Chris Adrian - The Best American Mystery Stories 2007

I think I scare them.

From Murder in the Rough

This was the way you won the Open.

This was the way you won a million dollars.

This is what you did .

Lucy had a list, and she was sticking to it.

Every morning, in the back bedroom, braced on the tinny, oil-canning floor, looking into a full-length mirror she’d bought at the Wal-Mart, Lucy did a hundred grips and a hundred turns. She’d grip the club and check alignment, start the turn and check her intermediate position in the mirror. When she was satisfied, she’d continue, let her wrists cock, hold at the top and check the final position. Then she’d start over.

She was on the eighty-fourth turn when the screaming started. The screaming didn’t affect the drill. Strange sounds came off a golf course, and besides, she’d do a hundred reps if the trailer burned down around her. At ninety-nine she hadn’t even paused to look out the blinds.

On her hundredth turn, she checked her form in the mirror, nodded at herself and relaxed. She was a middle-sized girl, lean from walking and working out, deeply tanned, dishwater blonde with a pixie cut. She was sweating a little, and wiped the side of her nose on her shirtsleeve. She was dressed in a navy-blue golf shirt and khaki shorts, with a Ping golf hat. Her blond ponytail was threaded through the back of the hat.

She put the weighted club in the corner of the bedroom and walked down the central hall to the kitchen. Her mom was digging in a toaster with a fork, talking to it around a lit Marlboro, letting it know: “You piece of shit-ass junk, you let that outta there.”

By some mistake, the television was turned off, so the screaming outside sounded even louder than it had in the back. Mom, still talking sticky-lipped around the cigarette, glanced sideways at the screen door and said, “Goddamned golfers,” and turned the toaster upside down and banged it on the counter.

Lucy looked out through the screen, across the six-foot strip of grass that served as the front yard, past the corner of the Tobins’ double-wide and over the fence, across the end of the driving range and the east corner of the machine shed, and judged the screams as coming from the first fairway. “Don’t sound like drunks,” she said. She corrected herself. “Doesn’t.”

“Yeah, well, fuck ’em anyway,” Mom said. Lucy’s mother knew about golfers, having had a number of hasty relationships with them over the years, including one with Lucy’s father. Lucy knew little about him except that he was a 6-handicap and, under pressure, had a tendency to flip his hands at the beginning of his downswing.

“Duck-hooked me right into the county maternity ward,” her mother told her. “Not that I didn’t love you every minute, sweetheart.”

Lucy would have liked to know more, but never would. She had two photographs of him, taken with a small camera, reds and greens in the photos starting to bleed: her mom and dad in their golf clothes, standing near the ball machine on the driving range, squinting at the camera, sunlight harsh on their faces. Her father had been murdered by a man named Willis Franklin, who at that very moment was probably sitting on a barstool at the Rattlesnake Golf Club, not five hundred yards away, having gotten away with it.

“How did this happen?” her mother asked, peering into the toaster. “That sonofabitch is welded in there.”

“I told you, you cannot put frozen flapjacks in a toaster; it don’t work,” Lucy said. “When they thaw out they get sticky and they sink down and grab ahold of them little wires at the bottom... Ah, shit.” She was tired of hearing herself talk about it; and a little tired of correcting her own grammar. She did it anyway: “ Doesn’t work,” she said. “ Those little wires.”

Her mom looked up: “You been pretty goddamn prickly lately.”

“I’m headin’ out; see what’s going on,” Lucy said. She rattled through the golf bags stacked in the corner and pulled out her putter.

“Dinner at five thirty,” Mom said.

“Yeah.” Like it made any difference what time they fired up the microwave. “I’ll be back before then, probably for lunch. I got a couple of lessons; then I gotta run into town.”

Lucy took her putter, which she called the Lizard, and stuck five balls in the pocket of the golf vest she’d designed herself and produced on Mom’s pedal-driven Singer — a sports-activity vest that sooner or later would be stolen by those sons of bitches at Nike, she didn’t doubt, and somebody would make a million bucks, but it wouldn’t be her. She went out the door, the Lizard over her shoulder, the new Titleists clicking in her vest pocket. On the step, she automatically touched her pocket again, didn’t feel the book. “Shoot.”

She went back inside: “Forgot my list,” she said.

“Heaven forbid,” Mom said. She’d given up on the toaster and was looking through the litter in the kitchen for her Marlboros. “Got to clean this place up,” she muttered.

Lucy went back to the bedroom, got the little black book from the dresser and headed out again, out the door, past the Tobins’ place, through a hole in the fence and past the machine shed, where Donnie Dell was poking around the mower blades on an aging orange Kubota tractor. He called, “Hiya, Luce,” and she raised the putter and called back, “What’s all the hollerin’ about?”

He shook his head: “I don’t know. Too early to be drunks.” She kept going and he called after her, “You gonna be around?”

“Maybe tonight,” she called back. “Right now, I got a lesson with Rick Waite and his wife.”

“Okay. Maybe, uh, I’ll stop by. Later.”

She smiled and kept moving. Donnie Dell was taking some kind of ag course over at UW-River Falls; a college boy. She knew exactly what he wanted; he’d been coming around for a month, ever since he got hired. What he didn’t know, but that she did, was that he was going to get some, but not for a week. That’s when he came up on her list, and she’d hold to it.

But tonight, tomorrow, the next day — uh-uh. She was busy.

She was passing the end of the machine shed, heading toward the putting green, when she saw one of the Prtussin brothers trotting down the first fairway. The sight stopped her. Dale Prtussin was forty-five years old and weighed upwards of 250 pounds. None of it was muscle, and seeing him run was like watching a swimming pool full of Jell-O in an earthquake. He’d once eaten one of his own salads and come down with food poisoning. The major symptom was projectile vomiting and she’d seen him walk to the john in mid-spasm.

Up the fairway, at the top of the hill, just shy of the 185-yard marker, a half dozen golfers were gathered around the sand trap that guarded the inside elbow of the dogleg. They were all looking into the trap. Lucy went that way, twirling the putter like a baton.

One of the golfers, an older guy named Clark who always pretended to be taking an avuncular interest while he peered down her blouse, frowned when he saw her coming, held out a hand, and said, “This isn’t for you, young lady.”

“Don’t make me hurt ya,” Lucy said, pointing the putter handle at his gut. Harley Prtussin said, “Howya, Luce?” as she came up and looked in the sand trap. The first thing she saw was the ball that somebody had driven into the lip of the bunker; then she saw the nose in the divot.

“Holy shit,” she said. She was gawking. “What’s that?”

“Stevie,” Prtussin said.

“Stevie? Is he dead?” All right, that was stupid. “How’d he get in there? Who found him?”