And then the reality begins to seep in.
CHAPTER 2
He remains seated beside her and loses track of time. Through a blur he sees his watch. Three hours have elapsed since the bus arrived. His crying has stopped. He holds her hand. It’s still warm, yet he senses stiffness in the fingers. A part of him realizes he should call someone, probably 911. He stands and moves his shaking body to the downstairs phone, but hesitates before he takes the instrument from its cradle.
What would they think? he wonders. It was an accident, but there is no proof. No witness to his sordid thoughts.
“It was just an accident,” he shouts into the empty hallway. Yet some prosecutor might claim he bludgeoned her to death in a jealous, frustrated rage. What was she doing at his house? they would ask. Did she refuse you when you wanted sex? And Sara? She would ask the same thing and shout that she knew all along he was screwing someone else. And there would be no answer that could satisfy all of the questions. Even the complete truth would be insufficient.
“I wasn’t even here,” he shouts over and over again into empty space, and absurdly remembers the potential legal problems he faces. In those cases his innocence was suspect, but here, while there is no question, why would anyone believe him?
“This is madness,” he says aloud, yet in some deep recess of his brain, in some effort at rationality, he has already decided he must find a way to move the body.
A storage shelf in the garage provides a supply of large steel-flexed trash bags. He takes two silver colored bags from the carton. He’s about to leave when he impulsively grabs a pair of gardening gloves from the same shelf. He returns to the hall. She has not moved. He almost wished she had. He would pay the penalty if she survived, but she lies still and motionless. His tears return and he sits on the steps for several minutes until they dry.
He has never been this close to a dead person, but there is no particular discomfort. He slips on the gloves, and then lifts her body and tries to maneuver it into the bag. The body is all deadweight, a thought that in other circumstances might have brought a smile, but this is not such a time. The body moves surprisingly smoothly into the sack. Her face is the last part to be covered. Her eyes are closed as if in sleep.
“I’m so sorry,” he says and lingers for a moment before he impulsively leans forward and brushes a kiss across her forehead. He starts to close the bag when he remembers her shoes. He takes the pair of white sandals, and slips them in as well. Then he slides the second bag around the first. It is actually a harder process that takes him several minutes. Perhaps the rigor has already begun. He rolls the bag over in the hallway and it seems secure.
Only then does he see her straw bag, as it hangs over the edge of a high step where its own fall must have ended, somehow immune from gravity’s further demands. He brings the straw bag down and reopens the double plastic bags. He inserts the bag beside the lifeless form. His motion forces him to move his arm across the front of her body, necessarily across her breasts. He gulps down his bile and finishes his work, for that is what this has become.
That is when he sees the bloodstains for the first time. A purplish mass rests on the tiles where her head had landed. He finds a sponge, wets it, and begins to soak up the residue. Twice he flees back into the downstairs bathroom to vomit. He retches long after there is nothing left to expel, but the sight of her blood and other clotted matter that clings to the tiles is too much.
Many minutes pass before he concludes that the blood is gone, yet a small stain in the grout remains between some of the tiles. He curses silently and goes back to the garage for another remedy. He will bleach the grout he thinks, but there is no bleach in the laundry area. He could go out to buy bleach, or just clean the area as well as he could, and make up a story for Sara. Yes, that is what he’ll do. The stain is too small for her to notice right away. The bleach will need to wait for another day. There will be many stories to concoct for Sara and others. He realizes with a stark revelation, as if a bright light has been turned on in a black room, that his deception has only begun, despite his absolute innocence.
Then he remembers the photo, his photo, still embedded in the memory of Heidi’s cell phone. A cold sweat rises on his neck, and tightness invades his chest. He feels a rumbling in his body, something new and beyond anything he’s ever felt. He knows he must again untie the plastic bags and retrieve the phone from her straw handbag.
First the outer one, and then the inside one. He sees her face again. What can change in a few minutes? he wonders. Yet she looks paler, as if the Iranian sun has begun to recede from her skin.
He pulls out the straw bag and removes the cell phone with the idea that later he will smash it into bits and distribute the scrap residue in the ocean. He reties the bag and stops.
He needs a plan. He needs to think. He walks upstairs and stares out the window at the ocean. The dark clouds have passed and the absence of motion at the tops of the sand pines tells him the wind has died. The sun hangs white, low, and alone to the west. Sara will be on her way to her Long Island meeting. He doesn’t have much time, but his sense of logic and planning begin to return. He knows what he will do next, but first he washes the glass she used, returns it to the cabinet, and recorks the wine, which he leaves on the countertop. He stands at the top of the stairs, and then moves down toward the silvery bundle.
He’s late getting to East Hampton Airport to pick up Sara. There’s been just too much to do, too much to think about. He needed to put things as they should be before she comes. As he drives, he remembers how they met. It was her father who introduced them at a year-end cocktail reception at Posner’s firm where her father’s investment company was a client.
“Sara, this is Amos Posner, whose firm handles some of our overseas commodities business,” Jacob Auslander spoke as one hand pressured Amos’s elbow to turn.
Amos pivoted his body away from the open bar without the glass of red wine he’d ordered and faced a very tall brunette with shoulder-length hair, dark eyes, and a clear, pale complexion. She was wearing a simple black cocktail dress with a strand of tiny pearls and matching earrings. He absorbed all of this in seconds, even before Jacob introduced his daughter Sara.
“She’s a lawyer. Just moved back east from Chicago.”
Jacob went on for at least another minute, but Amos wasn’t listening, only looking.
“Don’t forget your wine,” she said breaking into their mutual concentration.
Soon after they met, they discovered that she was coincidentally doing legal work for a British subsidiary of his firm. There was a chance meeting in London less than three months later. Three weeks after, they spent a weekend at Inverlochy Castle in Scotland and within six months they were married.
And now it’s possible that the very survival of their marriage has come down to what’s happened today and what he’s done about all of it. He fights off a series of tremors that invade his hands, rubs sweaty palms on his pants, and wills himself to stay calm as he pulls up to the terminal entrance.
No one stands in front of the doors. He’s late. The clock on the dash reads twenty past, yet she should be there. Should have already dropped the rental off. He leaves the car and steps a few feet inside the small terminal, which is nearly empty, but doesn’t see her. Back in his car, he reaches for his cell phone to call, but a message is waiting. Sara called. Why didn’t he hear the ring? Yet the reason is immediately obvious when he sees that the call came in earlier during that time when he was busy agonizing and then acting on a plan to remove the body. The message is harsh, almost cruel, as if she had spit the words out.