by Peter Seth
“She – she was a good woman,” Nanci wept. “And you killed her.”
Silently I thought, No, she wasn’t, but that was neither the time nor place to say it, now that there was this strange, new presence in the room: Death. Actual, real Death. And it froze us all. But only for a moment.
“You . . . you . . . evil, little –” Nanci raged, suddenly springing up from the floor, straight at Rachel.
She grabbed Rachel around the throat with both hands and slammed her straight up against the wall. Rachel’s head made a thudding sound against the tropical wallpaper. In a crying frenzy, Nanci stood Rachel up hard against the wall and started to strangle her.
“You killed her!” screamed Nanci into Rachel’s face, just a few inches away. “YOU KILLED HER!!!”
Rachel’s face started to turn red as she tore at Nanci’s hands, trying to pull them off of her throat. But Nanci, while not that much taller than Rachel, was about twice her weight, and she used it all to press against her neck.
“You stupid, evil – !” Nanci growled as she forced her hands tighter around Rachel’s throat, standing her up higher and higher against the wall.
I have to admit, to no honor on my part (and do I really have to say that now, again, for the millionth time?), that I stood there virtually paralyzed through all this madness. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, almost from the moment that Eleanor had come in. It was all a living nightmare. On the one hand, it was mostly their fight; on the other hand, I should have done something.
Anyway, finally, I snapped back to the moment, found my legs, and ran to try to break them up just as Nanci heaved and took a big, asthmatic gasp, letting up momentarily on Rachel’s neck.
Rachel instantly sprang back at Nanci, grabbing her around the throat and forcing her back across the room. Rachel lunged at Nanci and bit her hard on the cheek. Nanci screamed in pain, as they grabbed at each other’s throats, struggling and spinning across the room. I jumped aside as they whipped around twice, then both of them fell to the floor, with Rachel on top of Nanci. They landed hard, very hard, onto the flagstone hearth by the fireplace. The back of Nanci’s head cracked audibly against the sharp edge of rough flagstone. The sound was loud, juicy, and final.
Slowly, slowly, slowly, Rachel pulled herself up off of Nanci’s body.
Nanci was lying on her back, her head at an odd angle up against the edge of the stone. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t seem to be seeing anything. Her mouth was partly open, but she didn’t seem to be breathing. There was a big bite mark on her cheek where Rachel had bitten her when they were fighting, and her arms were up over her head, palms facing up, as if she had surrendered to someone. There was a little trickle of blood that had started flowing slowly out from under her head. And she wasn’t moving at all.
Rachel stood over her, looking down.
“I think she’s really hurt,” Rachel said.
“What should we do?” I asked, my mind blank.
Rachel thought for a very long moment, and then said, “I think we. . . let her die.”
She turned to me and explained, “She betrayed me. And you. She was with Eleanor all along. Can you believe it? . . . This fat, disloyal pig . . . I was her only friend, and she betrayed me.”
I looked at Nanci’s body . . . and Eleanor’s body, not more than twenty feet away from hers. It felt unreal. I had never seen a dead person before, much less two. Much less one killed by my girlfriend, and the other by Fate or Bad Luck or My Own Inexplicable Inaction.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard “silence” like the silence that was in that room, at that moment.
Then Rachel spoke again.
“Why didn’t you help me before,” she asked. “When she was trying to strangle me?”
“What?” I said, a beat behind things; my mind still on the floor, with the bodies and the blood trickling, inch by inch away from Nanci’s head.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know: I just froze. I just . . . couldn’t move.”
Rachel suddenly bent over from the waist, gasping for air. I thought that she was going to throw up or something, but it was like she was choking.
I rushed over to her – at first, my legs felt powerless and slow – but I got there just in time to catch her as she pitched forward. I caught her arm as she slumped, and held her up, pulling her into my chest.
I held her tight. She was trembling, and so was I.
“What are we going to do?” I muttered into her dark hair, holding onto her so that we both didn’t collapse.
We held each other for a very long time. Rachel felt small in my arms, as if she were trying to turn herself inside out and somehow vanish. Then, her whole body seemed to be become harder, more concentrated, in my embrace.
“‘What are we going to do?’ . . . I know what we’re going to do,” she said in a very even voice. “We’re going to do what we have to do. To save ourselves.”
I held her away from me, at arms’ length. She was looking down; then she looked up at me directly.
“We’re going to take their bodies out of here, and we’re going to get rid of them,” she said as if she were seeing the future. “And we’re going to save our own lives.”
I wasn’t sure that I heard her correctly.
“We’re going to take them out of here and drive them to a place where they’ll never be found,” she said.
“And where is that?”
“The Quarry,” she said simply.
It took me a moment to connect her words to my memory of the Quarry itself.
“I’ve actually thought about this,” she said, her eyes not focusing on anything: she was all in her daydreams. “How I’d get rid of Eleanor if it ever came to this.”
I let her go on.
“I knew it could happen someday,” Rachel said. “Not ‘knew’ so much as felt it could. If she didn’t kill me first. There were nights when I swear I thought she was going to do it. Stab me, or something. You know about the cigarette burns. But there were the slaps and the pinches, all the time. All the time.”
I think I said again, “What are we going to do?” but I’m not exactly sure of that fact.
Rachel walked a couple of steps and looked down at Eleanor’s body.
“I can’t believe this,” she said. “This is . . . this is . . . poetic justice is what it is. This is what she got from pushing me and pushing me and pushing me, my whole life. It was what she . . . deserved.”
Her tone suddenly intensified. “And then when she said that she had a big fight with Herb tonight! And a lot of people saw them! If she disappears, they’re gonna blame him. He’s a violent guy. It’s almost too perfect.”
“‘Disappears’?” I repeated the word, not sure I wanted to follow her meaning.
“There are those swamps by the airport,” she considered. “By Kennedy. That’s where the Mafia dumps dead bodies, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think so,” not really thinking at all.
“But that would be too obvious,” she said. “And too close to here. No, it has to be the Quarry. Just where we saw those Boonies dump all that stuff. You saw it! Stuff gets dumped into the Quarry all the time! No one cares. We’ll just take them up there, and they’ll just be . . . disappeared.”
“‘Disappeared,’” I repeated.
She tried to sound confident, but I wasn’t sure of anything at that moment.
“Don’t you see? The best thing is to get them far away from here! Far far away from here,” she said in an urgent voice. “If we do this right, right now, no one will catch us. No one will evereverever look for them up there. No one will find out.”
“And what happens when people come looking for Eleanor here?” I asked.
“We play dumb,” she said. “We don’t know anything.”
“And what about Nanci?”
&n
bsp; “No one cares about her!” Rachel scoffed. “Her drunk parents don’t care about her! That’s why they’re always traveling someplace. I was her best friend, and you saw how she treated – no, sorry – Eleanor was her best friend. . . . So they disappeared together! We know that Pauline knew that they were involved.”
Rachel was getting more animated now, thinking out loud, trying to get some sense of action into me. I admit that I was still in some kind of mental fog. Rachel saw that my eyes were straying, looking at Nanci’s body on the floor by the fireplace.
“She betrayed me! And betrayed you!” Rachel said passionately. “All of our secrets, all of your secrets, she told to Eleanor. And Eleanor probably told them to Herb! Doesn’t that just disgust you, to think that Herb knew all our secrets?”
I thought of Herb’s raspy, knowing “Don’t be a sucker!” in the parking lot of that Greek diner, and it made me heartsick.
“And she pretended to be my friend!” Rachel continued scornfully. “She’d work me up and get me to talk against Eleanor. She’s the one who told me to ditch class to go see you. She drove me to the train that day! I think she wanted us to break up – no, more than that: she wanted us to really crash and burn.”
“Crash and burn,” I repeated.
“She’s the one who kept the whole Eric thing going, just to make you jealous, just to put a wedge between us. … What kind of a person is that? To give your whole life to revenge?” Rachel wondered.
We looked down at the two bodies. There was a pool of blood on the floor under Nanci’s head, but it had stopped spreading. Eleanor’s body just lay there.
“What are we going to do?” I repeated.
Right at that moment, we had a choice – I had a choice. We could have called the police, told them what happened, thrown ourselves on their mercy, and taken the consequences.
Or I could have listened to Rachel.
“I know what I’m not going to do,” she said passionately, just inches from my face. “I’m not going to stay here and wait for the police. I’m not going to let my life be ruined. I’m going to do something to save myself. I am not going to let her win. I’m going to fight for my life, now that I’m free of her. And I am not going to any jail either, I’ll tell you that. I’ve been in jail all my life. No, we’re going to get these bodies out of here, we’re going to clean up this place, and we’re going to drive them far away from here. We’re going to drive them up to the Quarry and dump them, and we’re going to get away with this.”
I don’t think I ever heard her sound so sure of anything as long as I’d known her. In a way, this was the realest Rachel I’d ever seen.
“We’ve got to save us!” she said, grabbing my arm the way she did when she felt strongly about something. “And we can. We can!”
I stood there for I don’t know how long – a few seconds? my whole life? – not wanting to think, wanting to go back in Time, be invisible, anything but what was actually happening.
“What do you want to do?” asked Rachel. “Leave them there until they rot?”
“I didn’t say that,” I said. I didn’t say anything for a long moment. I don’t know if I thought this explicitly, or if it was just in the back of my confused, shattered mind, but at that moment I had two choices: either walk out of that house, go to the police and tell them what Rachel had done, or stay there and help her conceal it.
“We’ll do this properly,” she insisted, penetrating me with those gorgeous blue-blue eyes once more. “We’ll do this properly and then we’ll be free forever. Free forever! You and me. Just as we always wanted.”
So I stayed . . . and did what I did.
Record of Events #32 - entered Saturday, 4:44 A.M.
≁
This was the plan. We would put the bodies in the trunk of Eleanor’s Cadillac and drive up to Mooncliff – me, driving the Caddy, and Rachel, driving her Mustang behind me. We’d dump the Caddy in the Quarry and immediately drive back home in the Mustang. Put it all a couple hundred miles away and under water, and everything would be gone. Disappeared. As simple as that.
We got dressed and went into action.
“Watch out! Max is out!” yelled Rachel. “He’ll track the you-know-what all over!”
The you-know-what was already all over the floor. Well, not all over. Actually, there wasn’t that much, considering that there are eight pints of blood in the average human body. More useless Jeopardy knowledge.
Rachel had gone to the laundry room for cleaning supplies and accidentally let Max out. And, sure enough, the dog came running in and went straight to Eleanor’s body. She had started to sniff at the leg of Eleanor’s purple pantsuit when I scooped her up, well before she could sniff her way up the body.
The little dog turned in my hands and actually tried to nip me – the first time she had done that since that first walk on Buckingham-whatever-Terrace – but I held on. She squirmed and yipped. Maybe the animal in her sensed what had happened in the room, maybe not. But she was very squiggly and resistant as I ran with her back to the laundry room.
“Great,” said Rachel, standing in the kitchen with a mop, a roll of paper towels, and a bucket filled with all kinds of cleaning supplies (Lestoil, Clorox, and a big bottle of Mr. Clean) as I whisked past with the wriggling Max. “Thanks.”
I dropped Max gently onto the floor of the laundry room, said “Stay, Max!” as she scampered away, and shut the door behind her.
“Good dog,” I said to myself, taking a breath.
A lot of what happens from here on in is, I confess, horrible. There are many other words for it, but “horrible” is an accurate start. It’s what I would have said at the trial, if the Assistant D.A. had been smart enough and had gotten the chance to get it out of me on the witness stand. I don’t really know why I’m saying it all now. I think it’s because, finally, I have to.
I walked back into the back room, and Rachel was already on her knees, using paper towels to mop up the blood that had pooled around Nanci’s head. Smart girl, she had on a pair of big yellow Playtex Living gloves to protect her hands. I saw that she was working quickly and methodically.
I said, “Be careful.” Which was kind of a stupid, unnecessary thing to say, but she let it pass.
Without looking up at me, she said, “OK. What do you want to do with her?”
I knew she meant Eleanor.
“Well,” I said. “Didn’t you say we were going to put them in the trunk of Eleanor’s Cadillac? I mean we’re not going to sit them up in the backseat, right?”
I walked a little closer and looked down at Eleanor’s body, still on the floor, still very dead. I hadn’t really looked into her face. Her head had been turned away from me, face down on the floor when she landed, and I hadn’t seen her face . . . until then.
She was never a pretty woman, to say the least. I think that was part of her hatred of Rachel: sheer jealousy. But in Death’s odd kind of mercy, even with her face half smushed against the floor, she looked almost pretty. Her face was certainly relaxed, not screwed up and sour from the toxic feelings inside her. Whenever I met her, she always seemed bent on saying something cutting, something “witty.” At least at that moment she seemed to be at peace.
“Where are the keys?” I asked.
“Give me a minute,” she said, still kneeling by Nanci, wiping the floor with another paper towel and deliberately, with both hands, putting it into the big brown paper grocery bag that she had stood up next to her. Already the room smelled like bleach and ammonia combined. At that particular moment, it was a great smell.
I didn’t want to rush Rachel or make her nervous, but I knew we had a lot to do before we got out of there that night, in terms of making things clean and presentable. And that was only temporarily: I knew we would have to do a lot more cleaning up once we got back. But if we really were going to dump the Cadillac in the Quarry and not be
seen, we had to get there well before daybreak. According to the big, ugly clock over the mantel it was 10:45 p.m. I figured that we had about six hours before dawn. The drive was about three hours. We could definitely make it but only if we moved quickly and intelligently.
Everything I’m going to say from here on in makes me look bad. I mean, worse. I know that. I’m sorry, Counselor, but it’s too late to stop now. Keep reading.
“We should put them in something,” I said. “To carry them out to the car. So we don’t track anything around here. Anymore than necessary.”
Rachel straightened up for a moment and agreed, “You’re right.”
She carefully removed the Playtex gloves and carefully laid them on the edge of the brown paper bag, making sure they would stay balanced there, and not fall or touch anything. Then she sat back on her heels and sprang up to her feet, all in one motion.
“There’s something in the garage, I think,” she said.
I followed her out of the room toward the kitchen, where we could get out to the garage.
“How’re you doin’?” I asked her.
“Good,” she said, not turning around.
I didn’t say anything else to Rachel. As long as she seemed “OK,” I didn’t want to open anything up by asking her anything other than what was absolutely necessary. I certainly didn’t want to think too deeply about what we were doing: I just concentrated on doing it. And she didn’t say anything either.
As we entered the kitchen, Max started to bark.
“Shut up, Max!” said Rachel as she opened the door to the laundry room, blocking the dog from leaving with her leg. “Stay!”
I scooted in behind Rachel and closed the door, keeping Max inside.
“Good dog,” I said as I followed Rachel out the other door and into the garage.
It was cold in the garage. Well, cool. It was April, the cruelest month “breeding”, and nights were still T.S. Eliot-chilly. It would be really cold up at the Quarry, but I put that thought out of my mind for the moment as I walked around Rachel’s Mustang. Eleanor’s big white Cadillac was parked on the far side, against the wall, waiting for me.