He stepped into his house barefoot and dripping.
A lightning flash showed him a picture that jolted his adrenaline.
Beside the table where’d he sat for lunch, a chair was overturned.
A familiar straw hat with a tightly rolled and blackened brim lay on the floor, as if it had fallen off its owner’s head and then been crushed, as if somebody had stepped on it during a struggle.
Billy’s hat.
The moment Hugh-Jay saw it, he panicked and thought, Laurie!
Billy was drunk, he was angry, he was crazy, and he’d already tried to attack her at Bailey’s.
He raised his face to the ceiling, heart pounding, listening.
He pulled off his rain slicker, let it fall, and kept moving.
He wanted to shout his wife’s name but didn’t dare. What if Billy had a gun?
Desperate to find and rescue his wife, terrified of what kind of revenge a drunken Billy Crosby might be taking on her even at this moment, but also realizing the urgent need to move silently, Hugh-Jay took long strides to his office on the first floor and went immediately to his gun case, where the key was in the lock.
He pulled out a long-barreled pistol, his favorite of his small arms.
It was powerful, sharp of aim, straight of shot, and after the thirty seconds it took him to arm it, loaded.
The gun held in front of him, he hurried down the first-floor hallway, finally grasping that the noise of the storm covered every sound he made, though that meant it also covered every sound that might be coming from upstairs.
What if Billy hadn’t taken her to the second floor?
He raced through the other rooms on the first floor, cursing himself for the delay when he didn’t find anyone. He reached the upper landing and quickly checked the rooms there. Master bedroom and bath, second bath, large guest room, Jody’s room, leaving only one to go. With a speed born of fear and fury, he covered the remaining few feet of carpet, burst into the room, and saw the two figures on the bed, the man on top of the woman. His heart clenched with the pain of heartache, betrayal, and outrage as he yelled, “Billy! Get off of her!”
Hugh-Jay’s voice-harsh, furious, frightened, and sounding nothing like normal-was unrecognizable to the couple in bed. Laurie, seeing a dark and threatening figure in the doorway, screamed. Meryl, rolling off of her, saw the same shadow, but also saw the shape of the gun, and he lunged at the man’s waist. As they fell together to the floor, Hugh-Jay pointed the gun down at the man he still thought was Billy Crosby, but the man moved at the last moment, shoving the gun backward. The bullet fired into Hugh-Jay’s own abdomen, knocking him back onto the carpet.
Deafened and shocked by the noise and light of the shot, Meryl saw and heard darkness for several moments. It was only when Laurie began screaming Hugh-Jay’s name that he realized whose blood he had all over him.
“Oh, my God,” he said. “Oh, my God. Oh, no. Oh, God, please no.”
Meryl Tapper helplessly watched his friend and his future bleed to death on the carpet.
40
MERYL STOOD in the shower in the spare bathroom on the second floor with his clothes on, holding a naked Laurie by her upper arms as she screamed and wept. Hugh-Jay’s blood washed from his face, his hair, his neck and arms, his clothes. Her arms where he held her washed pink from the blood on his hands and from the spots on her body where it had splattered onto her. A bit of it had reached her lips, which terrified her when she realized it by tasting it. He thought she might claw her own tongue out in her frantic attempts to get the blood off of it.
Afterward, he wrapped her in a towel and held her.
“What will we do?” Laurie cried, shaking and sobbing. “What will we do?”
Meryl went over multiple scenarios in his head, just as if he were still in law school reviewing evidence from case histories and trials. There were no working phones. They couldn’t call the sheriff, or call for help for Hugh-Jay, even if it weren’t too late for that. He was dead, not instantly, but quickly from the gushing blood they were helpless to stem.
They could drive to Henderson City to report it, they could…
We could what? Meryl asked himself as his own teeth chattered with cold fear.
He made himself keep thinking: If they told the story truly, then Laurie was an adulterer and he was as good as one, and they would forever be held responsible for Hugh-Jay’s death even if nobody thought they’d meant to kill him. But how many people would believe that? Who would believe it was an accident?
Not many, Meryl thought, wanting to throw up.
And the Linders… oh, God, he thought, the Linders.
“I can’t have been here,” he finally said to her. “I was never here tonight.”
“What about me?” she screamed at him.
“You have to leave.”
“Leave? But-”
“This house. Rose. So people think somebody took you.”
“What?” She looked at him as if he were insane.
“Laurie, we have to get you out of here. It has to look as if somebody broke in here and raped and kidnapped you and killed Hugh-Jay when he tried to protect you.”
“I can’t do that!” She looked stunned, confused. “Where would I go?”
“We’ll figure that out. I’ll take you somewhere tonight, and then we’ll figure out the rest of it.”
“Come with me!”
“What?”
“Meryl, come with me. We’ll go away together! It will be all right.”
“No, it won’t, it will never be all right if we do that. I have to stay here. I have to go back to my office and get up in the morning and act as if I was there all night after I left Belle. You have to be gone, where nobody can find you, and then when they do, you have to pretend you were taken.”
“I can’t do that!”
“Yes, you can. You have to. Get dressed. Don’t bring anything. Not your purse. Nothing.”
“I don’t want to, Meryl!”
“Would you rather be charged with his murder?”
“What? But we didn’t-”
“Can you prove that? They’ll want us to prove that, and we can’t.”
“Maybe he killed himself, we could say he-”
“Because he found us in bed? No, I don’t think we want that, either.”
“Meryl, I can’t do what you say I should do. I can’t-”
“Go put on some clothes. Whatever you need later, I’ll get it for you.”
When she wouldn’t budge, he ran into her bedroom and took the first thing he saw: her yellow sundress. He came back and put it over her head, pulling it down over her body. Then he picked her up and carried her outside before he remembered he didn’t have his truck. “Shut up,” he told her, so the neighbors wouldn’t hear her during moments when the storm died down. Fearful of being witnessed now, she acquiesced to his plan, even telling him to use Billy Crosby’s truck, which was behind the garage.
They rolled it silently down to the street.
With the storm still boiling all around them, Meryl drove her out to Testament Rocks over dirt and gravel roads that made the going slippery and treacherous and threatened to dump them into ditches. They drove through low places where the water came halfway up the tires, and once the truck got stuck and he had to rock it from drive to park and back again several times in order to rock it into moving again.