The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 by Laura Lippman, Otto Penzler Read Free Book Online

shed? Will you?
    And that was when he remembered there was no shed in the backyard anymore. They’d torn it down when Lorie was pregnant because she said the smell of rot was giving her headaches, making her sick.
     
    The next day the front page of the paper had a series of articles marking the two-month anniversary of Shelby’s disappearance.
    They had the picture of Lorie under the headline “What Does She Know?” There was a picture of him, head down, walking from the police station yesterday. The caption read: “More unanswered questions.”
    He couldn’t read any of it, and when his mother called he didn’t pick up.
    All day at work, he couldn’t concentrate. He felt everyone looking at him.
    When his boss came to his desk, he could feel the careful way he was being talked to.
    “Tom, if you want to leave early,” he said, “that’s fine.”
    Several times he caught the administrative assistant staring at his screen saver, the snapshot of Lorie with ten-month-old Shelby in her Halloween costume, a black spider with soft spider legs.
     
    Finally he did leave, at three o’clock.
    Lorie wasn’t in the house and he was standing at the kitchen sink, drinking a glass of water, when she saw her through the window.
    Though it was barely seventy degrees, she was lying on one of the summer loungers.
    Headphones on, she was in a bright orange bikini with gold hoops in the straps and on either hip.
    She had pushed the purple playhouse against the back fence, where it tilted under the elm tree.
    He had never seen the bikini before, but he recognized the sunglasses, large ones with white frames she had bought on a trip to Mexico she had taken with an old girlfriend right before she got pregnant.
    Gleaming in the center of her slicked torso was a gold belly ring.
    She was smiling, singing along to whatever music was playing in her head.
    That night he couldn’t bring himself to go to bed. He watched TV for hours without watching any of it. He drank four beers in a row, which he had not done since he was twenty years old.
    Finally the beer pulled on him, and the Benadryl he took after, and he found himself sinking at last onto their mattress.
    At some point in the middle of the night, there was a stirring next to him, her body shifting hard. It felt like something was happening.
    “Kirsten,” she mumbled.
    “What?” he asked. “What?”
    Suddenly she half sat up, her elbows beneath her, looking straight ahead.
    “Her daughter’s name was Kirsten,” she said, her voice soft and tentative. “I just remembered. Once, when we were talking, she said her daughter’s name was Kirsten. Because she liked how it sounded with Krusie.”
    He felt something loosen inside him, then tighten again. What was this?
    “Her last name was Krusie with a
K
,” she said, her face growing more animated, her voice more urgent. “I don’t know how it was spelled, but it was with a
K
. I can’t believe I just remembered. It was a long time ago. She said she liked the two
K
’s. Because she was two
K
’s. Katie Krusie. That’s her name.”
    He looked at her and didn’t say anything.
    “Katie Krusie,” she said. “The woman at the coffee place. That’s her name.”
    He couldn’t seem to speak, or even move.
    “Are you going to call?” she said. “The police?”
    He found he couldn’t move. He was afraid somehow. So afraid he couldn’t’ breathe.
    She looked at him, paused, and then reached across him, grabbing for the phone herself.
    As she talked to the police, told them, her voice now clear and firm, what she’d remembered, as she told them she would come to the station, would leave in five minutes, he watched her, his hand over his own heart, feeling it beating so hard it hurt.
     
    “We believe we have located the Krusie woman,” the female detective said. “We have officers heading there now.”
    He looked at both of them. He could feel Lorie beside him, breathing hard. It had been less than a day since Lorie