by Jack Ketchum
The woman just sat there on a rock, watching, slack, as though her legs might not be up to supporting her. The man took a roll of plastic wrap out of the pack and wrapped the bat and put that in there too along with the thermos and zipped the backpack shut. He slipped the pack over his shoulders and they were ready.
And the nicest thing happened then.
The man turned and looked up the mountain.
And Wayne knew him.
The man was a customer over at the Black Locust Tavern. Came in now and then.
A scotch drinker, he thought.
He didn’t know his name.
He watched the woman rise—it seemed as though she was going to be able to walk on out of here after all—and the two of them move away down the path. Just a pair of hikers out for a walk on a nice sunny day. If somebody passed them and thought that the woman looked a little shaky—well, it was no easy climb.
The whole thing, Wayne thought, including the killing, had probably taken less than ten minutes.
Ten minutes to kill a guy. It was amazing.
He waited until they were out of sight, and then he started down.
There was blood splashed along the rocks where they’d killed him, droplets in the brush and a small pool staining the grass. He pulled this up with his hands. The blood was half-dried and sticky, the color of rust. The grass clung to the palms of his hands. He scattered it and dug up the dirt beneath until no trace was left and rubbed some more dirt into his hands.
They’d done a piss-poor job on the trail so he finished scuffing it up for them with his Reeboks and a sharply pointed stick. He rubbed some dirt along the rock face. There was nothing he could do about the splattered brush but he had made the whole scene less noticeable. You would have to be looking for something now. You would not just trip across it.
It took him a while to find the body.
In fact it was getting on to late afternoon when he finally saw it drifting back and forth in a gently whirling eddy between some granite boulders a quarter mile or so from where they’d killed him.
He did not approach directly but waited until he was certain there was no one around either moving up- or downstream or coming down the mountain from above.
At this hour it was unlikely but he did not want to take any chances.
He waited until he was confident that all he was hearing was rushing water and birds and forest sounds and then he waded in.
The body floated facedown. The pants, jacket, and shirt were sodden and looked too big for him now. The backpack rode high, almost to his neck, and was skewed to the left. Wayne took hold of a clammy pale wrist and pulled him halfway up onto one of the rocks so that just his legs dangled in the water. The right leg had twisted in its socket during his fall. The knee pointed almost completely behind him now.
He examined the head wound, washed partly clean but still red and glistening. It looked like a roast or a steak left to defrost too long in its clear plastic wrap on the counter, a deep rich spoiled red, lying in a pool of blood thinned and diluted by water.
He touched its rim, touched the strands of soft thick brain matter the stream had urged free along the side of the wound, saw small sharp shards of bone poking through the way the broken shell of a clam will embed itself in the soft delicious mantle.
He touched the hard jagged edge of broken skull, thinly draped with silky flesh and coarse strands of muddy dark hair.
He picked a twig away.
He turned the body over. It was the eyes he wanted to see. The body was heavy with water and it was hard to move but he managed to get it over on one shoulder and pulled and finally the legs flopped over splashing in the water, followed by the torso and the head.
The eyes were not what he expected.
He had expected shock. Maybe even wonder. Some romantic final gaze into the infinite. A look of startled wide-eyed amazement like they wrote about in all the books. Like you saw in the movies. The look of somebody who’s seen deep into his own mortality. Then past it.
But the eyes were hardly open.
Just thin dull slits of gray filmed over. Like the guy was drunk, maybe, and sleeping off a hangover.
It was boring.
He turned the body over, let it slide back into the stream. He gave it a push with his foot so that it escaped the eddy, turned slowly into the current and began moving downstream. He watched it drift away. He had done the same with toy wooden boats once long ago.
He guessed that he had learned something.
It was the killing—not the death—that mattered.
It was not the product of the kill, which was nothing but meat and emptiness when you got down to it, though the person you killed wasn’t there anymore and that was something. But the act itself, the moment of the taking and the losing.
That was classy. That was important.
He wondered what it felt like.
No dog, no cat. But a man.
Maybe one of these days he’d ask them.
It was getting dangerously close to dusk. The stream had turned metallic black. The sky was gray—as though they indeed might see more rain tonight. He decided he’d better get out of there.
It was a fact that people got lost on this mountain every year.
This time it was definitely going to be the other guy.
SUNDAY
CHAPTER THREE
The morning after the murder she dreamed that she had shut both her cats up inadvertently in the oven. She had seen them crawl in there, had simply forgotten and turned the oven on and closed the oven door and left the kitchen.
It wasn’t until she heard the yowling, the hideous hissing scratching sounds that she remembered and hurried in from her bedroom.
She opened it and there was Beastie covered with Vinni’s blood, her black coat glistening, shaking Vinni by the neck, tearing wide the open gash from ear to shoulder with her two front paws and glaring out at Carole as though to say, You did this. You made us crazy. You see what you did? Vinni was dead, her poor head lolling, tongue longer than she had ever seen it in life protruding through bloody teeth.
She woke up crying, aching, to Sunday morning and the first thing she did was look past Lee’s shoulder out the window.
It had rained overnight as they’d hoped.
The grass on her long sloping lawn was wet and green and there were puddles on the fieldstone porch.
She guessed that they were lucky.
She didn’t feel lucky.
She felt frightened.
Lee was still sleeping, the sheet bunched up beneath him. She looked at the clock. The clock read eight fifteen. Three and a half hours of sleep. They’d both had more than their share to drink last night—more than they were used to. Adrenaline ran high in each of them until well into the morning. She supposed that fear would do that to you. The bed stank of sweat and exhaustion.
She looked at him. He looked like a stranger. A stranger she’d known for a good two years now. She didn’t want to wake him.
She needed some time alone before she could face anybody. Even him.
Maybe a lot of time.
She got up and pulled on a robe and walked to the kitchen. There was coffee in the pot left over from the night before. She poured some and put it in the microwave and set the timer for seventy seconds. The cats were circling her, brushing against her ankles, so she fed them, pulled the tab on the can of Friskies and spooned it out onto two plates and watched them attack in their accustomed spirit of happy near-starvation. She leaned back against the counter and watched them.
Beast was all black except for a paintbrush stroke of white down along her bib. Vinni was a golden-gray-and-white tabby. Howard had picked them both up for her at the ASPCA a year apart from one another. The nicest thing he’d ever done for her.
That was years ago. Beast was six and Vinni was five.
And there was the goddamn trembling again.
Last night it had seemed it would never go away—her whole body shaking, com
ing at her in spasms. A drink would fix it for a moment but last night even the drinking was strange. The scotch would wear off in no time, leaving her vividly sober and remembering what they’d done and right back where she started again. Shaking.
She’d been afraid of Howard when he was alive.
She was afraid of him now that he was dead.
What had changed?
She’d thought that once he was gone at least that sense of inhabiting these all-too-frequent moments of desperation would finally go away. That sense of possession. He’d created it, after all. He’d put it there.
But it hadn’t. Not at all.
It had woken up with her this morning.
It was here with her now making coffee.
You’ve got to give it time, that was what Lee said and he was probably right. But it was also all too possible that the only thing they’d managed to do here was to make a horrible situation immeasurably worse than they’d imagined.
What in god’s name had they been thinking?
What had ever made them think they could kill a man and make things better?
Even someone as cruel and…implacable as Howard.
Even if they got away with it.
Which, for all their planning and precautions she couldn’t help but feel was very much in doubt. There was Lieutenant Rule for one thing. Rule or someone like him. And her as yet untested ability to make herself over into a world-class liar.
They were crazy.
The timer buzzed on the microwave.
She sipped the coffee. Either it was stale or her mouth was stale. Probably both. She carried it into the living room and sat on the sofa and cradled the cup in her hands, feeling its warmth. The warmth helped stop the shaking.
She sat back and stared and drank the coffee until her mind went blank and empty—until it felt like there was nothing at all left inside her—just externals. Soft couch and warm cup and the morning birds on the lawn outside the window.
She wanted to shower alone, without Lee.
Somehow that was necessary.
It wasn’t his fault. She didn’t think it was.
He had only been reacting to her pain.
Though the idea to kill him—if you could even dignify it with the word idea, born as it was on a night of utter blinding rage after what, finally, Howard had seen fit to do to her—the actual utterance had been Lee’s.
We’ve got to kill him. He’ll never go away. You know that. He’s got to die.
She had never disagreed. Not by then.
By then Howard had made her a believer.
But now she needed to grasp and hold the morning without Lee the same way she was holding this cup of coffee here, to be alone with the morning, to get used to the sheer cold fact of morning and listen to the familiar sound of the shower drowning out everything else, feel it pound across her body as hot as possible and soap herself until she was cleaner than anyone would ever need or want to be, soap her body over and over just like she’d needed to yesterday but couldn’t because first they had to stop at Jim Clarke’s service station as soon as they got off the mountain to fill up the BMW and pass some time talking with Jim so that he’d remember them, then make their seven o’clock dinner reservations at Foxfire. They had to be seen in public as close to the time of Howard’s death as possible. So that by the time she got to shower last night it had been nine. By then her anxiety was so intense she could barely stand the spray on her nerve ends, could barely stand to towel dry—or after that, the feel of the fine silk teddy against her skin.
Do it now, she thought. Before he wakes and wants company. Before he needs to talk again.
She dropped the robe off her shoulders to the marble bathroom floor and stood gazing at herself naked in the mirror.
Her flesh looked exactly the same to her.
It was amazing.
As though it and she had gone through nothing extraordinary whatsoever.
It would have been much more appropriate to find some new scarring there next to the old.
To find stigmata.
She reached down and turned on the water—hot—and stepped into the scorching spray.
“I’d suggest a movie,” he said.
“What?”
“Seriously. We’ve got to get our minds off this. Wait it out. Be patient. We’re not going to hear anything today.” He hesitated. “Not unless…”
“Not unless they find him.”
“That’s right. And I don’t think they will. Do you?”
She shrugged. His question was meant to be rhetorical but it also had an edge to it.
Reassure me.
She’d showered and brushed her teeth until her gums were sore and the coffee still tasted foul and chalky.
“Look,” he said. “Tomorrow’s what we’ve got to think about. When he doesn’t show up at the office first thing Monday morning like they’re used to. Sooner or later the police are going to get around to questioning us and it could be as early as, say, tomorrow afternoon. We’ve got to be up for that, Carole. Physically and mentally. So what are we supposed to do all day, keep drinking?”
She stared at him blankly across the table. “So you’re suggesting a movie?”
“Why not?”
“You could concentrate on that?”
He smiled a little. “I suppose I could give it a shot.”
“Jesus.”
He didn’t like the way this was going.
She looked bad for one thing. It was the booze last night and the lack of sleep. She sounded alternately depressed and jumpy—to him at least, though he supposed he was more attuned to her than most would be. But if she was still acting this way tomorrow and the police did want to question her you never knew who might get to thinking what, and that was not good for their…situation here.
He didn’t know exactly what he’d expected of her. But he’d expected more strength. More firmness. More an acceptance of what they’d done and why it had needed doing.
More sense of relief.
She didn’t seem relieved.
In fact there were times she looked like she’d lost her best friend.
Which Howard sure as hell wasn’t.
He supposed it was too early for that. Relief would come later. When Howard was officially an accident and they were safe again.
Howard would be an accident.
He willed it.
He finished the coffee and stood, tightening the towel around his waist.
“I’m going to go get dressed,” he said. “Think about it. If you come up with any better ideas I’d be happy to hear them. Honest.”
In the bathroom he went to the mirror and checked the damage. The eye was a little puffy but it wasn’t going to go black on him, thank god. The lip was cut but not too badly, no worse than a cold and chapped lips could account for. The worst things didn’t show. He’d taken a deep nasty bite out of the left side of his mouth where Howard had hit him and his left upper incisor and two front uppers were movable inside the gum and they hurt like hell. He’d been popping aspirin since yesterday afternoon. He popped two now at the hand-cut marble sink.
Dammit. I don’t like this, he thought.
What in hell got me into this?
Carole had of course. Who she was and where they’d arrived together.
That very strange place indeed.
The two of them. A pair of failed romantics wanting something back from lives that had each gone down the toilet long ago, wanting something they had missed for a very long time.
Trying to help each other get it.
That was what it was about, wasn’t it?
Howard’s murder?
He had yet to speak the word aloud.
He still suspected it was going to be worth it.
If they didn’t get caught.
If she didn’t shape up soon they could very well get caught.
He knew this much—the police always looked at the wife or husband first, and looked hard, if there was any q
uestion of homicide. He could only hope that either she’d rise to the occasion if and when it arose or that the police would assume Howard’s death was a hiking accident the way they were supposed to in the first place and let the matter drop. Howard was a hiker, a skier, a rabbit hunter and a sailing enthusiast. Every one of them accident-prone activities to one degree or the other.
But what if they didn’t?
Then Carole was going to have to carry the ball.
And somehow he had to get her ready for that.
He dropped the towel on the brass four-poster bed and went to the dresser for socks and underwear, to the closet for slacks and a shirt. Some of the shirts toward the back didn’t belong to him. When Howard had left (been kicked out, actually—she’d simply changed the locks on him) it all had happened so fast that a lot of his clothes were still in here, months after the divorce. In fact Howard’s things were everywhere, scattered throughout the house. It had been easy to find things, belongings of his, suitable for the backpack.
Once this was over it would all have to go.
He dressed. He felt calmer now.
Not like her.
The peak of his own anxiety had passed holding that goddamn bat over Howard’s head after the second blow took him down, and he realized that they had to kill him now, there was no turning back, that they were in it every inch of the way. He’d hesitated, feeling all of a sudden weak as a kitten, shaky in the legs, the Louisville Slugger no longer the avenging jawbone of Samson’s ox but a thousand-pound weight riding over him and bearing down.
Thank god for Carole.
Howard was stronger than some soft businessman who owned an eighty-condo, eighty-four-room ski resort had any right to be. He’d damn near botched it.
And then where would they be?
In jail.
If there was one thing Howard had plenty of it was lawyers.
He slipped on the new pair of running shoes he’d bought a week ago for exactly this very occasion, for this morning, and laced them up. The old ones were ashes in the furnace along with the baseball bat and the rest of yesterday’s clothes, both his own and Carole’s. His first order of business today would be to clean that out thoroughly, bag the ashes and deposit them in Little River.