“I’ve been baptized,” Katharine protested, but she was already unzipping her shorts, pulling her T-shirt over her head. “Anyway, I’m Catholic, and we’re not into total immersion.”
“This is sprinkling, Catholics believe in sprinkling, don’t they?” Mary Bliss asked. Suddenly she had an answer to everything.
Katharine cringed as the first spray of cold water sliced across her face, chest, and thighs.
“Come on,” Mary Bliss said. “You’ve got to keep moving. Do like I do.”
So Katharine Weidman, age forty-five, found herself doing some kind of rain dance in the backyard of her best friend’s house—wearing nothing but her black lace thong panties and Wonderbra.
When they’d danced and laughed themselves near dead, they went inside and put their dry clothes on again.
Katharine made a face when she saw the lukewarm casserole of chili-roni; instead she ordered beef Kowloon and garlic prawns and hot-and-sour soup from the Chinese delivery place up the street, and charged it to Charlie’s Visa.
“So?” Katharine asked when they were down to the fortune cookies.
Mary Bliss adjusted the towel covering her hair. “Hmm?”
“The plan. You said you had a plan, for taking care of Parker. I got baptized, now I want to hear your plan.”
“Accidental death,” Mary Bliss said. “It’s the best way.”
“And what about a body? No insurance company is going to pay death benefits without a body.”
“I know,” Mary Bliss said. “So it has to be an accident where the body is never found. But nothing too sensational, you know? Nothing where there would be a big police investigation. So that lets out something like a plane crash or a fire or something like that.”
“What’s left?” Katharine asked.
“Well…,” Mary Bliss said. “Do you ever watch that Discovery Channel on cable?”
“No,” Katharine said firmly. “I am not interested in the mating habits of sperm whales, or quantum physics or snowstorms in the Himalayas or any of that kind of thing. Anyway, I thought you only watched PBS.”
“And Discovery,” Mary Bliss said. “It’s very educational. Anyway, a couple of years ago, when Parker first started traveling so much, I saw this true crime–type program. You know, it’s not only science and nature on there. Anyway, this time I was watching, it was a show about this cute little married couple from Oklahoma. The wife was this kind of plain-looking girl, and the husband was a big brawny type. Anyway, they got married, and on their honeymoon, they went on one of those windjammer sailing trips, down in the Bahamas. They were way out at sea, and a big storm came up, real suddenly. And the husband radioed for help, that something had gone wrong with the sails, but all of a sudden, a big wave swept over the boat, swamped it, and the boat broke in half, and they were both swept into the water.”
“I bet I know what happened,” Katharine said, out of patience. “The wife drowned, and the husband survived. Is that what happened?”
“Just let me finish,” Mary Bliss said, taking her own sweet time. “No, Miss Smarty-pants. Actually, the wife was able to grab a life jacket. When the Coast Guard came out looking for them, they found her, passed out from the heat and all, but they never did find him.”
Katharine gave her a fishy look. “The husband died? Are you sure you got that right?”
“Dead sure,” Mary Bliss said defiantly. “And when she got back to Oklahoma, or wherever it was that they lived, she cashed in a two-million-dollar life insurance policy they’d taken out, just before the wedding.”
“What’s the catch?” Katharine asked. “Are you telling me she planned the whole thing?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Mary Bliss said. “It was her idea to take the sailing trip. They took a weekend sailing school together, down in Florida, a couple of months before the wedding. And that’s where she met the other guy.”
“There was another guy?” Katharine asked, sitting up straighter. “You didn’t say there was another guy.”
“She had to have an accomplice,” Mary Bliss explained. “So she seduced this sailing instructor she met down in Florida. His name was Lars. When the couple went out on the windjammer, Lars followed them in another boat. And when they got far enough out to sea, she fixed her husband a drink, and of course she’d put some kind of tranquilizer or something in it, so he got real woozy. And when he’d about passed out, she radioed Lars on the other boat.”
“What happened next?”
“Lars got on the sailboat’s radio and acted like he was the husband. And when the wind really picked up, they just sort of slid the husband overboard. And he sank like a rock. So the wife puts on her life jacket, and they did something to the sail, to break it somehow, to make it look like the wind did it. Then the wife got on Lars’s boat while the storm was really bad, and when it died down, she got on the life raft and acted all stunned and confused.”
“What about Lars?”
“He got on his own radio and contacted the Coast Guard, and they told him they’d heard the distress call and were on the way. So he backed on off and let them rescue her.”
“Slick,” Katharine said. “But, how did they get caught?”
“It turns out neither of them was as bright as they thought,” Mary Bliss said with a sigh. “The husband’s mother was a real bitch. She never liked the wife. The mother-in-law hired a private investigator. He started following the wife, and of course found out everything.”
“And they got caught.”
“Lars turned state’s evidence,” Mary Bliss said. “He told the police it was all the wife’s idea. She got a life sentence, Lars got six to fifteen.”
Now Katharine sighed. “Good story. But, hon, let’s face it, they got caught. You don’t want to do anything like what they did.”
“No,” Mary Bliss said. “My plan is different. I just got it from thinking about that program. I was thinking about a scuba diving accident. Down in Cozumel.”
Katharine thought about it.
“I didn’t know Parker liked to scuba dive.”
“We took lessons years ago. At the Y. We both got certified, we even went on a couple dive trips to the Cayman Islands. We’ve even still got our equipment, up in the attic.”
“Why Cozumel?” Katharine asked.
“I saw another program,” Mary Bliss started to say.
Katharine held up her hand. “Just cut to the chase, please. I can’t take another of your shaggy dog stories.”
Mary Bliss stuck out her tongue. “In Mexico,” she said deliberately, “they have a very lax and corrupt law enforcement. You can get anything you want down there for the right amount of money. Like a death certificate for a hundred bucks.”
“Is that so?” Katharine asked.
“I saw it on the Discovery Channel,” Mary Bliss said.
“This could work,” Katharine said. “It really could work. We go down to Cozumel, check into a nice hotel. One that has filtered water. You don’t want to get Montezuma’s revenge. We do some shopping, buy some nice silver jewelry, then buy the fake death certificate and fake Parker’s death.”
“We?” Mary Bliss’s eyebrow was raised way up near her hairline.
“You’ve got to have an accomplice,” Katharine pointed out. “And I was born to do this.”