Winnie would have to bury the body. Leaving it above-ground, where she could see it, where anyone could see it, where the smell—
She cut off the thought, breath trembling.
She needed to get out of there. Hawthorn was on his way. Was it already too late to avoid him? She could try to pass for her double and claim the other her got away, but not if he saw the body lying there, the blood pooled purple under the skin, her eyes—oh god, oh god, her eyes—
The handcuffs. The first thing Winnie had to do was remove them. Her hands were stuck behind her back, but it was better that way—it forced Winnie to turn around while she searched her double’s pockets for the key. She didn’t have to look at her.
After a few minutes’ awkward fumbling, Winnie found the key and got the cuffs off.
She took a deep breath, then bent over and checked for a pulse. Nothing. Winnie closed her double’s eyes.
She had to bury the body.
If she gave herself simple commands, she could function.
Winnie picked up the shovel her double had dropped and held it in her wooden hands.
Dig a hole, Winnie, she told herself.
And so, Winnie started digging.
The dirt floor of the shed was packed tight, but at least the ground hadn’t frozen yet. She dug as fast as she could, through the screaming of the muscles in her back, as blisters formed and then burst on her palms and in the tender cradle of skin between her thumb and forefinger.
Finally, she had a hole—not as deep as it should be, but deep enough, and too much time had passed already. Hawthorn could arrive at any moment.
Drag the body to the hole, Winnie.
She grabbed the body’s slim ankles and pulled. She moved it inch by slow inch until it toppled into the shallow hole.
The dead eyes had come open and they stared up at her, but she couldn’t think of them as her double’s eyes or human eyes or even eyes at all or she would lose it. So, she didn’t bend down to re-close them. She covered them with a shovelful of dirt.
Before she finished filling the hole, she surveyed the shed to make sure she was getting rid of every trace of what had happened there. She wiped at the workbench with a bit of shop rag, then threw the rag and the handcuffs in with her double’s body.
Now fill the hole, Winnie.
And this part was easy, because she wanted nothing more than to get the body out of her sight. She wanted this much more than she wanted her head to stop throbbing or her hands to stop bleeding or her back to stop aching or for that strange dull roar in her ears to go away.
She tried to think past the awful present. As soon as the body was taken care of, she would quickly pack some of her double’s things, some food, then go. She didn’t know where. Anywhere. Away. Take James’s advice too late and flee the city.
Winnie hoisted shovelful after shovelful of dirt into the hole, moving mechanically.
Be a clockwork girl, she told herself. Feel nothing.
Once the hole was all full of dirt, she tamped it down with her feet, walking over it again and again, refusing to think about what lay below.
She was so focused on blocking it all out that she almost didn’t hear the footsteps approaching on the paving stone path outside the shed.
Winnie froze. Could it really be Hawthorn so quickly? Maybe it was Father. Did he know Winnie had stayed home from school? Maybe he was coming to check on her.
The prospect of speaking to the father of the girl she’d just buried was maybe worse than the thought of facing Hawthorn.
Winnie surveyed the shed. No one would guess what had happened there. All she had to do was pretend to be Winnie. Her hands were bloody, wrists bruised from the cuffs. If it was Hawthorn, it would be easy to explain her injuries—she and the Split-Winnie had fought; Split-Winnie had escaped—but what would she say to Father? There was no time to come up with a coherent lie. She would have to improvise somehow.
Winnie kept the shovel in her hand. She couldn’t just rush at whoever walked through that door—her chance of being able to fight her way out of this was even worse than her chance of lying her way out—but she couldn’t bear to set the shovel aside and stand there totally defenseless either.
The knob turned, and the door swung open.
Winnie held her breath.
“Winnie? And Winnie? Are you out here?”
No.
No, no, no.
It was Scott.
Tears began to stream silently down her cheeks. She would have preferred almost anyone else.
“Jesus!” he exclaimed as soon as he saw her, then rushed to her side. “What happened to you? And where’s Winnie?”
Just the way he said that “Winnie” . . . she knew that he knew that she wasn’t his.
Could she lie about what had happened to her double? She wanted to—she had the same impulse for secrecy as always, the one she had so recently realized her double shared—but all she could think about was the desperation on her double’s face as she hissed that no, she never told anyone about the splinters.
A lie now would doom Winnie to lie forever.
And Scott deserved the truth, although she wished more than anything that she had a different truth to give him.
Winnie looked down at the ground, where her double was buried. She spoke her confession to the dirt.
“She’s dead,” Winnie said, her trembling finger pointing at the ground. “She’s there. I—it was an accident.”
“What?” His eyes darted back and forth between Winnie’s face and the spot on the ground where she was pointing. “You killed her? You’re not making any sense.”
“She was going to turn me over to Hawthorn. I pushed her—trying to escape—and she hit her head.”
“No. Winnie wouldn’t do that.”
“She didn’t have a choice.” Winnie reached up to rub her throbbing temple. Now that the panic and adrenaline that had fueled her double’s burial was gone, she felt completely drained. “What I said to Hawthorn at the morgue—it gave me away. He showed up here and tricked Winnie into telling him the truth. It was only a matter of time.”
Winnie noticed there was blood on her hand. When she fell and knocked her head on the ground, it must have reopened the cut on her forehead.
“I just don’t—I don’t understand,” Scott said, voice thick with grief.
For now, confusion buffered his pain, but it was still torture for Winnie to witness. How much worse would it be once his shock wore off? How would he look at her once he felt the full weight of what she’d done?
The pain in Winnie’s head was becoming increasingly insistent. First her injuries during the experiment at school, now this.
I’m about to faint, Winnie realized with relief—unconsciousness would be a delicious vacation.
The world tilted, then began to pass slowly before her eyes.
Pegboard . . . workbench . . . stool . . . lovely ground.
Winnie had space for one last thought before her vision tunneled in. She remembered what her stern paternal grandmother used to say, back in Germany, when someone endured misfortune after misfortune: They must be living wrong.
Then the world went dark.