Lawrence Block - The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

The screen fills with the image of Jackson Davies embracing Russell as sobs rack his body. Davies glares up at the camera, then closes his eyes and lowers his face, kissing the top of Russell’s head. This image freezes as the children finish singing their hymn.

Tanya’s voice once more, soft and low, no singsong mode this time, no inflection whatsoever: “For tonight, who weeps anywhere in the world, weeps for Cedar Hill and its wounds that may never heal.

“Tanya Claymore, Channel 9 News.”

After the tape had finished playing and the lights in the classroom were turned back on, a student near the back of the room — so near, in fact, that Irv Leonard’s ghost could have touched the boy’s head, if he’d chosen to — raised his hand and asked, “What happened to all those people?”

“Tanya Claymore was offered a network job as a result of that tape. She eventually became a famous news anchor, had several public affairs with various coworkers, contracted AIDS, became a drug addict, and drove her car off a bridge one night. Jackson Davies remarried his ex-wife, and they live in Florida now. He’ll turn seventy-one this year. Mary Alice Hubert died of a massive coronary six months after the killings. Most of Cedar Hill turned out for her funeral. Russell Brennert stayed in Cedar Hill and eventually bought into Jackson Davies’s janitorial service. When Davies retired, Russell bought him out and now owns and operates the company. He’ll turn fifty-two this year, and he looks seventy. He never married. He drinks too much and has the worst smoker’s hack I’ve heard. He lives in a small four-room apartment with only one window — and that looks out on a parking lot. He told me he doesn’t sleep well most of the time, but he has pills he can take for that. It still doesn’t stop the dreams, though. He doesn’t have many friends. It seems most people still believe he must have known what Andy was going to do. They’ve never forgiven him for that.” I looked at the ghosts and smiled.

“He was so happy when I told him who I was. He hugged me like I was his long-lost son. He even wept. I invited him to come and visit me and my family this Christmas. I hope he comes. I don’t think he will, but I can hope.”

The room was silent for a moment, then a girl near the front, without raising her hand, said, “I knew Ted Gibson — he was the first person that Dyson shot. He... he always wanted me to go to Utica with him to try their ice cream. I was supposed to go with him that day. I couldn’t... and I don’t even remember why. Isn’t that terrible?” Her lower lip quivered, and a tear slipped down her cheek. “Ted got killed, and all I could think of when I heard was I wonder what kind of ice cream he was eating.”

That ended my story, and began theirs.

One by one, some more hesitant than others, some angrier, some more confused, my students began talking about their dead and wounded friends, and how they missed them, and how frightened they were that something so terrible could happen to someone they knew, maybe even themselves, had the circumstances been different.

The ghosts of Cedar Hill listened, and cried for my students’ pain, and understood.

Before they left that day, someone asked me why I thought Andy had done it. I stopped myself from giving the real answer — what I perceive to be the real answer — and told them, “I think losing out on the scholarship did something to him. I think he looked at his future and saw himself being stuck in a factory job for the rest of his life and he became angry — at himself, at his family, at the town where he lived. If he had no future, then why should anyone else?”

“Then why didn’t he kill his grandmother and Russell, too? Why didn’t he kill you?”

Listen to my silence after he asked this.

Finally, I said, “I wish I knew.”

I should have gone with my first answer.

I think it runs much deeper than mere anger. I think when loneliness and fear drive a person too deep inside himself, faith shrivels into hopelessness; I think when tenderness diminishes and bitterness intensifies, rancor becomes a very sacred thing; and I think when the need for some form of meaningful human contact becomes an affliction, a soul can be tainted with madness and allow violence to rage forth as the only means of genuine relief, a final, grotesque expression of alienation that evokes feeling something in the most immediate and brutal form.

The ghosts of my birth seem to agree with that.

You read the account of the Utica killings in the paper and then move quickly on to news about a train wreck in Iran or a flood in Brazil or riots in India or the NASDAQ figures for the week, and unless you are from the town of Utica or in some way knew one of the victims or the man who killed them, you forget all about it because you can’t understand how a person, a normal enough person, a person like you and me, could do such a horrible thing. But he did, and others like him will, and all you can hope for is not to be one of the victims. You pray you will be safe. It is easier by far to understand the complicated financial maneuverings of Wall Street kingpins than an isolated burst of homicidal rage in a small Midwestern city.

They are out there, these psychos, and always will be. Another Andy Leonard could be bagging your groceries; the next Bruce Dyson might be that fellow who checks your gas meter every month. You just don’t know — and there’s the rub.

You won’t know until it’s too late.

I wish you well, and I wish you peace. My penance, if indeed that’s what it is, must nearly be paid by now. The ghosts don’t come around as much as they used to. The last time I saw them was the night my son was born; they came to the hospital to look at him, and to tell me that I was right, that those prayers spoken by strangers for the baby I once was are still protecting me, and will keep myself and my family safe from harm.

I’ll pray, as well. I’ll pray that the next Andy Leonard or Bruce Dyson doesn’t get that last little push that topples him over the line: I’ll pray that these psychos go on bagging groceries or checking gas meters or delivering pizzas and never raise a hand to kill, that the police in some other small town will be quick to stop them from getting to you if they ever do cross the line; I’ll pray that no one ever picks up a paper and reads your name among the list of victims.

Because that kind of violence never really ends.

I hold my son. I kiss my wife and daughter.

The story is over.

Except for those who survived.

We continue.

Safe from harm, I pray.

Safe...

Watching them from a distance, the way she rocked backward and forward in her grief, her arms gathered around his lifeless body, I could feel nothing but a sense of icy satisfaction, relishing the fact that both of them had finally gotten what they deserved. Death for him. For her, perpetual mourning.

She’d worn a somber gown for the occasion, her face sunk deep inside a cavernous black hood. She stared down at him and ran her fingers through his blood-soaked hair, her features so hideously distorted by her misery it seemed impossible that she’d ever been young and beautiful, or ever felt delight in anything.

By then the years had so divided us and embittered me that I could no longer think of her as someone I’d once loved. But I had loved her, and there were times when, despite everything, I could still recall the single moment of intense happiness I’d had with her.

She’d been only a girl when we first met, the town beauty. Practically the only beautiful thing in the town at all, for it was a small, drab place set down in the middle of a desert waste. To find something beautiful in such a place was nearly miracle enough.