The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

Diamond Alley by Dennis Mcfadden

FROM Hart's Grove

THE YEAR WE WERE SENIORS in high school, a girl in our class was murdered and the Pittsburgh Pirates won the World Series. Which was the more momentous event? No contest, of course; how could a game, a boys' game at that, compete with the death of a classmate, a girl who was our friend? Yet somehow, despite our lip service to the contrary, these two happenings seemed to attain a shameful equality in our minds. And if anything, now that so many years have passed, Mazeroski rounding the bases in jubilation after his homer had vanquished the big, bad Yankees is more vivid in our memories than the image of Carol Siebenrock, young, beautiful, and naked, as seen from the darkness beyond her window.

The Pirates were with us everywhere that autumn. They filled the air. Every evening when we went out, we didn't need our transistors-we could hear Bob Prince calling the game all over town, his friendly baritone drifting from radios on porches, in kitchens and living rooms, pervasive as the scent of burning leaves. We would often pause, interrupting whatever nonsense we were up to, holding a hand in the air to signify an at-bat worthy of our attention: maybe Smoky Burgess coming up to pinch-hit with the tying run in scoring position, or Clemente connecting, sending a screamer through the gap, or big, dumb Dick Stuart approaching the plate with enough runners on to win the game with one mighty swing of his lumber. And every time they played the Pirates' jingle, we would sing along:

Oh, the Bucs are going all the way,

All the way, all the way,

Oh, the Bucs are going all the way,

All the way this year!

We might have been anywhere in Hartsgrove, the hilly, leafy town of our youth that most of us have long since abandoned. We came out after dark, after our homework was done, savoring our first heady taste of freedom-seniors now! When we weren't at Les's Pizza Palace down by the bridge over Potters Creek, we were at the elementary school playground on the north side, back in by the swings and seesaws near the trees, watching the stars, smoking the Winstons and Luckies we'd pilfered from our old man's pack on the kitchen counter. Or walking down East Main Street, by all the crowded houses sorely in need of paint and repair, or trudging up Pine, where the leaves on the trees were burnt orange in the scattered streetlights. We might have been crossing the swinging bridge over the Sandy Lick Creek by Memorial Park, seeing how perilously we could get it to sway in the dark, or taking the shortcut down Rose Hill, shrieking like ghosts in the woods on the rutted, littered path that had been a turnpike a hundred years before. Everywhere we went, we smelled the burning leaves and listened to the Voice of the Pittsburgh Pirates. The darker it got, the better we liked it.

Many nights found us in the pine shadows of Carol Siebenrock's backyard on Diamond Alley, waiting for the light in her window.

Her house was on a hill-Hartsgrove was built on seven hills-the backyard at eye level with her second-floor bedroom. We didn't venture there till late summer, when the days were getting shorter, the concealing nighttime longer. We'd heard the rumors a year or two before, from older guys, guys since graduated and gone, but we were younger then, our curfews earlier, it was the fifties, and we were timid; peeping was a serious offense in Hartsgrove, Pennsylvania-that and running stop signs were about all the cops had to live for. But now we were seniors, bulletproof, brave, bold and fast, our ears attuned to the slightest hint of a cruiser on Diamond Alley, a dozen escape routes mapped out in our minds.

On the good nights, her light would come on. And there she was. "Ladies and gentlemen, it is now showtime," Wonderling would whisper. At the foot of her bed she unbuttoned her blouse, looking out at the darkness hiding any number of eager eyes; then she turned, blouse open. Steadying herself, hand on the dresser, she stepped from her shoes, loosened her belt. Then the snaps and crackles would begin, as we positioned ourselves in the pine needles for a better view, louder than dancing elephants. She stepped from her pants, shrugged from her blouse. White bra and panties. Heavenly curves and crevices. Her bra fell away, nipples staring us down like little red eyes. Her thumbs went to the sides of her panties.

The nights were rare and precious when the planets aligned to allow us the perfect sighting. She might have gone to bed too early, or too late, or it was raining, or we were spotted on Diamond Alley, or we heard a car, or we had too much homework, or we were simply giving it a rest. But when the planets finally did align, it was ecstasy, nearly unbearable.

"You're blocking my view!" Wonderling whispered hoarsely, shoving Nosker. But his inflated state amplified the whisper, and the ensuing chorus of shushes must have sounded to Carol as though her backyard had sprung a leak.

She came to the window holding a pillow over her tits, and yelled through the screen, "Why don't you guys grow up! Go get a girlfriend!"

We were gone. Down Diamond Alley in the dark, wind whistling past our ears, coming out on Pine beneath the streetlight, where we slowed, ambling down toward Valley Street. Suddenly we stopped. In the air we heard Rocky Nelson line a shot up the right-field alley, scoring Groat all the way from first with the winning run- How sweet it is! cried Bob Prince; How sweet it is! -and we pumped our fists and yelled, falling to our knees on the sidewalk, nearly weeping.

Next time the curtains would be closed. They would inch open again over the next few nights, first a visible sliver, followed by a gradual widening. We wondered if Carol could guess we were there, and we tried to believe she was willing to play the game, willing to be seen as long as we didn't let her know we were seeing. That was what we wanted to believe. It never occurred to us that she might simply have felt she had the right to fresh air, that she might have believed that we had given up, or, better, that we had grown up now and respected her privacy and were above crawling on our bellies in the dirt and darkness for a cheap glimpse of flesh.

She stood out from the other girls in our class. Other girls were pretty, sexy, smart, and popular, but none of them packaged it quite the way she did. None of us had been her boyfriend, but we'd all been her confidant at one time or another, the one chosen to rub her back between classes, to sit with her at lunch, to dance with her at Les's, to have those privileged, personal conversations when her clear blue eyes would mesmerize you.

When we rubbed her back, she would put her arms on her desk, her head down as if she were going to sleep. "Higher," she would say. "Right there-between the shoulder blades." And she would moan. That moan. That skin. We would have to pretend our heavy breathing was caused by the physical exertion of rubbing. And we would have to cross our legs.

"Do you have a date for the record hop?" she would ask.

"I hadn't really thought about it," we said, panting.

She was concerned about our social life. She didn't want any of us left out, left behind. It was as though she wanted us all to experience life in the same expansive, wonderful way that she was. She was always offering helpful advice: Bobby, you should be more serious-everything's not always a joke, you know. Or, Jimmy, how come you never smile? You look so serious all the time. Or, Doug, why don't you comb your hair in a DA? You'd look really sharp with a DA. Or, Don't squeeze that, John. If you squeeze it, it'll leave a scar.

"Why don't you ask Brenda?" Carol said. "She likes you."

"I don't know. I'll think about it." We wanted to play it cool. "You going with Bucky?" Bucky was her boyfriend. Her boyfriends were always three or four years older than us, always with cars and the coolest of reputations.

"Yeah. Wait'll you see his car." Bucky had a new midnight-blue GTO, leather seats, four on the floor, competition clutch. She told us all about it. Then she put her hand on ours, leaning close, adding conspiratorially, "But I don't like it-the back seat's too small."

A comment such as that could fuel our masturbatory fantasies for a month. She was mature, sexy without being slutty, no easy feat in 1960. Her silky blond hair and clear blue eyes seem almost suspect now, as if our memories have polished them to perfection, but her picture in our yearbook-which we dedicated to her-bears out the truth of it. She always seemed to wear the skimpiest briefs beneath her cheerleader's outfit, and Nosker in fact claimed that once she wore none at all, swears to this day he saw her beaver that fateful Friday night. We insisted he was full of shit, secretly allowing ourselves to entertain the possibility, masturbatory fuel for another month.

The teachers seemed to hold her apart as well. She challenged Mrs. Ishman, an elegant and earthy lady, over the amount of trigonometry she assigned. Mrs. Ishman, grim and determined, defended herself as she would to an adult-the rest of us would have ended up in detention. Carol debated Mr. Zufall, our social studies teacher: Why should we bother watching the presidential debate? Everyone knew Kennedy didn't have a snowball's chance in heck anyway, because then the pope would be running the country, so it was all just a waste of time. Mr. Zufall laughed, shook his head. He let her get away with it. Mr. Zufall, in fact, almost seemed to encourage her.

He almost seemed to be in Carol's confidant rotation along with the rest of us. He was one of those teachers who try to be one of the guys, and he came close. We liked him. He had a habit of rocking up on his toes while he was teaching, which we often mimicked but secretly admired. He was graceful, athletic; he'd been a pretty good basketball player for Hartsgrove High, then got a medal in the war. He used to make fun of the nonathletic types behind their backs, the same as we did, mimicking their pigeon-toed strut across the front of his classroom. He told us dirty jokes and gossip, the only teacher who did. And every day he could talk to us about how the Pirates had fared the night before.

He pulled us aside before class. "I came in the back way this morning," he said. "No sooner do I open the door than who do I see standing there, behind the back stairwell, but a good friend of ours, with her boyfriend-I won't mention any names, but you know her well. And her boyfriend is holding her breasts! One in each hand! Buoying them up!" Mr. Zufall was positively gleeful. He repeated the phrase- Buoying them up! -holding out his hands, buoying a pair of imaginary tits. We shared his zeal, wondering exactly who he was talking about, when we noticed Carol Siebenrock across the room, watching us.

The last place we saw her was Les's, the evening she disappeared. Les's was overflowing with the usual afterschool crew. Carol was sitting with some of the other cheerleaders, planning a bonfire and pep rally for Friday night. We had a big game Saturday against Cranberry.

"Hey," Carol yelled over to us. The music was too loud for talking. Everybody yelled. "Do you guys know where we can get any wood?"

"I know where you can get some," Wonderling said, snickering.

"I don't know," Nosker said. "I haven't been getting any either."

"Get your minds out of the gutter," Carol said.

"I'd like to lay the wood to her," Knapp whispered, and we grinned.

Plotner dropped a nickel, reaching down to get it so he could look up their skirts, smacking his head against the table on the way back up, good for another laugh. He swore Brenda Richards had jerked her legs apart while he was down there, displaying her crotch for his viewing pleasure. "Sure, sure," we said, refusing to allow the remotest possibility it was true, believing it all the while, because it's what we wanted to believe. We were hooked on the implications of a free peek willingly given. The cheerleaders kept talking wood and fire, while we lapsed into our typical topics: who was getting bare tit off whom, who was getting bare ass, who was finger-fucking whom, and who was actually getting laid. And, most importantly, with whom. The jukebox stopped playing, but no one stopped yelling. Allshouse chased Judy Lockett around the pinball machine, and Les Chitester, his long white apron bloody with sauce, yelled from beside his pizza oven, "Hey! Take a cold shower!" Linda Pence was dancing, shaking her perfect ass in our general direction, and Nosker said, "Say this five times real fast: Tiny Tim tickled Tillie's tit till Tillie's twat twitched," and we were up to the challenge. Many times. And every time we looked at Carol Siebenrock, all we could see were her nipples.

Les brought out the cheerleaders' pizza, and Carol, taking her first bite, dropped sauce on her white blouse, close enough to her boob to prompt another outbreak of hilarity on our part. She tried to wipe it off with her napkin, but only smeared it around. She stood to leave, shoulders back, making no effort to conceal her sullied boob. "Grow up, you guys," she said.

We wanted to run after her. We wanted to leapfrog over the parking meters down Main Street, fly up the hill, get to her backyard before she got home, but we didn't. It was still light out, and we wondered why she was leaving so early, assuming it was the stain on her blouse, never guessing she might have had a date. It was a school night. So we stayed, laughing, leering, the occasional erection springing to life on our young, healthy bodies, and later we walked home listening to the Pirates' magic number dwindling down toward zero. The last thing Carol ever said to us was "Grow up." We remembered that later, smitten by the twist, sure that we were the only ones on the face of the earth ever to witness an irony so deep and true as that.

Carol's two older sisters, Dottie and Mary, were married and gone. She was the baby. Some years before, her mother had tried to commit suicide with her father's rifle-trying to pierce her ears, went the old, black joke. She'd managed only to graze her brain, leaving her more or less lobotomized. Mr. Siebenrock was a chubby, earnest fellow who owned a shoe store down on Main Street, and we all knew him pretty well-he'd been one of our Little League coaches, even though he'd apparently never held a bat in his own two hands before taking over the reins of Sterck's Terriers. He cheered enthusiastically-maybe the source of Carol's talent. As a coach, he made a pretty good shoe salesman.

He'd left Little League about the same time we had, when his wife had shot herself with his.22, which he'd kept in a closet and seldom touched. He was not a hunter, but for some reason thought he should own a gun. Everyone else did. Now, when he wasn't selling shoes he spent most of his time taking care of his wife, bringing her to church and school events, trying to maintain some semblance of a social life.

The night Carol disappeared he'd taken his wife to the Hartsgrove Businessmen's Association Banquet out at the country club. Home late, he'd assumed Carol was upstairs asleep. Next morning he discovered his mistake, along with her bloodstained blouse.

By the time we learned the blood was pizza sauce, a hundred different rumors had swept through town: Her bracelet had been found here, her shoe there, a stranger spotted here, Carol herself there. She'd run away with her boyfriend; she'd run away by herself. She'd been abducted from her bedroom; she'd been abducted walking up the hill from Les's. She'd gone kicking and scratching; she'd gone willingly with someone she knew. She'd been raped; she'd eloped; she was being held for ransom. The rumors were flimsy, yet they lived and died and were born again, endlessly, it seemed. In the end, she was simply missing.

Her empty desk filled every classroom. Every blond head we saw in the hallway brought an instant of expectation, which dissolved again just as quickly. Mr. Zufall seemed as stricken as any of us. She'll be fine, he told the class. Leave her alone and she'll come home, wagging her tail behind her. And he grinned a rueful grin.

Shuffling down Main Street one afternoon on our way to Les's, we saw Mr. Zufall coming out of Siebenrock's Shoes with his arms full. It looked as though he'd bought half-a-dozen pairs of shoes. Seeing us across the street, he only nodded a greeting, his arms too full to wave. It struck us at the time as some sort of magnanimous, mature gesture, a show of support, the sort of thing we'd have been incapable of. We wouldn't have had the slightest idea of what to say to Mr. Siebenrock in a circumstance such as that.

Evenings at Les's were quiet, filled with the whisper of rumors. The pep rally and bonfire at Memorial Park were canceled; we lost to the Cranberry Rovers the next afternoon, 45-6. The cheerleaders' efforts were halfhearted, as were the team's, although the outcome of the game wasn't all that far from the norm. No one was in the mood for a pep rally the next week either, but there was a large pile of lumber that had to be disposed of somehow, so the pep rally was rescheduled for the next Friday night, before the Harmony Mills game.

Like the crowd, the fire was large and nervous, shooting jittery red trails of sparks and shape-shifting plumes of smoke into the night over the black running waters of Potters Creek. The speakers-the captain of the cheerleaders, the football team captain, the school principal-all spoke about our team, our school, our town, our pride, about giving our best and winning. No one mentioned the big white elephant sitting just beyond the bonfire. It was a decidedly pepless rally.

All the while Carol stayed missing.

The rumors grew silly and cruel. She was living with beatniks in New York City. She was living with cousins in Oil City, having been knocked up. She'd run away to join the circus girlie show. She'd run off to become a Playboy Bunny. She'd had to leave town because someone had spotted her in a skin flick. All the silly, cruel rumors tried to imagine where she was. None of them imagined her dead.

All the while the Pirates kept winning.

Carol's disappearance, magnificent mystery that it was, never distracted us from the heat of the pennant race. There was plenty of room in our hearts and minds for both. When the Pirates finally clinched on a Sunday afternoon in late September, joy erupted and settled back over the town like a golden mist. It was the only topic of conversation at school Monday morning- How sweet it is! How sweet it is! We sang, Oh, the Bucs are going all the way! The first fifteen minutes of Mr. Zufall's class were devoted to nothing but Hoak, Groat, Mazeroski and Stuart, Clemente, Virdon, Skinner and the boys. By the end of class, however, it was business as usual; Mr. Zufall reminded us-warned us, really-that the Kennedy-Nixon debate was taking place that evening.

"Who watched the debate?" he asked next morning. "Raise your hands."

No one was foolish enough not to. Mr. Zufall rocked up on his toes, his approving smile turning wistful as he glanced at the empty desk. "I'm only sorry Carol wasn't here to see it," he said. "History in the making. I think even Carol would have appreciated that."

The collective sigh was audible, the moment of silence spontaneous. It was the first time anyone had spoken of her as though she weren't coming back.

They found her two weeks later. Evan Shields and his grandson, hunting squirrel in the woods along Potters Creek just north of town, spotted her body snagged on a log in the water. Her skull was fractured, and she'd probably been dead since the day she disappeared. That was about all the coroner could determine, given the state of her body.

It was assumed she'd been raped. She was naked from the waist down.

Every generation or so there's a murder in Hartsgrove above and beyond the usual run-of-the-mill, heat-of-the-moment killing, a murder with a certain cachet. About twenty-five years earlier, before we were born, a lady had been raped and stabbed to death in the railroad yard signal tower on the south side of town, where she worked. Les Chitester, manning his pizza oven with his long-handled paddle, remembered it well, though he'd been only ten at the time; the town had been in a frenzy of fear till the killer had finally been caught. Years later, after we'd scattered and were slogging toward the end of our own middle ages, a pack of drunken, drugged-up kids stripped and hanged a girl in a clearing in the woods by Potters Creek. The young always think these flashy crimes are unique, that life has devised this outstanding drama just for them, and them alone. That's what we thought. Now we know better. Now we know it's just part of the cycle, just another run-of-the-mill murder that happens to have a certain cachet.

Girls cried in the classrooms. Boys shook their heads. There were hollow-eyed stares down the hallways of the school. Gone but not forgotten; Mr. Zufall must have uttered that hackneyed phrase a hundred times. Les's was even quieter. We hugged self-consciously, in solemn unawareness of what else we could possibly do. We talked about it, tried to exorcize it. We talked about Carol, every last little thing we'd ever done with her, every last little minute we'd ever spent with her, competing to have known her best, as if whoever had been closest to her would be closest to this new mortality, and therefore the most worthy among us.

Who had done it? Who could have done such a thing? Bucky Morrison, her boyfriend, naturally came to mind, but Bucky was away at college, and though his alibi wasn't airtight, he was reputed to be a gentle creature, who, Brenda Richards let it be known, kept a kitten in his dorm room against all regulations. Mark Schoff-ner, the boy Carol had dumped for Bucky? In the army now, at Fort Drum. There were the usual local toughs in Hartsgrove, the high school dropouts and misfits, but we inventoried and dismissed them one by one, group by group. The crime was a quantum leap from picking a fight on a street corner with a bellyful of beer, from stealing hubcaps or keying the car of an antagonist. It was beyond them, just as it was beyond any of us, beyond anyone, really, that we knew. It would have to be a stranger. No one we'd ever laid our eyes upon could possibly commit such an evil.

She was buried on a Wednesday, the same day as the sixth game of the World Series. We were conflicted, to say the least, though we never dared suggest we'd have preferred spending the afternoon in front of a television, rooting for the Pirates to wrap it up; they led the series three games to two. But the Buccos made it easy on us that day. Their resounding 12-0 loss dovetailed perfectly with the tragedy, reflecting ominously on the future. We were sure they'd lose tomorrow too. It was how the planets were aligned.

Mr. Siebenrock looked softer than we remembered, like a marshmallow that had been stepped on. He followed Carol's casket down the wide aisle of the Presbyterian church, his jowls inflated, his comb-over glistening with sweat, his hand fidgeting in his pocket like a squirming mouse; we could hear the coins jingle in the sniffle-filled silence. His wife, her hand clutching his coat sleeve, her hair too black, her gaze unanchored, looked as though she were wandering through a fog. Carol's two older sisters, Dottie and Mary, not nearly as pretty as Carol, followed with their husbands. Our hearts ached at how sad they looked, and at the fact that we were missing the game, and as soon as the service was over we rushed out to Nosker's car and turned on the radio-the Pirates were trailing 6-0 after two and a half! Crushed, we joined the funeral procession to Chapel Cemetery, a couple miles south of town, Bob Prince filling us in: Bob Friend, in whose right arm we'd trusted, had lasted only two innings. Clouds swelled with gloom over the cemetery at the top of the hill.

We did our best to say goodbye to Carol there. The view from the cemetery was wide, but the sweep of bright trees was dulled by the gray of the day. We were too far away to hear the words of the preacher, a skinny man with white hair and big ears. When it was over we drifted away. We weren't in a hurry to get back to the game; we knew a lost cause when we saw one. Over our shoulders we watched Carol's mother, her hand fluttering at the pile of dirt like a toddler just learning to wave bye-bye.

Next morning during homeroom, they interrupted the announcements over the PA system to call for a moment of silence for Carol. We felt it applied just as much to the Pirates. That afternoon they suspended classes, and we gathered in the auditorium to watch the seventh game of the series on the televisions they'd set up on the stage. We were absorbed from the first flickering image of Forbes Field, immersed for the next four hours, emotions soaring and plummeting, as the lead went back and forth, ecstasy and anguish in the balance. The Pirates blew a four-run lead and trailed, 5-4, after seven. When the Yankees tacked on two more in the top of the eighth, Allshouse actually snuffled and blew his nose, and we were actually too upset to ridicule him for being such a baby. We were on the verge ourselves.

In the bottom of the eighth, a routine ground ball took a bad hop and hit the Yankee shortstop in the neck. We rejoiced, Tony Kubek's evident agony notwithstanding. This could be the break-pun intended-we needed; this might be the omen, the sign we'd been waiting for, and sure enough, when Hal Smith capped the five-run rally with a three-run homer, joy once again erupted, echoing through the cavernous old auditorium. With a two-run lead in the top of the ninth, and Bob Friend coming in to nail it down, it was all but over.

Incredibly, impossibly, the Yankees tied it up.

Blackness settled over the congregation. The wooden seats never felt harder. "I can't watch," Plotner said, and he was the stoic one among us. The big, bad Yankees were bearing down on us like an oncoming freight train. Nosker buried his head in his hands. And Carol Siebenrock revisited us, tragedy in all its guises, as we went to the bottom of the ninth.

Then, when Mazeroski homered, we were born again. We leaped in the aisles, teachers and students alike, hugging, cheering, delirious with bliss. Clover and Mrs. Ishman were dancing. Plotner and Nosker were dancing. Wonderling hugged Brenda Richards and Judy Lockett, every girl he could find, copping as many feels as he possibly could. Mr. Zufall, at the peak of his powers, lifted Allshouse over his head. And Carol was gone again.

Gone but not forgotten. Less than a week later we paid our final respects. It was a spontaneous tribute, unpremeditated. Leaving Les's, we crossed the crumbling bridge over Potters Creek, heading up toward Main Street in the dwindling twilight. At the Court House, we turned up Pershing, still paved with bricks as all of Hartsgrove's streets had been at one time, onto Coal Alley, and up the concrete steps that climbed the hill through the trees. The steps were tilted, old, and uneven. By the time we reached the top we were winded, our thighs aching.

The mansards and gables high on the school were nearly invisible in the dark. The streetlights couldn't throw much light up through the trees, only a glint off a window here and there. We cut through the schoolyard. Mary Lou Allgier lived on Maple, just beyond the baseball field. We checked out her windows: the lights were on, but the shades were down, and we couldn't see a thing. Halfway up Pine, we cut across to Diamond Alley. The best place to pay our last respects was not in the graveyard but in the backyard.

Solemnly we filed in, taking our places among the pines. From the shadows we stared at her darkened window, remembering. Everything was black. We spoke in whispers. "Remember how she used to piss off Mrs. Ishman?" we said. We thought, Bobby, don't try so hard-if you pretend you 're not interested, you'll have her eating out of the palm of your hand."How about the way she argued with Zufall?"Jimmy, your teeth aren't that bad-is that why you never smile? You have a nice smile."Remember the time she called Mrs. Stockdale a bitch? Man, she had balls." We stared at her window as though the light might come on at any moment, as though she might appear. Doug, you have to work harder on your grades. You have to get into college. Do you need any help studying?"Remember the time she was cheering without any tights on?"You should learn how to dance, John. It's easy. Want me to teach you?"What a body." The shadows sighed. "What a shame."

You have such beautiful hair, Jimmy. You 're going to get taller. By next year at this time, the girls are going to be chasing you like a hawk. Her clear blue eyes were still gazing into ours, holding us hostage, verifying the truth of every word she said. Her beautiful face was still resting on her hands as we rubbed her back, the warm, soft, living heat of her.

The whispering desisted. The moment of silence was long and true. The air was empty, except for the scent of burning leaves, the sound of crickets. No Bob Prince. It was over. We began to stir, our tribute paid, our obligation fulfilled, feeling a little ennobled, a little restless.

The light came on. Carol's mother appeared in her window, looking around the room as if she'd never seen it before. "Ladies and gentlemen, it is now showtime," Wonderling whispered, and at that moment we hated him. Carol's mother came toward the window and we crabbed back farther into the shadows. Absently she raised a hand to her ear, looking around again with a frown, then to her other ear, taking off her earrings. She placed them on the dresser, straightened the tilted mirror, then began to unbutton her blouse. The look on her face was as though she were trying to recognize a song, a song that no one else could hear. We watched, uncomfortable with the hollow thumping in our chests. A pinecone dropped with a soft plump that jolted through us like a shot. We watched Carol's mother step out of her slacks.

We watched. Not watching was no more of an option than speaking. We watched until she was naked, until every inch of her aging flesh had been revealed in all its faded splendor, and she stood bewildered, looking around the room again, perhaps for her nightgown, perhaps for nothing at all. Carol's father came in, a look of relief on his face, and we watched him gather up his wife's clothes, put his arm around her shoulder, and guide her toward the doorway. There he paused, looking around the room again. Spotting something, he came back, crossing our field of vision; when he returned he was carrying a doll that appeared to be quite old, a well-worn, well-loved doll with yellow hair. Putting his arm around his wife again, he led her out of the room. We watched him reach back and flick off the light with a nervous glance toward the window.

We watched the dark of the house again, in silence, until our erections and galloping blood, our shame, had finally subsided enough to allow us the freedom to leave.

They arrested Blinky Mumford a month later, but it wasn't the closure we needed. It was anticlimactic. We never suspected him; furthermore, we never really believed he did it. One of the school janitors, Blinky Mumford was sullen and ill-tempered, with a facial tic that animated his scowl. He had no family and was often seen walking up and down Main Street muttering to himself. The story was that he'd been left in Hartsgrove when he was six by one of the orphan trains that used to stop on the south side in the early years of the century, but no one had taken him in. As with the other candidates we'd inventoried and dismissed, a crime like this was beyond him-too important, too notable. Despite his conviction, we were never convinced. They found what they said were strands of her hair in his battered old wreck of a Ford, and the key piece of evidence was a pair of panties found hidden in the janitors' closet near Blinky's buckets, brooms, and mops. Her father identified them as Carol's.

We wondered how he could possibly have been so sure, so Bruner came up with a theory: skid marks are like fingerprints, he hypothesized, no two exactly alike.

Not much is left now. The old high school on the hill came tumbling down, and a whole generation of kids has graduated from the new school out by the new interstate, neither of which is new anymore. Les Chitester built a new place too, the Colonial Eagle Interchange Hotel Restaurant, not far from the new school, and our old hangout by Potters Creek was razed, a hardware store built in its place. For over thirty-five years, its motto has been "Buy by the Bridge." Even Memorial Park was buried, all the towering elms and oaks along the banks of the creeks cut down and burned, victims of Hartsgrove's flood control project.

We scattered. The teachers are gone too, retired and died, most of them. A few years after we left, Zufall quit teaching to become a carpenter. That didn't surprise us; we figured he must have wanted a manlier profession, something more in line with his athletic sensibilities.

And Blinky Mumford? He faded away in his cell, a self-proclaimed innocent man.

We still gather in Hartsgrove now and then for reunions and funerals. Tomorrow we're burying Nosker's mother. We'll be next in line. Unlike Carol, we're waiting our turn. Thanks to Carol, we know how to die.

We talk about the Pirates. They won two more titles in the seventies but haven't come close since; it's beginning to look as though they never will. We complain about the state of baseball, the small-market quandary, convinced the sport will never be the same. We don't complain about our own aging bodies, however, which will never be the same again either. We don't ogle and leer at the pretty girls like we used to, because we're mature now-unlike Carol, we got to grow up. At least that's what we tell ourselves. The truth is, ogling and leering would only be mocking our own aging bodies. The truth is, we miss it, everything about it; we miss our young, healthy selves, the dependable, Eveready erections of our youths.

Sooner or later, as if to atone, we set aside the Pirates, put to rest the small talk, and Carol Siebenrock arises from the grave. We speak of her reverently, honoring her. We never speak of our adolescent indiscretions, the nights we spent on our bellies in the black shadows of her yard, the primordial thrill we felt at the sight of her lush, naked flesh.

But in our minds she is naked. In our minds she will always be naked.

She is naked even as she sits in a classroom a lifetime ago, raising her hand, sunlight streaming through the window, touching her with grace and radiance. Where is our place in this picture? Where is our place in this world? We maintain our innocence. We blow away any trace of guilt, like blowing dust off the top of a locked box, but the dust swirls and swirls in the sunlight, swirls and swirls, refusing to disperse and disappear. And so we talk about the Pirates. We talk about Carol as if we never loved her. And always it ends up the same. "Who do you suppose really killed her?" we always say, never looking ourselves in the eye.