by Jason Allen
He turned and began trudging across the lawn. The rain returned and he walked faster, trying to ignore the sense that Leo’s eyes had begun burning a hole in the back of his head. When his brother answered, he started by asking how he was doing. Casual.
“Not bad,” Dylan said. “But Ray came by again, man. I didn’t let him in or anything, but he was hammered, shouting all sorts of nasty shit about Mom from the front yard.”
“When was that?”
“About an hour ago, something like that?”
“You said she was getting a restraining order, right? You should call the cops, tell them what happened.”
“Yeah, alright, I will. Seeing him here like that and his crazy shit with the gun outside Layne’s house—the guy’s way off the deep end now.”
“You should tell her all this when she gets home tonight, too, even the stuff from the other night. I didn’t want to worry her with that before, but she should know. And if Ray comes back, definitely call the cops again. Sorry so much of this shit is falling on you tonight.”
“It’s all right, I’ll just be happy when they arrest that asshole.”
Corey passed by the last of the bronze chess pieces, still moving as he turned to look over his shoulder, far enough away now that Leo’s bathrobe-shrouded body there on the balcony appeared no bigger than an ant. As far as he could tell in the light rain and darkening twilight, nobody else had any idea he’d trekked out here. The rest of the Sheffield family and their guests all lingered on the lake side of the house. Nobody but Leo would be looking his direction. Nobody would see him dragging Henry from the woods, or see his truck when he drove over with the headlights off.
His brother had gone quiet on the other end, waiting for him to say something more.
“We should get off the phone so you can call the cops now,” Corey said, “but before we do I wanted to let you know I’m gonna be away for a little while.”
“Where are you going?”
“On a road trip with—” He stopped walking. “With someone you haven’t met yet. My girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend? When the fuck did that happen?”
He imagined his younger brother preparing some snarky comment. He would miss Dylan. His friends, too, but mostly his mother and brother, the two people he’d shared a tiny house with since Dylan was born—the only people he’d ever truly cared about. Tomorrow and each day he and Angelique put more distance between themselves and the estate, he would make sure to call Gina and Dylan to let them know he was okay.
“I’ll tell you all about her soon,” Corey said. “I gotta go now, though. Just wanted to check in with you before we left, and to give you the heads-up that Mom’s had a really rough day, so take care of her as best you can tonight, alright?”
“Sure, man.”
“Thanks, Dyl.”
He paused, debating whether he should say the three sappy words he had in his head. No need to overthink it, though. He should just say it.
“Love you, man,” he said.
Dylan stayed quiet on the other end for a few beats.
“You okay, Core? You sound, I don’t know, different.”
“What, a guy can’t tell his bro he loves him?”
“Alright. Yeah, I love you, too.”
The call ended and Corey noticed that the distant violins and cellos had been playing the entire time, but now seemed to be drifting all around and settling over him as a calm blanket of sound, a comforting background when he walked on toward the pines, and while he doubled back to the toolshed, where he grabbed the flashlight hanging from a nail on the plywood wall and then pushed the Sheffields’ wheelbarrow with one of their shovels gently clanging inside.
At the spot where he’d followed Polly into the woods he squatted down and stared toward the house once more, straining to decipher any voices amid the party static beneath the music. Squinting hard, he counted to ten and still saw no one out there in the faraway flaps of light from the tiki torches.
Just wait for the fireworks, he thought, then drive over here with the headlights off, load him up, then stick to the speed limit till I get to that spot in the woods in North Sea where Mick said we should grow pot last summer.
Roughly a two-mile drive across Southampton with Henry rewrapped in the blanket and hidden beneath the wheelbarrow, and then no one would see Corey’s truck parked twenty or thirty feet from the road, shrouded by so many trees in that enclosed space where he and Mick and Joey and Dylan used to drink once in a while but had all but forgotten...and no one would see him wheeling the body deep into the woods out there, either.
“I can do this,” he said, as he started pushing the wheelbarrow into the woods, the flashlight clicked on and beaming, aimed at the trail Leo had left in the pine needles when he’d dragged Henry through.
With the shovel clattering, he approached the body slowly, already aware that Polly had returned and disturbed the blanket much more than when he’d last been here, unfurling it more than halfway. Henry had rolled a bit as well, and now lay on his left side on a bed of pine needles, his chest facing Corey, his head awkwardly turned away.
Corey set down the wheelbarrow and knelt and looked at Henry’s face. What am I doing? The question struck him just before the smell, which had grown so much stronger since his last visit here. He started to dry-heave. He’d never taken death inside his nose, and now he needed to keep his arm up to block it from seeping in any deeper. He didn’t have any gloves. Why hadn’t he thought to bring gloves from the shed? Too late to head back to get them. The countdown to the fireworks had already begun ticking loudly in his head. Time to suck it up and take this dead guy by the wrists and flop him into the wheelbarrow. He’d just have to use his bare hands and then wipe down Henry’s skin afterward to make sure he left no prints. But easier said than done, because the second his hands touched the cold skin of Henry’s wrists, Corey recoiled as though he’d been snake-bit.
His entire body shuddered. His stomach didn’t feel right. He wretched while turning his face away from Henry’s face, coughing the smell from his lungs, covering his nose with his shoulder. The pine boughs kept him pretty well sheltered from the rain, but the wind gusted some more, the dark canopy of branches high overhead bending and shaking wildly, releasing another spatter of rainwater. The music far off on the other side of the property had been reduced to the thinnest thread of sound and no longer calmed him, but instead penetrated his head like a needle.
He leaned back and sat on his heels, willing his stomach to relax. How had he ended up here? What had he been thinking to even consider transporting a dead body? A muted flash of light turned his head upward but he couldn’t see anything through the dense pine boughs. The flash set him wondering if there would even be any fireworks if the rain started falling any heavier, and without that distraction to keep everyone’s eyes fixed to the sky, Leo’s plan wasn’t much of a plan anymore. Without the fireworks, someone might wander back to this side of the property and see him loading something big and heavy and unexplainable from the woods into the bed of his pickup, or at least witness him driving across the lawn.
For the first time since he’d agreed to help Leo with this horrible task he doubted that he could follow through. Millions of dollars aside, this was just too fucked up, and way too risky. Wasn’t it? He tilted his head back and prayed for a sign.
Then he looked down.
The flashlight lay angled in such a way as to illuminate the dead man’s face in profile, an image worse than anything Corey had ever imagined seeing in real life—Henry’s bluish-purple lips, the gash and trace of dried blood, a thin strip of his skull exposed just above his temple, the pine needles between his teeth, the busted capillaries and violet blotches along his cheekbone, and the worst detail, that sliver of milky-gray eyeball where the wrinkled lids hadn’t quite stayed closed.
Corey couldn’t breathe as he stood
and went stumbling back. He fell to his hands and knees, his backbone arching up like a dog with its hackles raised, coughing until he felt his throat might tear. He couldn’t go through with it. No fucking way.
The wind fell away for a moment, which he took as a good omen, a nod from the universe that finally he’d reached a moment of clarity. He’d been insane to consider this, but it had taken only a second to be returned to a familiar sense of himself. He used his T-shirt to wipe off Henry’s wrists, thinking as he did that he and Angelique had enough money to leave now and they could be on their way within the hour—and he had to believe Gina would be safe enough for the night with Dylan looking out for her and his call to the cops. Soon, whatever fate decided should happen here with Leo and Henry would come to pass, and all that mattered in the aftermath would be that Corey had had nothing to do with it.
He started heading out of the woods, pushing the wheelbarrow as quickly as he could without it tipping over. The sound of the rain beyond the pines resembled rolling waves. At the tree line he stumbled over a backbone-shaped root, and then tried to hold the flashlight steady while texting Angelique: Meet me at the driveway gates ASAP.
Once he left the canopy of the pines, he jogged the wheelbarrow back to the shed, his head low as the rain came down hard, blowing at him sideways with each swell of wind. Breathing heavily outside the shed door, he stood still for a moment, fine with getting soaked, thinking he’d made the right choice. There wouldn’t be any fucking fireworks with it raining like this... How could there be?
A sudden blast from above hit him like a cannonball to the chest and whipped his head toward the lake. The first burst of fireworks—streaks of green, branches of red, concussive shots pop, pop, popping along flashing veins of chemical reactions, shimmering, crackling, a bright gold willow-tree-shaped explosion, flecks glittering down and sizzling before they faded. Then another crack, a burst, a series of booms followed by purple and green asterisks tearing open the sky, thunderclaps echoing off the lake, the whole sequence so violent and yet beautiful enough to mesmerize.
Corey stood as still as the chess piece statues beside him. Soon someone would make the horrible discovery out there in the woods, and when they did, he and Angelique needed to be long gone. At least one detective in the city had started retracing Henry’s final days, and eventually would come looking for him here...and that’s if the dog or the smell didn’t draw someone to the woods first.
He walked on, shuddering with each new crack in the sky, his palms pressed to his ears. Supernatural flashes of light, shadows dancing, his pace too slow, acid churning in his stomach when his hands dropped and he started running toward the gates, now propelled by the explosions. Never had he been so wide-awake and simultaneously plagued by a voice telling him that this waking life was really all a dream. If not for her, he’d be wishing for nothing more than to wake up. If not for her, he may have been so blinded by the money that he would have forced himself to follow through with Leo’s plan and moved the body, which he knew now would have been a huge mistake.
He kept running, but the gates off in the distance seemed no closer than they had a minute ago when he’d been walking, so he ran harder. The next series of fireworks flashed like artificial stars and lit up the driveway enough for him to see Angelique out there crouched beside the hedge, his legs suddenly feeling so much lighter as she stood up and waved and began running toward him with the gym bag full of cash over her shoulder. He couldn’t get to her fast enough...but she was helping to close the space between them twice as fast as he could have done alone, racing through the bomb blasts and colorful flashes of light to meet him.
THIRTY-THREE
Leo stood out on the master bedroom’s balcony in his robe. Around the house to the left of him, the orchestra music and a cacophony of sounds from the party echoed out over the lake, while to his right, the boy he’d begged and bribed hurried away from the commotion, toward Angelique.
As long as the boy followed through with his end and moved Henry’s body, Leo would keep his side of the bargain and hand over the sealed envelope addressed to Gina with bank codes for two of the accounts in the Caymans, and the Halpern family would have all the money they’d ever need. Then he would decide whether to sign the note he’d worked on throughout the evening, which now lay on his writing table in the bedroom. The paragraph explaining his reasons for suicide had taken no effort at all, though his apologies to Sheila and the kids had.
A few minutes ago, he’d returned the scrap of paper with Detective Faraday’s phone number to the writing table drawer, spun the dial and opened the wall safe, and now gripped the gun in his silk bathrobe’s deep pocket. The signing of the suicide note rather than its burning in the fireplace still depended on whether Leo still felt this empty after knowing Corey had done his part to save him from prison and his family from such inconceivable scandal. If this hollowness remained for any substantial amount of time after Henry had been moved, it would simply be too much to bear; and instead of wallowing in morbid self-reflection throughout yet another sleepless night, he would start the countdown.
First step: sip his final glass of Scotch. Second step: ask once more for Henry’s forgiveness, as well as his father’s forgiveness, and then God’s forgiveness, though he wasn’t so sure he believed either of those last two mattered anymore. Third and final step: he would click the safety off and chamber the bullet, breathe one final deep breath and be done.
He regretted not returning Henry’s I love you so intensely it was as though his spine had begun cracking, his body crumbling in on itself. He still couldn’t begin to reconcile his failure to give him that one act of kindness before he died, after he’d so recently slashed his wrists. He stared down at Corey and Angelique with his right hand clutching the wet balcony railing, watching the young lovebirds hug and then the girl hurrying off out of sight.
Corey looked up and saw Leo perched above him. They stared at one another for longer than either could have held his breath. Then the boy turned with his cell phone pressed to his ear and started heading toward Henry through the sculpture garden, and Leo sighed, believing he would follow through, not out of any sense of duty or kindness or even pity for his mother’s boss, not even out of any personal greed. He would do it for his family.
The boy’s frame grew smaller and fainter in Leo’s vision as he entered the darker distance beside the old-growth oaks roughly halfway to the pines, and soon enough he vanished altogether, along with the last hints of daylight, as if he’d been absorbed by the branches swaying and bowing in anticipation of the encroaching storm. Leo exhaled and removed his hand from his pocket. Despite the vague hope that Corey might actually save him, the desire to live still eluded him. He ran through his countdown once more, thinking afterward that he might have put his pistol to his head and pulled the trigger right then and there, but he still needed to sign his note to Sheila and the kids.
No, he thought, better to do this right. Planning to pour his final drink, or possibly his second to last, he turned to walk inside, feeling...peculiar.
Peculiar?
It seemed the most accurate word to describe this purgatorial state he’d been trapped in all weekend long, especially peculiar to have made up his mind that this was to be his final night on earth—after his biggest fear only a few days ago had been that Henry might try to kill himself again. Peculiar. The word kept ringing out as he considered the fact that he hadn’t truly contemplated killing himself since he was younger than Corey was now, back when Leonard Sr. had fallen ill and suddenly spent all his time at home, so much more time spent berating Leo for his subtle affectations, the violence of his words all too often evolving to violence from his shaky hand. And even so, back then, if Leo had been honest with himself, he would have admitted to fantasizing far more about homicide than suicide. He’d loved his father, though there had been no one else on earth he’d ever hated so much, either during his youth or since. The ther
apists and psychiatrists over the years had encouraged him to let go of his anger through a slew of so-called cathartic exercises. He should try his best to forgive, they’d said. But the suggestions had been too abstract, the therapy more akin to picking a scab than healing. He’d never felt anything change.
Peculiar, as well, that his existence had suddenly been distilled to such simple desires. His only two wishes now boiled down to resurrecting the dead—two people, each for very different reasons. Most of all he would give anything for Henry’s death to have been a dream, to then have the second chance to grant Henry’s wish and return the sentiment he’d offered a week ago. But almost as much as this, he wished his father hadn’t died all those years ago—because then, if he were still alive now, he could finally kill him.
Daydreaming had kept him on the balcony for an extra minute or two while raindrops pattered all around and the nearby oak branches seemed to sway, not from the wind but along with the rhythms of the orchestra’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Lulled momentarily into a thoughtless space by the soft sound of the rain, Leo then swiftly fell to Earth, as he noticed Gina down below, staggering toward the garden with her face in her hands and then falling to her knees.
He removed his palm and fingers from the gun butt and let it rest in his bathrobe pocket, thinking he could wait a few more minutes to pull the trigger. Come to think of it, it might be better to pull the trigger outside, anyhow. Yes, better to do it in the garden instead of leaving behind a slasher-movie scene in the bedroom. Gina shouldn’t have to clean up after him anymore, especially not any mess as gruesome as that.
That poor woman, he thought, leaning over the rail to get a better look at her kneeling in the rain. She’d been a friendly presence in the orbit of his fractured family for so many years. She’d been trustworthy all along. He should try to help her, if for no other reason than she’d kept his horrific secret for the past two days.