Rosie O'Dell
Page 35
“Who? Your poor dad?”
“No. Yes, him too. But I was thinking about Rothesay first off.”
Rosie grimaced and tittered. “It seems to be the only option left open to us.” Then she went completely serious. “I know I can’t stand the thought of wasting our lives on more futile soul-destroying court work. I know I’m not allowed to expose him for what he is for another two years, by which time he will have violated half the preteens of British Columbia. So it’s either exterminate him or let him slither anonymously off into the mists and fog. Jesus, what a choice. I suppose we could just cripple him or something— confine him to a wheelchair for life, take him out of circulation. We’d get a shorter sentence for that than if we murdered him. But I wouldn’t want to spend any time in prison on account of him, would you?”
“I hear ya. That’s why we’d have to kill him and make it look like suicide.”
“That would be poetic justice, for sure. Look, will you stop getting my hopes up?” She took my arm and pulled herself to me. “I am going to think about the press conference some more, though. Let the media carry whatever they feel they can—someone here or on the mainland or in the States may be brave enough. They will carry the story even if they don’t use names, and it will at least start some speculation rolling, and then two years from now I could go whole hog.”
I didn’t like the sound of all that again. “Rosie, we could do it, you know.”
“Yeah, I really think I should, no matter what Lucy—”
“No, not the press conference. I mean, kill the bastard and make it look like an accident or suicide. And even if we slipped up and got nailed by the police for it, what jury would convict us when everything came out? I’m starting to think that no matter what might happen to us, it would be worth it.”
She stopped and looked at me. “No argument from me, Tom, but how? To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t mind doing it, even if it did mean me going to jail. He certainly deserves it. But I can’t ruin your life beyond what I’ve already managed to do.”
“What we really need to achieve here is closure,” I intoned, and we laughed at my use of “closure.” We always ridiculed its blanket use on TV, applied to everything from genocide to a teen dumped by a sweetheart. I would never forget that I used the word “closure” that night, because it would tell me years later that Rosie and I had started off on our outlandish trajectory in a light and humorous mood before, somehow, we became deadly serious. I would always remember that we were just being silly at first. I continued, “If the two of us, with our combined brains and brawn, can’t figure out a way to secretly bump the bastard off, we’re simply not trying.”
For the sake of argument, we mulled over possibilities. I wondered if Rothesay was really drinking as much as I’d thought he was whenever I’d been in the house at night, because having him drunk might be a help. Yes, he’d been lowering down glass after glass of scotch every night before she’d moved out, said Rosie, and it was probably worse since the charges had been laid and the trial started. I suggested that we’d have to get him to pass out and then suffocate him with a pillow, or something. But with Rosie not even living there anymore, every idea along those lines involved a lot of sneaking in and skulking about and logistical difficulties.
“Have you told Lucy you’re giving up on a new trial yet?” I asked.
“Sort of. I gave her my gut-feeling and she said that, for the moment, we should wait.”
“Tomorrow you should tell her you want to go ahead with a new trial. And get her to notify Rothesay’s lawyer that you are, in fact, going ahead. We’ve got to keep the bastard here and give him something to commit suicide about.”
“Jesus, you’re serious.”
“I frigging well am serious. I can’t think of a better project for the summer than that.”
“And I can’t believe we’re even talking like this.”
“We’ve just got to use our smarts and think it through with no slip-ups.”
“Tom, this could be good. I think I like this.”
We were two bright and motivated kids in love, with great creativity in dreaming up a clever way of murdering a despised man, and getting away with it. But we possessed no insight then into the ghastly personal consequences to us both, even if we succeeded.
IT TOOK ROSIE AND me only two days to come up with our “foolproof” plan. I already had my novice driver’s permit, but Rosie hadn’t had time to get hers. That required parental consent, so it was a good excuse for Rosie to visit her mother and rekindle some sort of relationship with regular visits, something she’d vowed never to do, in her pain from her mother’s betrayal. But now, the end justified the means.
A number of things had to come together in our fancy plot. My mother and father often spent weekend nights at their cottage during the summer and usually went there in Dad’s car. During one of their absences, Rosie had to visit her mother when she knew Rothesay would also be there and when she knew I could sneak access to my mother’s car parked out in the driveway. Rosie would then contrive to talk to Rothesay to see if he was drunk enough. If he was, she would then move the conversation to the possibility of a discussion on stopping the new, upcoming, mutually destructive criminal trial. But she didn’t want to talk about that there in the house with her mother roaming around, she’d tell him. How about if they took a drive in his Land Rover and discussed things? Rosie could drive. If he said yes, Rosie would call me to meet them out where they were going to end up, a place he’d taken her to years before. Kind of for old times’ sake. A bluff above the ocean off the Marine Drive ten minutes from town called Red Cliff. A partly paved, partly dirt road would bring them to the edge of the precipice. It was where Rothesay had parked with Rosie and laid his final groundwork for seducing her. As she had testified at the trial, he had told her he would commit suicide here if their secret love affair ever became known. The place could not be more appropriate.
Rosie and I rode our bikes out and satisfied ourselves that access was still possible by vehicle to the cliff’s edge. That was where Dr. Heathcliff Rothesay could easily end it all by driving his Land Rover over the brink into the sea far below. We figured that together, Rosie and I were strong enough to overcome any drunken resistance the man might put up to his assisted suicide.
For days and nights, whenever we were alone and out of everyone’s earshot, we talked of little else but Rothesay’s imminent demise. Private time that we used to apply to making love, we directed now to making foolproof plans for the termination of the miscreant—tweaking the efficacy of this, shoring up the credibility of that, reducing actions and explanations to their simplest terms. Occam’s razor before the fact. The conception journeyed in our young minds from wacky and grotesque to familiar and routine, from a bare possibility to inevitable, as if absolutely preordained by laws of universal causation.
Chapter 14
OUR LOOKED-FOR OPPORTUNITY CAME onaFridayevening after supper with an hour of daylight left. When Rosie called I told her that, as we’d expected, Mom and Dad had left for the cabin in Dad’s car right after an early supper. Mom’s keys were hanging on their hook in the porch. “I put it to him,” Rosie said, “and he does want to talk.”
“How is he?”
“As pickled as the proverbial lord.”
“Where’s your mother?”
“Watching TV in her bedroom. Probably zonked out by now.”
“Does he mind you driving his car as a novice while he’s sitting there sloshed?”
“I mentioned that to him and he said, ‘It’s okay, I’m a doctor.’ Tom, I’ll meet you out there.”
“Are you sure about this?”
“I certainly am. How about you?”
I don’t know what I would have answered if she hadn’t whispered into the phone, “Shh, he’s coming out. He’s got his jacket on. I’m going. See you out there.” She hung up.
I borrowed—stole—Mom’s car and drove towards Red Cliff. I met three police cars on the r
oad during the trip, more in ten minutes than I’d seen during the previous month. At each encounter I nearly turned around and went back. But instead, I threw them off by continuing on at a believable five kilometres over the speed limit, and none of the cops even looked at me.
I turned off on the road to the bluff and drove up. At the top I pulled into my pre-scouted hidey spot behind a wall and saw Rothesay’s vehicle ahead, just stopping at the edge of the drop. I got out and crept towards it. As I approached I saw the window go down on the passenger side and heard the English baritone, slurred but still elegant in accent, asking, “What the fuck is that Tom fucker doing here?” He’d seen me in his outside mirror.
My heart stopped. There was no way I was going to be able to go through with this. I heard Rosie through her open window. “I asked him to meet me here, just in case you tried something weird.”
“Weird how? I’m too drunk to perform normal? Ha, ha, ha.”
I forced myself to keep going. His reply had stimulated my interest in following through with our plan. Rosie answered with, I thought, amazing forbearance: “Just in case you got out of hand. But you’ve been really good, I must say. Hi, Tom. Everything is okay here. He and I have come to an agreement. He wants me to tell the prosecutor that I don’t want to proceed with a new trial once he has turned over to my mother half of the investment portfolio he’s been squirrelling away on the quiet—about a quarter of a million dollars to Mom—and then he can bugger off to wherever he wants. Have I got our deal right, Heathie?”
“Absolutely right, my darling stepdaughter. Very impressive. And to think I believed the education system was not up to scratch over here in this colony.”
Rosie opened her door and got out. Then she pulled her little tape recorder out of her jacket pocket and said into it, “Well, Heathcliff, you can take your deal and shove it.” She switched off the recorder and leaned into me, whispering, “Where’s the pipe?” Our plan was that I would bring the foot-long piece of iron pipe from my basement that we’d earlier examined and found good, and that before pushing his car over the cliff I would knock him unconscious with a blow to the head so that there was no chance of his escaping. And we figured that such a blow would be indistinguishable, after the body was found, from other contusions sustained in the long drop to the water and from submarine tidal movements.
“In Mom’s car.” I’d forgotten it, or, more likely, my brain had refused to order my body to bring it.
“Tom, get it.”
“Rosie, I don’t think I can—”
She took off for Mom’s car, yanked open two doors, front and back, spotted the pipe, and returned with it behind her back.
“What’s going on out there? I’ve got to get back. Your mother needs me, Rosie. Where the fuck is Rosie? What do you mean, shove it? I thought we had a deal.”
“I’m here, Heathie. I had to get something I left in Tom’s car.” We both scanned three hundred and sixty degrees. Everything was quiet and there was no sign of life around on this drizzly Friday evening, with dusk approaching. Rosie whispered to me, “I’ll divert him while you clobber him.” She passed me the pipe and pulled me to Rothesay’s car.
“What was that you just gave him?” asked Rothesay.
Rosie opened the back door and pushed me in. Then she opened the driver’s door and said, “It’s an iron pipe, you perverted limey prick. We’re going to beat some of the shit out of your head and push you over the cliff.”
“Oh Christ, Rosie.” Rothesay twisted around and struggled to open his seat belt, but locked it tight with his movements. “You won’t do that, Tom. The girl is insane. You know that. It’s not worth going to jail for life just because she sucked you off or gave you a piece of tail.”
“Yes, do it, Tom. Do it for me and all the Pagans in his future. Or give it to me and I’ll do it.”
My space inside the car was constricted. I drew back to bash him on the forehead as planned—the place where his head was likely to hit the wheel or the dash or the windshield. The backswing of my backhand stroke was shortened by bumping into the driver’s headrest before I moved the pipe forward to strike him. The sound of the thud on his skull was dull but sickening.
He and I groaned the same words at the same time: “Oh fuck.” Then we both put our hands to our heads. Rothesay’s eyes were dancing in his head as he tried to look around at Rosie and me. “Oh, Rosie,” he moaned. “You fucking witch. Rosie O’Dell, go back to hell.” Someone had told him of the writing on the school shithouse wall. Brent’s father, probably. I was actually waiting to hear him refer to me as a little dildo on feet.
“Give me that thing,” said Rosie. She grabbed the pipe and, with a short but powerful tennis two-hander, brought it down on the top of his head. Rothesay slumped forward in the seat. She passed the pipe to me. Then she ran around to open his door, undo his seat belt, and re-close the door. I got out and flung the pipe as far as I could over the cliff and into the sea. Then she ran around to the driver’s door, turned the key to start the engine, put the gears in low, pulled out the choke to keep it from stalling, hopped out, and slammed the door. Then she ran back and leaned into the rear of the vehicle. “Push,” she said.
The vehicle was easy to push ahead, assisted by the engine and gears. When the front wheels were about to go over the cliff, I said, “Harder, so it doesn’t get stuck.” As it was, the chassis brought up on the edge and we had to rock the rig a half-dozen times before it started to slide. The rear wheels bumped the edge and the car began its slow forward twist to the ocean. When it splashed on the surface, I felt a tremendous thrill go through me. We watched the upside-down car sink below. Then I looked at Rosie. She looked at me and gave a brief, almost maniacal giggle. The drizzle turned into torrential rain, filling in any footprints and ruts we had caused. Luck was with us there, too. We ran to Mom’s car. Inside, we sat for a moment in silence, looked at each other, and bent forwards in peals of frenzied laughter. Then Rosie took out her recorder, rewound the tape, and played the conversation. It was muffled and Rothesay admitted nothing about sexual abuse, but he could be heard trying to make the deal that Rosie had just described. And Rosie was heard agreeing with him until I arrived on the scene, when she repudiated the whole thing before the recorder clicked off. We started to laugh again. When we stopped, I said, “Sorry about nearly chickening out.”
“Understandable. You didn’t have my motivation. But when I said to you, ‘Do it for me and all the Pagans, ’ and then you did it—Tom, that was enough for me.”
Driving back, we went over our story again and found that we both had it down seamlessly. I nearly said that this was the perfect murder, but I was afraid of jinxing it. Yes, the perfect murder, all right. What I didn’t reckon with at the time was that I would be facing a lifetime of broken sleep from nightmares, and of daytime flashbacks, featuring the horrifying sight and sound of blows from an iron pipe to a skull, of Rothesay’s slumped body, of a Land Rover twisting surrealistically, but all too truly, in empty space, of hard-faced police at the door with the anticipated, dreaded words of my—our—arrest.
ROSIE CALLED ME ON Saturday morning to say that her mother had just telephoned. Heathcliff did not come home last night after he’d left with Rosie. He had told Nina that he and Rosie were going out to have a talk. Did Rosie have any idea where he might have gone afterwards? “Mother,” Rosie had replied, “I think you should call the police and report him as a missing person.”
“Why? What did you say to him? Do you think he’s flown the coop or something?”
“I have no idea where he’s gone or what he’s doing. But I am going to call Lucy Barrett, the prosecutor, to say he may be missing.”
“Don’t get him into more trouble, Rosie. You’ve already got him in enough.”
Rosie called me back later to say she had reached Lucy at home and told her everything that had happened last night, except that Rosie’s narrative ended with her getting out of Rothesay’s car after telling him to shove his
offer and joining me to drive back to the city.
Lucy had been incredulous. “Why on earth did you go with him like that, Rosie? You may have buggered up the possibility of a new trial by that interference. You may even be charged with mischief or obstruction of justice.”
“Well, he asked me to, and I figured I might be able to get something incriminating out of him. I taped our conversation.”
“What? Did he say anything?’
“Nothing about the sexual abuse, but he did make an offer to benefit my mother financially if I did not proceed with the new trial. It’s all on the tape. I’ll let you hear it.”
“I’ll come and get you right away, and listen to it. And we’ll go to the police. Rosie, please don’t do anything like this with him ever again. My God, you could even have endangered your life at his hands.”
“I insisted on driving his car, so I knew where I was going. And I had Tom drive out to meet me for additional protection.”
“Tom doesn’t even have a licence, does he? He’s in trouble too, now. The police will have to give him a ticket for underage driving and driving without a licence. There are big fines for that. And where did you go, precisely?”
“Out to Red Cliff.”
“Jesus. Where he prepared you for that first night…”
“Right. I thought it might get him—stimulate him—to say something about the sexual abuse. But it didn’t.”
“He’s too cute for that. But he did try to cajole you to drop the case, you say. I’ll have a listen to that. There may be something there we can use. Any idea where he is?”