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It took me a minute to understand who it was.
“Andy.”
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s me.”
I blinked slowly, then I pushed back the blankets and got out of bed. I walked over to the windows and looked outside. It was snowing. Everything was quiet.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“At the Barretts’ house. The old one near Lover’s Lane.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I shot him, Lee. I killed Simon Jordan. I didn’t plan to, but I did.”
My grip tightened on the phone. The world came into focus quickly. “Tell me what happened.” Andy’s voice, which had seemed like it was coming from very far away, was suddenly very loud.
“He killed Nina. He killed our girl. And I couldn’t let him walk away.”
I closed my eyes. I kept the phone pressed to my ear with my left hand, and my right hand cradled my own right cheek, as if I could hold myself together that way. Andy was still talking.
“I’m going to have to leave you and Grace. I’m going to be in prison for a very long time. I’m not going to be there for you. Fuck, Lee. I screwed up so bad.”
I’d known Nina was gone, but it was different hearing it from Andy. It was like I had one small little ember of hope, still burning somewhere deep inside, and with his words that hope went out. I opened my eyes. I expected a flood of grief to come, but it didn’t. Everything was too urgent. My gaze fell on the coffee table and I saw Andy’s phone sitting there, the screen dark.
“Has anyone seen you?”
“There’s no one here. The house is empty.”
“And... how did you... did you drive? Did the press see you leave here?” I went back to the window, moved the drapes, and peered outside. I couldn’t see any lights at the end of the driveway. Surely they would all have left, found somewhere warm to spend the night?
“I hiked to the Jordans’ place. Simon was running away. I followed him up the trail. Then I carried him back down. It took me... Jesus... I don’t know how long. But no one saw me.”
Relief washed over me. “Okay. Then you listen to me, Andy. No one is ever going to know about this except you and me. What time is it?” I pulled the phone away from my ear just long enough to check. It was already after 7:00 A.M. How had I slept so long? “No one knows you left the house. Your phone is here. You’ve been here with me all night, okay? I’m going to get you and bring you home, and you’re going to shower and we’ll burn your clothes in the big barrel and we’ll never talk about this again, okay?”
“It won’t work.” He was calmer now. Less frenetic. “I carried Simon down the mountain. I dumped his bag in the woods. I washed away the blood from the hut floor, but it’s not enough. I thought about dropping his body in a crevasse, like I did with his bags, but dogs would find him. I’ve been carrying him, and his blood... it’s all over me. By now my DNA must be all over him. The sun will be up soon enough. There’s no way I can get home without someone seeing me. And when they find his body they’ll test everything. I’m going to be the obvious suspect. We both are. They’ll ask us both for a DNA test. You know they will. The best we can hope is that you stay out of it. I shouldn’t have even called you. I just wanted you to know. To hear it from me.” He spoke with an it’s-all-over tone. Like everything was past and decided. Like he was slipping away from me.
“No!” It was almost a shout. “No, Andy. You listen to me, okay? You are not leaving me, and you are not leaving Grace. Not without a fight. Not without a fight every goddamn step of the way, okay?”
“I don’t know what—”
I cut across him. “We just need to think. We need to take a minute and think.” We were quiet for a while. Time went by. My thoughts were slippery. They slid by too fast for me to make sense of them. I clenched my eyes shut again and forced myself to concentrate.
“Okay, this is what we’re going to do. You’re going to stay exactly where you are. Except... no. I want you to search the Barretts’ house for plastic garbage bags. You need to wrap Simon’s body, and you need to clean up any mess you’ve made there. You don’t want anyone to know that you’ve been in the house. When you’ve done that, stay hidden until I get there.”
“No, Lee. If you come here then you’re a part of this, right? We can’t both go to prison. We have to think about Grace.”
“No one’s going to prison, Andy. Simon killed our daughter. He’s not going to destroy our family entirely. We’re not going to let that happen. Mehuron’s opens in less than an hour. I’m going to go there first and pick up some groceries and make sure I’m seen. And on the way back I’m going to come to you. Just do everything I asked you to, and be ready.” I ended the call. I didn’t want Andy to argue with me, and the call had already gone on too long. If anyone looked at my call records, would a phone call from a private house in Waitsfield be suspicious? I’d have to come up with some sort of explanation for it, if I was ever asked. You don’t speak for five minutes to a wrong number.
I put my phone in my pocket and picked Andy’s up. I took it up to our bedroom and sat on our bed. I couldn’t leave yet. The supermarket wouldn’t open for another forty minutes. I plugged Andy’s phone in at his bedside table, turned on the lamp, and woke his screen. I entered his password—he uses the same one for everything—and started going through his email. He had two text messages from Craig; encouraging words and photos of Grace. I texted Craig back, saying thanks and telling him that we’d be over to see Grace later in the day. Then I went through Andy’s work emails. There were three more job cancellations, and an invoice from a supplier. I wrote an email from Andy to the cancellations, just a simple “no problem, I understand, and if your circumstances change please get in touch.” I sent the invoice from Andy’s email to my email address, because that’s what he would usually do. I pay his invoices and I do his books. After that I spent twenty minutes scrolling through YouTube clips of sports, and various landscaping gurus showing their latest work—basically whatever the algorithm served up. Then I put Andy’s phone down and turned on our TV. I didn’t know if police could tell if something had played on your TV screen or not, but I figured it was possible, at least, with smart TVs. I found a game and let it play. I changed my clothes, washed my face, and went back downstairs, where I left my own phone on the kitchen table.
I took my car. Andy’s truck would have been better, but I never drove it, and I had to do everything the way I usually would. Before I left the house I took an old tarp from the barn and laid it out in my trunk. There was one car at the gate, and by the time I was leaving, a second had arrived. I drove to Mehuron’s and saw through my rearview mirror that one of the cars—a red Jeep Renegade—was trailing me. They made no attempt to hide the fact that they were following me. They drove so close behind me that I could make out the features of the man in the driver’s seat. He was in his forties, a little overweight, and wearing a hat and a scraggly beard and a bright orange jacket. I drove on like I didn’t see him, but when I got to the parking lot at Mehuron’s I took a spot on the far left of the building. I kept everything slow and casual when I got out of the car. When I went into the store, I got a cart and started down the first aisle. There were people there who knew me. Sarah Butler from the post office and Billy Ware who teaches at the school. Billy came over to say hello. He squeezed my hand and said how sorry he was. Sarah went red and muttered something under her breath, then ran away down the aisle. I guess she’s more of a Facebook user than Billy, or maybe she’s just more gullible. I loaded up the cart with all sorts of stuff. A carton of sparkling water. Three big boxes of cereal. I added three kinds of jam and a cantaloupe. I could see Orange Jacket lurking out of the corner of my eye, but I never looked directly at him. I filled up my cart quickly and then I left it in one place, as if it was too awkward to move. I walked down the aisle, trying hard to keep my body language casual, browsing as if I had all the time in the world. I picked up two cans of chickpeas and jar of pesto. I wandered back to my cart and piled the cans and jar on top of the other food. Then I wandered away again. I picked up a jar of capers, got to the end of the aisle, and kept going. As soon as I was around the corner I started jogging. I pushed through the plastic curtain that separated the supermarket from the storage warehouse at the back, and then I started running. At the back of the warehouse I nearly ran into Paul Thomas, who was signing for a delivery. I knew Paul. He’d worked for Mehuron’s for ten years.
“Sorry,” I gasped.
“No trouble, Leanne,” he said. He looked at me curiously but passed no other comment as I walked quickly around him and outside. I ran around the side of the building, climbed into my car, and drove away. There was no sign of Orange Jacket. I drove fast, took a turn, then another and another, and then I pulled in at the side of the road to make sure that I really had lost him. A minute passed. I drove on in the direction of Lover’s Lane. I knew the house, kind of. It was an old one, owned by an older couple who were having trouble maintaining it. They’d hired Andy once to do some yard work, but that was years ago now. It was still snowing, and the snow was already inches thick on the roadway, but my car had snow tires and I was used to the conditions. The Barretts’ house was set back off the road, at the end of a winding driveway. I let out a long breath once I made it around the first corner of that drive and my car was hidden from the road by the trees. The house was as I remembered it. It was a hundred-year-old farmhouse, with stone chimneys at either end. The garden was overgrown and tangled and the paint on the walls was peeling a little. In the gloom of the day the place looked unloved. How long had it been since the Barretts had visited? How long until they came again?
I got out of the car and walked around to the back. Andy was there, standing under the covered porch. He looked like a stranger. Older, exhausted, broken. There was a smear of mud on his face, or maybe... it was dark. Maybe it was dried blood. He saw me coming and he didn’t move. There was no relief in his eyes. All I saw there was dread and despair.
