“Right,” Ben said. “Wait, what? What do you mean, now you know?”
“I told you all this,” Hamilton said.
“You haven’t told me shit!”
“I killed a girl,” Hamilton said, and then that sentence hung there in the darkness for a while.
Ben felt the adrenaline cutting through his buzz. “What?” he said softly. “How?”
“I don’t know. Funny that’s your first question, though.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know that either, except that it apparently was in me, and something in her woke it up. All those years of getting away with murder. So to speak. It’s emptied me out.”
“Are the—” Ben stopped when he thought he heard something outside on the steps, but it must have been just his paranoia. “Are the cops looking for you, then? Helen is helping you to hide from the cops? That doesn’t sound like—”
“I’m not hiding from anyone. Helen is making me stay here.”
“Why?”
“Because she doesn’t believe me. She doesn’t believe I did it.”
“Who does she think did it?”
Hamilton didn’t answer.
“So the cops are not looking for you?”
“No. Nobody’s looking for me, except my agent, Kyle, probably. No reason to.”
“No reason to?”
“There has to be a body,” Hamilton said sadly, “before anybody will believe there was a crime.”
And there it was again — the creak from outside, but it was definitely not his imagination this time, there were feet on the steps that ran up the side of the building. What the hell is this turning into? Ben had time to think. He dumped the rest of the vodka into the plant and raised the empty bottle above his shoulder, without getting out of the desk chair. A face pressed up against the glass; then the knob turned and the lights went on and there, with as close to a look of disequilibrium as you were ever going to see on his face, was Bonifacio, wearing a Carhartt jacket over a pair of plaid pajamas, a set of keys in one hand and in the other, now dropped limply to his side, a gun.
“What the fuck is going on here?” he said. “I had three different people call and tell me someone had broken in. But it’s what, an office party? In the dark? Motherfucker,” he said, gesturing with the gun, “did anybody ever tell you you look just like Hamilton Barth?”
Ben stood and beckoned his boss into the desk chair. They had one more round, from Bonifacio’s desk-drawer bottle of Jameson, while everybody calmed down, and then Bonifacio, though likely drunk himself, drove the two men home. When they crested the hill, Ben saw a strange car in the driveway, and he reached out and grabbed Hamilton’s arm. “We’re dead,” he said. Bonifacio, tired and disgusted, made them get out at the top of the driveway. Trying gamely to sober up, they marched down the pavement toward the front door.
From the foyer Ben could see Helen sitting at the kitchen table and Sara stretched out on the new living room couch. He stood between them, paralyzed with fear, until Hamilton ungracefully squeezed past him, sat down across the table from Helen, and leaned toward her on his elbows.
“What have you found out?” he said.
“Where on earth,” Helen said in a gratingly high voice, “have you two been?”
“It’s not what you think,” Ben said.
“Helen, please!” Hamilton said.
“We just needed to get out,” Ben said. “But we didn’t do anything too stupid. We just went to Bonifacio’s office.”
“Bonifacio’s office?” Helen said incredulously. “At ten o’clock at night?”
“So we wouldn’t be seen,” Ben said.
“And did anybody see you?”
“Well,” Ben said, “Bonifacio.”
Helen put her head in her hands.
“Helen,” Hamilton said again. “Have they found her?”
“Have they what? Oh. No, there’s no word. We can’t find her, but on the bright side, no one has reported her missing either. She doesn’t really have a job to go to, and she has an apartment she hasn’t slept in in a while, but that doesn’t mean anything. Could just mean she found someone else to shack up with. Anyway,” she said, softening as she saw the anguish on his face, “that’s not why I drove up here, because I had news or anything. I just couldn’t get ahold of you and I was worried. Oh, and also,” she said to Ben, “apparently your daughter wants to live with you now. So there’s that.”
Hamilton sighed, got up, and wandered unsteadily toward the living room. He and Ben were clearly too drunk to keep up any kind of productive conversation for long; and Sara, scared and resentful and confused and tired, hadn’t spoken for more than an hour.
For a long moment, Helen, thinking of the three of them, felt that she would like nothing more than to get away from there, away from a sense of her own accountability for any of it, much less all of it. But a powerful inertia kept her in that ugly new kitchen chair, and she realized that she too was far too exhausted right now to get back in the car and go anywhere. “Hold it,” she said loudly, and everyone turned around. “Sara in her room. You two in the master bedroom. I’ll stay out here and then leave in the morning.”
The two men looked at each other. “I can sleep on the couch,” Hamilton said, “if—”
“That’s not happening,” Helen said. With great effort she rose, walked to the living room, and, after a brief search for the TV remote, just pulled the plug out of the wall, which caused Sara to stand up without a word to anyone, go into her once and future bedroom, and close the door. The men went off dutifully to pass out on the bed together, closing the door behind them as well, and finally, for as long as she could manage to keep her eyes open at least, Helen was alone.
No point, she knew, in even looking anywhere for extra blankets or sheets. She lay down on the stiff, new-smelling couch and closed her eyes. As she drifted off, she recalled that there was a cedar chest full of very nice blankets at the self-storage place in New Castle. One of them had belonged to her mother. Her eyes fluttered open again and took in the ceiling above her living room, strangely shadowed without all her old lamps and sconces, but still startlingly, reproachfully familiar. There had to be some meaning in it all, she thought, some logic, because it so strongly resembled a joke: the moment at which everything about her life seemed lost, useless, outside of her control, was also the moment when they were all reunited under one roof — not just any roof either, but their home, the home it had once comforted her to think she would die in. Now it was both itself and a mean-spirited parody, both a freshly sold, newly furnished suburban house and a ruin. She wished she had never lived there, and at the same time she began to dream, with her arms folded across her chest and her coat thrown over her like a too-short blanket, that the house was on fire, and that Sara and Hamilton and Ben were all standing on the lawn screaming at her to run out, to abandon it, to save herself, and she wouldn’t do it.