A last-minute check of everything. Alison ran a cloth over the door handles and the steering wheel, because she assumed a carjacker would remember to do that even in a botched attempt. I bundled the pieces of my plastic suit into the trash bag and then we ran back to Julie’s car. I climbed in the back after Heather, who was nervously tugging at her hands. We had just pulled onto the road when Alison said, “Our tire tracks!”
Julie put the car in park in the middle of the road and fetched an ice scraper from the trunk. She used the brush to swipe the side of the road ahead of Viktor’s car, trying to erase any evidence of her car and our footprints.
When she came back to the car, she added the scraper to the trash bag. “We need to find an isolated garbage dump or Dumpsters somewhere,” she said.
As we pulled away the second time, I turned to look out the rear window, capturing forever the scene that I would I visit over and over again in my dreams. The isolated stretch of road on that murky night, the black spires of trees looming above it, and that bottle-green Mercedes. Its jewel color glinted in the taillights, and I could see the driver’s door ajar and picture Viktor’s foot dangling over the side, its dead weight brushing the ground. I watched the car shrink as we sped away, until it disappeared from view, swallowed up by the darkness.
We took different roads back to Heather’s house, Julie purposely changing the route. Along the way we passed an old industrial park, and when we couldn’t spot any cameras, she pulled into the back and Alison threw the bag into a huge metal Dumpster.
“We still have to get rid of the gun,” Alison said. “You’re sure Brian doesn’t know you have one?”
Julie shook her head. “No. He’s anti-gun.”
“Yeah, me too,” Alison said in a dark voice.
It was almost three. What if Olivia woke up, or Eric, and found me gone? When I’d left home, my daughter had been asleep in our bed after crawling in with us sometime around midnight. Soon after, her father had given up trying to sleep with three of us crowding the queen-size bed and had decamped to her room. Both of them had been sound asleep when I tiptoed out of the house, but what about now? Would Eric call 911 if he woke and found me gone and couldn’t reach me on my cell phone? In my haste to help Heather, I’d left it in my car. I pictured the police swarming over my house, Sam greeting them at the door in pajamas, Olivia and Josh wailing. My throat constricted.
“We can ditch the gun in the river,” I suggested.
“I’m afraid of being spotted on a security camera,” Alison said. “We can’t risk being seen throwing something off the Sewickley Bridge.”
“Well, we can’t hold on to it—we’ve got to get rid of it,” Julie said, as if she weren’t the one responsible for the gun.
“Maybe we could bury it?” I said, but where would we do that without being spotted? I pictured us trying to hide it at the park and some enterprising dog digging it up.
“Let’s find another Dumpster,” Alison said, but we’d moved away from the river and were driving along one of the winding back roads between Sewickley and Edgeworth, and there weren’t any businesses with Dumpsters in sight.
Feeling queasy from all the twists and turns, I didn’t realize we were crossing over a creek until Julie stopped the car. “What about here?”
We were on an old stone bridge that covered a steep embankment with a creek running through the middle. We got out of the car and looked down at the water below. It looked like an oil slick in the moonlight, a fast-running greasy stream. Someone had thrown a bag over the side, spilling pop and beer cans. Brush and silt had accumulated like mortar up and around them, creating a dam. “Someone will come by to pick up this trash and they’ll spot the gun,” Alison said. “The water’s not deep enough to hide it.”
“The water’s moving further out,” I said, pointing at a spot through brush and scraggly trees where I could make out a thin line of dark water. “No one will look there,” I said to Julie. “Just be careful on the hill.”
“I don’t want to climb down there through that muck,” Julie said.
“It’s the best place we’ve found.”
“Then you do it.”
“It’s your gun,” I snapped. “We wouldn’t be in this mess if you hadn’t given it to Heather in the first place.”
“We don’t have time for this,” Alison growled, moving toward the edge of the bridge. “I’ll climb down and one of you can pass me the gun.”
chapter fifteen
ALISON
I didn’t wait for their agreement, conscious of the time and terrified that someone could drive along this stretch at any minute and spot us. Switching on my iPhone flashlight, I took a closer look over the edge of the embankment. It was a steep slope, made slippery by the soft mulch created from years of fallen leaves, plus the recent rain and snow. At least it wasn’t raining at that moment. The clouds shifted, the moon disappearing, making me hesitate, before it reappeared a minute later. It seemed like a sign. Shoving my iPhone in my pocket, I used the edge of the stone bridge for support and picked my way down the hill before switching my grip to the trunk of a skinny, stunted tree. I looked back up to see Julie, Heather, and Sarah leaning over the bridge. Clearly panicky, Julie didn’t come close enough to pass me the gun, but instead just tossed the towel-wrapped weapon over the side to me. I missed and it slipped from the towel as it hit the ground beyond me, sliding forward into some leaves. I dug through them to retrieve it, gagging on the smell of wet rot and wood mold, and the awful, clammy feel of it, which thin latex gloves couldn’t fully block. Hastily bundling the gun back in the towel, I plodded through the soft ground, picking my way toward the creek and following it along the bank until it widened and the sound of water rushing over rocks grew louder.
It was so cold out I could see my breath. I unwrapped the gun, wiping it down one more time, just in case. It felt surprisingly heavy for something so small. An iron weight in my gloved palm. I hefted it and then threw it as far as I could downstream, aiming for the center. I heard the plop as it hit the water, a distinct noise in that awful darkness.
I hurried back up the way I came, moving so fast that I slipped and fell, hands sinking through the morass, palms scraping against the ground. Scrambling to my feet, I plowed on, frightened by the darkness, certain that someone was watching, that there were dark shadows sliding in and out of the trees. It was harder getting up the embankment than it had been going down. Julie reached out and helped pull me the rest of the way up.
“You’ve cut yourself,” Heather said, using a tissue to dab lightly at my face, holding it out with her gloved hand so I could see the dark spots of blood.
“Do that in the car,” Sarah said. “We’ve got to go.”
We drove back to Heather’s house in silence, Julie taking the curves as fast as she dared, all of us painfully aware of the dashboard clock relentlessly ticking away. It was almost four A.M. by the time we drove back up Heather’s driveway.
“Shit! What about the security cameras?” I said as we pulled up, scanning the corners of the house and the garage. “We’ll be caught on tape—we need to find that and destroy it.”
“No, it’s okay,” Heather said, delivering the only good news of that night. “Viktor disabled the cameras a while ago.”
She typed in the key code for the garage and the door to the bay that had held Viktor’s car rose, the rumbling noise so loud that I looked around, afraid of being overheard.
We all stripped off our latex gloves and added them to the trash bag and then three of us put on new pairs, but Heather didn’t need to. This was her house—the police would expect to find her fingerprints here.
I kicked off my muddy shoes so I could follow the others into the laundry room. I felt a sudden yearning to be home and doing laundry, a mundane, safe task that I would never complain about again, no matter how many dirty clothes the kids seemed to accumulate.
Julie righted the chair in the hall and I picked up the suitcase. “You need to unpack and put this away and clean up the kitchen,” I said. “Do you want us to do that for you?”
Heather shook her head, taking the case from me. “No, I can do it.”