"Pick her up and carry her up the hill," he said. "I'll toss a rock when I want you to turn."
"Why?"
"You don't ask why, Monroe. You do. You do, or I'll throw your ass in jail and you can watch the minutes tick by-all day long. You can think about your defense, and Isabella, and how you're going to make the payments for your lawyer and this stilt thing. Or, you can pick up Alice and march up the damned hill."
The revolver left my head. Marty motioned to the freezer. I looked down through the mist at Alice.
If epiphany is a moment of revelation and insight, what came to me next was no epiphany at all. It was blinder than any kind of sight, it revealed nothing, and it came to me not through the brain but from a deeper, instinctual place inside me-a place of earth and stone, blood and birth, flesh and bone: It would have taken no dread of our criminal justice system to eschew the scenario Martin had just sketched for me. In fact, would have taken a faith akin to religion to offer myself into it maw of society for the purpose of proving my innocence. No, I was a simpler being in that moment, honed by circumstance to something more essential. What I needed, what I desire more than anything else at that point in time, was a practice workable method of saving my own trembling ass.
Judas's heart could not have been more heavy as he placed the final kiss than mine was at what happened-at what I did next!
A patch of Alice Fultz's frozen hair broke off with a click and stuck to the wall as I wrestled her out. I hefted her over my shoulder and put one foot in front of the other, heading up the driveway. Her waist rested against my left shoulder, and I had to spread my arms in order to grasp each of her icy, stiff ankles. I could see her right arm waving out in the darkness as I climbed. Her left arm knocked against the back of my head as if in some horrid reminder, and in the far-right periphery my vision I could see her pale fingers jiggling tautly with each footstep.
I realized as I climbed, with every step I took, that few things in my life after this night would ever be the same. The terrible march was a simple, clear dividing line-a border-that would separate my future from everything that had gone before. The two might not be able to cohabitate within me; this much, I knew. New rules would apply; alternate systems would be required; considerable adjustment would have to be made, bargains struck; concessions offered; treaties signed. My soul would never again belong only to me, but to this woman, these men, this night. I had never dreamed that I would be forced to tender it for so little.
What I prayed for as I struggled up the hillside (if grunting desperately can be called prayer) was that there be something left of my old life that I could recognize and remember-and maybe, in a moment of need, cling to-other than terror, fear, and shame. A rivulet of icy fluid ran from Alice's waist down my shoulder, the coldest thing this world has ever offered me.
The fog rolled in from the south and we vanished into the darkness of the canyon. I could hear three sets of footsteps as I labored higher, deeper into the thick, dry hillside brush. I ached and shivered as Alice's meltings ran down my body. The video light wobbled out in front of me. A pebble hit my back and I turned left into a deep ravine, an overgrown clot of oak and elderberry, sage and prickly pear. My legs burned. I penetrated the cover. I stumbled and fell. Alice rolled off and righted herself like some kind of weighted child's toy, faceup in a bed of cactus. The video light went out and I panted there on my hands and knees.
"Good enough, Monroe," I heard Martin say. "Now get up and we'll head back down to your garage. You can't dig a grave without a shovel."
I dug for two straight hours, and still wasn't deep enough. Marty had recommended a pair of gloves, which helped. I had to go back for a pick because the bedrock was so hard, the shovel just bounced. The fog hugged us. The moon disappeared. A dark circle formed on the earth around Alice. Keyes got most of it on video. I felt as if I'd been banished to hell, and spent probably twenty minutes trying to pinpoint-as I bent waist-deep and hurled the pick against the rock-the exact moment of my death. How could I have missed it? I half-believed, at times, that this was a severe nightmare from which I would surely soon awake. Fever, I thought: There must be fever involved.
But the deeper the hole got, the better I began to feel! I felt closer to being real, and I wondered as the sweat ran down into my gloves if maybe-just maybe — I would feel truly whole again when the last spadeful of canyon dirt sealed away Alice and Marty and Keyes and this hellish night forever. A surge implausible optimism went through me. And it allowed me concentrate on the particulars of this horror, on the madness that surely drove Martin Parish to put Alice's body in my freezer on the dire aspects of his murderous obsession with Amber Mae, on the way-some way, any way-that I could salvage even one handful of redemption from this night. I vowed then and there that I would never let this touch Isabella, that if I had to I would lay down my life-and certainly most anyone else's to keep the infection of this night from ever spreading to her. It seemed clear to me then that Isabella was the only good thing left in my world and that she must be spared this disease, this two-decade sickness of Amber and Martin and Grace and, most obviously, myself. I looked down at my dirt-covered shoes, half expecting to see hooves. Never, I thought, never will I let you, Izzy, be tainted by this. If I die having accomplished nothing more than that, it will be a death greeted with a secret smile. I swear. I promise. I swear.
And with that silent vow, a clarity came to me, and I knew that there were questions I needed to answer. I was four feet down into the earth by then. I wiped the sweat from my face on the sleeve of my stinking shirt. Keyes was sitting on a rock, camcorder across his lap. I looked up at Martin.
"So," I asked, "how much money did I murder the wrong woman for?"
Marty's face, fog-brushed, regarded me from on high. "Well, as you know, she's worth about six million. I did some prying when I thought she was dead."
"Did you."
"You sure as hell didn't-you knew it all ahead of time. Grace came into the beginnings of her share when she turned eighteen. That's why you waited."
"What is Grace's share?"
"Five million," said Marty. "Come on, you know all this. I'm written in for half a million, and so is ex-flame, lover, friend, worshiper Russell Monroe. If you or I die before Grace does, or end up in prison, for instance, the winner gets a full million. If Grace goes first, the United Way ends up with the five. A little more prying finds you owe some pretty big bucks to the hospital. Tina Sharp, quite helpful when she thinks she's talking to an administrator. Motive, Russell. Lots of motive in the air around here."
I could hardly believe that Amber would include me in the dispensation of her fortune. But my belief was not important.
"Then there's the life-insurance policy she took out ten years ago, for Grace. Death benefit of another two million- payable over ten years. Were you and Grace going to split that?"
"I don't know," I mumbled.
"When did you figure out that you'd slaughtered the wrong beauty?"
I couldn't answer truthfully without admitting to Martin that Amber had defected into my camp. The fact that I knew where she was and had in my possession a boxful of evidence collected by Martin Parish-to save his own ass from the gas chamber, I could now assume-were my only two remaining hole cards. Why hadn't Martin figured she would come to me?
I thought long and hard about how best to play this. None of the obvious options seemed strong enough to bet on. I concluded that the best I could do while digging Alice's grave was to encourage Marty to dig one for himself.
"When I saw her," I said. "The body."
"I have to know, Russ, were you going to stick Amber my freezer when you framed me, or somewhere else?"