The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

from One Story

I. June, 1969

That morning, Nora Stevens left a sink full of breakfast dishes and walked outside to investigate the barking of her father’s dog. It was an old dog, one that hadn’t mellowed with age, and many nights it had kept them awake barking at a strip of tin flapping against the barn, or coyotes singing in the distance, their voices carried on the wind. It was a terrible summer for wind, even for southern Colorado. It wailed down the river bottom and blew grit into everybody’s eyes. It made hairdos impossible. Many women Nora’s age still wore bouffants, and she planned to wear one herself at her wedding to Ron Whitehead in the fall — a voluminous updo half-hidden by a shoulder-length veil. She’d planned it down to the last detail. Having reached the age of twenty-six unclaimed and having grown up without a mother to instruct her in beauty and manners, she felt a certain duty to prove herself as a bride, to show Ron’s family she was as sweet and ordinary as any other girl he might’ve wed. In this campaign the wind had begun to feel like a sentient foe. It would rip the veil right out of her hair. It would howl around the church like wolves.

At her approach, the dog didn’t calm down. In fact, it got louder, interrupting one bark with another until she swatted its head with her open hand.

“Quiet, Rascal!” she said. Her father’s dogs were always named Rascal — a long line of them going all the way back to his boyhood. This one was barking at its own doghouse.

Sighing, she bent to look through the little arched doorway. She didn’t expect to find anything inside, really — a cornered skunk at the very worst. But there in the darkness she discerned the form of a huddled child.

She stood, cinching her housecoat around her. There was no reason for a child to be on the property, much less in the doghouse. There weren’t any neighbors nearby, nobody but old Tobias in his shack at the bottom of the hill, decrepitly tending his long-haired goats. The nearest school was a twenty-minute drive and it was summer besides.

She hunched down, hoping her eyes had played a trick on her. But there they were again: a pair of muddied knees encircled by plump child-arms, and below that, two small pale feet.

Nora’s heart was thundering. For a moment, she thought it might not be a child at all but some deformed and naked night-thing, an unearthly being she didn’t even believe existed and yet suddenly feared. The dog nosed at her elbow.

“Hello?” she managed. “Who’s in there?”

The child began to cry — a soft, pitiful sound. The dog began barking again, with such alarm that Nora finally took hold of its scruff and dragged it into the house. There she buttered a slice of bread with a shaking hand and as an afterthought, sprinkled it with sugar.

Back outside, she knelt a few feet from the doghouse.

“Are you hungry? I’ve brought some bread. There’s water in the house — do you want me to get some water?”

She waited, but no answer came. She heard shuffling from within the doghouse, and a set of palms appeared on the plywood.

It was a girl — three or four years old, if Nora had to guess, potbellied and chubby-cheeked, naked except for a pair of dingy white underwear. Her hair was tangled, and on her knees there were streaks of something brown that Nora later would recognize as dried blood. The child crouched just outside the doghouse, rubbing one eye with a dirty fist.

Slowly, Nora extended the bread.

The child’s eyes were big and turned down at the edges in a way that might’ve looked merry when she smiled but now gave her an appearance of sad wisdom. She glanced left and right, presumably in search of the dog, and seeing it gone she bolted straight across the dry patch of ground, right through the outstretched bread and into the warm center of Nora’s body.

Nora gasped. She tried to hold her at arm’s length, and to remind her of the bread, which was now smashed between them, butter on the girl’s neck and in her hair. “Now, now,” Nora said, “stop that — let’s not — you mustn’t—” But the child clung with fierce hands, gripping and pinching and climbing until her legs were wrapped tight around Nora’s waist. It was all Nora could do to regain her feet.

“My God,” she said, hoisting the child with her forearms. “My God in heaven.”

She hurried toward the field, where her father’s tractor was making its way along the east fence. He saw her coming and shut the engine off. For once there was no wind.

Anita Dewey was the girl’s name. She lived two miles south, on a rambling property covered in scrub oak. Her family didn’t farm — her father was a welder, and their acreage was strewn with car parts and metal structures that stuck up out of the weeds like dinosaur bones. You couldn’t see their house from the county road unless you knew just where to look.

Anita had gone missing, along with her brother Gerald, from a summer barbecue the day before. It was somebody’s birthday and people had gathered to celebrate in the Dewey family’s backyard. Smoke drifted from a charcoal grill fashioned by Mr. Dewey himself. Men in flannel shirts hunkered around a card game, drinking beer, while women shuttled food to a large and shrieking group of children. They were climbing up and rolling down a hill at the edge of the yard, dry grass clinging to their hair. Country music blared from the house — loud when the door opened, muffled when it slammed.

It was late afternoon when Mrs. Dewey noticed her kids were gone. She stood in the middle of the yard looking all around. She wasn’t worried yet — they were at their own house, after all, and there were plenty of older cousins to look after the little ones. Surely they were around here somewhere.

That’s when a little girl tugged her arm. She said she’d seen Anita and Gerald leaving with an older boy.

“What older boy?”

A big one, she said. Carrying a green bag over his shoulder. She pointed in the direction he’d gone, down a trail through the tall weeds and over a big log that bridged the creek. He’d had Gerald on one hip, while Anita had walked alongside him, holding his hand.

As it turned out, the mother of the older boy was sitting nearby. Her name was Linda LeDivic, and when she heard that her son — who owned an army rucksack, and had it with him that day — had gone off with the Dewey children, she stood so abruptly she overturned her plate. Her soda fizzed away into the grass. She was a shy woman with a soft voice people often strained to hear, but that day she spoke up loud so there could be no mistake.

“We’d better find them quick,” she said.

All this, Nora learned later.

She learned the children’s names from the postmistress and heard the rucksack described by the man who helped her father with the farm equipment. She found out about Mrs. LeDivic from a teacher at the school where she worked that summer as a substitute. And she was told the contents of the rucksack (a crushed pack of Pall Malls, a notebook filled with strange drawings, and a noose made from thick rope) from her fiancé, Ron, who’d been called not long after the children disappeared to join the search party. It took the sheriff more than an hour to get there, and by that time half the men in the county had gone vigilante.

In pairs and groups of three, they fanned out from the Dewey place, shouting the children’s names. But after an hour or two they settled into a grim silence, each man fearing what he might find. Meanwhile, the LeDivic boy’s mother was collapsed on the Dewey’s couch in a fit of hysteria, with a couple of neighbor women trying to help her breathe — behavior that comforted nobody.

They found the boy’s shirt first, about half a mile from the Dewey’s backyard: small and blue, hanging in the high weeds. The boy was lying a short distance away. Naked in the yellow evening light, he looked so much like a corpse that Mr. Dewey dropped to his knees like he’d been shot. The noose was still thick around the child’s neck, and scattered nearby were bits of bark and splintered wood from the limb that had snapped above him by the grace of God. He was bruised and cold, but he was alive, and there was a great bustle of activity to get him home to his mother, and then on to the hospital in town.

But as darkness gathered, Anita was still missing. Her father and the other men walked the fields and forests, calling her name. The police were also searching by then, but Mr. Dewey kept apart from them, running ahead, unable to bear their stern and pitying faces, which seemed to say already how it would end, how it always ended. He wanted to be the one to find her, to cover her up, to shield her from their eyes.

“I still don’t know why you didn’t call me that night,” Nora complained to Ron, a week after she found the girl. “There was a missing child, not to mention a madman on the loose, and you couldn’t be bothered to pick up the telephone?”

Ron shrugged. They were in the backseat of his old Plymouth, Nora lying with her head in his lap while he sipped from a bottle of bourbon. He had one elbow out the window, which let in the cool evening air, and there were crickets singing in the weeds along the edge of the road.

“Aren’t too many telephones out behind the Dewey place,” he said. “And like I said, I didn’t get home till half past two.”

“Well, you could’ve called anyway. You might’ve saved me a lot of worry.”

“That I doubt.”

Nora sighed. “I just keep thinking of what a long night it must’ve been for that little girl. I can’t even bring myself to imagine it.”

But in fact she couldn’t stop imagining it. She thought about the child wandering the dark countryside, stumbling over rocks and through skunkbrush. She heard the crack of the branch that saved the boy from hanging, and the dull thudding of the little girl’s feet as she made her escape. She wondered whether LeDivic had spoken to the children while he tried to hang them, and what he might’ve said, and whether the children had cried for their mother or gone mute with shock. All week, thoughts like these had driven her to distraction. She’d burned herself on the stove and left the front door standing open. She’d pricked her fingers while tailoring her mother’s old wedding dress. Maybe it was the surprise she couldn’t shake — the fact that something so terrible could happen on an average day, like a curtain lifting to reveal some grim other world rubbing up against this one, then falling shut before she could fully apprehend it. She couldn’t forget how the child had clung to her while they waited for the sheriff to arrive, or the way she’d smelled — like creek water and musty earth.

Now, when she felt Ron fumbling with the buttons of her shirt, she pushed his hand away. She was thinking about the way Mr. Dewey had wept when he came to retrieve the girl, how he’d grabbed her out of Nora’s arms so abruptly you’d have thought Nora was the kidnapper. She wanted to talk about this — about all of it — but she’d already told Ron everything at least twice.

“Maybe we could forget that deal for tonight,” Ron said. “Give yourself a break.”

But how could she forget? How could she be expected to return to normal life, to fooling around in the backseat of Ron’s car, as though nothing extraordinary had happened? If finding a kidnapped child in a doghouse didn’t give a person pause, whatever would?

Not to mention how often people asked about it. Given her role, she was expected to have some insight. “How are you holding up?” the women asked, reaching out to give her arm a gentle squeeze. “You must’ve had quite the scare!” Men were more irreverent, though no less nosy. “Well, if it isn’t the big hero!” Or, “How’s life in the limelight?”

Nora understood they weren’t really asking after her. What they wanted was the grim particulars. They wanted to hear about the child’s terrible shivering, which started right after Nora and her father got her inside and could not be stopped by blankets or sips of warm broth. They wanted to hear about her underwear stiff with urine and her ankle swelled with cactus needles. They wanted to know what exactly LeDivic had done. What exactly the child had told her.

The inconvenient fact was this: the child had revealed nothing. Aside from asking for her brother once, she hadn’t spoken at all, and by the time the police arrived she was just staring out the window at the shapes of the trees. The sheriff and his deputy were no more forthcoming, and in the end Nora and her father were left to piece things together from the newspaper, just like everybody else.

Local Teen Abducts Two Children, Tries to Hang One.

Hanged Boy Recovering from Injuries.

Trial Begins in Abduction and Hanging Case.

Alongside every story, the newspaper ran the same grainy photo of Clay LeDivic. At first glance he looked just like any other young man, smiling for what must have been a school photographer. His forehead was wide and smooth, partially covered by a swoop of sandy hair, but his eyebrows were so blond they looked more like blank places where eyebrows had been peeled away. This gave him a startled appearance and drew attention to his eyes, which were small and dark, like buttons. He was only fifteen, but if Nora stared at him long enough she saw a quiet, adult menace.

Woman Who Found Escaped Child Speaks Out.

Of all the articles, this one saw the most wear. Nora cut it out and saved it along with the other clippings in a kitchen drawer, reading it so many times the paper went soft and pliant. It was exhilarating to see her own words in print, and to read them as though she were someone else, an average person picking up the paper, drawn in by her account. I knew there was something wrong from the moment I heard the dog barking. I could just feel it. And when I saw that child, there was no doubt in my mind she’d been running for her very life.

In the accompanying photo, Nora sat on the porch steps, hands folded in her lap, hair pulled over one shoulder. She wore a skirt she now regretted, but her expression was appropriately resolute, and the black-and-white gave her a kind of gravity, as though she knew all the world’s tricks and wasn’t about to be taken in by them.

It was hard to say what Ron Whitehead had seen in her. But whatever it was, he’d seen it right away. They were at a Grange Hall dance, Nora with her girlfriend Marjorie, who was homely to the point of painful but always scheming after this or that bachelor, and Ron playing chaperone to one of his big-boned sisters. He was passing Nora’s table, and then suddenly he wasn’t — he stood there gaping at her, so that the first thing Nora noticed about him, rather than his sunburned nose or his thick farmboy’s hands, was his interest.

Next to her, Marjorie squealed. Then she commenced whispering wetly into her ear what Nora already knew: that Ron was the eldest son of the Whitehead family, which was large and well-regarded. In fact, they were everywhere you looked, volunteering at church, parading their livestock around the county fair — broad-chested, rosy-cheeked, loud-laughing Whiteheads. Nora had never attended football games in high school, but according to Marjorie, Ron had been something to see on the field. He’d also dated the prettiest girls. His disinclination to marry any of them after graduation had made him all the more popular, and now that so many boys had gone off to Vietnam, he was the most eligible bachelor left.

It wasn’t long before Nora caught him looking at her again — this time from across the room, with a hopeful expression. Already she wished he’d develop a bit more cunning, but she supposed it might be useful to have a man whose every thought appeared right on his face. He had a ruddy sort of charm, and everybody knew and liked him, which was more than could be said for Nora, who was sallow and shy and bookish, with big gray eyes that tended to water. As a girl, she’d been prone to headaches that kept her confined while other children celebrated Halloween and rode horses and performed in Christmas pageants, and perhaps it was these early absences that had pushed her to the margins. There was something off-putting about her, she knew, some seriousness or intensity that made people’s smiles lose their warmth. At school and at family gatherings she had a sense of being tolerated but not particularly enjoyed, and she often wondered if this was typical of only children, or of motherless daughters, or of women who felt strongly about certain things: tidiness, timeliness, simplicity, composure. She’d learned by now to keep these opinions to herself, but it seemed people could still sense them there on her tongue, as though she carried with her some inextricable air of censure.

She and Ron made an odd fit. But he was proud to have her on his arm, and he beamed when he introduced her to people at dances and at the feed store. He was impressed by what he considered her great intelligence, and he also found her funny, which nobody else ever had done. He had a great big laugh that expanded his already sizable chest and further reddened his wind-chapped face. He had a tendency to grab her up and spin her around. His hugs were warm and sudden and crushing.

They went to dinner and spent time with friends, but what Nora remembered most were those hours alone in his Plymouth, after the public part of their dates was over. Then, they haunted the backroads and darkened oil field sites, lounging in the dashboard lights, listening to Ron’s eight-tracks. They paid to park at the drive-in movie but saw very little of the screen. Often they didn’t even hang the speaker in the window, and John Wayne’s head would materialize silently in front of them, filling up the windshield like a storm cloud, and Nora would feel his look of disgust aimed at her. It was thrilling to defy him and allow Ron’s hands in her hair and under her clothes. Passion came to her slowly, and at first she didn’t quite know what to do with it, aside from narrate the experience to Ron, telling him how warm his body felt and how much she liked his shoulders, and asking him questions about his previous sexual experience — until he suggested she shut up and enjoy herself for once. They grappled for hours in that old car, fogging up the windows, inadvertently honking the horn, forgetting all possibility that someone might see them. He was a different Ron then — not the grinning man who shook hands with everyone they met, but serious and single-minded, growling with desire. His back was so broad Nora could barely get her arms around it, and she felt crushed beneath him, erased, subsumed. She made noises it embarrassed her to remember later. When at last she stumbled out of his car in front of her house, she could not have told you what day it was, or named a single constellation in the sky.

When they announced to his family their engagement, Nora had the sensation of being surrounded by a herd of curious cows: parents, aunts, uncles, and sisters all crowded around, looking at her, chewing on their impressions. Finally, they smiled and clapped Ron on the back. His mother, a sentimental woman with ponderous hips, alternated between crying and squeezing Nora’s hands, looking down at them beseechingly, as if an agreement might be forged within her grasp.

Nora’s father only said, “It’s about time, at the rate you two have been going.” He pretended to be indifferent, but she knew he was relieved. A widower who had yet to live alone, he’d long ago given up hope that anybody would ever take this sad, strange daughter off his hands.

Even in a small town, news doesn’t stay fresh for long. People move on. And that summer, the LeDivic kidnapping was only one of several alarming events. On the same day as the Dewey boy was released from the hospital, a disagreement over communism spilled out of the dancehall and somebody was stabbed, staining the cement with blood. Elsewhere in the country, college students took over campus buildings, shouting about civil rights and the war. They stomped and chanted until their anger was heard in the smallest backwaters, and by the least involved citizens, including Nora’s father, who’d never paid much attention to anything save for his crops. Now he spent evenings listening to the radio with his chin on his fist. Society itself seemed ready to blow apart, but it was hard to pinpoint the danger — whether it was the Viet Cong or the black radicals or the women tearing off their bras. And in the midst of it all, an astronaut stuck an American flag into the moon. The event was broadcast on every television across the country, into every hushed living room. Nora didn’t understand why anybody would want to go to the moon in the first place, and seeing two puffy men meander over the surface clarified nothing at all. Her father would accept no part of it. “It’s a damned fake,” he said, and would continue saying for years. “It said ‘simulated’ right there on the screen. Am I the only person in this goddamned country who can read?”

In the newspaper, Nora learned of a pregnant starlet who’d been killed in California. Her murder was described as “ritualistic,” and Nora shuddered to think of LeDivic, with his notebook of bizarre drawings and his carefully tied noose. Was LeDivic a sadist, like the hippie they suspected in the Tate murder? And how many sadists were there in any given town, driving down any given road? For every missing person there was someone who knew where they could be found, in flesh or in bones, and it bothered Nora to think the culprits walked around with this dark knowledge, hiding it, possibly even treasuring it. As a girl, she’d seen a boy disembowel a toad that had been lured onto the playground by spring rain, and perhaps what was most disturbing — she explained to Ron as they sat eating in a local diner — was the boy’s glee, his obvious enjoyment of the toad’s suffering.

“Woman,” Ron said. “You sure know how to throw a man off his feed.” He wiped his mouth and dropped his napkin onto his plate.

“I think everybody is capable of cruelty, don’t you?” she went on. “Given the right circumstances, anybody could be. But it’s different when people enjoy it. That’s the part I don’t like to think about, whether Clay LeDivic enjoyed what he did to those kids.”

“So quit thinking about it.”

“That’s easy for you to say. None of it happened to you.”

Ron made a noise in his throat. “None of it happened to you either, Nora. You’ve made too much of it. I think you’re the one who’s enjoying it, if you want to know the truth.”

This stung so badly that she stood up from the table and stared at him through brimming eyes, unable to speak. Then she fled the diner for the parking lot, where she roamed for a while but ultimately had nowhere to go but Ron’s Plymouth, since home was too far to get to on foot. She sat fuming in the passenger seat for a chilly half hour, and when Ron still didn’t emerge, she had no choice but to go back inside the diner to get him.

She hadn’t even reached the door when she saw he wasn’t alone. Through its big rectangular window she could see two girls sharing his booth. One she recognized — a cheerful Italian girl who went to Grange Hall dances. But the other was unfamiliar. She had a head of springy blond curls, and she was sitting so close to Ron their shoulders touched. Rather than coming out to find her, he was telling a story or a joke, gesturing with his hands, regarding the girls with a serious, confidential expression. When he finished, the blonde laughed wildly, throwing her head back so that the overhead lamp made her throat look smooth and white as marble. Ron seemed pleased with himself, and while Nora watched from the darkness, he leaned in to plant a kiss on the strange girl’s neck.

Woman — that’s what he’d taken to calling her in the months leading up to the incident in the diner, as though they were the only two humans on earth. Don’t sass me, woman. Or, woman, don’t give me any more of your lip. He was making fun of a certain type of man, she realized, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t also making fun of her. He sometimes called her Neither Nora, and Nora Noreen. And he had a habit of twisting the lyrics of songs that came on the radio, making them dirty and about her and belting them out the truck window. He had a strikingly good voice, and it was a shame he wouldn’t just sing the songs as they were meant to be sung. Sometimes, when she cooked Sunday supper, he tried to lure her into dancing by the stove.

“I’m cooking,” she’d protest.

“Ah, well. It doesn’t look too complicated.”

“It’s Beef Wellington!”

“I’ll beef your Wellington.”

This he’d say loudly enough for her father to hear, if he was in the next room. He’d take her hands and shuffle her around the creaky old floor. Rarely could Nora bring herself to enjoy it. She was busy with the details of the recipe, or thinking about the book she was currently reading, or some scrap of gossip she’d overheard, or just nothing, a comforting blankness.

Of course, these were differences they might’ve worked out between them in the course of forty or fifty years. Married, they might have grown toward each other, she becoming looser and softer, Ron growing quieter, more contemplative, losing some of his boyish imprudence. They might’ve had children that combined their natures, a smiling daughter and a tall, gray-eyed son.

But she never spoke to Ron Whitehead again. Not during the long drive home from the diner, or any day after. He wrote letters, but she didn’t read them. He showed up at her house, but she wouldn’t come downstairs. His mother came by with a homemade lemon cake and tried to say what a misunderstanding it had all been, how sorry Ron was, how miserable he was without her, all the weight he’d lost. She said the two of them would look back on this as a minor bump in the road if they could only get past it.

Nora barely heard her over the roar of her own blood. What a fool she’d been to make herself vulnerable in the first place, and to such a ridiculous man! How vain she’d been to believe the things he said, how weak! Her fury formed a barrier around her, and deep in the middle of it Nora felt an icy calm, a pain so deep it was almost gratifying. She sent a handwritten card to everyone they’d invited: We regret to inform you that the Stevens-Whitehead wedding will not take place as planned. She stuffed her mother’s wedding dress down into the garbage barrel in the backyard and stood back from it while it burned.

In December, everybody was glued again to the television, this time to watch the first draft lottery for Vietnam. It was all anybody talked about for a while, those dates. Any mother who had borne a son on April 24th had to promptly send him off to war; any mother who’d held off until April 25th could keep her boy at home.

Ron’s was the third birthdate drawn.

“See?” she told her father over dinner. “He’d have left me regardless.”

II. August, 1987

For ten years, she taught the fourth-and-fifth-grade combo class as there weren’t enough students to make a whole class of each. Governing a classroom suited her, and the children found her a strict but reassuring presence. But then her father got sick and she stayed home to nurse him. He needed care around the clock, and the days stretched into years, eight of them before he died frail and indignant in his bed. Now that the old farmhouse was hers alone, Nora opened the windows for a week to let the stale air out. She got rid of all the furniture and bought new. Big floral sofas. The kitchen wallpapered in a pattern of ducks.

Saturdays she went into town for groceries. If the weather was nice, she made a day of it, buying the local paper to read on the bench in front of the store. Framingham was a growing town but largely peaceful, so there wasn’t much to read about aside from the odd spectacular car accident, mostly caused by drunks. There were funnies in the back of the paper, and she read these too, wondering if anybody really found them funny, and if so, what they were smoking.

Mostly, she watched the other shoppers come and go. She looked for people she recognized, taking particular note of who was getting fat and who was getting old, though she supposed the latter wasn’t entirely their fault. Her sharpest attention was reserved for the young ladies, who’d taken to ratting their bangs and wearing boxy unflattering clothes and looked every bit as frightful as the hippies, only more self-consciously so. She looked for Anita Dewey among them, wondering if she’d recognize her crescent eyes, even under some tumbleweed of hair. She would be a young woman now, and Nora often wondered where she lived and what she did and what she remembered about her night in the wilderness. It aggrieved her that she’d been prevented from knowing the girl. Twice she’d tried to bring food to Mrs. Dewey — a meatloaf, a casserole — only to be stopped at the door. “We appreciate your interest, Ms. Stevens, but we’re trying to put that whole thing behind us.” And later, when the children were in Bible study and she saw them getting out of their car in front of the church, she’d rushed over to say hello, perhaps a bit more breathlessly than she’d meant to, and was met with “Ms. Stevens, please.”

Now the little boy would be a junior in high school. Nora knew from one of the teachers that he’d fallen behind a grade or two, and that he struggled with his schoolwork, his head drooping and eyes fluttering like a narcoleptic. Brain damage of some kind, apparently. People said he was lucky to be alive, and Nora agreed, though she thought luck was a strange thing to ascribe to a person kidnapped, stripped naked, and hung — all before the age of four.

She folded the newspaper on the bench beside her. All around, the parking lot had begun to fill with cars — doors slamming, engines starting, shopping carts rattling over asphalt — and she had to admit that some small, stupid part of her lingered in the vain hope of seeing Ron. She’d heard from Marjorie (married now, and a mother of three) that Ron had made it home from Vietnam in one piece and had moved to a suburb of Phoenix, more than four hundred miles away. Still, he came back every summer to visit his sisters, accompanied by his Asian wife, whose named sounded to Nora like someone spitting — Pa-tooey or Hi-yuck. They had several children themselves — oriental-looking, like their mother — so Nora figured if they ever stopped in for groceries they’d be hard to miss.

But today the parking lot was full of tourists from Texas and California, lumpen people in khaki pants. They came to see the mountains, and to ride a coughing old train, and sometimes you could see them wading around in the river downstream from the old uranium mine, where the water was radioactive. That very morning she’d seen someone fishing, and she was thinking about this when a gust of wind lifted a page from her newspaper and tumbled it down the sidewalk.

A passerby caught it with a quick stride. He was a young man with broad shoulders and baggy Hawaiian shorts. He had two children with him, girls preoccupied with lollipops.

“Oh, thank you,” Nora said. “This wind! Can you believe it?”

The man didn’t answer. He went on, one hand on each of the girl’s heads, steering them toward the store. There was a briskness in his movements, a kind of mustered pluck, and Nora felt the same compassion she always felt when she saw a man tasked with childcare. “Samantha,” she heard him say as they approached the automatic doors. “No running off. You hear me? I want you right here by me the whole time, both of you.” He straightened his shoulders and Nora saw that he was older than he’d looked at first, probably in his mid-thirties, with a potbelly pushing against his T-shirt. His blond hair was cut short as a soldier’s, and he had a tattoo on one of his calves, a large compass in black ink.

It was only after the automatic doors swooshed shut, and the three of them disappeared inside, that Nora realized who it was. LeDivic. The name rose in her throat like bile.

How could he be walking around, completely free? A regular man, with errands to run? With children?

She gathered her purse and stood, breathing hard, watching the doors through which he’d passed. She didn’t know what to do but had a sudden, strong conviction that she should keep an eye on him, at least, so she took a cart with a wobbly front wheel and followed him inside.

The store smelled like fried chicken, and Nora was aware of the drippy saxophone music being piped in from overhead. Her cart thumped and squealed past the pharmacy and the movie-rental kiosk. At last she found him in the dairy aisle, chewing a thumbnail, contemplating the cheese. One of the girls sat in his shopping cart, posing what sounded like questions, while the older one had wandered a few yards away, stepping heel-to-toe, following the pattern of the floor tiles. She wore a bright yellow sundress, and her hair had not been combed.

Nora turned to examine some premium charcoal briquettes. Why they were sold in the dairy aisle she couldn’t imagine, but she lifted the bag into her cart and pushed it closer to LeDivic.

“You like watermelon flavor,” he was telling the child in the cart. “You liked it last week.”

“But, Daddy, my head grew, and so did my tongue, and now my taste buds don’t like watermelon anymore.”

“Well, I’m not getting you another sucker. You’ll have to live with the one you’ve got.”

The child let out a shriek of protest and threw something over her shoulder. Nora flinched; she didn’t know what had caused the sting of pain until she reached up and felt the lollipop hanging from her hair. She could smell it too. Sickly sweet and tart, nothing like real watermelon.

LeDivic gasped.

“Oh, Jesus. I’m sorry.” He turned the child around by the shoulders. “Jenny, look what you did! Apologize to this lady. Tell her you’re sorry for throwing your sucker.”

The little girl scowled, refusing to speak. But Nora didn’t care. She was too shocked by LeDivic’s nearness, by his casual demeanor, by the deep timbre of his voice. It felt as though a silent marching band was parading through her head, the way she sometimes felt when she drank too much coffee and went out to weed the garden in the heat. She looked at the hairs on his forearms and the brown bag of potatoes in his cart. Slowly, she reached up and pulled the lollipop from her hair.

“Here, let me help you.” LeDivic took the lollipop from her. Then he pulled a napkin from his pocket and, before Nora could stop him, dabbed her hair where the lollipop had been. She felt his touch just above her ear, two quick movements before he made a hopeless noise.

“It’s one of those gum-pops,” he said. “There’s a little goo left, but it’ll wash right out.”

He laughed nervously and scratched the back of his head, looking dismayed by her lack of reaction, and by the fact that she was still standing there, blocking the aisle, one hand gripping the handle of her cart.

“I’m Nora Stevens,” she said in a thin voice. “I live off County Road 219.”

LeDivic looked at her. “So?”

“So I know what you did to those little country children.”

She wasn’t sure why she’d called them this; she’d never used the phrase before, and it sounded strange as soon as it left her lips. But LeDivic heard it loud and clear. He lifted the little girl out of the cart and told her sister to help her pick out a cookie from the bakery case. Then he moved closer to Nora. She noticed again the width of his shoulders and the muscles in his arms, which were tanned and scratched from outdoor work.

“Listen, lady. You need to mind your own business.”

“This is my business. I’m the one who rescued that little girl you tried to hurt!”

“Keep your voice down.” He stepped so close she could smell his deodorant or shaving cream or the soap he used in the shower. “Now you listen to me,” he said in a fierce, panicked-sounding whisper. “I’m an American citizen. I’m a Marine, a decorated serviceman. That thing you’re talking about was a long time ago. I was fifteen years old, and I got treatment for it. Every kind of treatment they could dream up. They drugged me and scanned me and electrocuted me and shoved shit up my nose into my brain, you understand? So don’t come meddling in my life, following me through stores, insulting me. And don’t you so much as look at my kids. They aren’t any part of this.”

LeDivic’s eyes held hers; they were flat and brown and unwavering. At either end of the aisle, people were coming and going. The music burbled overhead.

“That little boy still has fits because of you!” Nora hissed.

“No shit,” LeDivic said. “You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t know my own cousin? And for your information, he’s not so little anymore. He’s six-foot-three and he plays on the football team. We go down to the field and watch his home games.”

Nora stared, unable to hide her shock. She couldn’t recall having heard anything about the families being related, not in her news clippings, or in all the talk she’d heard.

“And the girl? I suppose she’s your cousin too?”

LeDivic flashed a brief, incredulous smile. “Yeah. That’s how it works. Now is there anything else I can help you with?”

Nora gripped the cart, which was cold and sturdy before her. She looked down the aisle, at the people floating past the doughnut case, and at LeDivic’s girls, who were coming toward them now, eating cookies as they walked.

“Is she all right? Can you at least tell me that?”

“Who? Anita?” LeDivic’s shoulders loosened a bit, and he spoke in a measured voice. “Sure. She’s fine. In college back East somewhere. Fancy place, I forget the name. She got a scholarship. Made her mother proud. She’s just about the pride of the family, I think.”

He glanced over his shoulder at his daughters, who’d stopped to take some unauthorized item off the shelf.

“Unlike me,” he said. “I’m pretty much at the other end of the spectrum. Now, are we done here?”

When Nora didn’t speak, LeDivic clapped his hands, a sound like gunfire.

“Girls! Let’s go. Hurry up. Sam, put that back. Let’s get going.”

Nora hurried in the other direction. She abandoned her cart and didn’t get any groceries and had to come back in the middle of the week when she ran out of coffee. It was a month before she’d find the sticky napkin with a strand of her own dark hair in the pocket of her jacket.

At home that night, she watched television. First the news and then The Cosby Show. During a commercial, she got up and went to the kitchen drawer where she kept the old news clippings. Without looking at them, she threw them into the trash.

The next morning there was a chill in the air. Fall was coming, and she watched the deer make their daily pilgrimage to the apple orchard behind the house, pausing as they did to graze on the fescue that overgrew her father’s fields. She hadn’t replaced the last Rascal, so the deer strode fearlessly into the yard. They got so close to the windows that Nora could see the wetness of their eyes and the tufts of black hair around their ears. She watched as they stood on their hind legs to get the last stubborn apples from the trees, and she spoke to them from behind the glass, teasing them, giving them names.

She ate peanut butter cookies for dinner sometimes, because there were no more men around requiring meat, and in the evenings she read her father’s collection of Louis L’Amour novels, wherein rugged men fell in love with tender women, and the villains died quickly and without complaint.

On those rare occasions when the phone rang, she made her way into the kitchen, shuffling in warm socks. Sometimes the line was dead when she got there. Other times she thought she heard someone hang up. Once or twice it rang in the middle of the night, and she held it to her ear, listening to the tone. Alone in a big house, it was hard to keep her mind from blooming with dark thoughts. She saw movements in the shadows, slinking forms. She heard boots on the stairs and what might’ve been a knock at the front door, the soft rapping of knuckles. Imagined, no doubt, but paralyzing.

When morning came, as it always did, she pulled the curtains aside and looked out at the yard. Leaves were drifting down from the apple trees. Deer had slept there in the night and left impressions of their bodies in the grass. The sky was blanching. Another winter was coming. There was everything and nothing to be afraid of.