The Best American Mystery Stories 2020

John M. Floyd Rhonda and Clyde

from Black Cat Mystery Magazine

The strangest two days of Helen Wilson’s life began with a skiing trip to Appaloosa Resort one winter Sunday. The trip itself wasn’t unusual: Appaloosa was a popular location, and only forty miles from her home in the town of Lodgepole, Wyoming. What was unusual was that Helen had gone there in the company of friends. Helen Wilson didn’t have many friends.

Even as a child she’d been a loner, and her school years had given her little reason to change. She also had no desire, after graduating with an accounting degree from UW, to leave her hometown to pursue a career. Instead she hired on as a bank teller, a safe and unpretentious job on a safe and unpretentious street near the house her late parents had left her. Ten years later Helen was still there, a sensible woman of reasonable means but no ambition, one of those rare people who doesn’t require much in order to be happy. Even so, she was pleasantly surprised when two total strangers engaged her in conversation one day at a neighborhood coffee shop, and even more surprised to find that she enjoyed their company.

Rhonda Felson and her husband, Clyde, were new to the area, Helen discovered — ​writers who had rented a cabin in the mountains nearby and who spent most of their time hiking and sightseeing and creating what Helen suspected would one day be masterpieces of literature. During the days after that first meeting, the three of them had gotten together twice for dinner in local restaurants, and the following weekend Rhonda had invited Helen to accompany them to Appaloosa. The trip ended badly. Helen, who had never before been near a pair of skis, suffered the fate of many first-timers: six hours later she found herself medicated and hobbling on crutches through the exit doors of the local ER. More painful to her than her injuries was the knowledge that she’d been so much trouble to her new friends — ​they’d driven her to the hospital and then home afterward — ​and she found herself apologizing nonstop for spoiling their outing.

“Nonsense,” Rhonda said for the tenth time. She used Helen’s key to open the apartment door and stood aside as Clyde helped Helen maneuver down the hallway to her bedroom. “These things happen. I’m just sorry it happened to you.”

Helen sagged backward onto the bed, propped her bad leg up on pillows, and sighed. “Thanks, guys,” she said. “I’ll be okay now.”

Rhonda was frowning. “Maybe I better stay. Clyde can come fetch me in the morning—”

“I’ll be fine,” Helen said again. “Oh, I just remembered — ​where’d we put my purse?”

“It’s in the other room.”

“Could you get it for me? My cell phone’s inside it, and I need to call my boss.”

“Now?” Clyde asked. “It’s past ten.”

“He stays up late. He knows a lot of the folks at the resort, and if he hears about my mishap I want him to know I’ll still be coming in to the bank tomorrow.”

Both Felsons blinked at the same time. “You’re going in to work?” Rhonda said.

“This isn’t exactly life-threatening. I just want to forewarn him. I don’t want everybody mooning over me when I limp in with my cast and my new wooden legs.” Helen closed her eyes for a second and added, “Whoa — ​I can’t believe I’m so tired.”

“Tell you what. I’ll make the call for you. You need to rest. What’s your boss’s number?”

Helen gave it to Rhonda and watched sleepily as the two of them left the room. It occurred to her that from now on she would stick to tennis...

Sheriff Marcie Ingalls had never fully adjusted to cold weather. Her parents had moved the family here from Alabama when she was nine, and she was sometimes convinced that she’d lived in balmy climes just long enough to thin her blood. But she’d married a local guy and her mother was still here, so Marcie made the best of it. She dressed in three or four layers, never complained, and even on subzero mornings usually got to the office before anyone else.

Today, though, she arrived to find the door unlocked and coffee brewing. Jerry Pearson, her only deputy, was at his desk in the back corner, feet propped up and a copy of Guns & Ammo in his hands.

“You’re early,” Marcie said. What a detective she would’ve made.

“And full of news,” Pearson replied in a bored voice. “I put a ticket on a car parked in the alley off Fourth Street, a twenty-foot limb fell from an oak in front of the courthouse, and the bakery has jelly doughnuts on special today.”

Sheriff Ingalls shrugged out of her heavy coat and took a seat at her desk. “Was it blocking traffic?” she asked.

“What, the limb?”

“The car.”

“No, just blocking the alley.” Pearson tossed the magazine onto his desktop. “Illegally parked. You saying I shouldn’t have ticketed it?”

“I’m just saying it’s not even seven a.m., and nobody ever drives through there anyhow.”

He snorted. “Where I come from, they’d tow it away.”

“You’re not where you came from, Jerry. We do things a little different here.”

“You can say that again.” He nodded toward the window. “Hear that sound?”

Marcie frowned, listening. Sure enough, something was pounding on something, in the distance — bam... bam... bam, sharp and clear in the brittle morning air. She was about to reply, then stopped as Wanda Stalworth, the dispatcher, pushed through the door in a bright red parka. They exchanged greetings, Wanda headed for her desk in the other room, and Marcie looked again at Jerry Pearson.

“I hear it,” she said. “What is it? Hammering?”

“Yeah. Roscoe Three Bears. He’s fixing Maude Jessup’s front steps.”

“Good. She’s almost ninety, and that’s a high porch — ​it’d be too bad if she fell.”

“What I can’t figure is why he does it. Splits her firewood for her too. Roscoe’s banned from the rez and dirt poor, and I hear she never pays him. Probably never even thanks him.”

Marcie took a pair of reading glasses from her pocket and started riffling through her in-basket. “He does it because Maude’s old and there’s no one else to help her, Jerry.”

He shook his head. “Maybe one of these days I’ll understand that kind of thinking.”

“I doubt it,” she said.

From the dispatch desk Wanda called, “Are you two arguing again?”

“Not me,” Pearson said. He rose to his feet and picked up his coat. “I’m going to do something to make me feel good for a change.”

“You quitting?” Marcie asked.

“Not that good.”

“Where you going, then?”

“To buy some jelly doughnuts.”

Two hours later and two blocks away, in the bank on the corner of Western and Fourth, branch manager Spencer E. Spencer looked up from the papers on his desk to see loan officer Ernest Polk standing in his office doorway. Both men were wearing thick winter jackets, and Polk even had on a fur hat with earflaps. He looked like a movie poster for Fargo.

“Any word on the heating situation?” Spencer asked him.

“They’re sending a repair crew from Casper,” Polk said. “It’ll take a couple hours. Until then I guess we’ll just have to stay bundled up.”

Spencer sighed. He had come in this morning to find the bank lobby as cold as Siberia, although the lights and the computers all seemed to be working. When he’d phoned the bank’s home office, they had instructed him to call the heating-system people and to — ​above all else — ​remain open for business. He glanced through the glass wall of his office at two of his tellers, who were huddled at their stations like ice fishermen. Both were wearing mittens and had the hoods of their coats pulled up over their heads. He found himself dreaming of Florida.

Spencer E. Spencer was still staring at the lobby when his third teller clomped through the door on a pair of crutches. Helen Wilson was encased in a brown parka from the top of her head to her knees, and what little of her could be seen wasn’t good: one eye was squeezed shut, her nose was bandaged, and a long comma of black hair hung in her face. Looking at no one and saying not a word, she solemnly made her way to her teller cage and wrestled herself onto her stool. The other two women muttered sympathetic words to her, their breath making little white clouds in the air, but otherwise the room was dead silent.

The two men in the office couldn’t help staring. “She’s in worse shape than I expected,” Ernest Polk whispered.

Spencer, who had already alerted the staff, said, “That friend of hers — ​the one who called me last night to tell me Helen was coming in? — ​said she skied into a tree.”

“She must’ve knocked it down.”

“Tough lady,” Spencer said. He reached for his phone and punched a number. When he saw Helen Wilson pick up her receiver, he said, “Sure you feel all right, Helen?”

“I’b vine,” her voice said. “Doesn’d hurd doo bad.”

“Looks like it would, from here. And what’s wrong with your voice?”

“My doze is all stobbed up, dad’s all. Like I god a gold.”

“Okay,” he said. “You let me know if you need anything.” He hung up and said to Polk, “Maybe she’ll have an easy morning — ​we shouldn’t get many customers anyhow, with no heat.”

But as soon as he uttered those words, the front door opened again and a short redheaded man entered carrying two duffel bags. On the nearest bag were the printed words PARADISE VALLEY CASINO. He walked to Helen Wilson’s station, set the bags on the counter, and grinned at her. The tired smile she gave him in return looked more like a grimace to Spencer, but the man didn’t seem to mind. He also didn’t seem bothered by the frigid temperature.

“Thank God for the casino,” Spencer said. “They deposit more money in a week than most of our customers deposit in a year.”

“I believe it,” Polk said as he turned to leave. “I’ll keep a watch out for the repair folks.”

Spencer nodded and went back to his paperwork, wishing he could do it with his gloves on. He also wished he didn’t know the Paradise Valley Casino quite as well as he did. Sadly, some of those funds being deposited had probably once been his.

It took him twenty minutes to sign off on the earnings reports and finish a long phone call with the bank’s IT crew about an upgrade to his ATM software. Finally Spencer leaned back in his swivel chair, burrowed lower into his coat, looked over at the tellers — ​and frowned. No one was sitting at Helen Wilson’s station. Earlier, around the time the casino courier was here, Spencer had noticed Helen leaving her stool to make several trips to the vault. That made sense: the casino’s deposits were always large, and her crutches would prevent her from carrying too big a load at once. But now she was gone. He picked up the phone to call the head teller, but before he could hit the intercom button, Ernest Polk stuck his head into the office.

“Know what we should do, Spence?”

“What.”

“We should have a promotion and give away those big duffel bags like the casino does.”

“What?” Spencer said again. His mind was on injured employees, not bank giveaways.

“You know — ​those bags like the ones the guy was carrying earlier, with the name printed on the side. That’s great advertising, and—”

“Wait a minute,” he said, still holding the receiver. “Are you saying the casino lets anybody have those, for free?”

“Well, not free,” Polk said. “You have to spend at least fifty bucks at the slot machines. But that doesn’t take long.”

Spencer frowned. A vague uneasiness had crept into his bones. Shaking it off, he said, “Thanks, Ernie. I’ll consider it.” Then, without waiting for a response, he pressed the button for the head teller and, when she answered, said, “Libby? Is Helen taking her break?”

“She left for home ten minutes ago, Spence. Said she wasn’t feeling well after all. I’m not surprised — ​she shouldn’t have tried to come in.”

“Thanks, Lib. I’ll give her a call.” Which he did, after allowing her five more minutes to get home. That should be plenty — ​Helen’s house was barely a mile from the bank.

But her cell phone didn’t answer. It rang four times, then went to voicemail. Rather than leave a message, he found her home number and tried her landline. After three rings, she picked up.

“Helen?” he said. “It’s Spencer, at the bank. Just wanted to make sure you’re all right.”

Helen Wilson said, a little groggily, “I’m fine — ​thanks for checking on me.”

“Well, you sound better, anyway. More like yourself.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your clogged nose,” Spencer said. “It must’ve cleared up, right?”

Hesitation. Then: “It’s my leg, Spence, not my nose. I broke my ankle.”

“But — ​when you were here earlier...”

“There? I wasn’t there. I’ve been here at home all morning.”

Spencer felt a cold ripple move through his stomach. “What?”

“My friend Rhonda phoned you last night, right? At first she was going to call and tell you I’d be coming in anyway, but she later said she’d taken the liberty of telling you I’d be staying home sick today. She was right, I guess — ​I needed the rest. So I stayed home.”

Silence. Spencer tried to respond, but his throat seemed to have closed up.

“Didn’t she call you?” Helen asked him. “What’s going on?”

He swallowed. “I don’t know. I mean — ​the person who called said you’d be coming in, like always. She didn’t say anything about taking a sick day.”

“Oh my. She must’ve misunderstood. Or maybe I misunderstood her...”

“Listen, Helen — ​this is important. Who’s Rhonda?”

“I told you, a friend. I met her last week, she’s the one who invited me to go skiing with her and her husband yesterday. The one who fell on my leg.”

“Fell on it?”

“Well, it was an accident, but yeah, she fell and landed on my leg.”

Spencer was sweating now, his heart thudding in his chest. “Hold on a second, okay?”

He rose and walked stiffly into the lobby and around to the teller area. Underneath the counter, in front of Helen’s chair, he found it — ​a huge stack of bills. But they weren’t bills at all — ​they were cash-sized bundles of blank paper. Helen’s trips to the vault, he realized now, weren’t to transport cash to it. They were to transport cash from it. If he’d been paying attention, he’d have noticed that the duffel bags the casino man had taken out of the bank were probably stuffed as full as they had been when he came in — ​but with real bills this time.

Quick as a flash, he pressed the alarm button under the counter, to alert the sheriff’s department, then sprinted back to the phone in his office. “Helen?” he said. “What did they look like, your two friends?” But he was afraid he already knew.

“Look like? Well... the guy’s short, reddish hair, glasses. His wife is — ​I don’t know, about my height and weight, I guess. In fact it’s a little spooky how much she does look like me, with the black hair and—”

“Names,” Spencer blurted. “Do you have names?”

She gave them to him: Clyde and Rhonda Felson. He scribbled them onto a pad, looked up at the window, and saw Sheriff Ingalls’s patrol car screech to a stop at the curb. As he leaped from his desk and hurried to meet the cops, Spencer realized he was trembling.

But not from the cold.

“I can’t believe it,” Helen murmured. She was still propped up in her bed, her leg cast resting on a pillow. Her face was noticeably free of bruises and bandages. “Rhonda told me she told you I wasn’t coming in... when in fact she told you I was. She was setting the stage for” — ​Helen swallowed hard — ​“for impersonating me.”

Gathered around her were Sheriff Marcie Ingalls, Deputy Jerry Pearson, and branch manager Spence Spencer.

“That seems to be what happened,” Marcie agreed.

Spencer, who seemed to have aged ten years, said, “You didn’t hear her make the call?”

Helen shook her head. “No, she used my cell phone, from the other room. I was a little woozy anyhow, from the painkillers. But I remember her coming back in and waking me up and telling me you’d said that taking a day off was fine, and to get well soon.”

“She must’ve been crazy, to stroll into the bank like that,” Marcie said. “But it worked.”

“Without that damn parka it wouldn’t have worked,” Spencer said. “Between it and the fake bandages, we couldn’t see much of her face. Also, she disguised her voice.”

“And her partner, husband, whatever — ​he walked out with... how much?”

Spencer shrugged. “We don’t know yet. A lot.” He ran a hand over his face. “With bags the casino gave him for free, for playing the slots. Insult to injury.”

“You’ll get me the security video, right?”

“Ernie Polk’s holding it for you. And our main office has already offered a reward.”

The sheriff nodded and looked at Helen. “Clyde Felson, you said? And Rhonda?”

“Yes.” Helen repeated the descriptions she’d given to Spencer on the phone. “She really does look like me. She’s prettier than I am, though.” She sighed. “He called her Ronnie.”

“Ronnie and Clyde?”

“Why not?” Deputy Pearson said.

Everyone turned to look at him.

Pearson shrugged. “They rob banks.”

Marcie and Pearson continued questioning Helen for another half hour, trying to come up with some kind of lead. The only thing helpful at all was the fact that the robbers and fake friends (Helen had to admit that’s what they were) drove a black Toyota Tundra. At least that’s the vehicle they’d taken Helen to the resort in. As for today, nobody remembered seeing what the imposter had driven to the bank.

Sheriff Ingalls said it had probably been Helen’s Ford Focus, because of the possibility that someone might see it — ​and the fact that its keys were missing from her purse. In any case, the Ford was now parked in its rightful place behind Helen’s house. The sheriff said they would check it over for prints but that it would probably yield no clues; Rhonda Felson would almost certainly have kept her gloves on during the drive to and from the bank.

“Wait a second,” Helen said. “I think they might’ve had two cars. One that I never saw.”

“Why would you think that?” Marcie asked.

“We went to the resort in the Toyota, but Rhonda drove. Once, on Sunday, I saw Clyde take a set of keys from his pocket. It was only for a moment — ​he was looking for his ticket for the ski lift — ​but the biggest key on the chain wasn’t for their Tundra.”

“What kind of key was it?”

“A Honda.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. It had that funny curved H that’s bigger on top than on the bottom.”

The sheriff and her deputy exchanged a look. Both were thinking the same thing: since the robbers knew Helen had seen the Toyota, they would probably ditch that vehicle someplace and use another for a getaway. They could always steal one, but if they already had a second car waiting in the wings...

“Okay, that helps. They’re probably driving a Honda,” Marcie said. “Anything else?”

“Not that I can think of.” Helen heaved a sigh. “They even stole my crutches.”

A silence passed. Marcie used it to look carefully around the room. When she noticed the old-fashioned telephone sitting on the floor between Helen’s bed and the potty chair, she blinked.

“Helen, is that the phone you used earlier, to talk to the bank?”

“Yeah, Spence called me on it. I had to dig it out from under the bedside table. It’s still connected, obviously, but I haven’t used it much since I got my cell phone.”

“Where’s your cell phone now?”

“Same place as my crutches, probably. Rhonda used my cell to call Spence last night, and must’ve kept it.” Helen looked up and added, “I bet they figured they were taking my only phone, so I wouldn’t be able to call anyone at the bank today — ​or get a call from anyone — ​and screw up their plans. They wouldn’t have seen my landline.”

The room fell silent again. Then Marcie had a thought.

“If your cell phone’s still turned on,” she said to Helen, “we can track it.”

“It’s still on,” Spencer E. Spencer said. “Or at least it was, after the robbery.”

Everyone turned to face him. Marcie had actually forgotten he was still there, and then realized he was probably reluctant to go back to an unheated bank and a heated interrogation by his bosses. As he’d mentioned, he hadn’t even determined yet how much money was taken.

“How do you know her cell phone’s on?” she asked him.

“Because I tried to call her on it first, and it rang. No one picked up, but it rang several times and went to voicemail — ​it didn’t give me a not-in-service message or anything.”

“Okay,” Marcie said, deep in thought. “That’s good. We’ll see if we can get the cell towers to triangulate the signal, try to pin down the whereabouts of the phone.”

All of a sudden Helen’s eyes widened. “You won’t have to,” she said.

“What?”

For the first time today, Helen Wilson smiled. “It has a GPS chip.”

“Excuse me?” Marcie asked.

“A GPS locator. My aunt bought me the phone a few months ago and said if I ever lost it, this feature’ll find it. There’s an app that’ll point us straight to it.”

“How exactly does that work?” Pearson said.

“We just need Aunt Lettie’s phone. It’s tied to mine — ​you click the app on her phone and it shows where my cell phone is, on a map. And where the Felsons are, if they still have it.”

“Where does she live, your aunt?”

“Over past Battle Creek, near the edge of the reservation. About twenty miles—”

“I know her house,” Marcie said. She pointed to the landline. “Will you call her?”

Within minutes Sheriff Ingalls and her deputy were in her cruiser and headed for Lettie Wilson’s home. As usual, Jerry Pearson sat silent and brooding in the passenger seat. Marcie glanced at him from the corner of her eye. She liked him, but could never quite figure him out. He’d been a Seattle cop for years before moving here to be near his wife’s folks, and had always seemed either unable or unwilling to adapt to local ways. Marcie sighed. Here she was, in a high-stress/low-pay job, freezing her butt off every year between September and May, with a deputy who was always in a bad mood. She couldn’t imagine two better examples of ducks out of water.

She forced her mind back to the matter at hand. “Something’s worrying me here, Jerry,” she said. “Remember what the banker said about the heat being off in the building?”

“I remember. What about it?”

“He said if it hadn’t been off, if the imposter hadn’t stayed bundled up in winter gear, he and the staff would’ve probably recognized that she wasn’t Helen.”

“And?”

“Seems pretty convenient,” she said, “that heating-system failure.”

Pearson lapsed again into silence. Then: “Are you thinking they—”

“I don’t know.” Marcie chewed her lip a moment. “But the people coming to fix it should be there by now. Why don’t you call Wanda, have her connect you to the bank. Ask to speak to the head fred on the crew.” She turned, and they locked eyes. “Humor me,” she said.

Two minutes later they had the repairman on speakerphone.

“You fellas see anything strange?” Pearson asked him.

“Dern right we did,” the guy said. “The wires were cut to the heating system.”

Pearson blinked. “Did you say cut?”

“Yep. As in severed. Somebody took a crowbar to the panel door and cut the wires. The correct wires — ​nothing else was affected. Whoever did it knew his way around a power board.”

“Where is this panel? Somewhere in the bank?”

“Above the bank. On the roof.”

Pearson thanked the man, disconnected, and turned to the sheriff. “Whoa,” he said.

“Sounds like they decided to improve their odds a bit.”

“Sure does,” Pearson said. “They get two bags with the casino’s logo, find a bank employee with the right looks, befriend her, cause her to have a disabling accident, create a situation that makes a disguise even easier... They know what they’re doing, these two.”

“So do we, now. We know one of them has teller experience and one’s an electrician.”

“Does that make us any closer to catching them?”

Marcie shrugged, her eyes on the road. “The more we know, the better off we are.”

“We also know they’re smart,” he said.

“Let’s hope they’re not smart enough to turn off Helen’s phone.”

Helen’s aunt Lettie took a while to find her cell phone, but when she did, she loaned it to them with her blessing. Marcie and Pearson arrived back at Helen’s apartment within an hour.

And found that they had company.

Two men in dark suits were standing in the bedroom. One of them, who looked like he’d just taken a bite out of a lemon, said, without a handshake, “Detective Murphy. State police.” He pointed to his partner and added, “This is Detective Ellington. We’ll take it from here.”

Marcie glanced at Spencer, gave him a Did you do this? look. He shrugged and appeared clueless. She figured the big boys at the main bank had called the big boys in Cheyenne.

“I doubt you have the vast resources required for something like this,” Murphy said.

Grinding her back teeth, Marcie said, “The crime happened in my county, Detective.”

“But I suspect the criminals are no longer in your county, Sheriff.” He looked down at the cell phone in Marcie’s hand. “And it sounds like this will tell us for sure. Ms. Wilson, would you do the honors?”

Helen, still in bed, took her aunt’s phone from Marcie, tapped some buttons, studied it a moment, and handed it back. Everyone crowded in to see.

On the screen was a map with a red dot in the middle. The location wasn’t approximate; it was exact. According to the GPS, Helen’s missing cell phone was now at an address on the northeast corner of Hill Street and Lancaster, in the small town of Florence. Sixty miles south.

They watched the screen for several minutes. The red dot didn’t move.

Detective Ellington took out his own phone and Googled the address shown on the GPS map. After a moment he looked up at his partner. “Two-twenty Lancaster Street,” he said, “is a place called the Traildrive Motel.”

Murphy nodded, his eyes on the screen. The red dot stayed put.

“We got ’em,” he said.

Rhonda Felson, although that wasn’t her real name, kicked off her shoes, stretched out on the too-small bed, and blew out a sigh. Her husband, Clyde, although that wasn’t his real name, hefted both duffel bags onto the rickety table in one corner of the room and stared at them lovingly. “So far, so good,” he said.

“I’m glad you’re pleased,” she murmured, her eyes closed. “I’ll be pleased when we’re in Florence, Italy, and not Florence, Wyoming.”

“All in good time, Ronnie my dear.”

Outside, the traffic on Lancaster Street, which consisted mostly of pickup trucks, was sparse. That was to be expected, probably: it was 11 a.m. on a weekday. But Clyde had a feeling traffic here was always sparse.

“So this is part of your plan?” she said. “Check into a motel only an hour away from the scene of the crime, in broad daylight?”

“This is one of the final phases of my plan,” he said. “We’re almost done here.”

“We’ll be done, all right, if they find us.”

He smiled, still looking at the bags. “They won’t find us.”

Sheriff Marcie Ingalls pushed through the door of her office, tossed her hat onto the desk, and sagged into her chair. Deputy Pearson followed.

Seconds later Wanda Stalworth stuck her head in, from dispatch. “What are you guys doing back?” she said. “Did you catch ’em?”

“We’re here because we were told to be,” Marcie said. “It’s not our case anymore.”

“Then why are you frowning?”

Marcie rubbed her eyes. “Because something’s bothering me.” She looked all around, studying her surroundings as if seeing them for the first time. “Something small, something I think we talked about, right here in this office. I just can’t put my finger on it.”

“You think the state cops are wrong about heading down to Florence?” Pearson asked.

“I’m just saying we’re missing something. As for Florence, those two detectives are in no hurry. I heard Murphy say he’ll be taking several state troopers along with them and making this a big deal. He wants all the glory, I promise you that.”

Pearson snorted. “While we stay here and write parking tickets. Right?”

Marcie blinked, then scowled. Slowly she turned and focused on her deputy.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“That’s it. That’s what I was trying to remember. That car you said you ticketed this morning, in the alley.”

“What about it?”

“That alley runs beside the bank, Jerry. Right beside it.”

“So?”

“And I bet there’s a ladder on the side of the building, to the roof.”

They stared at each other for a long moment.

“The car,” she said. “Was it a Honda?”

Seventy-eight minutes later, Clyde Felson was relaxing in the room’s only chair, reading a travel brochure he’d found in the drawer of the nightstand, while Rhonda counted the money in the two bags. She’d been counting for half an hour now.

In spite of Rhonda’s doubts, the motel was everything Clyde had wanted: small, cheap, quiet, and perfectly located. He didn’t plan to be here long.

He turned to Rhonda, idly watching the glow of the lamplight on her jet-black hair. He had just opened his mouth to speak to her when he heard the screech of tires somewhere outside their window. A lot of tires. Then the slamming of car doors.

Clyde was on his feet in an instant, dashing to the window and easing the curtains aside to peek out.

The Law had arrived.

Detective Michael Murphy was pleased with what he saw. As soon as he had assembled his team of patrolmen, they had hit the road and headed south. Now they were spread out evenly along the inside of the U-shaped row of twenty-four motel rooms. Ellington had already fetched the Hispanic owner — ​a man named Roberto Gonzales — ​from the motel office, and had learned from the register that only one couple was checked in at the moment: a Mr. and Mrs. Curtis Allen, from Laramie, in Room 12. Murphy was now standing outside that door, his weapon drawn and his mouth dry. As planned, he caught Ellington’s eye and nodded once.

Ellington took Aunt Lettie Wilson’s cell phone from his pocket and punched in Helen’s number... and everyone went dead quiet. Helen had told them her ringtone was loud and distinctive: the “Throne Room” theme from Star Wars. Every cop on the scene held his breath, waiting and listening. Five seconds passed.

And then Murphy heard it. It was ringing. The phone was here.

But not behind the door of Room 12. The ringtone was coming from somewhere off to Murphy’s left. He turned, alert and searching, and saw others turn as well. Moments later they found the source of the music: a small blue mailbox on the outside wall of the motel office.

Frantically Murphy signaled one of the troopers, who fetched a tire iron from the trunk of a cruiser and pried open the lid of the mail drop. Inside were half a dozen stamped envelopes and a model 5 iPhone, which had finally stopped playing John Williams’s music and was now calmly instructing the caller, in Helen Wilson’s recorded voice, to please leave a message.

But that wasn’t all. Rubberbanded around the phone was a scrap of paper with the printed words:

Murphy stared at it silently for a minute or more, ignoring the looks of his fellow cops and a confused-looking elderly couple standing in the now open doorway of Room 12.

Detective Ellington and Mr. Gonzales were both peering over Murphy’s shoulder to study the message. Ellington looked at Murphy and asked, “Adios?”

“Sí,” Gonzales said.

A hundred yards away, on the other side of Lancaster Street, the Felsons stood at the back window of Room 7 at the tiny Hamilton Inn, watching the festivities across the road. The room’s curtains had been pulled back and the lights switched off so no one could see in from outside. Rhonda had brought Clyde the binoculars he’d placed on the bedside table an hour ago, and he was smiling as he watched the policemen in the Traildrive Motel’s parking lot mill around, disperse, and leave the scene. When all activity had died down he closed the curtains, switched the lights back on, and returned the field glasses to Rhonda’s travel bag.

She stood there staring at him. “That was stupid. You know that, don’t you? Stupid and risky. We should be miles away from here by now.”

He gave her a smug look. “It was necessary. I wanted to know how safe we are.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they sent the big guns after us. State troopers, suits, everybody at once. That tells me that pinpointing her phone with that app you saw on her screen — ​that was all they had. They know nothing else about us.”

Rhonda didn’t respond, but she did seem to relax a little.

“They’ll never catch us now,” he added. “We’re home free.”

“It was still stupid,” Rhonda murmured.

He sat on the bed, put his shoes on, and laced them up. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“Thank God. I was afraid you’d want to stay the night.”

“I’ve seen what I needed to see.” He looked up at her. “We’ll double back and be in Canada by tomorrow. Then, the world.”

“Why’d you write adios on the note?”

“Misdirection never hurts,” he said. “Whether they’re after us or not.”

Within two minutes they’d gathered their belongings. Rhonda handed Clyde her travel bag, then turned to leave the room key on the dresser. He looped the straps of the two casino bags over his shoulders, took his car keys from his pocket, and pulled open the door.

The gray Honda Accord was parked nose out in the space directly in front of the room. Clyde pushed the button to pop the trunk even as he stepped out onto the sidewalk, his wife right behind him in the doorway. Head down and intent on his task, he loaded the two bags into the trunk, tucked Rhonda’s bag in beside them, and closed the trunk lid.

And saw, for the first time, that he wasn’t alone.

Two uniformed policemen, a man and a woman, were standing against the motel wall, ten feet from the door. The lady cop had a sheriff’s badge, and her gun was drawn and pointed.

“Guess I don’t have to ask if this is your car,” she said.

For a long moment the two suspects stood there, staring. Their expressions weren’t scared, or angry, or even disappointed. Mostly they looked stunned.

Marcie Ingalls said, in a level voice, “Turn around, both of you. Slowly. Hands behind your backs.” She kept her automatic aimed and ready while Pearson cuffed them.

When they turned again to face her, the man — ​Clyde Felson, Marcie assumed — ​said, “How’d you know?”

She shook her head. “We didn’t at first. My deputy and I arrived at the other motel long before the cavalry did, and when we found that you weren’t there we looked around to see where else you might be. In case you decided to hide and watch from a distance.”

“Watch? What made you think we might do that?”

“Nothing. But it happens sometimes, and it was worth a try.” Without turning, she asked Deputy Pearson — ​who had already taken the car keys from Clyde — ​to check the bags. He opened the trunk and unzipped the two duffels.

“The money’s here,” he said.

“Main thing is,” Marcie continued, “we knew you weren’t at the other motel because your car wasn’t in the lot. All we did then was check possible vantage points until we found it.” She nodded toward the still-open doorway to Room 7. “The lady in the office confirmed that this was the room that went with the car.”

“But — ​you had no way to know about our car.”

Marcie smiled, took the parking ticket from her pocket, and held it up. “Yes, we did — ​not only the make and model, but the license plate number. Thanks to my deputy here, who wrote a citation for your Honda earlier today, in an alley beside the bank building. An alley with the only outside access to the roof.” She smiled, watching their faces. “That was smart, disabling the heating system. Everything you did was smart, except for parking in the wrong place this morning and hanging around here too long now. Which, by the way, was downright foolish.”

“I told you,” the woman growled.

Clyde’s jaw tightened. “Shut up, Ronnie.”

Marcie took out her cell and called dispatch while Pearson finished checking the cab of the getaway vehicle. “Wanda? It’s me,” she said into the phone. “Do me a favor. Track down Detective Murphy and tell him he might want to turn himself and his vast resources around and head back here to Florence. We have the two suspects in custody, along with the stolen cash. Yep, that’s right. Tell him we’re across the street from the red dot. He’ll know what I mean.”

She disconnected and turned to Pearson. “Find anything interesting?”

“A couple things.” To the Felsons he said, “What kind of people steal a woman’s crutches?”

Rhonda snorted. “Good old Helen. Guess she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“I agree,” Pearson said. “And she was wrong about something else too.”

“What’s that?”

“She told us you were prettier than she is.”

Rhonda glared at him.

“Okay,” Marcie said. “Let’s go.” Pearson gripped Clyde’s elbow and steered him and his wife toward the cruiser.

“Ronnie and Clyde,” Marcie added, walking behind them. “What are your real names?”

The man turned and gave her an even darker look. “Thelma and Louise.”

Marcie smiled.

“They didn’t end well either,” she said.

Two days later things were back to normal. Around 9 a.m. Sheriff Ingalls was sitting at her desk, sending an email to the mayor regarding his highly publicized but understaffed Pothole Prevention Program. For some reason, complaints about the poor condition of town streets were finding their way to the county sheriff instead of the city Public Works Department, and Marcie considered it her duty to place that particular monkey on the correct back.

Aside from the usual administrative headaches, though, all was going well. The quick arrest of the bank-heist suspects and the recovery of the stolen loot had put smiles on the faces of everyone except the two robbers and egg on the face of one Detective Michael Murphy. An additional but unexpected result of the incident was that the injured but wiser Helen Wilson now had an upcoming dinner date with Detective Scott Ellington. Proof positive, in Marcie’s view, that clouds do have silver linings.

She had sent the mayor’s email and was scrolling through the others when Wanda Stalworth ambled in from the other room. Marcie looked up, then turned back to her computer and said, “For what reason has the Wanda Woman abandoned her post?”

“Business is slow. Where’s Pearson?”

“Out front, trying to fix our flagpole,” Marcie said, eyes on her screen. A windstorm last night had snapped it off, along with three trees and the steeple of a nearby church.

Wanda, never one to be distracted from the important things in life, said, “Is that a box of doughnuts on his desk?”

“Half chocolate, half cream-filled. Help yourself.”

“You want one too?”

Marcie shook her head. “One of my rules: I only eat sugar when I hear good news.”

“Why’s that?”

“You got any good news?”

“I guess not.”

Marcie nodded. “Well, there you go. It helps me stay skinny.”

Wanda picked out a doughnut and took a bite. Chewing, she said, “I do have some gossip. I heard you told the bank folks that Jerry Pearson caught the robbers the other day.”

“That’s not gossip. It’s a fact.”

Wanda stared at her. “But he didn’t, Sheriff. You solved the case — ​I was standing right here when you linked the criminals to the car that was parked beside the bank that morning.”

“I didn’t say Pearson solved it,” Marcie corrected. “I said his actions led directly to their capture. If he hadn’t ticketed that parked Honda, there would’ve been no record of the license plate, and we couldn’t have found them.” She leaned back in her chair, holding Wanda’s gaze. “If law officers were eligible for such things, I’d have made sure Pearson got that reward the bank offered. And I’ll tell you something else: if it’d been me, I wouldn’t even have written that ticket. Pearson did what he felt was right, and it turned out to be the only thing that pointed us to the guilty party.”

Wanda finished her doughnut and wiped her mouth with a napkin. When her hand came away, Marcie saw that she was smiling.

“What’s so funny?”

“I seem to remember you hinting that morning that Pearson should change his way of thinking.”

“Well, I take it back,” Marcie said. “I’m not sure I want him to change.”

Wanda seemed to consider that, then said, “You might be a little late.”

“Why?”

“Because of the reward.” Wanda tossed the wadded-up napkin into a trashcan and sat down on the edge of Pearson’s desk. “Do you recall telling us yesterday that the bank had withdrawn the reward offer because no one had come forward with information leading to the arrest and capture, blah blah blah?”

“Yes,” Marcie said. “What about it?”

“Libby Anders, the head teller at the bank, called me this morning. She said Deputy Pearson told the bank manager last night that the reward would have to be paid. Said that he — ​Jerry Pearson — ​was informed by two alert citizens early Monday morning that a strange car was parked in the alley beside the bank. Said he wouldn’t have noticed it otherwise. Since information from that ticket, as you said, later led to the apprehension of the two suspects, Pearson insisted that those two people should be given the full reward. Ten grand, divided between them.”

“Who were these two observant citizens?”

“Roscoe Three Bears and Maude Jessup.”

Marcie blinked. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Pearson said they mentioned the illegally parked car to him on his way to the office that day. Then he walked over and wrote the ticket.”

“But...” Marcie stared into the distance, thinking. “Roscoe was working on Maude’s house at the time. Repairing her porch steps. To even talk to them on his route to work, Pearson would’ve had to climb three fences and cross two yards.”

Wanda narrowed her eyes. “Are you wondering if that’s what really happened?”

“Well... I’m wondering what Roscoe and Maude would say if asked about it.”

“Pearson said they shouldn’t have to be contacted.”

“What?”

“He said Roscoe doesn’t speak much English and Ms. Jessup forgets things sometimes.”

Marcie thought that over, and felt a smile spread across her face. Slowly she rose from her chair and crossed the room to the front window. On the snow-covered lawn between the office and the street, a man in a furry brown coat stood surrounded by tools, his fists on his hips and his eyes on a new brace that had been bolted to the pole supporting the Stars and Stripes.

Marcie stared out the window at her deputy for a long moment. Flagpoles aren’t the only things you can fix, are they, Jerry? She was surprised at the sudden warmth she felt in her heart.

“That sounds reasonable to me,” she murmured.

“What?” Wanda said.

Before Marcie could reply, she caught a glimpse of Helen Wilson’s maroon Ford. She saw it putter its way up the snow-cleared street and pull into a parking spot, saw Helen climb out and limp on her recovered crutches to the front door of the bank. Spence Spencer appeared then, as if he’d been waiting for her to arrive. Marcie watched as he held the door open for Helen, bowed theatrically, and followed her inside. First, though, Spencer turned and stared directly down the street at the sheriff’s office. Directly at her. Marcie knew he probably couldn’t see her from that distance, but he raised a hand anyway, and so did she. She thought she saw a grin on his face.

“What was it you just said?” Wanda asked again.

Marcie blinked and turned from the window. “I said I think I’ll have a doughnut after all.”

“Chocolate or cream-filled?”

Once more Marcie felt herself smile. “One of each.”