A Simple Plan (12 page)

“He was still alive when you left,” I said. “I didn’t realize it till I went to pick him up, and by then you were already gone.”

“I didn’t kill him?” Jacob asked.

I shook my head. “I smothered him with his scarf.”

It took a while for my brother to absorb this. He stared down at his lap, his head tucked into his chest, so that the skin beneath his chin piled up into a rippling series of folds.

“Why?” he asked.

The question caught me by surprise. I looked at him closely, trying to analyze what had prompted me to do it. “I did it for you, Jacob. To protect you.”

He shut his eyes. “You shouldn’t have done it. You should’ve let him live.”

“Christ, Jacob. Didn’t you hear me? I said I did it for you. I did it to save you.”

“Save me?” he asked. “If you’d let him live, it would’ve just been me beating him up. We could’ve turned in the money, and it wouldn’t have been that bad. Now it’s murder.”

“All I did was finish what you started. We did it together. If you hadn’t done your part in the first place, I never would’ve had to do mine in the second.”

That silenced him. He took his glasses off, cleaned them on his jacket, and then put them back on.

“We’re going to get caught,” he said.

“No, Jacob, we aren’t. We’ve done it, and we’re going to get away with it. The only way we’ll get caught is if you break down and attract attention.”

“I’m not going to break down.”

“Then we aren’t going to get caught.”

He shrugged, as if to say, “We’ll see,” and we watched a little boy ride by on a bicycle. He pedaled right down the center of the street, struggling against the wind. He had a black ski mask on, and it made him look threatening, like a terrorist.

“Are we going to tell Lou?” Jacob asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

I felt something shift and settle heavily into place when he asked this. The word
accomplice
floated up from somewhere in my mind, and for perhaps the first time in my life I understood what it meant. It was a powerful word; it connected people, bound them to one another. Jacob and I had committed a crime together, and our fates were now inextricably intertwined. That Jacob appeared to be more frightened at present than I was by what we’d done meant nothing. Our power was equal; we were in each other’s hands. If he was too shaken to understand that at present, he wouldn’t be for long.

I turned toward him. “Why would you want to tell Lou?”

“It just seems like he ought to know.”

“This is a bad thing, Jacob. This is something we could spend the rest of our lives in jail for.”

He shut his eyes again.

“Promise me you won’t tell him,” I said.

He hesitated, staring down at his gloves. Then he shrugged. “All right.”

“Promise me.”

He sighed, looked past me out the window. His pickup was parked across the street. “I promise I won’t tell Lou,” he said.

We fell silent after that. Jacob seemed like he was about to get out of the car, but then he didn’t.

“Where’d you hide the money?” he asked.

I gave him a sharp glance. “In the garage,” I lied.

“In the garage?”

“I thought Sarah might find it if I hid it in the house.”

He nodded, waited a moment, as if trying to think of something further to say. Then he reached over and opened the door. The dog sprang to his feet behind us.

“We forgot to visit the cemetery,” I said.

Jacob looked at me with a tired expression, his lips edging into a sneer. “You want to go now?”

I shook my head. “I’m just saying we forgot.”

He made a deprecatory gesture with his hand. “That’s about the least of our problems, isn’t it?” he asked. He didn’t wait for my answer. He just heaved himself up to his feet, whistled for Mary Beth, and—when the dog scrambled over the back of the front seat and out onto the pavement—swung the door shut behind him.

S
ARAH
heard me come home and called me upstairs. I found her in the bedroom, the shades pulled, the light dim. She was just settling in for a nap, lying on her back beneath the covers, her hair pinned in a bun on top of her head.

I sat down beside her, on the edge of the mattress, and began to recite the morning’s events. I started from the beginning, letting the story unfold, leaving its climax, the encounter with Pederson, to fall, bombshell-like, in its proper place. Sarah rolled onto her side, shutting her eyes, the covers pulled up to her chin. She didn’t react to what I said; she simply lay there, her lips frozen into a sleepy smile. I wasn’t even sure that she was listening.

But then, just as I was describing my exit from the plane, she lifted her head a little and opened her eyes.

“What about the beer can?” she asked.

She’d caught me off guard. “The beer can?”

“Lou’s beer can.”

I realized that I’d forgotten to look for it. I’d meant to do it after I planted the money, but then the two crows had appeared, flustering me.

“I didn’t find it,” I said, hedging.

“You looked?”

I paused, considered fibbing, but my hesitation eliminated the need for it.

“You forgot,” she said, her voice heavy with recrimination.

“I didn’t see it. It wasn’t near the plane.”

She lifted herself into a sitting position. “If they find it,” she said quickly, “they’ll know someone’s been there.”

“It’s just a beer can, Sarah. No one’s going to notice it.”

She didn’t say anything. She was staring down at the bed. I could see that she was becoming angry: her lips were locked tightly over her teeth, and it seemed like she was clenching the muscles in her forehead.

“They’ll assume it was dropped last summer,” I said. “By someone picnicking in the orchard.”

“They can run tests to see how long it’s been there. They can tell by how much it’s rusted.”

“Come on, Sarah. They aren’t going to run any tests.” I was stung by her tone of voice. It seemed to imply that I’d made a grave and unforgivable error. She thought I’d acted foolishly.

“They’ll find Lou’s fingerprints on it.”

“He was wearing gloves,” I said, straining to remember if this was true. “It’s just a beer can lying out in the woods. Nobody’s going to think twice about it.”

“They will, Hank. If there’s even the slightest suspicion that any of the money’s been taken, they’ll search every inch of the orchard. And if they find the beer can, and they find Lou’s fingerprints on it, they’ll track us down.”

I thought about that. I was hurt by her anger and had a vague desire to hurt her back. I knew that she was blowing things out of proportion, but at the same time I saw that she was probably justified in her fear. We’d left something behind: small as it was, it still had the potential to become a clue, a little piece of evidence to indicate our presence.

“We might as well just burn it,” she said.

“Come on, Sarah.”

She shut her eyes and shook her head.

“We aren’t going to burn it,” I said.

She didn’t say anything. She smoothed the cover out across her belly, a sulky look on her face, and, watching her, I realized suddenly that I wasn’t going to tell her about Pederson. I was surprised by this, jolted. We’d never kept secrets from each other, had always confessed everything. But I knew I wasn’t going to tell her this, not here, not now. Perhaps I would sometime in the future, in ten or twenty years, when we were living happily off the money, when what I’d done had been justified, upheld by what had come after. I’d tell her then how I’d saved us from discovery, how I’d taken it upon myself, alone, to protect her and our unborn child from harm. She’d be shocked at my bravery, at the way I’d kept it to myself all those years, and she’d forgive me everything.

The truth was, I was afraid of what she’d think of me. I was terrified of her judgment.

“Your forehead looks better,” she said, not looking at me. It was an effort at rapprochement.

I touched my forehead. “It doesn’t hurt anymore,” I said.

Then we sat in silence. Sarah dropped back onto her pillow, rolling toward me. I didn’t look at her. I was waiting for her to say that she was sorry. If she had I might’ve told her, but she didn’t, and finally I gave up.

“Go on,” she whispered.

“That’s it,” I said. “I shut the door and hiked back through the woods to the road. Then we came home.”

I
T DIDN’T
snow all afternoon. I moved restlessly about the house, glancing now and then through the windows at the sky. I turned on the radio every hour and listened for the weather. The forecast was for snow, heavy at times, lasting through the afternoon and into the evening, but by dinnertime there wasn’t a cloud in sight, and when the sun finally set, a brilliant sea of icy white stars appeared in the sky, blinking down through the darkness at the earth.

Pederson’s accident made the local news. Sarah and I saw it on TV before dinner. They had a shot of the bridge, taken sometime that afternoon. The snowmobile was still in the water, half submerged, the old man’s hat floating beside it, but his body had already been retrieved. There were tracks up and down the creek’s bank, so that you could imagine the scramble to pull him out, the panic and flurry fueled by the illusory hope that he might not yet be dead.

The newscaster said the body had been found by a passing motorist, shortly before noon. There was no mention of foul play, no indication that anything suspicious had been discovered. In the background I could see the sheriff’s truck, pulled off onto the edge of the road, its lights flashing. Carl was standing beside it, talking to a tall, thin man in a bright green down vest, perhaps the unnamed motorist. In the very corner of the screen, off in the distance, I could see Pederson’s house. There were three or four cars in the yard, friends come to comfort the widow.

Sarah didn’t comment on the report. All she said was, “That’s sad, on New Year’s Day and all.” She didn’t seem to realize how close the creek was to the nature preserve.

I went to bed sunk in a deep depression.

I’d killed a man. There it was, every time I turned back to look—it was something I had done. In my heart I felt unchanged, the same man I’d always been, but in my head I knew I was different now. I was a murderer.

And then there was Sarah. I hadn’t told her the truth. It was the first major lie ever to come between us. I realized, too, that with the passing of time it would only grow more difficult to tell her. My fantasy of confessing in twenty years was just that, a fantasy. Each moment I spent in her presence without telling her was a continuation, a reaffirmation of the original lie.

I drifted into sleep that night with my arm draped across her belly. If the baby were to kick, I’d be able to feel it in my dreams. But my last waking thoughts were not of the infant, or of Sarah, or of the money. My last waking thoughts were of Jacob. I closed my eyes and saw the look of panic on his face as he stood over Pederson’s body, believing that he’d killed him, and in my chest, as my breathing deepened into sleep, I felt a surge of warmth, the same wave of pity for him I’d felt when I’d seen the tears glistening on his cheeks. But it wasn’t just for Jacob now, this warmth and pity—it was for myself, too, and Sarah, and the baby, and Pederson, and Pederson’s widow. I felt sorry for everyone.

I
N THE
morning I could tell just from the light in the bedroom that it was snowing. It was dim, gray, with a sense of movement to it, and a silence. I slipped out of bed and crossed quietly to the window. Giant, wet flakes were floating down out of the sky, spinning, swirling, sticking to whatever they touched. It had obviously been snowing for most of the night. The tracks in the yard were filled in, the branches of the trees bowed down toward the earth. Everything, the whole world, was white with it, covered up, hidden, buried.

4

M
Y OFFICE
window faced directly south, out the front right-hand corner of Raikley’s Feedstore, toward St. Jude’s Episcopal Church across the street. I was there at my desk on Wednesday, the sixth of January, eating a powdered donut with a cup of lukewarm coffee, when a handful of darkly clothed men and women emerged from the church’s side door and made its way slowly across the gravel parking lot, through the chain-link gate of the tiny cemetery, to the dark black gouge of a freshly dug grave forty yards beyond.

It was Dwight Pederson’s funeral.

There were six cars in the parking lot, including the silver hearse pulled up right next to the cemetery’s gate. It was a small gathering; Pederson had been something of a loner; he hadn’t had that many friends. I could pick out his widow, Ruth, as she made her way back toward the grave. The priest clung to her arm, diminutive, his shoulders bowed, his left hand clutching a Bible to his chest. I could see only the very edge of the grave; the rest was hidden behind the church. The crowd of mourners arranged itself around its border.

St. Jude’s bell began to toll.

I finished my donut, then got up and took my coffee to the window. The cemetery, perhaps a hundred yards away, was far enough in the distance that I couldn’t identify the people around the grave. Some of them were hidden behind the church; the others, heads bowed, bodies muffled against the cold, were faceless, like strangers, though I must’ve known most of them. They would’ve been people I passed on the street in town, people I knew stories about, comic anecdotes, gossip.

I watched as they bowed their heads, then lifted them, saying something in unison before bowing again. I could see Ruth; her back was turned to me. She didn’t lift her head with the others; she kept it bowed. I suppose that she was weeping. The priest was hidden from view.

I remained at the window until the service was over and the people began to make their way slowly back toward the parking lot. I watched them, counting under my breath. There were seventeen in all, including the driver of the hearse and the priest. They’d given up their morning to honor the memory of Dwight Pederson and express their grief over his death. They all believed that he’d died accidentally, a freak tragedy, pinned beneath his snowmobile in six inches of icy water, his leg and two of his ribs broken, his skull cracked, struggling vainly to free himself from the suffocating grip of his woolen scarf.

Only Jacob and I knew the truth.

Things were going to get easier from here on out, I knew. With each passing day there would be less and less anxiety about what I’d done. Pederson was buried, eliminating the threat of something being discovered in an autopsy; the plane was covered with snow, the tracks around it erased forever.

Perhaps the greatest relief of all, though, was that I still thought of myself as a good man. I’d assumed that what had happened at the edge of the nature preserve would change me, affect my character or personality, that I’d be ravaged by guilt, irreversibly damaged by the horror of my crime. But nothing changed. I was still who I’d always been. Pederson’s death was just like the money; it was there whenever I thought about it, but then when I didn’t, it was gone. It made no difference to my life in a day-to-day sense unless I called it up myself. The key was not to call it up.

I believed that what I’d done on New Year’s Day was an anomaly. I’d been forced into it by extraordinary circumstances, circumstances far beyond my control, and now the whole thing seemed remarkably understandable to me, even forgivable.

But was it? If there was an anxiety which plagued me at that time, it had nothing to do with being caught, nothing to do with the money or the memory of my crime. It had to do with Sarah. Would Sarah understand what I had done?

I could feel a draft coming through the window. There was a plastic sheet of insulation sealing its outside frame, but it was torn and flapped loosely in the wind. I watched the mourners talk for a bit in the parking lot. They clustered around Ruth Pederson, hugging her one after the other. The men shook one another’s hands. Finally they all climbed into their cars, pulled out of the parking lot, and started slowly down Main Street toward the western edge of town.

They were going back to the Pedersons’: I could imagine it well enough. They’d eat lunch around a big wooden table in the kitchen—casseroles and three-bean salads, cold cuts and potato chips. There would be warm drinks—tea, coffee, hot chocolate—in Styrofoam cups and for dessert they’d have Jell-O, carrot cake, chocolate chip cookies. Ruth Pederson, changed now out of her black dress, would sit at the head of the table. She’d watch the others eat, making sure that everyone had enough. People would hover around her, speaking softly, and she’d smile at what they said. Everyone would go out of their way to help clean up, washing dishes and putting them back in the wrong cabinets. Then, as the afternoon wore on into evening, the light fading westward toward the nature preserve, they’d slip off one by one into their own lives, until at last Ruth was left all by herself in the empty house.

I could picture this in my mind—could see her sitting there, the house sunk in shadows, the guests gone, their well-meaning tidiness leaving her nothing to busy herself with except her grief—but, though I knew that I ought to, I felt no remorse at the image, no guilt, only an abstract sort of empathy, distant and subdued. I’d taken her husband from her; it was not something I would’ve thought I could ever live with. Yet, there I was.

I pulled shut the blinds, finished my coffee, dropped the empty cup into the wastebasket. Then I sat down at my desk, turned on the little light there, pulled a pen from my shirt pocket, and set to work.

O
N MY
way home from the feedstore that night, I took a long detour, so that I could drive by the nature preserve. I circled above it, then came in from the west, moving slowly along the park’s southern border. It was just beginning to get dark, and I drove with my high beams on, scanning the edge of the road for our tracks. There was nothing there; all the signs of our passage, even the gouge Jacob’s truck had cut into the snowbank, had been erased.

When I drove by the Pederson farm, I could see several lights shining through the windows of the house. The collie was sitting on the porch. It didn’t bark this time though; it simply stared at my station wagon, its ears erect, its thin, angular head rotating slowly on its shoulders as the car drifted past down the road toward the bridge over Anders Creek.

A
FULL
week passed. I spoke twice with Jacob on the phone but didn’t see him. We talked only briefly, both times about Pederson, reassuring each other as to the success of our cover-up. I didn’t speak to Lou at all.

Thursday afternoon I was working in my office when Sarah appeared. Her face was flushed from the cold, making her look angry, and there was a busyness about her—her eyes shifting rapidly from spot to spot, her hands reaching up to touch now her hair, now her face, now her clothes—which told me that something bad had happened. I stood up quickly, came out from behind my desk, and helped her take off her jacket. Beneath it she was wearing one of her maternity dresses—a fleet of tiny sailboats floating across a sea of pale blue, cheap-looking fabric. The dress molded itself to the swollen dome of her belly. I couldn’t help but stare at it; it reminded me of some giant fruit. There was a baby inside her: whenever I saw her now, the thought jarred me, gave me an uneasy feeling in my own stomach.

Sarah dropped heavily into the armchair beside my desk, the chair customers sat in when they came to ask me for an extension on their bills. Her hair was pinned up around her head, and she was wearing dark red lipstick.

“Lou’s told Nancy,” she said.

I went over and shut the office door. Then I sat down behind my desk.

“I saw her at the grocery store,” Sarah said. “I came in to buy some applesauce, and I was digging through my purse for a coupon I’d cut out of the paper when she came up behind me and asked why I was bothering with it.”

“With the coupon?”

Sarah nodded. “She said with our New Year’s present I shouldn’t have to worry.”

I spread my hands out across the desk, frowning.

“She said it right in front of the cashier. Like she was commenting on the weather.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. I pretended I didn’t understand.”

“Good.”

“But she knew. She could tell I understood what she was talking about.”

“We couldn’t really expect Lou not to tell her, could we?”

“I want to burn it.”

“I mean, she had to find out sooner or later.”

“We’ve made a mistake, Hank. Admit it. We’re in over our heads.”

“I think you’re overreacting,” I said. I leaned forward to take her hand, but she pulled it away. I stared across the corner of the desk at her. “Come on, Sarah.”

“No. We’re going to get caught. I want to burn it.”

“We can’t burn it.”

“Don’t you see, Hank? How it’s going to get out of hand? It was all right when just the four of us knew. But everyone feels like they can tell someone else. There’re five of us now. Pretty soon there’ll be more. It’ll just keep growing like that until we get caught.”

“We can’t burn it,” I said again.

“It’s a small town. It won’t take that long. We have to stop it while we still can.”

“Sarah,” I said slowly. “It’s not as simple as it was at first.”

She started to protest, but then she saw my face. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“Do you remember seeing the story about Dwight Pederson on the news? The old man whose snowmobile went into the creek?”

She nodded. “On New Year’s Day.”

“He didn’t die accidentally.”

Sarah didn’t seem to understand. She gave me a vacant stare.

“He saw Jacob and me at the nature preserve, and we killed him.” Saying this, I felt a weight shift from my shoulders. Without having planned it, I was confessing. I was coming clean.

Sarah sat there, trying to grasp it.

“You killed him?” she asked. Her face had a strange look to it. It wasn’t horror, which was what I’d dreaded most; it was something closer to fear—apprehension tinged with perplexity—and beneath it all, just the slightest hint of disapproval, sitting there like a seed, waiting to learn more before it sprouted and grew. Seeing it, I hesitated, and then, without even thinking, so that when I heard myself speak I was astonished by the words, I began to lie again.

“Jacob did it,” I said. “He knocked him off his snowmobile and kicked him in the head. Then we took him down to the bridge and made it look like an accident.”

My confession lay between us, stillborn, draining blood onto the papers scattered across my desk.

“Jesus,” Sarah said.

I nodded, staring down at my hands.

“How could you let him do that?” she asked. She said it, I could tell, not out of admonition but merely from curiosity. I didn’t know how to answer her.

“Couldn’t you have stopped him?”

I shook my head. “It happened so fast. He just did it, and then it was over.”

I glanced up at her, met her eyes. I was relieved by her look; it was calm. There was no horror in it, no grief, simply confusion. She didn’t understand what had happened.

“He was tracking the fox,” I said. “If Jacob hadn’t killed him, he would’ve found the plane, and seen our tracks around it.”

Sarah considered that for a moment. “We can still burn the money,” she said.

I shook my head again. I wasn’t going to do that. I’d killed for the money; if I were to give it up now, it would mean that I’d done it for nothing. The crime would become senseless, unforgivable. I understood this but knew I couldn’t say it to her. I frowned down at my desk, rolled a pencil slowly across its surface beneath the palm of my hand.

“No,” I said. “We aren’t going to burn the money.”

“We’re going to get caught,” she said. “This might be our last chance.” Her voice rose as she spoke, and I glanced toward the door. I held my finger to my lips.

“If we burn it,” she whispered, “Jacob’ll be all right. There’ll be no motive, no reason to connect us with Pederson. But if we wait to get caught, Carl might put things together.”

“We’re okay,” I said calmly. “We’re not in any danger. And if it begins to look like we’re in danger, we can just burn the money then. It’s still the only evidence to show that we’ve committed a crime.”

“But now it’s not just stealing, it’s murder.”

“We’re the only ones who know about this, Sarah. Us and Jacob. It’s our secret. There’s no reason for anyone else to suspect a thing.”

“We’re going to get caught.” She sank backward into her chair, her hands on her stomach.

“No,” I said, with more conviction than I felt. “We aren’t. No one else is going to know. Not about Pederson, and not about the money.”

Sarah didn’t say anything. She seemed close to tears, but I could tell that, at least for the moment, I’d held her off. She was going to let things stand as they were; she was going to wait and see what happened. I got up from my chair and moved around the desk to her side. I touched her hair, then bent down and hugged her. It was a graceless movement: she was sitting slouched away from me, her belly protruding between us, and I had to lean over the arm of the chair to reach her, but it had the desired effect. She let her head fall toward my shoulder, reached her arms up around my back.

My phone started to ring. It rang five times and then stopped.

“I promised you, Sarah, didn’t I? I promised I wouldn’t let us get caught.”

She nodded her head against my neck.

“And I won’t,” I whispered. “I’ll talk to Lou about Nancy. It’ll be okay. Just wait it out, and it’ll be okay.”

T
HAT NIGHT,
as the feedstore was closing, I heard Jacob’s voice in the lobby, arguing with the cashier. I got up quickly and moved to the doorway of my office.

Jacob was standing at the checkout counter, his jacket zipped up to his throat. He was gazing beseechingly at Cheryl Williams, a squat, thickly rouged older woman who was a part-time cashier. Cheryl was shaking her head.