought.

Men.

Like that goddamn Stevie. Fuckin’ Mom all night, then coming on to little Lucy in the shop. Holding her hips during the lessons, when he was showing her how to turn; hands on her rib cage, standing her up straight. Hands all over her. And more than his hands, down there in the basement room of the club, after he’d closed it down. He called her tasty, like she was some kind of fuckin’ bun. Nobody knew because Lucy had to deal with stealing her mother’s boyfriend; and Stevie had to deal with the problem of statutory rape, which he knew all about.

Then last week, when she told him she’d missed her period, out there on the fairway, he’d laughed at her: “So much for the fuckin’ Tour,” he said, and he turned away, laughing. If there’d been anybody else out there in the semidark, they’d have heard him, laughing, laughing, laughing.

The driver had been right there, poking out of her bag. She’d had it out in an instant, a lifelong familiar. Stevie’d started to turn when the clubhead caught him in the temple, and he’d gone down like a shot bird.

She’d buried him in the bunker, because it was convenient, and she had a lot of thinking to do; lists to make. She was back in the house before she noticed the blood on the club. She went out to wipe it on the grass when she noticed the taillights blinking in the club parking lot, and down on the far end, where it always was, the hulk of Willie Franklin’s Tahoe. He never locked the back doors…

Mom was home by eleven and knocked on the bedroom door. “Okay in there?”

“Yeah. Gotta get up at five,” Lucy called back.

Mom opened the door: “You heard about Willie Franklin?”

“Yeah. Oh — you’re supposed to call Mitchell if you get in before midnight. He wants to talk to you about it.”

“I’ll call him,” Mom said. “See you in the morning.”

Lucy listened to her footsteps down the hall, then got up and looked at the latest Kotex. It was fairly bloody, but the flow seemed to be slowing. That’s what the instructions had said: the onset would take a couple of hours, then the flow would be heavy for a couple of more, and after that, it would be more or less like a regular period. She switched pads and crawled back in bed.

This was what it took to go on the Tour, she thought. A fierce determination: nothing would stand in the way. A fierce organization: determination was nothing without focus.

And talent. She had all of that, Lucy did.

And her lists.

Her lists. Better do something about those. She reached across the familiar darkness, found her vest and took out the small book. She had matches on her bed stand, to light the evergreen-scented candle. She lit it, and in the candlelight, found the pages and carefully ripped them out.

One note said, RU-486. Ripped and burned.

Another said, New job. Ripped and burned, the paper flaring in the near dark.

A third one said, Frame Willie. Ripped and burned.

She looked at the last note for a while, the only note not written with a golf pencil. It had been written the week before, in pale blue ink. Girlie ink, she thought now.

It said, Marry Stevie?

No fuckin’ way. Not at this stage of her career, she thought. A pro went it alone, until the money got big. Then she’d have her pick.

Marry Stevie?

A tear trickled down her cheek. Ripped and burned, the smoke smelling of damp pulp paper and evergreens.

But it was gone in a moment, and everything was back on track.

Lucy lay in the bed she’d made, and dreamed of lists.