He took the knife, tested the blade, and found it very sharp. She hadn't lied about that. He pulled his shirttail out and used it to wipe the knife clean of fingerprints and transfer it to Bonnie's right hand, carefully wrapping her fingers around the handle. Then he opened her left wrist and watched the warm blood jet out of her onto the cold sand. A thin vapor rose from the growing pool. The red was almost too bright, but it quickly dulled and blackened as it spread and soaked into the sand.
Bonnie stirred two or three times, but Jeff applied his fingers to her neck and put her under again. After a while she became too weak to resist. She didn't seem to know what was happening, which pleased him. Such a strong young heart, mightily pumping the life out of her. He was awed and fascinated by the sight of it, and a little sad. But then he reminded himself that Bonnie had never been more than a diversion. Close but not the real thing. She had nearly won his heart, he thought, but in the final analysis that was impossible.
When the flow of blood was no more than a bare trickle and Jeff couldn't detect a heartbeat, he left, taking the Scotch bottle with him. He didn't try to cover his tracks completely, but obscured them enough so that no particular shoe print remained. They would know someone had been with her-a friendly accomplice, he hoped they would think. After he pulled the car out onto the road, he ran back to blur the tire tracks in the sand. It was the best he could do in an unfortunate situation. Let them make of it what they could.
He was thinking of Georgianne. She didn't know it yet, but she was alone now. She was about to endure another terrible shock. Jeff thought of it as somehow purifying. She'd come out of it eventually, and in a way she'd be back to where she was twenty-one years ago, alone, on her own. That was what he had achieved for her, and for himself. This time he wouldn't falter. Georgianne would need him, more than ever. And he would be there.
PART V
The Land of
Lost Content
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Jeff couldn't sleep that night at the Cambridge Hyatt. Not guilt, but attention to detail kept him awake. He could have checked out immediately and caught a late flight to the West Coast, but he didn't want to draw attention to himself by leaving in a rush. You make mistakes that way. Besides, he didn't think Bonnie would be found that quickly.
He reserved a seat on a Monday-morning plane and asked the front desk for an early wake-up call. Then he very carefully packed his luggage. It wasn't easy, because he had to take with him everything Bonnie had left in the hotel room, including the several items of clothing she'd bought at Filene's, as well as the notebooks, texts, and magazines she'd been carrying on Friday. They were dangerous, incriminating things to have, but he could think of no sure, safe way to dispose of them there. In California, it would be a cinch-drop the clothes in a trash barrel somewhere and burn all the paper. The only things he felt comfortable about leaving in the hotel room wastebasket were the whiskey bottle, empty and wiped, and the crumpled shopping bags.
Using one of his T-shirts, he cleaned every surface Bonnie might have touched while she had been in the room. It was a long and tedious chore, but he didn't mind at all, and when it was finally done, he felt a measure of pride. The chances were incredibly slight that anyone would ever search this room with the idea of connecting it with Bonnie Corcoran, but you have to do these things right, and he had.
Jonathan Tate checked out of the Hyatt the next morning and drove to Logan Airport. He caught the news on the radio twice, in the hotel room and again in the car, and neither time was there any mention of a body being discovered on the south shore. He turned in the rental car and boarded a flight to San Francisco, where he retrieved his own car and cruised down 101 at a leisurely speed to L.A.
Was it just another case of overkill, these ridiculous and perhaps unnecessary precautions he took to cover his tracks? Probably, Jeff admitted to himself. But he liked it. There was, he thought, something almost sacramental about it.
Back in Santa Susana, he read the Boston Globe for a week. There were only two news items about Bonnie. The first reported the discovery of her body, stating that she was an "apparent suicide" and that the police were questioning her friends and classmates at Harvard about her recent activities and state of mind. The second article mentioned that the girl's father had been a murder victim the previous year in an "apparent drug-related case" in Connecticut that remained unsolved. Police interviews in Cambridge had turned up no new information or leads of any significance. An unnamed police source speculated that, although she had appeared to be in generally good spirits and was regarded as an outstanding student, the girl might never have recovered psychologically from the loss of her father and, unable to cope any longer with a persistent and growing depression, had taken her own life with the assistance of a sympathetic friend, as yet unidentified. The investigation continued, but no new developments were expected.
It was true: Bonnie's death, however unfortunate, however necessary, didn't change the fact that Jeff thought of himself as her friend.
Georgianne was shocked by her own lack of surprise. When the words came, they were words she had feared but half-expected many times previously, words from a bad dream that had never stopped playing in the depths of her mind. The last of her borrowed time had run out. Life had condemned her in its absurd, arbitrary, undeniable way, and Bonnie's death was the completion of the sentence. Georgianne tried briefly to resist the fact, but it was like scratching at granite. Suicide? Bonnie? Never. But what did Georgianne know? She knew nothing any more, nothing about anything.
Had Bonnie been on drugs? Could they test the blood or find out somehow without resorting to a complete autopsy? Georgianne couldn't bear the thought of her daughter's body being dissected and then cobbled together again for the funeral.
When she told them the details of Sean's death, as she had to, the two polite officers who interviewed her looked at each other as if to say, There you are.
Georgianne went ahead with the sale of the house. It seemed inevitable, so why turn down a good offer? She had less reason than ever to stay on at Indian Hill Road. Her husband and daughter were buried in Foxrock, and Georgianne wasn't sure she wanted to leave, but the house was like a tomb, and she could no longer live in it. There were no apartments in the village, but if she decided to remain in the area, she would probably be able to find a place in Danbury.
She packed up everything she wanted to keep and had the load put in storage. It didn't amount to much, because she found she was becoming ruthless about sentiment and possessions. She had lost the strength and courage to attach emotional value to anything. She went through the days like some minimally functional creature, semihuman, semirobot. Everything else, the furniture, the tools, the unneeded clothes and miscellaneous household items, she left behind, and Burt Maddox kindly agreed to sell them for her.