Rosie O'Dell (42 page)

“I hear ya. That’s why we’d have to kill him and make it look like
suicide.”

“That would be poetic justice, for sure. Look, will you stop
getting my hopes up?” She took my arm and pulled herself to me. “I am going to
think about the press conference some more, though. Let the media carry whatever
they feel they can—someone here or on the mainland or in the States may be brave
enough. They will carry the story even if they don’t use names, and it will at
least start some speculation rolling, and then two years from now I could go
whole hog.”

I didn’t like the sound of all that again. “Rosie, we could do it, you
know.”

“Yeah, I really think I should, no matter what Lucy—”

“No, not the press conference. I mean, kill the bastard and make it look like
an accident or suicide. And even if we slipped up and got nailed by the police
for it, what jury would convict us when everything came out? I’m starting to
think that no matter what might happen to us, it would be worth it.”

She stopped and looked at me. “No argument from me, Tom, but how? To tell you
the truth, I wouldn’t mind doing it, even if it did mean me going to jail. He
certainly deserves it. But I can’t ruin your life beyond what I’ve already
managed to do.”

“What we really need to achieve here is closure,” I intoned, and we laughed at
my use of “closure.” We always ridiculed its blanket use on TV, applied to
everything from genocide to a teen dumped by a sweetheart. I would never forget
that I used the word “closure” that night, because it would tell me years later
that Rosie and I had started off on our outlandish trajectory in a light and
humorous mood before, somehow, we became deadly serious. I would always remember
that we were just being silly at first. I continued, “If the two of us, with our
combined brains and brawn, can’t figure out a way to secretly bump the bastard
off, we’re simply not trying.”

For the sake of argument, we mulled over possibilities. I wondered if Rothesay
was really drinking as much as I’d thought he was whenever I’d been in the house
at night, because having him drunk might be a help. Yes, he’d been lowering down
glass after glass of scotch every night before she’d moved out, said Rosie, and
it was probably worse since the charges had been laid and the trial started. I
suggested that we’d have to get him to pass out and then suffocate him with a
pillow, or something. But with Rosie not even living there anymore, every idea
along those lines involved a lot of sneaking in and skulking about and
logistical difficulties.

“Have you told Lucy you’re giving up on a new trial yet?” I
asked.

“Sort of. I gave her my gut-feeling and she said that, for the moment, we
should wait.”

“Tomorrow you should tell her you want to go ahead with a new trial. And get
her to notify Rothesay’s lawyer that you are, in fact, going ahead. We’ve got to
keep the bastard here and give him something to commit suicide about.”

“Jesus, you’re serious.”

“I frigging well am serious. I can’t think of a better project for the summer
than that.”

“And I can’t believe we’re even talking like this.”

“We’ve just got to use our smarts and think it through with no slip-ups.”

“Tom, this could be good. I think I like this.”

We were two bright and motivated kids in love, with great creativity in
dreaming up a clever way of murdering a despised man, and getting away with it.
But we possessed no insight then into the ghastly personal consequences to us
both, even if we succeeded.

IT TOOK ROSIE AND
me only two days to come up with our
“foolproof” plan. I already had my novice driver’s permit, but Rosie hadn’t had
time to get hers. That required parental consent, so it was a good excuse for
Rosie to visit her mother and rekindle some sort of relationship with regular
visits, something she’d vowed never to do, in her pain from her mother’s
betrayal. But now, the end justified the means.

A number of things had to come together in our fancy plot. My mother and father
often spent weekend nights at their cottage during the summer and usually went
there in Dad’s car. During one of their absences, Rosie had to visit her mother
when she knew Rothesay would also be there and when she knew I could sneak
access to my mother’s car parked out in the driveway. Rosie would then contrive
to talk to Rothesay to see if he was drunk enough. If he was, she would then
move the conversation to the possibility of a discussion on stopping the new,
upcoming, mutually destructive criminal trial. But she didn’t want to talk about
that there in the house with her mother roaming around, she’d tell him. How
about if they took a drive in his Land Rover and discussed things? Rosie could
drive. If he said yes, Rosie would call me to meet them out where they were
going to end up, a place he’d taken her to years before. Kind of for old times’
sake. A bluff
above the ocean off the Marine Drive ten minutes
from town called Red Cliff. A partly paved, partly dirt road would bring them to
the edge of the precipice. It was where Rothesay had parked with Rosie and laid
his final groundwork for seducing her. As she had testified at the trial, he had
told her he would commit suicide here if their secret love affair ever became
known. The place could not be more appropriate.

Rosie and I rode our bikes out and satisfied ourselves that access was still
possible by vehicle to the cliff’s edge. That was where Dr. Heathcliff Rothesay
could easily end it all by driving his Land Rover over the brink into the sea
far below. We figured that together, Rosie and I were strong enough to overcome
any drunken resistance the man might put up to his assisted suicide.

For days and nights, whenever we were alone and out of everyone’s earshot, we
talked of little else but Rothesay’s imminent demise. Private time that we used
to apply to making love, we directed now to making foolproof plans for the
termination of the miscreant—tweaking the efficacy of this, shoring up the
credibility of that, reducing actions and explanations to their simplest terms.
Occam’s razor before the fact. The conception journeyed in our young minds from
wacky and grotesque to familiar and routine, from a bare possibility to
inevitable, as if absolutely preordained by laws of universal causation.

OUR LOOKED
-
FOR OPPORTUNITY CAME
onaFridayevening
after supper with an hour of daylight left. When Rosie called I told her that,
as we’d expected, Mom and Dad had left for the cabin in Dad’s car right after an
early supper. Mom’s keys were hanging on their hook in the porch. “I put it to
him,” Rosie said, “and he does want to talk.”

“How is he?”

“As pickled as the proverbial lord.”

“Where’s your mother?”

“Watching TV in her bedroom. Probably zonked out by now.”

“Does he mind you driving his car as a novice while he’s sitting there
sloshed?”

“I mentioned that to him and he said, ‘It’s okay, I’m a doctor.’ Tom, I’ll meet
you out there.”

“Are you sure about this?”

“I certainly am. How about you?”

I don’t know what I would have answered if she hadn’t whispered into the phone,
“Shh, he’s coming out. He’s got his jacket on. I’m going. See you out there.”
She hung up.

I borrowed—stole—Mom’s car and drove towards Red Cliff. I met three police cars
on the road during the trip, more in ten minutes than I’d seen during the
previous month. At each encounter I nearly turned around and went back. But
instead, I threw them off by continuing on at a believable five kilometres over
the speed limit, and none of the cops even looked at me.

I turned off on the road to the bluff and drove up. At the top I pulled
into my pre-scouted hidey spot behind a wall and saw Rothesay’s
vehicle ahead, just stopping at the edge of the drop. I got out and crept
towards it. As I approached I saw the window go down on the passenger side and
heard the English baritone, slurred but still elegant in accent, asking, “What
the fuck is that Tom fucker doing here?” He’d seen me in his outside
mirror.

My heart stopped. There was no way I was going to be able to go through with
this. I heard Rosie through her open window. “I asked him to meet me here, just
in case you tried something weird.”

“Weird how? I’m too drunk to perform normal? Ha, ha, ha.”

I forced myself to keep going. His reply had stimulated my interest in
following through with our plan. Rosie answered with, I thought, amazing
forbearance: “Just in case you got out of hand. But you’ve been really good, I
must say. Hi, Tom. Everything is okay here. He and I have come to an agreement.
He wants me to tell the prosecutor that I don’t want to proceed with a new trial
once he has turned over to my mother half of the investment portfolio he’s been
squirrelling away on the quiet—about a quarter of a million dollars to Mom—and
then he can bugger off to wherever he wants. Have I got our deal right,
Heathie?”

“Absolutely right, my darling stepdaughter. Very impressive. And to think I
believed the education system was not up to scratch over here in this
colony.”

Rosie opened her door and got out. Then she pulled her little tape recorder out
of her jacket pocket and said into it, “Well, Heathcliff, you can take your deal
and shove it.” She switched off the recorder and leaned into me, whispering,
“Where’s the pipe?” Our plan was that I would bring the foot-long piece of iron
pipe from my basement that we’d earlier examined and found good, and that before
pushing his car over the cliff I would knock him unconscious with a blow to the
head so that there was no chance of his escaping. And we figured that such a
blow would be indistinguishable, after the body was found, from other contusions
sustained in the long drop to the water and from submarine tidal
movements.

“In Mom’s car.” I’d forgotten it, or, more likely, my brain had refused to
order my body to bring it.

“Tom, get it.”

“Rosie, I don’t think I can—”

She took off for Mom’s car, yanked open two doors, front and back, spotted the
pipe, and returned with it behind her back.

“What’s going on out there? I’ve got to get back. Your mother needs
me, Rosie. Where the fuck is Rosie? What do you mean, shove it?
I thought we had a deal.”

“I’m here, Heathie. I had to get something I left in Tom’s car.” We both
scanned three hundred and sixty degrees. Everything was quiet and there was no
sign of life around on this drizzly Friday evening, with dusk approaching. Rosie
whispered to me, “I’ll divert him while you clobber him.” She passed me the pipe
and pulled me to Rothesay’s car.

“What was that you just gave him?” asked Rothesay.

Rosie opened the back door and pushed me in. Then she opened the driver’s door
and said, “It’s an iron pipe, you perverted limey prick. We’re going to beat
some of the shit out of your head and push you over the cliff.”

“Oh Christ, Rosie.” Rothesay twisted around and struggled to open his seat
belt, but locked it tight with his movements. “You won’t do that, Tom. The girl
is insane. You know that. It’s not worth going to jail for life just because she
sucked you off or gave you a piece of tail.”

“Yes, do it, Tom. Do it for me and all the Pagans in his future. Or give it to
me and I’ll do it.”

My space inside the car was constricted. I drew back to bash him on the
forehead as planned—the place where his head was likely to hit the wheel or the
dash or the windshield. The backswing of my backhand stroke was shortened by
bumping into the driver’s headrest before I moved the pipe forward to strike
him. The sound of the thud on his skull was dull but sickening.

He and I groaned the same words at the same time: “Oh fuck.” Then we both put
our hands to our heads. Rothesay’s eyes were dancing in his head as he tried to
look around at Rosie and me. “Oh, Rosie,” he moaned. “You fucking witch. Rosie
O’Dell, go back to hell.” Someone had told him of the writing on the school
shithouse wall. Brent’s father, probably. I was actually waiting to hear him
refer to me as a little dildo on feet.

“Give me that thing,” said Rosie. She grabbed the pipe and, with a short but
powerful tennis two-hander, brought it down on the top of his head. Rothesay
slumped forward in the seat. She passed the pipe to me. Then she ran around to
open his door, undo his seat belt, and re-close the door. I got out and flung
the pipe as far as I could over the cliff and into the sea. Then she ran around
to the driver’s door, turned the key to start the engine, put the gears in low,
pulled out the choke to keep it from stalling, hopped out, and slammed the door.
Then she ran back and leaned into the rear of the vehicle. “Push,” she
said.

The vehicle was easy to push ahead, assisted by the engine and
gears. When the front wheels were about to go over the cliff, I said, “Harder,
so it doesn’t get stuck.” As it was, the chassis brought up on the edge and we
had to rock the rig a half-dozen times before it started to slide. The rear
wheels bumped the edge and the car began its slow forward twist to the ocean.
When it splashed on the surface, I felt a tremendous thrill go through me. We
watched the upside-down car sink below. Then I looked at Rosie. She looked at me
and gave a brief, almost maniacal giggle. The drizzle turned into torrential
rain, filling in any footprints and ruts we had caused. Luck was with us there,
too. We ran to Mom’s car. Inside, we sat for a moment in silence, looked at each
other, and bent forwards in peals of frenzied laughter. Then Rosie took out her
recorder, rewound the tape, and played the conversation. It was muffled and
Rothesay admitted nothing about sexual abuse, but he could be heard trying to
make the deal that Rosie had just described. And Rosie was heard agreeing with
him until I arrived on the scene, when she repudiated the whole thing before the
recorder clicked off. We started to laugh again. When we stopped, I said, “Sorry
about nearly chickening out.”

“Understandable. You didn’t have my motivation. But when I said to you, ‘Do it
for me and all the Pagans, ’ and
then
you did it—Tom, that was enough for
me.”

Driving back, we went over our story again and found that we both had it down
seamlessly. I nearly said that this was the perfect murder, but I was afraid of
jinxing it. Yes, the perfect murder, all right. What I didn’t reckon with at the
time was that I would be facing a lifetime of broken sleep from nightmares, and
of daytime flashbacks, featuring the horrifying sight and sound of blows from an
iron pipe to a skull, of Rothesay’s slumped body, of a Land Rover twisting
surrealistically, but all too truly, in empty space, of hard-faced police at the
door with the anticipated, dreaded words of my—our—arrest.

ROSIE CALLED ME ON
Saturday morning to say that her
mother had just telephoned. Heathcliff did not come home last night after he’d
left with Rosie. He had told Nina that he and Rosie were going out to have a
talk. Did Rosie have any idea where he might have gone afterwards? “Mother,”
Rosie had replied, “I think you should call the police and report him as a
missing person.”

“Why? What did you say to him? Do you think he’s flown the coop or
something?”

“I have no idea where he’s gone or what he’s doing. But I am
going to call Lucy Barrett, the prosecutor, to say he may be missing.”

“Don’t get him into more trouble, Rosie. You’ve already got him in
enough.”

Rosie called me back later to say she had reached Lucy at home and told her
everything that had happened last night, except that Rosie’s narrative ended
with her getting out of Rothesay’s car after telling him to shove his offer and
joining me to drive back to the city.

Lucy had been incredulous. “Why on earth did you go with him like that, Rosie?
You may have buggered up the possibility of a new trial by that interference.
You may even be charged with mischief or obstruction of justice.”

“Well, he asked me to, and I figured I might be able to get something
incriminating out of him. I taped our conversation.”

“What? Did he say anything?’

“Nothing about the sexual abuse, but he did make an offer to benefit my mother
financially if I did not proceed with the new trial. It’s all on the tape. I’ll
let you hear it.”

“I’ll come and get you right away, and listen to it. And we’ll go to the
police. Rosie, please don’t do anything like this with him ever again. My God,
you could even have endangered your life at his hands.”

“I insisted on driving his car, so I knew where I was going. And I had Tom
drive out to meet me for additional protection.”

“Tom doesn’t even have a licence, does he? He’s in trouble too, now. The police
will have to give him a ticket for underage driving and driving without a
licence. There are big fines for that. And where did you go, precisely?”

“Out to Red Cliff.”

“Jesus. Where he prepared you for that first night…”

“Right. I thought it might get him—stimulate him—to say something about the
sexual abuse. But it didn’t.”

“He’s too cute for that. But he did try to cajole you to drop the case, you
say. I’ll have a listen to that. There may be something there we can use. Any
idea where he is?”

“None whatsoever. He was quite upset when I said no. He might have taken off
for the airport, I suppose.”

“Was he drunk or sober?”

“Oh, sober. I wouldn’t have left him alone to drive back drunk, if only as a
safeguard to innocent people on the road.”

“You said he once threatened suicide if you… I don’t
suppose…”

“I look back on that as his normal bullshit, but you never know. He
was
distraught at the thought of another trial. Maybe they should send divers
down off Red Cliff.”

After Rosie said goodbye to me to wait for Lucy, I sat there by the phone
shaking. The fat was in the fire and she had sounded so calm. Soon the police
would be coming around and asking their questions. Mom and Dad would be glaring
at me with their inquisition. Why this and wherefore that? I had a more serious
attack of the jitters.

Thank God for a father who suspected the absolute worst of his son. When, on
Tuesday, having exhausted all other more reasonable alternatives, the police
followed Rosie’s suggestion and sent divers down off Red Cliff, they found
Rothesay’s Land Rover, empty with windows smashed and doors open. Police
surmised that the condition of the vehicle was caused by the force of the fall,
the impact, and the tidal action. They scoured the vicinity for a body. Two days
later, people visiting the Ocean Sciences Centre spied a body rolling in the
surf on the rocks off the Marine Lab. If it was Rothesay’s, it had drifted in
the Labrador Current across Logy Bay. The police retrieved it from the wild
water with difficulty.

I told my parents I’d heard from Rosie through her mother that the police had
identified the corpse as Rothesay’s. Dad broke the glowering silence he’d
imposed on me after hearing my story on Sunday past and said, “I don’t like the
looks of this. I’m making an appointment for you to see lawyer Barry right away.
You need to get Rosie to go, too.”

Everyone had heard of lawyer Barry. He was forever on the news. Leonard Barry,
Q. C. was the pre-eminent criminal lawyer in town. Dad knew him well from
working as a forensic accountant against Barry’s clients in half a dozen
embezzlement and misappropriation cases. The accountant in Dad hated him, but
the lawyer’s successes on behalf of his thieving clients had instilled in Dad a
grudging respect for the man’s brilliance. Dad’s esteem for him went way up that
day when it appeared that his skills could be needed to drag his son out of a
deep, dark pool of something unplumbed but already malodorous.