Chris Adrian - The Best American Mystery Stories 2007

She was waiting for the pill when she heard a ruckus out by the fence line, and then somebody started banging on the door, the whole trailer trembling with the impact. She climbed out of bed and went to look. Donnie Dell, the boy from the machine shed, the college student she was going to sleep with in a week, stood at the bottom of the steps. His straw-colored hair was sticking out wildly from beneath his ball cap, like the Scarecrow’s in The Wizard of Oz.

“What?”

“You hear?” he croaked.

“Hear what?”

“The cops arrested Willie Franklin.”

Lucy stepped out the door. “You’re shittin’ me.”

“I’m not shittin’ you,” Donnie said. His eyes glowed with the excitement of it. “They found blood in the trunk of his car. And a hair, is what people are saying. Jim Doolittle got it straight from the cops.”

“How would Doolittle know?”

“Works up with the hospital... I’m tellin’ you, he knows. Jim’s over in the bar right now. The cops found blood in Willie’s trunk, and they matched it. He’s absolutely fuckin’ toast.”

That was a moment that Lucy knew she’d remember forever.

She might someday be an old lady with a mantel full of Open trophies, and maybe a big scroll from the Hall of Fame, and maybe five kids and twenty grandkids — but she’d always remember standing outside the trailer door with somebody playing a Stones record off at the other end of the park, and a car accelerating away from the club, and the crickets in the cinder-block foundations, and the smell of cut grass and gasoline coming off the course, the best smell in the world. The moment she’d heard.

“Thanks for coming, Donnie,” she said.

“You coming over to the bar?”

“I’d like to, but I’m feeling not so good. I ate one of them fuckin’ salads...”

“Aw, Jesus,” he said. “You know better than that.”

“I know, I know, but I was hungry... So... see you next week?” She touched his shoulder.

“Maybe catch a movie,” he said.

“That’d be cool, Donnie,” she said.

She went back to the bed, but ten minutes later, a car pulled into their parking space, the lights sweeping over her window. Too early for Mom, unless something happened.

“Goddamn it,” she said. She pushed herself up, went to the door. Mitchell Drury.

“Mitch?”

“Hi, Luce. Is your mom home?”

“No, she’s got the Pin-Hi’s over at the Hollow tonight. Donnie Dell was just here, said you arrested Willie.”

He nodded: “I was coming to tell her. ’Cause it’s so much like what happened with your dad.”

“How’d you catch him?” Lucy asked, crossing her arms and leaning on the door frame.

“Got a note from somebody at the club — said they saw him running off the course with his bag the night Stevie disappeared. Looked like he was panicked...”

“A note? From who?”

“We’re trying to figure that out,” Mitchell said. “Anonymous. Kind of think it might be one of the schoolteachers. One of the profession guys. The language was... high-level.”

“No shit,” Lucy said.

“Had access to a computer and a laser printer. We’ll find him, one way or another.”

“What’s Willie say?”

“Same thing he did with your dad — that he didn’t have anything to do with it. Now he’s got an attorney, and he’s not saying anything.”

“Well, fuck him,” Lucy said fiercely. “Two people? Fuck him.”

“That’s sort of what I think. I was talking to...” Drury paused and took a half-step back. “You feel okay?”

“Ah, I got an upset stomach from one of the Prtussins’ fuckin’ salads,” Lucy said.

“Well, uh, you got...”

He looked down, and Lucy looked down and saw the dark spot near her crotch. “Oh, Jesus.” Her hands flew to her face. “Oh, God, I’m so embarrassed, Mitch. My period, I, God, it’s early, God...”

“That’s all right,” he said hastily. “You go take care of it, honey. Tell your mom to call me at home whenever she gets in. I’ll be up till midnight or later.”

“Aw, jeez, Mitch...”

He was still backing away. “Take care of it, honey...”

She shut the door and got a Kotex from the box under her bed, strapped it on, pulled on a fresh pair of pants, then squirted ERA all over her stained underpants and shorts and threw them in the washer. She grinned at the thought of Drury’s face: men would generally cut off their arms rather than have to deal with something like that, she thought.

Men.

Like that goddamn Stevie. Fuckin’ Mom all night, then coming on to little Lucy in the shop. Holding her hips during the lessons, when he was showing her how to turn; hands on her rib cage, standing her up straight. Hands all over her. And more than his hands, down there in the basement room of the club, after he’d closed it down. He called her tasty, like she was some kind of fuckin’ bun. Nobody knew because Lucy had to deal with stealing her mother’s boyfriend; and Stevie had to deal with the problem of statutory rape, which he knew all about.

Then last week, when she told him she’d missed her period, out there on the fairway, he’d laughed at her: “So much for the fuckin’ Tour,” he said, and he turned away, laughing. If there’d been anybody else out there in the semidark, they’d have heard him, laughing, laughing, laughing.

The driver had been right there, poking out of her bag. She’d had it out in an instant, a lifelong familiar. Stevie’d started to turn when the clubhead caught him in the temple, and he’d gone down like a shot bird.

She’d buried him in the bunker, because it was convenient, and she had a lot of thinking to do; lists to make. She was back in the house before she noticed the blood on the club. She went out to wipe it on the grass when she noticed the taillights blinking in the club parking lot, and down on the far end, where it always was, the hulk of Willie Franklin’s Tahoe. He never locked the back doors...

Mom was home by eleven and knocked on the bedroom door. “Okay in there?”

“Yeah. Gotta get up at five,” Lucy called back.

Mom opened the door: “You heard about Willie Franklin?”

“Yeah. Oh — you’re supposed to call Mitchell if you get in before midnight. He wants to talk to you about it.”

“I’ll call him,” Mom said. “See you in the morning.”

Lucy listened to her footsteps down the hall, then got up and looked at the latest Kotex. It was fairly bloody, but the flow seemed to be slowing. That’s what the instructions had said: the onset would take a couple of hours, then the flow would be heavy for a couple of more, and after that, it would be more or less like a regular period. She switched pads and crawled back in bed.

This was what it took to go on the Tour, she thought. A fierce determination: nothing would stand in the way. A fierce organization: determination was nothing without focus.

And talent. She had all of that, Lucy did.

And her lists.

Her lists. Better do something about those. She reached across the familiar darkness, found her vest and took out the small book. She had matches on her bed stand, to light the evergreen-scented candle. She lit it, and in the candlelight, found the pages and carefully ripped them out.

One note said, RU-486 . Ripped and burned.

Another said, New job. Ripped and burned, the paper flaring in the near dark.

A third one said, Frame Willie. Ripped and burned.

She looked at the last note for a while, the only note not written with a golf pencil. It had been written the week before, in pale blue ink. Girlie ink, she thought now.

It said, Marry Stevie?