by Lisa Lutz
“How would you get that?” I said.
“Well, they’re hardly going to bury her with her wallet. It’s got to be around somewhere. I think we should follow the husband home and then break into their house when he’s away.”
“You can’t be serious,” I said.
“Have you got a better idea?”
I didn’t. I pulled the VW around the corner and parked behind an old maple tree. The fresh leaves had just opened like the palm of a hand.
All these years, while I’ve done nothing significant with my life, I’ve acquired one perfect skill. I know when a man is lying to me. I know a black heart when I see one.
“He killed her,” I said.
“What? The husband?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?” said Blue.
“His wife is dead less than a week and he’s commenting on her weight. That’s not normal.”
“Normal or not, it isn’t proof.”
“Nobody takes antifreeze when they want to off themselves. So many better ways to go about it,” I said.
“Should we leave an anonymous tip for the cops?” Blue said.
“Not if you think she’s a viable candidate. Be easier if her death goes unnoticed,” I said.
“Doesn’t really matter how she died, does it?” Blue said.
“Guess not.”
“I think I’d like to try on Laura Cartwright. See if she fits.”
WE WAITED until the mourners departed and followed the husband in his red GMC Sierra. He drove several miles to a suburb in some place called Fairview and parked his car in front of a white clapboard house. The lawn was brown and patchy and there was old furniture on the porch. We kept vigil in Blue’s car for the next hour. When Lester departed, he looked up and down the block as if he were checking to see if he was being tailed. He drove off in his truck and Blue got out of the car.
“Text my mobile if you see anyone coming,” Blue said.
“What are you going to do?”
“Break in and see if I can find her wallet.”
I slumped in the driver’s seat of the car and waited for Blue. My nerves felt like rockets firing under my skin. Every sound from wind chimes to the rustling of leaves sent a jolt through me.
Blue was in the house for thirty minutes before I sent her a text.
Get out. This isn’t safe.
Blue texted back. Still looking.
Cars drifted past. I couldn’t tell if they could see me or not, but one or two might remember an unfamiliar Jetta parked in the neighborhood. A middle-aged woman in a housecoat was watering her lawn and she looked right at me.
The red truck returned and pulled into the driveway. I texted Blue again.
He’s back. Get out.
Blue didn’t reply. Lester hoisted a case of beer and a bag of groceries from the flatbed. He walked up the front steps, unlocked the door, and went inside. Blue didn’t return to the car.
Where are you? He’s in the house.
Ten minutes later, Blue slipped out of the bathroom window and casually walked to the car.
“Let’s go,” she said.
I started the engine and drove slowly out of the neighborhood and onto the highway.
“What happened in there?” I asked.
“I couldn’t find her paperwork,” said Blue, deflated. “But even if I did, I’m not sure this plan would pan out. I could never get a job with her social security number, since the husband probably filed for some kind of death benefit, and without a bribable contact at the DMV, I’d be using a license with a picture that barely resembled me. No matter how many doughnuts I ate.”
“There has to be a way,” I said.
“I’m sure there is,” said Blue. “We just haven’t figured it out yet.”
Chapter 6
* * *
I NEVER quite knew what to make of Blue. I never trusted her and yet I owed her an immeasurable debt because my quality of life improved greatly under her roof. She worked nights, so I got out of her hair during the day; I couldn’t yet risk being kicked to the curb. Blue never told me her life story. She was an ex-schoolteacher with a bad husband named Jack. Whenever I inquired about the rest of her history, she was cagey and vague. I asked her once what her childhood was like. I did what kids did. Played and stuff. I inquired about her family. I had some, she said. I don’t remember sleeping well during those days with Blue. It always seemed possible that I could wake up with a gun trained on my head.
Blue wasn’t, however, my primary cause of concern. I still had Mr. Oliver to contend with. I tried to imagine what his next step would be. Where would one begin looking for a single woman who matched the description of all kinds of single women in Austin? Sometimes being unremarkable is a good thing.
The Austin library circuit became my second home. Since I couldn’t risk becoming too familiar, I never paid a repeat visit to the same branch in a week. I mixed it up as much as I could. Yarborough, Twin Oaks, North Village, Carver, and Faulk Central; I got to the computer banks before the children escaped from school. If I didn’t beat the afternoon rush, I’d roam the stacks and peruse travel books, pretending my imaginary new life was just an ambitious vacation.
I checked up on the investigation into the death of my recently departed husband. The coroner’s report claimed that Frank died from blunt force trauma to the head. In the papers, they never mentioned that blunt force could happen from the cranium tumbling toward a static object like the edge of a stair. I remained a person of interest, mostly because I disappeared right after he died. My whereabouts were still unknown. If I had stayed, maybe all of this could’ve blown over and I’d have the house, a name, and a life without Frank. I thought about going back, but now that I had angered Mr. Oliver and painted myself as a black widow to my old neighbors, I couldn’t see my return playing out as smoothly as I’d want.
I turned back to the obituaries to get my mind off the living. I found a promising corpse named Charlotte Clark. A name I could get used to. She was survived by only her sister and a niece and nephew. I jotted down the information for the funeral and headed back to Blue’s place.
WHEN I opened the door, Blue was sitting on the couch, watching the news. Her foot pounded the rug like a jackhammer. She clicked off the remote and got to her feet.
“Good. You’re home. I’ve been waiting hours for you.”
Blue always managed to look cool as an iceberg, but now she was jittery, charged, like someone had given her a shot of adrenaline. Something in her manner set me on edge, more than usual.
“Everything all right?”
“It will be, eventually. But now we have to go.”
“Where?”
“I’ll tell you in the car,” Blue said.
She walked out of the front door expecting me to follow, so I did. When we reached her car, she tossed me the keys.
“I assume you want to drive,” she said.
We got into the car without any more words and I backed out of the snaky driveway.
THE SKY turned dark; Blue’s taciturn directions laid a track on top of the rush hour traffic. Turn right, turn left, left up ahead, right.
“Take 290 East for about thirty miles and then take 21,” she said.
“You plan on telling me where we’re going?”
“We’re going on a nature excursion,” Blue said.
“At night?”
“Yes.”
“Wouldn’t we be able to see the nature better during the day?”
“Fewer tourists at night.”
Blue didn’t seem like she was in the mood for conversation and I wasn’t in the spirit of inquisition. No one said another word until she told me to turn right onto FM 60. Traffic quieted and I began to see signs for a state park. The absence of lights and conversation sent my head to the wrong place.
“You’re not planning on killing me—are you, Blue?”
Blue took a deep breath. I tried to read its meaning, but nothing came. She opened the
glove compartment and pulled out her gun and I swerved the car into opposing traffic. It felt like all of the blood in my veins had to turned to ice. A truck blasted its horn; I steadied our vehicle and tried to quiet the pounding in my chest.
“You need to calm down,” said Blue. She released the cylinder on the revolver and tipped the bullets into the palm of her hand. “Take them,” she said. “Then you can stop thinking whatever nonsense you’re thinking.”
She dropped the bullets into my hand and closed my fingers around them. I slipped my hand into my jacket pocket, counting as my fingers released each slug. One. Two. Three. Four. Five . . .
“Slow down when you see the sign for Park Road 57. That’s where we’re headed,” Blue said.
“I’m not exactly in the mood for a camping trip.”
“We’ll keep it brief.”
I pulled off the road at Lake Somerville State Park. The ranger station was closed. A chain blocked the entrance, secured only by a hook slipped into an eye. Blue unhooked it. We drove up a dirt driveway and parked in an empty lot. Blue plucked a flashlight from the backseat, got out of the car, and strolled up a short trail leading to the campsites. I followed the bright beam of her light. The only sounds were gravel crunching under our feet and the steady chirp of crickets. The fire pits looked like they hadn’t seen a glow in months.
Blue walked back to the car. I followed her. She passed me the flashlight and opened the trunk.
“Keep your cool. Can you do that for me, Amelia?”
Blue didn’t wait for an answer. She opened the trunk. Inside was a large, bulky blanket. I stepped closer and saw that it was a large, bulky blanket with shoes. Looked like size-twelve work boots, to be precise. I let the light drift along the body until I got to the head, where I saw a giant blot of blood. Resting on top of the body was a shovel.
“Did you kill someone, Blue?”
I realize now that was a foolish question.
“Indeed, I did.” She said it as if I’d asked her if she’d picked up milk at the store.
“Who?”
“Amelia, allow me to introduce you to my husband, Jack Reed. I wish you could have met under better circumstances.”
As Blue and I lugged Jack’s body as deep into the woods as our feet could carry him, I gleaned the following information: Jack found Blue; he tried to kill her; she killed him instead. She made it sound as simple as counting to three.
I asked Blue how Jack found her. He learned she had an aunt, found a few letters from before Greta died, with the address for her house printed clear as day on the envelope. He drove straight to Austin, to the last known address of one Greta Miles. He sat on the house for less than a day and spotted his wife. Soon after I left for the library, he knocked on her door. But Blue had seen him traipsing up the driveway. Got her gun, invited him in. When he pulled a knife, she pulled her gun and marched him over to her car. She figured it wouldn’t be so easy getting a body into the trunk, and she didn’t want to bother cleaning up the mess in her house, so she laid a tarp and asked Jack to get in the trunk. He obliged. She shot him then and there. That was why there was so much blood.
“If someone put a tarp inside a trunk and told me to get inside, I’m not sure I’d go without a fight,” I said. “It’d be like climbing into my own grave.”
“If you put a gun to someone’s head, they’ll do just about anything you ask, including climbing into their own grave,” said Blue.
“You make a good point,” I said.
The woods smelled like pine and oak and that damn pureness only nature can offer. Jack smelled like the taste of a nine-volt battery.
Blue took the first turn at digging the grave. When her breath got raspy and I could see sweat trickling down her brow in the cold of night, I took over, even though I didn’t exactly see how burying her husband was any responsibility of mine. For the record, it did occur to me that I was becoming an accessory after the fact, but considering I had already been an accessory to a double homicide, one more charge felt like a drop in the bucket. At this point, it almost seemed wise to go home and face the music for the crimes I didn’t commit.
The dirt was soft at first. Then it got hard, and we had to throw our weight into the chore.
“How deep should this be?” I said.
“At the cemetery, it’s six feet, I think. For our purposes, four should do,” said Blue.
I got the feeling maybe Blue had done this before. Or thought about it considerably.
It took us two hours to get the hole just right. Blue rolled her husband over into the grave. The blanket came off, his blasted face now exposed. I looked away and tried to keep my stomach from turning over.
“My apologies,” Blue said.
She shifted the blanket to cover his head and began shoveling the dirt over the body. When she was done, a small mound rested over the shallow grave.
“That doesn’t look right,” Blue said.
She gathered rocks and moss and studied the earth adjacent to the grave and tried to make Jack’s final resting place resemble the surrounding landscape. It still resembled a fresh grave, but less than before.
Blue took a moment to regard her work. Maybe she was paying some kind of respect to the dead.
“Good-bye, Jack,” she said. “Sorry how things worked out. But you only have yourself to blame.”
That was the shortest funeral service I’d ever attended. Even I took the time to drink a hand of whiskey as I said good-bye to Frank. Then again, I didn’t kill Frank. If you kill someone, I’m not sure a eulogy is in order. Or maybe it’s even more in order.
Blue picked up the shovel and returned to the car. I followed, holding the flashlight.
The first part of the drive home was quiet. I’d like to think that Blue was feeling an itch of guilt and trying to find a way to scratch it.
“How do you feel?” I asked. I didn’t ask to make conversation or slice the tension. I asked because I honestly couldn’t read Blue at all. She didn’t look scared or relieved or guilty or sad. Her eyes seemed to drift in thought, pensive in an academic manner. Her face was in complete repose, not a worry wrinkle in sight, not a single tear at the start of a slide. I didn’t know the man and I didn’t kill the man, but I’m fairly certain I felt more of an ache of guilt for my part in the ordeal than Blue did for her far more ample role.
“I feel free,” Blue said plainly.
“Huh,” I said.
In my experience when you leave a dead body in your wake, you are decidedly less free.
“I don’t have to run anymore,” Blue said.
“Not from Jack. But maybe now you have to run from the law.”
“He wouldn’t have told anyone he was coming for me. I should be long dead by now, according to any plan of my dearly departed. Jack was the kind of person who would run off without telling anyone, just plain disappear. Or get himself in a mess with someone who would disappear him.”
“Is it that simple?” I said.
“Of course not. I still have to clean the blood out of the trunk of the car,” Blue said. “That could take hours.”
July 20, 2009
To: Ryan
From: Jo
I’ll admit you people have done a hell of a job keeping me secret. But, in general, you have to assume that you don’t have any secrets anymore. Even from me. If you’re bored and still living in the past, like I am, it’s easy to trawl those websites and follow comment after comment until you find a truly intriguing thread. You were in a mental hospital, weren’t you? That’s why you haven’t written in over six months.
Why hide that? I was almost relieved when I figured it out. Not that I want you unwell, but knowing that maybe sometimes you can’t live with yourself makes me feel a little bit better. You don’t have to tell me what it was like, none of the cuckoo’s nest details. But you don’t have to keep it a secret, either.
I’d probably have ended up there too, if my life weren’t such a high-wire act. Vigilance keeps you sharp, l
ike an animal. There isn’t much time for melancholy.
So, when you were in the nuthouse, did you get to the bottom of all of your troubles?
Jo
August 14, 2009
To: Jo
From: Ryan
I didn’t tell anyone anything when I was in there. That’s what you really want to know, right? I hardly said a word the whole time, which might be why they kept me so long. Some days I wanted to talk. It’s not like they could tell anyone. But I knew it might ease my conscience and I didn’t want that. You don’t want that for me either.
September 3, 2009
To: Ryan
From: Jo
You don’t know me anymore, Ryan. You don’t know what I want for you.
It’s unnatural to keep this kind of secret. It surfaces in other ways. Frank sent me to a priest last year, thought maybe I needed clerical intervention. I had these nightmares that scared the hell out of him. More importantly, they were interrupting his precious sleep. So I went to the priest, who suggested that guilt was causing my sleep disturbances. I think he figured I was stepping out on my husband, maybe stealing from the till to go on shopping sprees. I could tell that he thought my crimes were trivial. I found his tone insulting and so I confessed. Not to my exact crime, but one that rang a bell.
I went into one of those booths you see in gangster films, with the mesh screen that divides you. I could still recognize Father Paul, but I pretended like we hadn’t just spoken for an hour.
And so I made a false confession. I was young, I told him, and in love. But the boy I was in love with had spurned me. I drank, I drank to the point of complete oblivion. I got in my car and drove. I must have blacked out, I told the priest. Because the next thing I remember, I was in a hospital. They told me I was in a car accident, an accident that had killed a girl, the girl who had stolen my boy. The priest asked if I had been punished for my crime. I said I had. Wouldn’t you agree? He told me to do ten Hail Marys and twenty Our Fathers. I found the prayers on the Internet and did as I was told. The nightmares ceased for a few weeks and then returned. Maybe that was a coincidence.