In the end we went with duct tape.
I dragged a chair into the laundry room, forced her to sit on it, and went to work on her wrists. Then her ankles, securing them with loop after loop of tape to the legs of the chair. Before slapping a strip over her mouth, I asked, “What are you doing here? Ethan said you were at the lake.”
I didn’t expect her to answer. But her face crumpled. “I play tennis on Wednesdays. Every Wednesday morning, for years now. I’ve told him a million times. He never remembers.” Tears spilled from her eyes.
And there it was, in twenty words, a portrait of a marriage. Of the toll that decades of jealousy and resentment can take. It occurred to me that she had retched, but she had not actually cried at the sight of his body. What had broken her, what had brought her to tears, was the admission that he didn’t care where she was on a Wednesday morning. Or any other morning, presumably, and that he hadn’t for years. Had she heard his dying words? About Sadie Rawson being the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen? For a moment, just a moment, my heart broke for her.
But the drumbeat was back: Get out of here.
“Are you expecting any visitors today? Betsy?”
She had her eyes shut and her head down.
“Betsy, I’m sorry, so sorry. You can’t imagine how sorry. But this is important. When will someone come looking for you or Ethan?”
“I don’t know,” she sobbed. “I was going to drive up to the lake after I showered.”
“When does your housekeeper come?”
No answer.
“Betsy!” I lifted her chin. “Do you have a regular cleaning lady?”
She sniffled. “Thursdays.”
“So tomorrow? Are you sure? Is she reliable?”
Betsy nodded.
That meant I had, maybe, eighteen hours before the body was discovered. I wiped Betsy’s face with a tissue and forced her to swallow a sip of water. Covered her bare legs and shoulders with towels I found in the dryer, so she wouldn’t get chilled. I felt awful leaving her there, far guiltier than I did about having just shot her husband. But what choice was there? I taped her mouth shut and pulled the laundry-room door closed behind me. I wedged another chair under the doorknob, so it would be tough to open from the inside, even should she manage to wriggle free.
Ethan Sinclare’s body was sprawled grotesquely across the tiles. I stepped around it in as wide a circle as possible. Turned off the lights. Wiped clean the switch. Stole an Atlanta Braves cap from the hall closet and tucked my hair beneath, hid my eyes behind sunglasses. My head was down and I was thinking fast as I strode up the street.
There was a witness. Everything had changed. I would have to run.
? ? ?
THE FACTS, AS I saw them, were as follows: I had shot and killed a man.
Murdered him.
He had deserved it. What I had done to Ethan Sinclare represented a pure, shining biblical justice. An eye for an eye. Unfortunately, that didn’t make it legal.
I could turn around, give myself up, argue that the shooting had been self-defense. But it hadn’t been, not really. I had created this situation all by myself.
I had thought to swipe Ethan’s wallet and maybe a knickknack or two. Police would reasonably surmise that an intruder had broken in, that Ethan had come home and surprised him, and that a struggle had ensued. The random-burglar theory. It had the benefit of simplicity. And I liked the parallels to thirty-four years ago. Another kitchen, another gun, another set of police assumptions about a burglary gone wrong. The investigation into Ethan’s death would play out in similar fashion to the investigation that he himself had set in motion, back in 1979, back in the house on Eulalia Road.
It was perfect. The very definition of justice.
But Betsy Sinclare had upended this plan. As soon as she was set free—whether that happened in the next hour or not until tomorrow and the arrival of her housekeeper—she would finger me. She would describe how she had watched Caroline Cashion slaughter her husband. Within minutes, my name would be all over CNN. There would be a manhunt, for Christ’s sake.
Then it would all unravel. They would trace the gun. They would discover I had bribed a stranger in a parking lot to illegally purchase it for me. They would match the bullets in Ethan’s chest to my revolver. God, the irony. I would be charged with homicide. I was no expert on Georgia sentencing guidelines, but it was a safe bet that the pre-meditated murder of a prominent local attorney wouldn’t be looked on kindly.
I didn’t want to go to prison.
That wasn’t the way this was supposed to end.
If you were suddenly a fugitive, where would you go?
? ? ?
THE TRADITIONAL ANSWER to that question is Mexico. Run for the border.
But in an astonishing stroke of bad luck, I had already told everyone to look for me there. I had a plane ticket booked, to Cabo San Lucas, leaving from Washington Dulles on Friday morning. I’d given my name and credit-card information to a hotel there, a lovely hotel on the beach, where I’d been very much looking forward to staying. I was telling the truth when I said I was planning quality time with a pitcher of margaritas. When I’d made the reservations, my instinct had been that however things turned out with Sinclare, I would need time on my own to calm down. To wait things out. Now those reservations guaranteed that every passport officer south of the Rio Grande would be on the lookout for me. Mexico, alas, was out.