Crime + Mystery

December 30, 2018 Dear Wade, You know Arnie’s Gas, Bait & Tackle? I’ve always wondered why he built it where he did, on that dusty strip by the community college, all the way across town from the lake. The first time I stopped there for gas—a decade ago, just out of college and moving to […]

I walked into our shack holding a dead seagull. I’d come all the way from the beach with hunger stabbing my stomach, clutching that bird in my fist and refusing to eat it because Amos needed it more. My younger brother’s dark head jerked up from where he was whittling at the kitchen-table. I grinned […]

There came an evening when, returning home from filling his lungs with rank seaside air, Abel Crane noticed a light in his living room window. The sight froze him. He had never seen a room of his house lit from outside before. Finally, he removed his spectacles and wiped their lenses on the quarters of […]

My younger half-sister fell thirty-seven feet from the Canyon River Bridge sometime between 11:30 PM and 1:30 AM on a Thursday in early January, and I, being the coroner’s assistant, would have watched her autopsy if Dr. Stevens hadn’t led me into the stale, frigid morning, under a monochrome sky with its heart ripped out. […]

Phyllis and Davina lived at the superior end of Almiston Green, furthest from the cricket pitch and the little houses that so cluttered the lower slopes.  Their homes were large, detached and sprawling, commanding chocolate-box views of the church, the war memorial and, across the green, the thatched Duke of Almiston public house.  So much […]

Game six of the 1982 World Series had been a damp affair, and the skies in St. Louis were opening again as the tarp came out for yet another rain delay. In his basement workshop, Kevin Watts grimaced but did not actually look up at the small TV in the corner as the announcers settled […]

I flick my tongue across each individual tooth to busy my mouth with something other than talk. I am rooted to the spot in the backyard―once my yard, now Kate’s―and also rooted to something else. The soft whisper of a time not so long ago, when Kate was younger and more vulnerable, and I stood […]

The house is quieter than you’d imagine for how many people are inside of it. The women keep looking over their shoulders like actresses waiting for whispered lines from off stage. They smile at each other constantly, whenever they meet another pair of eyes. It sets off a chain reaction of teeth unveiling across the […]

Whenever Jacob goes out—to the grocery store for packages of hot dogs and cans of SpaghettiOs and cases of pop, or to the gas station to fill up the tank of his truck—he locks Minh in the closet beneath the basement stairs. If someone—a TV repairman, A Jehovah’s Witness, a neighbor—comes to the front door, […]

Standing beneath the overhead canopy of a Phillips 66, out of the desert sun, Delbert opened his wallet to take out the department credit card. He hesitated and withdrew Stella’s photo, her blond hair and piercing blue eyes smiling up at him. But all he could hear was her scornful, “Did you have to eat […]

That first week of no school, at the summer house, this is our world: drinking Amaro and soda and spitting olive pits and dying and being reborn over and over again in the icy creek. The water is like death; once it touches you, you’re brand new.

On Black Friday, my father cleaned up the garden shed, neatly stacking the bags of cedar mulch, and sweeping up the pine needles which blew in whenever the door was open.