In fiction, it always came down to the shower curtain. A hotshot cop would tear a crime scene apart, searching for evidence, and immediately spot the glaring absence of a shower curtain. Because people use shower curtains. They need shower curtains. And if you’re involved in a homicide investigation and don’t have a shower curtain, you might as well call 911 and slap the cuffs on yourself.
Which was why I was wrapping Harris Mickler’s body in my best silk table linens.
They’d been a wedding present from my Great Aunt Florence eight years ago when I’d married Steven, and I had never once used them. And since I’d sold my dining room furniture six months ago on Craigslist to make my van payment, if some hotshot cop did come to search my house, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t even notice they were gone.
Vero and I spread the maroon fabric on the garage floor at Harris’s feet. Then Vero took his hands and I took his ankles. Together, we hoisted him a few inches off the ground and swung him down in the middle of the sheet.
I dropped his legs, rearranging the linens at an angle to cover him, kind of like arranging a sandwich on a sheet of cellophane. Then, with exhaustive effort and a lot of grunting, Vero and I rolled Harris Mickler into a giant corpse burrito.
“His feet are sticking out,” I panted as we finished the last roll.
“Better than his head.” Wisps of Vero’s hair had escaped her ponytail, and sweat bloomed on her chest. She was almost ten years younger than I was, and in far better shape. My muscles screamed as I bent over my knees.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked between labored breaths. She was young, single, smart. Once she finished her degree, she’d have her whole life ahead of her.
“I need the money.”
“What for?”
“Student loans.”
I put my hands on my hips, chest still heaving as I gaped at her. “Let me get this straight. You’re helping me dispose of a body to pay for school?”
“Clearly, you’re too old to remember how much a bachelor’s degree costs,” she said bitterly.
“I’m not too old. I just … never had to worry about it.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll be paying interest until I’m fifty.”
“Assuming we don’t get arrested first.” We both stared at the messy enchilada on the floor.
There was no way we were unrolling him—it had been hard enough to roll him up the first time—but he’d be far too unwieldy with his feet dangling out. Rummaging through the contents of Steven’s old workbench, I found a lone bungee cord in a bucket of rusted nails. The hook on one end was missing, which was probably the only reason he hadn’t taken it when he’d left. I wrapped the elastic around Harris’s ankles and tied it in a knot, leaving the single remaining hook wobbling off the end.
“I have to pick up the kids at my sister’s house,” I said, afraid to check the time on my phone.
Vero gestured to Harris. “What do we do with him?”
I couldn’t put him back in the van with my kids. But I couldn’t leave him lying in the middle of the garage where they might see him when they got home.
“We’ll put him in your car.”
“My car?” Vero’s eyes flew open wide, her ponytail swinging with her recoil. “Why my car?”
“Because you have a trunk. Everyone knows dead bodies go in the trunk. Don’t look at me like that. What do you want me to do? Strap him in Delia’s booster seat? His shoes are sticking out!”
Vero muttered a string of expletives in Spanish as she pulled her keys from her pocket. We snuck out the side door, where I waited in the rhododendron bushes, watching for faces in the neighbors’ windows as Vero crept to the street and backed her Honda tightly to the door of the garage. We turned off the porch lights and the lights inside the garage, and by the dim glow of the streetlamp at the foot of my driveway, together we heaved open the broken garage door and attempted to hoist Harris Mickler into her trunk.
“I think he’s gotten heavier,” Vero said after our third breathless try. My hands were raw and red with the effort. Damp flyaways had come loose from my mom-bun and were plastered by sweat to the side of my head. “How did you get him in the van by yourself?” she asked.
“I lured him with promises of sex,” I panted. Vero quirked an eyebrow, unconvinced. Clearly, amateur-killer-in-sweaty-yoga-pants was not my best look. I rolled my eyes and said through a huff, “He was under the influence of drugs, okay?”
Vero snorted.
She was right though. There had to be an easier way to do this.
“Grab Delia’s skateboard,” I said. More likely, it was the bourbon talking when I pointed to the hot pink plastic deck propped against the far wall.
Vero wheeled it alongside Harris. “Did you get this idea from one of your books?”
“Not exactly.” I was pretty sure it came from an episode of Sid the Science Kid. At this point, I didn’t care as long as it worked.
On the count of three, we hefted Harris onto the board and rolled him to the open trunk of Vero’s car. Using the bumper for leverage and Harris’s head as a counterweight, inch by inch, with a lot of cursing and grunting, we managed to stuff him inside. When it was done, I leaned against the rear quarter panel of the Honda, dripping sweat and feeling a strange sense of accomplishment.
Vero grabbed the small pink trowel from the workbench and tossed it on top of him.
“What’s that for?” I asked as she slammed the trunk closed.
“What else do we have to bury him with?” She shrugged and got in the car.