“I don’t expect you to do the killing for me.”
“No, I know. It’s just that, with me helping you, we can greatly reduce the chances of getting caught. That’s the hardest part. Committing the crime is easy. People do that all the time. But most people don’t get away with it.”
“So how do we get away with it?”
“The way to commit murder and not get caught is to hide the body so well that no one will ever find it. If there was never a murder, then there can’t be a murderer. But there are many ways to hide a body. You can leave a body out in the open but make it look like the opposite of what happened actually happened. That’s what needs to happen with Miranda, because if she goes missing the police will keep looking until they find her. When the police look at her body it needs to tell a story that has nothing to do with you. It needs to lead them down a road where you’ll never be. I have a question for you. How do you feel about Brad Daggett?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you have an opinion on whether he should live or die?”
“I do have an opinion. I want him to die.”
“Good,” she said. “That’s going to make this a whole lot easier.”
CHAPTER 6
LILY
When Chet came back out of the apartment and joined me in the yard, I was glad that he had put a shirt on underneath his overalls. He still smelled bad, like apple cider that had turned sour. I told him that I had found something in the meadow on the other side of the woods and needed his help. I told him that I would have asked my father but he was busy. Chet grunted in solidarity, as though he knew that my parents were reuniting in their bedroom.
We entered the narrow band of pine forest that separated my parents’ property from the derelict property next door. “Have you been over to the meadow?” I asked. He was behind me, stumbling slightly, holding up a forearm, as though branches might suddenly lash at his face.
“I took a walk down to the old railway tracks when I first got here,” he said. The tracks were in the opposite direction of where we were going.
“The meadow’s cool,” I said. “It’s behind an old farm that no one lives in anymore. I go there all the time.”
“How far is it?”
“Just through the woods here.” We clambered over the toppled stone wall that lined the edge of the woods. A ghostly light from the low sun turned the meadow’s scattered wildflowers into electric colors. The sky above was transforming from pink to dark purple.
“Beautiful,” Chet said, and I felt a brief, unreasonable annoyance that he was sharing my meadow.
“Over here.” I began to walk toward the well.
“You, too. You’re beautiful, too.”
I forced myself to turn and look at him.
“Sorry,” he said. “I told myself . . . But, God, just look at you. You don’t even know how beautiful you are, do you, little Lil? You don’t mind, do you? Just if I look.” He swayed a little, one hand rubbing at his unruly beard.
“It’s okay, but I need you to help me first. There’s an old well and there’s something down there attached to a rope and I can’t pull it up.”
“Cool. Let’s go take a look. How’d you find a well out here?”
I ignored his question and led him across the meadow. I’d known about the well for years. It wasn’t too deep. With a flashlight you could see the bottom, nothing down there but pieces of rock, and sometimes standing water if it had rained. I wasn’t even sure it was initially a well, so much as a deep hole, maybe the beginning of a well that had failed. I had come across it when I was probably nine years old, running back and forth across the meadow. One of my footfalls had made a hollow, wooden sound and I pulled away dry, yellow weeds to discover the well cover, a rotted wooden square that looked like it had been put there just to keep someone like me from falling in. It barely covered the rectangular well hole and was easily pulled off. The sides of the well were lined with layered rock. I didn’t have a flashlight with me then, so I dropped rocks down to judge its depth. They hit something solid after only a second or so, so I knew it wasn’t that deep. At the time, I thought maybe it was a hiding place for treasure, or a clue to a larger mystery. I raced back to get a flashlight, but I ended up disappointed. The well hole was just that, a hole in the ground, collapsing in on itself.
When I showed Chet the well, he said, “Hey, look at that. When did you find this?”