I lay what was Officer Colleen down at the edge, ready to roll her off the pier. As I do, her bag slides from my shoulder to the ground. I see the gun inside. If the police find this, they’ll realize that her gun was fired. Would it be better to dump them separately and hope the current carries them miles apart? Should I take her purse with the gun so that, if she is found, police assume that someone intended to rob her and committed murder in the process?
I move Colleen’s bag to the side and then sit next to her body. Both of my bare feet press into her sides. I bring my legs back toward my chest and then kick out with all my energy.
The body barely makes a splash before vanishing beneath the dark water. With luck, it will be gone for good. The East River was named “Hell Gate” by early Dutch explorers because the current is stirred to rapids by the different tidal flows converging in it. It’s why so few bodies dumped here ever surface. Jake told me that after a gang case once.
I remove Colleen’s phone from her purse and pitch it as hard as I can into the water. The splash is audible, though I can’t verify that the device has sunk in the darkness. Either way, I’m sure the salt water will destroy it soon enough. I wonder whether or not the police will be able to tell that her cell was at the construction site when they begin investigating her disappearance and track the last known signal. Maybe the phone will register as outside her apartment.
My purse still hangs from my shoulder. I jostle the pipe from inside. Dark spots splatter the metal. In the moonlight, I can almost convince myself that the marks are rust. I hold it like a boomerang behind my head before hurling it over the railing. It makes a big splash, the kind that would be noticed by someone, if anyone was around. Watching me.
An icy fear possesses my body at the thought. The gun is still in Colleen’s bag. I slip the shoulder strap over my left arm, feeling the weight of the weapon at my side. The loaded pistol makes me feel simultaneously more secure and panicky. I used it before to protect myself. I could do it again. But it connects me to this murder. Even if the cops never find Colleen’s body, my hands on her gun would reveal my crime. I have to get rid of it.
Throwing it in after Colleen doesn’t feel right. I am relying on the East River to destroy too much evidence. One more item will somehow clog the drain, sending all the sewage bubbling back to the surface.
Over my shoulder, I see the mountains of earth that had called to me before. I choose the mound farthest from the construction hole. Using my hands and the weapon itself, I tunnel into the side of the dirt hill. It has rained recently and the earth is moist. To keep the soil from spilling into my hiding place, I must keep patting the sides, like sculpting a sandcastle. When I have a space deep enough to fit my arm up to the joint, I shove the gun inside. Finally, I smash my fists into the pile until the mound crumbles in on itself, filling the cavity.
With luck, this dirt is destined for landfill somewhere else. It will be loaded on the back of a truck and dumped at a new construction site. Everyone wants a flat piece of property, particularly by the water. The gun could end up buried beneath the new backyard of a seaside home, topped by grass and flowering weigela bushes, an iron rock beneath manicured landscaping. Every year, the soil will settle, and the gun will sink deeper into the earth.
The idea comforts me as I head out to the street.
LIZA
The flight attendant tells me to shut my laptop. I plead for another moment with a raised finger and a sheepish glance as she scowls at me from the aisle. Something is wrong in the scene I finished moments ago. The gun, I think. How Beth gets rid of it is too complicated. She’s thrown everything else into the water, why not the weapon?
Because, I need to bury it.
I hear Beth’s voice in my head, comingled with my own writerly justifications. A death cries out for a burial. Instinctually, people will want the images of digging and soil. Hiding the gun in a mound of construction dirt will resonate more with readers than having Beth throw yet another item into the East River.
But I can’t force Beth to do something stupid because it fits with a death aesthetic. Discarding the murder weapon in a different location from the body only makes sense if the gun itself ties the perpetrator to the crime. In this case, it doesn’t. The Glock wasn’t Beth’s; it belonged to Colleen. Even if Beth is concerned about her prints on it, submersion is far more likely to destroy them than dirt. I gave Beth a crime reporter background. She would know this.
I murdered someone, Beth protests. I’m not thinking straight. I want to bury it.
“Ma’am, we’re landing.” The stewardess looks as though she wants to slap the screen down on my device. “Your laptop could fly from your tray table when the wheels touch down. If you don’t store it now, I’ll have to confiscate it.”
I have not e-mailed myself my last chapter. Apologizing, I hit the save button, close the computer, and then slide it into the purse that barely fits beneath the seat in front of me. The flight attendant watches me do all this, a mother checking up on a child’s chores after she failed to do them the first time.
We touch down with barely a bump, which I mentally argue means I could have kept my computer out longer. I know I’m wrong, of course. Rules have reasons. A laptop probably went airborne during a particularly rough landing once and injured a litigious passenger. I don’t care, though. All I want is to get back to my story and figure out how to fix the murder scene.
Images of earth and metal continue to plague me as I roll my suitcase across the airport to the short-term parking lot and retrieve my car. Burying the gun is too similar to how the mother hides the murder weapon in my bestseller. Well, it worked then, Beth quips. Throwing the weapon in the river makes the most sense, I argue.
BUT I BURIED IT!
BUT YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE!
I get onto the highway, still thinking about the gun. That gun! I can’t leave it there, waiting in a mound of dirt like a body in a wall or a telltale heart beneath the floorboards. It will make me crazy. It is already driving me nuts. Rather than concentrating on the road, I am inventing excuses for Beth to bury the weapon. I’ve outsourced the car’s operation to an automatic part of my brain, the section that controls breathing and bathroom urges.
There’s little traffic heading back from Queens on a Monday evening. I pull into the garage in under an hour and run to the elevator, eager to get back to my manuscript. A woman rushes in before the door closes. I know her vaguely. She has two boys, middle school age, and lives in one of the penthouses above me. She wears her power suit from work. In my peripheral vision, I see her smile at me as though we’ve spoken and not simply acknowledged one another’s existence with the occasional nod. Fortunately, she must sense that I’m preoccupied and doesn’t attempt small talk.
As soon as the elevator doors shut behind me, I hurry to my apartment and twist the key in the lock. “Hi, honey,” I shout as I enter, letting David know an intruder hasn’t broken in.
Silence responds. I don’t sense my husband’s presence. Instead, there’s a strange energy. An odd smell. Stagnant odors have been released from hidden places, as though a bin of decaying paper was uncovered and left in the center of the room. The shelving unit in the foyer has been rearranged. A glass vase with crystal roses—a wedding present from one of David’s tchotchke-loving aunts—has been put on the same shelf as a wood-framed picture of my mom. The two items do not belong together. The books, too, have been moved. My fiction stack is now squashed by one of David’s law textbooks.
I drop my suitcase in the foyer and walk through to the living/dining area. Legal documents are scattered on the glass table. David’s briefcase is on the floor. It’s the first sign that he might be in the house, though I doubt it. If he were in the bedroom, he’d yell, “Welcome home,” or, at least, “Hello.” Our home is not big enough to hide in.