The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 Read Free Page B

check my e-mail, see a request from an editor.
Could you write about . . . ?
And I say yes.
    Unless it’s about cars.
    I am grateful that the writers of this collection said yes, whether to external or internal prompts, to characters or situations that suddenly appeared, requiring their attention. Because as a reader, when I’m yearning for a short story, nothing else will do. As demanding as the form may be for the writer, it is exceedingly rewarding for the reader. Being guest editor of
The Best American Mystery Stories 2014
was like being given an enormous box of very good chocolates and asked to go hog wild. If my final selection veers to the dark ones, preferably with nuts, that’s my personal taste. No, it really is—in chocolates and in stories. Dark, with nuts.
    Dig in.
    L AURA L IPPMAN

MEGAN ABBOTT
My Heart Is Either Broken
    FROM
Dangerous Women
     
    H E WAITED IN THE CAR . He had parked under one of the big banks of lights. No one else wanted to park there. He could guess why. Three vehicles over, he saw a woman’s back pressed against a window, her hair shaking. Once, she turned her head and he almost saw her face, the blue of her teeth as she smiled.
    Fifteen minutes went by before Lorie came stumbling across the parking lot, heels clacking.
    He had been working late and didn’t even know she wasn’t home until he got there. When she finally picked up her cell, she told him where she was, a bar he’d never heard of, a part of town he didn’t know.
    “I just wanted some noise and people,” she had explained. “I didn’t mean anything.”
    He asked if she wanted him to come get her.
    “Okay,” she said.
    On the ride home, she was doing the laughing-crying thing she’d been doing lately. He wanted to help her but didn’t know how. It reminded him of the kinds of girls he used to date in high school. The ones who wrote in ink all over their hands and cut themselves in the bathroom stalls at school.
    “I hadn’t been dancing in so long, and if I shut my eyes no one could see,” she was saying, looking out the window, her head tilted against the window. “No one there knew me until someone did. A woman I didn’t know. She kept shouting at me. Then she followed me into the bathroom and said she was glad my little girl couldn’t see me now.”
    He knew what people would say. That she was out dancing at a grimy pickup bar. They wouldn’t say she cried all the way home, that she didn’t know what to do with herself, that no one knows how they’ll act when something like this happens to them. Which it probably won’t.
    But he also wanted to hide, wanted to find a bathroom stall himself, in another city, another state, and never see anyone he knew again, especially his mother or his sister, who spent all day on the Internet trying to spread the word about Shelby, collecting tips for the police.
    Shelby’s hands—well, people always talk about babies’ hands, don’t they?—but they were like tight little flowers and he loved to put his palm over them. He never knew he’d feel like that. Never knew he’d be the kind of guy—that there even were kinds of guys—who would catch the milky scent of his daughter’s baby blanket and feel warm inside. Even, sometimes, press his face against it.
     
    It took him a long time to tug off the dark red cowboy boots she was wearing, ones he did not recognize.
    When he pulled off her jeans, he didn’t recognize her underwear either. The front was a black butterfly, its wings fluttering against her thighs with each tug.
    He looked at her and a memory came to him of when they first dated, Lorie taking his hand and running it along her belly, her thighs. Telling him she once thought she’d be a dancer, that maybe she could be. And that if she ever had a baby she’d have a C-section because everyone knew what happened to women’s stomachs after,
not to mention what it does down there
, she’d said, laughing, and put his hand there next.
    He’d