Chris Adrian - The Best American Mystery Stories 2007

After two false starts, she made forty-eight, and missed on the forty-ninth when she saw Dale Prtussin hurrying toward her. “Howya, Luce? Did I make you miss?”

“Nah. Lost my focus.”

“How far did you get?”

“Forty-eight in a row. Forty short of my record.”

“I’m sorry... Listen. I hate to talk business like this, with Stevie not even in the ground, but do you think you could take over for him? For the rest of the summer, until you get to school? I mean, you aren’t that experienced, so I couldn’t pay you everything I gave him—”

“How much?”

“Six hundred a week, salary. You’d have to run the cash register in the mornings, starting at six o’clock, seven days a week. And you know, all the group lessons and supervise the school tournaments, but shit, it’s not nothing you haven’t done.”

She nodded: “Start tomorrow?”

“That’d be good. I’ll have Alice put you on the regular payroll, and you got a group lesson tomorrow at four in the afternoon. The ladies from 3M.”

She poked her putter handle at his gut: “You got it, Dale. And thanks. It’ll help me out at Florida, having a little bankroll of my own.”

“Glad to do it,” he said. But his tiny eyes were worried: “This is a bad day at Rattlesnake, Luce. Old Stevie was sorta an asshole sometimes, but nobody ought to go like that.”

“Who’s the hot name in the suspect pool?”

He shook his head. “Isn’t any pool... yet. But, uh... never mind.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Come on, you got somebody in mind?”

He looked both ways, like Mitch had earlier, and said in a hushed voice, “I’d like to know where Willie Franklin was Saturday night.”

She looked away. “Didn’t see him — and I wouldn’t even want to say anything about that. You know, my daddy.”

“I know; but I say the sonofabitch did it once, and if he can do it once, he can do it twice.”

That night, Lucy did her vocab list, then lay in bed and thought about Willis Franklin, the man who’d shot her daddy. A group of men from Rattlesnake had been deer hunting, the weekend before Thanksgiving, up in Sawyer County. Out of tree stands. Franklin came running into the hunting shack, late in the day, and said he’d just found Lucy’s dad dead on the ground, under his tree stand. Shot in the heart.

The body was taken into the coroner’s office, and when it was examined by some state medical people, it was found to have a broken neck and small debris punched into the skin of the face — he’d been knocked right out of the stand.

Unusual. You’d have to be shooting up to hit him.

Then, blind luck, they’d found the remnants of a bullet in the tree, and metallurgical tests matched it to the fragments of metal found in the dead man’s sternum. There was just enough of the slug left to match rifling marks made by Willis Franklin’s gun. Franklin had denied shooting the rifle at all during the afternoon, but then admitted it, saying he was afraid of what he might’ve done. Said he wasn’t even sure he’d done it — he’d been driving deer toward the stand, had one jump up close by, a buck with a big rack, and snapped an uphill shot at it... missed... and found Lucy’s dad five minutes later.

That was all fine, except that Franklin had been after Lucy’s mom like a bloodhound, until her dad stepped in and took her away. And Willis was a man known to have a foul temper and was not a man to forget. There was a trial, but nothing came of it: just not enough evidence, and the jury cut him loose. A tragedy in the woods, a few people said. A few more said, darkly, murder ... And that was how Lucy learned the story.

Lucy thought about it all — her dad, Willis Franklin and Stevie — and allowed herself to snuffle over it for a few minutes. She tried to switch her mind over to the Tour, as she usually did, but it didn’t work: she just kept seeing the dark shape of her father falling out of a tree stand, a bullet in his heart.

She’d never known him. By the time she first heard the murder story, she was seven years old, and her daddy had been moldering in the ground for seven and a half years.

Lucy did the early morning cash register, and when Dale Prtussin came in at ten o’clock, walked back to the trailer, found her mom reading the paper. “Gotta do my grips,” she said, and went on back to the bedroom. The grips and turns took a half hour, and then she was back in the kitchen. “You’re still going to the Pin-Hi’s this afternoon, aren’t you?” she asked.

Her mom nodded. “Yeah. No point in hanging around here.” The Pin-Hi’s were a group of women golfers who played a circuit of eight courses during the summer. “Half the girls will have known Stevie — a couple of them in the biblical sense — and that’ll be all the talk.” She tried a smile again. “I got to protect my back.”

“Did you talk to Mitchell?”

Mom nodded: “We had a good little heart-to-heart. Stevie was fooling with somebody, but it wasn’t me. I’d heard maybe Satin Shorts—”

“That’s what I heard. Mary.”

Mom frowned. “And I heard a couple of weeks ago that Willie Franklin... Ah, shit, I’m not even going to think about that.” She forced a bright smile. “So what are you doing, dear? With your new job?”

Lucy shrugged: “Usual stuff. Pretty much run the place in the early mornings, until the Prtussins show up. Stevie’s job.”

“So that’s something you can cross off your list,” Mom said.

“What?”

“Getting a bankroll together for Florida. A month ago, you were talking about getting a night job with UPS.”

“Yeah, well. Stevie wouldn’t mind, I guess. If he’d known it had to be this way.”

Mom snorted, poured two tablespoons of sugar into a new cup of coffee. “Bullshit. I’ll tell you something about Steve, honey — knowing that you were going to the pros was eating him up. He had a half year on the Tits Tour and that was the best he’d ever do. No way he’d ever make it on the regular Tour, make it through Q school. He hated every move he saw you make. He hated you out there practicing every day.”

“C’mon. He was always helping...”

“Baby, I’ve known a lot more men that you have, and I knew Steve for fifteen years,” Mom said. “That man would have run you over with his car if he thought nobody would catch him. Some goddamn chick stealing his glory at Rattlesnake? I don’t think so.”

“Then how come you were... seeing him?” Actually, Stevie’d come over and bang Mom’s brains out on the other side of a sixteenth inch of aluminum wall.

Mom shrugged. “Company. He was a good-looking man, and he could make me laugh. I don’t got that many years left, with men coming around.”

Lucy fished the Lizard out of the bag in the corner. “Maybe you ought to look for somebody steadier. Somebody who doesn’t play golf.”

Mom snorted again. “Like that might happen.”

Lucy did the group lesson at noon, then two private lessons and then went back in and pushed Dale Prtussin out of the cash register station, even though she didn’t have to. At three o’clock, she walked home. Mom was gone, and she went back to her bedroom, found the second pill case, blanked her mind and went into the bathroom, looked at the second pill, took a breath, bent over to suck water from the faucet, looked at the pill and popped it.

At four o’clock, she had the 3M women. They liked her, but they were all talking about Stevie. At five, she went into the bar, got a salad out of the refrigerator, ate it and then walked back home, twirling the Lizard.

At the trailer, she lay down, waiting for the pill to work; fetched Dan Jenkins’s Dead Solid Perfect from her rack of golf books and giggled through the best parts, though Jenkins sometimes cut a little close to home — a little too close to the way she and Mom lived in their little trailer off Rattlesnake.