and drive back to the bridge.' I waved down the road toward Anders Creek. 'I'll meet you there.'
He opened his eyes, bewildered. 'At the bridge?'
I nodded. 'I'm going to drive Pederson there on the snowmobile. We'll push him over the edge, make it look like he drove off by accident.'
'It'll never work.'
'It'll work. We're going to make it work.'
'Why would he be down at the bridge?'
'Jacob,' I said. 'I'm doing this for you, all right? You've got to trust me. Everything's going to be okay.' I held out the car keys in the palm of my glove. He stared at them for several seconds; then he reached out and took them.
'I'm going to drive through the park,' I said. 'Out of sight from the road. You'll get to the bridge before me, but I don't want you to stop. I want you to drive by and then circle back. I don't want people to see you sitting there.'
He didn't say anything.
'Okay?'
He took a deep breath, letting it out slowly, and wiped at his cheeks. The car keys jingled in his hand. 'I just don't think we'll get away with it.'
'We'll get away with it.'
He shook his head. 'There's so much to think about. There's all this stuff we probably haven't even noticed yet.'
'Such as?'
'Stuff we're not counting on. Stuff we're missing.'
I was growing impatient. Time was slipping by. Any moment a car might appear on the horizon, driving toward us. If we were seen here like this, everything would be lost. I took Jacob by the elbow, guiding him toward the station wagon. I sensed that if I could get him moving, everything would be all right. We stepped out onto the road. The dog rose to his feet and stretched.
'We aren't missing stuff,' I said. I tried to smile reassuringly at him, but it felt like it came out pleading. I gave him a little push forward.
'Just trust me, Jacob,' I said.
IT WAS perhaps ten seconds after Jacob started the car and drove off, as I was turning toward Pederson to pick him up and set him on the snowmobile, that the old man let out a long, agonized moan.
He was still alive.
I stared down at him in shock, my head swimming. He kicked his leg a little, and it slipped off the snowmobile onto the ground. His boot made a heavy thumping sound when it landed. I glanced down the road. Jacob had disappeared.
Pederson mumbled something into his wool scarf. Then he groaned again. One of his gloves flexed into a fist.
I stood there, bent at the waist, my mind racing. With frightening clarity, I saw two paths opening up before me. Taking one of them, I'd be able to finish it right here. I'd get Pederson up on the snowmobile, drive him back to his house, and call Carl. I'd have to tell him everything, and give the money back. If I did that, if I were totally honest, and Pederson survived his beating, I knew I'd have a good chance at escaping a jail sentence. But Jacob wouldn't. Carl would send somebody down to the bridge to pick him up. He'd be charged with assault and battery, or attempted murder. He'd go to jail, probably for a long time. And the money would be gone.
Then, of course, there was the other path. It was already prepared for, already halfway trodden upon. I had the power to save Jacob, save the money. And in the end, I suppose, that was why I did it: because it seemed possible, it seemed like I wouldn't get caught. It was the same reason I took the money, the same reason I did all that follows. By doing one wrong thing, I thought I could make everything right.
Pederson groaned. He seemed to be trying to lift his head.
'I'm,' he said very distinctly, but nothing more. He clenched his fist again.
I stooped down beside him. It was an ambiguous motion: someone watching us from a distance might've assumed that I was trying to help the old man.
His scarf was wrapped tightly around the bottom half of his face. His eyes were closed.
When I'd seen Jacob hit him, it had happened so quickly that it seemed natural to me, predictable. I'd been surprised, but not shocked. I'd accepted it immediately. Jacob, I said to myself, has killed him. In my mind at that instant Pederson had been dead. And that's what I told myself now as I crouched over his body.
At first I'd planned to hit him again, like Jacob had, perhaps in the throat. For some reason I thought of the throat as a particularly vulnerable spot on the body. But looking at his neck, I saw his bright orange scarf, and the sight of it changed my mind.
I glanced up and down the road, to make sure no cars were coming, then leaned forward, took the scarf in my hand, balled it up a bit, and pressed down firmly against his mouth. With my other hand I pinched shut his nostrils.
Looking back now, it seems as though there ought to have been something more, some impediment or compunction, a barrier to struggle through. I would've expected at the very least a sense of terror, an atavistic revulsion, a realization that what I was doing was unequivocally wrong, not simply because the society of which I was a member called it such but because it was murder, a primal crime. There was nothing like that, though. And perhaps this shouldn't be surprising -- perhaps it's romantic to expect that epiphanic realization, that sudden sense of fate's diverging pathways as one hesitates between them, choosing. In real life the immensity of such moments must almost always slip by unnoticed, as it did for me, something to be added later, in hindsight, but buried until then beneath the incidental details -- the feel of Pederson's scarf through my glove, the worry that I was squeezing his nostrils too tightly, that I might be bruising them, and that this might be discovered in an autopsy.
I didn't feel evil. I felt nervous, scared, nothing more.
He struggled very little. He moved his hand once, a wiping motion across the ground, as if he were trying to erase something, but that was all. His eyes stayed shut. There was no noise, no death rattle, no final groan. I held the scarf there for a long time. The sky had cleared enough now for the sun to come out, and it warmed my back. I could see a cloud shadow moving slowly along the edge of the field across the road. As I watched it pass, I started to count. I counted very slowly, pausing before each number, concentrating on the sounds they made in my head. When I reached two hundred, I let go of the scarf, took off my glove, and felt carefully for the old man's pulse.
There was nothing there.
I RODE east through the nature preserve, keeping the road just out of sight to my right. I reached the pond after a minute or so. It was frozen solid. Picnic tables were scattered haphazardly about its border. Everything was covered with snow.
Past the pond, the woods were thicker, and I had to choose my route with more care, winding in and out between matted tangles of underbrush. The branches of the trees scraped against my jacket, as if they were trying to stop me, hold me back.
Pederson's body straddled the seat in front of me, slouched forward like the pilot's in the plane. I had to press right up against his back to reach the controls.
I tried to occupy my mind solely with thoughts of my plan. I sensed a danger in circling back to what had happened already that morning, sensed that doing so would only lead to confusion and anxiety, that the safest path was forward, where things could still be changed.
The bridge would be plowed and salted, I knew; there would be a thick bank of snow along either edge. If Pederson had wanted to cross without damaging his snowmobile's treads on the cement, he would've had to have ridden along one of these banks -- banks that were just wide enough to support his machine and just high enough to crest the top of the guardrails.
People would wonder what he was doing there, why he'd decided to cross the bridge, but it wouldn't be
