Lawrence Block - The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

“You generally kill total strangers, Keller.”

“They’re strangers to me,” he said, “but not to the client. Anyway, I decided to take a bird in the hand, and the bird comes to twenty-two thousand. I guess that’s better than nothing.”

“It was,” Dot said, “last time I checked. And none of it was work, anyway. You did it for love.”

“Love?”

“Love of country. You’re a patriot, Keller. After all, it’s the thought that counts.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so. And I like the flower, Keller. I wouldn’t think you’d be the type to wear one, but I have to say you can carry it off. It looks good. Adds a certain something.”

“Panache,” he said. “What else?”

Violence never really ends, no more than a symphony ceases to exist once the orchestra has stopped playing; bloodstains and bullet holes, fragments of shattered glass, knife wounds that never heal properly, nightmarish memories that thrash the heart... all fasten themselves like a leech to a person’s core and suck away the spirit bit by bit until there’s nothing left but a shell that looks like it might once have been a human being.

My God, what do you suppose happened to that person?

I heard it was something awful. I guess they never got over it — hell, you can just look at ’em and know that.

Drop a pebble in a pool of water, and the vibrations ripple outward in concentric circles. Some physicists claim that the ripples continue even after they can no longer be seen.

Ripples continue.

A symphony does not cease.

And violence never really ends.

It took half my life to learn that.

Three days ago, a man named Bruce Dyson walked into an ice cream parlor in the town of Utica, Ohio, and opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle, killing nine people and wounding seven others before shooting himself in the head.

Some cry, others rage, many turn away, and life will go on until the next Bruce Dyson walks into the next ice cream parlor, or bank, or fast-food restaurant; then we’ll shake our heads, wring our hands once again, and wonder aloud how something so terrible could happen.

Newscasts were quick to mention Cedar Hill and draw tenuous parallels between what took place there and what happened in Utica. When one of my students asked me if I was “around” for the Cedar Hill murders, I laughed — not raucously, mind you, but enough to solicit some worried glances.

“Yes, I was around. Excuse my laughing, it’s just that no one has ever asked me that before.”

At a special teachers’ meeting held the previous evening, a psychologist had suggested that we try to get our students to talk about the killings; four of the dead and three of the wounded had attended this school.

“Do any of you want to discuss what happened in Utica?”

Listen to their silence after I asked this.

“Look, I don’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable, but odds are someone in this room knew at least one of the victims. I know from experience it’s not a good idea to keep something like this to yourself. You have to let someone know what’s going on inside you.”

Still nothing — a nervous shrug, perhaps, a lot of downcast stares, even a quiet tear from someone in the last row of desks, but no one spoke.

I rubbed my eyes and looked toward the back wall where the ghosts of the Cedar Hill dead were assembling.

Go on, they whispered. Remember us to them.

“Sixteen people were shot. You have to feel something about that.”

A girl in one of the middle rows slowly raised her hand. “How did you... how’d you deal with what happened in Cedar Hill?”

“In many ways I still am dealing with it. I went back there a while ago to find some of the survivors and talk with them. I needed to put certain things to rest and — wait a second.”

The ghosts of the four dead students joined those from Cedar Hill. All of them smiled at one another like old friends.

I wished I could have known them.

Tell them everything.

Go on.

I nodded my head, then said to the class: “Let’s make a deal. I’ll tell you about Cedar Hill only if you agree to talk about Utica. Maybe getting things out in the open will make it easier to live with. How’s that sound?”

Another student raised a hand and asked, “Why do you suppose somebody’d do something like that?”

Tell the tale, demanded the ghosts.

Remember us to them...

I’ve gotten a little ahead of myself.

My name is Geoff Conover. I am thirty-six years old and have been a high school history teacher for the last seven years. I am married to a wonderful woman named Yvonne who is about to give birth to our first child, a boy. She has a six-year-old girl from her previous marriage. Her name is Patricia and I love her very much and she loves me, and we both love her mother and are looking forward to having a new member added to our family.

This story is not about me, though I am in it briefly under a different name. It’s about a family that no longer exists, a house that no longer stands, and a way of life once called Small Town America that bled to death long before I explained to my students how violence never really ends.

I did go back to Cedar Hill in hopes of answering some questions about the night of the killings. I interviewed witnesses and survivors over the telephone, at their jobs, in their houses, over lunches, and in nursing homes; I dug through dusty files buried in moldy boxes in the basements of various historical society offices; there were decades-old police reports to be found, then sorted through and deciphered: I tracked down more than two hundred hours’ worth of videotape, then subjected my family to the foul moods that resulted from my watching them; dozens of old statements had to be located and copied; and on one occasion I had to bribe my way into a storage facility in order to examine several boxes of aged evidence. There were graves to visit, names to learn, individual histories lost among bureaucratic paper trails that I had to assemble, only to find they yielded nothing of use — and I would be lying if I said that I did not feel a palpable guilt in deciding that so-and-so’s life didn’t merit so much as a footnote.

I do not purport to have sorted everything out. In some instances the gaps between facts were too wide and I had to fill them with conjectures and suppositions that, to the best of my knowledge and abilities, provided a rightness to the story that nothing else could. Yvonne says I did it to forgive myself for having survived, to be free of the shame, anger, guilt, and confusion that have for so long threatened to diminish me. She may be right. No one asked me to do it; nonetheless, certain ghosts demanded it of me — and I say this as a man who’d never thought of himself as being particularly superstitious.

I cleared my throat, smiled at the ghosts in the back of the room, and said to my students, “In order for you to understand...”

...what took place in Cedar Hill, you first have to understand the place itself, for it shares some measure of responsibility.

If it is possible to characterize this place by melting down all of its inhabitants and pouring them into a mold so as to produce one definitive citizen, then you will see a person who is, more likely than not, a laborer who never made it past the eleventh grade but who has managed through hard work and good solid horse sense to build the foundation of a decent middle-class existence; who works to keep a roof over his family’s head and sets aside a little extra money each month to fix up the house, maybe repair that old back-door screen or add a workroom; who has one or two children who aren’t exactly gifted but do well enough in school that their parents don’t go to bed at night worrying that they’ve sired morons.