believing that he'd killed him, and in my chest, as my breathing deepened into sleep, I felt a surge of warmth, the same wave of pity for him I'd felt when I'd seen the tears glistening on his cheeks. But it wasn't just for Jacob now, this warmth and pity -- it was for myself, too, and Sarah, and the baby, and Pederson, and Pederson's widow. I felt sorry for everyone.
IN THE morning I could tell just from the light in the bedroom that it was snowing. It was dim, gray, with a sense of movement to it, and a silence. I slipped out of bed and crossed quietly to the window. Giant, wet flakes were floating down out of the sky, spinning, swirling, sticking to whatever they touched. It had obviously been snowing for most of the night. The tracks in the yard were filled in, the branches of the trees bowed down toward the earth. Everything, the whole world, was white with it, covered up, hidden, buried.
4
MY OFFICE window faced directly south, out the front right-hand corner of Raikley's Feedstore, toward St. Jude's Episcopal Church across the street. I was there at my desk on Wednesday, the sixth of January, eating a powdered donut with a cup of lukewarm coffee, when a handful of darkly clothed men and women emerged from the church's side door and made its way slowly across the gravel parking lot, through the chain-link gate of the tiny cemetery, to the dark black gouge of a freshly dug grave forty yards beyond.
It was Dwight Pederson's funeral.
There were six cars in the parking lot, including the silver hearse pulled up right next to the cemetery's gate. It was a small gathering; Pederson had been something of a loner; he hadn't had that many friends. I could pick out his widow, Ruth, as she made her way back toward the grave. The priest clung to her arm, diminutive, his shoulders bowed, his left hand clutching a Bible to his chest. I could see only the very edge of the grave; the rest was hidden behind the church. The crowd of mourners arranged itself around its border.
St. Jude's bell began to toll.
I finished my donut, then got up and took my coffee to the window. The cemetery, perhaps a hundred yards away, was far enough in the distance that I couldn't identify the people around the grave. Some of them were hidden behind the church; the others, heads bowed, bodies muffled against the cold, were faceless, like strangers, though I must've known most of them. They would've been people I passed on the street in town, people I knew stories about, comic anecdotes, gossip.
I watched as they bowed their heads, then lifted them, saying something in unison before bowing again. I could see Ruth; her back was turned to me. She didn't lift her head with the others; she kept it bowed. I suppose that she was weeping. The priest was hidden from view.
I remained at the window until the service was over and the people began to make their way slowly back toward the parking lot. I watched them, counting under my breath. There were seventeen in all, including the driver of the hearse and the priest. They'd given up their morning to honor the memory of Dwight Pederson and express their grief over his death. They all believed that he'd died accidentally, a freak tragedy, pinned beneath his snowmobile in six inches of icy water, his leg and two of his ribs broken, his skull cracked, struggling vainly to free himself from the suffocating grip of his woolen scarf.
Only Jacob and I knew the truth.
Things were going to get easier from here on out, I knew. With each passing day there would be less and less anxiety about what I'd done. Pederson was buried, eliminating the threat of something being discovered in an autopsy; the plane was covered with snow, the tracks around it erased forever.
Perhaps the greatest relief of all, though, was that I still thought of myself as a good man. I'd assumed that what had happened at the edge of the nature preserve would change me, affect my character or personality, that I'd be ravaged by guilt, irreversibly damaged by the horror of my crime. But nothing changed. I was still who I'd always been. Pederson's death was just like the money; it was there whenever I thought about it, but then when I didn't, it was gone. It made no difference to my life in a day-to-day sense unless I called it up myself. The key was not to call it up.
I believed that what I'd done on New Year's Day was an anomaly. I'd been forced into it by extraordinary circumstances, circumstances far beyond my control, and now the whole thing seemed remarkably understandable to me, even forgivable.
But was it? If there was an anxiety which plagued me at that time, it had nothing to do with being caught, nothing to do with the money or the memory of my crime. It had to do with Sarah. Would Sarah understand what I had done?
I could feel a draft coming through the window. There was a plastic sheet of insulation sealing its outside frame, but it was torn and flapped loosely in the wind. I watched the mourners talk for a bit in the parking lot. They clustered around Ruth Pederson, hugging her one after the other. The men shook one another's hands. Finally they all climbed into their cars, pulled out of the parking lot, and started slowly down Main Street toward the western edge of town.
They were going back to the Pedersons': I could imagine it well enough. They'd eat lunch around a big wooden table in the kitchen -- casseroles and three-bean salads, cold cuts and potato chips. There would be warm drinks -- tea, coffee, hot chocolate -- in Styrofoam cups and for dessert they'd have Jell-O, carrot cake, chocolate chip cookies. Ruth Pederson, changed now out of her black dress, would sit at the head of the table. She'd watch the others eat, making sure that everyone had enough. People would hover around her, speaking softly, and she'd smile at what they said. Everyone would go out of their way to help clean up, washing dishes and putting them back in the wrong cabinets. Then, as the afternoon wore on into evening, the light fading westward toward the nature preserve, they'd slip off one by one into their own lives, until at last Ruth was left all by herself in the empty house.
I could picture this in my mind -- could see her sitting there, the house sunk in shadows, the guests gone, their well-meaning tidiness leaving her nothing to busy herself with except her grief -- but, though I knew that I ought to, I felt no remorse at the image, no guilt, only an abstract sort of empathy, distant and subdued. I'd taken her husband from her; it was not something I would've thought I could ever live with. Yet, there I was.
I pulled shut the blinds, finished my coffee, dropped the empty cup into the wastebasket. Then I sat down at my desk, turned on the little light there, pulled a pen from my shirt pocket, and set to work.
ON MY way home from the feedstore that night, I took a long detour, so that I could drive by the nature preserve. I circled above it, then came in from the west, moving slowly along the park's southern border. It was just beginning to get dark, and I drove with my high beams on, scanning the edge of the road for our tracks. There was nothing there; all the signs of our passage, even the gouge Jacob's truck had cut into the snowbank, had been erased.
When I drove by the Pederson farm, I could see several lights shining through the windows of the house. The collie was sitting on the porch. It didn't bark this time though; it simply stared at my station wagon, its ears erect, its thin, angular head rotating slowly on its shoulders as the car drifted past down the road toward the bridge over Anders Creek.
A FULL week passed. I spoke twice with Jacob on the phone but didn't see him. We talked only briefly, both times about Pederson, reassuring each other as to the success of our cover-up. I didn't speak to Lou at all.
Thursday afternoon I was working in my office when Sarah appeared. Her face was flushed from the cold, making her look angry, and there was a busyness about her -- her eyes shifting rapidly from spot to spot, her hands reaching up to touch now her hair, now her face, now her clothes -- which told me that something bad had happened. I stood up quickly, came out from behind my desk, and helped her take off her jacket. Beneath it she was
