A Simple Plan (35 page)

“He’s looking for his brother,” Sarah said.

My eyes strayed back to the center picture and for one brief, intense instant, I was flooded with a sense of recognition. There was something familiar about the man’s eyes, about the way his cheeks sloped down toward his mouth, the way he held his head on his shoulders. But then, just as quickly, it was gone, overwhelmed by his other features—his beard and thick hair, the stockiness of his frame, the mug-shot frown on his face.

“You’re saying it’s Vernon,” I said. “The older one.” I laid the piece of paper on the table between us.

She nodded, still smiling. Neither of us had eaten any of our food yet. It was cold now, the sauce on the chicken growing viscid. I scrutinized the photo, willing myself to recognize Agent Baxter in Vernon Bokovsky’s features. I concentrated, squinting, and briefly managed to make him appear, but again it was only for a second. The photo was several years old. It was blurry, grainy, heavily shadowed.

“It’s not him,” I said. “The guy I met today was skinnier.” I pushed the article back across the table toward Sarah. “He had a crew cut, and no beard.”

“Maybe he’s lost weight, Hank. Maybe he cut his hair and shaved his beard.” She looked from me to the article, then back again. “You can’t tell me it’s impossible.”

“I’m just saying that it doesn’t seem like it’s him.”

“It’s got to be him. I know it.”

“He seemed like an FBI guy, Sarah. He had that professional look, like a movie star. Poised, perfectly groomed, a nice dark suit…”

“Anybody can do that,” she said impatiently. She slapped her hand at the article. “He impersonated a cop to kidnap the girl. Why wouldn’t he fake being an FBI agent to get back the ransom?”

“But it’d be such a risk. He’d have to go through every town from here to Cincinnati, show up in all these different police stations, each of which would probably have his face tacked up somewhere on a poster. It’d be like he was asking to get caught.”

“Put yourself in his shoes,” Sarah said. “Your brother takes off in a plane with all that money and disappears. You think he’s crashed, but you wait and wait, and nothing’s reported. Wouldn’t you go out and try to find him?”

I thought about it, staring across the table at the photos.

“You couldn’t just give it up. You’d have to at least try and get it back.”

“He’s thinner,” I said quietly.

“Think about what we’ve already done to keep the money. What he’s doing is nothing compared to that.”

“You’re wrong, Sarah. You’re just making this up.”

“Would the real FBI try to find a plane like this? Send an agent in a car all the way across the state? Wouldn’t they just issue some sort of announcement?”

“They don’t want it leaked to the press.”

“Then they’d call on the phone. They wouldn’t send an agent.”

“Why wouldn’t the kidnapper call, then? It’d be safer. There’d be less chance of getting caught.”

She shook her head. “He wants to be there. He wants to be able to control things, convince people with the way he’s dressed, the way he acts. Like he convinced you. He can’t do that on the phone.”

I thought back over my interview with Agent Baxter, searching for clues. I pictured him wiping his palm on his pant leg before he shook my hand, like it was clammy with sweat. I remembered how insistent he’d been about confidentiality, keeping the story away from the press.

“I don’t know…”

“You have to use your imagination, Hank. You have to picture him with more hair, with a beard.”

“Sarah.” I sighed. “Does it even matter?”

She picked up her fork and poked at her chicken. “What do you mean?” Her voice was hesitant with suspicion.

“If we were to decide that he was really the kidnapper, would it change what I did tomorrow?”

She cut off a square of chicken and put it into her mouth. She chewed slowly, pausing between bites, as if she were afraid it might be poisoned. “Of course,” she said.

“Let’s say we agree that he’s really an FBI agent.”

“But we don’t.”

“Just hypothetically. For the sake of argument.”

“All right,” she said. Her fork was poised over her plate. I could tell that she was waiting to contradict me.

“What would I do?”

“You’d take him to the plane.”

“If I were going to take him to the plane, I’d have to go back tonight and return the money.”

She set her fork down on her plate. It made a clinking sound when it hit. “Return the money?”

“They know it’s on the plane. There’s no excuse for any of it to be missing.”

She stared across the table at me, as if waiting for something more. “You can’t give it back,” she said.

“We’d have to, Sarah. I’d be the only one they’d suspect. As soon as we left town, they’d know.”

“But after all you’ve done? You’d just let it go?”

“After all we’ve done,” I corrected her.

She ignored me. “You wouldn’t have to put the money back, Hank. If you guided him to the plane, you’d be beyond suspicion. There’d be no tracks in the surrounding snow, so it’d look like no one had been there. He’d find the five hundred thousand and just assume that his informant was wrong, that the pilot had left the rest behind somewhere.”

I pondered that. It seemed to make sense. It was a risk, but no more of a risk than sneaking back to return the money would be.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s say that if we decide he’s really from the FBI, I’ll brave it out and take him to the plane.”

She nodded.

“Now what’ll I do if we decide he’s actually the kidnapper?”

“You won’t go.”

“Because?”

“Because he’s a murderer. He killed all those people—the guards and the chauffeur and the maid and the girl. You’ll call Carl and make up an excuse. You’ll say that the baby’s sick and you have to take her to a doctor.”

“I’m a murderer, too, Sarah. Being a murderer doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

“As soon as he sees the plane, he’ll shoot you both. That’s why he wants you to go, so he can get rid of all the witnesses.”

“If I don’t go, Carl’ll take him by himself.”

“And?”

“And, by your logic, if they find the plane, this guy’ll shoot him.”

She thought about that. When she spoke, her voice was low and ashamed sounding. “That wouldn’t be such a bad thing for us,” she said. “Any violence he does will only help cover up our involvement with the plane. It’ll push us off to the edge.”

“But if we were sure it was Vernon, it’d be like we were setting Carl up. It’d be just as bad as shooting him ourselves.”

“They’re the only two people who can threaten us. They’re the only ones who can tie you to the plane.”

“Wouldn’t you feel bad, though? If Carl were killed like that?”

“It’s not like I’m asking you to shoot him, Hank. I just want you to stay away.”

“But if we know…”

“What do you want to do? You want to warn Carl?”

“Doesn’t it seem like we ought to?”

“And what would you say to him? How would you explain your suspicions?”

I frowned down at my plate. She was right: there was no way I could warn him without revealing my knowledge of the plane’s cargo.

“He might not even shoot him,” Sarah said. “We’re just guessing about that. He might just take the money and disappear.”

I didn’t really believe this, and I don’t think she did either. We both picked at our food.

“You don’t have a choice, Hank.”

I sighed. It had come down to that again—our telling ourselves that we didn’t have a choice. “It’s a moot point anyway,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we won’t know if it’s him until after it’s over.”

Sarah stared down at Amanda, thinking this through. The baby’s arms were extended stiffly into the air, one pointing toward me, the other toward her mother. It looked as if she were trying to hold our hands, and, for a moment, I was tempted to reach out and touch her. I resisted, though; I knew it would only make her cry.

“We can call the FBI office in Detroit,” Sarah said. “We can ask for an Agent Baxter.”

“It’s too late; they’ll be closed by now.”

“We can call in the morning.”

“I’m meeting them at nine. They won’t be open before that.”

“You can stall them for a bit. I’ll call from here, and then you can run over to your office and call me to find out.”

“And if there’s no Agent Baxter?”

“Then you won’t go. You’ll tell Carl that I just called, that the baby’s sick and you have to go home.”

“And if there is one?”

“Then you’ll go. You’ll take them to the plane.”

I frowned. “It’s a risk either way, isn’t it?”

“But at least something’s going to happen. The waiting’s over; it’s all going to come out now.”

The baby let out a short yelp, an exploratory sound. Sarah reached down and touched her hand. My dinner sat before me, cold and uneaten.

“We’ll leave soon,” Sarah said, as if she were comforting Amanda rather than me. “We’ll leave and everything’ll be all right. We’ll take our money and change our names and disappear, and everything’ll be all right.”

S
OMETIME
after midnight, I opened my eyes to the sound of Amanda waking up. She always signaled the onset of a nocturnal crying spell with several minutes of quiet gurgling—a choking babbling mixed with little hiccoughs. She was doing it now, building up from a soft undertone, something close to the idling of a car’s engine, toward what I knew would momentarily be a sudden, window-rattling shriek of distress.

I slipped from beneath the covers, padded barefoot across the room, and scooped her out of her crib. Sarah was lying on her stomach in the bed, and as I snuck away, she reached out her hand, pulling my empty pillow toward her chest.

I rocked the baby in my arms.

“Shhh,” I whispered.

She was too far along to be comforted so easily, though; she let me know this with a single avian squawk, like an extended burp, and I took her quickly across the hall into the guest room, to keep her from waking her mother. I climbed onto the bed there, pulling the comforter around us.

I’d come to enjoy these late-night sessions with Amanda. They were our sole form of bodily contact; during the day she’d begin to shriek as soon as I touched her. Only at night could I hold her in my arms, or stroke her face, or kiss her softly on the forehead. Only at night could I soothe her, quiet her, make her fall asleep.

I was pained by her constant crying; it weighed on me like a feeling of guilt. Whenever she was left alone with me, she immediately started to weep. Our pediatrician, though he seemed hesitant to say when it might end, claimed that it was just a phase, a brief period of increased sensitivity to her environment. I understood this and trusted his opinion, but still—despite my efforts not to—I couldn’t help letting it affect my feelings for her. I was developing a cruel ambivalence around her, so that while I was filled with both warmth and pity in her presence, I was also faintly repulsed, as if her crying were symbolic of some budding character flaw, an innate pettiness and irritability, a judgment of me, a refusal to accept my love.

At night, for some reason, all this disappeared. She accepted me, and I was flooded with love for her. I’d tuck my head down close to her face and inhale the soft, soapy fragrance of her body. I’d cuddle her against my chest, let her hands grip at my skin, explore my nose, my eyes, my ears.

“Shhh,” I said now, and whispered her name.

The room was cold, its corners sunk in shadow. I’d left the door open, and through it I could see the hallway. Its bare white wall seemed to glow in the darkness.

Very slowly, Amanda began to quiet. She twisted her head back and forth on her neck, her hands opening and closing in rhythm with her breathing. She pressed her feet up against my ribs.

Twice now, I’d dreamed that she could talk. Both times she was in her Portacrib by the kitchen table, eating with a fork and knife. She babbled nonsense, her voice surprisingly deep and throaty, her eyes staring straight in front of her, as if she were talking into a TV camera. She made lists: lists of colors—blue, yellow, orange, purple, green, black; lists of cars—Pontiac, Mercedes, Chevrolet, Jaguar, Toyota, Volkswagen; lists of trees—sycamore, plum, willow, oak, buckeye, myrtle. Sarah and I listened in stunned silence while she lay there before us, smiling, the words literally tumbling from her lips. Then she listed names—Pederson, Sonny, Nancy, Lou, Jacob…When she got to Jacob, I stood up and slapped her in the face. Both times that’s how the dream ended—I woke up with the slap—and each time I was left with the inescapable feeling that if I hadn’t struck her, she would’ve kept reciting names, spitting them out, one after the other. The list would never have ended.

As she quieted down, I began to hear the house. The snow had passed, and a wind had come up. The walls creaked with it, a boatlike sound. When it gusted, it made the windows shake. Shivering, I pulled the comforter more tightly around us, supporting Amanda’s weight within its folds.

I knew that I could take her back into the bedroom now, that she was about to fall asleep, but for some reason I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay there for a while yet, with her quiet in my arms.

This was Jacob’s bed. The thought came unbidden, a surprise, and following right behind it was an image of him lying there, drunk, and of me bending over him to kiss him good night. Without thinking, I held the quilt to my nose and inhaled, trying to believe that I could smell him in it, though of course I couldn’t.

Judas kiss,
he’d whispered.

Outside, on the street, a snowplow passed, thudding and scraping. I glanced down at Amanda. She was limp in my arms, as if she were sleeping deeply, but her eyes were still open. I could see them shining in the darkness, like glass marbles.

When I looked forward to the approaching morning, I got a hard knot in my stomach. I couldn’t escape the feeling that no matter what I decided to do, it would probably be a mistake.

The best solution, I realized suddenly, the utterly ruthless one, would be simply to take the money and run. I could abandon Sarah and Amanda, just head off into the night, alone. I could start up a different life from scratch, change my name, create a new identity. I closed my eyes and pictured myself purchasing a new car, something foreign and sporty and brightly colored, not worrying about financing or loans or payment schedules, simply counting out the money from my wad of hundred-dollar bills into the startled salesman’s hand. I imagined myself driving off in this new car, living out of a suitcase, buying new clothes when the old ones got dirty, moving from hotel to hotel—expensive ones with pools and saunas and weight rooms and king-size beds—all the way across the country in a giant zigzag, moving on as soon as I grew tired of a place, westward or southward or eastward or northward, any direction I felt like as long as it was somewhere new, as long as it was away from here where I was now, home, Ohio, where I’d always been.