high one. It made a plinking sound. 'They won't take it back.'
She shrugged this off. 'We can put an ad in the paper and sell it ourselves.'
'I didn't buy a condominium,' I said, shutting my eyes. When I opened them she was staring at me, confused.
'It was a scam. I got ripped off. They stole my money.'
'I--' she started. 'What are you talking about?'
'It was a fake auction. They took my check and cashed it. The condo doesn't exist.'
She shook her head, opened her mouth to speak, then shut it, then opened it again.
Finally she said, 'How?'
I readjusted the boots in my lap, lining them up. They felt stiff now; the blood had dried. 'I don't know.'
'Did you tell the police?'
I smiled at her. 'Come on, Sarah.'
'You just let them take it?'
I nodded.
'All our savings?'
'Yes,' I said. 'Everything.'
She put her hand up to her face, touched the back of it to her forehead. She was still holding the packet. 'We'll be stuck here now,' she said, 'won't we? We'll never be able to move.'
I shook my head. 'We've got our jobs. We can start to save again.'
I was trying to console her, but even as I spoke, I began to feel the full weight of her words. In a single day we'd gone from being millionaires to virtual penury. We had $1,878 in the bank; it was nothing. Any day now we'd have to start dipping into it -- for our monthly payments on the house and cars, for our phone bill, electric bill, gas bill, water bill. We'd have to pay off our credit cards. We'd have to buy food and clothes. From here on out, everything was going to be a struggle, a constant battle to make ends meet. We were poor; we were what I'd sworn all my adult life we'd never be: we were like my parents.
We wouldn't be able to leave Fort Ottowa either; by the time we saved up enough money for a move, we'd be worrying about Amanda's education, or a new car, or my retirement. We were going to stay here forever, and we'd never be able to purge the house of what we'd done. Its rooms, and their awful freight of memories, would always be there, waiting to ambush and accuse us. The floor beneath our bed would never cease to be the place where we hid the duffel bag, the guest room where Jacob spent his last night, the kitchen where we packed the baby pouch, the piano where we tried to baptize our new life together with a drunken act of love.
We weren't simply returning to where we'd begun, as Sarah had tried to claim. We'd lost all that, had given it up that very first day without even realizing it, and now we'd never, no matter how long we lived, be able to get it back.
'We've still got the money,' Sarah said. She held the packet out toward me.
'It's just paper. It's nothing.'
'It's our money.'
'We have to burn it.'
'Burn it?' she asked, as if surprised. She lowered the packet into her lap, readjusted the rug around her shoulders. 'We can't burn it. Some of it's still good.'
'I've got to get rid of my boots, too.' I held them up to the light, turning them around in the air. 'How should I get rid of my boots?'
'I'm not going to let you burn the money, Hank.'
'And the bottle of champagne you bought, and his wallet and watch and keys.'
She didn't seem to hear me. 'We can run with it,' she said. 'We can just get out and spend as we go. We can leave the country, go to South America, Australia, somewhere far away. We can live like outlaws, like Bonnie and Clyde.' She trailed off, staring down at the packets spread out around her. They looked shiny in the firelight. 'Some of it's still good,' she whispered.
'A purse, too,' I said. 'And a fur coat.'
'Maybe if we wait long enough, they'll forget about the numbers. We could keep it till we're old.'
'How can I get rid of a fur coat?'
Her gaze returned to me, focusing sharply on my face. 'A fur coat?'
I nodded, feeling a little dizzy. I hadn't eaten since that morning. My body was so tired and hungry that it ached. I probed at the bruise on my rib cage, trying to see if anything was broken.
'Where did you get a fur coat?'
'An old woman,' I said. 'She came in while I was there.'
'Oh, God. Oh, Hank.'
'I'd taken off my mask. I tried to make her go away, but she wouldn't leave.'
Upstairs, directly above our head, the baby began to cry.
I stared across the room at the fire. My mind felt unfocused, anchorless, like I couldn't trust it. For some reason I started to think of the pilot in the plane, Vernon's brother, and the pull I'd felt toward his corpse that first day, that inexplicable urge to touch it. Then I thought about Alexander's, and how, just before I left, when I tried to mop up my boot prints from the floor, the blood seemed to get redder and redder as I smeared it, losing all hint of blackness, moving closer and closer to pink. Next came an image of Jacob, standing in the snow in his red jacket, his nose bleeding, crying over Dwight Pederson's body. And as that last picture, the one of my brother, melted away within my mind, I felt a shiver of foreboding. There were going to be more than just monetary debts coming due now, I realized. There were going to be things I'd have to account for to myself, explain and rationalize, things I'd have to live with that would make the loss of the money seem almost inconsequential.
'Oh, God,' Sarah whispered again.
I set my boots down on the piano bench, rose to my feet, and edged my way carefully around the blanket of bills to the fireplace. She turned to watch me.
'Hank,' she said.
I pulled open the fire screen and, with a quick movement, threw the paper bag full of money onto the burning logs.
'Let's keep the money,' she said. 'We can keep it and see what happens.'
The bag caught quickly, contracting in upon itself, like a fist. As it began to dissolve into flame, the coins started to fall out one by one, plopping musically to the cement floor beneath the logs. One of them, a blackened quarter, rolled lazily out across the hearth. I flicked it back inside with my foot.
'Hank,' she said. 'I'm not going to let you burn it.'
Amanda raised her volume, screaming now, her cries echoing down the stairs. We both ignored her.
'We have to, Sarah. It's the last piece of evidence.'
'No,' she pleaded, with a tremor in her voice, as if she were close to tears. 'Don't.'
I crouched down before the fire. I could feel its heat on my face, opening my pores. 'I promised you I'd burn it if things got out of hand,' I said. 'Didn't I?'
She didn't answer.
I reached out behind me across the floor until I felt one of the packets. I picked it up and, forcing myself not to look at it, tossed it onto the logs. It took a while to burn; the paper was too densely packed. It just smoked around the edges a bit, the ink going black, giving the flames a greenish tint. I reached back for another packet and tossed it in on top of the first. It was going to take a long time to burn them all, I realized. And then I'd have to get rid of the ashes, bury them in the backyard or flush them down the toilet. And the boots, and the ski mask, and the sweatshirt, and the purse, and the fur coat, and the machete, and the woman's jewelry, and the cashier's watch and wallet and keys.
I heard a rustling sound behind me. She was picking up the money.
Amanda was still crying, but it seemed more distant now, just background noise, like traffic passing outside a window.
I turned to look at Sarah. She was sitting folded in upon herself, the bearskin wrapped around her body, so that she looked like an old squaw. She was staring past me, toward the fire.
