by Scott Smith
Jacob didn't get out. He stared blankly past the windshield, as if he wasn't sure where he was. He touched the bridge of his nose with his fingertips.
"I think I broke it," he said.
"You didn't break it," I reassured him. "It's just bleeding."
He still looked scared, shaken up, and it was beginning to worry me. I didn't want to leave him like this. I reached across the seat and turned off the engine.
"You know what I thought of?" I asked. "Right when you hit him?"
He didn't answer me. He was still probing at his nose.
"I thought of you getting into a fistfight with Rodney Sample." I tapped my head with my hand. "I had this instant flash of it inside my brain, an image of you swinging at him and falling down."
Jacob didn't say anything.
"How old were you then? You remember?"
He turned and gave me a distracted look. He had his gloves on again. The right one was stained dark with blood; there was a dime-size spot of dried egg yolk on its forefinger.
"Rodney Sample?"
"In gym class. You swung at him, and you both fell down."
He nodded but didn't say anything. He gazed down at his gloves, noticed the egg yolk. He lifted his hand and licked at it, then wiped it on his pant leg.
"We're in it now," he said, "aren't we?"
"Yes." I nodded. "We are."
"Jesus." He sighed, and then it seemed, for a moment, as if he were about to cry again. He wrapped his arms around his stomach and, rocking a bit, started to scratch at his elbows.
"Come on, Jacob. Pull yourself together. What's done is done."
He shook his head. "I killed him, Hank. They're gonna do an autopsy, and then they'll know."
"No," I said, but he ignored me.
"It's easy for you to be calm. It's not you that they'll send to jail." He was taking deep breaths now, panting.
"You didn't kill him," I said, surprising myself. He was scaring me with his panic; I was trying to calm him down.
He glanced at me, confused.
I realized immediately that I didn't want to tell him what I'd already begun to. I tried to backtrack. "We both killed him," I said. I looked out the window at the street, hoping he'd let it go. But he didn't.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
I attempted a smile. "Nothing."
"You said I didn't kill him."
I stared at him, trying to work it through in my mind. Since we were children I'd known that I couldn't depend on him -- he'd be late, he'd forget, he'd let me down out of laziness or ignorance -- so of course I should've known better. But he was my brother; I wanted to trust him. And, though I could sense that there was a danger in it, I saw that there might be a benefit, too. I'd saved him; it seemed like he ought to know about it. It would put him in my debt.
"He was still alive when you left," I said. "I didn't realize it till I went to pick him up, and by then you were already gone."
"I didn't kill him?" Jacob asked.
I shook my head. "I smothered him with his scarf."
It took a while for my brother to absorb this. He stared down at his lap, his head tucked into his chest, so that the skin beneath his chin piled up into a rippling series of folds.
"Why?" he asked.
The question caught me by surprise. I looked at him closely, trying to analyze what had prompted me to do it. "I did it for you, Jacob. To protect you."
He shut his eyes. "You shouldn't have done it. You should've let him live."
"Christ, Jacob. Didn't you hear me? I said I did it for you. I did it to save you."
"Save me?" he asked. "If you'd let him live, it would've just been me beating him up. We could've turned in the money, and it wouldn't have been that bad. Now it's murder."
"All I did was finish what you started. We did it together. If you hadn't done your part in the first place, I never would've had to do mine in the second."
That silenced him. He took his glasses off, cleaned them on his jacket, and then put them back on.
"We're going to get caught," he said.
"No, Jacob, we aren't. We've done it, and we're going to get away with it. The only way we'll get caught is if you break down and attract attention."
"I'm not going to break down."
"Then we aren't going to get caught."
He shrugged, as if to say, "We'll see," and we watched a little boy ride by on a bicycle. He pedaled right down the center of the street, struggling against the wind. He had a black ski mask on, and it made him look threatening, like a terrorist.
"Are we going to tell Lou?" Jacob asked.
"No."
"Why not?"
I felt something shift and settle heavily into place when he asked this. The word accomplice floated up from somewhere in my mind, and for perhaps the first time in my life I understood what it meant. It was a powerful word; it connected people, bound them to one another. Jacob and I had committed a crime together, and our fates were now inextricably intertwined. That Jacob appeared to be more frightened at present than I was by what we'd done meant nothing. Our power was equal; we were in each other's hands. If he was too shaken to understand that at present, he wouldn't be for long.
I turned toward him. "Why would you want to tell Lou?"
"It just seems like he ought to know."
"This is a bad thing, Jacob. This is something we could spend the rest of our lives in jail for."
He shut his eyes again.
"Promise me you won't tell him," I said.
He hesitated, staring down at his gloves. Then he shrugged. "All right."
"Promise me."
He sighed, looked past me out the window. His pickup was parked across the street. "I promise I won't tell Lou," he said.
We fell silent after that. Jacob seemed like he was about to get out of the car, but then he didn't.
"Where'd you hide the money?" he asked.
I gave him a sharp glance. "In the garage," I lied.
"In the garage?"
"I thought Sarah might find it if I hid it in the house."
He nodded, waited a moment, as if trying to think of something further to say. Then he reached over and opened the door. The dog sprang to his feet behind us.
"We forgot to visit the cemetery," I said.
Jacob looked at me with a tired expression, his lips edging into a sneer. "You want to go now?"
I shook my head. "I'm just saying we forgot."
He made a deprecatory gesture with his hand. "That's about the least of our problems, isn't it?" he asked. He didn't wait for my answer. He just heaved himself up to his feet, whistled for Mary Beth, and -- when the dog scrambled over the back of the front seat and out onto the pavement -- swung the door shut behind him.
SARAH heard me come home and called me upstairs. I found her in the bedroom, the shades pulled, the light dim. She was just settling in for a nap, lying on her back beneath the covers, her hair pinned in a bun on top of her head.
I sat down beside her, on the edge of the mattress, and began to recite the morning's events. I started from the beginning, letting the story unfold, leaving its climax, the encounter with Pederson, to fall, bombshell-like, in its proper place. Sarah rolled onto her side, shutting her eyes, the covers pulled up to her chin. She didn't react to what I said; she simply lay there, her lips frozen into a sleepy smile. I wasn't even sure that she was listening.
But then, just as I was describing my exit from the plane, she lifted her head a little and opened her eyes.
"What about the beer can?" she asked.
She'd caught me off guard. "The beer can?"
"Lou's beer can."
I realized that I'd forgotten to look for it. I'd meant to do it after I planted the money, but then the two crows had appeared, flustering me.
"I didn't find it," I said, hedging.
"You looked?"
I paused, considered fibbing, but my hesitation eliminated the need for it.
"You forgot," she said
, her voice heavy with recrimination.
"I didn't see it. It wasn't near the plane."
She lifted herself into a sitting position. "If they find it," she said quickly, "they'll know someone's been there."
"It's just a beer can, Sarah. No one's going to notice it."
She didn't say anything. She was staring down at the bed. I could see that she was becoming angry: her lips were locked tightly over her teeth, and it seemed like she was clenching the muscles in her forehead.
"They'll assume it was dropped last summer," I said. "By someone picnicking in the orchard."
"They can run tests to see how long it's been there. They can tell by how much it's rusted."
"Come on, Sarah. They aren't going to run any tests." I was stung by her tone of voice. It seemed to imply that I'd made a grave and unforgivable error. She thought I'd acted foolishly.
"They'll find Lou's fingerprints on it."
"He was wearing gloves," I said, straining to remember if this was true. "It's just a beer can lying out in the woods. Nobody's going to think twice about it."
"They will, Hank. If there's even the slightest suspicion that any of the money's been taken, they'll search every inch of the orchard. And if they find the beer can, and they find Lou's fingerprints on it, they'll track us down."
I thought about that. I was hurt by her anger and had a vague desire to hurt her back. I knew that she was blowing things out of proportion, but at the same time I saw that she was probably justified in her fear. We'd left something behind: small as it was, it still had the potential to become a clue, a little piece of evidence to indicate our presence.
"We might as well just burn it," she said.
"Come on, Sarah."
She shut her eyes and shook her head.
"We aren't going to burn it," I said.
She didn't say anything. She smoothed the cover out across her belly, a sulky look on her face, and, watching her, I realized suddenly that I wasn't going to tell her about Pederson. I was surprised by this, jolted. We'd never kept secrets from each other, had always confessed everything. But I knew I wasn't going to tell her this, not here, not now. Perhaps I would sometime in the future, in ten or twenty years, when we were living happily off the money, when what I'd done had been justified, upheld by what had come after. I'd tell her then how I'd saved us from discovery, how I'd taken it upon myself, alone, to protect her and our unborn child from harm. She'd be shocked at my bravery, at the way I'd kept it to myself all those years, and she'd forgive me everything.
The truth was, I was afraid of what she'd think of me. I was terrified of her judgment.
"Your forehead looks better," she said, not looking at me. It was an effort at rapprochement.
I touched my forehead. "It doesn't hurt anymore," I said.
Then we sat in silence. Sarah dropped back onto her pillow, rolling toward me. I didn't look at her. I was waiting for her to say that she was sorry. If she had I might've told her, but she didn't, and finally I gave up.
"Go on," she whispered.
"That's it," I said. "I shut the door and hiked back through the woods to the road. Then we came home."
IT DIDN'T snow all afternoon. I moved restlessly about the house, glancing now and then through the windows at the sky. I turned on the radio every hour and listened for the weather. The forecast was for snow, heavy at times, lasting through the afternoon and into the evening, but by dinnertime there wasn't a cloud in sight, and when the sun finally set, a brilliant sea of icy white stars appeared in the sky, blinking down through the darkness at the earth.
Pederson's accident made the local news. Sarah and I saw it on TV before dinner. They had a shot of the bridge, taken sometime that afternoon. The snowmobile was still in the water, half submerged, the old man's hat floating beside it, but his body had already been retrieved. There were tracks up and down the creek's bank, so that you could imagine the scramble to pull him out, the panic and flurry fueled by the illusory hope that he might not yet be dead.
The newscaster said the body had been found by a passing motorist, shortly before noon. There was no mention of foul play, no indication that anything suspicious had been discovered. In the background I could see the sheriff's truck, pulled off onto the edge of the road, its lights flashing. Carl was standing beside it, talking to a tall, thin man in a bright green down vest, perhaps the unnamed motorist. In the very corner of the screen, off in the distance, I could see Pederson's house. There were three or four cars in the yard, friends come to comfort the widow.
Sarah didn't comment on the report. All she said was, "That's sad, on New Year's Day and all." She didn't seem to realize how close the creek was to the nature preserve.
I went to bed sunk in a deep depression.
I'd killed a man. There it was, every time I turned back to look -- it was something I had done. In my heart I felt unchanged, the same man I'd always been, but in my head I knew I was different now. I was a murderer.
And then there was Sarah. I hadn't told her the truth. It was the first major lie ever to come between us. I realized, too, that with the passing of time it would only grow more difficult to tell her. My fantasy of confessing in twenty years was just that, a fantasy. Each moment I spent in her presence without telling her was a continuation, a reaffirmation of the original lie.
I drifted into sleep that night with my arm draped across her belly. If the baby were to kick, I'd be able to feel it in my dreams. But my last waking thoughts were not of the infant, or of Sarah, or of the money. My last waking thoughts were of Jacob. I closed my eyes and saw the look of panic on his face as he stood over Pederson's body, believing that he'd killed him, and in my chest, as my breathing deepened into sleep, I felt a surge of warmth, the same wave of pity for him I'd felt when I'd seen the tears glistening on his cheeks. But it wasn't just for Jacob now, this warmth and pity -- it was for myself, too, and Sarah, and the baby, and Pederson, and Pederson's widow. I felt sorry for everyone.
IN THE morning I could tell just from the light in the bedroom that it was snowing. It was dim, gray, with a sense of movement to it, and a silence. I slipped out of bed and crossed quietly to the window. Giant, wet flakes were floating down out of the sky, spinning, swirling, sticking to whatever they touched. It had obviously been snowing for most of the night. The tracks in the yard were filled in, the branches of the trees bowed down toward the earth. Everything, the whole world, was white with it, covered up, hidden, buried.
4
MY OFFICE window faced directly south, out the front right-hand corner of Raikley's Feedstore, toward St. Jude's Episcopal Church across the street. I was there at my desk on Wednesday, the sixth of January, eating a powdered donut with a cup of lukewarm coffee, when a handful of darkly clothed men and women emerged from the church's side door and made its way slowly across the gravel parking lot, through the chain-link gate of the tiny cemetery, to the dark black gouge of a freshly dug grave forty yards beyond.
It was Dwight Pederson's funeral.
There were six cars in the parking lot, including the silver hearse pulled up right next to the cemetery's gate. It was a small gathering; Pederson had been something of a loner; he hadn't had that many friends. I could pick out his widow, Ruth, as she made her way back toward the grave. The priest clung to her arm, diminutive, his shoulders bowed, his left hand clutching a Bible to his chest. I could see only the very edge of the grave; the rest was hidden behind the church. The crowd of mourners arranged itself around its border.
St. Jude's bell began to toll.
I finished my donut, then got up and took my coffee to the window. The cemetery, perhaps a hundred yards away, was far enough in the distance that I couldn't identify the people around the grave. Some of them were hidden behind the church; the others, heads bowed, bodies muffled against the cold, were faceless, like strangers, though I must've known most of them. They would've been people I passed on the street in town, people I knew stories about, comic anecdotes, gossip.
I watched as they bowed their heads, then lifted them, saying something in unison before bowing again. I could see Ruth; her back was turned to me. She didn't lift her head with the others; she kept it bowed. I suppose that she was weeping. The priest was hidden from view.
I remained at the window until the service was over and the people began to make their way slowly back toward the parking lot. I watched them, counting under my breath. There were seventeen in all, including the driver of the hearse and the priest. They'd given up their morning to honor the memory of Dwight Pederson and express their grief over his death. They all believed that he'd died accidentally, a freak tragedy, pinned beneath his snowmobile in six inches of icy water, his leg and two of his ribs broken, his skull cracked, struggling vainly to free himself from the suffocating grip of his woolen scarf.
Only Jacob and I knew the truth.
Things were going to get easier from here on out, I knew. With each passing day there would be less and less anxiety about what I'd done. Pederson was buried, eliminating the threat of something being discovered in an autopsy; the plane was covered with snow, the tracks around it erased forever.
Perhaps the greatest relief of all, though, was that I still thought of myself as a good man. I'd assumed that what had happened at the edge of the nature preserve would change me, affect my character or personality, that I'd be ravaged by guilt, irreversibly damaged by the horror of my crime. But nothing changed. I was still who I'd always been. Pederson's death was just like the money; it was there whenever I thought about it, but then when I didn't, it was gone. It made no difference to my life in a day-to-day sense unless I called it up myself. The key was not to call it up.
I believed that what I'd done on New Year's Day was an anomaly. I'd been forced into it by extraordinary circumstances, circumstances far beyond my control, and now the whole thing seemed remarkably understandable to me, even forgivable.