The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (50 page)

He found rags and bottles of pine cleaner and Simple Green, and threw away moldering food and swept out the first floor. The gun safe had stood empty when he came in, whatever had been in there taken by the girlfriend or his cousins from Vermont. The first night he ate a can of macaroni in red sauce he found in the cupboard and watched a tape in the ancient, whistling VCR about making lures, a man with thick glasses and tufts of gray hair at his ears carving and painting crankbait bodies. When the wind picked up, he went out and let the dogs out of their pens and brought them into the house, and from the way they settled companionably on the couch he figured it was something Henry had often done. He had scoured the cabinets and found nothing to drink but some old grape juice, and he sipped at that, watching the man on the tape work in near silence, stopping to show off a stripe of vivid red, a spray of green dots. Something in the hissing and popping of the dry wood in the stove reminded him of his father’s voice.

The next morning Larocque came out of the shower and cracked a window against the steam. While he was standing there feeling the narrow blade of cold air on his arms, a sheriff’s car pulled up outside and the dogs began barking and pawing at the windows. He got dressed fast and stepped outside, pulling at his shirt and wishing for something to carry, to have something to do with his hands. It was the woman who had left the card, Carrie Milgram, and she introduced herself and shook his hand and waved at the puppy that was pushing at the screen with one long paw. She pointed at the dog, asking permission, and he nodded, so she let her out and the dog danced and pantomimed joy and prodded her hand to be stroked, which the woman did, giving each dog in turn a treat from one of her pockets.

She told him their names, pointing to each in turn. “The Belgians are Masie and Poke, the border collie is Halley. I was helping Henry train them for the county.” She explained that they paid Henry a little money to use the dogs for tracking. Search and rescue when hikers got lost on Mount Pisgah. The dogs watched her closely while she told Larocque about tracking, finding lost kids and old people who had wandered away from family outings by the lake in Otter Brook. Her face was wide and plain and open, like a girl’s, and the brown parka and gunbelt obscured her shape.

“We were all real sorry about Henry,” she said. “We took up a collection for the funeral. He was real well thought of.” Larocque nodded, not knowing what to say. “He said you were out west? A contractor, he said?”

“Oh, you know. A little, you know, just small jobs.” He had no idea what his father would have said about him, how he would have explained him, and he watched her face for some sign that she was lying or being polite, but she had the same open expression as the young dog and he thought she wasn’t much given to hiding what she thought. He nodded as if she had made some comment and felt a little dizzy, as if he were impersonating somebody, creating an identity by just standing on his dead father’s porch and having a civil conversation with somebody in authority. Somebody in a uniform. He wanted to say,
Don’t you know who I am? What I’ve done?
But nobody knew, nobody but Gifford Pelletier, and he figured Gifford must have run even farther away than he had, must be locked up or dead.

Carrie began to come over after her shift with the sheriff’s office. The dogs would stand up just before he heard her car, the young Belgian throwing his head like a horse. The first few times Larocque had nodded from the porch, his hands in his pockets, and then he began to follow them down the trail behind the house where she ran them through the woods. There was always something in her pockets for the dogs, and they watched her hands, her eyes. One Monday afternoon she brought a short, round man in khaki overalls gobbed with pine sap out to the house, and Larocque felt a pang, a bright flash of jealousy, until she explained that the man was a contractor looking for a backhoe operator. He shook hands with the man and felt himself standing taller. When he left, Larocque asked Carrie to have a drink with him, and she said yes.

One night when he’d been back a month he went to pick up cigarettes at Jake’s in Keene. He was standing by the glass doors looking at the beer when Gifford Pelletier walked in with a boy. Larocque watched them together, the boy a smaller, blonder version of Pelletier. His son, maybe. He could hear a conversation about ice cream, Pelletier saying it was winter and ice cream was for the summer. Larocque waited until the boy went to stand by the candy and then walked out, Pelletier turning to look at him and then back at the cashier. Larocque didn’t know what to do with himself, so he kept walking, out to the parking lot, working his keys in his hand. He was standing by his father’s pickup when a shadow fell on the truck and he turned to see Pelletier standing behind him. Larocque covered his eyes against the glare from the lights. His breath glowed white in the cold.

“I thought that was you.”

Larocque nodded. “Was that your son? That boy?”

“Don’t worry about him.” His accent had thickened, it sounded like, and Larocque was conscious of how the years in California had softened and lengthened his own speech so that he sounded to himself as if he were drawling, floating his words on the open air like balloons. They stood for a minute, Larocque feeling the cold working into his clothes, up his sleeves and down his collar. There was something threatening in Pelletier’s silence, the way he held his body canted to one side as if hiding something behind his hip. He said, “What are you doing home?”

Larocque lifted a shoulder. “Henry died.”

“Okay,” the other man said, as if that was an acceptable excuse. “Closing up the house? Selling out?”

“I don’t know.”

Pelletier nodded, his face shadowed and unreadable. “I see.”

“I thought I would, you know. Come and go. That’s what I thought when I started back.”

“Yeah? What happened?”

“I don’t know. It ain’t the same. Maybe with the old man gone it’s just a place.”

“You should think about that.” Pelletier was breathing heavily, like he was working up to doing something. Hitting him, maybe? He had on a parka that thickened his middle and a white hat with a wide brim. Larocque couldn’t help thinking that the Pelletier he had known would have knocked a hat like that off a stranger just to see it roll in the dirt.

“I’m surprised you’re still here, far as that goes. You got married?”

“Yeah, Jennifer Harrington.”

“I remember her.”

“Do you?”

He did remember her, as one of those high school girls with old-lady haircuts who seemed in all the particulars of their appearance and demeanor to be already in some henlike middle age.

Pelletier’s chest moved in and out. “Why are you here?”

“I said. I’m here because my father died. I needed a place to live.”

“Yeah? You should think about that.”

Larocque thought they were somehow having two different conversations. When Pelletier turned, Larocque climbed into the cab of the truck and drove away. He drove a wide circle to the T-Bird on West Street to get the cigarettes he’d forgotten. As he walked through the dark lot to his car, his hands were shaking and he cradled the carton in his arms like a child. The wind picked at the hem of his jacket and he whirled in place, thinking he would find somebody behind him.

A week after that Larocque was coming out of the One Stop with a bag of dog food under his arm to find Pelletier standing next to the pickup looking at the dogs. Carrie was sitting in the open door while the Belgian puppy pushed her snout under Pelletier’s stiff hand.

“I didn’t know you kept dogs.”

Carrie looked from Pelletier to Larocque, who nodded. “They were Henry’s.”

Carrie said, “They’re trackers. Find anything. Lost kids, people.” The young Belgian stood tall, looked from face to face, alert.

“Is that right,” Pelletier said, and Larocque dropped the heavy bag in the truck bed and got in beside Carrie. To Larocque, Pelletier said, “You with the police now?”

Carrie smiled, “No, he’s not, but he helps run the dogs when they’re looking for someone.”

“Looking for someone? For who?”

As he started the car, Larocque saw Pelletier’s face change, grow purple as if a hand had closed on his throat. A white vein stood out on his neck. Larocque said, “We gotta go,” and left Pelletier standing by Roxbury Street, his hands jammed in his pockets.

Carrie watched his face as they drove. “Who was that?”

Larocque shook his head. “Nobody. Don’t talk to him.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Is that so?”

He let his breath go in an agitated hiss. “He’s just somebody I used to know. He’s just . . .” He was conscious of her watching his face, and he felt heat spreading across his cheeks and up to his hairline. “He’s not a good guy.” He drove too fast until they reached the park around the reservoir and Carrie put her hand over his and he nodded and slowed down. He thought he’d feel safer under the white pines and balsam, but as the road narrowed he felt crowded by the looming trees. He wondered if he should have stayed in the desert, with nothing but the sky overhead, a ribbon of stars at night and sometimes the pale, bruised face of the moon.

A child disappeared, a ten-year-old girl who had been camping with her father on the Ashuelot River. He had gone to the store to get marshmallows and smokes and when he’d come back she was gone. Carrie took the dogs out, and Larocque waited with the man and a park ranger. The man told them her name, Allyson, and said they’d been driving around earlier and he’d shown the girl the covered bridge down in Winchester and he was afraid she was heading there, that she’d been fascinated by the fact of what seemed to be a house built right over the river, with a roof and a wooden floor. The man sat smoking at a picnic table and stole terrified glances at the river behind him. Larocque stood some distance away, trying to be respectful, but some secret part of him wondered if he would be blamed or accused. He said her name, Allyson Briese, to himself and wondered if that was a strong enough name to be the name of a survivor.

Carrie came back after an hour with a state trooper and said the dogs had made a wide circle back to Pine Street a half mile away. She stood with one hand on the man’s shoulder but looked meaningfully at Larocque, and when they were alone in her cruiser she stroked the dogs with a gloved hand and said the girl must have gotten into somebody’s car. She touched the dogs in turn and presented them each a piece of hot dog from a plastic bag, telling him (as she had before) about how frustrated dogs could get when they couldn’t find the person they were searching for. The tracking dogs at the towers on 9/11, she said, had felt it was their fault when they couldn’t find survivors in the collapsed buildings. A dog could take on the guilt of the people around it, she said.

That night he climbed through a confused welter of burning rubble and jutting steel, looking for the dogs. He woke up knowing he’d have the dream again, wondering what it meant that he was the one searching, digging through the ash, ruining his hands on the white-hot shards of steel looking for the dog that would save him.

Two days later Carrie met him at the house, the lights of her cruiser going and the dogs already leashed. He locked up his tools in the truck and jumped in and they were moving, the familiar landscape transformed by riding next to her, cars scattering at the intersections and people turning to watch them pass.

Carrie told him a state trooper had gone to question a man about the disappearance of Allyson Briese and they’d fought, the man struggling for the trooper’s gun and running off into the state park north of Winchester.

“Did he get the gun?”

She motioned for him to be quiet and listened to the radio chatter, otherworldly metallic pips and shrieks, alien and indecipherable, that Carrie understood but that to Larocque seemed to announce some emergency so dire that there was no way to prepare for it or survive it when it came.

They got out on 119 south of the park and walked by state police cars, ambulances, news vans. There were circles of police in military dress, wearing combat boots and helmets. The breeze rose and he walked crabwise, trying to give it his back. Men and dogs squinted into the wind, and a helicopter moved overhead, rotors pounding. Carrie held a twelve-gauge Winchester in both hands. She went to stand with a group of men who had a map spread on the hood of a car, listening to a briefing. She was serious, somber, her mouth set in a way he hadn’t seen before. Afterward she showed Larocque lines on a map and pointed into the woods, and he brought the dogs alongside the state trooper’s car. There were black bullet holes punched in the metal of the door and the windshield was shattered.

Somebody brought a paper bag over to where the dogs stood ready, and Carrie reached in with a gloved hand and took out a wide-brim white hat. She looked at Larocque and he nodded yes.

The wind died as they walked, but the sky was woven with threads of blue and black. He tried to talk to Carrie about Gifford, couldn’t think of a way to go at it. They were making their way uphill slowly through the hemlock and red oak, watching the dogs as they moved, tongues hanging. Masie was out front, running a zigzag course, and Carrie said, “She’s quartering,” showing Larocque a side-to-side motion with her hand that was the dog trying to find the scent trail. When they reached the firebreak, the radio at Carrie’s hip crackled and a voice told them to wait where they were, so Carrie stopped and opened the pack she carried to get out a plastic bottle and let the dogs drink water from her hand. Larocque sat heavily on a cracked, blackened stump and breathed through his mouth. He saw Carrie looking at him, a question in her eyes.

He said, “I was a kid when I knew Gifford. I don’t know. Not kids, but. Seventeen?” He looked into the woods ahead of them, the dark spaces between the trees. “We would drive around, talk all this crazy talk, all these things we were going to do.” He dropped his head, unable to look at her while he talked about himself. “Henry, my father. I don’t know what he ever said about me. I can’t remember anymore if I acted wrong because he hated me or if I really did wear him down with the things I did. He was just angry all the time after my mother left. So what do you do when your father thinks you’re no good? I guess I thought I’d be bad, be what he thought I was.”