wearing one of her maternity dresses -- a fleet of tiny sailboats floating across a sea of pale blue, cheap-looking fabric. The dress molded itself to the swollen dome of her belly. I couldn't help but stare at it; it reminded me of some giant fruit. There was a baby inside her: whenever I saw her now, the thought jarred me, gave me an uneasy feeling in my own stomach.
Sarah dropped heavily into the armchair beside my desk, the chair customers sat in when they came to ask me for an extension on their bills. Her hair was pinned up around her head, and she was wearing dark red lipstick.
'Lou's told Nancy,' she said.
I went over and shut the office door. Then I sat down behind my desk.
'I saw her at the grocery store,' Sarah said. 'I came in to buy some applesauce, and I was digging through my purse for a coupon I'd cut out of the paper when she came up behind me and asked why I was bothering with it.'
'With the coupon?'
Sarah nodded. 'She said with our New Year's present I shouldn't have to worry.'
I spread my hands out across the desk, frowning.
'She said it right in front of the cashier. Like she was commenting on the weather.'
'What did you say?'
'Nothing. I pretended I didn't understand.'
'Good.'
'But she knew. She could tell I understood what she was talking about.'
'We couldn't really expect Lou not to tell her, could we?'
'I want to burn it.'
'I mean, she had to find out sooner or later.'
'We've made a mistake, Hank. Admit it. We're in over our heads.'
'I think you're overreacting,' I said. I leaned forward to take her hand, but she pulled it away. I stared across the corner of the desk at her. 'Come on, Sarah.'
'No. We're going to get caught. I want to burn it.'
'We can't burn it.'
'Don't you see, Hank? How it's going to get out of hand? It was all right when just the four of us knew. But everyone feels like they can tell someone else. There're five of us now. Pretty soon there'll be more. It'll just keep growing like that until we get caught.'
'We can't burn it,' I said again.
'It's a small town. It won't take that long. We have to stop it while we still can.'
'Sarah,' I said slowly. 'It's not as simple as it was at first.'
She started to protest, but then she saw my face. 'What do you mean?' she asked.
'Do you remember seeing the story about Dwight Pederson on the news? The old man whose snowmobile went into the creek?'
She nodded. 'On New Year's Day.'
'He didn't die accidentally.'
Sarah didn't seem to understand. She gave me a vacant stare.
'He saw Jacob and me at the nature preserve, and we killed him.' Saying this, I felt a weight shift from my shoulders. Without having planned it, I was confessing. I was coming clean.
Sarah sat there, trying to grasp it.
'You killed him?' she asked. Her face had a strange look to it. It wasn't horror, which was what I'd dreaded most; it was something closer to fear -- apprehension tinged with perplexity -- and beneath it all, just the slightest hint of disapproval, sitting there like a seed, waiting to learn more before it sprouted and grew. Seeing it, I hesitated, and then, without even thinking, so that when I heard myself speak I was astonished by the words, I began to lie again.
'Jacob did it,' I said. 'He knocked him off his snowmobile and kicked him in the head. Then we took him down to the bridge and made it look like an accident.'
My confession lay between us, stillborn, draining blood onto the papers scattered across my desk.
'Jesus,' Sarah said.
I nodded, staring down at my hands.
'How could you let him do that?' she asked. She said it, I could tell, not out of admonition but merely from curiosity. I didn't know how to answer her.
'Couldn't you have stopped him?'
I shook my head. 'It happened so fast. He just did it, and then it was over.'
I glanced up at her, met her eyes. I was relieved by her look; it was calm. There was no horror in it, no grief, simply confusion. She didn't understand what had happened.
'He was tracking the fox,' I said. 'If Jacob hadn't killed him, he would've found the plane, and seen our tracks around it.'
Sarah considered that for a moment. 'We can still burn the money,' she said.
I shook my head again. I wasn't going to do that. I'd killed for the money; if I were to give it up now, it would mean that I'd done it for nothing. The crime would become senseless, unforgivable. I understood this but knew I couldn't say it to her. I frowned down at my desk, rolled a pencil slowly across its surface beneath the palm of my hand.
'No,' I said. 'We aren't going to burn the money.'
'We're going to get caught,' she said. 'This might be our last chance.' Her voice rose as she spoke, and I glanced toward the door. I held my finger to my lips.
'If we burn it,' she whispered, 'Jacob'll be all right. There'll be no motive, no reason to connect us with Pederson. But if we wait to get caught, Carl might put things together.'
'We're okay,' I said calmly. 'We're not in any danger. And if it begins to look like we're in danger, we can just burn the money then. It's still the only evidence to show that we've committed a crime.'
'But now it's not just stealing, it's murder.'
'We're the only ones who know about this, Sarah. Us and Jacob. It's our secret. There's no reason for anyone else to suspect a thing.'
'We're going to get caught.' She sank backward into her chair, her hands on her stomach.
'No,' I said, with more conviction than I felt. 'We aren't. No one else is going to know. Not about Pederson, and not about the money.'
Sarah didn't say anything. She seemed close to tears, but I could tell that, at least for the moment, I'd held her off. She was going to let things stand as they were; she was going to wait and see what happened. I got up from my chair and moved around the desk to her side. I touched her hair, then bent down and hugged her. It was a graceless movement: she was sitting slouched away from me, her belly protruding between us, and I had to lean over the arm of the chair to reach her, but it had the desired effect. She let her head fall toward my shoulder, reached her arms up around my back.
My phone started to ring. It rang five times and then stopped.
'I promised you, Sarah, didn't I? I promised I wouldn't let us get caught.'
She nodded her head against my neck.
'And I won't,' I whispered. 'I'll talk to Lou about Nancy. It'll be okay. Just wait it out, and it'll be okay.'
THAT NIGHT, as the feedstore was closing, I heard Jacob's voice in the lobby, arguing with the cashier. I got up quickly and moved to the doorway of my office.
Jacob was standing at the checkout counter, his jacket zipped up to his throat. He was gazing beseechingly at Cheryl Williams, a squat, thickly rouged older woman who was a part-time cashier. Cheryl was shaking her head.
'I'm sorry, Mr. Mitchell,' she said. 'I just can't do that. You'll have to go across the street to the bank.'
'Come on, Cheryl,' Jacob pleaded. 'They're closed.'
'Then you'll have to wait till the morning.'
