I Love You More: A Novel (18 page)

“Gun?” Bert asked. “You mean I’m supposed to shoot him, not stab him?”

Mama gave Bert the look I’d seen a million times. The stop-it-I-mean-it look.

“Real funny, Bert,” Jewels said. “What I meant was, did you find a good place to hide the gun?”

“There’s a little blue door around back,” Bert said. “It leads to the crawl space under the house. Immediately to your left, there’s a shelf with paint cans and such on it. I figure that’s safer than hiding it somewhere outside.”

“It wasn’t locked?” Jewels asked.

“No. It doesn’t have a lock. It’s just a door.”

“And what do you do with the gun after you—uh—shoot him, Bert?” Jewels asked.

“I wipe it down, put it in the garbage bag and then the fanny pack, take it with me, and once I get on the ferry, throw it in the ocean, when I’m sure no one is looking of course. Then I drive to Wildacres.”

Jewels held out her glass for more wine. “Bert, I want you to know how much I appreciate you doing this for us.”

By
this
Jewels obviously meant
kill Daddy
.

It felt like my heart dropped to my belly button. A vision of my future flashed before me. The police would arrest Mama. I’d be shipped off to God knows where, some foster home somewhere. I
had
to stop them. But how?

“I had no idea my boss was planning to have a hysterectomy,” Jewels continued as Bert refilled her wineglass. “And that she’d tell me to go to this silly charrette in her place. Are you sure you’re okay with it, Bert? I wish we could change the date, but everything’s set. Diana rented the beach house months ago.”

“I’m fine with it, Jewels,” Bert said. “Don’t worry. I’ve got it.”

“Well, thank you, Bert,” Jewels said. “And remember, we all are doing this thing, not just you, Bert.” She paused. “Okay, let’s go
through it one more time from the beginning, this time ensuring we’ve covered every single, small detail. Diana?”

My stomach was churning. I felt faint and nauseous. I managed to get up and walk away. I didn’t get very far before I vomited, but it was far enough that I didn’t think they could hear or see me. By the time I got back, they were toasting again. I’d missed the “details” part, but at that point what did it matter? The future was set to fall like dominoes. I kept hoping it was all a bad dream, that something would go wrong and Bert wouldn’t kill Daddy. Maybe she would run out of gas, or get in an accident and go to the hospital. Or die. I actually started wishing that Bert would die, or that Jewels’s airplane would crash. Surely if one of the two of them were fatally injured, Mama would snap out of her alien-inhabited trance.

I heard Jewels talking again in her serious, bossy tone.

“We can’t communicate after it’s done,” she was saying. “Murder investigations can take a while. We
cannot
in any way indicate that we know one another. They
will
find out about us. That’s why Bert and I have to come forward first. It will look suspicious if we don’t report Oliver missing. When they tell us about one another, we act the scorned but devastated wives. We say we loved our husband. We had no idea who he really was. We just act dumb. Any questions?”

That should be easy. They were being dumb
.

“What about our hair?” Bert asked.

“What about it?” Jewels asked.

“Should we dye it back, change our styles? I mean, won’t our looking so alike cause suspicion?”

“I think it’ll look more suspicious if we dye it back now, so close to the murder,” Jewels said. “And I’m thinking it might work in our favor.”

“I don’t understand,” Bert said.

“Don’t you see?” Jewels said. “It’s brilliant, actually. The police
will think we’d never be stupid enough to dye our hair the exact same color if we were planning to kill our husband. Besides, it’ll fuck with their heads.”

Mama and Bert nodded like they were those bobbing-head dolls weird people put on the dash of their cars.

“Diana,” Jewels continued, “it will be hardest on you. They
will
suspect you. They
will
interrogate you, but it
will
be okay. I promise. You just need to stick to the story, got it? And put on your charm.”

It would be okay? Were they mental?

“Got it,” Mama said. She actually sounded scared, which was good. Maybe she’d chicken out.

“There won’t be any evidence, Diana,” Jewels said. “You won’t have pulled the trigger.”

Mama started crying. Then Bert did too; she pulled a white candle from her tote bag. I’d never seen her bring a candle before. She lit it and started chanting something. A hymn? Prayer? The three of them held hands, and Mama and Jewels started chanting too. I was stunned. They really
had
gone crazy. I mean, who does that? Certainly not the Mama I knew. The one time I did a séance with Betsy Porter, this older girl who used to live down the street, I thought Mama’s head was going to pop off she got so mad. She even called Betsy’s mom.

They stopped.

“Remember,” Jewels said. “We’ll meet right here, exactly one year from the day Oliver takes his last breath, same time, same spot.”

“Noon, July third,” Bert said with a nod.

“Noon, July third,” Mama said.

Then they packed up their stuff and walked off, each in a different direction like they were shoots of a firework.

I waited for a while. I thought and thought, and thought more. Then I prayed (inside myself)—which I usually only did when I was sick or wanted something—for God to give me a sign. I
must have sat there like that for a long time, but it seemed like only minutes. At some point I felt raindrops, and then the sun was setting. The sky had turned pale pink. Tomorrow would be a sailors’ delight day for some, but not for me. My life as I knew it was about to change. I noticed that the woods were eerily quiet. The birds weren’t singing. There was no buzz of people in the distance. No splash of boats on the water. No smell of barbecue. It was like the whole world had died.

I rose, shivered, brushed the twigs and dirt from the seat of my shorts, stretched my damp, scrunched-up T-shirt back over my hips, zipped up my hoodie (I had no idea when I’d put it on), redid my ponytail, and walked to the bus stop, thinking all the while that unless I did something, one week from that day Daddy would be dead.

We felt the emptiness the moment we walked away from our private clearing. It would be the last time the three of us saw one another for one long year. It rained on the way home. In our separate vehicles, we found ourselves lost inside the sound of the windshield wipers. Swish, swoosh, swish, swoosh. None of us remembered watching the road or even driving. We were consumed with thoughts of what was to come. We felt the inevitability of it; we’d committed and there was no going back. Somewhere along the way, time had begun running the show. Choice had been stripped from us, like patches from a soldier’s jacket.

This was the way the murder was
supposed
to go.

Sometime between when they arrived at the beach house and the murder, Diana was to hide Oliver’s gun behind the little blue door that led to the crawl space under the house. While seducing Oliver the second night would be a plus, she was definitely to do so the last night. That way she would ensure her scent and his lust blinded him. At exactly five o’clock the night before the murder, she was to call Jewels and verify we were still on. In the meantime, Bert was to wear a wig and a baseball hat just in case, stick a bag of rocks in her trunk, drive to Cooper’s Island in the early-morning hours, park somewhere far enough away to avoid suspicion, jog
to the beach house, retrieve the gun from its hiding place in the crawl space, put on her gloves, drape herself in the garbage bag she’d brought along in her fanny pack, and kill Oliver. When she was certain he was dead, she was to turn the garbage bag inside out, wrap it around the gun, put the gun, gloves, and rocks in the fanny pack, jog back to the car, dispose of the fanny pack when she was on the ferry, and then drive to her writing retreat. Diana was to return from her swim and, finding Oliver dead, call 911.

Yes, that was the way the murder was
supposed
to go.

We had discussed all the things that could go wrong over and over again. What if Oliver didn’t get out of bed to watch Diana swim? What if someone saw Bert hanging around the house? Picasso was
not
an early riser, especially at the beach. Diana always woke her after she got back from her morning swim, but what if she got up uncharacteristically early? What if our research wasn’t accurate, and the blood spray wasn’t within the calculated distance? The garbage bag was a precaution, but what if blood did get on it or Bert and was transferred onto the steering wheel, seat, trunk? What if someone saw Bert throw the fanny pack into the ocean?

“None of this is going to happen,” Jewels said more than once. “Everything is going to go smoothly as long as we
stick to the plan
.”

But, as we were to learn, no matter how detailed, how considered, how seemingly impregnable our plan had been, life has a way of making its own plans.

Mama spent most of the next day asleep in her room. I spent most of the day looking up words and working up my nerve. I’d pretty much run the gamut on passive-aggressive approaches to the situation and none of it had even close to worked. My only hope at that point was to confront her.

At around four o’clock in the afternoon, I heard Mama get up and shuffle down the stairs. Then I heard her rooting around in the kitchen. I took a deep breath, closed my wordbook, opened the door to my room, walked into the hallway, down the stairs, through the living and dining rooms, sat at the counter, and stared at her. She was standing on the other side browsing through her catchall book, which pretty much holds Mama’s entire life, like, for instance, her to-do lists, recipes, and all sorts of clippings. I sat there for at least five minutes before she realized I was there. When she finally looked up, she jumped with surprise.

“Picasso,” she said. “You scared me.”

“Sorry,” I said.

She started taking vegetables out of the refrigerator.

“What’re you making?” I asked.

“Paella and a summer salad,” she said.

“Is Daddy coming home?” Daddy loved paella.

“Daddy always comes home on Thursdays. You know that.”

I did know that, but how else was I going to ease into the Kill Daddy conversation. I watched her chop and prepare; watching Mama’s hands while she cooks is one of my favorite things in the world to do—behind spelling and word journaling.

After a while, not knowing what else to do, since Mama was in her “zone” and I still hadn’t come up with a plan to approach Kill Daddy, I stood on the rung of my stool, reached over the counter, grabbed the catchall book, opened it, and as if the inside spine had recently been smashed down, it settled on a page in the R section. And there it was. Mama must have scribbled the first part of the note when she was talking to Jewels that day, “noon, July 3rd, Rainy Cove Park, same spot,” but the last part had obviously been added later because it was written in a different color pen, “one year.” Even though I was still nervous about bringing up Kill Daddy, I decided my turning to that very page in the catchall book had to be a sign, and since bad things can happen if you ignore signs, because signs are messages to keep you on your right path in life, I knew I had to say something. But what? Wording was extremely important. What could I say that might trick Mama into talking? And then it came to me.

“We’ll be at the beach on July third.”

Either Mama hadn’t heard me, which could easily have been the case since that happens a lot when she’s lost in thought, and especially had been happening a lot around then, or she was ignoring me, which also could easily be the case. So I said it again, louder.

Mama looked up from her vegetable chopping, put down the knife, and wiped her hands on her pj bottoms. “What do you mean?” She attempted a look of confusion.

I turned the book toward her and pointed. “This note says you’re meeting someone at Rainy Cove Park on July third, but you’ll be at the beach with Daddy and me on July third.”