“What you doing with that man?” she said.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Are you drownden him?”
I said the first thing that came to mind.
“I am baptizing,” I said. “I am cleansing his heart.”
It was late afternoon then. I looked back over my shoulder at Maeve. She was half lit by sunlight sifting through the leaves, half in shadow. A mostly naked child in rotten garment.
Underwater, Uncle Sebastian jerked and his eyes came open. I held him harder and waded out to where it was up to my shoulders and the current strong toward the spillway, my heart heavy in the water, the pressure there pressing on it. Behind me. Maeve waded into the shallows.
“I want it too, Uncle,” she called.
Sebastian’s arms ceased thrashing, and after a minute I let him go. I saw him turning away in the water. Palms of his hands, a glimpse of an eye, the ragged toe of a boot dimpling the surface, all in a slow drifting toward the spillway, and then gone in the murk. Maeve lifted the gauzy nightslip up over her head as she waded in, her pale middle soft and mapped with squiggly brown stretch marks. I pushed against the current trying to reach her before she got in too deep. There was such unspeakable love in me. I was as vile as my uncle, as vile as he claimed.
“Hold still, wait there,” I said at the very moment her head went under as if she’d been yanked from below.
The bottom is slippery, there are uncounted little sinkholes. Out of her surprised little hand, the nightslip floated a ways and sank. I dove down but the water slowed me and I could not reach her. My eyes were open but the water was so muddy I could barely even see my own hands. I kept gasping up and diving down, the sun was sinking into the trees.
She would not show again until dusk, when from the bank I saw her ghost rise from the water and walk into the woods.
The strays tuned up. There was a ringing from the telephone inside the house. It would ring and stop a while. Ring and then stop. The sheriff’s car rolled its silent flickering way through the trees. Its lights put a flame in all the whispering leaves. There was a hollow taunting shout from up on the ridge but I paid it no mind.
I once heard at dawn the strangest bird, unnatural, like sweet notes sung through an outdoor PA system, some bullhorn perched in a tree in the woods, and I went outside.
It was coming from cast of the house, where the tornado would come through. I walked down a trail, looking up. It got louder. I got to where it had to be, it was all around me in the air, but there was nothing in the trees. A pocket of air had picked up a signal, the way a tooth filling will pick up a radio station.
It rang in my blood, it and me the only living things in that patch of woods, all the creatures fled or dug in deep, and I remember that I felt a strange happiness.
Contributors’ Notes
Raised in northern Michigan, author Doug Allyn served in Southeast Asia in military intelligence during the Vietnam War, later studied criminal psychology at the University of Michigan, then somehow parlayed those credentials into a twenty-year career in rock music before becoming an author.
From the beginning, critical response to his work has been remarkable. After winning the Robert L. Fish Memorial Award for best first short story, he has won or been nominated for every major award in the mystery field, including the ultimate prize, the Edgar Allan Foe Award.
• “Miracles! Happen!” features R. B. Axton, a composite character based on a number of amiable thugs I met on the fringes of the music business. The moral is straightforward. If you’ve lived at all, you are scarred. Some marks are visible. But for good or ill, the deepest cuts don’t show.
David Beaty was born in Brazil of American parents. A graduate of Columbia University, he earned an MFA in creative writing from Florida International University. He has worked in Greece, England, and Brazil and currently lives in Coral Gables, Florida.
• I once played a version of “Ghosts” — an infinitely more benign and enjoyable version — when I was nine or ten years old. I forgot about it until the day five or six years ago when I looked at my parents and was shocked to see that they’d grown old. And then I remembered the night when, still young, they’d powdered their hair and dressed up in sheets and we played hide-and-seek in our darkened house in Miami.
Tom Berdine was born and raised in Lawrence Park, outside Erie, Pennsylvania, and attended the University of Buffalo. With brief stints in retail sales, textbook editing, construction, and sawmill work, his career has been in the people business, mainly child welfare, from which he retired Iast year. He is a husband, lather of five, grandfather of three.
• “Spring Rite,” in one form and another, gathered rejection notices for about fifteen years. I worked on it from time to time, feeling it was a good story and motivated to capture, or recapture, the intense feeling of a recalled scene — less than a scene really, an image or two — from a live television drama I saw as a kid. (We go way back with television in our family, our first set being homemade by an engineer rooming in the attic.) A fragment from that old video play, seen in boyhood, installed itself in my mind as a market for the sexual mystery and outright dangerousness of women. I was able to finish this story when I stopped being preoccupied with plot and recognized that what I was after was an evocation of that dark, ephemeral little nugget: the women here are mainly offstage, taken in only in sideways glances, at a distance, or in the imagination, so powerful are they, and the Fisher woman in particular is intended as the ghost of that phosphorescent creature I gulped from the surface of a ten-inch cathode-ray tube fifty years ago.
The setting for “Spring Rite” is the area in which I have lived for the past twenty or so years, with place names altered so that my neighbors won’t think I’m talking about them — something I do not do, vis-â-vis the advisory on gossip contained in “Spring Rite” — even though many of them naturally have stories and family histories more interesting than that of the Kramer brothers. For me, one of those people who can’t shut up and has boxes of unfinished novels, the mystery genre is very practicaclass="underline" solve the mystery, that’s the end.
Bentley Dadmun was born and raised in Wisconsin and has lived in New Hampshire for the past twenty years. After spending several decades wandering the wrong roads, he now leads the life of the stereotypical hungry writer, and although it is often frustrating, the act of building a story is a joy without equal.
• I like to write about protagonists who are somewhat dysfunctional and eccentric but get the job done in spite of themselves — people who, while on their quest, must drag their baggage along with them, for that is how most of us function and that is how most of us live our lives, although few of us engage in worthwhile quests.
Before earning B.A. and M.A degrees at Northwestern University, Barbara D’Amato worked as an assistant surgical orderly, a carpenter tor stage magic illusions, an assistant tiger handler, and a criminal law researcher. She is a past president of the Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime. Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, she now lives in Chicago.
• My husband and I drove Route 66 decades ago, when it still more or less existed as a continuous road. It seemed to me to be a bit of America that had seen most of the changes of the twentieth century, so I wanted to explore that in the story of “Motel 66,” as well as the effects of time on human beings. The story is also about secrets. We all have secrets. In this case, two people who are close have secrets, but what happens when two long-held secrets suddenly intersect?