A Simple Plan (43 page)

“This is the plan,” she said huskily, through her mask of hair. She lifted the bottle toward me. “We’re going to get a little drunk, and then I’m going to fuck you on the money.”

The mock sexy baritone of her voice failed her on the last few words, and, suddenly shy, she finished with a giggle. “We’ve made our bed,” she said, gesturing with her hand toward the money, “and now we’re going to sleep on it.”

I didn’t move from the doorway. I still had my hat and parka on. There was a long pause, while she waited for me to say something. I didn’t; my mind was blank, numb.

“Do you want to eat something first?” she asked, her voice taking on a note of concern. “Have you had dinner yet?”

She sat up a little, the rug slipping down her shoulder, revealing one of her breasts.

“There’s some cold chicken in the fridge,” she said.

I slid the door shut behind me, then turned back toward her. I didn’t know how to tell her; I was waiting for an opening. I felt as if I were about to do something very cruel.

“Where’s Amanda?” I asked, unable to think of anything else to say.

Sarah flicked the hair away from her face. “Upstairs,” she said, “sleeping.” And then, after a pause, “Why?”

I shrugged.

She sat up a little more, leaned back on her hand. She gave me a long, inquisitive look. “Hank?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

I came into the room, edging my way around the money, and sat down behind her on the piano bench. I leaned forward to drop my boots to the floor, but then decided against it and placed them in my lap instead, resting them on the bag of money. It made a crackling sound beneath their weight. The boots were stained black around their soles. They stank of wine.

“Have you been drinking?” Sarah asked. She had to spin around to see me, and as she did so, she sat all the way up, crossing her legs.

I gave her a slow shake of my head. “The money’s marked,” I said.

She just stared at me. “You’re drunk, Hank. I can smell it.” She pulled the rug up around her shoulders, covering her breast. Her left knee stuck out down below, hard and pale in the firelight, like marble.

“It’s marked,” I said again.

“Where did you go? A bar?”

“If we spend it, we’ll get caught.”

“You reek, Hank. You smell like Jacob.” Her voice rose on this last statement, becoming angry. I was ruining her celebration.

“I haven’t had anything to drink, Sarah. I’m perfectly sober.”

“I can smell it.”

“It’s on my boots and pants,” I said. I held the boots out toward her. “They’re soaked with wine.”

She stared first at my boots, then at the dark splash marks on my jeans. She didn’t believe me. “And where were you that they got like that?” she asked, her voice taking on a litigious tone.

“Out by the airport.”

“The airport?” She looked at me like I was lying. She still didn’t get it.

“The money’s marked, Sarah. They’ll track us down if we spend it.”

She stared up at me, the set, angry look slowly slipping from her face. I could see her shuffling the pieces about in her head, could see them, one by one, falling into place.

“The money’s not marked, Hank.”

I didn’t answer; I knew I didn’t have to. She understood now.

“How can it be marked?” she asked.

In my head I was silently going over everything I’d done after killing the woman, checking things off one by one. I felt tired, stupid, like I was forgetting something crucial.

“You’re being paranoid,” she said. “If it were marked, they would’ve said so in the paper.”

“I talked to the FBI men. They told me themselves.”

“Maybe they suspect you took it. Maybe they’re just trying to scare you.”

I smiled sadly at her and shook my head.

“They would’ve said something in the paper, Hank. I’m sure of it.”

“No,” I said. “It’s their trap. It’s how they plan on catching whoever’s taken it. They copied down the serial numbers before they paid the ransom, and now the banks are looking for them. As soon as you start spending it, they’ll track you down.”

“They couldn’t have done that. There were forty-eight thousand bills. It would’ve taken them forever.”

“They didn’t copy them all. Just five thousand of them.”

“Five thousand?”

I nodded.

“So the rest are still good?”

I could see where she was heading, and I shook my head. “There’s no way to tell the good from the bad, Sarah. Every time we went out and spent a bill, there’d be a one-in-ten chance that it was marked. We couldn’t risk it.”

The firelight threw quick, flickering shadows across her face while she considered this. “I could get a job at a bank,” she said. “I could steal the list of numbers.”

“You wouldn’t find it at a normal bank. It’d only be at a Federal Reserve bank.”

“Then I could get a job at one of those. There’s one in Detroit, isn’t there?”

I sighed. “Stop it, Sarah. It’s over. You’re just making it harder.”

She frowned down at the mattress of money. “I already spent one,” she said. “I spent one tonight.”

I reached into my front pocket and took out the hundred-dollar bill. I unfolded it and held it toward her.

She stared at it for several seconds. Then she looked down at my boots.

“You killed him?”

I nodded. “It’s all over, Beloved.”

“How?”

I told her how I’d done it, how I’d called the police about the hitchhiker, how the cashier had come after me when I tried to rob him, and how I’d hit him with the machete. I lifted my shirt to show her my bruise, but she couldn’t see it in the dim light. She interrupted me before I got to the woman.

“Oh God, Hank,” she said. “How could you have done this?”

“I didn’t have a choice. I had to get the money back.”

“You should’ve just let it go.”

“He would’ve remembered you, Sarah. He would’ve remembered the baby, and your story about the money. They would’ve tracked us down.”

“He didn’t know who—”

“You were on TV at Jacob’s funeral. He would’ve described you, and someone would’ve remembered. They would’ve put it all together.”

She thought about that for a few seconds. The rug had slipped down her shoulder again, but she ignored it.

“You could’ve brought five twenties to the store,” she said, “asked him to return the hundred-dollar bill, said that your wife had spent it, and that it had sentimental value.”

“Sarah,” I said, losing my patience, “I didn’t have time to get five twenties. I would’ve had to come all the way back here. I had to get there before he closed.”

“You could’ve gone to the bank.”

“The bank wasn’t open.”

She started to say something more, but I didn’t let her.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s already done.”

She stared at me, her mouth still open to speak. Then she shut it and nodded.

“Okay,” she whispered.

Neither of us spoke for the next minute or so. We were both thinking about where we were, and what we were going to do next. A log collapsed in the fireplace, sending up a shower of sparks and a tiny, just perceptible wave of heat. I could hear the clock ticking on the mantelpiece.

Sarah picked up one of the packets, held it in her hand. “At least we weren’t caught,” she said.

I didn’t say anything.

“I mean, it’s not the end of the world.” She forced a smile at me. “We’re just right back where we started. We can sell the condo, sell the piano…”

At the mention of the condo, I felt a sharp pain in the center of my chest, as if I’d been hit by an arrow. I touched my sternum with my fingertips. I’d forgotten all about the condominium, had forced it from my mind.

Sarah continued. “We did bad things, but only because we had to. We were trapped into them, each one led us on to the next.”

I shook my head, but she ignored me.

“The important thing,” she said, “the thing that really matters, is that we didn’t get caught.”

She was trying to turn things around, trying to put them in the best possible light. It was how she dealt with tragedies; I recognized it immediately. Usually it was something I admired—her doing it made it easier for me, too—but now it seemed too simple, like she was taking it all too lightly, forgetting what we’d done. Nine people had been murdered. I’d killed six of them myself. It seemed impossible, but it was true. Sarah was trying to hide from it, trying to obscure the fact that they were dead because of us, because of the plans we’d made along the way, because of our greed and fear. She wanted to avoid what would follow from this admission, wanted to escape the damage we both knew it was going to do to our lives. We couldn’t escape, though; I understood that even then.

“We can’t sell them back,” I said.

She glanced up at me, as if she were surprised to hear me speak. “What?”

“I got the piano on sale.” I reached behind me and touched its keyboard, pressing down one of its keys, a high one. It made a plinking sound. “They won’t take it back.”

She shrugged this off. “We can put an ad in the paper and sell it ourselves.”

“I didn’t buy a condominium,” I said, shutting my eyes. When I opened them she was staring at me, confused.

“It was a scam. I got ripped off. They stole my money.”

“I—” she started. “What are you talking about?”

“It was a fake auction. They took my check and cashed it. The condo doesn’t exist.”

She shook her head, opened her mouth to speak, then shut it, then opened it again.

Finally she said, “How?”

I readjusted the boots in my lap, lining them up. They felt stiff now; the blood had dried. “I don’t know.”

“Did you tell the police?”

I smiled at her. “Come on, Sarah.”

“You just let them take it?”

I nodded.

“All our savings?”

“Yes,” I said. “Everything.”

She put her hand up to her face, touched the back of it to her forehead. She was still holding the packet. “We’ll be stuck here now,” she said, “won’t we? We’ll never be able to move.”

I shook my head. “We’ve got our jobs. We can start to save again.”

I was trying to console her, but even as I spoke, I began to feel the full weight of her words. In a single day we’d gone from being millionaires to virtual penury. We had $1,878 in the bank; it was nothing. Any day now we’d have to start dipping into it—for our monthly payments on the house and cars, for our phone bill, electric bill, gas bill, water bill. We’d have to pay off our credit cards. We’d have to buy food and clothes. From here on out, everything was going to be a struggle, a constant battle to make ends meet. We were poor; we were what I’d sworn all my adult life we’d never be: we were like my parents.

We wouldn’t be able to leave Fort Ottowa either; by the time we saved up enough money for a move, we’d be worrying about Amanda’s education, or a new car, or my retirement. We were going to stay here forever, and we’d never be able to purge the house of what we’d done. Its rooms, and their awful freight of memories, would always be there, waiting to ambush and accuse us. The floor beneath our bed would never cease to be the place where we hid the duffel bag, the guest room where Jacob spent his last night, the kitchen where we packed the baby pouch, the piano where we tried to baptize our new life together with a drunken act of love.

We weren’t simply returning to where we’d begun, as Sarah had tried to claim. We’d lost all that, had given it up that very first day without even realizing it, and now we’d never, no matter how long we lived, be able to get it back.

“We’ve still got the money,” Sarah said. She held the packet out toward me.

“It’s just paper. It’s nothing.”

“It’s our money.”

“We have to burn it.”

“Burn it?” she asked, as if surprised. She lowered the packet into her lap, readjusted the rug around her shoulders. “We can’t burn it. Some of it’s still good.”

“I’ve got to get rid of my boots, too.” I held them up to the light, turning them around in the air. “How should I get rid of my boots?”

“I’m not going to let you burn the money, Hank.”

“And the bottle of champagne you bought, and his wallet and watch and keys.”

She didn’t seem to hear me. “We can run with it,” she said. “We can just get out and spend as we go. We can leave the country, go to South America, Australia, somewhere far away. We can live like outlaws, like Bonnie and Clyde.” She trailed off, staring down at the packets spread out around her. They looked shiny in the firelight. “Some of it’s still good,” she whispered.

“A purse, too,” I said. “And a fur coat.”

“Maybe if we wait long enough, they’ll forget about the numbers. We could keep it till we’re old.”

“How can I get rid of a fur coat?”

Her gaze returned to me, focusing sharply on my face. “A fur coat?”

I nodded, feeling a little dizzy. I hadn’t eaten since that morning. My body was so tired and hungry that it ached. I probed at the bruise on my rib cage, trying to see if anything was broken.

“Where did you get a fur coat?”

“An old woman,” I said. “She came in while I was there.”

“Oh, God. Oh, Hank.”

“I’d taken off my mask. I tried to make her go away, but she wouldn’t leave.”

Upstairs, directly above our head, the baby began to cry.

I stared across the room at the fire. My mind felt unfocused, anchorless, like I couldn’t trust it. For some reason I started to think of the pilot in the plane, Vernon’s brother, and the pull I’d felt toward his corpse that first day, that inexplicable urge to touch it. Then I thought about Alexander’s, and how, just before I left, when I tried to mop up my boot prints from the floor, the blood seemed to get redder and redder as I smeared it, losing all hint of blackness, moving closer and closer to pink. Next came an image of Jacob, standing in the snow in his red jacket, his nose bleeding, crying over Dwight Pederson’s body. And as that last picture, the one of my brother, melted away within my mind, I felt a shiver of foreboding. There were going to be more than just monetary debts coming due now, I realized. There were going to be things I’d have to account for to myself, explain and rationalize, things I’d have to live with that would make the loss of the money seem almost inconsequential.