The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

Light Bulb by Nancy Pickard

FROM Kansas City Noir

The Paseo

IT TOOK JUDY HARMON fifty-eight years to wonder about the other children. Maybe it was the deluge outside her apartment that reminded her of the flooding that summer in Kansas City back in the ’50s. Maybe it was the lightning flashing over downtown Detroit that jogged her memory. Whatever the cause, the epiphany struck her all of a nasty sudden while she was doing nothing more than watching a crime show on TV and drinking her supper of wine and more wine.

Oh my God, there must have been other children.

Judy sat up so fast that she spilled wine and didn’t care: pink blotch on white pants, new stain on her conscience seeping through to soak her in dismay. Only now, fifty-eight years later, did her unconscious pull a light cord to force her to look-Over here, Judy!-at the decaying fly in the spidery corner of her psyche’s forgotten basement.

How could I have failed to realize it for so long?

It felt like her boss coming in to tell her she was fired, which he had done last week. It felt like not being able to pay her mortgage, which she couldn’t next month. It felt like watching her retirement slip away as CEOs bought yachts and stockbrokers sent their kids to private schools. It felt like when she’d realized that she was never getting married, or having children, or doing anything but working all of her life, and it felt like not even being able to do that now. It was a sinking in her stomach, a sick feeling in her heart, a setting of a match to an unburned pile of regret.

I was a child myself! I couldn’t have known!

She defended herself to herself and to the other-possibly other, probably other-children who might have been hurt, might have been scarred, by the man.

Outside, rain plunged down her windows in the same waterfall way it had poured that July in Kansas City. That summer, the Missouri River drowned the industrial districts of both Kansas Citys-the Missouri one, where she spent her childhood, and the smaller, poorer one in Kansas. She remembered staring at the frightening water from the back seat of her parents’ ’47 Chevy. The river made a washing sound, like surf where there wasn’t supposed to be a beach. Judy remembered a green car, brown water, and a dull bright sky that looked like the dirty chrome on the car’s bumpers before her daddy washed them in the parking lot behind their apartment on Paseo. The air that summer smelled wet-not the fresh, clean wet of ordinary summers, but the wet of dirty dishrags, drowned rats, overflowing sewers. She’d been excited to see the flood, wanted to get near enough to watch it rising up the floors of the buildings, and then got scared when her father inched the car close enough to spy the river’s currents. They bubbled ugly brown and sudsy white; they surged and swirled in boat-sucking eddies.

“Back up, Daddy! Back up!” she had yelled in panic from the back seat. That had made her father smile, but he slid the gearshift into neutral and didn’t tease the Chevy any closer.

“I swear that river could shoot us all the way to St. Louis!” her mother had said.

Now, fifty-eight years later, Judy berated herself: I should have told them about that man. Why didn’t I tell my parents?

Judy Harmon picked up her cell phone to call her mother.

Judy was eight years old that summer.

While the two Kansas Citys were flooding, she went to Vacation Bible School at a Presbyterian church on Linwood Boulevard near their home. She and her parents lived six blocks south, on the white side of the city’s “color line,” Twenty-seventh Street. Blacks who ventured in that direction generally needed the passport of a job.

Theirs was a block of red-brick apartment buildings and old homes converted into rentals. There was a synagogue catty-cornered to their building. It was safe to play outside or walk home alone from school in her neighborhood, even though it wasn’t a rich one. The only bad things that had ever happened to her on her own block were getting stung by a wasp and falling off her bike. Once she’d watched her mother give a hobo a half-empty box of powdered doughnuts after he knocked on their door and asked for something to eat. When he left, he had confectioners’ sugar on his whiskery chin, as if he’d dipped it in a snowdrift, but she didn’t have the nerve to tell him.

There were many things she’d never had the nerve to say.

That day, when she walked to the babysitter’s by herself from Bible school, Judy carried an umbrella that was too big for her. She had to fight it to keep it up. Judy remembered feeling nervous when she started out-it was five blocks to the sitter’s and she’d never walked so far alone. Her father was at work at the factory; her mother had a summer job at Katz Drug Store. Usually Judy went with a little friend; years later she couldn’t remember why she walked by herself that day. She remembered hearing thunder rumble, though. Her too-big umbrella was black with a wooden handle, and it didn’t keep her dry. The backs of her calves got spotted with raindrops, her dress clung to her legs, her fingers got wet and slipped up and down the handle so she had to carry it in both hands.

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

Judy’s mother lived in a retirement home in Arkansas. Judy had just told her about that day in the rain.

“I told the babysitter, didn’t she tell you and Daddy?”

“She never said a word.”

Her mother was angry, as if it had happened only yesterday. Judy remembered her mother as she’d looked in those years-young, harried, smelling of cherry-scented Jergen’s hand lotion and dressed in a cotton shirtwaist, with hose and pointy high heels that caused bunions and bent her big toes sideways.

“Nobody would have believed me, anyway,” Judy said.

“I would have! Your dad would have gone over there.”

“But then what would have happened? People would have hated us.”

Her mother fell silent.

“You know they would have, Mom, for saying bad things about a churchman. Maybe that’s why I didn’t tell you-because I didn’t want to cause you and Daddy any trouble.”

Her mother couldn’t let it go. “I can’t believe she didn’t tell me. You were just a child, and she was the grownup. And I’m your mother. She should have told me.”

The man was white, tall, and thin.

In Judy’s memory, he wore black trousers, a white dress shirt buttoned to his neck, with a thin black tie, although she might have invented the tie. As she walked home alone from Bible school she passed another church, where she heard someone call out to her.

“Little girl!”

Startled, she paused and looked left. The rain had slowed a bit, so she could see the man from under her umbrella. He stood just inside an open door. He could have been the minister or janitor, he could have been a deacon. She didn’t know who he was, but she had a sense of what he was even though she couldn’t name it.

She saw a ladder in front of him.

“Little girl, come help me change this light bulb.”

She glanced up and saw a light fixture above the ladder.

She was an obedient child, respectful to grownups, but something inside of her didn’t like this. Nobody had ever warned her; nobody ever warned any children about anything like this in those days, but still, she knew.

She shook her head and gave him a small, stiff smile.

“Come in here and help me,” he called out to her. “Don’t you want to come in out of the rain?”

He wasn’t attractive. He had dark hair that looked thin and greasy, which was how his voice sounded to her, too. She had a crush on the handsome husband of one of her mother’s friends, but this man didn’t look like that. She wouldn’t have wanted to laugh at his jokes, or take any lemonade he handed her.

She shook her head again. “I have to go.”

“What? Come closer so I can hear you!”

“No,” she whispered, her heart pounding as she started walking away from him. “No thank you.”

“But I need help. It will only take a minute. You should help me, little girl. Don’t you want to help me?”

He wasn’t much of a salesman, she thought years later, or he’d have known never to ask a question that could be answered no.

She walked faster. Why would a grown man need to have a little girl help him put in a light bulb? She felt shaky and afraid and embarrassed without knowing exactly why. Nobody had told her anything about sex, but she’d seen her parents kiss, she’d been to an Elizabeth Taylor movie, and she blushed when her mother’s friend’s husband was nice to her. She didn’t know anything, and yet she knew. She wanted to run, but she had an instinct like a little animal that knows that if you run you’ll look even more like a rabbit. She walked awkwardly, as if she’d forgotten how to move her legs; she walked quickly, longing for the end of the block, longing to turn the corner and get out of his sight, afraid to look back. She kept her face pointed straight ahead, as if nothing were amiss, as if she didn’t think he was scary. When she was sure he couldn’t see her any longer, she finally did run, releasing the handle of the umbrella when it pulled against her hand, letting it fly off behind her.

“I was so mad at you for losing that umbrella.”

“What if he’s still out there, Mom?”

“After all these years? Judy, he’s dead by now. Or he’s as old as I am.” She was ninety-three. “He could have Alzheimer’s. He could be in prison.”

“I think he was about thirty. That would put him near ninety now. He could still be in pretty good shape. Look at you. You’re as smart as you ever were, and you’d still be walking a mile a day if your back didn’t hurt so much.”

“I want him to be dead,” her mother said. “Judy, tell me the truth, are you sure he didn’t hurt you?”

“He never touched me. Truly, Mom. He never got close.”

“You were smart.”

“I was lucky.”

She didn’t tell her mother there was another Judy, an imaginary one who had developed in her mind over the years, a little girl who obeyed him even though she didn’t want to, a child who did go up that walk, who entered the dark hallway and started to climb the ladder, a little girl he grabbed when she was halfway up. Judy thought of her as Alternate Reality Judy. Sometimes Alternate Reality Judy made it home and told her parents and they got him arrested and thrown in jail, sometimes she bit him and hurt him, and sometimes nobody ever saw that little Judy again. She’d had nightmares about imaginary Judy. And now she realized there could be real children, other Judys out there, and maybe she could have saved them.

“How’s your job?” her mother asked.

“Okay,” Judy lied, and then quickly got off the phone.

Two more glasses of wine later, she looked at her calendar, and then she looked up airfares to Kansas City.

This is crazy.

But it wasn’t only that she hadn’t told her parents about a child molester. It was that she had kept silent about a lot of things throughout her life. She didn’t say a word when a popular boy in high school mocked an old black man and called him nigger. Cringing on the inside wasn’t courage, and neither was shame. Sympathy, alone, was not integrity. Moving to Detroit, where she was in the minority, wasn’t anything noble either; she’d been chasing jobs, not racial equality. She hadn’t ridden a Freedom Bus or marched in Selma, or even in Kansas City. She hadn’t crossed lines, not literal ones like Twenty-seventh Street, nor metaphorical ones. Once she’d had a boss who cheated customers, but she’d never reported him. She’d seen car accidents where people could have used a witness, and she’d driven on. She felt as if she’d spent her life with tape over her mouth, one word written on the tape in black and permanent ink-coward. It was why she liked mystery novels with strong female detectives; she could feel their courage without having any herself.

“Little girl! Don’t you want to help me?”

“I did help you,” she murmured as she clicked her payment through for a flight. “I helped you to keep doing it.”

In a rental car she picked up at the Kansas City airport, Judy drove into downtown and then cut east to Paseo, where she turned south toward Linwood. What she saw along the way seemed to confirm what she’d heard: the city of her birth was still segregated. She drove past her old address, but the building was gone. The Presbyterian church was still there on Linwood, but it stood empty, truncated, half of it vanished, leaving only bare ground in the place of three stories of brick that she would have sworn could never fall.

And then, there it was-the corner with the church where he had stood in the doorway calling to her. It was an African American Methodist congregation now, she saw from its sign. It looked as deserted as her own old church. She parked anyway, and walked over to the side door. How many times had she sent Alternate Reality Judy up this walk? she wondered. How many other children had crossed that distance?

“That church is closed.”

She turned and saw an elderly black woman coming slowly down the sidewalk. Judy walked toward her.

“Hello. I used to live around here,” she said, “back in the fifties.” She wanted to defend herself: I was just a child. “This was a different church then, and I can’t remember the name of it. You wouldn’t happen to know what it used to be, would you?”

“Well, it wouldn’t have been like this one,” the woman said. It wouldn’t have been African-American, she meant. She looked permanently tired; the circles under her eyes were twice as dark as the rest of her face. “It’s been a lot of different churches.”

“Do you remember any of them?”

She appeared old enough to remember when she herself wouldn’t have been allowed to sit in the pews of any church along the boulevard.

“Not from when you would have lived here. Sorry, I can’t help you.” She started again on her slow perambulation over the buckling cement. But then she turned back: “You might try looking it up on the Internet, honey. That’s what I’d do.”

“I did look it up, but I couldn’t find it.”

“This where you went to church when you were young?”

“No. It’s where a man tried to molest me.”

It felt liberating to say it out loud to a stranger.

“Lot of that going around,” the woman said, with a headshake and a look of disapproval. “Good luck to you, although I don’t know why you’d want to find that man again.”

“I want to stop him.”

That felt good to say, too.

“A little late, aren’t you?”

Judy felt herself flush, the good feeling dissolving into shame.

“If it was that long ago,” the woman said with a shrug, “then I expect God’s already stopped that man by now.”

Judy glanced up the impoverished block and saw no sign of any deity’s beneficence to children.

“Do you know where the nearest police station might be?”

“Police? We don’t need no police around here,” the woman said, in the tone of a wry joke. But then she raised her right arm and pointed. “Go on up west on Linwood, honey.”

At the police station, a young black female officer sent Judy back north to the Crimes Against Children Division. The detective who took her to an office there was also Afro-American, also a woman. Changes, Judy thought, and was grateful for them. The expression in the cop’s brown eyes blended wary attention with a willingness to listen. “I don’t know if the archives go back that far,” she said, “but I’ll check.” Her tight-lipped smile reminded Judy of salespeople who didn’t have what she wanted but promised to let her know if anything came in, and then she never heard back from them.

“Why now,” the cop asked, “after all these years?”

“It finally dawned on me there might be other kids that he did worse things to than what he did to me. He only scared me. I don’t think that was his first time. I doubt it was his last time, either. I just thought, maybe I can still do something. Maybe he’s a grandfather now, maybe he has grandchildren…”

The cop nodded. “If I find out anything, I’ll call you.”

Judy felt her hope fall.

They traded cards with phone numbers.

Judy got into her rental car, knowing nothing was going to come of this. She had thought she’d feel better for the effort, even if it was too little, too late, but she only felt worse for trying and failing.

Why did I waste all this money I don’t even have?

She was sixty-six years old, alone, out of work, at the limit on her credit cards, soon to be out of her house.

Feeling despairing and adrift, she checked her cell phone and saw there’d been a call from her mother.

“Judy, I’ve remembered the name of that babysitter,” her mother said when Judy called. “Or, rather, I didn’t remember it, but I’ve found it.”

Judy felt queasy in the hot car. “I didn’t know you were looking for it,” she responded slowly, and then tried to swallow away the sick feeling in her mouth. She turned on the ignition and the air conditioning, rolled down all the windows, and waited for a chance to tell her mother goodbye.

“Well, the more I thought about how she didn’t tell me, the madder I got. So I looked for my old phone directory, and there it was. I guess personal phone books have gone out of style now that people have those fancy cell phones to keep track of everything, but I’ve still got mine from every place we ever lived. So, if she’s still married to the same man, her name is still Mary Lynn Whelan, and his name was Sidney, and their daughter’s name is Sue.”

“Wait. What? She had a daughter?” With her free hand, Judy plucked at her lower lip.

“A year younger than you.”

“I don’t remember.”

“I’m not surprised. She didn’t have much personality, and what little there was of it wasn’t all that great.” Her mother laughed a little. “We called her dishwater girl, because she had a kind of bland and dirty look.”

“That was mean of us. Mom, I’d better go.”

“If you talk to Mary Lynn Whalen,” her mother suddenly blurted, “you tell her that she should have told me!”

“I won’t be talking to her, Mom.”

But after Judy got off the phone, a breeze kicked up. She was still depressed, though her stomach had calmed down. Curiosity got the best of her, and she looked up Sidney Whalen on the Internet on her cell phone-thinking that the old black woman would approve-and shocked herself by finding the listing: Sidney and Mary Lynn Whalen. While she stared at it, she got another call, this one from the local area code, 816.

The detective.

“I made a call,” she told Judy, “and I’ve got you some information on a cop who used to cover that beat, back in the day. Do you want it?”

Judy felt her pulse jump with surprise and anxiety.

“Oh. I… sure… yes. Thank you!”

“I probably should tell you…”

When the detective didn’t say anything for a moment, Judy said, “What?”

“He’s a mean old bastard, and he says there were other children.”

He was old, fat, bad-tempered, cancerous, and unreasonable, and he lit into her the moment she entered his room in his nursing home. He was in a wheelchair, and he said, “Come over here where I can see the person who might have saved those children and didn’t. It was you, was it? You knew what he was doing, you could have been a witness. All I needed was a witness, somebody he’d molested or tried to molest, some kid to say what he did and how he did it, and you could have been that girl, but you didn’t do it. Why didn’t you? Do you know how many children he hurt after you? Before you? Because of you?”

“You can’t blame me for what he did-”

“Of course I can, you goddamned little coward.”

She recoiled. He was her own conscience reviling her.

“I was eight years old, for heaven’s sake.”

“Well, you’re not now, are you? And you haven’t been that young for how long? Fifty years, sixty years? All that time you could have come forward. All that time you could have done some good. Go away. I don’t even want to see your goddamned face. Now you come? Now you say there was a bad man in that church? What the hell good did you think this was going to do?”

“Who was he? Is he still-”

“His fucking name is James Marway, and he is a senile old pervert, vegetating away in the Greenly Nursing Home, and they treat him nice and gentle instead of poking him with hot irons the way they ought to do, and he doesn’t even know what he did to those little kids. I kept hearing about it, rumors, and I finally figured out it was him, but nobody would talk, nobody would accuse him, and there wasn’t anything I could do to get him. With you, maybe I could have got him. I could have stopped him, or at least got him moved out of my streets. Get out of here! You’re too late, you’re too damn many years late!”

She fled, and it felt familiar.

“I’m surprised you remember me.”

“My mom asked me to say hi.”

Judy didn’t know why she was sitting in Mary Lynn Whalen’s living room. She barely remembered driving there, ringing the doorbell, stumbling over “Hello, I’m Judy Harmon, and you used to be my babysitter.” Maybe I want a babysitter right now, she thought. Maybe I want somebody to take care of me and sing me a lullaby and tell me I’m not a horrible person.

“Well, that’s so nice of her.”

Mary Lynn looked a little confused as she sat at the opposite end of her very nice couch. Sidney must have done all right over the years, Judy thought, thinking of how her own parents had been upwardly mobile, too. In her own generation, people were only moving on down.

Mary Lynn said, “How are your folks?”

“Dad died ten years ago. Mom lives in Arkansas, and really likes it. I’m in Detroit. I had a job in accounting with General Motors.”

“I can’t believe a girl I babysat is old enough to be retired.”

Judy didn’t correct the impression. She wondered if she looked as wild-eyed, shocked, and besieged as she felt. Probably not, or this woman, this stranger now, wouldn’t have let her inside. “What about your family?”

“Oh, Sid and I are okay, I guess. We lost our daughter-I doubt you’d know about that.”

“Sue? No, oh, I’m so sorry. When did she die?”

“Oh, not that kind of lost, although honestly sometimes I think it might be better. I mean lost as in meth addict, all kinds of problems, prostitution, in and out of jail.”

“Sue?” This time the single syllable held a new world of shock.

“I know, who’d have suspected she would turn out like this…” She trailed off, stared down at the carpet.

“I’m so sorry, Mary Lynn. I had no idea.” After a moment she said, abruptly enough to feel rude, “I want to ask you about one of the times you babysat for me.”

“Okay.” Mary Lynn looked up, clasping her hands in her lap.

“I came in late one day, from Bible school. It was raining really hard, and I’d lost my umbrella. And I told you that a man had scared me. That I’d run away from him because he tried to get me to go inside his church.”

“What?” Her hostess seemed to pull herself together, and then she startled Judy by laughing. “Oh my gosh, I do remember. Didn’t I tell you not to worry?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, I should have, because that was just Sue’s uncle.”

“Sue’s uncle?”

“No, wait, I wouldn’t have told you that, come to think of it.”

“Excuse me. It was some man I’d never seen before.”

“No, I suppose you hadn’t ever met him, but yes, that was my husband’s brother. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you. I should have, so you wouldn’t be scared. He was custodian at that church, and we didn’t like to tell people that. So silly. We should have been open about it, but we were embarrassed. If we’d only known the humiliating things we’d have to tell people about our own daughter later… Sue wasn’t supposed to tell anybody about him, either.”

“About him?”

“That he was a janitor.”

“Are you sure we’re talking about the same man? What was his name?”

“Well, it still is his name, though he has forgotten it.” She shook her head. “James Marway was, is, his name, because he had a different father from my husband. Sidney’s dad died in World War II and his mom got remarried to Jim’s dad. I never liked him very well, to tell you the truth. Jim, I mean. There was just something about him, you know? He always loved children, though. So that was a point in his favor. His own kids are incredibly screwed up, though, so it wasn’t just us that ruined our kid.”

Her eyes had endless regret and bafflement in them. “I think that’s why Sue didn’t come home with you that day, wasn’t that right? I think she stopped off to help her Uncle James with something.”

“Changing a light bulb,” Judy said, her mouth dry.

“Was that what it was?” Sue’s mother smiled, breaking Judy’s heart. “You really do have a good memory, to be able to recall a little thing like that.”

Judy told her everything else she remembered of that day.

She had to see him.

“I’m his niece,” she told the nurse in his room.

The overhead light was on, making the room unpleasantly bright, but it allowed her to see clearly the old man under the sheets. He wore white pajamas, and the blanket and sheets were tucked up neatly under his armpits, as if the nurse had just performed that service and then placed his long arms over the top of them. He looked grizzled, with white whiskers and long strands of white hair over his skull. “He needs a shave,” the nurse said, sounding apologetic.

“Don’t worry,” Judy said, thinking of straight-blade razors.

The nurse walked out of the room.

Judy went up to the bed and stared down at him. His eyes were closed, and she wanted him to open them, so she said his name several times.

“James. Jim Marway!”

When he didn’t respond, she raised her hand and slapped his face so that his eyelids popped open and he looked around, confused.

“That was for your niece,” she told him.

He seemed to peer into her face without seeing her.

“Sue,” she repeated.

She was shocked at herself, and then momentarily scared that somebody might have seen her slap him. She turned to check if anybody was in the hallway and shielded her eyes from the overhead light. The part of her that was still scared and reticent felt as if it was crawling to the back of her being, and a new, bolder, furious Judy seemed to be taking over.

She let it in, let it flood her with confidence.

“I hate this light,” she said, and then walked over and flipped it off, throwing the room into dimness, and closed the door. “Oh look!” she exclaimed in a mocking little-girl voice. “The bulb has gone out! I think this light bulb needs changing, don’t you? Don’t you want to help me change this bulb, little boy?”

The old man’s eyes cleared for a moment, and he stared at her with panic. She crossed back to his bed and jerked a pillow out from under his head and then put it onto his face and pressed.

“And this is for the other children.”

Just northwest of downtown, where the Kaw River flows into the Missouri and they start riding on east together, there is an overlook that wasn’t there when Judy was a child. If it had been there in the early ’50s, it would have been underwater. She stood with her arms crossed over a railing to watch the rush of muddy water below.

She thought she remembered the river as having been busy with barges and tugs, but there were none that she saw now. It was as treacherous-looking as she recalled, however, full of rough current and dangerous eddies. She watched a big log pop up and down, get caught, sucked under, and then turn up again downstream. It made her stomach feel funny, like being on a roller coaster, as if she’d ever been brave enough to actually ride one.

I’m braver than that now, she thought.

She leaned harder against the railing so she could stare deeper down into the river. In the back of her mind she heard her own scared, childish self, yelling, Back up, Daddy! Back up!

Judy put her right foot on the lower bar of the railing.

“I swear that river could shoot us all the way to St. Louis!” her mother had exclaimed that day in the Chevy, during the great flood in Kansas City.

Judy climbed to the top rung and brought her legs over until she could sit on the railing. The bar was slick with moisture, and it was easy to lose her grip.