On the Edge of Dangerous Things (Dangerous Things Trilogy Book 1) (26 page)

Forty-Eight

Everything was quiet except for the screeching parrots in the top of the Bo tree. The workers were in their trucks waiting out the rain. Let Clayton slap her with a fine. Hester didn’t care. She walked to the tree, pressed her hand against the scar, and looked down. Drops of water clung to the blossoms of the flowers she’d planted. She kissed her hand, knelt, and touched the wet earth where Nina was buried. If only she could turn back time.

Hester walked away past a row of refrigerators, rotting food spilling out of their open orifices, toward mounds of debris. Like refuges from better times, sofas, mattresses, chairs, draperies, jagged chunks of Formica countertops, light fixtures, lamps, and rugs were jumbled up together waiting to be loaded onto some truck and hauled away. As Hester circumnavigated the rubble, she was nearly run down by a Bobcat, whose driver seemed blinded by his goggles.

Once she got beyond the construction site, the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and the noise resumed with a vengeance. Hester knew it wouldn’t last long.
The truth will change everything
, she thought.

Yes, she hid Nina’s body. Yes, she lied to Al about what happened. Yes, she told him the girl had gone back to the community college. And, yes, Hester knew how hard Al tried to get in touch with Nina. Hester checked his cell phone, saw all the fruitless, unanswered calls to what must have been a cell phone he’d given Nina. Hester knew, despite his silence, he was desperate to find his secret lover. He was probably walking around the campus at this very moment searching for her. Hester could almost pity him if she weren’t so disgusted by him.

She didn’t really need a DNA test—even though she was hell-bent on getting one done—to be certain.

In the end Al was a stranger to her. She was married to him, cooked for him, cleaned up after him, worried about him, fought for him and with him, soothed him, flattered him, and had sex, lots of sex, with him, without really knowing him. So how had she loved him all these years? By turning a blind eye to what was right in front of her? By acting clueless when she already connected the dots?

She had invented the Alexander Bruno Murphy she loved. That man was a figment of her imagination and not the real person with whom she’d spent most of her life. Why she should’ve spent the past three decades writing an epic novel instead of putting up with the real Al. Oh, she’d done a spectacular job of fictionalizing their existence. From afar, as a couple, they glowed romantically like the moon; but as the astronauts found out when they touched down on it, that shining magical sphere was, in reality, cold, cratered, and barren.

All Hester desired now was to salvage some shred of dignity from the wasteland of her life. She had plenty of regrets concerning Al, but none as immutable as the sin she’d committed before Al came into her life. Her abortion distorted everything forever after. That single loss was a stake in the center of her being upon which any chance for happiness was quickly impaled.

And then there was what she did with Nina.

The day of the hurricane.

Nina’s dead! Dead!
She had to do something. She was washing the young women’s body. She was… She lost track…

She knelt on the floor whispering the Hail Mary.
Forgive Nina. Help me.

She looked up, tucked a strand of Nina’s wild hair behind the girl’s delicate ear, caressed Nina’s face, touched her lips. Nina’s lips were warm. Inside her flesh was still warm.
This part of Nina is alive
.

Quickly, Hester sat on the bed and cradled Nina in her arms.
The Grapes of Wrath
. It flashed through her mind. Hester thought of Rose of Sharon, her baby dead, her breasts agonizingly full of milk. The old man would starve to death. Rose could see it in Ma’s eyes. If Rose didn’t help him, if she didn’t cradle him and feed him from her own breast, he would die. Rose wasn’t always a good girl, but now she could do something exceedingly good—she could save someone’s life.

Gently, Hester leaned forward, pressed her breast into Nina’s open mouth, and felt the warmth.
Maybe, just maybe
. Nina’s head was in the crook of Hester’s arm. Her eyes were open and vacant. Still Hester stared into them lovingly.
Is this how it feels to have a child of your own?
Hester’s flesh throbbed with contentment. She felt at peace imagining Nina to be her own, longed-for child. Hester half-believed she could perform the miracle. She could bring Nina back to life.

Hester lost track of time. Soon Nina’s mouth grew cold. It made goose bumps rise on Hester’s skin. She laid the dead girl on the bed, kissed her on the forehead, and went to get the trash bags. She came back, and as she stuffed Nina into the black plastic, remorse, and horror, descended on her.

She hadn’t broken Nina’s neck. Al, or the hurricane, did, but she had been the one who cast the net that captured Nina and gathered her to them. If she hadn’t loved Nina, if she hadn’t been so desperate to make her part of their family….

By the time Hester reached her car, which she’d parked on A1A the night before, she was drenched in sweat beneath the slicker. She put the box on the ground and removed the heavy garment. She wiped her damp hands on her pants, took out her cell phone, and flipped it open.

Nine-one-one.

When Hester heard the ringing, she hesitated for a fraction of a second.
If I don’t tell them, they’ll probably never find her. They’ll just plow everything under, grind everything up. If they do see it, they’ll just think, oh, it’s only a big dog. Lots of Pleasant Palmers had dogs. Dogs barking night and day. Plenty of dogs are buried in plastic bags all over the park.

But if she did tell them, what she said could never be taken back.

A dispatcher answered, “What is your emergency?”

“The body of a young woman…” Hester’s voice faltered, “…is buried in Pleasant Palms Trailer Park on A1A. It’s buried under the tree at 23 Fish Tail Lane.”

“Please, stay on the line while I determine your exact location.”

The dispatcher put Hester on hold. She kept her cell phone to her ear, turned, and walked back toward the demolition site. Dust hung in the air, the palms lolled, the marina flags drooped. It took several minutes before the noise stopped, and all she heard was the sound of her own uneasy breathing. Everything had come to a halt, just as she knew it would.

The drivers of the steam shovels and cranes shut off the engines, descended from their cabs, removed their goggles. By the time she reached Fish Tail Lane, Clayton was hurrying down the street with several workers with shovels. He was on his cell phone too. Hester ducked behind the Buchanans’ unit, which they hadn’t gotten to yet. She didn’t want Clayton to see her.

“What the hell is wrong?” hollered Clayton into his phone. “What the hell do you mean stop everything?” A pause. “Yes, I’m at 23 now. Yes, they’re digging under the tree right now.”

It didn’t take long for the strong men to dig down a few feet before they struck something. Ginger leaves, impatiens petals, gardenia blossoms dotted the dark soil they piled to the side of the hole. Two men reached into it and pulled out something in plastic bags that were duct-taped together.

“Officer, I can’t hear what you’re saying. You’re breaking up,” shouted Clayton.

“Open it up,” he ordered one of the workers. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on. The police said something about somebody called about a dead body. They’re on their way, but I’m not waiting. It’s probably only a dog. Lots of these old people had dogs.”

The man ripped at the duct tape, then hesitated. The smell was disgusting. He backed away and said, “Man, I can’t do this.”

Two other workers grabbed the ends of the bags and pulled them apart.

Nina’s decomposing body, the mushroom-colored skin rotting off the bones, slipped out in front of them. Despite its condition, the body was clearly that of a woman.

“Oh my God,” whispered Clayton. “It is a dead body. Now what in the hell are we going to do? This is going to screw everything up.” He punched some numbers into his phone and turned away.

Hester tried not to look at Nina, but she couldn’t help it. Nina’s face was pulsing with squirming maggots. A sudden breeze caught the long curly hair and unfurled it into sort of a halo above Nina’s head. Hester couldn’t look away from the writhing countenance, from the black holes of Nina’s empty eye sockets.

A voice on the cell phone. “I’m patching you through to a supervisor. Stay on your phone.”

Hester was numb. She stepped back, turned away, and leaned against the trailer to wait for whatever came next. In this in-between moment, Hester envisioned herself, in the not too distant future, sitting in a Florida courtroom with Al, who would be on trial for the murder of Nina Tattoni. Exactly how it happened, the coroner would be unable to determine conclusively. However, the DNA test done on the sperm found on the pink thong was irrefutable—Nina Tattoni, immediately prior to her death, had engaged in sexual intercourse with the defendant, Alexander Bruno Murphy.

The prosecution built their case around that fact, and one other scandalous piece of information—the results also revealed that Mr. Murphy was not only the young woman’s lover, but he was also her father.

Forty-Nine

Hester would, of course, have uncovered this horrifying piece of information long before the trial. She had a plan. After she told the told the police everything she knew, she’d hand over the pink thong. When they released her on her own recognizance, she’d find a lab and pay to have a DNA test on both the strands of hair she’d taken from Nina’s brush and skin cells from Al’s dirty razor.

When she had the results, she’d drive as fast as she could, north to the Lambertville condo where she’d most likely find Al sitting in his Eames chair channel-surfing, trying—Hester was sure—to distract himself from fuming about what she’d done.

How Hester could have done such a dumb thing, would be going through his mind. It was a stupid accident, was what he’d told the Lambertville cops when they’d questioned him. He didn’t even know Nina Tattoni was dead. And look at the mess his stupid wife had stirred up, now. She was the criminal, putting the poor girl’s dead body in a hole in the ground and lying about it to everyone. Saying she buried Nina to save him? And their marriage? Why, he hadn’t done one thing to Nina Tattoni, except to try to protect her from the hurricane. She’d jumped into bed with him because she was scared half out of her wits.

Oh, Hester knew now how Al’s mind really worked now. She knew how he would be so pissed about the whole thing. The development of Pleasant Palms Trailer Park would stop, maybe the developer would pull out all together. Dead bodies weren’t part of the deal. They’d have to give all that money back.

But the worst thing for Al would be if, damn it to hell, anyone found out about what he’d gotten away with for all those years at Sourland High. All those teenage girls. Well, that couldn’t happen to somebody like him, it just couldn’t.

All of this would race through his mind in the time it took for Hester to hand him a manila envelope.

He’d frown at it. “What the hell is this?”

Not wanting to tip her hand, Hester would say as sweetly as she could, “Al, just open it. Please.”

“Look I’m so furious with you right now…”

“Please, Al.”

“Shit, it better be good news. I am not in the mood…” He wouldn’t be able to finish his sentence because as soon as he saw the photograph, he’d recognize Jennifer Masterson. But he’d be clever enough to say, “Where the hell did you get this, Hester? And why the hell are you showing it to me?”

“Just read that paper, Al.” Hester would calmly point to the DNA report. Inside she’d be roiling with anticipation. What will Al do when the light goes on?

His eyes dart over the words as he scans the document, his expression hardens. Feverishly he tries to strategize.
How can I worm my way out of this?
His panic so tangible, Hester would smell it.

He’s shocked alright to learn Nina was his daughter and sickened to think he fucked his own flesh and blood, his own longed-for child. Despite this initial pang of guilt, though, Hester knows his knee-jerk reaction will be cowardly. He will rue the public humiliation. He will fear the punishment he so richly deserves and will surely be forced to suffer.

Al Murphy will plead, project, berate, and maybe even try to choke the life out of Hester. Hell hath no fury like a pervert exposed. No, she won’t give Al a chance to defend himself or put the blame on her, or on Nina. She’ll turn and leave and never go back.

The wail of a siren distracted Hester. She still had her cell phone to her ear. “The officers are approaching Fish Tail Lane. Please stay on your phone.”

Hester’s mind raced. She foresaw impending doom, bleak days ahead. There was no way around it, she would be punished too, and she welcomed it. It was time she made reparation for her sins.

Despite the fact that her past life was swirling fast in the drain it was about to go down, Hester was oddly at peace. It was difficult for her to put into words— she was rising above what was and drifting toward what would be. She felt light and transparent, like a little less than a god, or, at long last, a part of God. Yes, Hester’s retreat from the edge of all that was wrong, had begun.

The End