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Chapter Thirteen
Sean Grant stands atthe living room window, staring out at the street. It’s almost eleven o’clock and Olivia is already in bed. A large quarter moon sits high and yellow in the sky. Clear, focused, ineffably beautiful. As if it’s been photoshopped, he thinks. Picture perfect.
Unlike everything else in his life.
He does a quick scan of the neighboring houses. It’s so quiet now. Not that it’s ever all that noisy, which is interesting when you count the number of children who live in the small enclave: the two Wilson boys, the two McKay kids, his own three. And now Julia Fisher’s grandson, who seems to have taken up permanent residence, although technically he’d qualify as a young adult.
The kid strikes Sean as a troublemaker. What was he doing earlier with that sexy little number from across the street? Sean had been here at the window and he’d witnessed their introductions, then watched the boy take the bags of groceries she was holding and carry them into her house. He’d waited to see him come out again, but after an hour, the kid still hadn’t emerged. And then Olivia came home from work, full of questions about his latest round of interviews, and Sean had been forced to abandon his watch.
The kid is definitely playing with fire, Sean decides now, watching hordes of mindless insects buzzing around the lights of the streetlamps. Not the smartest thing in the world to mess around with the wife of an army vet. If the boy isn’t careful, he’s liable to get himself shot.
A white Lexus is parked in the Youngs’ driveway, which means that Lisa—he’s pretty sure that’s the woman’s name—is visiting. Again. She’s there so often, she might as well move in.Nice that she gets on so well with her daughter-in-law,Sean thinks, wandering into the kitchen and removing the bottle of vodka from the freezer, pouring himself a glass, and downing it in one long, satisfying sip.
He needs to forget all about this miserable day, the string of nonexistent interviews with the company’s top honchos he pretended to go on, his subsequent lies to Olivia, making it sound as if the job at Advert-X was all but in the bag.
Talk about playing with fire! What the hell is he doing?
He’s been praying for a miracle, that’s what, hoping to have secured another job by now. Or at least a decent prospect. Something tangible. Something real.Anything.
“Looks like the job at Advert-X fell through,” he could tell his wife then. “But hey, something else has come up….”
At least the lies have forced him to start taking better care of himself, to start shaving every day, to put on some clean clothes. So that’s something, he tells himself, trying not to picture that ridiculous linen jacket accumulating wrinkles in the trunk of his car, because there’s no way he can risk bringing it inside the house.
“Here’s to me,” he says, raising his glass in a mock toast. How long does he think he can keep this up? How soon before his lies catch up to him, before Olivia gets wise to his deceit?
What will she do then? Cry? Definitely. Hurl well-deserved obscenities at him? Probably. Pack up the kids and leave? What the hell would he do then?
He pictures the look of disbelief on her pretty face, watching it morph into anger, and then worse—oh, so much worse—into pity.
I’d rather be dead than see that look,he thinks.
The thought triggers spasms of alarm throughout his body. Although, if he’s being honest, Sean has to admit this isn’t the first time such thoughts have popped into his head. What good is he after all? What purpose is he serving, now that it doesn’t look as if he’ll be “bringing home the bacon” anytime soon? Olivia certainly doesn’t need him. She’s proven that. He can no longer provide for her. And his kids don’t need him, other than to pick them up from school. Hell, the insurance money they’d collect from his death would be more than enough to pay for a chauffeur.
Does his insurance policy cover death by suicide? he wonders, warming to the idea of his death as he downs another glass of vodka. If it doesn’t, he’d just have to figure out a way to make said suicide look like an accident. He returns the bottle to the freezer before the urge hits to have another. The bottle is edging close to empty.I notice we’re running low on vodka,he can hear Olivia say, and he laughs, although the laugh is joyless, a hollow bark that scratches at the air like the claws of a cat.
He grabs his laptop from where it’s charging on the kitchen counter and opens it, typing inways to commit suicide that don’t look like suicide.Immediately, the screen fills with information and suggestions, some straightforward, others pretty far out there. The more practical include drowning, which wouldn’t be difficult to accomplish, considering that he lives in Florida and the ocean is only minutes away. The fact that he’s an accomplished swimmer means relatively little, given the ocean’s strength and unpredictability. Still, he’s not sure his survival instinct wouldn’t kick in at the last minute. He suspects it’s not that easy to purposely drown.
There are also snake and spider bites to consider, along with being eaten by an alligator, although none of these strikes Sean as a particularly pleasant way to go. He’s always been terrified of snakes, wouldn’t know a poisonous spider from its harmless relation, and short of throwing himself into the Everglades, he imagines that the chances of being eaten by an alligator are slim to none.
Poisonous plants are offered as another option. But Sean knows next to nothing about plants in general, and despite the plethora of recipes he finds for concocting lethal soups and salads, he’s come to despise any form of meal preparation in these prolonged months of forced unemployment. Besides, poisoning suggests intense stomach pain, and there’s no guarantee that, before dying, he might not spend endless hours throwing up, a thought even worse than death.
There are also recipes for making deadly hydrogen sulfide gas by mixing toilet cleaner with pesticide, recipes for cyanide poisoning, and suggestions for concocting a deadly combination of ricin and castor oil, all of which seem needlessly time-consuming and complicated. But wait—there’s a book that makes all this easier to navigate:Suicide for Dummies.
Perfect,Sean thinks, laughing and closing the laptop.Probably easier to just hire a hit man to murder me,he decides, then laughs again, knowing he has no money to hire a hit man. Maybe his would-be killer would consider a designer jacket instead?
He’s suddenly reminded of a wild story he read online a few years back. A man, right here in Palm Beach Gardens, was discovered lying dead by the side of PGA Boulevard at around six o’clock one morning, a bullet in his chest. He’d been on his way to meet friends for their regular morning cup of coffee, and when he didn’t show, the police were called and his body was quickly discovered. His wallet was missing, indicating he’d been killed during the commission of a robbery.
But it eventually came to light that the man had, in fact, committed suicide by fastening a gun to a helium-filled balloon, then shooting himself in the heart, the balloon carrying the weapon off into the sky as the man dropped lifeless to the ground. Apparently, he’d gotten the idea from watching an old episode ofCSI: Miami.
Ingenious,Sean thinks, although it’s unlikely the trick would fool anyone twice. Hell, it hadn’t even fooled them once!
Besides, he doesn’t own a gun.
Not that it would be difficult to buy one. He’d have no trouble passing the background check, having no criminal record and no history of mental illness. And this is Florida, after all, where guns are as accessible as gummy bears. He reopens his computer, types inguns,and immediately finds his screen flooded with sites to visit. “Whoa,” he says, his mind unable to absorb so many options.
Not that he could afford most of the weapons he sees on display. Shit—he’d had no idea how much some of these things cost.
Although most are considerably cheaper than that stupid jacket he bought, he thinks, and almost laughs.
