A Simple Plan (34 page)

“I know. It’s just…”

“We’ve got enough money without it.” I smiled.

“I know,” she said again.

“It doesn’t really seem like it’s worth crying over.”

“Oh, Hank. I’m not crying over that.”

I looked at her in surprise. “What’re you crying for?”

She wiped at her face again. Then she shut her eyes. “It’s complicated. It’s all sorts of things put together.”

“Is it about what we’ve done?”

My voice must’ve come out strange—nervous maybe, or scared—because she opened her eyes at the sound of it. She looked directly at me, as if she were appraising me. Then she shook her head.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “It’s just me being tired.”

T
HAT
weekend a thaw arrived.

Saturday the temperature rose to fifty degrees, and everything, the whole world, began to melt in a sudden dripping, sliding, oozing rush. Large, perfectly white clouds floated across the sky throughout the afternoon, pushed gently northward by the moist touch of a southerly wind. The air smelled deceptively of spring.

Sunday was even warmer; the thermometer eased its way up into the lower sixties, accelerating the melting. By late morning, the ground had begun to reappear in small squares and slashes the size of footprints, dark against the dirty whiteness of the retreating snow, and in the evening, when I went out to untie the dog and put him in the garage, I found him sitting in an inch-deep puddle of mud. The earth was unveiling itself.

I had trouble falling asleep that night. Water dripped loudly from the eaves beyond the window with an incessant ticktock sound. The house creaked and moaned. There was a sense of movement in the air, of things breaking free, coming undone.

I lay in bed and tried to trick my body into fatigue, consciously relaxing muscles, forcing my breathing to slow and deepen, but every time I shut my eyes, a vivid image of the plane floated up before me. It was lying on its belly in the orchard, its wings and fuselage free of snow, its metal skin glinting brightly in the sunshine, like a beacon, attracting the eye. Looking down at it in my head, I could sense it waiting, could feel its impatience. It was yearning to be found.

O
N
W
EDNESDAY
of that week, a strange thing happened to me. I was sitting at my desk, working on an account discrepancy, when I heard Jacob’s voice out in the lobby.

It wasn’t his voice, of course, I knew that, but its tone and pitch were so eerily familiar that I couldn’t resist rising from my chair, walking quietly over to my door, opening it, and peeking out.

There was a fat man there, a man I’d never seen before. He wasn’t a customer; he’d merely come inside to ask for directions.

He didn’t look at all like Jacob. He was old, balding, with a thick, drooping mustache, and as I watched him speak, watched the unfamiliar gestures of his hands, the way his face moved above his mouth, the illusion that he was using Jacob’s voice gradually disappeared. It started to sound a little too throaty, a little too rough. It was an old man’s voice.

But then I shut my eyes, and it instantly became my brother’s once again. I stood there very still, focusing my whole mind on the sound of it, and, listening, I felt an irresistible surge of sadness and loss rise up within myself. It was overwhelming, stronger than anything I’d ever felt before, so powerful that it had an actual physical effect on me, like a wave of nausea. I bent forward slightly at the waist, as if I’d been hit in the stomach.

“Mr. Mitchell?” I heard.

I opened my eyes, straightened my body. Cheryl was standing behind the checkout counter, staring at me with an expression of grave concern. The fat man stood in the center of the lobby, his right hand touching the corner of his mustache.

“Are you all right?” Cheryl asked. She seemed as if she were about to come running toward me.

I tried quickly to recall the past few moments in my mind, to see if I’d made some sort of sound standing there, a groan, or a gasp, but everything was blank. “I’m fine,” I said. I cleared my throat, smiled toward the fat man. He gave me a friendly nod, and I returned it.

Then I stepped back into my office and shut the door.

T
HAT
evening I read an article in the paper about a giant confidence game that had been operating lately in the Midwest, bilking millions of dollars from unsuspecting investors.

A fake advertisement would be placed in the local paper, announcing a government sale of goods seized in drug raids. People would bid on this merchandise sight unseen, apparently believing that since the government was running the auction nothing fraudulent could be occurring. The con men would have several confederates mixed in with the crowd, to help artificially raise the bidding. Their victims would make payments by check, assuming that they’d bought things at less than 10 percent of their appraised value, then show up two weeks later to find that their purchases were nonexistent, simply photographs in a catalog.

I took this news with remarkable calm. My check had cleared the day before; I’d gone by the bank to see. My account balance was listed as $1,878.21. I’d given away $31,000, virtually our entire savings, but I couldn’t force myself to believe it. It seemed like too horrible a thing to have happened so quietly. A calamity had struck, undoubtedly one of the worst I’d ever encountered, but it had arrived with such little fanfare, a tiny article in the middle of the paper, that I had trouble accepting it. I needed something more, needed to be woken from my sleep late at night by the ringing of the phone, needed the sound of sirens in the distance, needed a sudden flash of pain in the center of my chest.

I surprised myself, in fact, by feeling more reassurance than grief. As long as I maintained the image of the duffel bag in my mind, I could make the $31,000 seem inconsequential, a minor mistake, an unfortunate lapse in judgment. And I found the idea of someone stealing it, rather than my merely losing it, strangely comforting. There were men out there who were just as bad as me, even worse, a whole gang of them traveling the country and robbing innocent people of their savings. It made what I’d done seem a little more explicable, a little more natural. It made it seem easier to understand.

There was a tremor of fear, too, of course—I can’t deny that—a cold, little kernel of terror mixed in with my reassurance. The safety net that I’d strung up to aid our descent into crime, the idea of burning the packets at the first sign of trouble, had been swept away. We could never relinquish the money now, no matter what might happen in the future, because without it we had nothing. My last illusion of freedom had been stripped from me—I realized this with perfect lucidity—and it was this thought that lay at the core of my fear. I was trapped: from here on out, all my decisions about the money would be dictated by its indispensability; they would become choices of necessity rather than desire.

When I’d finished studying the article, I tore it out of the paper and flushed it down the toilet. I didn’t want Sarah to know until we were safe and far away.

L
ATE
that night, while I was untying Mary Beth from his tree to take him into the garage, I noticed that the raw spots beneath his collar had grown dramatically worse. They were open sores now, bleeding, oozing runny streams of pus. Mud was plastered into the surrounding fur.

Seeing this, I felt a burst of compassion for him. I knelt beside him on the wet ground and tried to loosen his collar a notch, but as soon as I touched him, he tucked his head, and, very quickly, very neatly, like someone pruning a branch off a bush, bit me on my wrist.

I jumped up, shocked, and he cowered before me in the mud. I’d never been bitten by a dog before, and I wasn’t sure how I ought to react. I considered kicking him, stomping into the house and leaving him to spend the night out in the yard but then decided against it. I wasn’t really angry, I realized; I merely felt like I ought to be.

I carefully inspected my wrist. The sun was set, and the yard was dark, but just by the way it felt, I could tell that the dog hadn’t broken the skin. It was only a nip, a sort of slap rather than a closed-fisted blow.

I watched Mary Beth lie down in the mud and begin to lick at his paws. Something, I knew, had to be done about him. He was sick, unhappy, like an animal in the zoo, tied up all day, imprisoned during the night.

The front light flicked on, and Sarah leaned out the door. “Hank?” she called.

I turned toward her, still holding my wrist in my hand.

“What’re you doing?” she asked.

“The dog bit me.”

“What?” She hadn’t heard.

“Nothing,” I said. I bent down and carefully took Mary Beth by his collar. He let me do it. “I’m putting him in the garage,” I said to Sarah.

T
HURSDAY
night, late, I opened my eyes and sat up in bed, my body literally shaking with an irrational, panic-filled sense of urgency. Deep in the depths of sleep, I’d devised a plan, and now I turned to wake Sarah and tell her.

“Sarah,” I hissed, shaking her shoulder.

She rolled away from my hand. “Stop it.” She groaned.

I turned on the light and pulled her toward me. “Sarah,” I whispered, staring down at her, waiting for her eyes to open. When they did, I said, “I know how to get rid of the plane.”

“What?” She glanced toward Amanda’s crib, then blinked up at me, her face still half asleep.

“I’m going to rent a blowtorch. We’ll take it out into the woods and cut the plane into little pieces.”

“A blowtorch?”

“We’ll bury the pieces in the woods.”

She stared at me, trying to grasp what I was talking about.

“It’s the last piece of evidence,” I said. “Once it’s gone, we’ll have nothing left to worry about.”

Sarah sat up in bed. She brushed her hair from her face. “You want to cut up the plane?”

“We have to do it before someone discovers it.” I paused, thinking. “We can do it tomorrow. I’ll take the day off. We’ll call around to find a place that rents—”

“Hank,” she said.

There was something about her voice that made me stop and look at her. Her face was frightened. Her arms were folded tightly across her chest.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Listen to yourself. Listen to how you sound.”

I stared blankly at her.

“You sound crazy. We can’t take a blowtorch out into the woods to cut up the plane. That’s insane.”

As soon as I heard her say this, I realized that she was right. It suddenly seemed absurd, as if I’d been talking in my sleep, babbling like a child.

“We’ve got to calm down,” she said. “We can’t let things get to us.”

“I was only—”

“We’ve got to stop this. What we’ve done, we’ve done. Now we just have to live our lives.”

I tried to touch her hand, to show her that everything was all right, that I was in control, but she pulled away.

“If we keep on like this,” she said, “we’ll end up losing everything.”

Amanda made a short crying sound, then stopped. We both glanced toward the crib.

“We’ll end up confessing,” Sarah whispered.

I shook my head. “I’m not going to confess.”

“We’re so close, Hank. Somebody’ll find the plane soon, there’ll be a big commotion, and then people’ll start to forget. As soon as that happens, we’ll be able to leave. We’ll just take the money and leave.”

She shut her eyes, as if to picture us leaving. Then she opened them again.

“The money’s right here.” She patted the bed with her hand. “Right beneath us. It’s ours if we can keep it.”

I stared at her. The light on the night table made a little golden cloud out of her hair, so that it looked like she had a halo.

“But don’t you feel bad sometimes?” I asked.

“Bad?”

“About what we’ve done?”

“Of course,” she said. “I feel bad all the time.”

I nodded, relieved to hear her admit this.

“We have to live with it, though. We have to treat it just like any other grief.”

“But it’s not just like any other grief. I killed my brother.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Hank. You didn’t choose to do it. You have to believe that.” She reached forward to touch my arm. “It’s the truth.”

I didn’t say anything, and she pressed down on my arm, pinching my skin.

“Do you understand?” she said.

She stared at me, squeezing my arm until I nodded. Then she glanced at the clock. Her head slipped away from the light, and her halo disappeared. It was 3:17 in the morning. I was fully awake now; my thoughts were clear. In my mind, I repeated her words:
It wasn’t your fault.

“Come here,” she said. She held out her arms for a hug. I leaned forward into her body, and when she got a grip on me, she dragged me slowly toward the mattress.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” she whispered. “I promise.” She waited a moment, as if to make sure that I wasn’t going to try to sit up again; then she rolled away and turned out the light.

As we lay there in the darkness, Mary Beth began to howl.

“I’m going to shoot him,” I said. “I’m going to put him out of his misery.”

“Oh, Hank.” Sarah sighed, already halfway into sleep. She was lying a few inches to my right, the sheets growing cool in the gap between us. “We’re all through with shooting now.”

Sometime before daybreak, winter returned. A wind came up from the north, and the air turned cold.

Friday morning, as I made my way out across the farm country in to work, it started to snow.

9

T
HE SNOW
continued to fall throughout the morning and into the afternoon—heavy, incessant, as if it were being thrown from the sky. The customers brought it into Raikley’s, brushing it from their shoulders and stamping it from their boots, so that it collected on the tiles before the door, melting into little puddles. Everyone seemed excited by it, even giddy: the suddenness of its arrival, the rapidity with which it fell, the ghostly silence that it draped across the town. There was a manic quality to the voices I heard drifting into my office from the lobby, a holidaylike tone, an extravagant friendliness and good cheer.

For me, though, the storm acted not as a stimulant but as a sedative. It calmed and reassured me. Ignoring my work, I spent much of the morning sitting at my desk, staring out the window. I watched the snow fall on the town, softening the contours of the cars and buildings, blocking out the colors, making everything white, uniform, featureless. I watched it fall on the cemetery across the road, erasing the black rectangles of Jacob’s and Lou’s and Nancy’s and Sonny’s graves. And when I closed my eyes, I pictured it falling in the nature preserve, drifting quietly down through the stunted trees of the orchard, and slowly, flake by flake, burying the plane.

I accepted Sarah’s logic—eventually the wreck had to be discovered. It had to be found and then forgotten, so that we could leave and begin our new lives. But I knew, too, that the longer it took to surface, the safer we would be. I prayed silently:
Let no one connect the shootings with the money on the plane. Let no one remember the one when they think of the other.

While I watched the storm, I daydreamed about where we’d go and how we’d live. I doodled on a pad—miniature sailboats, Concorde jets, the names of foreign countries. I imagined myself making love with Sarah on an island beach, pictured myself surprising her with expensive presents from native bazaars: exotic perfumes, tiny statues of ivory and wood, jewels of every size and color.

All day the snow continued unabated, filling in the morning’s footprints, drifting back across the freshly plowed road.

A
BOUT
a half hour before closing, I got a call from Sheriff Jenkins.

“Howdy, Hank. You busy?”

“Not really,” I said. “Just tidying things up for the weekend.”

“Think you could pop over to my office real quick? I got somebody here you might be able to help.”

“And who’s that?”

“A man by the name of Neal Baxter. He’s from the FBI.”

W
ALKING
across the street through the snow, I thought,
This has nothing to do with what I’ve done. They wouldn’t call me over to arrest me; they’d come to Raikley’s and get me themselves.

Carl’s office was in the town hall, a squat, two-story, brick building with a short flight of concrete steps leading up to its double doors. I paused at the foot of these steps, beside the aluminum flagpole, and tried quickly to gather myself together. I brushed the snow from my hair. I unbuttoned my overcoat and straightened my tie.

Carl met me in the entranceway. It seemed as though he’d been waiting for me there. He was smiling; he greeted me like an old friend. He took me by the arm and led me off to the left, toward his office.

He had two offices really, a large outer one and a smaller inner one. His wife, Linda, a short woman with a pretty face, was working in the outer one, typing at a desk. She smiled at me as we came in, and whispered hello. I smiled back. Through the open doorway beyond her, I could see a man sitting with his back to me. He was tall and crew cut and dressed in a dark gray suit.

I followed Carl into the inner office, and he shut the door behind us, blocking out the sound of Linda’s typing. There was very little in the tiny room—a wooden desk, three plastic chairs, a row of filing cabinets along the wall opposite the window. Two pictures were propped up on top of the cabinets: one of Linda holding a cat in her lap; another of the entire Jenkins clan—children, grandchildren, cousins, nephews, nieces, in-laws—all crowded together on a lawn in front of a yellow house with blue shutters. The desk was clean, orderly. A little American flag in a plastic stand sat beside a tin can full of yellow pencils and a stone paperweight without any papers to weigh down. Behind the desk, hanging from a wall, was a glass-doored gun cabinet.

“This is Agent Baxter,” Carl said.

The man rose from his chair, turning to face me. He leaned forward to shake my hand, wiping his own along the side of his pant leg before he did so. He was lean, broad shouldered, with a square face and a flat nose, like a boxer’s. His handshake was short, firm, decisive, and he held my eye while Carl introduced us. I found him strangely familiar for some reason, as if he resembled a movie star, or an athlete, but I couldn’t exactly place it; the resemblance was too vague, just the bare trace of a memory. He was polished; there was a glow about him, a sheen of calm competence.

We sat down, and Carl said, “You remember earlier this winter, when I saw you out by the nature preserve?”

“Yes,” I said, a fistlike ball of panic forming at the center of my chest.

“Didn’t Jacob say you guys had heard a plane with engine trouble a few days before?”

I nodded.

“Why don’t you tell Agent Baxter what you heard?”

I could see no way to avoid it, no way to lie or evade the question, so I did exactly as Carl asked. I dragged up Jacob’s story and laid it out for the FBI man. “It was snowing,” I said. “Hard, like today, so we weren’t really sure, but it sounded like an engine coughing on and off. We pulled over to the edge of the road to listen, but we didn’t hear anything more—no crash, no engine, nothing.”

Neither Carl nor Agent Baxter spoke.

“It was probably just a snowmobile,” I said.

Agent Baxter had a little black book open in his lap. He was taking notes. “Do you remember the date?” he asked.

“We saw the sheriff on New Year’s Eve. It happened a few days before that.”

“You said it was near where I saw you?” Carl asked. “Out by Anders Park?”

“That’s right.”

“Which side were you driving on?”

“The south side. Near the center.”

“By the Pederson place?”

I nodded, my heartbeat rising, forcing its way up into my temples.

“Would you be willing to take us out there?” Agent Baxter asked.

I gave him a confused look. “To the nature preserve?”

“We’d have to go in the morning,” Carl said. “After the storm passes.”

My overcoat was dripping melted snow onto the floor. I started to take it off but stopped myself when I saw how my hands trembled once they were free from my lap.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

There was a short silence while the two lawmen seemed to debate who should speak, and what exactly ought to be revealed. Finally Agent Baxter, with just the slightest, the most subtle of movements, gave Carl a little shrug.

“The FBI’s looking for a plane,” Carl said.

“This is all confidential, of course,” the agent said.

“I’m sure Hank understands that.”

The FBI man sat back in his chair, crossing his legs. His shoes were shiny and black, their leather spattered with little water spots from walking through the snow. He gave me a long, penetrating look.

“Last July,” he said, “an armored car was robbed as it was leaving the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank. From the start we suspected that it was an inside job, but nothing came of it until this past December, when the car’s driver was arrested for raping an old girlfriend. After his lawyer told him that he might get twenty-five years, he jumped on the phone to us, saying he wanted to turn state’s evidence.”

“He handed over his friends,” I said.

“That’s right. He was mad anyway because they took off after the heist without giving him his share, so he fingered them, and we got his charges reduced to a misdemeanor.”

“And you caught the robbers?”

“We traced them to Detroit, their hometown, and set up a surveillance team outside their apartment.”

“A surveillance team? Why didn’t you just arrest them?”

“We wanted to make sure we got the money, too. There was no evidence to indicate that they’d even tapped into it yet. They both had jobs and were living together in a rathole apartment down by the stadium, so we assumed the money was hidden somewhere, that they were waiting to make sure no one was looking for them. Unfortunately, our surveillance was sloppy, and the suspects bolted. We caught one of them the next day trying to cross into Canada, but the other one disappeared. We’d almost given up on him when an informant called my partner and told him that the suspect was about to take off in a small plane from an airfield outside of Detroit. We rushed over there and arrived just in time to see the plane lift off from the ground.”

“You couldn’t follow it?” I asked.

“There was no reason to.”

“They knew where he was going,” Carl said. He seemed very pleased by this idea. He sat back in his chair and grinned at the FBI man. Agent Baxter ignored him.

“My partner’s informant gave us the suspect’s destination. It was another small airfield, this one just north of Cincinnati.” The agent paused, staring at me, his face collapsing into a frown. “Unfortunately, the plane never arrived.”

“Maybe he went somewhere else.”

“It’s possible, but doubtful. For various reasons, we consider our informant’s word to be virtually incontestable.”

“They think he crashed on the way,” Carl said. “They’re covering his route, going over it town by town.”

“Was the money on the plane?” I asked.

“We assume so,” the agent said.

“How much?”

Agent Baxter glanced toward Carl. Then he looked at me.

“Several million dollars.”

I let out a low whistle and raised my eyebrows, feigning disbelief.

“We wanted to head out around nine tomorrow morning,” Carl said, “after the weather clears. Can you make it then?”

“I didn’t see a plane go down, Carl. I just heard an engine.”

They stared at me, waiting.

“I mean, I really don’t think we’d find anything out there.”

“We realize it’s a long shot, Mr. Mitchell,” Agent Baxter said. “But we’ve reached the point in our investigation where all we have are long shots.”

“It’s just that I can’t show you anything. I didn’t even get out of the car. You could simply drive along Anders Park Road and see everything I did.”

“We’d still appreciate it if you came. You’d be surprised at what you might remember once you got there.”

“Is nine o’clock bad for you?” Carl asked. “We can make it earlier if you want.”

I felt my head shake, as if of its own volition.

Carl grinned at me. “I’ll treat you to a cup of coffee when we get back.”

As I got up to leave, Agent Baxter said, “I don’t think I can put too much emphasis on the confidentiality of all this, Mr. Mitchell. The whole thing’s something of an embarrassment to the Bureau. We’d be very disappointed if the press were to get ahold of it somehow.”

Carl interrupted before I could respond. “Press, hell,” he said. “There’s four million dollars sitting in those woods. Word gets out, and we’ll have a goddamn treasure hunt on our hands.”

He laughed and threw me a parting Lou-like wink. Agent Baxter smiled icily.

S
ARAH
already had dinner prepared when I got home.

“A robbery?” she said, when I told her what had happened. She shook her head. “No way.”

I was sitting across from her at the kitchen table, watching her serve herself a leg of barbecued chicken. I already had one on my plate. “What do you mean, no way?”

“It doesn’t make sense, Hank. The kidnapping made sense.”

“This isn’t a guess, Sarah. It’s not a theory. I talked to a man from the FBI, and he told me where it’s from.”

She frowned down at her plate, pushing at her rice with her fork, mixing it into her peas. The baby was on the floor beside us, lying in her Portacrib. She looked like she always did lately, like she was about to cry.

“He’s searching for a plane full of money,” I said. “You can’t tell me there’s more than one of those around here.”

“It’s hundred-dollar bills, Hank. If it were an armored car, there’d be other denominations. There’d be fifties and twenties and tens.”

“You aren’t listening. I just told you, I talked to him myself.”

“It’s old money. If it were coming out of a Federal Reserve bank, it’d be new. They burn old bills there and replace them with fresh ones.”

“So you’re telling me he’s lying?”

She didn’t seem to hear me. She was biting at her lip, her head turned toward the baby. Suddenly she gave me an excited look. “Did he show you his badge?”

“Why would he show me his badge?”

She dropped her fork onto her plate, pushed back her chair, and ran from the room.

“Sarah?” I called after her, bewildered.

“Wait,” she yelled over her shoulder.

As soon as she left the room, the baby began to cry. I hardly even looked at her. I was trying to devise a way to get the money back into the plane without leaving any tracks. I scraped at my chicken with my knife, tearing strips of meat from the bone.

Amanda increased her volume, her body tightening like a fist, her face flooding a dark crimson.

“Shhh,” I whispered. I stared down at my slowly cooling food. I’d have to go during the night, I realized, right after dinner, before it stopped snowing. I’d have to do it in the dark. I’d keep three packets, just enough to cover what I’d lost on the condominium, and give everything else back.

Sarah returned a moment later, carrying a sheet of paper. She sat down with an exultant look on her face, her cheeks flushed with it, the paper held out toward me like a gift.

I took it from her, recognizing it immediately. It was the photocopy of the article about the kidnapping.

“What?” I said.

She grinned at me. “It’s him, isn’t it?” She leaned down and touched Amanda’s face with the back of her hand. The baby stopped crying.

I examined the piece of paper. It was the third article, the one with the photographs. I studied them left to right—first the younger brother, then the older, then the freeze-frame of the younger one executing the security guard.