The Best American Mystery Stories 2014

Princess Anne by Jim Allyn

FROM Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

HOWARD PICKED UP his blinking line. “Investigations Division, Jim Howard.”

Silence. “Hello?”

Rough breathing. He could make out a quiet beeping in the background. “Charlie?”

“Jus’ a sec,” a weak voice said. Charlie Post had been in intensive care for ten days now. Howard waited as he gathered enough strength to speak.

“Lyle Collins is coming out,” Post finally rasped. “My guy at Eddystone told me.”

Eddystone was the warehouse of choice for Northern Indiana criminal psych patients. Howard felt a cold knot forming in the pit of his stomach.

“For Christ’s sake, don’t they ever die inside?”

“Coming out late this month. The report will say he’s stable.”

“Stable?! And what do the geniuses think did that? Sloppy Joes every Thursday?”

“Stay on’m, Jim. He’s ancient history. Off the books. He’ll be flying under the radar.” Charlie Post coughed hard.

Howard was jammed up, in the middle of a limbo that involved moving his life and his work from the Northern Indiana Investigations Division of the state police to northern Michigan, where he was trying to land a position with the Major Case Unit of the Michigan State Police. He and Charlie Post went way back. Way back was where Lyle Collins was coming from.

“Stay on’m. I know you’re spread thin. Just remember that bastard won’t be able to keep it together for long. He’ll be hungry.”

“I’ll make time, Charlie.”

Howard could hear fluid bubbling in Post’s throat. “Billy Ferguson used to come over Sunday nights to play hearts with the family. Sweet kid. He and Angie were a match, you know. Rare thing. Then one fine spring day he’s just gone.” Howard could not see the hand he lifted from the bed and waved slightly. “Just gone. Angie never got over it.”

“I remember,” Howard said. “You hang in there, Charlie.”

“Been doin’ that,” he whispered. “I’m ready for somethin’ else.”

“I’ll stop by next week.”

“Better make it sooner than that.”

Howard’s face was grim. He was going to miss old Charlie Post.

Some people have graves in their lives from early childhood, places to visit with their families to express their love for those gone on ahead. Neither of the Lanes had a grave in their life until they moved out into the country. It came with the house and became part of the fabric of their young family.

They had bought the abandoned farm for a song. Although it was only 25 miles from South Bend, it looked like something from the heart of Appalachia. The Deliverance banjo-boy would have felt right at home.

Many well-heeled South Bend professionals were into McTrophy homes of the castle variety or Frank Lloyd Wright knockoffs. Derek Lane, a tax attorney on the way up, and his wife, Parveen, a working pharmacist until she became pregnant, lived simply. They liked old things. Liked to clean them up, fix them, and make them part of their world. The fact that these things were often bargains suited the Lanes perfectly. They saved their money and looked for a vintage place with character and a little land.

They had found the peeling white eyesore lost on five acres in the rolling Indiana countryside. It might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. The Realtor hadn’t even bothered to put it on the website. Who would ever want to take on the work of a falling-down farmhouse with acreage that had not been tended for years? The Lanes loved it.

The couple had been inspecting the wildly overgrown grounds near the house when they found the grave. It was tough going. Beneath an early spring canopy of towering white oak and black locust, they were engulfed by head-high scrub brush and prickly raspberry bushes. Parveen, who came from a desert country, marveled at the vibrancy of the emerging green life. First they found the lid of the cistern, took one look down into that dank, water-filled tank, and decided to have it filled in. Their baby would be here soon and the cistern was an accident waiting to happen. They found green hundred-year-old bottles and rusty tools. They found a maze of half-buried chicken-wire fences and a pile of glazed bricks with raised letters that said “Metropolitan Block,” the foundation of something long since rotted away. They admired the glazed bricks and would put them to good use. They found a perfectly preserved brown jug. Then they found the grave.

The house overlooked a small hollow that fell away, rising quickly again at the edge of their property. Later they would install a large picture window so that they could look across that little hollow. They had been inspecting the brow the house sat upon when Parveen noticed a smooth spot on the ground. She thought it was the odd piece of broken brick, but when she rubbed it with her shoe she saw that it was larger than that. She scraped more away with her shoe and saw letters. The two knelt down together and with their gloved hands gently pushed away the dirt and matted leaves. Deeply and carefully carved into a thick piece of aged oak, the epitaph had a few worn letters but was clear nonetheless:

HERE LIES PRINCESS JENNY

Forever friends in this gentle place

My little princess

Gone home now to this good earth

Sleeping now where we lived together

And will again

When the heavens and the oceans and the mountains

Shall pass away

For a couple who treasured relics, nothing they might have found could have been more endearing. Parveen raised a hand to her reddening throat as Derek slowly read the words aloud in his clear barrister voice. He nodded his head approvingly and smiled. He stood up, put his hands on his hips, and looked about. They were home.

Derek took the oak marker down to his basement workshop. He cleaned out the letters with a wire brush and let the wood dry out for three weeks. He soaked the underside in black creosote and soaked the surface in boiled linseed oil. After it dried, he replaced it exactly, now essentially impervious to the elements.

Parveen gathered softball-sized fieldstones of gray and grayish pink and gray-black and made a semicircle around the top of the marker. She planted crocosmia with the orange-flame flowers that the hummingbirds loved and moonbeam coreopsis with their bright bursts of yellow, daisylike blooms.

Derek cleared the grounds of the forgotten homestead on weekends and vacations, removing the chaos of brush and dropping the dead trees with his thunderous 1950s Homelite chainsaw. It all began to look parklike, a five-acre estate. They installed the picture window and added an outside light. Sometimes at night they would light up the little grave and the area around it, the artificial light casting shadows so differently from the moonlight. When they turned off the light, the moonlight flowed down through the boughs, blanketing the marker and the fieldstones and the flowers in a magical glow.

Derek cut logs from the steel-like black locust and made twin benches. One he placed next to the grave, the other he placed directly across on the opposite ridge close to the property line. The benches became their favorite places to sit and read and have coffee, and, finally, wonderful places to sit with baby Margaret.

Margaret arrived after Smoky, the black Lab, and Trudy, the calico cat, had already joined the family, and after the heavy lifting at the place was done. A puppy, a kitty, a blond-headed baby girl. A young, vigorous, devoted couple. What had been a forgotten and forlorn place was now bursting with life. Derek and Parveen nestled into their handmade world. The joy they felt was beyond words. Because the grave was a mystery, holding no memories, it became a fanciful thing. As the years went by, they invented stories for Margaret. The stories of Princess Jenny became a bedtime ritual. Parveen drew charcoal sketches to bring the fantasies to life. Princess Jenny was a unicorn ridden by a fairy, a ferocious black panther with golden eyes who was the protector of a golden queen. Princess Jenny was the favorite companion of princes and kings and queens and paupers and blacksmiths because Derek and Parveen knew that in real life she had in fact been someone’s beloved companion. She lived in the time of miracles, when dragons breathed fire and covetous gods gazed down from castles in the clouds. Margaret would take her dolls and her mother’s sketches and play beside the grave for hours, a handy spot for Parveen to keep a watchful eye on her from the picture window.

It was July and muggy when a silver Cadillac Escalade pulled into the Lane Farm, as it came to be known. A distinguished-looking elderly man stepped out. Parveen was working in her garden and came toward him, toweling her hands as she came. It was no one she knew. She guessed that he just needed directions. She noticed that on such a hot day he was wearing a winter suit of rust-colored corduroy and a wide, dated tie. He looked like the gamekeeper of an English estate. He was tall, pale, and clearly uncomfortable. His white hair was long and slicked down. His moist blue eyes were kindly and faintly apologetic.

“Good afternoon, young lady,” he said. “My name is Lyle Collins and I’m here for Princess Jenny.”

Parveen dropped her towel. She stared at the strange old man who, with one sentence, had penetrated her intimate world, a world no one knew about except her immediate family.

“Do you know Princess Jenny?” Collins asked. “Have you found her grave?”

Parveen nodded, mute.

“I can see I’ve startled you,” he said. “I’m sorry. I know this seems bizarre. Please hear me out. I lived here many, many years ago. I was not a well man. I was what they now call bipolar, although no one really knows what that means. I was a young professor at Notre Dame when I descended into illness. For a time I was homeless. I moved into this farm because it was deserted and no one cared about it. It was my home for almost two years. Early the first winter, a little dog came to the door.” Collins took a white handkerchief from the pocket of his jacket and dabbed at his eyes.

“She was a brown-and-white cocker spaniel. I named her Princess Jenny and she became my only friend. We lived here together.”

He turned from Parveen, his eyes wandering over the spacious grounds, the lovely white farmhouse with green shutters and trim. “Of course, it was nothing like this. Did you do all this?”

“Yes, my husband and I,” she said proudly. “When we bought it, it was quite a mess.”

“You’ve done wonders with the place. It’s beautiful.”

“Thank you,” Parveen said.

“Of course, I was able to move in unnoticed because it was forgotten and abandoned,” Collins continued. “Without running water. Without electricity. Heat from wood I put in the cast-iron cookstove. In winter we lived mostly in the kitchen near the stove. Sometimes Princess and I shared dog food. I could not be friends with people. In my illness I did not understand people and they did not understand me. But Princess Jenny and I understood each other and she was my friend.” He paused, loosening his tie and unbuttoning the top button of his wrinkled white shirt. “I thought if I wore a coat and tie you might think me less weird,” he said with a small, embarrassed smile.

“It’s all right,” Parveen managed. “I’m beginning to understand. You thought about Princess Jenny a lot while you were… away?”

“Every day,” Collins said quietly. “Every day. At that time it was important to me that she immediately liked me and stayed with me. She didn’t have to. She could have left me at any time, run off.”

“What happened?” Parveen asked.

“One afternoon we were out for a walk in the woods when Princess stepped into a trap. I don’t know, something for a fox or muskrat, perhaps. It slammed shut, almost severing her left front leg. By the time I got the trap open and carried her back to the house, she was gone. I stayed… stable… just long enough to bury her and make the marker. Then I became unable to function and was committed to the mental hospital near Gary. Eddystone. That was fifteen years ago.” He looked intently at Parveen. “Medication, therapy, and time have made me well. I was released several weeks ago and plan to return to my family’s home in Wisconsin. They will have me now that I am well. I want to take Jenny there so that she can always be near me.”

“I understand,” Parveen said. “I understand how important she must be to you. You will probably be surprised to know that she has also become important to us. Come with me.”

Parveen took him to the grave. Lyle Collins knelt down. Tears filled his eyes. “It’s just wonderful the way you’ve made her part of your family,” he murmured. “It’s time now for us to be together again after all these lost years. I took great pains to bury her in a protected way.” He looked up at Parveen. She was deeply moved. She held out her hand to help him up.

“Can you come back tomorrow at noon?” she asked. “I will talk with my husband tonight.”

“Of course,” Lyle Collins said.

Predawn, like going out on night patrol. Howard parked his green Jeep wagon in the northeast corner of the empty parking lot of the old church. It was the corner nearest the woods. He put the POLICE sign on his dashboard. The weeds growing in the gravel lot were knee-high, waving slightly in the dimness. He wondered how many years it had been since a service had been held here.

The skyline was tinted with gray light. It was already warm, the air thick with dew and slim strands of fog. Howard smeared himself with insect repellent and smudged his face with camo grease. He had his binos, water, and a sandwich. His cell was working. His Colt Trooper was loaded. He let his eyes adjust to the darkness, checked his compass, and stepped into the thick, tangled hardwoods. He didn’t really need a compass, but it might save him a few minutes. It would be an up-and-down hike through thick woods, skirting just one farmhouse and one bog. He felt confident. Too bad Charlie Post wouldn’t be here to see it.

When Collins returned the next day, the Lanes were waiting. Derek had come home straight from the office and planned to go back. He was wearing a dark tailored suit with a solid navy tie, a very formal contrast to his wife’s bright yellow sundress. Collins wore the same dated corduroy suit he had worn the previous day.

Derek had a shovel and a wheelbarrow. He would spare the old man the digging. He shook hands with Collins and began digging. He removed the sod in squares so that it could be put back in place and shoveled the dirt into the wheelbarrow to keep the gravesite looking as undisturbed as possible. They had decided not to tell Margaret, who was now almost five. Someday they would explain, but not now. About 2 feet down, Derek struck something. Lyle Collins got down and with a trowel Derek gave him began gently scraping and digging around the object. After a few minutes he removed a military-issue waterproof PVC bag about the size of a car tire. Derek rinsed the olive-drab bag with the hose and Collins toweled it dry with a rag they gave him. Lyle Collins shook their hands and said he would never forget their kindness.

They did not see the shape at first. It arose by the far bench near their property line, moved down the small hollow and then up toward them. They heard the movement and turned and saw it at the same instant. It took them several beats to realize a big man was striding up toward them. As he neared they could see he was covered in woodland camouflage with black and green paint on his sweating face and a large blue revolver hanging from his right hand. Black binoculars were slung around his neck. He looked like he had stepped out of jungle combat in Quang Tri Province, Republic of Vietnam, in 1968.

He came up the slope extending his ID with his left hand. As they took a collective step back he swung his Colt Trooper in an arc, the long barrel glancing off the cheek of Lyle Collins. Collins dropped in a motionless heap. The man shoved the revolver into his green web belt, went down on both knees, jerked Collins’s hands behind his back, and cuffed him. Collins was dazed, but recognition and fear were evident in his twisted face. The man got back up.

He held his identification closer for the Lanes to inspect. In their shock, they struggled to focus in on the gold badge and photo. “My name is Jim Howard, Northern Indiana Investigations Division. This man, Lyle Collins, is my prisoner.” Howard stepped away, flipped his cell open, and called in. He gave the address and some codes.

“What’d you hit him for?” Derek asked angrily. “He wasn’t doing anything.”

“Can’t be too careful,” Howard said.

“For God’s sake, call an ambulance or I will,” Derek ordered, looking down at Collins’s still form and bleeding cheek.

“He doesn’t need an ambulance,” Howard said. “I’m a paramedic.” He kicked Lyle Collins hard in the stomach, and Collins groaned. “His vital signs are good.”

The Lanes were staring at Howard in disbelief, trying to make sense of the last few bizarre, explosive moments. Howard tried to imagine how he must look to them and how little they knew about what was going on. “Look,” he said, “this guy’s a killer. He killed several people years ago, but we could never make the case stick. Smart bastard, slippery and crazy as hell. He’s been locked away in a psych hospital for years. They just released him. God knows why.”

“Are you telling us there’s a body in that bag?” Derek asked, his skepticism apparent in his face and voice. The bag was obviously too small for that.

“No,” Howard said. “He told you he was coming back for… what? Some precious pet? I’ve been tailing him, scoped his visit yesterday, saw your wife bring him back here. When I came on your place last night and saw the marker, I figured it out.”

“You were creeping around our place last night?” Derek asked.

“Not creeping. Investigating,” Howard said mildly, with a slight smile. “Lyle here is the guy who creeps around.”

“I think there’s a long-dead cocker spaniel in that bag and that you just struck a harmless old man,” Derek said heatedly.

“Collins would just as soon barbecue a cocker spaniel as give it a pat on the head,” Howard said.

“You’re going to have a lot of explaining to do when I get through with you,” Derek said threateningly, taking a step toward Howard. “You’re way the hell out of line, and I’m just the guy who can make you pay for it. I’m an attorney and a county commissioner. Bill Phelps is a personal friend of mine.”

Howard nodded, studying Lane, who suddenly looked like real trouble. He looked at the carefully positioned fieldstones around the grave and the orange and yellow flowers. He looked at the restored farmhouse. He looked at Trudy and Smoky, asleep together in the shade. Lovely couple living in Shangri-la, he thought. And a lawyer to boot.

“Okay,” he said quietly, pulling latex-free gloves from a pocket of his fatigues. The green bag was curled several times at the top and clip-locked. He detached the clip and unfolded the top. He pulled out a tan hard-shell, carry-on-sized suitcase. It looked like it had just come off the shelf. He set it on the ground and tried to open it. It was locked. He dug through Collins’s pockets, found his wallet, and dug through that, producing a key. He unlocked the suitcase and gently opened it. He stood up.

“Look but don’t touch.” The Lanes knelt down. A mild rotten aroma rose up. Panties caked with blood. There was a ripped nightgown. A wallet and a man’s gold wristwatch. There was a loose assortment of photographs, some yellowed along the edges, revealing faces misshapen with terror and pain, faces in the last moments of life. There were photographs of entire bodies positioned just so, like artists’ models. The lips of a blond-headed man had been made clown huge by smeared lipstick. His ears were gone. There was jewelry and a flattened Chicago Cubs baseball cap. There were two cased videotapes.

“Trophies,” Howard said. “Maniac porn.

“Collins lived in South Bend. He hunted around here and also in Ann Arbor and Bloomington. Liked college towns. After all those years in the hospital, he needed a fix fast. I guess he wasn’t ready to kill yet, so his trophies were the next best thing. Safer. This stuff would have kept him occupied for months.

“He’s nuts, but he’s bright,” Howard continued, the Lanes looking up from the nightmare in the open suitcase to Howard’s face, which was calm and reassuring. “Hiding this stuff here this way is pretty damn smart. Predators are very good at predicting what nice, normal people will do. They learn through observation, because they don’t have such feelings themselves. One thing nice, normal people won’t do is desecrate the grave of some little pet.

“The grave was here when you bought the place, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was an old deserted farm,” Parveen said. She reached out to touch something in the briefcase. Howard gently blocked her hand with the toe of his boot.

“Told you a good story, did he?”

“Yes,” Parveen said. “It was perfectly plausible. I felt sorry for him. You know, we made up fairy tales about this grave for our Margaret. What will we ever tell her?”

“If I knew the answer to that I might have kids of my own,” Howard said. He squatted on his haunches and snapped the suitcase shut. Parveen tried to stand. Her legs failed her. Howard took her weight against him and guided her to the bench. She sat hunched over with her hands between her knees, her face pinched.

“I can’t tell you how many times Margaret has played next to that grave,” Parveen said. “I would ask her to stay there, where I could keep an eye on her. Endless hour after endless hour. With something so hideous just beneath her.” She looked at Derek.

“When we moved in,” she whispered. “When we moved in, there was a big red smear on the basement floor.”

Derek put his arm around her and pulled her tight. “I tiled the basement floor,” he said. “Tiled right over it. Didn’t try to remove it.”

“Show us where it is, but I doubt if it’s anything,” Howard said. “I don’t think Collins was ever in this place. He wouldn’t have hid his trophies at a murder scene. He knew we’d be searching all along his tracks, so he had to come up with something creative, something without a trail. He made the marker somewhere else and was probably here only long enough to dig the hole.”

“Even if it’s red paint, it will always be blood to me,” Parveen said. “Why didn’t you tell us what you were doing after you saw him come here?”

“Would have changed your behavior. Couldn’t risk that. Collins might have noticed. He’s a student of normal people.”

“The epitaph he carved,” Derek said after a while. “Beautifully poetic. Terrible thing to have such words inside an animal like that.”

Howard shrugged. “Words will do somersaults for anybody.”

“What will happen now?” Parveen asked.

“Oh, we have him now,” Howard said with satisfaction. “The suitcase is the mother of all connect-the-dots, a goddamn brass ring. With my testimony and yours, he’ll probably get two or three first-degree-murder convictions. Worst-case scenario, recommitted to a hospital for life. Either way, he’s off the streets for good.”

Siren off, a black-and-white prowler pulled into the driveway, followed closely by two unmarked cars.

Howard touched Derek Lane’s arm. “Look, counselor, you’re right, I was a little over the top with Collins. I’d appreciate a pass, though. I clipped him for a friend of mine who died last Tuesday. Name of Charlie Post. Stayed on Collins for years. His daughter’s boyfriend, kid named Billy Ferguson, was one of Collins’s victims. He went missing and we damn well knew it was Collins. I mean, you stir things up, it won’t bother me much. I know how to finesse a charge of excessive force. But it could screw up our case. Give some lawyer a foot in the door. We sure as hell don’t want that.”

“There was a scuffle,” Parveen said quickly. “We really didn’t see anything.” Derek gave her a sideways glance.

“That works,” Howard said. He looked at Derek. “Okay, counselor?”

Derek Lane looked thoughtfully at Howard. “Was my family ever in danger?”

Howard’s eyes widened. He looked away for a moment. He looked back at Lane. “Just so we’re clear, counselor, are you asking me if your family was ever in danger from a homicidal maniac who kills randomly and who has buried his trophy case next to your house?”

Derek Lane flushed. “There was a scuffle. We didn’t see anything.”

“Good. Thanks. I’ll take it from there if anything comes up.”

Derek looked over at the Escalade. “Nice ride. He must have money.”

“Loaded,” Howard said. “Furniture family up in the Wisconsin Dells. Had enough for dream-team doctors and lawyers. They took our cases apart. They were all circumstantial, no bodies. Sometimes there was blood, signs of a struggle, that’s about it. The only real pattern, the only thread, was location and this joker here. He was always around and he was memorable because he acted so weird. He was finally put away not because he was a murdering son of a bitch but because he was nuts.”

Howard went over to the approaching group of uniformed and plainclothes officers and spoke to them briefly. Two uniforms helped Collins up, put him in the back seat of the prowler, and drove off. Howard returned to the Lanes.

“Look, for all practical purposes your house and this whole area are going to be ours for a while. Crime-scene tape, CSI teams, holes dug, the whole nine yards. Maybe you and your daughter could take a vacation or something.” The Lanes stared at him. “Yeah, well, just a thought. I really don’t know what to tell you except that I’m sorry for all this.” He shook their hands.

The Lanes watched as Howard went through the wooden gate Derek had made and began walking down the side of the gravel road back to where his Jeep was parked at the church some 2 miles away. Someone gave a shout: Did he want a ride? He waved them off.

Howard shoved his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders, movements he made when he was thinking. It made him look smaller. It was ninety degrees and he was sweating hard, camo fatigues soaked black. After so many long years of half-assed monitoring, it had been a very near thing with Collins. What if he hadn’t been there to take the handoff from Charlie Post? What if Charlie Post had died before Collins was released? Would his contact have sought out anyone else? If Collins had left Indiana and set up shop in Wisconsin, hell, he’d have died of old age before he was caught. Officially there wasn’t enough on him to make him a person of interest. The interest in him lived in the memories of guys like Charlie Post and his contact at Eddystone.

Howard liked the crunch of gravel under his Airborne boots. Made him feel military again. He thought maybe he should have stayed in the Marines, where buddies are around you all the time and teams were really teams and the order of battle always started out clear. It never stayed clear, but at least it always started out that way, and you didn’t have to worry about brilliant defense attorneys and genius doctors and goofy judges and rose-colored cloistered couples from la-la land. “Was my family ever in danger?”

He stopped and looked back. Derek and Parveen were talking with two plainclothes, but both were still looking down the road at him, as if he was carrying off something that they wanted back. He wasn’t. The something they wanted back was gone forever. They just hadn’t realized it yet. From this day forward, spilled red paint would never be just spilled red paint. He figured the Lanes would move away within the year.

He began walking again. He had not told the Lanes about Princess Anne. What was the point? He could not remember her epitaph, but he remembered she had one. She was buried about 150 miles away on the back lawn of a dilapidated factory on the outskirts of Ann Arbor. Back in the day, his tracking of Collins had taken him through and around the idle manufacturing buildings. When he noticed the grave, he thought what the Lanes had thought about Princess Jenny. Final resting place of a beloved pet. In this instance, the cherished company mascot. He remembered that the company name, whatever it was, was in the epitaph. He remembered something about Princess Anne being a companion to each and every worker on each and every shift. Collins would have buried his collection that was Princess Anne long after the gates were chained and all those jobs were long gone to China. Hide in plain sight. Howard shook his head wonderingly. It was becoming almost a “normal” thing-ordinary people leading ordinary lives randomly cut down by some nut job playing Angel of Death.

His chin sank lower into his chest. He stared at the gravel just a foot or two ahead of his next step. Princess Anne had not been anyone’s happy fantasy. Her grave had not been embraced by a loving couple and a sweet little girl. This grave was what it really was: a solitary obscenity. When moonlight shone upon the grave of Princess Anne, it was moonlight devoid of dreams. The chilly wind did not rustle over a bedtime story. It rustled over remnants of murdered lives. It will always be blood to me, Parveen had said. It was like that for Howard. Every day. In the morning he would call the Ann Arbor police and give them directions.