The Best American Mystery Stories 2020

from Cutting Edge

I

When Diane comes back from boarding school this summer, she finds her father waiting in the still afternoon air. Diane usually walks to their quiet town house on a shady side lane in East Hampton, but today her father lounges in his tight blue jeans and his Panama hat in the shade of a tree at the bottom of the station’s steps.

“Oh, there you are, Kitten,” he says, his narrow face brightening, as she descends from the platform, dragging her fancy suitcase behind her. Diane’s father calls her Kitten or sometimes Pussy Cat because of her soft dark eyes, he says. He keeps, she knows, a photo of her as a little girl with blond curls and a bow in her hair on his desk in his office in an oval silver frame.

Diane is aware her father is considered a distinguished-looking man, with his fine profile, the delicate pointed nose, though he has lost much of his hair. He wears the Panama hat all through the summer to protect and hide his bald pate. Tall and slender, he moves quickly to take her suitcase from her and to kiss her hard on both her cheeks. “I’m so glad you are home,” he says, looking into her eyes.

She says politely, “Thanks for coming to get me,” as he swings her suitcase into the trunk of his old gray Mercedes, though she worries immediately that he is here in order to reprimand her in the privacy of his car. She is afraid her headmistress, Miss Nieven, might have phoned him from the school as she had threatened to do. What if they have decided to expel her?

Her father, a lawyer, has very strict ideas of what is right and wrong and often holds forth at length about the evils in the world: dishonest politicians, corruption in the government, and unfaithful wives, always sounding shocked and angry.

But when she gets into the familiar car and her father starts the engine, he says nothing about school. Instead he turns to her and confides apologetically that the work which was supposed to be done on their house has not been completed.

“They told me they would have it finished weeks ago, but of course they are still working on it,” her father warns, speaking of the new sleeping loft he has installed on one side of the house. “They haven’t put in the stairs yet,” he adds, and glances at her anxiously with his close-set, intensely blue eyes.

“Does she like it?” Diane asks, referring to her father’s second wife. It is the first time Diane has been in the house without her mother and with Miss Martin — ​Diane always thinks of her as Miss Martin — ​who was her father’s secretary and is now his wife.

He glances at her with something close to impatience and purses his thin lips as though her question is extraneous. “No, she calls it the slave quarters,” he says with sarcasm and scowls, driving skillfully down Town Lane, threading in and out of the cars, pale clouds vanishing across the sky.

Diane just looks at him and wonders why he has bothered to go to the expense of altering the house now that her mother has gone. She thinks of her maternal Kentucky grandmother saying, “Closing the barn door when the horse has bolted.”

Could it be simply out of spite?

Diane’s father is from an old New England family where thrift is prized and ostentatious wealth frowned upon. She knows her father does not like unnecessary expense. Though he is more than generous with her at times, he is basically a thrifty man who despite his excellent salary in the law firm and his inheritance never takes a taxi and says disparagingly that first class on an airplane is “for people with fat behinds.” Diane’s father does not have a fat behind, she knows. He keeps himself trim by running for an hour at six every morning and eating little.

The sleeping loft was something her mother wanted to have built. She always found the two-bedroom house too small, too cramped, claustrophobic. “It’s like a boat!” she would say in exasperation — ​Diane can hear the way her mother says boat with such disgust, as if she were naming something much more damning and using some other, unmentionable word.

When her father shuts the car’s engine off in the driveway of the white clapboard house, he glances at the small red Renault parked there and whispers, “Things are rather disorganized at home, I warn you. We will have to be patient, Kitten.”

She sits beside him uncomfortably in the shade of the magnolia tree, looking up at the house with some apprehension.

She stares at the creeper-covered dormer window of her small bedroom and thinks of her large, sunny dormitory at school, which she shares with two other girls and where she makes her narrow bed so neatly, with hospital corners, pulling the bright plaid blanket tightly across the top. She keeps her one small bookcase close by her bedside with her favorite books, which she has organized since she was quite small in alphabetical order. She thinks of her history teacher, who has given her an A+ for her paper on regicide — ​she wrote about Charles I, Louis XVI, and Nicholas II of Russia. Mrs. Kelly had read the paper to the class as an example of excellent work. “Listen to the scope of this paper!” she had said, while Diane sat feeling her face turn crimson. What will Mrs. Kelly say now if she hears about what Diane has done? What if she can never return to her history class?

Diane stares at the creeper-covered house, with its small dormer windows, where she has lived all her life, as though she has never seen it before, hesitating to enter until her father says, “Come along, Kitten. Got to face the music,” and they enter the living room together, her father carrying her suitcase.

II

The first thing Diane does in the house is climb up the long ladder which is propped against the wall of the dining room, going into the high loft that runs all the way above the kitchen and dining room.

“Wow!” she says when she gets to the top, standing in the part of the loft where the sloping roof is highest. “You could sleep seven up here.” She peers at the expanse of the long, low room and then down from the open door to her father, who stands watching her from below.

She thinks of her mother, who always said the space above the kitchen and the dining room was wasted. She had said, in what Diane understood was an effort to persuade her father, that this way Diane could have lots of friends over if she wanted to in the summers, when everyone liked to come to a house near the sea. It would be good for her. Diane, despite her house near the sea, has never had lots of friends who want to come over. She is too quiet, too shy, too bookish, to have made many friends. She is not one of the popular pupils at school. She likes spending her holidays alone in the small, shaded back garden with its white roses that her mother grew in shiny blue pots, just reading or swimming in the sea.

Sometimes Diane thought her mother wanted to put her in the sleeping loft on the other side of the house, so that her mother could have a room of her own where she could work on her books, or even just sleep on her own if she was so inclined. Diane had often found her father on the leather sofa in the living room when she came down in the morning for her breakfast. He would watch her coming down the stairs and sigh sadly, shrugging his shoulders as if to say, You see how your mother treats me.

“Come down now and say hallo,” her father calls up to Diane. “Be careful, Kitten, come down backward,” her father says, holding the long ladder as Diane descends fast into the small dining room, which opens onto the living room.

She expects Miss Martin to come forth from the kitchen in her narrow dark skirt with the small slit up the back, with a cup of delicious frothy coffee in her hands, as she would as her father’s secretary.

But to Diane’s surprise Miss Martin is not in the kitchen whipping up a soufflé and must be upstairs in one of the bedrooms. She soon comes wafting down the stairs and into the cramped living room with its overflow of Victorian furniture, the pink chintz-covered chairs, the leather sofa, and the large fireplace. She looks too tall for the low-ceilinged room, and she is smiling in a silly way.

Miss Martin, Diane will later learn when she goes to study abroad in France, is what the French call a pretty/ugly woman. She has a strong profile, a large nose, plump lips, and high cheekbones. Her glossy dark hair, which in the office was expertly coiled at the back of her head, is now springing rebelliously around her face despite the strange sort of Alice in Wonderland ribbon which circles her head, as though she were a child. Her makeup, Diane notices, has changed. Though Diane does not yet wear any, as her father prefers she does not, she has been studying the question. In the office Diane noted that Miss Martin’s makeup was impeccable: the lipstick discreetly pink, the mascara a faint blue echoing the color of her pale eyes, the foundation cream perfectly smooth and light. Now it has become suddenly violent: she has glossy red lips and dark mascara and dark foundation cream.

She is not in her skirt but instead a long loose dress with lots of bright red flowers, which Diane feels does not suit her at all. She seems to be wearing strong perfume.

She does not shake Diane’s hand firmly as she would do in the office, but lurches forward and seems almost to fall on Diane. She enfolds her in a huge hug, hanging on to her as though she cannot stand on her own. She gives her a damp kiss, which Diane is tempted to wipe from her cheek. Why is she kissing her! Diane hates physical contact with strangers. Miss Martin gushes, “Goodness, how you have grown up! A young lady! I love your hair like that!” Diane has cropped her fair hair short like a boy’s. She just looks at Miss Martin, aghast.

There is a moment of awkward silence. Then Miss Martin laughs in a girlish way and says they are both just to relax; she will bring in lunch in a jiffy. Diane is hungry, not having had time for breakfast before she took the early train, and she imagines that Miss Martin, despite her strange attire, will make something splendid for this first luncheon together.

III

Diane first heard about Miss Martin before she met her. Miss Martin was, Diane’s father said, smiling in a satisfied way, “the perfect secretary, remembers everything but is utterly discreet, always there when you need her, never there when you don’t.”

Miss Martin moved around her father’s office in her perfectly pressed long-sleeved blouse, the smooth sheer stockings on her long legs whispering seductively as she walked. The first time Diane saw her she wanted to touch the stockings and perhaps even the slim legs which seemed to go on forever.

Diane was immediately fascinated by Miss Martin’s obvious efficiency, the neatness of her desk, and her very high-heeled patent-leather shoes, which rapped out commandingly on the parquet floor. She was fascinated by the way she moved so fast around Diane’s father, the way she answered the telephone so swiftly, as though plucking up a weed from the garden, and the clipped way she pronounced the names of her father’s law firm. Diane presumed Miss Martin was English until her father said she came from South Africa. “Albee, Melbourne, and Morton,” she said commandingly, as though announcing the regiments in an army. Diane’s father is the Morton part.

“Why did they put your name last?” Diane once asked her father.

“Alphabetical order,” her father replied quickly. Diane wonders if that was true.

IV

Diane and her father sit opposite one another in the pink armchairs in the dark living room beside the empty fireplace in the steamy summer air. There is no air-conditioning in the house —​ “waste of energy,” her father says. Faintly in the distance they can hear the sound of waves. The house is not far from the shore. Diane’s father loves the sea and still likes to take his daughter there sometimes at twilight in his car.

“How’s school? Did you miss me?” he asks.

There is not much Diane can say under the circumstances, and her father hardly seems to be listening anyway. “Fine. I got all A’s.” She glances around the room. She has never had problems at her school before this. She loves her classes, most of her teachers, and has always had the best marks in the class.

There is a moment of silence, and Diane notices that the photo of her and her mother that always stood on the top of the old English dresser is gone. “The photo!” she says to her father, who shrugs and looks a little embarrassed.

“We put it upstairs in your room, Kitten.”

Diane is about to say something rude but decides it would be better not to, considering her situation.

It was her mother who with considerable difficulty had persuaded her father to send Diane to a select girls’ boarding school in Connecticut, which costs, as her father says, “a fortune.”

“It would actually save you money, as she would not be around for you to spoil rotten,” her mother had said, staring severely at him. Despite his thrifty upbringing, her father would from time to time buy Diane expensive gifts from the fancy shops in East Hampton: soft cashmere sweaters in pastel colors, gold bracelets, once a charm bracelet with a heart.

Her father had protested, sulked, asked her if she no longer loved him, insisted the school catered only to snobs, the rich and the privileged, and he had finally driven her there in silence the entire way when she went off for the first time at thirteen. He had lingered on in the long driveway when all the other parents had left. She had watched him from the dormitory window sitting there in his car, the sun sinking between the old oaks at the end of the driveway, his shoulders shaking. She hoped no one else had seen her father weep.

She is expected to contribute to her exorbitant school fees in any way she can. (“At least you could make an effort to help me,” her father had said.) When she turned sixteen this year, she was allowed to work in the mailroom, sorting the mail at the school for a small hourly wage. “It’s not much money,” Diane told her father apologetically. He just smiled and said he was proud of her and kissed her hard. He said it was not the money but the willingness to work that was important in life. Diane’s father admires people who work hard, whatever they do, or so he says. He says that the less one is paid, the more meaningful the work often is, though he is very well paid himself as a lawyer, though she knows he does do pro bono work occasionally.

Diane imagines he admired Miss Martin because she was so good at her work as a secretary, taking down his every word so exactly, and dealing with the complexities of the computer so efficiently, something he has never learned to do, all for a small salary. He must have thought she would make a good, hardworking wife.

They sit opposite one another in silence, listening at the same time to certain ominous noises coming from the kitchen.

“So, nothing to report?” Diane’s father asks.

She shrugs and shakes her head.

Her father seems not to have heard about the missing letters and packages in the mailroom (sometimes there was cash in the envelopes, sometimes delicious cookies in the packets). The headmistress, Miss Nieven, has apparently not called, as she had threatened, to discuss the matter. “I will have to decide with your parents what to do about this, Diane,” Miss Nieven had said ominously in the seclusion of her dark, book-lined study. “Quite frankly, I don’t really understand your behavior. You come from an affluent family, after all, your father a lawyer, your mother a full professor, a house in East Hampton. You are always beautifully dressed. I know you have had difficult changes in your life to cope with recently, but you have everything you need, surely?” Miss Nieven had said, staring at her. “You realize this is a serious matter. How would you like it if your father had sent you a package and you never received it?”

“My father has never sent me a package or even a letter,” Diane had replied. Her father only gives her presents in person. She looked at Miss Nieven and thought that now perhaps, as her mother was in France, where she had gone off with her lover, a French professor she met at the university in Southhampton where she teaches philosophy, she might send her packages. She hopes her mother will send her some French books. She is learning to speak French at school. She would like to speak a language that is not her mother tongue.

At this point they are distracted by a great clatter of dishes and pots and pans and the strong odor of something burning.

“Perhaps you better go and see if you can help, Kitten,” her father suggests.

Miss Martin is standing in the middle of the big, hot kitchen with its glass-fronted cabinets and old wooden table with several pots bubbling furiously on the stove, a frying pan smoking, and a serving platter — ​Diane sees it is the good blue-and-white Wedgwood one, which her father inherited from his Connecticut grandmother — ​that has broken at her feet. She is, to Diane’s consternation, weeping.

“Can I help?” Diane says as her father comes striding into the kitchen. He turns off the gas under the smoking pan and the bubbling pots and takes out a broom from the closet. He vigorously sweeps up the broken crockery from the floor into a dustpan and throws the pieces into the rubbish bin. Diane and Miss Martin stand and watch. He says severely, “I will get some sandwiches,” and Miss Martin weeps even louder as he walks out of the house, slamming the door behind him.

V

At night in her bedroom Diane lies awake reading. It rained earlier that evening, and with her window open she can hear the sound of the waves in the distance and smell the fresh odors of the garden mixed with something dead. In the faint light of the bedside lamp, she looks at the photo of herself and her mother on the dresser and the small silver pitcher of white roses that someone has arranged beside it. Could it have been Miss Martin? From the bedroom next door Diane hears her father’s loud voice and Miss Martin’s cries. She hears her wail, “What do you want me to do?”

In the morning at breakfast, when Diane goes down into the kitchen, her father has bought a coffee cake and makes the coffee and even squeezes the oranges for juice himself (he likes his orange juice freshly squeezed). Miss Martin sits red-eyed at the kitchen table in her dressing gown, her hair in disarray, staring blankly before her, her big hands folded in her lap, as though she were an unhappy guest.

Then Diane’s father says he has work to do but will be back and would like his lunch promptly at one, if that is not too much to ask. He leaves them sitting side by side in silence at the wooden table where Diane’s mother would chop vegetables and make her delicious soup.

When the door shuts on her father, Miss Martin starts weeping again, and Diane wants to give her a shake. What is wrong with the woman? She does not seem able even to clear the kitchen table of the breakfast dishes or the orange peels, which Diane does, stacking the dishes in the dishwasher with a clatter. Obviously Miss Martin is not used to kitchens but offices.

Miss Martin looks up at Diane and says, “A mistake. A terrible mistake! I thought it would be so different! He seemed such a good man, such a devoted father!”

Diane thinks about this and is not sure what to say in response, though she would like to agree. Then she says, “What can I do?”

Miss Martin looks at her, apparently thinking about the matter. “I just wish I could escape — ​marriage is so different from work, where you get to escape, at least in the evenings and on the weekends, to gather your wits. This just goes on and on!”

Diane laughs and says that is true. “I know just what you mean about wanting to escape.”

“You do?” Miss Martin says.

Diane thinks of how often she had wished to escape before she finally managed to persuade her mother to send her to boarding school when she turned thirteen.

Once she had tried to tell her mother about her father and what he would do in the car at the beach in the gloaming. She must have been nine or ten, but her mother had interrupted her in the midst. When she said something about her father’s hand and where it went, her mother had looked uncomfortable and sighed. She said, “Pet, all little girls make up stories in their minds about their fathers. It’s difficult to sort out what is real from fantasy in life. I remember doing that myself as a child. One day you will read Freud and understand why.”

Diane could think of nothing to say to that at the time. Now she tells Miss Martin, “Yes, I wanted so badly to leave home. Sometimes I thought of running away.”

“To get away from your father?” Miss Martin says, and looks at Diane and seems to understand.

She nods and says, “I tried to tell my mother, but she didn’t understand.”

What Diane wanted to tell her mother was that she would never make up a story like this: this was real, her father driving her to the beach at twilight, leaving the car motor running and staring as if mesmerized at the sea, murmuring to her on and on like the waves beating against the shore about things she would have preferred not to hear. He would sigh and breathe in an odd loud way, his hand straying so strangely and surprisingly. Each time, though she feared it was coming, it was a shock, the long fingers slithering from his knee across to hers and finding their way like a snake between her legs, stroking her like a kitten, almost as if the hand had nothing to do with her father.

Yet he would eventually say, “You like that, don’t you?” and she, weeping, would shake her head.

“Please don’t,” she would beg him.

“Oh, you do like it, I know you do, that’s why I have to do it,” he would repeat, the awful hand going on stroking and probing in her.

And the terrible thing was that the hand did excite her, making her damp until she came — ​she didn’t even know what was happening, but she felt the great sickening release, when she would gasp, and he would say, “And now you must help me, please, Pussy Cat. You know your mother won’t,” pulling her head down into his lap. Afterward he would give her expensive presents, designer suitcases, fancy pens, bright beautiful scarves, and her mother would complain. Her only escape was school.

“Your mother didn’t want perhaps to understand,” Miss Martin says now.

“She did finally get Father to send me to boarding school,” Diane says.

Miss Martin pushes her dark curls back from her face, and exclaims, “Oh, yes, boarding school! I’m sorry, with all this going on I forgot to tell you. I spoke to your headmistress. She sounded quite cross!”

“You did?” Diane says, abandoning the dishes and sitting down opposite Miss Martin, looking at her face with its red blotches and the dark curls which fall lankly about her cheeks, the dressing gown which is half open on her bony chest. “What did she say? What did you say?”

“I said that sometimes stealing can be a way of asking for help, that your mother had left so suddenly and unexpectedly and your father had up and married his secretary right away, that you are, after all, such an excellent student — ​one of her best and an asset to the school, obviously Ivy League material. That mollified her a bit. But she really changed her tune when I said your father and I were considering a gift to your excellent school — ​I sent quite a substantial check, actually.”

“You did? What did Daddy say?” Diane asks, putting her hand to her lips.

“Oh — ​I didn’t think it necessary to mention the conversation to him. I just said I thought it wise to be generous with your school. After all, your college applications are coming up soon, and you will need good references. That did the trick. He actually complimented me on my quick thinking and thanked me for watching out for you.”

“Gosh!” Diane says, opening her eyes wide with admiration. Miss Martin, despite her red eyes and her greasy hair, despite the dishes, looks fascinating to Diane again. How did she manage to think of such a thing? she wonders.

Suddenly Diane feels glad to be sitting in the sunny kitchen at the old wooden table where her mother would cut up vegetables and where Diane would fill in the pictures in her coloring book. She feels hopeful, as she did sometimes as a little girl, looking out the window at the branches of the tall magnolia tree stirring in the breeze against the blue sky, thinking she has all the summer before her to enjoy the beach and the sea and that she will be able to go back to her school in the fall.

“Luckily, your father opened a joint account for us before we married, though I’m afraid now that...” and she begins to weep again.

Diane says, “I think I know how we could manage at least an afternoon off.”

VI

Of course they do not expect him to try to jump. It is so easy to remove the ladder when he is up in the sleeping loft alone one afternoon, and then to grab their swimsuits and take off in Miss Martin’s red Renault. Despite the woman’s incompetence in the kitchen, she is a fast and excellent driver. They just drive down to the sea and go for a long swim — ​Miss Martin, it turns out, is a good swimmer. They swim out together, leaving the shore behind, ducking under the big waves and then riding them back onto the shore.

Then they drive all the way to Montauk to Diane’s favorite restaurant, which looks over the sea, where they order clam chowder, lobster, and cheesecake, which they pay for with Diane’s father’s credit card while he is pacing up and down in the attic, increasingly incensed.

When they arrive back, Diane’s father has tried to jump down from the loft, which might have been possible without injury but he has fallen on the ladder, which Diane left on the floor below. He is lying there making the sort of noises Diane remembers from the car. He has difficulty breathing. The doctors will later discover he has punctured a lung.

Miss Martin takes control of the situation as if she were his secretary again. She calls 911; then she speaks to Diane’s father, leaning down to talk in his ear with her South African accent as he lies gasping on the floor. She says nothing about the ladder but tells him that in her opinion it might be wise not to antagonize his daughter in any way in the future, as she is a remarkably enterprising young woman (and indeed Diane’s father does not bother her again and watches her warily at all times until she leaves for college).

Then Miss Martin shakes Diane’s hand firmly, wishes her all the best, and takes off immediately in her car to go — ​Diane discovers later — ​to empty the joint account. Diane never sees her again, but she still thinks about her at times and considers that her father’s initial estimation of her skills was correct: “Remembers everything, is utterly discreet, always there when you need her, never there when you don’t.”