Read Online The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 by Elizabeth George - Free Book Online

wallpaper.
    What did she think she would see, breathing hard, her knees creaking and her forehead pushed against the wall?
    The paper did not come off cleanly, came off in pieces, strands, like her hair after the dose Mr. D. passed to her, making her sick for weeks.
    A patch of wall exposed, she saw the series of gashes, one after the next, as if someone had jabbed a knife into the plaster. A hunting knife. Though there seemed a pattern, a hieroglyphics.
    Squinting, the kitchen so dark she couldn’t see.
    Reaching up to the oven, she grabbed for a kitchen match.
    Leaning close, the match lit, she could see a faint scrawl etched deep.
    Â 
The little men come out of the walls. I cut off
their heads every night. My mind is gone.
Tonight, I end my life.
I hope you find this.
Goodbye.
    Â 
    Penny leaned forward, pressed her palm on the words.
    This is what mattered most, nothing else.
    â€œOh, Larry,” she said, her voice catching with grateful tears. “I see them too.”
    The sound that followed was the loudest she’d ever heard, the fire sweeping up her face.
    Â 
    The detective stood in the center of the courtyard, next to a banana tree with its top shorn off, a smoldering slab of wood, the front door to the blackened bungalow on the ground in front of him.
    The firemen were dragging their equipment past him. The gurney with the dead girl long gone.
    â€œPilot light. Damn near took the roof off,” one of the patrolmen said. “The kitchen looks like the Blitz. But only one scorched, inside. The girl. Or what’s left of her. Could’ve been much worse.”
    â€œThat’s always true,” the detective said, a billow of smoke making them both cover their faces.
    Another officer approached him.
    â€œDetective Noble, we talked to the pair next door,” he said. “They said they warned the girl not to go back inside. But she’d been drinking all day, saying crazy things.”
    â€œHow’s the landlady?”
    â€œHospital.”
    Noble nodded. “We’re done.”
    Â 
    It was close to two. But he didn’t want to go home yet. It was a long drive to Eagle Rock anyway.
    And the smell, and what he’d seen in that kitchen—he didn’t want to go home yet.
    At the top of the road he saw the bar, its bright lights beckoning.
    The Carnival Tavern, the one with the roof shaped like a big top.
    Life is a carnival,
he said to himself, which is what the detective might say, wryly, in the books his wife loved to read.
    He couldn’t believe it was still there. He remembered it from before the war. When he used to date that usherette at the Hollywood Bowl.
    A quick jerk to the wheel and he was pulling into its small lot, those crazy clown lanterns he remembered from all those years ago.
    Inside, everything was warm and inviting, even if the waitress had a sour look.
    â€œLast call,” she said, leaving him his rye. “We close in ten minutes.”
    â€œI just need to make a quick call,” he said.
    He stepped into one of the telephone booths in the back, pulling the accordion door shut behind him.
    â€œYes, I have that one,” his wife replied, stifling a yawn. “But it’s not a dirty book.”
    Then she laughed a little in a way that made him bristle.
    â€œSo what kind of book is it?” he asked.
    â€œBooks mean different things to different people,” she said. She was always saying stuff like that, just to show him how smart she was.
    â€œYou know what I mean,” he said.
    She was silent for several seconds. He thought he could hear someone crying, maybe one of the kids.
    â€œIt’s a mystery,” she said finally. “Not your kind. No one even dies.”
    â€œOkay,” he said. He wasn’t sure what he’d wanted to hear. “I’ll be home soon.”
    â€œIt’s a love story too,” she said, almost a whisper, strangely sad. “Not your kind.”
    Â 
    After he