“Huge.”
She smiled. Made her “dinky” thumb-and-forefinger sign again. This “dinky” was slightly bigger than the last “dinky” she’d flashed. “Could I get a... well... not a big one, but not a small one, either?”
“Something in the middle?”
“Yes. That’s right. In the middle.” She kept her “dinky” sign up in the air.
As he got out of the car, Jeff wondered if he should have made up that lie about seeing Dr. Goldberg’s wife. It was just giving Mindy permission to keep on gorging herself and she was getting so fat he could barely stand to look at her.
Dusk was purple. The windshield was fretted with the dead, black nubby bodies of mosquitoes. The air conditioning was almost cold now. Mindy, her head back against the seat rest, her mouth wide open, snored. She’d put a sweater across her knees.
Jeff drove through the dusk, glad for the sight of occasional yellow headlights. With Mindy asleep, he felt isolated and afraid. All he could think of was Jenny in the trunk and what they were about to do.
While he couldn’t actually say he loved Mindy’s little sister, he certainly liked her. She was polite, obedient, and pretty. (He’d always felt uncomfortable acknowledging Jenny’s good looks because she was so young, but, dammit, she was attractive and there was nothing wrong in admitting it.) Unfortunately, she was also the only person who stood between them and two million dollars, Jenny’s inheritance. Mindy and Jeff had already squandered their part of the inheritance and now needed more. Lots more.
Getting her in the box had been no problem. Earlier that day he’d taken two Benadryl, an over-the-counter allergy medicine, and told her to take them too. Within fifteen minutes she was asleep. Within ten minutes after that she was in the box.
He hit his brights as he angled the BMW up a gravel road to the fishing cabin. Dusk in the forest was dark as night. Stars burned beyond a gray spectral haze.
Reaching the crest of the hill, Jeff gazed down at the ragged terrain of buffalo grass and scrub pines that was to be Jenny’s final resting place.
He pulled the car off the road, yanked on the emergency brake, and turned off the ignition.
Mindy came awake immediately.
“God, what time is it?” she said, stretching as if she were in her own bed and this was some fine lazy yellow morning.
“Nearly nine.”
“We here?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You don’t sound too good.”
“Uh-huh. You know.”
She leaned over and kissed him with breath that could crack plaster. “Hon, by midnight we’ll be back home. You can play that new videotape you got. The one with Candy Dane.”
“How’d you know about that?”
“Well, I was cleaning your desk in the den and I just happened to find it.”
“I thought we had an understanding about my desk.”
“Hon, don’t get cranky just because you’re all plugged up with your allergies. Anyway, I don’t mind if you have tapes like that. There’s nothing wrong with masturbation. I do it, too. I just don’t need videotapes to help me.”
He knew he was blushing. He sat there and smelled the heat of the day dying and heard the nighttime crickets and gazed up at the lemon slice of quarter-moon and wondered just what it all meant anyway.
How did a former altar boy, Boy Scout, and young Republican ever come to be sitting in a car in which his overweight wife told him masturbation was all right, while in the trunk a little girl waited to die?
How, exactly, did you get here, anyway?
“We’ll have some smoked salmon.”
“Huh?” Jeff said.
“You weren’t paying attention.”
“Sorry.”
“I said we’ll have smoked salmon.”
“When?”
“Tonight. When we’re home. We’ll have smoked salmon and then we can watch that Candy Dane tape.”
“Together?”
“Sure.” She giggled. “Maybe it’ll give me some new ideas.”
He slumped in the seat. It was as if a giant invisible wrecking ball had just crashed into his stomach. “I can’t do it.”
“What?”
“I can’t go through with it.”
“Hon, you’re not thinking very straight.”
“I’m not?”
“Hon, she’s probably already dead.”
“Oh, my God.”
“You mean you didn’t understand that?”
“No.”
“Well, I didn’t want to say anything in case you didn't understand that. But I’d bet you a hundred dollars that she’s already... well, you know.”
“My God.”
And with that, he flung open the BMW door, leaped into the night, ran around to the trunk of the car, inserted his key, snapped up the lid, and peered inside with the help of the flashlight he’d brought along.
The wooden box had never looked more like a coffin. Cheap pine, unpainted. He opened the lock with such force that he cut his finger. Throwing back the lid, he shined the light inside.
She lay as he recalled, bound, gagged, blinded in her virginal white blouse, her loose jeans, her white anklets, and her new blue Reebok hightops. Blonde and slender, she was the daughter every man wanted to have and so few would ever know.
Staring at her now, at her frail, unmoving chest and her tiny pale hands, he could hear her on another gentle summer night, creaking in her rocker with her doll held tenderly to her beautiful cheeks, a sweet lullaby coming from her perfect pink lips.
“No!” he shouted.
And he began undoing all the restraints Mindy had put on her during the day.
Off came the blindfold.
Off came the gag in her mouth.
Off came the cords wrapped around her wrists and legs.
He was just lifting her from the box when Mindy, coming around the car, said, “Oh, God, Jeff. I really didn’t want to see her again. I really didn’t. It’s just going to make it all the harder. For both of us.”
He sat on the ground, Jenny in his arms, as if she weighed no more than an infant. He rocked her gently as he kissed her face and spoke soft, insistent, meaningless words to her.
Finally Mindy sat plumply down next to him and put a soft hand gently on his shoulder and said, “Hon, I’m sorry but she’s dead. She suffocated.”
But far into the night, he rocked the little girl and sang to her, there in the buffalo grass with the crickets, which were later joined by barn owls and Savannah sparrows in crying tribute to the warm, starry night.
Finally, the little girl began to smell, and Mindy, more quiet than he had ever seen her, took Jenny from Jeff's arms and put her back in the box.
“We’d better get it over with,” she said.
Nodding, numb, Jeff took a brand-new shovel from the trunk and followed Mindy down the hill.
They buried her where they planned to bury her, beneath a stand of heavy scrub pine where nobody would find her for a long time. The grave was four feet deep.
Jeff, exhausted, sat in the car running the air conditioning. He didn’t care if he later got a chest cold. He needed relief and now. The digging had been incredibly exhausting.
In the shadowlight of quarter-moon, he saw the lumpen silhouette of his wife as she stood near the grave site. She was talking. To herself or to Jenny, he wasn’t certain.
When she came back, she got in the car and quietly shut the door.
“You all right?” he said.
She said nothing.
“Honey,” he said. She had taken care of him. Now it was his turn to take care of her.
“Please,” she said. “Drive.”
Forty-five minutes later they came to the DQ again. It was an oasis of light against the prairie night.