'Have you been drinking?' Sarah asked. She had to spin around to see me, and as she did so, she sat all the way up, crossing her legs.
I gave her a slow shake of my head. 'The money's marked,' I said.
She just stared at me. 'You're drunk, Hank. I can smell it.' She pulled the rug up around her shoulders, covering her breast. Her left knee stuck out down below, hard and pale in the firelight, like marble.
'It's marked,' I said again.
'Where did you go? A bar?'
'If we spend it, we'll get caught.'
'You reek, Hank. You smell like Jacob.' Her voice rose on this last statement, becoming angry. I was ruining her celebration.
'I haven't had anything to drink, Sarah. I'm perfectly sober.'
'I can smell it.'
'It's on my boots and pants,' I said. I held the boots out toward her. 'They're soaked with wine.'
She stared first at my boots, then at the dark splash marks on my jeans. She didn't believe me. 'And where were you that they got like that?' she asked, her voice taking on a litigious tone.
'Out by the airport.'
'The airport?' She looked at me like I was lying. She still didn't get it.
'The money's marked, Sarah. They'll track us down if we spend it.'
She stared up at me, the set, angry look slowly slipping from her face. I could see her shuffling the pieces about in her head, could see them, one by one, falling into place.
'The money's not marked, Hank.'
I didn't answer; I knew I didn't have to. She understood now.
'How can it be marked?' she asked.
In my head I was silently going over everything I'd done after killing the woman, checking things off one by one. I felt tired, stupid, like I was forgetting something crucial.
'You're being paranoid,' she said. 'If it were marked, they would've said so in the paper.'
'I talked to the FBI men. They told me themselves.'
'Maybe they suspect you took it. Maybe they're just trying to scare you.'
I smiled sadly at her and shook my head.
'They would've said something in the paper, Hank. I'm sure of it.'
'No,' I said. 'It's their trap. It's how they plan on catching whoever's taken it. They copied down the serial numbers before they paid the ransom, and now the banks are looking for them. As soon as you start spending it, they'll track you down.'
'They couldn't have done that. There were forty-eight thousand bills. It would've taken them forever.'
'They didn't copy them all. Just five thousand of them.'
'Five thousand?'
I nodded.
'So the rest are still good?'
I could see where she was heading, and I shook my head. 'There's no way to tell the good from the bad, Sarah. Every time we went out and spent a bill, there'd be a one-in-ten chance that it was marked. We couldn't risk it.'
The firelight threw quick, flickering shadows across her face while she considered this. 'I could get a job at a bank,' she said. 'I could steal the list of numbers.'
'You wouldn't find it at a normal bank. It'd only be at a Federal Reserve bank.'
'Then I could get a job at one of those. There's one in Detroit, isn't there?'
I sighed. 'Stop it, Sarah. It's over. You're just making it harder.'
She frowned down at the mattress of money. 'I already spent one,' she said. 'I spent one tonight.'
I reached into my front pocket and took out the hundred-dollar bill. I unfolded it and held it toward her.
She stared at it for several seconds. Then she looked down at my boots.
'You killed him?'
I nodded. 'It's all over, Beloved.'
'How?'
I told her how I'd done it, how I'd called the police about the hitchhiker, how the cashier had come after me when I tried to rob him, and how I'd hit him with the machete. I lifted my shirt to show her my bruise, but she couldn't see it in the dim light. She interrupted me before I got to the woman.
'Oh God, Hank,' she said. 'How could you have done this?'
'I didn't have a choice. I had to get the money back.'
'You should've just let it go.'
'He would've remembered you, Sarah. He would've remembered the baby, and your story about the money. They would've tracked us down.'
'He didn't know who--'
'You were on TV at Jacob's funeral. He would've described you, and someone would've remembered. They would've put it all together.'
She thought about that for a few seconds. The rug had slipped down her shoulder again, but she ignored it.
'You could've brought five twenties to the store,' she said, 'asked him to return the hundred-dollar bill, said that your wife had spent it, and that it had sentimental value.'
'Sarah,' I said, losing my patience, 'I didn't have time to get five twenties. I would've had to come all the way back here. I had to get there before he closed.'
'You could've gone to the bank.'
'The bank wasn't open.'
She started to say something more, but I didn't let her.
'It doesn't matter,' I said. 'It's already done.'
She stared at me, her mouth still open to speak. Then she shut it and nodded.
'Okay,' she whispered.
Neither of us spoke for the next minute or so. We were both thinking about where we were, and what we were going to do next. A log collapsed in the fireplace, sending up a shower of sparks and a tiny, just perceptible wave of heat. I could hear the clock ticking on the mantelpiece.
Sarah picked up one of the packets, held it in her hand. 'At least we weren't caught,' she said.
I didn't say anything.
'I mean, it's not the end of the world.' She forced a smile at me. 'We're just right back where we started. We can sell the condo, sell the piano...'
At the mention of the condo, I felt a sharp pain in the center of my chest, as if I'd been hit by an arrow. I touched my sternum with my fingertips. I'd forgotten all about the condominium, had forced it from my mind.
Sarah continued. 'We did bad things, but only because we had to. We were trapped into them, each one led us on to the next.'
I shook my head, but she ignored me.
'The important thing,' she said, 'the thing that really matters, is that we didn't get caught.'
She was trying to turn things around, trying to put them in the best possible light. It was how she dealt with tragedies; I recognized it immediately. Usually it was something I admired -- her doing it made it easier for me, too -- but now it seemed too simple, like she was taking it all too lightly, forgetting what we'd done. Nine people had been murdered. I'd killed six of them myself. It seemed impossible, but it was true. Sarah was trying to hide from it, trying to obscure the fact that they were dead because of us, because of the plans we'd made along the way, because of our greed and fear. She wanted to avoid what would follow from this admission, wanted to escape the damage we both knew it was going to do to our lives. We couldn't escape, though; I understood that even then.
'We can't sell them back,' I said.
She glanced up at me, as if she were surprised to hear me speak. 'What?'
'I got the piano on sale.' I reached behind me and touched its keyboard, pressing down one of its keys, a
