Worse yet, why should Sam suffer? Ramon had the power to hurt Sam — if not now, then at some indeterminate time in the future. What if she were to become engaged and Ramon threatened to show the video to her fiancé? What if she were to be offered a job or promotion? What might he demand then? As long as he had that video, he could set the terms. Evelyn couldn’t let that happen. She would have to erase that threat. At the very moment this idea occurred to her, a plan began to form in the darkest recesses of her mind. She would have to find a way to check the wicked before they could do more harm. Ramon had been very stupid. If he had not reminded her that unlimited copies were possible in the Digital Age, she would not have had to go to such extremes.
The first order of business was to find and destroy as many copies of the video as she could. Of course, she didn’t know if there were two, or ten, or a hundred. There really was no way of knowing. That was the sad thing. It was the thing that would drive the rest of her actions. She could never be sure there weren’t more copies concealed in an innocuous folder on a hard drive, lurking on a server, or hiding on a thumb drive in a drawer or safe-deposit box. Ramon, who might have multiple copies, also knew how to use them to achieve his ends, and he’d already proven himself to be unscrupulous. Anyone else who came into possession of his homemade porn might dismiss it as prurient self-indulgence and, not knowing whom it concerned, nor the power it possessed, simply disregard it as useless smut. Ramon, on the other hand, would have to go.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Human beings are fragile things. It doesn’t take much. A gun, some poison, a hammer to the head, an ice pick to the heart. It isn’t difficult, if you set your mind to it, but who in their right mind can put their mind to it? Murder is abhorrent. People naturally shy away from murder, either through a sense of empathy, morality, or fear of divine or secular retribution. Society frowns on it, until politicians lead us, like pigs to the slaughter, into the next war. Then newly minted murderers are branded heroes. Was Evelyn any less heroic for risking everything to save what she loved most?
Evelyn was tenderhearted and, as everyone would attest, wouldn’t hurt a fly. If God is an insect, Evelyn could expect to be welcomed into heaven with a parade. Everyone who knew her would have told you she was incapable of harming another creature, no matter how lowly. What no one seemed to realize, or acknowledge, was that she was also pragmatic. She did what she had to do, always. Ramon had awakened the snake in her by the threat he posed to her daughter. Anyone who doesn’t understand that simple fact doesn’t have children. A mother’s first duty is to protect her children, no matter the cost. She would willingly sacrifice herself.
There were only two things that gave her pause. First, she did not want that video to be seen by anyone. Not even if only twelve jurors. Let them speculate as to motive. Let them think there was an argument and things got out of hand. It wouldn’t be hard to lure him back to her bed, kill him, and claim she’d been raped. But if investigators found the video and put two and two together, they’d have a motive that could lead to a first-degree murder charge. The solution? — She would have to find and destroy the copies before she took care of Ramon. The second thing that gave her pause was the injustice of being sent to prison, while her cheating husband continued to live in her house and share her bed with his bimbos. The injustice of it rankled. So she determined she would have to do her best to get away with it. Somehow she would have to make it look like an accident, a random act of violence, or self-defense. And, of course, any planning she did would have to be untraceable.
Evelyn did her best thinking when she was sketching or painting. Art was a sort of meditation. Her mixed-media painting of the herb garden was of medium size, three feet by two feet, horizontal. The paper had a slight pebbled texture and was clipped flat to a board that she set on the easel in front of the jacaranda. She had finished the watercolor portion and was adding the final touches in pastel. The hose snaked in from the middle left. The shovel stood upright, blade half-buried, shaft topped with a sun hat. To the right of the shovel, on either side of a basil plant, were a trowel and a pair of gardening gloves. Today she added a footprint in the dirt, a shadow from the shovel, and a portrait of Bella (her late, beloved Shih Tzu) sitting by the left corner looking attentively off frame. Her paintings never contained humans, but they sometimes included animals, mostly birds, which, if she had ever thought about it, represented freedom. The only other dog had been a Golden Retriever leaping for a frisbee, that she’d sketched from a photo.
As she worked, she tried to think as a detective might think. How might she cover her tracks? She would have to learn something of forensics, which would require research. She knew enough about computers to know that the sites she visited online would be listed in the computer’s history, in which case any subsequent homicide investigation would surely conclude that the murder had been premeditated. She would have to be careful. Their only home computer was in Howard’s study. At first she thought of donning latex gloves to keep her fingerprints from the keyboard. That would throw suspicion onto Howard and imply premeditation on his part. However, as furious as she was with him, for her children’s sake she didn’t want to send their father to the gas chamber (or was it lethal injection these days?). In either case, if it were found that someone had been browsing forensic sites on his computer, Howard would know who had done the browsing, for there were only two people with access to that computer.
She knew she could browse the internet in Private Mode, which theoretically allowed her to roam the internet with impunity, leaving no record of her movements. But was that really true? Data recovery experts could retrieve deleted files, as well as information from computers burned in fires and damaged by water. How hard could it be to recover data from a fully functional machine?
At the library, hoping to do her research anonymously, she was instantly aware of security cameras as soon as she stepped through the door. She turned and left without pausing. She walked around the block, stopped in a store to buy a wide-brimmed hat, tucked her hair under the hat, and returned to the library. She strode in past the checkout desk and walked casually toward a dozen cubicles built against the far wall, each with its own computer on a small shelf. The security cameras, placed to discourage thievery, focused on the rows of bookshelves and the checkout desk. She sauntered over to a cubicle and sat down. If any camera’s field of vision was wide enough to include her, it would only capture a view of her back. She went online, switched to Private Mode just to be cautious, and spent two hours searching the internet for answers to her forensic questions.
For instance, she wondered if a coroner could tell how long a body had been dead. The answer could be found online. Each time she thought of a plausible way to kill Ramon and dispose of his body, she had to ask herself how it might go wrong. How might she be tripped up? How might she be caught? Could she make it look like an accident? It would be easy enough to go to his condo, knock, and put two bullets into his heart as he opened the door. But as Ramon had remarked (and she knew from watching TV) police and business surveillance cameras could probably track the time of her passage through a particular intersection, or past a certain store. Assuming she could lure him to a place where she could strike without being observed, she would still have to be able to prove that she was elsewhere when the crime was committed. She would need an alibi. The problem, as she found from her internet search, was that science could pinpoint the time of death fairly accurately by the temperature of the body, although there was a fudge factor, a degree of error of plus-or-minus forty minutes at best. Accuracy was further degraded in the case of drowning. The more time a body spent in water (a pool, for instance), the more difficult it became to ascertain the time of death. However, even then, the time could be extrapolated from the body temperature in relation to the water temperature.
She went over it again and again in her head and kept coming up with ways the police could catch her out. One could never b
e too careful. Better if the time were exact. A watch broken at the scene of an accident was an excellent way to pinpoint the time of death. With an analogue watch, you could turn the hands to any time you wanted. But most watches these days were digital, the time set automatically, and watches were sturdy. Did Ramon wear a watch? Being a pool boy, she thought he probably wore a waterproof watch. It would keep ticking even when submerged. Howard had several old analogue watches that might work. She imagined having to remove Ramon’s watch postmortem, and substitute it with one of Howard’s. She didn’t know if she was capable of doing that. And what if he fell in the water? Did bodies float? There was another question to answer. The simple act of switching watches might be hard to accomplish if the body had sunk to the bottom. She imagined having to dive into the deep end, holding her breath as she struggled to detach the watch. She saw him open his eyes and grab her wrist. The thought horrified her in a way that all this dry planning did not.
It made sense that immersion in water would confuse the time of death, but she didn’t think she could drag the body far, so she would have to kill him beside the pool. If she shot him and he fell into the pool, she would have to dive through bloody water to switch watches, and that could leave traces — in her hair, on her body. Only then did another complication occur to her: Ramon and Howard might wear different-size watchbands.
Waiting for sleep to come that night, she remembered another timepiece that Ramon carried in his pocket – a phone. A cell phone would undoubtedly stop in water, wouldn’t it? Could a forensics team determine the exact time? She thought they might.
Back at the library the next day, she discovered the enormous number of secrets that police could glean from a cell phone. Every day she willingly surrendered her privacy in exchange for information, without giving it a second thought. There were any number of apps requiring location services be turned on; Friend Finder and GPS directions were only the most obvious. To make information relevant to the user, searching for anything from movie theaters to restaurants, plumbers to electricians, local tides to the weather forecast, all required that location services be turned on. Even if you turned location services off, some information was stored on phone company servers, so even destroying a phone could not guarantee your anonymity. On the other hand, phone company records were not particularly accurate, only recording which cell tower your phone had connected to, and only then at fifteen-minute intervals. The only way to be sure your phone couldn’t be used to trace your movements was to turn it off. One could never be too careful.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Monday was one of those beautiful mornings when the knoll was bathed in sun while fog laid in against the coast below like milk against the side of a bowl. She opened the browser on her phone and scanned the headlines. The world is so full of such horrible things, she thought, and the very wording of her thought brought to mind a quote of opposing viewpoint by Robert Louis Stevenson: “The world is so full of such wonderful things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”
Why shouldn’t she be happy? She had a life to die for, as Connie had said. But if she had a life to die for, she might die trying to salvage what was left of it.
She checked on Samantha, who was currently on Îsle Saint-Louis in the middle of the Seine. Evelyn texted: “What are you up to?” Waiting for an answer, she checked on her chess game with Robert and made a move. Her message app pinged. Sam had texted a photo of a gargoyle with the caption: “Climbed to the top of Notre-Dame this afternoon.”
Evelyn heard the hiss of water in the pipes, signaling that Howard was awake and taking a shower. She went upstairs, took his keys from the top of his dresser, and hurried down to the office. She opened the locked drawer, reached for the pistol, and stopped. The only prints on the gun were Howard’s, which would suit her just fine. She didn’t want to add her own. She pulled a tissue from the box on the desk, wrapped it around the pistol, withdrew it, and closed the drawer, leaving it unlocked in case she had to replace the gun in a hurry. Then she ran back upstairs, put the keys on the dresser and the gun in her nightstand. Her heart was beating faster, whether from rushing or from fear of discovery, she didn’t know. She dropped her robe on the bed and joined Howard in the shower. He seemed glad to have company.
“You can do my back,” he said, handing her a bar of soap.
She felt vaguely repulsed by his body, as though Connie had permanently defiled it, stolen it with her touch, and no matter how much soap she used she could never own that body as she had owned it in her youth. He turned, letting the water rinse the soap off his back. She gave him the bar, expecting reciprocation. He soaped his underarms. Only after she raised her arms and cleared her throat did he seem to notice. He gave her a perfunctory lathering, then stepped around her to let the water through, grabbed a towel, and stepped out of the shower.
She couldn’t help saying what was on her mind. “Where did your passion go?”
He toweled his hair. “I don’t have time for passion; it’s a workday.”
Howard left for work at eight thirty, as he did every morning. His return home was never as predictable, except on Tuesdays and Thursdays when, for the past few months, he’d made a habit of “stopping by the gym” after work. Connie must be a demanding trainer, Evelyn thought bitterly, because he always comes home exhausted.
At ten thirty she checked Friend Finder. Howard was at the office, Connie was still at home, and Brooke was at the gallery. She called Brooke’s cell phone.
“Hi, Evelyn, what’s up?”
“What’s your schedule look like this week?”
“I work from ten to six.”
“And Connie?”
“She doesn’t really have a schedule. She comes and goes. She’s usually here to keep the shop open when I’m at lunch, and she never stays later than five. Why?”
“I have a new painting for the gallery. I was wondering if you might like to come by and pick it up on Thursday after work. Then we could go out to dinner, just you and me, my treat.”
“I’d love to. What’s the new painting?”
Evelyn described it to her. “We can go over framing options, and I’d like to get your opinion on a few ideas I have for the shop.”
“Super — sounds like a plan.”
“So you’ll be here around when?”
“Six thirty at the latest. It shouldn’t take me more than twenty minutes. I looked you up on Friend Finder. You’re not too far away.”
Evelyn hung up and took a minute to compose herself. She felt like an event planner, trying hard to keep all the different pieces in motion and in sync. A minute later, she called Ramon. He answered on the first ring.
“Evelyn, what can I do for you?”
Commit suicide, she thought. She said, “I don’t want you coming to clean the pool tomorrow.”
“Now don’t be...”
“I want you to come Thursday. I’m still working on how to get Howard on board.”
“He doesn’t have to know.”
“You know I can’t. I’d rather not go behind his back. It would be easier if he approved.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“Let’s not,” Ramon said with an audible sigh. “Let’s discuss this now. You can still come up with the money; I know you can. You have investments.”
“Yes,” she agreed tentatively. She could see where he was going with this.
“People in your income bracket always have investments. You have stock you can liquidate.”
“Yes, but Howard might not be so easy to persuade.”
“What he doesn’t know can’t hurt him.”
Oh, but it can, and it will, Evelyn thought. “He already knows. I showed him the prospectus and told him I wanted to make an investment,” she lied.
“And?”
“He wants to talk to our accountant. But I’ll tell you right now, I’m not giving you any money until I’m sure you’ve given me all the copies of that filthy video. I want to see you delete them all.” She said it, even as she knew there was no way she could possibly be sure how many copies there were. Feigning naïveté about the digital state of the world played into her hands. “Bring every copy, and bring your laptop, too. I want you here at five forty-five. You’ll destroy the copies in my presence. Then you can clean the pool until Howard comes home sometime after six.”
“I knew you’d see reason.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Given an onerous task, Evelyn would usually opt to get it over with quickly, rather than putting it off. This time she chose to put the unpleasant business off in order to capture, perhaps for the last time, two normal days. She wanted to appreciate each moment, knowing that these might be the last normal, peaceful, free days of her life. She had lived a privileged life, given every advantage by her parents and her husband. Her life had been rich with children and art and the freedom to do as she pleased, when she pleased. She had never taken it for granted. She had always appreciated her status. She wanted to remember it in every detail.
She made Howard breakfast and saw him off to work, as though he were the perfect husband, hard-working (that was true), loyal (that was not), and loving (could a man be loving and duplicitous at the same time?). She took a cup of coffee and her sketchpad to the wrought iron table by the fountain, and made preliminary pencil sketches of her suitcase painting. For a while she was able to lose herself in her work, but in the end, she couldn’t help wondering if she might never hold a brush again. Was there access to art materials in prison? Were prisoners allowed to paint?
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