No one spoke. Jeff slowly regained control. He snuffled, wiped his nose on the back of his hand. He sat with his elbows on spread knees, forehead resting on his fists as though he could not bear to look at anyone.
“It wasn’t... my plan,” he said, his breath catching from time to time. Hill nodded at the girl. She began to take notes. “Some of it was mine. The live fish. And the kind of gun. It started as a joke. After we started... seeing each other. I’d tell her how tight Stella was with her money. She’d tell me how dull Paul was. I think she was the one who said it would be nice if — if they dropped dead. I said Paul... ought to murder Stella and hang for it. Joking. Just joking like that. But... it grew. We talked about ways it could happen. Where it should happen. We had a lot of bad ideas. Then we had this one. It’s funny. Right up until... right up until the last second, I was... thinking about it like it was... a plan that wasn’t really real. Wouldn’t really happen. Then... she did it. She shot Stella in the head and that made it real and we... had to go through with it.”
He looked at Hill then. He said carefully, explaining it, “Once the shot was fired, you couldn’t take it back. You couldn’t change anything.”
“No,” Hill said gently, “you couldn’t change anything.”
“I didn’t mean to do it,” Jeff said.
There isn’t much more. I did one thing I’m sorry about. I had them let me in to see her. I looked through the bars at her. I had expected that she would be just the same, cold and fierce and haughty, even though they’d had her for three weeks. I wanted to call on her the way she’d called on me. I thought her eyes would flash at me and she’d make cruel hooks of her nails. But she just sat on the bunk. Her tan had faded a lot and she had put on a lot of weight. Her black hair was a mess and she didn’t have any make-up on. She had turned middle-aged in three weeks, and the new weight she had put on looked doughy. She looked at me with dull eyes and the lower part of her face was slack, the way it had been when I took the gun away from her.
She looked away from me. I stood by the bars and I said, “Linda.” She didn’t look at me. My eyes stung. I wasn’t crying for her, I guess. I was crying for the unknown girl named Linda I had once lived with.
At the trial they seemed like strangers. They didn’t look at me when I testified. I went back north after the trial. I worked in my shop in the cellar all through the night before the early morning when they were executed. I washed my hands in the cellar sink and hung up the sawdusty coveralls and went up into the kitchen. I looked at the electric clock she had bought. It was pottery, shaped like a plate. It was twenty past the hour and I knew it was over. I filled a glass with water and drank it slowly, looking out at the yard. The house was empty, and the world too seemed peculiarly empty. I felt as though I should do something dramatic, decisive, final. There seemed to be some great gesture I could perform, if I could only think of what it was.
In the end, all I did was shower, shave and drive to the office. I was early. When Rufus came in he told me I could take a day or week off if I felt like it.
I told him I felt all right.