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The sound she made caused my mouth to quirk.
I could tell with one statement how she felt about the man.
He sounded like a real winner.
And, in that moment, I made a rash decision that I hoped didn’t bite me in the ass.
“You promise, cross your heart and hope to die, stick a thousand needles in your eye, that you’ll never, ever, ever mention me again after this day?” I asked.
She leaned forward, her eyes huge, as she said, “I promise. Swear to God, I won’t.”
I searched her face. Made sure that I let her see the consequences that would befall her if she ever snitched and then took a deep breath.
“You know what lye is?”
She blinked. “Like lye the soap?”
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “The shit that you get when you make your own soap. They used to use it exclusively in the pioneer days. Now the preppers are using it, too, going back to the old ways. You need seventy-five pounds of it. Once you have it, heat it up to three hundred degrees and then submerge the body. Leave the body in it for three hours. It’ll completely dissolve it in that time.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Of course, you’re going to have to find a way to get the body into the solution. That’s going to be the hard part. My suggestion for that is to go to a trades day and get one of those massive fuckin’ cauldrons that are made out of cast iron. Depending on the size of this senator, you can use that. Start a big bonfire, then suspend it from one of those large metal triangles. I’d suggest going to a metal fabrication place and having them make you a stand. Once you’re done, I’d plant some fuckin’ pansies in it.”
She shook her head in surprise. “How do I get the body to where I want it?”
I smiled.
Then I gave her step-by-step instructions for how to lure the senator to where she wanted him, how to kill him without drawing a single drop of blood, and how to get the body into the cauldron that I recommended.
“Don’t do any of this inside the city limits. Get you a place in the country where it won’t look weird that you’re going around on a tractor.” I eyed her up and down. “A slip of a girl like you won’t be able to handle a two-hundred-pound man by yourself. Especially dead weight.”
“Won’t someone get suspicious if I just go out and buy seventy-five pounds of lye?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Tell them you’re starting a pretzel business. Or a soap business. For that do-it-yourself website. Itsy. That’s why you’re buying the property out of town. Hell, I’m sure at this point you can find one in the swamps, too. That would’ve been my next suggestion, but some places in there you need an airboat to navigate. And that might really cause people to go ‘hmm’ if you’ve never shown interest in that before.”
“Etsy?” she corrected me. “You think someone will fall for that?”
“Anyone wants to explain something to better fit the narrative. You’re an unassuming, cute, small little redhead. Someone’s not going to look at you and expect you to be using that lye to boil and dissolve a body.”
She pulled out her phone and started to type.
“What are you doing?”
She looked up and said, “Taking notes. I want to make sure I don’t forget this. Then I’ll have to come see you again, and you’ve already made it abundantly clear that you don’t ever want to see me again. So… taking notes.”
I looked at her phone, and a longing hit me so hard that I said, “You have Facebook?”
She blinked. “Yes. Why?”
“I wanted to see if my daughter’s posted any new pictures.” I paused. “But I actually don’t think she uses Facebook anymore.”
“Snapchat,” she said. “Most have switched to that. Or Instagram. Facebook is the old person platform.”
My lips twitched. “I’m thirty-eight this year. I guess that qualifies me as old.”
She pursed her lips, then started typing again.
When she placed her phone on the table, I felt my heart start to pound when she spun it around, and I saw my daughter’s smiling face.
“Instagram,” she said. “She’s beautiful. Tasteful, too. I don’t often see tasteful Instagrams anymore. Kids these days grow up a lot faster than they used to.”
Tasteful.
That was my girl.
I looked at all her long brown hair that she got from me and that mean-mugging smirk.
God, she took my breath away.
“Fuck,” I said softly.
I didn’t touch her phone, even though I wanted to bring it closer to my face.
Realizing this, she stood up, walked around, and then stood next to me as she went through picture after picture.
Lolo with her friends. Lolo with our dog, Tex, at my sister’s house. Lolo with me when she was a baby.
