“Just tell me,” I pleaded. “I have to know.”
Sally’s lips pressed tightly together. She looked away, then back at me.
“He wasn’t dead yet,” she said.
The words didn’t make any sense.
“I don’t… What?”
“My dad,” she said. “It hadn’t worked yet.”
“I… I don’t get you.”
“When I talked to you that morning, told you he was dead, he almost was. I’d given him a double dose of heparin, was waiting for it to make him bleed to death internally. But then, the son of a bitch, he rallied a bit. And that was when Sheila came over with the fucking lasagna. She comes right in, doesn’t even knock, she’s all ‘Oh, Sally, I’m so sorry for you, here’s something you can put in your fridge for later.’ And then she sees my dad, still barely breathing, and she’s like, what the hell? ‘He’s alive?’ she says. And then she starts going on about how we had to call an ambulance.”
I blinked. Sally was going in and out of focus. “You killed your father?”
“I couldn’t take it anymore, Glen. I gave up my own place-I couldn’t afford the rent spending all my money on his medicines-and I moved in here, but the cost of the drugs, Jesus, and pretty soon I was going to have to put him into care someplace, and do you have any idea what that costs? I’d have to put this place up on the market, too, and with the economy the way it is, what do you think I could even get for this dump? I figured, the day after I ended up on the street, he’d just die anyway. I needed to move things along.”
She sighed. “I couldn’t have Sheila telling the cops I killed my dad. I hit her in the head, shot her up with booze.”
“Sally, you’re making this up…”
“How you feeling, Glen? It must be working, right? Feeling no pain and all that?”
“The… accident.” I was trying not to slur my words.
“Just let it go,” she said. “It’ll be better that way.”
“How… did you do that?”
Another sigh. “Theo helped. Came over, couldn’t believe what I’d done, but I knew he’d bought those bogus parts from the Slocums, put them in the Wilson house, so he couldn’t say no to me. I drove her car up the ramp, got her behind the wheel, and Theo gave me a lift back. But I’m gonna have to do this one on my own tonight.”
“Sally, Sally,” I said, trying to keep my head clear despite what was coursing through my veins, “you… you were like family…”
She nodded. “I know. I feel bad, I do. But I gotta say, Glen, lately? You’ve been a bit holier-than-thou, you know, acting like I wasn’t making the best choices. I’ve made my choices, Glen. I’ve chosen to look out for myself. No one else will.”
“Theo’s note,” I said. “Saying he was sorry…”
“I know he was an asshole to you, but the guy had a conscience. It was eating him up. The fire. Sheila. He wanted to confess.”
“Doug,” I whispered. “You set him up… right? Put those boxes in his truck, take the heat off Theo.”
“I don’t want to talk about this, Glen. It’s all very painful.”
“How… wait a… fuck no… you killed Theo. That was you.”
For the first time, I thought she actually looked sorrowful. She rubbed her eyes. “I only did what I had to, okay? Like right now. I’m doing what I have to do.”
“Your… fiance…”
“He phoned me from his trailer, saying he couldn’t stay quiet any longer. Said he had to tell Doug it wasn’t his fault. I said, Theo, don’t do anything till I get there, and when I did, I said okay, call Doug, invite him over, tell him in person, that was the honorable way to do it. And as soon as Theo got off the phone, I walked him into the woods. I’d brought one of my dad’s guns.”
A tear ran down her cheek.
“I hid my car, then parked Theo’s truck down by the road so Doug would have to walk in. When he was looking around the trailer, I slipped the gun into his car. Betsy’s car.”
I was just able to understand it, but my brain was getting cloudy.
“The thing is, Glen, I’d rather be single, and on the outside, than married and sitting in a jail cell the rest of my life. You have to get up.”
“What?”
She got off the chair and knelt down beside me. She held on to the gun with one hand and grabbed my elbow with the other. Yanking on me, she said, “Let’s go. Up. Up!”
“Sally,” I said, on my knees now and weaving, “you puttin’ me on an off-ramp, too?”
“No. It has to be different.”
“What… how?”
“Come on, please, Glen. You can’t change how this is going to go. Don’t make it hard for both of us.”
She pulled hard and got me off my knees. She’d always been in good shape, and had the edge on me in size. Plus she had the added advantage of being sober. I tried to get my wrists apart but Sally had done a good job taping them. With enough time, I might have been able to free them. “Where are we going?”
“To the bathroom,” Sally said.
“What? I don’t have to go to the bathroom.” I thought a moment. “Maybe.”
I swayed. I was definitely drunk.
“This way, Glen. Just take it a step at a time.” She walked me patiently out of the kitchen, through the dining room, where I bumped into a chair, and into the hall that led to the bedrooms and the bathroom.
I didn’t know what, exactly, Sally had planned, but I had to do something. Try to make a break for it.
Suddenly, I threw my weight into her, ramming her into the wall with my shoulder. She knocked a commemorative Wedgwood plate, adorned with a profile of Richard Nixon, off its hook and to the floor, where it shattered.
I turned to run, but my feet caught on the carpet runner and I went down. Without hands to break my fall, I landed on my cheekbone. Pain rocketed through my jaw.
“Damn it, Glen, stop being such an asshole!” Sally shouted. I turned enough to see her standing over me, the gun pointed at my head. “Get the fuck up, and this time I’m not helping you.”
Very, very slowly, I got to my feet. With the gun, she pointed to the door to the bathroom. “In there,” she said.
I stood in the doorway of Sally’s refinished bathroom. Theo’s handiwork was everywhere. The toilet, sink, and tub were gleaming white porcelain. Uneven black-and-white checkerboard tiling covered the floor. Some of the grouting was chipped, and there was a glimmer of the heating cable beneath the tile. It hadn’t been properly covered.
The new tub had fresh caulking about halfway around. The tub, I was guessing, had never been used.
But it was full of water.
“Down on your knees,” Sally said.
Even in my drunken stupor, it was starting to become clear. Like Sheila, I was going to be found dead in my truck, with a very high blood-alcohol count. But they weren’t going to find me on an off-ramp.
They were going to find me in the water.
If I was doing this to someone, I’d run them off the road at Gulf Pond. Put my victim behind the wheel, roll the truck into the water, and let it sink. Hoof it home from there. When they hauled out the body, the lungs would be full of water.
“It… it won’t work, Sally,” I said. “They’ll put it together eventually.”
“On your knees,” she said again, sounding only a little impatient. “Face the tub.”
“I’m not doing it. I’m-”
She kicked me, hard, in the back of my right knee, and I dropped like a stone.
The tiles were hard beneath my knees. Even through my pants, I could feel warmth radiating through them. My left knee straddled two uneven tiles. One made a crunching noise beneath my weight, an indication that the tiling job was a joke.
If the tiles were cracked, if water could seep through, then -
