The Last Good Day (55 page)

He looked down at the shower drain gurgling.

Those first few minutes were still murky to him, as if he’d been underwater. He remembered wrapping her up in several layers of plastic from his dry-cleaned shirts and then stuffing her body halfway into his suit bag so she wouldn’t bleed all over the trunk. Then he’d started to drive down toward the city, trying to figure out what to do. Cars on the opposite side of the road blinked their high beams. Brake lights flared. Another car stopped short in front of him, and when he swerved he heard a heavy thump in the trunk.

He had a fleeting thought about turning himself in to the nearest police station, but what would he say? Yes, Officer, it was an accident. I lured my wife to a motel, making her think she was going to meet her lover there. And then we had a fight in the parking lot, and I punched her in the throat.

They’d think he meant for this to happen. Instead, he found himself driving back toward the house, almost in a fugue state. He cut the motor and sat before the garage for a few minutes, her blood drying on his face and hands. All at once, he felt stained and contaminated. He had to get rid of it all right away before anybody found out. He remembered the garage had its own washing machine and dryer, in case they ever wanted to rent out the upstairs apartment. There was a can of Carbona carpet cleaner on one of the shelves, so he could at least shampoo the rugs from the car’s trunk.

Once inside the garage with the door closed, he opened the trunk, and the stench almost made him vomit. He held his shirttail over his mouth and nose and forced himself to take a good look. He’d dug a deep smile into her throat.

He almost didn’t have to make a conscious decision to get rid of the head separately. It just seemed like the natural next step, as if somehow the choice had already been made for him. At least then the police wouldn’t be able to identify her so easily.

He struggled to get her out of the trunk and then laid her out on the cement floor, worrying that at any minute the kids or Inez the baby-sitter would come out of the house to see what was making all the noise.

He realized he had to clear his mind and not get stampeded by emotions.
You can do this. Yes, you can. Do it for the children. They’re going to need you more than ever.
He put a drop cloth over her face so he wouldn’t have to look at her eyes staring up at him and got to work with the hacksaws he still had from the old house on Sycamore.

He worked right above the drain in the middle of the garage floor. There was a hose hooked up just outside and a bottle of bleach above the washing machine to rinse the blood away afterward. He’d watched enough Court TV and read enough true crime books to know what to do. But after a while, all the cutting and gouging, all the spewing and gaseous bad smells, the sheer physical effort of sawing through bone and containing the quarts of blood spilling across the floor had started to get to him. He decided to forget doing a full-scale dismemberment and just dump the head and body separately into the river, like the drug dealer had done to his girlfriend in the spring. He put the wood protector can in the bag with the head and tied a metal stepladder around the torso to try to weigh it down. The sun would be coming up in a little while, and he figured surely the river would wash them down toward the city before full light.

The drain gave a mighty hollow yawn as he cut the shower off and watched the little whirlpool at his feet. God, who knew the body would backwash on him and end up right next to the train station?

“Daddy?”

A small silhouette appeared through the beveled glass of the shower door.

He shut the water off and wiped his eyes. “Izzy, honey, what is it?”

He opened the door a crack and saw his daughter staring up at him with those big opal eyes, wearing a pink halter top, the quilted denim jacket Sandi bought her last year at The Gap, and a pair of Powerpuff Girls underpants.

“I thought you were getting dressed. I laid the clothes out for you.”

“Mommy dresses me.”

“But Mommy isn’t here anymore.” He looked around for a towel. “Did you forget again?”

The Lip came out. It had been weeks since she’d set foot in the bedroom, Jeff realized. Not since the night she’d surprised Daddy in the living room as he tried to sneak upstairs to get a duffle bag and clean clothes to drive back up to Providence in. Everything had been going all right until that moment. In less than two hours, he’d managed to get the garage mostly cleaned, the bleach in the drain, and the body packed away in the trunk, ready to be thrown in the river. He’d even thought of the McDonald’s along I-95 just outside Providence, where he’d toss the saws he’d used in a Dumpster. All he needed was something to carry the head in and a fresh shirt and pants to wear to his meetings the next day. But then he’d heard that squeak on the stairs and looked over to see Izzy hanging over the edge of the banister, staring right at him.

I want a glass of milk,
she’d said, startling him so badly that he’d actually jumped out of the hallway and tried to hide in the living room.

For the longest three seconds of his life, he’d stood pressed against a wall, footsteps pacing back and forth across his heart, remembering how carefully he’d explained that he’d be away until tomorrow night. Even marking the date on the kitchen calendar so she wouldn’t forget.

Daddy?
he’d heard her creeping along the corridor, stalking him.

Go back to bed, Iz,
he’d called out.
I’m not really here. This is only a dream.

Dutifully, she’d turned and trudged back up the steps without argument, clutching her stuffed Bullwinkle. This is only a dream. Even now, Jeff wasn’t sure what she believed. He only knew that she hadn’t mentioned it since. But two days later he found a light-brownish red smear in the living room where Dylan was playing with his Pokémon toys, right where he’d been standing in the chinos with the bloodsoaked cuffs.

“Come on, baby.” He turned sideways and tried to cover himself with a washcloth. “Give your daddy a chance to get dressed. I’ll come and help you when I’m done.”

She stayed where she was, glaring at him accusingly. “But
where is
Mommy?”

“I already told you, hon. She’s not coming back.”

The bottom lip retracted, and the brown eyes narrowed. And in that instant, a terrible knowledge seemed to pass over the child, like a thunderhead.
She knows.
The water turned freezing cold on his skin. She knows it wasn’t a dream. She knows that I was home when I wasn’t supposed to be. She knows that she’ll never see her mother again. And in just a few years, she’ll understand what it all means.

He stood before his daughter, naked, teeth chattering. All this time, he’d been waiting to feel something real for the girl. For all of Sandi’s prattling on, a part of him had always remained unmoved by his own children, perhaps even a little resentful at all the space they took up. But now it dawned on him that this secret would bond him forever to his daughter. One day Iz could just wake up and destroy his life as easily as she could knock over one of her little brother’s sand castles. She could ruin him. Send him to prison for the rest of his life, or maybe even Death Row.

And as she stood outside the shower stall, Isadora seemed to sense that something was changing. She opened the shower door farther, to look more plainly upon her father’s vulnerability. Jeff reached past her to grab a bigger towel off the side rack.

“Come on, Izzy, what are you doing here?” He wrapped the towel around his middle, finding himself starting to shake uncontrollably.

His whole future rested in a child’s unsteady hands. He saw the corners of her mouth pull down and her eyes well up.
She knows.
He started to reach out to touch the child, barely stifling an urge to beg for mercy on credit.
Please. I’m your father.

But without warning, Isadora suddenly threw her arms around his damp knees, hugged him with the blind fervor of a child who knows this is absolutely all she has left in the world, and then ran skipping out of the room, eager to show her daddy she could finally put her clothes on by herself.

60

DAYBREAK FOUND THE SIDE
of the Schulmans’ garage charred and still smelling from oil smoke. Unable to face it at the moment, Lynn stood by the edge of the swimming pool with a skimming net, watching blackened clumps of dog hair swirl across the aqua-blue surface.

“Don’t touch anything.” Barry stepped over the yellow crime scene tape with two cups of coffee. “I just got off the phone with Allstate. They’re going to send a claims adjuster this afternoon.”

“Can’t they just take the police report?” She lowered the pole.

Harold and Larry Quinn had shown up a half-hour after the firemen put out the garage fire. They’d hauled Stieglitz’s carcass away in a human-size body bag, promising to send someone back today to search for additional evidence on the property.

“Ah, you know you have to argue with these guys about everything,” Barry said, giving her one of the cups. “Especially if this turns out to be arson. They don’t have much faith in small-town cops.”

“I don’t think Harold’s trying to whitewash this, Barry. He’s doing the best he can.”

“Maybe, maybe not. But I also called Sean Heffernan this morning.”

“Your old supervisor from the DA’s office?”

“He said he’d reach out to somebody he knew at the state police, see if they could get more involved. I asked about the FBI, but they’re a little busy these days …”

She folded her hands around the cup. “Do you think it’s smart, going over Harold’s head like that?”

“I don’t see where we have a hell of a lot of choice, do you? They’re not exactly protecting us. And that’s supposed to be their job, last time I looked.”

Sunlight slowly spread through the surrounding woods, ending just before the fence line and the abrupt slope of the hill that dropped down some one hundred fifty yards to the road below.

“We still can’t be sure who did this,” she said.

“You gave the detective that picture of Jeff with the wood protector, didn’t you?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Then I think it’s pretty safe to assume that he’s not going to nominate you for Friendly Neighbor of the Year or anything.”

She buttoned the front of her blue cardigan and shivered in the early chill, noticing how much the dew looked like perspiration on the grass.

“You think I did the wrong thing?”

“I think you did the only thing you could do. You had the picture. She was your friend. You weren’t going to sit on it and pretend you didn’t see it. This is what you could do for her.”

In the sloping distance, he saw the river roll pieces of the sun across its surface like a man studying glass shards in the dark folds of his palm.

“But that doesn’t matter anymore,” he said. “The thing that we have to get our minds around is that we’re on our own.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, no one else is looking out for us. The police. The FBI. School security. The government. We can’t rely on any of them anymore. There’s just us.”

A lone sparrow sang from a high branch of the apple tree. Wind shivered the sumac just over the edge of the hill and blew pieces of yellow crime scene tape across the lawn.

“You’re not making me feel a lot better,” said Lynn.

“I got a gun.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I bought a .38 from Richie. I’ve had it for a few days.”

From the woods, he heard the muffled
pith
of acorns hitting the ground and braced himself for the inevitable tirade. He deserved the worst. He’d been reckless and irresponsible. He’d brought a gun into the house where their children slept. What if Hannah found it? What if Clay found it? He was an asshole, a moral imbecile, a hypocrite. He’d kept the truth from her even after he’d had the audacity to call her a liar. He’d put them all at even greater risk. Didn’t he know how many people got shot with their own guns?

He was prepared to concede all of the above as long as he didn’t have to get rid of it.

But instead she gave him that long cool stare.

“So where is it anyway?” she said. “Don’t you think I ought to know how to use it?”

61

HE ROSE WITH
the sun and was out the door before his father awoke.

The day seemed stunned and not quite ready to begin. The river was dark and moving slowly, as if it were still holding a portion of the night under its surface. The other trailers in the waterfront park were silent but for the chirping of the morning talk shows and the disconsolate stacking of breakfast plates. The dressing around his thumb was starting to turn a dim shade of golden brown. Ignoring the fact that he could no longer bend it, he threw the black gym bag onto the front seat of his Tundra and turned the key in the ignition. The engine coughed and raced, and the gas needle refused to rise above the quarter-tank level, but that was fine. He wasn’t going far.

He decided to take the long way up into the hills, past the first house he grew up in on Bank Street. He remembered sitting on the wicker sofa with the crushed spokes, trying to comfort his mother after JFK’s assassination. Four years old, he must have been. She cried for days afterward. There were newspaper clippings and votive candles everywhere. He’d come running into the bedroom after they said Ruby shot Oswald on the news.
Mom, they killed the bad guy. Everything’s going to be all right.

It took him years to understand why that didn’t cheer her up more.

A few blocks up on Haverstraw Road, he passed the entrance to the old aqueduct and remembered the way his father used to explain how water passed through here on its way from a place called Tear in the Clouds, high in the mountains. A tear becomes a trickle, a trickle becomes a leak, a leak becomes a stream, a stream joins other streams in a brook carried along by the force of gravity. And the brook becomes a rushing river. And then nothing can stop it.

Even though he was loaded up on Vicodin, Advil, and Maxwell House, the world had a kind of stark diamond-hard clarity for the first time in weeks. He could remember the names of birds, trees, addresses on his paper route, golfers he’d caddied for, and boys he’d been friends with in fourth grade. He glanced off to the side and recalled pissing with his brother down into the reservoir, hoping it would eventually come out of a tap into some Manhattanite’s drinking water. As the sun strobed through the pines, it seemed his whole life had been leading to this. Water seeking its own level.