'In the garage?'
'I thought Sarah might find it if I hid it in the house.'
He nodded, waited a moment, as if trying to think of something further to say. Then he reached over and opened the door. The dog sprang to his feet behind us.
'We forgot to visit the cemetery,' I said.
Jacob looked at me with a tired expression, his lips edging into a sneer. 'You want to go now?'
I shook my head. 'I'm just saying we forgot.'
He made a deprecatory gesture with his hand. 'That's about the least of our problems, isn't it?' he asked. He didn't wait for my answer. He just heaved himself up to his feet, whistled for Mary Beth, and -- when the dog scrambled over the back of the front seat and out onto the pavement -- swung the door shut behind him.
SARAH heard me come home and called me upstairs. I found her in the bedroom, the shades pulled, the light dim. She was just settling in for a nap, lying on her back beneath the covers, her hair pinned in a bun on top of her head.
I sat down beside her, on the edge of the mattress, and began to recite the morning's events. I started from the beginning, letting the story unfold, leaving its climax, the encounter with Pederson, to fall, bombshell-like, in its proper place. Sarah rolled onto her side, shutting her eyes, the covers pulled up to her chin. She didn't react to what I said; she simply lay there, her lips frozen into a sleepy smile. I wasn't even sure that she was listening.
But then, just as I was describing my exit from the plane, she lifted her head a little and opened her eyes.
'What about the beer can?' she asked.
She'd caught me off guard. 'The beer can?'
'Lou's beer can.'
I realized that I'd forgotten to look for it. I'd meant to do it after I planted the money, but then the two crows had appeared, flustering me.
'I didn't find it,' I said, hedging.
'You looked?'
I paused, considered fibbing, but my hesitation eliminated the need for it.
'You forgot,' she said, her voice heavy with recrimination.
'I didn't see it. It wasn't near the plane.'
She lifted herself into a sitting position. 'If they find it,' she said quickly, 'they'll know someone's been there.'
'It's just a beer can, Sarah. No one's going to notice it.'
She didn't say anything. She was staring down at the bed. I could see that she was becoming angry: her lips were locked tightly over her teeth, and it seemed like she was clenching the muscles in her forehead.
'They'll assume it was dropped last summer,' I said. 'By someone picnicking in the orchard.'
'They can run tests to see how long it's been there. They can tell by how much it's rusted.'
'Come on, Sarah. They aren't going to run any tests.' I was stung by her tone of voice. It seemed to imply that I'd made a grave and unforgivable error. She thought I'd acted foolishly.
'They'll find Lou's fingerprints on it.'
'He was wearing gloves,' I said, straining to remember if this was true. 'It's just a beer can lying out in the woods. Nobody's going to think twice about it.'
'They will, Hank. If there's even the slightest suspicion that any of the money's been taken, they'll search every inch of the orchard. And if they find the beer can, and they find Lou's fingerprints on it, they'll track us down.'
I thought about that. I was hurt by her anger and had a vague desire to hurt her back. I knew that she was blowing things out of proportion, but at the same time I saw that she was probably justified in her fear. We'd left something behind: small as it was, it still had the potential to become a clue, a little piece of evidence to indicate our presence.
'We might as well just burn it,' she said.
'Come on, Sarah.'
She shut her eyes and shook her head.
'We aren't going to burn it,' I said.
She didn't say anything. She smoothed the cover out across her belly, a sulky look on her face, and, watching her, I realized suddenly that I wasn't going to tell her about Pederson. I was surprised by this, jolted. We'd never kept secrets from each other, had always confessed everything. But I knew I wasn't going to tell her this, not here, not now. Perhaps I would sometime in the future, in ten or twenty years, when we were living happily off the money, when what I'd done had been justified, upheld by what had come after. I'd tell her then how I'd saved us from discovery, how I'd taken it upon myself, alone, to protect her and our unborn child from harm. She'd be shocked at my bravery, at the way I'd kept it to myself all those years, and she'd forgive me everything.
The truth was, I was afraid of what she'd think of me. I was terrified of her judgment.
'Your forehead looks better,' she said, not looking at me. It was an effort at rapprochement.
I touched my forehead. 'It doesn't hurt anymore,' I said.
Then we sat in silence. Sarah dropped back onto her pillow, rolling toward me. I didn't look at her. I was waiting for her to say that she was sorry. If she had I might've told her, but she didn't, and finally I gave up.
'Go on,' she whispered.
'That's it,' I said. 'I shut the door and hiked back through the woods to the road. Then we came home.'
IT DIDN'T snow all afternoon. I moved restlessly about the house, glancing now and then through the windows at the sky. I turned on the radio every hour and listened for the weather. The forecast was for snow, heavy at times, lasting through the afternoon and into the evening, but by dinnertime there wasn't a cloud in sight, and when the sun finally set, a brilliant sea of icy white stars appeared in the sky, blinking down through the darkness at the earth.
Pederson's accident made the local news. Sarah and I saw it on TV before dinner. They had a shot of the bridge, taken sometime that afternoon. The snowmobile was still in the water, half submerged, the old man's hat floating beside it, but his body had already been retrieved. There were tracks up and down the creek's bank, so that you could imagine the scramble to pull him out, the panic and flurry fueled by the illusory hope that he might not yet be dead.
The newscaster said the body had been found by a passing motorist, shortly before noon. There was no mention of foul play, no indication that anything suspicious had been discovered. In the background I could see the sheriff's truck, pulled off onto the edge of the road, its lights flashing. Carl was standing beside it, talking to a tall, thin man in a bright green down vest, perhaps the unnamed motorist. In the very corner of the screen, off in the distance, I could see Pederson's house. There were three or four cars in the yard, friends come to comfort the widow.
Sarah didn't comment on the report. All she said was, 'That's sad, on New Year's Day and all.' She didn't seem to realize how close the creek was to the nature preserve.
I went to bed sunk in a deep depression.
I'd killed a man. There it was, every time I turned back to look -- it was something I had done. In my heart I felt unchanged, the same man I'd always been, but in my head I knew I was different now. I was a murderer.
And then there was Sarah. I hadn't told her the truth. It was the first major lie ever to come between us. I realized, too, that with the passing of time it would only grow more difficult to tell her. My fantasy of confessing in twenty years was just that, a fantasy. Each moment I spent in her presence without telling her was a continuation, a reaffirmation of the original lie.
I drifted into sleep that night with my arm draped across her belly. If the baby were to kick, I'd be able to feel it in my dreams. But my last waking thoughts were not of the infant, or of Sarah, or of the money. My last waking thoughts were of Jacob. I closed my eyes and saw the look of panic on his face as he stood over Pederson's body,
