He was right. After the initial shock that was the first thought that came to her. The mind simply rebelled. She couldn’t be sitting in a room with a murdered man lying on the floor in front of her. It just wasn’t possible.
“Get up. Go over and touch it. Here.”
He reached around and unfastened the manacles. It occurred to her that this was far and away the most freedom she’d had since the moment they took her.
She could run for the door.
Because the door is probably locked and even if it wasn’t he’d catch her easily. That’s why.
She stood, already dreading what she was going to find. If this thing on the floor were a mannikin why would he call his own bluff?
She walked over and knelt and for a moment couldn’t bring herself to touch it but he was standing behind her staring, she felt his stare like a harsh command so she reached out and gave a push to the center of the thing and it was the weight of a man all right, no mannikin ever felt so heavy nor the flesh beneath the bags so giving and it couldn’t be a living man pretending either because one of the bags was tied off tight at the neck and there was no way in the world he’d be able to breathe inside.
She was kneeling next to a dead man. A man he’d just admitted killing.
And they would do it to her, he said, if she defied him.
If he’d raised the stakes by showing her his face he’d raised them infinitely higher by showing her this. There was no way in hell he could let her live now unless she either escaped or submitted wholly to him and to this Organization he kept talking about.
Whether the Organization even existed or not really didn’t matter.
Though she now thought that maybe it did. Was it so far-fetched after all? Cults existed. White slavery existed. Neo-nazis existed. In the end it didn’t matter. Even if it was all in his mind, even if he was crazy, what mattered was his power over her. The power to extend her life or take it on a whim.
The back door opened and she saw the woman standing there on the landing in cutoff jeans and a baggy teeshirt. An ordinary-looking woman, in her early forties she guessed like the man appeared to be, neither homely nor pretty, braless, with long slim legs. She looked directly at Sara for a moment and then went into the kitchen. Turned on the water and began to wash her hands.
“It’s ready,” she said.
“Good. Sara?”
She turned to look at him. She heard the water go off in the kitchen and a paper towel ripped off the roll, sandals crossing the floor toward them and knew the woman was in the room with them but didn’t she didn’t take her eyes off him for an instant.
“You’re going to help us bury Victor. By doing so you’ll be helping us accomplish two important things. One, it’ll look very good for you in the eyes of the Organization. In fact you’re doing it at their direct request. Two… well, call it a kind of bonding factor. As far as the police go, should you ever decide you need to report this, you’ll be an accomplice to murder.
“Oh, I know what you’re thinking. You’re doing this under duress. So if you tell the police that, no problem. But the Organization has that covered too. We’ve done this before, you know. We’ve had practice. Once we finish with Victor here I’m going to sit you down with some pens and paper and you’re going to write us a few letters, post-dated. They’ll be friendly letters — I’ll tell you what to say, don’t worry — as though Kath and you and I are old buddies from way back. You’ll write, among other things, about how much trouble you’re having actually going through with the abortion. As though we’ve been advising you not to have one all along and you’re slowly coming around to seeing things from our point of view. Know what I mean? Then in the final letter you’ll ask us, if you do decide to keep the baby, if it’s okay for you come out here to stay awhile. Y’see? You get the idea? It’ll look like you’re here because you want to be. Period.”
“What about the envelopes?”
She almost bit her tongue for saying it. She knew damn well it was dangerous. But she had to try to shake him somehow. She felt trapped and resentful. She had to let him know that without defying him.
“Excuse me?”
“The envelopes. They’d be postmarked. Dated. You can’t fake the postmarks.”
He smiled. “Who keeps envelopes, Sara? You throw ’em in the garbage. But nobody’d think twice about people who keep letters from an old friend. Here’s the finish. Finally, what we’ll do is, we’ll give you back your address book for a minute or two. Let you enter our names in. Like we’ve been in there all along. We figure that about covers it. Don’t you?”
She supposed it did in some twisted way. Would the police really believe this? They might.
In any case she nodded.
“Good.” He stood. “Let’s get going. Kath’s already dug the hole for us. You get the honor of covering him up. Kath, you and Sara get his legs.”
She hesitated, warring inside.
“I’d do it if I were you,” the woman said.
Kath. Her name’s Kath. One more revelation. Her voice sounded cold, distant. Almost rehearsed.
“Your father plays golf at the Fairview Country Club,” she said. “Plays mostly Saturdays. Do you know how easy it is to shoot a man on a fairway? With a high-powered rifle? Remember what we told you, Sara. You’re not in this alone. You’re responsible for and to a lot of other people.”
She paused to let this sink in. It did.
“So. You want the right leg or the left?”
And then the weight of the man, the stiffness of his body, the night air cool through the thin cotton dress and her own unwashed smell rising off her as they carried and dragged his body across the lawn, dew at her ankles, the one behind her the oy house visible, carried him back through the line of evergreen trees and into scrubby woods to a crude four-foot hole in the ground and dumped him in, the feel of the shovel in her hands which she might have used to crack their skulls but for the baseball bat he held tapping against his leg, the blisters rising hot and sore along her thumb and forefinger, the sound of earth falling first on black plastic and then more softly upon itself, the smell of damp heavy earth, of mold and decay seeming to enfold her, thinking
THE THIRD DAY
TWELVE
June 10, 1998
11:45 p.m.
The headbox again. The still stifling air. The silence.
She’d been standing alone for what must have been hours. Her belly pressed to the X of the crossbeams, arms and legs manacled, leg spread wide apart and arms low across the center of the X to insure circulation. It was as though she were hugging the thing. Not punishment, he said, just convenience this time. They were going out to a movie. They were going out for a pizza. They needed to get out of the house for a while. As though it were the most ordinary thing in the world just to leave her here.
The day after she’d buried a man.
The day after they had killed him.
