The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

What she had found there were toy trains and love letters. Apparently Prewitt had devoted all those nights to building a perfect plastic world for a dozen electric trains to pass through. This world rested on a large board eight feet square. All the tiny houses and stores and trees were laid out on the board on plastic earth and AstroTurf. In front of a little house, a tiny dad and mom and boy and girl stood beside the track to watch the train go by. The tiny woman had blond hair and wore a pink coat, just like Amorette Strumlander.

Lucy found the love letters in a green tin box in a secret drawer built under the board beneath the train depot. There were dozens of letters written on legal pad paper, on pink flowered notepaper, on the backs of envelopes, hand-delivered letters from Amorette to Prewitt, and even a few drafts of his own letters to her. They were all about love as Prewitt and Amorette had experienced it. There was nothing to suggest to Lucy that passion had flung these adulterers beyond the limits of their ordinary personalities, nothing to suggest Anna Karenina or The English Patient. No torment, no suicidal gestures. The letters resembled the Valentines Prewitt sold in his gifts, cards, and party supplies shop in downtown Painton. Lacy hearts, fat toddlers hugging, fat doves cooing. Amorette had written, “Dearest dear one. Tell Lucy you have to be at The Fun House doing inventory all Sat. morn. Charlie leaves for golf at ten. Kisses on the neck.” Prewitt had written, “Sweetheart, You looked so [great, scratched out] beautiful yesterday and you’re so sweet to me, I couldn’t get through life without my sunshine.”

Beneath the letters, at the bottom of the box, Lucy had found the two Polaroid pictures she now touched in the bathrobe pocket. One showed Amorette in shortie pajamas on Lucy’s bed, rubbing a kitten against her cheek. (Lucy recognized the kitten as Sugar, whom Prewitt had brought home for Julie and who, grown into an obese flatulent tabby, had been run over five years ago by a passing car.) The other photograph showed Amorette seated on the hope chest in her own bedroom, naked from the waist up, one hand provocatively held beneath each untanned breast. After looking at the pictures and reading the letters, Lucy had put them back in the box, then turned on Prewitt’s electric trains and sped them up faster and faster until finally they’d slung themselves off their tracks and crashed through the plastic villages and farms and plummeted to the floor in a satisfying smashup.

Now, in the bathroom, listening to Amorette outside in the bedroom she clearly knew all too well, still rummaging through the closet, Lucy transferred the key and the photos from the bathrobe pocket to her purse. Returning to the bedroom, she asked Amorette, “Do you miss Prewitt much?”

Mrs. Strumlander was on her knees at the closet looking for shoes to go with the dress she’d picked out for Lucy. “Don’t we all?” she replied. “But let time handle it, Lucy. Because of my murmur I have always had to live my life one day at a time as the Good Book says, and that’s all any of us can do. Let’s just hope this crazy man keeps on shooting people he knows and doesn’t start in on strangers!” She laughed at her little joke and crawled backward out of the closet with beige pumps in her hand. “Because there are sick individuals just opening fire whenever and wherever they feel like it, and I’d hate for something like that to happen to us in the middle of The Miracle Worker tonight. Here, put that dress on.”

Lucy put on the dress. “Have you ever been down in Prewitt’s study, Amorette?”

“Ummum.” The dainty woman shook her head ambiguously, patting her carefully styled blond hair.

“Would you like to see it now?” Lucy asked her.

Amorette gave her a curipus look. “We don’t have time to look at Prewitt’s study now, honey. We are waaay late already. Not that jacket, it doesn’t go at all. Sometimes, Lucy... This one. Oh, you look so pretty when you want to.”

Lucy followed her dead husband’s mistress out to her car. Amorette called to her to come along: “Hop in now, and if you see that mall shooter, duck!” She merrily laughed.

As they drove toward the interstate to Tuscumbia through Painton’s flower-edged, unsafe streets, Lucy leaned back in the green velour seat of her neighbor’s Toyota (had Amorette and Prewitt gotten a special deal for buying two at once?) and closed her eyes. Amorette babbled on about how someone with no handicaps at all had used the handicapped-parking space at the Winn-Dixie and how this fact as well as the Mall Maniac proved that the South might as well be the North these days. Amorette had taken to locking her doors with dead bolts and might drop dead herself one night from the shock of the strange noises she was hearing after dark and suspected might be burglars or rapists. It was then that Lucy said, “Amorette, when did you and Prewitt start sleeping together?”

The little sedan lurched forward with a jolt. Then it slowed and slowed, almost to a stop. Pink splotched Amorette’s cheeks, until they matched the color of her coat, but her nose turned as white as a sheet. “Who told you that?” she finally whispered, her hand on her heart. “Was it Gloria Peters?”