by Saul Black
No, not innocence. Just guilt invisible to the eyes of the law.
She set the hammers on the floor and heaved the bags of potting compost to one side. Opened the metal box, the Tupperware one inside it. The greenhouse plants were a congregation of shy witnesses.
The first prod with her index finger told her the contents of the duct-taped bags had, as they were compelled to, thawed. Not surprisingly it brought to mind the instructions on frozen meat packaging. Defrost thoroughly before use. Do not refreeze.
She removed enough of the tape to get the bags open, then shifted the angle of the box to catch the beam of the lamp.
Right-handed. She’d established that early on. Therefore, she’d placed the right hand on top. The wristwatch—God damn it—had been on his left. A family heirloom, he’d said, clearly as proud of the word “heirloom” as he was of the watch. Even now, when there was no point in self-reproach, she cursed herself for not noticing he’d taken it off that night by the lake. Another imperfection. They were murder’s lice, these oversights.
Eliminate the physical evidence. Operate as if every single one of your movements sheds glittering cells, a fairy dust of incrimination that will lead the right kind of investigation step by step back to you. She had an image of a CSI team with halogens, magnifiers, chemicals, black lights, their collective will bent on re-creating the picture of her guilt, a painstaking but inevitable restoration. It was hopeless. They would find her out. They had twenty-first-century technology at their disposal. She had nothing but her own amateur violence. For a moment the thought of getting caught gave her a thrill of liberation. If nothing else, getting caught would free her from the burden of worrying about getting caught.
But that would leave Elspeth alone.
Therefore it couldn’t be allowed to happen.
Radial and ulnar arteries. Anterior interosseous. Median nerve. Elspeth’s illustrated book from years ago: The Human Body: How It Works. Rachel had memorized some of the basics. A madcap instinct had insisted the Latin would desensitize her to what she had to do when the time came. It hadn’t. When the time had come there had just been the ugliness of serrated metal and wet meat, the heat in her face and the ache in her arm. The blood had been a heavy softness in the air, in her breathing. When the time had come her mind had just repeated: Sawing off his hand … Sawing off … his … hand … She’d done the hands first, fearful she only had fuel in the tank enough for that. Astonishingly, she hadn’t thrown up, though the first rasping stroke of saw against bone had brought her close. Since all connections were allowed, she’d found herself thinking of the movie in which the guy trapped by a boulder had to amputate his own arm with a dull blade to free himself. She and Adam had watched it together. Adam had said: Christ, if it wasn’t true you’d never believe it, would you? All those ordinary things between them. Movies, dinners, conversations. Her and Elspeth making fun of him trying to choose a woolen hat.
Enough. What had happened had happened. Other women, other wives, would have been surprised, shocked to their cores. She had been surprised only in the upper strata of her being. Her core was immune to shock. Thanks to Larry, the worst had happened to her and made her core a place where the worst was expected, received, absorbed. After that it was just a question of what you did in response to the worst.
And here she was, responding.
She opened one of the ziplock bags and held it ready. Then she picked up Dwight Jenner’s amputated right hand and examined it in the light. Comedy, as before, was available. Comedy was durable. She resisted the impulse to wave with it or perform a mock handshake, though there was no denying the impulse was there. Comedy to block the pathos, the understanding that this was really his hand, that had recorded his life’s history of touch. Childhood. It had run over warm stone and delved into chilled sand, swished water, clutched hot coins.
But it had touched her, too, greedily delighted, rich with his contempt and blind to her purposes. He’d grabbed her hair, once, in spite of her telling him it was the one thing off-limits. Even when she’d told him, she’d known he’d try it sooner or later. That was men: Whatever you told them you didn’t want them to do became the thing they wanted to do above all else. At the time she’d frozen (she’d been on her hands and knees) and said: Let go of my hair right now or I walk and you’ll never see me again. He’d said, For Christ’s sake—but he’d let go. Not that the wig would’ve been a deal-breaker for him. She had too much else to offer. But he would have started asking questions, and, as per the male logic, would have started wanting to fuck her without her wearing it. In her natural state. She’d had no control over how much he might tell people about her. She had to be sure his description was inaccurate. When they started looking—as they would, inevitably—they had to be looking for a blonde. For Sophia.
She sealed the hand in the ziplock bag, peeled off the gloves, set them aside, and put on a fresh pair. Put the first bag in a second. Resealed the duct tape, closed the Tupperware box, then the lid of the tin crate. Locked it and stowed it under the bench. She put the amputated hand and the two hammers in the Met Foods carrier bag (imagined them nestling among packaged tomatoes, a carton of milk, bunched parsley—horror in suburban shopping!) then turned off the lamp.
Quicker across the yard this time. The sky had lost another layer of darkness. Still an hour till dawn, but she’d been too leisurely. There was a terrible tendency to let time drift, to be beguiled by herself, by what she was doing.
In the kitchen she took a clean polishing cloth and plucked the knife from its block.
She went up the stairs.
Prints. Hammers. Knife. Bedroom.
She set the carrier bag down on the landing, took out the slightly larger of the two claw hammers, and went into the reading room. Checked on Vincent. Still there, now holding a steaming red mug. Caffeine, he’d told her, made absolutely no difference one way or the other.
The window seat lifted. Storage space inside, occupied by spare cushions, throws, blankets, and, as of a week ago, half a dozen plain new brown paper bags (you only need two, so you get six), one of which she removed and set down, open, on the floor. She wrapped the larger claw hammer in an Indian-print throw and stowed it at the bottom of the pile. Then she went back out to the landing and changed her gloves.
Move as little as possible. Every gesture sheds the lethal fairy dust. She took the knife and the second hammer, along with the ziplock bag, back into the reading room. Went to work, vigorously, with the polish cloth until she was confident the surface was clean of all previous marks of contact.
The next wasn’t easy. (Nor, if she were being honest with herself, was she sure the prints would either take or last. Freezing and defrosting—would that fuck it up? Nothing she’d read indicated it would, but murder was the land of no guarantees.) There wasn’t much pliability to work with, and simulating an actual grip on either the knife or the second hammer was impossible. There was nothing to do but apply pressure with the fingertips and hope it was enough. The delicate trick was not to handle either the knife or the hammer where she’d placed the prints. Whatever she lost between now and tomorrow night was lost for good. There was only one shot at this.
When she’d finished, she put the hammer in one brown paper bag, the knife in another, rolled the tops of the bags into a loose seal, deposited them in the left corner of the storage space, and covered them with a blanket, arranged to allow only minimal contact between itself and the bags. As little friction as possible. The prints were her sleeping babies, now. On no account must they be disturbed—until it was time for them to wake and go to work.
She lowered the window seat. One brief vision of herself coming back here tomorrow night, lifting it again, unwrapping the hammers, the knife. The feel and weight of them in her hands, her lifeless accomplices. The last few minutes. I am in blood stepped in so far …
Let it go. No point. It would be what it was.
In the master bedroom she applied the dead fingertips—hard n
ot to overdo it—to the frame and handle of the French windows. Have to keep Adam away from them. Turn up the air-conditioning? More comedy. Jesus. She stepped out and very quickly (she was, after all, outside) pressed a set to the balcony rail. And if it rains?
It won’t rain. It can’t.
By the time she was back out in the yard, dawn was a burgeoning excitement, like a crowd outside a concert hall knowing it would soon be let in. She hurried again to the greenhouse.
This last preparation was, she admitted to herself, wildly optimistic. But at least it didn’t increase the risk. She took the smallest ziplock bag, a Swiss Army penknife, and a set of tweezers from her pocket. Her original idea, she knew, wasn’t going to work. Her fingernails simply weren’t strong enough. Instead she used the smallest of the knife’s blades and made three tiny incisions in the skin around the edge of the hand’s stump.
It took some work, a concentration that taxed her. But eventually, via a combination of blades and tweezers, she had an approximation of what she wanted: three minute, ragged parings of skin. She placed them in the last ziplock bag and put it in her pocket. The Swiss Army knife went in the Tupperware box. Along with all the used gloves—and Dwight Jenner’s right hand.
* * *
She allowed herself a long, hot, meticulous shower. The heat and water and steam were good. Good in an archetypal or Old Testament way: And God saw the light, that it was good. The coconut scent of the hair conditioner gave her pleasure out of all proportion. Deep soft towels and Shalimar body lotion. She went again into a spell of self-beguilement, rubbing it into her skin. Her physical details were renewed and strange with life. The lines in her knuckles, the creases behind her knees. The flesh of the dead vivified the flesh of the living. Her thoughts fluttered. Did morticians enjoy a sensuous advantage? Doctors and nurses? What could handling the dead do but remind you you were fabulously alive?
In the bedroom she painted her fingernails and toenails metallic blue, dressed in her favorite blue jeans, a crisp black T-shirt, and snug white sport socks with slightly padded soles. It was a ridiculous bliss to pull them onto her feet. Brand-new red Nike high tops that made her feel springy and strong. The world beyond what she had to do was filled with the sprawling promise of baked asphalt and brightly lit stores and good coffee and the hiss of the ocean pressed thin at the shingle’s edge. She had an image of her and Elspeth in a convertible on Route 1, Elspeth with her bare feet on the dash, her long dark hair wild in the rushing wind.
She ate a bowl of cereal and a peach yogurt and drank a cup of black coffee. The sky now was dark salmon-silver, a few horizontal shreds of thin cloud in silhouette in the lower reaches. An anarchy of birdsong in the backyard when she opened the patio doors and stood for a few minutes, going over everything one last time. Elspeth was due back at Drew at 5 P.M. She had almost eleven hours. Adam’s flight didn’t land till 8 P.M.
At which point the countdown would really begin.
* * *
Daylight. She put the metal tin in a cardboard box with a few paperbacks on top to hide it before stowing it in the Volvo’s trunk, alongside the ten-pound weight she’d brought up from the gym. There was always the chance she’d run into one of the marina staff or a boat neighbor. She was moving ahead to the investigation, picturing a tired-eyed but die-hard detective in a crumpled suit.
—Did you notice what Mrs. Grant was carrying in the box?
—Yes, books! She’s a great one for reading.
“Carrying books” the detective would write in his notes. Hardly a sign of homicidal guilt.
She didn’t run into anyone. The marina was quiet at that hour, though the city at its back was already going brashly about its business. With the tools and the extra ten pounds the box was heavy. The upper sky was deepening blue, the sun liquid on the green-bronze water, the white hulls blinding. Presumably because the universe couldn’t resist occasional symbolism, the last thinning tuft of a morning fog clung along the edge of Alcatraz Island. She’d taken the audio tour of the prison by herself, years ago, when Elspeth had first started kindergarten. Like every other visitor she’d tried to imagine herself as an inmate. Sometimes they put you in solitary and turned out all the lights. One prisoner so confined had passed his time by pulling a button off his shirt, tossing it somewhere in the pitch darkness of the cell, spinning himself around, then getting down on his hands and knees to find it. Find it, toss it again, and so on. The minutes, the hours, the days. Wandering among the rusted cells and bare concrete, Rachel had recalled the night she’d considered sending her mother to prison. She’d wondered whether Joanna might still be alive if she had.
Now the question was hers: How long will you last, incarcerated? Prison was what she saw on TV, the pumped inmates and the bare forearms of overweight guards. Women’s prisons, the assumption was you became someone’s bitch or made someone yours. At least she had violence and sexual malleability in her favor. In the early Vegas period she’d done couples, occasionally, until she tired of seeing that the men who got the most out of it were the ones whose women were putting up with it, reluctantly. Reluctance was wearily arousing to men. Larry had made that plain from the start.
Larry. So much of what she’d become circled back to Larry. And Joanna. Larry had determined what she hated in men. Joanna had determined the sort of mother she, Rachel, was never going to become.
And here, in these last days, the fruits of that tree had fallen.
True to form, Adam’s effectively living on the boat for the last two months hadn’t made much of a dent. Marina regulations prohibited residing on board, but Adam found a way around proscriptions. She supposed money had changed hands. In any case, the Aqua Nova was clean, tidy, organized. Order went with him. In the early days it had been one of the things she’d liked about him, the absence of mess, clutter, chaos. Living with him had been everything that living with Joanna had not.
She eased the boat out and headed west toward the Golden Gate Bridge. It was colder out on the water, and after only a few minutes she had to put on one of the windbreakers kept ready on board. The bridge itself never failed to astonish her, the extraordinary perverse human will that had pushed through the physics and math, sunk drills and hoisted steel. Such engineering was like a joyful insult to the old idea of God: He could divide land and water as He liked. It didn’t stop us altering such arrangements for our own convenience.
The old idea of God. She pictured the benevolent Old Man sitting distraught with his head in his hands, wondering how it had turned out that he wasn’t God after all. Just one more frail and redundant aspect of the actual and much larger God, by whom he was contained, and who had offered him to the human imagination as a parent offers a teddy bear to a child, to be a comfort for a few years—then discarded, when all such comforts were shown to be false.
Fresh, open space rushing toward her like the future. Liquid blue sky and her collar’s rattle in the wind. There wasn’t much traffic on the water. She kept west through the Gulf of the Farallones at a steady eighteen knots, turned slightly northwest to pass the islands themselves.
Fifteen minutes later she stopped the boat. In spite of the sun, cold came up from the deep water, spoke of the onyx darkness down there.
On deck she spread the tarp, put on gloves, opened the cardboard box, and lifted out first the metal one, then the Tupperware. Along with the books, the gym weight, and the duct-taped bags were a steel mallet and chisel. Corpses, notoriously, filled with gas. The sea all too often gave up its secrets. She didn’t imagine mere amputated hands and feet would float up to betray her, but she was taking no chances. She removed the books, weight, and tools, transferred the bags from the Tupperware box directly into the metal one, and gouged a few holes in them with the chisel. She put the weight in, closed the lid, and punched several large holes in that as well. Let the water get in. Little fish, crabs, scavengers. The Tupperware and tarp she would discard on the way home, since even if it was found it would prove nothing—and so much th
e better if it was found on dry land.
There was a moment, standing with the now locked and vandalized metal box balanced on the handrail, where all her risk gathered and pressed upon her. Once this went overboard it was beyond her recall. She was tempted to retrace her actions again—there had to be something she’d missed—but sheer mental fatigue got the better of her. She let it go.
For a second or two she thought the weight wasn’t enough. It canted, seemed to bob a couple of times …
But it went. The water crept in through the holes as if in eager investigation, as if she’d given the ocean a gift—then it was gone.
She held on to the handrail, feeling empty. Then she gathered up the mallet and chisel and hurled them as far from the boat as she could.
* * *
“So?” Rachel said to Elspeth when she picked her up at Drew later that afternoon. “How was it?”
“Please don’t make me go there ever again,” Elspeth said. They had both just got in the Volvo.
“It smells weird in here,” Elspeth said.
“I had it valeted.”
“It smells like bleach.”
“Roll the window down. I’ll turn the AC off. Was it really that bad?”
Elspeth shrugged. She hadn’t wanted to go to the summer camp, in spite of it being the countryside equivalent of the Waldorf.
“It was okay,” she said quietly. This was her daughter, now, Rachel knew, everything accepted with submissive resignation.
“Lana and Jeanette sounded nice.”
“They were okay,” Elspeth said.
“Mica must’ve been a drag. Now that she’s had her braces out she must be swaggering around like Beyoncé.”
Humor. Weak, admittedly, but come on, baby. Don’t go under. Don’t let it be the only thing. Not long now. After tomorrow we’ll be free.
