Megan Abbott - The Best American Mystery Stories 2016

Watching, Penny had felt like the peeping Tom. It was so intimate.

“Sometimes I wonder,” Mr. Flant said now. “There were rumors. Black widow, or old maid.”

“You can’t make someone put his head in the oven,” Benny said. “At least not for long. The gas’d get at you, too.”

“True,” Mr. Flant said.

“Maybe it didn’t happen at the oven,” Penny blurted. “She found the body. What if she just turned on the gas while he was sleeping?”

“And dragged him in there, for the cops?”

Mr. Flant and Benny looked at each other.

“She’s very strong,” Penny said.

Back in her bungalow, Penny sat just inside her bedroom window, waiting.

Peering through the blinds, long after midnight, she finally saw her. Mrs. Stahl, walking along the edges of the courtyard.

She was singing softly and her steps were uneven and Penny thought she might be tight, but it was hard to know.

Penny was developing a theory.

Picking up a book, she made herself stay awake until two. Then, slipping from bed, she tried to follow the flashes of light, the shadows.

Bending down, she put her hand on the baseboards, as if she could touch those funny shapes, like mice on their haunches. Or tiny men, marching.

“Something’s there!” she said out loud, her voice surprising her. “It’s in the walls.”

In the morning it would all be blurry, but in that moment clues were coming together in her head, something to do with gas jets and Mrs. Stahl and love gone awry and poison in the walls, and she had figured it out before anything bad had happened.

It made so much sense in the moment, and when the sounds came too, the little tap-tap s behind the plaster, she nearly cheered.

Mr. Flant poured her glass after glass of Amaro. Benny waxed his mustache and showed Penny his soft shoe.

They were trying to make her feel better about losing her job.

“I never came in late except two or three times. I always did my job,” Penny said, biting her lip so hard it bled. “I think I know who’s responsible. He kited me for seven hundred and forty dollars and now he’s out to ruin me.”

Then she told them how, a few days ago, she had written him a letter.

Mr. D.—

I don’t write to cause you any trouble. What’s mine is mine and I never knew you for an indian giver.

I bought fine dresses to go to Hollywood Park with you, to be on your arm at Villa Capri. I had to buy three stockings a week, your clumsy hands pawing at them. I had to turn down jobs and do two cycles of penicillin because of you. Also because of you, I got the heave-ho from my roommate Pauline who said you fondled her by the dumbwaiter. So that money is the least a gentleman could offer a lady. The least, Mr. D.

Let me ask you: those books you kept beneath the false bottom in your desk drawer on the lot — did you buy those from Mr. Stanley Rose, or his handsome assistant Larry?

I wonder if your wife knows the kinds of books you keep in your office, the girls you keep there and make do shameful things?

I know Larry would agree with me about you. He was a sensitive man and I live where he did and sleep in his bed and all of you ruined him, drove him to drink and to a perilous act.

How dare you try to take my money away. And you with a wife with ermine, mink, lynx dripping from her plump, sunk shoulders.

Your wife at 312 North Faring Road, Holmby Hills.

Let’s be adults, sophisticates. After all, we might not know what we might do if backed against the wall.

It had made more sense when she wrote it than it did now, reading it aloud to Mr. Flant and Benny.

Benny patted her shoulder. “So he called the cops on ya, huh?”

“The studio cops. Which is bad enough,” Penny said.

They had escorted her from the makeup department. Everyone had watched, a few of the girls smiling.

“Sorry, Pen,” Gordon had said, taking the powder brush from her hand. “What gives in this business is what takes away.”

When he’d hired her two months ago, she’d watched as he wrote on her personnel file “MR. D.”

“Your man, he took this as a threat, you see,” Mr. Flant said, shaking his head as he looked at the letter. “He is a hard man. Those men are. They are hard men and you are soft. Like Larry was soft.”

Penny knew it was true. She’d never been hard enough, at least not in the right way. The smart way.

It was very late when she left the two men.

She paused before Number Four and found herself unable to move, cold fingertips pressed between her breasts, pushing her back.

That was when she spotted Mrs. Stahl inside the bungalow, fluttering past the picture window in her evening coat.

“Stop!” Penny called out. “I see you!”

And Mrs. Stahl froze. Then, slowly, she turned to face Penny, her face warped through the glass, as if she were under water.

“Dear,” a voice came from behind Penny. A voice just like Mrs. Stahl’s. Could she throw her voice?

Swiveling around, she saw the landlady standing in the courtyard, a few feet away.

It was as if she were a witch, a shapeshifter from one of the fairy tales she’d read as a child.

“Dear,” she said again.

“I thought you were inside,” Penny said, trying to catch her breath. “But it was just your reflection.”

Mrs. Stahl did not say anything for a moment, her hands cupped in front of herself.

Penny saw she was holding a scarlet-covered book in her palms.

“I often sit out here at night,” she said, voice loose and tipsy, “reading under the stars. Larry used to do that, you know.”

She invited Penny into her bungalow, the smallest one, in back.

“I’d like us to talk,” she said.

Penny did not pause. She wanted to see it. Wanted to understand.

Walking inside, she realized at last what the strongest smell in the courtyard was. All around were pots of night-blooming jasmine, climbing and vining up the built-in bookshelves, around the window frame, even trained over the arched doorway into the dining room.

They drank jasmine tea, iced. The room was close and Penny had never seen so many books. None of them looked like they’d ever been opened, their spines cool and immaculate.

“I have more,” Mrs. Stahl said, waving toward the mint-walled hallway, some space beyond, the air itself so thick with the breath of the jasmine, Penny couldn’t see it. “I love books. Larry taught me how. He knew what ones I’d like.”

Penny nodded. “At night I read the books in the bungalow. I never read so much.”

“I wanted to keep them there. It only seemed right. And I didn’t believe what the other tenants said, about the paper smelling like gas.”

At that, Penny had a grim thought. What if everything smelled like gas and she didn’t know it? The strong scent of apricot, of eucalyptus, a perpetual perfume suffusing everything — how would one know?

“Dear, do you enjoy living in Larry’s bungalow?”

Penny didn’t know what to say, so she only nodded, taking a long sip of the tea. Was it rum? Some kind of liqueur? It was very sweet and tingled on her tongue.

“He was my favorite tenant. Even after...” — she paused, her head shaking — “what he did.”

“And you found him,” Penny said. “That must have been awful.”

She held up the red-covered book she’d been reading in the courtyard.

“This was found on... on his person. He must’ve been planning on giving it to me. He gave me so many things. See how it’s red, like a heart?”

“What kind of book is it?” Penny asked, leaning closer.

Mrs. Stahl looked at her but didn’t seem to be listening, clasping the book with one hand while with the other she stroked her neck, long and unlined.