Gary Alexander - The Best American Mystery Stories 2010

What he wonders is, Would it be better to have one day with her or a forever separated by ice?

He goes back into the house and sits down at the kitchen table. Lights a cigarette, then digs through the envelopes on the table until he finds the unopened bill from the power company. He opens it, reads the impossible number, shoves the bill back into the envelope. He tries to calculate how much time the ice will buy him, but can’t figure it out. He could never do math or figures, can’t begin to solve a problem like this.

The basement refrigerator had always smelled bad, like leaking coolant and stale air. It wasn’t used much, had been kept because of his father’s refusal to throw anything away rather than because of any sense of utility. By the time Punter found his mother there, she was already bloated around the belly and the cheeks, her skin already slick with something that glistened like petroleum jelly. He slammed the refrigerator door and ran back upstairs to hide in his bedroom, unsure what he should do. By the time his father came home, Punter was terrified he would know what Punter had seen, that his father would kill him too, that what started as a beating would end in murder.

But his father never said anything, never gave any sign that his wife was dead. He stuck to his story, telling Punter over and over how his mother had run away and left them behind, until Punter stopped asking about her.

He tried to forget, to believe his father’s story, but he couldn’t.

Punter tried to tell someone else, an adult, but he couldn’t do that either, not when he knew what would happen to his father, not when he knew they would take her away if they knew where she was.

During the day, while his father worked, Punter went down to the basement and opened the refrigerator door. The first few times, he just looked at her, at the open eyes and mouth, at the way her body had been jammed into the too-small space, how her throat was slit like the throat of a deer his father had once shown him. The first time he touched her, he thought she was trying to speak to him, but it was just some gas leaking from her mouth, squeaking free from her too-full lungs. Still, Punter had pulled her out of the refrigerator, convinced for a moment she was somehow alive.

When he wrapped his arms around her, all that gas rolled out of her mouth and nose and ears, sounding like a wet fart but smelling so much worse.

He hadn’t meant to vomit on her, but he couldn’t help himself either.

Afterward, he took her upstairs and bathed her to remove the vomit. It was the first time he’d ever seen another person naked, and he tried not to look at his mother’s veiny breasts, at the wet thatch of pubic hair floating in the bath water. Scrubbing her with a washcloth and a bar of soap, he averted his eyes the best he could. Rinsing the shampoo from her hair, he whispered that he was sorry.

It was hard to dress her, but eventually he managed, and then it was time to put her back in the refrigerator before his father came home. He tried to arrange her so that she would be more comfortable than she had been before.

Closing the door, he whispered good-bye. I love you. I’ll see you tomorrow.

The old clothes, covered with blood and vomit, he took to the cornfield behind the house and buried them. After that, there was just the waiting, all through the evening while his father occupied the living room, all through the night while he was supposed to be sleeping.

Day after day, he took her out and wrestled her up the stairs. He sat her on the couch or at the kitchen table, and then he talked, his normal reticence somehow negated by her forever silence. He’d never talked to his mother this much while she was alive, but now he couldn’t stop telling her everything he had ever felt, all his trapped words spilling out one after another.

Punter knows that even if they hadn’t found her and taken her away, she wouldn’t have lasted forever. After the first week, he had started finding little pieces of her left behind, wet and squishy on the wooden basement steps, the kitchen floor, in between the cracks of the couch.

Day after day, he bathed her to get rid of the smell, which grew more pungent as her face began to droop, as the skin on her arms wrinkled and sagged.

Day after day, he searched her body for patches of mold and then scrubbed them off.

Day after day, he held her hands in his, marveling at how, even weeks later, her fingernails continued to grow.

Punter sits on his front step, trying to make sense of the scribbles in his notebook. He doesn’t have enough, isn’t even close to solving the crime, but he knows he has to, if he wants to keep the police away. If they figure the crime out before he does, if they question the killer, then they’ll eventually end up at the pond, where Punter’s attempts at covering his tracks are unlikely to be good enough. Punter doesn’t need to prove the killer guilty, at least not with a judge and a jury. All he has to do is find this person and then make sure he never tells anyone what he did with the body. After that, the girl can be his forever, for as long as he has enough ice.

Punter drives, circling the scenes of the crime: the gas station, the school, her parents’ house, the pond. He drives the circuit over and over, and even with the air conditioning cranked he can’t stop sweating, his face drenched and fevered. He’s halfway between his house and the gas station when his gas gauge hits empty. He pulls over and sits for a moment, trying to decide, trying to wrap his slow thoughts around his investigation. He opens his notebook, flips through its nearly empty pages. He has written down so few facts, so few suspects, and there is so little time left.

In his notebook, he crosses out father, mother, boyfriend. There is only one name left, one suspect he hasn’t disqualified, one other person who has seen the girl. He smokes, considers, tries to prove himself right or wrong, gets nowhere.

He opens the door and stands beside the car. Home is in one direction, the gas station in the other. He reaches back inside the car for his things, leaving the notebook and binoculars behind but shoving the hunting knife into his waistband, untucking his T-shirt to cover the weapon. Punter knows it’s just a guess, but he also knows that in the movies, when the detective has a hunch, it always turns out for the best.

It’s not a long walk, but Punter gets tired fast. He sits down to rest, then can’t get back up. He curls into a ball just off the weed-choked shoulder, sleeps fitfully as cars pass by, their tires throwing loose gravel over his body. When he wakes up, it’s dark out. His body is covered with gray dust, and he can’t remember where he is. He’s never walked this road before, and in the dark it’s as alien as a foreign land. He studies the meager footprints in the dust, tracking himself until he knows which way he needs to go.

There are two cars parked behind the gas station, where the drowned girl’s car had been before it was towed away. One is a small compact, the other a newer sports car. The sports car’s windows are rolled down, its stereo blaring music Punter doesn’t know or understand, the words too fast for him to hear. He takes a couple steps into the trees beside the road, slows his approach to try and stay hidden. To control his breathing, he stops walking until his gasps for air grow quieter. Leaning against the station are two young men in T-shirts and blue jeans, nearly identical with purposely mussed hair and scraggly stubble. With them are two girls, a redhead and a brunette — still wearing their school uniforms and looking even younger than they are.

The brunette presses her hand against her man’s chest, and the man’s hand clenches her butt cheek. Punter can see how firmly he’s holding her, how her skirt is bunched between his fingers, exposing several extra inches of thigh.