The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

Rebecca McKanna Interpreting American Gothic

from Colorado Review

Chloe received the first letter in December. She worked at the American Gothic House in Eldon, Iowa, and spent that afternoon helping a middle-aged couple put their golden retrievers into two of the museum’s many replicas of the clothes the couple in Grant Wood’s painting wore — a black dress and colonial-print apron for the woman; denim overalls and a black jacket for the man. Both dogs endured this stoically, much more stoically than Chloe thought she would have been able to do.

The house looked salmon colored in the fading winter light. It was only four thirty, but with the time change the sun would set soon. She walked toward the visitors center next to the house. Her hands ached from the cold. As she walked, carrying the pitchfork and costumes, she thought about Grant Wood. Was there any way he could have predicted the bastardization of his creation? Bougie people driving from suburbs of Chicago to pose their dogs for an insipid picture they would probably frame and hang above a piano no one played.

Inside the visitors center, Mark was behind the front desk, listening to someone on the phone. He was in his mid-twenties, a few years older than Chloe, and had worked at the museum longer than she had. He was tall and skinny with pale skin, wire-rimmed glasses, and hair the same color as Van Gogh in Self-Portrait with Palette — hair that was a golden red and seemed to be lit from within. Mark usually answered phone calls from people with questions about the house and its history or teachers who wanted to schedule field trips; he sometimes, however, talked to elderly people who called under the pretense of sharing their story about Grant Wood or the painting but who just wanted someone to talk to. He was always kinder and more patient with those people than Chloe thought she would be, making active-listening statements like I’m sorry. That must have been difficult. I see. Good for you.

The museum was closing soon, and one visitor remained — a man in his late fifties with graying hair and a long black coat. Chloe left him in front of an exhibit about Grant Wood’s childhood and went into the break room, where she propped the pitchfork against the wall, took off her coat, and grabbed a pile of mail from the counter to sort.

She heard the documentary about American Gothic playing on repeat in the media room. She always found the name “media room” a little too ambitious for the tiny space with a few wooden chairs and a TV and DVD player. She almost had the documentary memorized: “It is one of the most familiar images in American art, and its story starts here, in Eldon, Iowa, in the year 1930, when a young artist named Grant Wood saw a small white house built in the Carpenter Gothic style.” She found the narrator’s deep voice comforting.

She threw away a lot of junk mail — magazine-subscription ads and coupons mostly — and then sorted through the remaining letters. One was a thank-you card from a fifth-grade class that had visited the house a month before. Another was a clipping about the house that was in some art magazine recently.

Finally she got to the last letter. Its Daffy Duck postage was out of step with what was stamped across the back of the envelope in red: NOTICE! This correspondence was mailed by an inmate confined in a facility operated by the Kentucky Department of Corrections. Its contents are uncensored.

When she ripped it open she found creamy paper, the surface covered with neat, old-fashioned cursive from a pencil. The letter was formal, polite. A man asking what the painting was truly about. Was it a parody of Iowans? Or a tribute? Or something more serious — possibly a mourning portrait? He said he’d read a variety of different interpretations, and he was curious what the “official” interpretation was.

This may seem silly, he wrote. But as you can understand, I have nothing but time on my hands to ponder these things. I want to understand what Grant Wood’s intentions were. He signed the letter: Peace, Jon Allan Blue.

The name nagged at her. It seemed familiar, but wouldn’t she remember someone with the last name Blue? She looked up “Jon Allan Blue” on her phone. The number of results surprised her. The media had dubbed him “The Midwest Mangler.” His victims were young women in Iowa, Kentucky, and Nebraska, bodies mutilated beyond recognition, skulls bashed in, bodies stabbed repeatedly. He had been on death row at the Kentucky State Penitentiary for over a decade, since Chloe was ten years old.

There were photos of him online. He was handsome — even the media commented on his “all-American good looks.” His eyes were gray, his lips full. His forehead was heavily lined, and there were tributaries of wrinkles fanning out from his eyes. There was something appealing and youthful about his smile. He looked more like a CEO than a serial killer, although Chloe had read once that people in both occupations often had psychopathic traits.

Chloe held a letter written by someone who had stabbed several women to death, and this was terrifying — and the most exciting thing to happen to her. She was desperate to understand how someone who did so many horrific things could write such a polite, reasonable-sounding letter in perfect Palmer script.

While she read an interview with one of Jon Allan Blue’s lawyers, Mark entered the break room. He sat next to her, his shoulder touching hers, his head craned to look at her phone.

“What are you reading?”

Although there was no reason not to tell him, although the letter would have made for an interesting conversation, she darkened her phone’s screen, shrugged, and said it was nothing.

She did not write back, but she did not throw Jon Allan Blue’s letter away. She took it home and kept it in a drawer in her nightstand. She read through websites about his crimes each night when she got home from work.

Some of the websites said the women Jon Allan Blue murdered resembled an old girlfriend who scorned him. People pointed to this woman as the reason he began to hate and want to hurt women. This seemed much too simplistic to Chloe. Besides, when she pictured him murdering young women, they were never brunettes like his old girlfriend. They were always blondes like Chloe.

Then, in January, Jon Allan Blue sent a second letter. It was almost identical to his first letter, asking the same question about the painting’s meaning with the same polite tone. At the end he wrote, I am sure it would be more convenient for you to answer my question through email. Unfortunately, Kentucky inmates are not allowed Internet access, so I would greatly appreciate your written response.

After work Chloe went to Eldon’s post office, a red brick building on Eldon’s main street, across from the diner and a heating-and-cooling business. She paid thirty-five dollars, not an insignificant sum on her paycheck, to rent a PO box for a year and mailed her first letter to Jon Allan Blue. She kept her response short. She told him she worked for the museum and his question was a valid one. There was no consensus about what the painting meant. All the suggestions he floated were possibilities. Wood himself, however, had always maintained it was a tribute to Iowan life. Before she closed the letter, she encouraged him to respond with other questions he might have. As she drove home, she felt the thrill of expectation, a blooming in her chest. She felt the same way when she was a little girl and stole a candy bar from a gas station — guilty yet buzzed on adrenaline and the satisfaction of doing something inadvisable.

The next day after work, she and Mark went to Eldon’s only remaining bar. The town’s population was nine hundred, but with each census it continued to dwindle. There were a lot of shuttered businesses, mobile homes with busted windows, and plastic toys left in front yards to bleach in the sun. On the sign in front of Eldon’s high school, the motto “Do No Harm” had been posted, which summed up the school’s aspirations for its students pretty well. The people who did leave for college rarely returned.

Chloe had never gone to college, never left Eldon at all. At eighteen, she hadn’t known how to afford it and wasn’t sure she was college material. She’d never performed particularly well in her classes, other than art, and was often lost in daydreams when she should have been listening to her teachers. She told herself someday, when she saved some money, maybe she’d study art. But years passed and the day never came.

The bar smelled like stale beer and cigarette smoke. Other than the Johnny Cash song playing, the only sounds were pool balls hitting one another and the occasional smoker’s cough. She and Mark ordered beers and talked about the girl who’d tried to shoplift from the museum gift store earlier that day.

“What kind of teenager tries to steal a tote bag printed with a Grant Wood painting?” Mark asked, although to Chloe the answer was obvious — a desperate one. She opened her mouth to say that, but a hand on her shoulder interrupted her.

“Your mama let you out to play?”

It was her mother’s ex-boyfriend, Frank. He flashed yellow teeth at her in a smile. He was tall and skinny, and his jeans, work boots, and the hairy backs of his hands were flecked with white paint. She had never liked him — a mean drunk who always looked at her like she was a flank steak rather than a human being. He leaned forward and slurred something else. By his inflection, she could tell it was a question. She did what she often did in such situations — appeased him and nodded and laughed, hoping she could make the interaction end, hoping his beer breath would move out of her face.

She realized she could have been agreeing and laughing about anything. He could have been asking if she were a dumb cunt, and she would have just laughed and nodded. The realization made her angry.

Frank leaned back and laughed, too. Then he continued on to the bathroom.

“Dick,” Mark said, but long after the man was out of earshot.

Jon Allan Blue responded to her letter a week later, thanking her for her response and asking what it was like to work at the museum. This started a series of short letter exchanges. They wrote about innocuous things — her job, his interest in art and Grant Wood in particular, their shared love of the Midwest landscape. Eventually, he began to write about his daily life in prison.

His cell on death row was 6 x 9 x 9.5 feet high. He woke at five A.M. to the rattle of the breakfast cart — powdered eggs and toast served on a Styrofoam tray with a plastic spork. At least once an hour a guard checked on him. Other than phone calls, legal visits, or exercise, he stayed in his cell. Death row had a particular smell — body odor and fecal matter. It was better back before 2011 when people were still allowed to smoke, he wrote. The smoke masked the stink. Although, you get used to it after a while.

He owned a 13-inch TV and said his favorite shows were American Idol and a drama about young lawyers. In another life, I would have liked to be a lawyer, he wrote.

Multiple prisoners in the wing watched Jeopardy together, each trying to yell out the right answer first. Men in the wing talked to one another, moving to the front of their cells and speaking loudly enough for their voices to echo down the hall. However, the talk was frequently the rambling of isolated, crazed men, so he put on his headphones and listened to the radio. He read a lot: news magazines and, lately, books about regionalist art and Grant Wood.

I’m not sure why American Gothic interests me so much, he wrote. I guess there’s something funny and sad and disturbing about it — all at the same time. I guess life is kind of like that, too.

One evening in March, she sat in her apartment reading his most recent letter.

She lived on the first floor of an old, creaky house sectioned off into apartments. As was often the case, she heard the girl who lived upstairs talking to her mother on the phone, telling her, yes, she was making good decisions, yes, this guy was a good guy, different from the last one.

Things are much the same here, Jon wrote in his latest letter. The appeals process drags on, but you know I doubt my attorneys’ skills and competence. It’s hard to describe how lonely this place is, especially in the evening. Your letters help make it bearable. It’s strange — I feel like I know you, yet we’ve never met. I would love to talk to you on the phone, if you’d be willing. I’m allowed limited phone privileges each week, and I can’t think of a better way to use them than hearing your voice. Please consider it. If you’re willing, let me know, and I’ll tell you how you can go about getting on my approved callers list.

As always, I wish you all the best, Chloe, and I think of you often.

She leaned her head against her futon. She’d bought it at the Salvation Army, and despite her best efforts, it still smelled of onions.

He was taking up more and more of her thoughts. She was painting again, something she hadn’t done since high school. She was good enough to be decent, but not good enough to be great or ever have a show in a gallery. She found herself sketching Grant Wood photos she looked up online, copies of copies. She mailed them to Jon, who told her he taped them up on his cell walls and complimented her on her proficiency. She started a sketch of him, but every time she worked on it, after about a half hour she realized she was sitting alone in her apartment drawing a flattering portrait of a serial killer. She would close her sketchbook and watch TV instead.

Chloe drank a beer to calm her nerves. When the phone finally rang, she heard an operator asking if she would accept a collect call from an inmate at the Kentucky State Penitentiary. She said yes but had a hard time catching her breath. She was perched on the edge of her futon and found herself staring at her bare feet on the hardwood floor, her calluses and chipped pink polish looking in step with the warped wood, two of the oak boards water stained and bowing like they were inflated.

She’d already heard his voice from interviews posted online, videos of him in the scarlet-red jumpsuit designating the prison’s death row inmates. In them, he talked like a teacher — someone comfortable with the sound of their own voice, comfortable explaining things to people, and confident they had the knowledge to make people understand. In more recent interviews, he said killing people was like being possessed by a demon. The next day, he felt great remorse for what he had done, and it weighed on him that, “in the eyes of God and in the eyes of the law,” he was responsible for what a “great force” had made him do. He squeezed his eyes shut when he talked like this.

The lines on his face were deeper than they had been during pictures taken at his trial, and his eyes appeared sunken, with dark circles surrounding them. Although he would spend long portions of the interview looking at his hands, choosing his words with care, when he did look at the interviewers, his stare was intense and penetrating. Chloe wondered what it would be like to be on the receiving end of such a gaze.

There was a thrill when she heard him say her name. He asked her where she was. After she answered, he said, “You have a lovely voice with just the tiniest bit of a lisp.”

She blushed. She’d endured years of special speech classes in school because of her lisp. It used to be much worse. She and a girl who couldn’t say her Rs read aloud from books about jungle cats. Both she and the other girl had only slight traces of their speech impediments by the time they graduated from high school.

“Oh, God,” she said. “That’s embarrassing.”

“No, no,” he said. “It’s endearing. It’s sweet.”

She felt profoundly grateful to him in that moment. He had only twelve minutes of phone privileges. They talked about his daily routine — apparently the prison gym’s treadmill was broken — and she talked about her job.

“I saw the painting in person once,” he told her. “In Chicago. It was,” he laughed drily, “before all this happened. It’s an amazing piece.”

Chloe told two lies to get her job at the center. The first was that she liked American Gothic, when in fact she found it hideous. The second was that she had seen it in person. The truth was, although she had lived in the Midwest her entire life, she never had the opportunity or funds to travel to Chicago.

Still, she found herself nodding, even though he couldn’t see her. “Amazing,” she agreed. “I felt the same way.”

Finally, when they had to hang up, he said, “Thank you for this. You don’t know how much I looked forward to talking to you.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. Once they were off the phone, she sat on her futon and continued to stare at her feet. She wondered what she was supposed to feel. Possibly guilt? Possibly conflicted? Instead, she tried not to smile.

Several phone calls later, he asked her to tell him something she hadn’t told anyone.

“I’m not that interesting,” she said.

“That’s obviously not true,” he said. “You were willing to become my friend. Not everyone would do that.”

She felt pleased he considered her a friend, and slightly unsatisfied — like when someone gave a hungry person only a bite of chocolate when they craved the whole bar.

“I guess there’s one story,” she said. “But it’s kind of weird.” Even thinking of it made her feel queasy.

“I like weird,” he said. So she told him.

She told him how her real father left when she was a baby. How he returned only once — when she was fourteen he came through town and asked to take her to dinner at a steak house in Fairfield, so they could catch up. Her mother hadn’t wanted to let her go, but Chloe wheedled until she got her way. The meal was good, a nice change from peanut butter sandwiches and ramen noodles. She learned he had done okay for himself, starting his own construction business in Illinois. He was ready to pay the back child support, to try to support her as best he could.

“You deserve that,” he said while they chewed their steaks. While he was paying the bill, she thought how lucky she was to have this man as her father and not her idiot stepfather, the father of her half siblings.

They had so much to talk about he drove down by the Des Moines River once they got back to Eldon, and they parked and sat and talked. It happened naturally. First he hugged her. Then he kissed her forehead. Then he kissed her neck. And then he reached up her skirt. The water lapped at the riverbanks. She put her hands where he told her, but she didn’t allow herself to think about anything. She kept her eyes closed, kept listening to that rushing water, kept letting it drown everything else.

When he dropped her off at her house, he kissed her on the forehead. He never visited again, but the child support payments continued coming until she turned eighteen.

When she finished her story, Jon cleared his throat. “It makes me regret I’m in here and not able to find your father and give him some nice whacks with a crowbar. That often does wonders for a person.”

That was the first night Chloe started fantasizing about Jon murdering people she knew.

She couldn’t deny his phone calls were becoming less a curiosity and more a thing stilling the loneliness beating inside her. The darkest thing he had ever done was out in the world for everyone to see. There was something comforting about that.

She didn’t fantasize about having sex with him. She didn’t know why, but she didn’t. Maybe because she had never enjoyed sex? Maybe because it always hurt in all the wrong ways? Instead, she pictured him putting a choke collar around her neck and leading her into the woods. She pictured him cutting off her clothes and making her kneel, naked, in the leaves. He would pull on the choke chain and grab a handful of her hair, yanking hard. For a while, that was the extent of the fantasy, and it was enough to get her off late at night, her fingers moving between her legs. But eventually, it changed. After he yanked at her hair, she would grab a sharp stick from the forest floor. She’d wait for him to let go of her hair, for him to give her chain some slack. Then she’d stab him in the neck with the stick, his warm blood flowing out across her hands and her naked chest until she was sticky with it.

“I think about stabbing you,” she told him once on the phone, surprising herself by saying it aloud.

“Do you?” he said, as though this amused him. “What else do you think about?”

She told him in precise detail, and when he finally spoke, his voice sounded deeper than before. “The first part of that sounds just fine,” he said. “But if you tried the second part, you would regret it.” He said this almost cheerfully.

“Would I?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, this time more firmly. A few moments later, the operator cut in, signaling their time was up.

“How would you kill someone and get away with it?” she asked Mark.

“What?” They were in the break room, eating sandwiches during lunch. He was sitting so close she felt the heat of his arm.

She repeated the question. He stared at her. “You’ve never thought about it?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I can honestly say I never have.” They lapsed into silence. The subject was all Chloe thought about. Killing and those who were capable of it. She wasn’t the only one fascinated. She couldn’t be. There were too many TV shows and movies and books all based around it. Too many fictional serial killers who were memorable in pop culture. But they couldn’t give her what Jon Allan Blue could. They were glamorized, flashy, unreal — pretty actors covered in corn syrup and red dye. They knew nothing about what it really felt like to take a life, what allowed you mentally to ascend to that ultimate assertion of power, erasing another person’s existence.

Mark bumped her shoulder with his and smiled. “What are you thinking about? The perfect crime?”

She smiled and shook her head.

“I think I’ve figured it out,” Jon said. It was early June, and Chloe was drinking a beer and sitting in front of her window air-conditioning unit, trying to dry the sweat that collected between and under her breasts.

“Figured what out?” she asked.

“The painting,” he said. “I think I understand what it means.” Jon told her Grant Wood lived in the attic of a funeral home’s carriage house and had replaced his front door with a coffin lid. He talked about the reaction to American Gothic — how one Iowan woman was so incensed by the painting, she threatened to bite Wood’s ear off. He started talking faster and faster, and Chloe struggled to follow what he was saying. He talked about all the black in the painting — the man’s black jacket, the woman’s black dress. He talked about the symbolism of the farmer’s pitchfork and of the plants on the doorstep — the geranium for melancholy.

“Look at the people in the painting,” he said. She had never heard him so agitated before. “Really look at them. These are people seething with repressed violence. These are people fixated on death.”

She pulled the painting up on her computer and stared at the expression on the man’s face. She studied how his bushy eyebrows came to points, how his long face and pinched mouth added to how sinister he looked. The woman, on the other hand, just looked lost. Chloe had read that originally Wood said the woman was the farmer’s wife, but after the age difference scandalized people, he began telling people she was the farmer’s daughter.

Despite what Jon said about it, Chloe saw something sad about the painting. Despite their severe expressions, the two figures looked powerless and defeated, like people who had felt small their whole lives, standing in front of a cheap farmhouse with fancy windows.

After five minutes, Chloe ended the conversation, much to her reluctance. The collect calls from the prison cost five dollars a minute. “It’s a racket,” Jon told her once. “And the prison gets a cut of the money.” After saying goodbye to Jon, she walked to the bar to meet Mark.

It was hot, and they were thirsty. Instead of pacing themselves with waters in between rounds, they both downed beers quickly, getting much drunker than usual.

After their fifth round, Mark leaned toward her. “I think you’re beautiful,” he said, and kissed her. She let him. She felt dizzy and light and took his bottom lip between her teeth and bit. At first he moaned as if he were aroused, but a second later, the moan changed to one of pain, and he pulled away from her. She tasted blood.

“What the fuck?” he demanded, dabbing his bloody lip with a cocktail napkin.

She stared at him. She liked the way he was looking at her — as if she were some fearsome creature he had never seen clearly until now.

He rose from his stool and threw some cash on the bar. “Look, we’re both drunk. I’m going to go.” She didn’t stop him.

She saw Frank, her mother’s ex-boyfriend, facing away from her, resting his arm on the edge of the pool table. The adrenaline flowing through her, coupled with the alcohol, made her feel like she took up all the space in the bar. She finished her beer and stood to grab a pool cue.