I can still remember Laura’s face.
She stood in the doorway, her features frozen in horror.
“I rang the bell. The door was open, so . . .” She stared at your body. The blood was congealing. The ceiling lights were reflected in the sticky gloop on the floor—a halo of silver around your head. “What happened?”
I’ve thought a lot about that moment. About what I said. Would things have been different if I’d explained to her it was an accident? That I’d lost my temper, lashed out? That drink made me do things I hadn’t planned to do?
“I killed him.”
The color drained from her face.
I felt my muscles spasm and I realized I’d been in the same spot since I . . . since you fell. I straightened. Remembered I was still holding the neck of the bottle. I dropped it, and it fell with a thud. Rolling, not breaking. It made Laura jump.
The sound jolted me into action. I picked up the phone but didn’t dial. My hand shook.
“What are you doing?”
“Calling the police.” I wondered if being drunk made it better or worse. An aggravating factor to be under the influence, or mitigation that I didn’t know what I was doing?
“You can’t call the police!” Laura crossed the kitchen and took the phone out of my hand. She glanced at you again and I saw her wince as she took in the seeping mess from behind your ear. “Caroline, you’ll be arrested! They’ll put you in prison.”
I sank onto a chair, my legs suddenly unable to support my weight. There was a strange smell in the kitchen, a metallic, sour odor of blood and sweat and death.
“You could get life.”
I imagined what it would be like to live my life in a prison cell. I thought of the documentaries I’d seen. I thought of Prison Break and Orange Is the New Black and wondered how close they were to the truth.
I thought, too, of the help I might get.
Because you were right, Tom—it was no way to live. I kidded myself that I didn’t have a problem, because I didn’t wake up shaking, or sit in a park with a can of Special Brew. But I shouted at you. I taunted you. I hit you. And now I’d killed you.
I had a problem with alcohol. A big problem.
“I’m calling the police.”
“Caroline, think about this. Think carefully. Once you make that call, there’s no going back. What’s happened is . . .” She shudders. “God, it’s awful, but you can’t undo it. Going to prison isn’t going to bring Tom back.”
I looked at the series of photographs printed on canvas and hung above the Aga. You, me, and Anna, lying on our stomachs wearing blue jeans and white T-shirts. Laughing. Laura followed my gaze. She spoke quietly.
“If you go to prison, Anna loses both of you.”
I said nothing for a while. “So . . . what?” I felt myself sliding away from what was right, what was good. Did it matter? I had already committed a crime. “We can’t leave him here.”
We.
That was the moment. The moment we became a team.
“No,” Laura said. Her jaw was set tight. “We can’t leave him here.”
It took two of us to move the terra-cotta pot away from the manhole cover. You had put it there when we’d moved in, and I’d planted a bay tree we’d been given as a housewarming gift. The cover was ugly, and there was no need for access—the septic tank was a hangover from when the town boundary was half a mile to the west, and this cluster of houses a rural outlier.
The key was a fat metal baton, about three inches long. It had lived in the dresser drawer for as long as we lived at Oak View, but it slotted into the hole in the cover as neatly as the day it had been made.
Inside, a narrow tunnel, like the entrance to a sloping well. The air was stale but not fetid, the contents of the tank long since dried up. I looked at Laura. We were sweating from the effort of dragging you out from the kitchen, and from the blind fear of what we were about to do. What we’d already done. If we stopped now, it would be too late. It would be obvious we had tried to hide your body. The damage had already been done.
We put you in headfirst. I cried out as you slid halfway into the tunnel and stuck fast, as your belt caught on the metal surround. Laura pulled hard on your jeans, and you made a sound. An involuntary groan as air was forced from your lungs.
I couldn’t watch. I turned away and heard the heavy drag as you traveled into the tank; a loud, dull clunk as you hit the bottom.
Silence.
I had stopped crying, but my heart ached with loss and guilt. If the police had arrived right then, I think I would have told them everything.
Not Laura.
“Now we need to clean up.”
It was Laura’s idea to fake the suicide.
“If we report him missing, they’ll see you as a suspect. They always do.”
She made me go over the plan again and again; then she left. I didn’t sleep. I sat in the kitchen, looking out the window at the garden I’d turned into a grave. I cried for you, and—yes—I cried for me, too.
Laura drove to Brighton as soon as it was light, waited for the shops to open, and bought a mobile phone. An untraceable SIM card. She called the police; said she’d seen you go over the cliff edge.
Every day I expected the police to come. Every day I jumped when the doorbell rang. I couldn’t sleep; couldn’t eat. Anna tried to tempt me with scrambled eggs, scraps of smoked salmon, tiny bowls of fruit salad, her eyes full of her own grief, even as she tried to lessen mine.
But the police didn’t come.
The weeks went by and you were declared dead, and no one pointed a finger or asked a question. And although I saw Laura often, and although we’d never agreed on it, we never spoke of what had happened. What we’d done.
Until your life insurance paid out.