Рон Рэш - The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

Inside the house, father and daughter are greeted by the real-estate agent, a large woman with black curly hair who wears a necklace made of flat gold links fitted together like vertebrae. She chats brightly as she shows them through the rooms — the sweep of living room, the Italian marble countertops of the kitchen, the “sol ah rium” — and Nino’s father casually manages to drop a word or two about his cousins, the Saudi royals, with a sly look in Nino’s direction. In actual fact he’s from outside Tbilisi, capital of the Republic of Georgia, and most of his relatives are farmers and shopkeepers. But something about him makes the story believable: his accent, maybe, the soft-spoken schoolbook English he speaks, or the suit and tie he’s wearing, his dark hair and skin and eyes, which are cupped in mournful circles. He emanates quiet respectability. He’s in the market for a house, he tells the agent, where he can stay when he’s visiting his daughter, Scheherazade, who will be attending a private school in Boston in the fall.

“Wonderful,” the agent says, then turns to Nino. “Which school is it?”

Nino stares at her for a second or two, her mind empty. “Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters,” she says at last.

The agent makes an impressed sound. Which means she must never have had stepbrothers who kept her supplied with X-Men comic books, as Nino does, otherwise she’d know that Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters is an institution for mutant superheroes. Nino feels pleased with her little lie. It gives her a guilty feeling of superiority, the thought that she is smarter for having deceived an adult.

But it’s not deception, her father would tell her. It’s pretending. Nobody is hurt by make-believe. He makes it seem like a lark, like they are going to these open houses for free entertainment, but Nino understands that they fill some deeper need in him. Back in Tbilisi, before she was born, before he and her mother came to the U.S., he was a cardiologist, a respected man, someone to whom patients came for advice and treatment. Here he works weekday nights as a home nurse for an elderly Dominican woman named Elvira, whose son pays him in cash and doesn’t ask for a Social Security number. All week long he attends to her wants and needs, and when the weekend comes, he wants someone to attend to his. He likes being courted by the real-estate agents, enjoys their hovering attentions.

The real-estate agent excuses herself to go and greet a young couple who have just come inside. Nino heads for the refreshment table, always the best part of these open houses. She peels back the cling wrap tented over the food trays and eyes the block of marble-veined blue cheese and browning apple slices. She helps herself to a gherkin. Her hunger has lately become bottomless. As she eats, she’s listening to the conversation across the room between the agent and the young couple. The wife, mishearing the agent, wants to know what a Finnish basement is. Does it have a sauna? The man interrupts to ask about a sump pump. Nino doesn’t know what a sump pump is, but she likes the sound of it. She tries it out in her mouth: sump pump, sump pump. One of those mechanical objects whose name is also the sound it makes while operating. What are some others? She’s concentrating on coming up with more, and so she doesn’t hear the lull in the conversation across the room, and that the real-estate agent is now addressing her. She wants to know if Nino and her father have signed the guest book. Nino looks around. Her father is nowhere in sight.

“Not yet,” Nino answers, spotting the guest book on the table. She sticks a wedge of apple she’s holding into her mouth — it’s too big, and hurts the roof of her mouth when she bites down — and signs their made-up names in the book. Over the column marked ADDRESS, she pauses, pen hovering, then writes down the first address that comes into her mind, which is her father’s. Where is he, anyway? She ducks into the living room. The husband of the couple is inspecting a closet. “Hollow-core doors,” he says to himself, rapping on it with his knuckles in the confident manner of a male evaluating something outside his area of expertise.

Nino grabs another apple slice from the tray on her way through the dining room, then wanders upstairs to look for her father. She has this habit that she can’t help, this way of moving soundlessly from one place to another. If she had any superpower, it would be this — the ability to creep up on people in total silence. It makes adults nervous. Shane, her stepfather, calls it skulking. But she doesn’t mean to; it’s just the way that she moves.

She finds her father in the master bedroom. He’s standing in front of the mirror over the room’s dresser.

“Hi,” she says.

Her father jumps in surprise at her voice. There’s a strange expression on his face, a flushing of his cheeks, as if she’s caught him doing something he shouldn’t be.

He opens his mouth to say something, but at this moment the real-estate agent comes into the room, out of breath from the stairs.

“Here you are,” she says. “Have you seen the his-and-hers sinks?”

The following afternoon Nino is sitting in her father’s galley kitchen and reading a Piers Anthony novel, her socked feet propped up on the hot radiator, when the doorbell rings. “Door,” she says.

“What?” her father calls from the bathroom.

“Nothing, I’ll get it,” she says, getting up from her chair and unfastening the door chain. Standing in the spring sunshine outside are two police officers. One is an older white man with a graying mustache and heavy jowls, the other is a small and smooth-faced Latina with her hair pulled back into a bun.

“Is Mr. Gelashvili in?” the woman asks.

“He’s in the bathroom,” Nino says.

“Are you his daughter?” the older man asks her.

Nino nods. And because she doesn’t know what else to do, and because the outside air is cold against her ankles, she opens the door wider and silently stands aside to let them in. The two officers stand awkwardly in the tiny kitchen, their boots leaking puddles on the yellowing linoleum, their jackets brushing against each other with a rustling sound.

“Did you say something, Nanuka?” her father calls from the hallway. He comes into the kitchen with shaving cream on his neck and stops short in the doorway.

“Can I help you?” he says to the officers.

“Mr. Gelashvili? Were you at an open house the other day?”

Her father doesn’t move from the doorway. “Why?”

The woman officer explains. There was a theft during the open house. Some valuable personal items, including heirloom jewelry, were taken from the owners’ bedroom during the day. The police are questioning everyone who was at the event. “We have a search warrant for your home,” she says, unfolding a piece of paper and putting it on the counter.

“You are searching everyone’s home?” her father asks.

The two officers shift uncomfortably.

“Mr. Gelashvili, would you mind telling us what you were doing at the open house?” the older officer says, looking around the kitchen, taking it all in: the ancient refrigerator chugging to itself in the corner, the contact paper on the countertops, the water stains on the ceiling. “Are you in the market for an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar home?”

“I’m studying for my real-estate license,” he says.

“Then would you care to explain why you are in the guest book under a false name?”

Her father stares at the woman for a moment before speaking. His face is pale. Nino can tell he’s afraid of the officers. Back in the Soviet Union you were afraid of the police, he’s told her. But not here. Americans are honest people. This is why he left Tbilisi and came to this country.