“What?”
“I’ll kill her, Miranda. It will be easy. She’s sneaking up here to see you. No one knows she’s involved in this. She told me. I’ll take you to the house. You go in the front door and I’ll go around and come in the back. Keep talking to her and I’ll sneak up and hit her with something. I can bury her in the yard.”
“You’d do that for me,” I said.
“I killed your husband for you, Miranda. I love you. Of course I’d kill this bitch.”
It made perfect sense. I knew that it was the only way out. If Lily knew everything, then she needed to die. But it worried me. “Won’t she expect that?” I said, speaking my thoughts aloud. “It’s so risky for her to come up here to meet with me—”
“She’s not coming up to meet with you. She’s coming up here to kill you. She told me that.”
“That’s what I mean. How could she be so sure that she could convince you to do this for her. She just met you. She did just meet you, right?”
“Look. She was convincing. She told me it was my only way out—that you were going to throw me under the bus, that when the police came it was going to be my word against yours and there wasn’t going to be any proof that you conspired to murder your husband. You could say that I was deranged, that I became obsessed with you. No one, besides me, could say otherwise.”
This was, of course, my plan if Brad was arrested for killing my husband. I would say that we’d gotten physical once, in a moment of weakness for me, but that there had never been any talk about killing Ted. Now that I think of it, I did mention to Brad Daggett that I was going down to Florida for a long weekend. He must have thought . . . He must have thought I was telling him because I wanted . . . Oh my God. They might suspect me, but there was no way they could convict me. “And you believed all this shit she told you?” I said to Brad, a look of disgust on my face.
“No, I don’t. I believe you, but I told her that I’d help her out. I pretended to believe her. We’re in trouble, Miranda. She knows everything.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll meet her at the house, and you’ll kill her. It will all work out. It needs to be done.”
We talked some more that night, but Brad was drunk, and starting to not make sense, and he needed to sleep. I was paying the price for enlisting a gutless alcoholic to help me kill my husband. Before I left, about an hour before dawn, I told him that he should disappear the following day. Take a drive up the coast and not answer his phone. “You’re not in any condition yet to be questioned by the police,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
“This is going to turn out fine. They might suspect us, but they won’t catch us. We knew this all along.”
“I know.”
“If you wanted to, baby, you could leave after tomorrow night. Skip town. Skip the country. Go down to the islands, and I’ll come and find you when this is all over.”
“They’d know it was me.”
“They would, but they wouldn’t be able to find you. I could give you money to run with, and I’d meet you later, bring more money. You’d be free.”
“What about my kids?” he said, his voice cracking. He raised his big fat head toward me, and I saw that his eyes were genuinely wet. We’d never talked about his kids. Not even once.
“Shh,” I said. “Let’s not talk about it now. You need to get somewhere and sleep, and we can talk about this tomorrow night. Remember: stay away from your house and off your phone. Drive somewhere in your truck and sleep there, okay? Just in case the cops come early in the morning. I’ll meet you in Portsmouth outside that restaurant that Ted and you and I went to way back when. Okay? At nine at night.”