A Simple Plan

'Please,' she said.

I shook my head. 'We have to, Sarah. We don't have a choice.'

She lifted her face to me, and I saw that she was crying, her skin shiny with tears, a thin strand of hair pasted across her cheek. As I watched, the rug fell from her shoulders, revealing her lap. She'd collected about twenty packets there, as if she hoped to save them from the flames.

'But what'll we have without it?' she said. Her voice caught on the words and ended with a sob.

I didn't answer her. I just leaned forward and, very slowly, pried her hands away from the money. Then I took the packets one by one out of her lap and set them in the flames.

'We'll be all right,' I said, lying to soothe her. 'You'll see. We'll be just like we used to be.'

It took me four hours to burn the money.

THE FRONT page of Sunday's Blade was dominated by the story of Carl's murder. There were pictures of the plane, the bag full of money, Vernon's corpse. There was nothing about Alexander's, though; the bodies weren't discovered until a little after five that morning, so it had to wait until the evening news.

The old woman's name was Diana Baker. She'd just dropped her son off at the airport and was on her way to a dinner party in Perrysburg. When she didn't show up at the party, her host called her house, and then, having received no answer, the police. A passing patrolman noticed her car in Alexander's parking lot early the next morning. He stopped to investigate, peered through the store's front window, and saw the bloody smear marks I'd left on the floor when I tried to mop up my footprints.

Besides the son, who was a lawyer in Boston, the old woman had a daughter and four grandchildren. Her husband had died seven years before, though her obituary didn't say how. The cashier's name was Michael Morton. He had parents in Cincinnati but no brothers or sisters, no wife or children.

The state police released a composite sketch of a suspect based on the description I'd given them over the phone. It looked exactly like you would've expected, like a young, addicted drifter, a derelict. The woman's son ran ads in all the major Florida papers begging whoever had called the police that night to come forward with more information, and lots of people did, adding further murk to the investigation. Once the cashier and the old woman were buried, the story stopped making the news.

After I burned the money, I flushed the ashes down the toilet. I still have the rest of the stuff -- the duffel bag and the machete and the ski mask and the sweatshirt, the old woman's purse and jewelry and fur coat, the cashier's watch and wallet and keys. I'd planned to go out into the woods somewhere once the ground thawed and bury it all in a big hole full of lye, but it's been five and a half years now, and I haven't done it yet, so I doubt I ever will. I keep everything stored away up in the attic, hidden in Jacob's trunk. It's dangerous, I know, foolish, but if it ever reached the point where people were knocking on our door with a search warrant, I'd just as soon have them find something decisive, so that it would all be over quickly.

A few months after the killings, I saw in the paper that Byron McMartin had filed suit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation for negligence in his daughter's death, but I never heard what happened with the case.

Sarah and I had another baby two years ago, a boy. In a fit of what I can only call penance, I suggested that we name him after my brother, and Sarah, still groggy from the pain of labor, surprised me by agreeing. There are times when I regret it, but not as often as you might think. We call him Jack rather than Jacob.

It was in June, six weeks after her brother's birth, that Amanda had her accident. We'd set up a little plastic wading pool in the backyard for her, and somehow, in the time it took me to go inside the house, use the bathroom, and return, she managed to fall face down in the water in such a way that she couldn't get back up. She was unconscious when I found her, her hands and lips blue, her body cold to the touch. I yelled for Sarah to call an ambulance, then started pushing on Amanda's chest and breathing into her mouth like I'd seen people do on TV, and by the time the paramedics arrived, I'd managed to revive her.

The paramedics took her to the hospital, where she remained for the next two weeks. There was some brain damage, hypoxia, though the doctors weren't sure how much. They recommended that she spend some time down in Columbus, at a clinic for head injuries -- promising us that it would speed her recovery -- but our insurance wouldn't cover it. When word got out in Ashenville about our trouble, St. Jude's started raising money to help us. They ended up collecting six thousand dollars, enough for a one-month stay at the clinic. Everyone who donated signed a giant get-well card, which they gave us with the check. Both Ruth Pederson's and Linda Jenkins's names were on the card.

It's hard to tell what good the clinic did, but the doctors all seemed pleased with the results. Even now, though it's clear to Sarah and me that Amanda will be damaged for life, they still speak of a young body's resiliency, of similar cases with sudden, almost miraculous recoveries. They say we should never give up hope, but Amanda's physical maturation has slowed to the point of stasis; she still looks like the two-and-a-half-year-old I pulled from the pool that afternoon, still has the same thin arms and legs, the same large, round skull waiting impatiently for the body beneath it to begin to grow. Her speech hasn't developed, her coordination is poor, her bowel and bladder control erratic. She's still attached to Jacob's bear and won't go anywhere without it. Sometimes she wakes in the middle of the night and winds it up, so that I'll surface suddenly from a deep sleep to the sound of 'Frere Jacques' drifting into our bedroom from the darkness across the hall. Amanda sleeps in what used to be the guest room, in Jacob's old bed.

Sarah takes a surprisingly fatalistic attitude toward the accident. She's hinted several times now that she believes it's a form of punishment, a way of paying for our crimes, and in the way she hovers over Jack, I can tell she thinks something might happen to him, too, unless we're vigilant and protect him.

I still work at the feedstore, in the same position. I've had some raises over the years, but just enough to keep up with inflation. Sarah's back at the library, full-time now, because we need the money. Amanda's accident used up the small amount of savings we'd managed to accrue.

You'll want to know how we spend our days, I suppose, how we manage to live with what we've done. Sarah and I never discuss the money or the murders; even when we're alone together we pretend that none of it ever happened. There are times when I want to talk, of course, but never to Sarah. It's to strangers I want to speak, people who could, perhaps, offer me an objective opinion about what I've done. It's not an urge to confess -- I feel nothing like that -- but rather a desire to go through things step by step with someone impartial, so that they might help me discover where I first began to go wrong, help me pinpoint that one moment after which everything became inevitable.

The children will never know about any of it, and there's some solace in that.

There are days during which I manage not to think of our crimes at all, but these are few and far between. Other times, when I do think of them -- of me standing in Alexander's with the machete raised above my head, or in Lou's doorway with the shotgun in my hands -- they seem unreal, like they never really happened. I know in my heart that they did, though, know exactly what I'm capable of, know it in a way that you probably never could, not unless you've been there, immersed in a similar situation, making your own fateful choices.

For a while I used to have dreams where I let the old woman escape, let her run out the door to her car and drive away, but that's stopped now.

Since we never talk about it, I don't really know how Sarah feels. All I have are hints, like her agreeing to name our son after my brother, or the time I found her sitting on Jacob's trunk in the attic, lost in thought, the old woman's fur coat draped across her knees, its collar matted with dried blood. I imagine she feels much like I do -- that we're not so much living now as simply existing, moving from one day to the next with a hollow, bewildered feeling, trying all the time, but never with much success, not to remember what has happened.

When things get especially bad, I force myself to think of Jacob. I picture him as he was the day he took me out to our father's farm. He's in his gray flannel slacks, his leather shoes, his bright red jacket. His hairless head looks cold without a hat, but he doesn't seem to notice. He's spinning on his heels, pointing out where our barn used to be, the tractor shed and grain bins. In the distance, when the wind blows, I can hear the creak of our father's windmill. I return to this moment again and again because it always makes me weep. And when I weep, I feel -- despite everything I've done that might make it seem otherwise -- human, exactly like everyone else.