The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 by Elizabeth George

city, the more the neighborhoods sagged, all the wood falling off of brick, most every house uninhabited, the stores a couple thousand square feet of blank shelves, windows barred against the stealing of the nothing there. Paint scraped off concrete, concrete crumbled, turned to dust beneath the weather. Wind damage, water damage. Fire and flood. Before the zone, Kelly had never known rain alone could turn a building to dust. But rain had flooded the Great Lakes, ice had sheered Michigan’s cliffs, had shaped the dunes he’d dreamed of often after he’d left the state, before he’d returned to find these fading city streets, the left-behind houses abandoned to this latest age of the state’s greatest city.
    As Kelly drove he saw how the zone sprawled beneath the falling snow, casting its imperfection wider than he could accept, but eventually he chose a house—two floors, blue paint on the siding, gray boards over the windows, a yellow door, surrounded on both sides by vacant lots, with only a burnt shell standing watch across the street—then went to the door and knocked, yelled greetings loaded with question marks.
    He waited, yelled again.
    He raised his hood, returned to the truck for a pry bar. He moved out of the front yard and along the side of the house, the brown grass crunching beneath the snow. Beside the blue house was a metal gate in a chain-link fence, but the gate wasn’t latched. At the first window he pulled back the covering board, found the glass gone. He peeked in, searched for furniture, a television or a radio. Instead, stained carpet, signs of water damage, a kitchen with no dirty dishes but an intact gas range, a sink and faucet he could wrench from the countertops.
    He lifted himself through the window. Leading away from the kitchen was a staircase to the second floor and also a basement door, closed and latched with a padlock. He’d cut the lock later, after the other work was done. Upstairs, the bedrooms were small, their ceilings sloped to fit beneath the peaked roof, but there was enough room to swing a sledge. Back downstairs he opened the front door—the door not even locked, but he hadn’t thought to check before climbing in the window—then crossed the snowy yard to the truck for the rest of his tools. Already his first footprints were buried beneath the accumulation and afterward he wouldn’t be able to convince himself there had been others, no matter how insistently he was asked.
    In the master bedroom he flicked the light switch to check the power, then aimed above the outlets and swung. He took what other scrappers might have left behind. With a screwdriver he removed each metal junction box from the bedroom, then in the bathroom he cut free the old copper plumbing from under the sink and inside the walls. He smoked and watched the snowfall through a bedroom window, the world quiet and wet under its weight. In the South he’d forgotten the feeling of a house in winter, the unexpected nostalgia of watching the world disappear under snowfall. He put his forehead to the cool glass, watched the stillness fill the pane.
    Downstairs, he dismantled the kitchen, disconnected the stove from the wall, cut the steel sink from the counter. He worked quietly in what he thought was the wintry hush of the house, but later he would be told about the amateur soundproofing in the basement, about the mattresses nailed to the walls, about the eggshell foam pressed between the basement rafters.
    The soundproofing meant the boy screaming in the basement wasn’t screaming for Kelly but for anyone. There would be talk of providence, but what was providence but a fancy word for luck? If the upstairs of the blue house had been plumbed with PVC, Kelly might not have gone down into the basement. But then copper in the bathroom, but then the copper price.
    It wasn’t until he cut the padlock’s loop and opened the basement door that he heard the