Cody scooped Maria up into his arms and hugged her closely as he walked through the house and into the kitchen. Danielle looked up and smiled as he wandered in, Maria clinging to his neck with one warm cheek pressed against his own. Pots and pans bubbled with aromatic odours as Cody crossed the kitchen to his wife’s side.
‘Just made it,’ he said as he leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Traffic’s lousy. How’s she been?’
‘Okay,’ Danielle said as she swept a strand of hair from her face. ‘Busy as always and full of new words.’
‘Much like being at work,’ Cody said as he tugged at Maria’s cheek.
‘Hey, we’re low on bread,’ Danielle said. ‘Could you get some from the store? I’ll fix dinner once Her Ladyship’s settled down for the night.’
‘Sure,’ Cody said. ‘Wine?’
‘Merlot, and don’t skimp on it.’
Cody walked through into the lounge and kissed his daughter on the cheek with a whispered be good as he set her down inside a safe play-den. Maria busied herself with a collection of toys as Cody walked back out of the lounge and headed for the front door. He fished about in his wallet for cash and was about to open the door when he heard a faint tinkle of breaking glass.
Cody stopped in his tracks and turned, called out.
‘You okay?’
He heard nothing in reply and turned back down the hall, his pace quickened by some unknown instinct that surged through him as he hurried into the kitchen and came up short.
Danielle was standing with her back to the kitchen counter.
Standing opposite her in the open door to their back yard was a man dressed in ragged, dirty clothes stained with what Cody guessed was a foul mixture of alcohol and vomit, his face weather beaten and his eyes infected with a radical glitter as they shifted focus to Cody.
‘Don’t move,’ he snapped in a hoarse voice.
Cody did not know much about guns. The snub-nosed pistol in the vagrant’s hands, pointed at his wife, could have come from any period and any country. Unlike many Americans, Cody just wasn’t a firearms fan. He did not keep one in the house. Nor had his father, a man of nobler principles forged in a grander age.
‘Pete?’ Cody stared at the bedraggled form of his brother and tried to see the man he knew through the shell that remained. ‘You can take anything you want,’ Cody added automatically. ‘Just keep the gun out of it.’
Peter Ryan shifted the pistol to point at Cody.
‘Cash,’ he demanded. ‘All of it, or I’ll turn your family into bullet art.’
‘Jesus,’ Danielle gasped as she stared in horror at Cody’s brother. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
Cody did not understand what separated him by such magnitude from his brother. They had been raised together in a close knit, loving family. Their father had worked hard to provide for them, as had their mother. They had both done well in school. Cody had gone on to college, Peter into the army, his great love of sports and the outdoors driving his ambition. Six years later he had been dishonourably discharged after being found guilty of possession of marijuana with intent to supply while serving in Guam.
From there, Peter’s life had degenerated into years spent wandering from one half-way house to another, interspersed with spells in both jails and prison for a colourful array of misdemeanour felonies. Experiments with the very drugs he peddled to losers on Boston’s meaner streets led to escalating addiction until he spent his every waking hour fixated on the destructive pleasures of methamphetamine.
Cody slowly retrieved his wallet and tossed it onto the counter within Peter’s reach.
‘Sixty dollars and change,’ Cody said, ‘only cash in the house. Now get out.’
Peter snatched the wallet up and then his eyes settled on Cody again.
‘Jewellery,’ he spat. ‘I know it’s in here, Cody. Fetch it me.’
Cody didn’t move. Nor did Danielle. Peter’s features twisted with fury as he screamed at her, his mouth a morass of blackened teeth. ‘Get them now, bitch!’
To Cody’s surprise Danielle stared at Peter for a moment before replying calmly.
‘You don’t need to do this, Peter.’
‘Shut up,’ Peter sneered. ‘You run or try callin’ the law and I’ll put holes in my dear little brother here.’
Danielle turned and walked away. Cody looked Peter up and down, tried to swallow his revulsion as he spoke.
‘Is this what you’ve come down to?’ he uttered. ‘You used to just ask for money.’
‘I’m done askin’ any of you for anythin’,’ Peter spat at him.
Peter had always gone to their parents for money, and they had given him what they could until there was no more they could give. It had been the last they’d seen of their eldest son. The man Cody had once looked up to, a soldier, a natural leader, was now a decrepit and shuffling wreck who could barely string a sentence together. He guessed it was a cruel kindness that their folks had gone to their graves without seeing what he had become.
‘You can’t do this forever, Pete,’ Cody said. ‘You’re dying.’
Peter shot him a fearsome glare. ‘Ain’t nothing worth living for.’
‘Not for you maybe,’ Cody replied. ‘But this is the last time you’ll come here.’
Peter whirled and lunged at Cody, the pistol pushed hard into his temple as Peter shouted at him, his breath a foul stench of alcohol and decay.
‘I’ll come here for as long as I like, you understand?!’ he bellowed.
Cody shot a glance at Danielle, who had returned and was standing by the kitchen door, her bottom lip quivering as she held a jewellery box in her hand.
Peter grinned as he saw her, yellowing stumps loosely anchored to blackened gums. ‘Pretty little thing, ain’t she Cody?’
‘Take the box and get the hell out of here,’ Danielle hissed.
‘Bet young Maria is a heartbreaker too, eh little brother?’
‘You leave my little girl alone,’ Cody uttered, his voice choked.
‘Don’t you worry,’ Peter sneered. ‘I want her alive because even if you don’t give a damn about me, she might of use to me one day,’ Peter looked over his shoulder at Danielle, and then back at Cody, ‘for all sorts of things.’
Cody’s vision blurred and the world around him receded as a hot flush rushed up his spine and over his head. The fear infecting him was shouldered aside by something hot and dangerous that seared his veins and burst from his synapses with a scream that sounded as though it came from another universe.
Cody stepped in and dropped his forehead with a deep crack across Peter’s nose. His brother gagged as he tumbled backwards and hit the kitchen units beneath the window, the pistol waving dangerously as Peter tried to draw aim on his brother.
Cody swung a boot at the weapon and it crashed into Peter’s wrist with a sharp crack. The pistol flew from Peter’s grasp and clattered down onto the tiles across the kitchen. Cody jumped backwards from his brother as the former soldier leaped to his feet, his bunched fists flying toward Cody.
The boiling water crashed into Peter’s face in a cloud of steam as Danielle swung the pan at him. Peter’s hands flew to his face as he collapsed to his knees with a broadside of agonised screams. Peter’s agony warred with Danielle’s rage as she rushed forward. The heavy metal pan landed with a deep thud of metal against bone. Peter’s bloodshot eyes rolled up into his skull to expose yellowing conjunctivae as Danielle raised the pan again. The second blow landed beside the first and Cody heard the skull fracture, saw blood spill from the wound as flesh was scraped aside to expose white bone.
Cody froze on the spot as though he were watching events from afar.
Danielle slammed the pan again and again into Peter’s head, her teeth gritted and her eyes ablaze with something that Cody had never witnessed before. Horror spurred him from his rictus of disbelief and he dashed forward and grabbed his wife’s arms.
‘Jesus, stop!’
Danielle stopped.
Her chest heaved and he realised that she was sobbing, her body shaking as thick globules of blood drooped from the pan she held. Beneath them, Peter lay in a pool of thick blood that glistened in the glow of the kitchen lights. Cody staggered backward as he looked down at the body slumped beneath him. Peter’s chest was still and the blood pooled beneath his head was no longer spreading.
Cody felt devoid of emotion, scoured of remorse for the terrible thing he had witnessed. He turned to see Danielle staring at him, her jaw agape and her eyes wide with emotions that for some reason he could not recognise.
‘Oh God, what have we done?’ he gasped.
‘Where’s Maria?’ she asked.
Cody stared at her as though unable to formulate a reply. ‘She’s okay. We need to call nine-one-one, right now.’
Cody looked down at his brother’s body as slowly his senses began to reconnect themselves, like a computer rebooting.
‘I’ve killed him,’ Danielle whispered.
‘In self-defence,’ Cody replied, taken aback by his inability to feel remorse for his own brother.
‘What if they don’t believe me? What if they think I murdered him in cold blood?’
‘A biologist and climatologist, in their own home, kill a drug-addicted vagrant?’ Cody tried to soothe her, moving closer. ‘I don’t think so. We need to stay calm here and do this right.’
Danielle stepped away from Cody. ‘But they could claim I used excessive force,’ she said, panic infecting her voice. ‘They could argue for the death penalty. Jesus, I killed him, I killed your brother.’
‘It won’t come to that,’ he reassured her, ‘they’ll believe us because he had a long history of violence and drug abuse and….’
‘You don’t know that!’ she shrieked.
Maria called out to them, touched with alarm after the screams. Danielle’s hand flew to her mouth as she tried to calm herself down. Tears spilled from her eyes.
‘Cody, we can’t do this. We can’t go to the police.’
Cody looked down at his brother’s inert corpse and he realised just how much he had come to hate his brother, a selfish, cruel shadow of his former self.
‘This isn’t worth it,’ Cody uttered. ‘I’m not going to let him destroy our lives.’
‘He already has!’
Cody caught an accusing undercurrent in her voice. ‘You’re saying this is my fault?’
‘He was your brother!’
‘Christ, Danielle, don’t make this worse than it already is.’
‘It can’t get any worse!’
‘Not for him,’ Cody snapped as he pointed at Peter’s inert corpse.
‘He threatened us, Cody,’ she snapped. ‘He threatened Maria.’
‘Danielle, right now we’re looking at self-defence against an armed intruder. You try to conceal this we’ll be looking at perverting the course of justice, culpable manslaughter, maybe even premeditated homicide. Peter was a war veteran, something that could be used against us. We have to be honest and maintain every bit of integrity that we have or everything could fall apart.’
‘And if I don’t?’ she uttered. ‘If it goes against us? Will you still be here in twenty years’ time when I get parole?’ Her voice cracked as tears formed in her eyes. ‘Will Maria?’
‘And how do you think that you’re going to hide this from her?’ Cody uttered, ‘or from the police?’
She looked down at the body and then her gaze lifted to his, stricken with a paralysis of fear.
‘Don’t let them take Maria away from me,’ she sobbed. ‘I can’t do this.’
Cody felt a surge of empathy and he crossed the kitchen and threw his arms around her shoulders as she buried her face into his chest.
Over her shoulder he stared down at his brother’s ruined body, every fibre of his being alive with hate for what Peter had done to them, for all that he had done to them over the years. How his parents worried for Peter’s wellbeing and how he had taken from them so many times, giving nothing back. Cody tightened his hold on his wife’s shoulders.
‘I’ll find a way,’ he said. ‘Nobody will ever know he was ever here. He was a drug addict and a loser. Nobody will ever miss him.’
Danielle looked up at him and nodded. Maria called out again from the lounge. Danielle wiped her face with her sleeve and stood back from Cody as between them a gulf emerged that somehow he knew could never be bridged. Danielle backed away from the kitchen, her eyes fixed upon his brother’s corpse.
‘I want you to get rid of it,’ she whispered. ‘Take it away, please. I don’t want to think about this ever again.’
Danielle turned and hurried toward the lounge and their daughter. Cody stared after her, and then looked down at the body in their kitchen.
*
It was about a ten mile drive east out of the district to Sudbury Reservoir, but to Cody it felt like the longest journey of his life.
Never, in all of his years, would he have envisaged what had happened that night or what he was about to do. His brother’s body lay in the trunk, wrapped in plastic sheets Cody had grabbed from the garage. Beside it lay a sack containing every tile in the kitchen. It was almost hilarious that a diet of intense and realistic police dramas on television could arm an innocent citizen with the knowledge to effectively conceal a crime, even one like homicide.
Blood splatter on the kitchen units would disappear when Cody replaced the doors. The bloodied tiles would soon vanish into a municipal waste dump in town to be buried in landfill. Peter’s pistol was already sinking into the abyssal depths of the Charleston River, hurled from Cody’s car on a long, dark stretch of road far from watching traffic cameras.
There had been no noise to alert the neighbours during the fight. His brother had carried no identification and no possessions but for a well-used crack pipe in one pocket. He had been utterly alone and unknown except maybe to other vagrants haunting Boston’s lonely city streets.
Cody drove out to a remote beauty spot near a small airfield beside the reservoir’s northern shore, and there he stopped. At 2am in the morning there were no vehicles on the narrow, pitch black road to witness Cody lift the body out of the trunk. Cody hefted the corpse onto his shoulder and staggered into the woods with it. Then he returned to the vehicle and lifted out a steel storage box and a set of tools.
He walked back into the woods where the body lay well out of sight and let his eyes adjust to the darkness of the night. Then he un-wrapped the body. To his relief it was dark enough that he could only just make out the form of the corpse and could not see his brother’s face.
Cody lifted up a large hack saw and examined it for a few moments. His stomach felt empty and cold, his mind filled with strange and conflicting emotions, none of which felt good. Images of his brother as a young man tried to infiltrate his thoughts as he worked but he forced them away, bludgeoned them out of existence with each angry thrust of the saw. The darkened forest echoed to the sound of ripping flesh and splintering bone as though wild dogs were feasting on carrion in the night.
He knew that he must leave as little as possible to identify his brother’s remains.
His grim task took half an hour. Sweat drenched his skin. Each chunk of flesh and bone was discarded into the storage box. When he was finished, Cody turned away and walked several paces in the darkness before he lurched forward and vomited into the foliage, choking back sobs as he did so.
A long time passed as he sat alone in the darkness, engulfed by an unspeakable emotional turmoil. Cody finally dragged himself back to the body and grabbed a shovel. He dug down for an hour before he dumped his brother’s remains into the ragged grave and filled it in. He stamped the ground down and brushed leaves over the grave until it was entirely concealed.
Cody slipped out of his clothes and gloves then placed them carefully in a plastic bag and sealed it. He put fresh, clean clothes on and then sealed the storage box. The soiled clothes would be trashed the following morning. The tools would be cleaned and dispos
ed of in his local recycling plant. His brother’s head and hands, his identifiable remains, would have to be taken somewhere far away and buried.
Then he drove out onto the old post road and across to Arlington, staying away from as many street cameras as he could before driving back into Boston from the north-east.
Maria was still asleep when he returned but Danielle was awake, her features haunted as she sat in bed staring at the wall. She did not look at him when he walked into the bedroom, did not speak to him.
Cody slipped into bed, turned his back to his wife and stared at the opposite wall.
He hoped that somehow in the eyes of God, if not the law, he had done his best to protect his wife and daughter. That he had committed no crime and neither had Danielle. Yet despite all of his prayers he knew that somehow they would never be able to leave this night behind.
Cody began to think of ways to get away for a while until things settled down again. Somewhere to hide the remains.
Maybe some kind of research trip, somewhere distant.
***
23
Jake McDermott strode onto the Phoenix’s bridge, a mug of coffee steaming in each hand as he crossed to the wheel and handed the mugs to Saunders and Hank.
The deck outside was being lashed by horizontal streaks of snow flecked rain that streamed down the windows and billowed in gusts between the masts. The grey and white surface of the water off the port bow stretched away into the boundless ocean beyond. To starboard, the coast of Newfoundland crouched against the cruel gales.
‘Moment of truth,’ Jake murmured as the ship heeled against the blow, the deck steeply inclined.
‘If we don’t see any evidence of habitation at St John,’ Hank agreed, ‘we’ll sail on by and keep heading south.’
‘Don’t reckon there’ll be anybody home,’ Saunders said as he held the ship’s wheel against the winds buffeting the hull and the magnificent sails, ‘too bleak up here.’
Hank watched the figures of his crew huddled against the bitter wind, their hoods of their waterproofs up as they worked the ship’s rigging to keep the yards and sails angled correctly, loosening them with the wilder blows.
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