Chapter 28 #4
They say that your life flashes before your eyes when you are dying, but that is not what Anna Plummer experienced.
In real time, she had been knocked unconscious.
Ligature marks, Sticks had said, but it had been tidier than that.
A Gucci belt, slipped effortlessly from Mimi Mar’s cinched waist. It took two women to exert the force, but it was surprising how quickly something that had been there for so long suddenly wasn’t.
The buttons were Ellen’s idea. “We need some kind of contract,” she said, once they were all in the car.
Mimi was in the driver’s seat, Karen shotgun, Di and Ellen in the captain’s seats in the second row, with Mary riding in the back next to what had once been Anna.
Or maybe she was still Anna. No one talked as they slipped from discussion of what they might do into the action of what they were carrying out.
But now they needed proof that this had happened, and proof that they were indebted only to one another.
“I just think we should . . . seal this somehow.”
“I agree,” Di said.
“What is she wearing?” Mimi asked, turning around.
They hadn’t left the driveway yet. The car was still off.
They could all see their breath. Di had sent her children off with the nanny for the evening, banking on her husband having dinner and drinks with colleagues in Boston for the night.
But their good fortune wouldn’t last forever.
They had to get moving. A crime was only as good as its worst perpetrator.
“Black sweater, black jeans,” Mary called from the back of the car. She looked down at Anna, noticing the sweater’s details. “There are buttons here,” Mary said. “Gold ones.”
“That settles that,” Mimi said. “Everyone gets a button. No questions asked. We can deal with it when we get there.”
A silence consumed the car as Mimi engaged the engine.
She drove slowly from Di’s house, out through the dark roads of Hamilton and toward Ipswich.
Trees rose up like skeletons, bony fingers reaching toward the sky.
They passed no cars on the road, saw no other headlights as they inched toward the haul-out.
It wasn’t yet late, but it was cold, and most houses blew tufts of smoke from their ancient chimneys.
People were at home now, safe and snug in their beds, but not the upstanding women of the Hamilton PTO.
Not them. They were out and looking for a place to hide the body.
They were out and looking for a place to store the evidence.
“Call your brother,” Mimi told Ellen as they got closer to the Ipswich line. “Call. No texts.” They couldn’t risk any mistakes, not now, not after they had been so particular, not after they had come so far.
Ellen nodded in the dark. She punched a few numbers into her phone. It rang twice before someone answered on the other end. It was Sticks, who had clearly been expecting the call.
“Hi,” she said a few seconds later. “The car is at Di’s house.” A pause. “Yes. Yes. Right, where we talked about. Yes. Yes, it’s all set. I’ll be gone by then.” Then she hung up.
“It’s all set,” Ellen said. “He’ll take care of the car.
” Sticks would come for the Volkswagen, moving it to the haul-out once everything was clear.
In a week or two, he’d pin it all on the husband, because it was always the husband, in every episode of Dateline.
Di could help with that. She had known them the longest. There would be enough to arouse suspicion, at least, even if there was no hard evidence.
A little unsolved mystery, gossip floating around town, leave the books open for just long enough and then abandon the whole thing entirely.
The last piece of the puzzle, proof they were untouchable.
“Fucking fantastic,” Mimi said, concentrating on the road ahead. “One less thing to worry about.”
At the haul-out, Mimi parked in the darkest spot, beneath a thicket of trees.
She pulled the dark car in as far as she could so that it was nearly invisible from the road.
“Karen, I want you to stand here near the road. If you see anyone driving by or anything happening, you let us know.” Karen nodded, like she had been waiting her whole life for this unique opportunity.
The others lined up at the trunk to help with the body.
They pulled the buttons off the sweater, one by one, and slipped them into their pockets.
They came off with surprising ease. That was all they needed.
A pact. An agreement among friends. After this, they could go back to being the upstanding members of the Hamilton Fucking PTO.
President, vice president, and, of course, premium members.
Life as it should be, all smoothed over in a small town.
Anna was wearing a slouchy sweater. It looked less suspicious in the middle of January, like she had simply gone out for a walk and lost her way.
Weren’t they all just losing their way, after all?
Wasn’t everyone always just losing their way in adulthood?
One big clusterfuck. Proof that life wasn’t an accident.
The snowpack was low for this time of year.
Global warming had come for them, too, even all the way up in Massachusetts.
At least there was something, a chill to work with.
One side of the haul-out had a shallow embankment of ice and snow, and it was hidden from trails and from the road.
It would make a good hiding place for a few days.
The river was moving slow and thick, and they placed her on the side, where she would be found, and hopefully not be swept downstream.
Mimi trekked back toward the car, making sure their footsteps were invisible.
By now, they all blended together; it was impossible to tell who had stepped where, and by morning, it would be completely indecipherable.
“Let’s go,” Mimi called. Di followed right behind. She didn’t look back at Anna, who was now just another part of the Ipswich landscape, as natural to winter as the falling snow.
Ellen was next, but before she trailed behind, she held Anna’s hand for just a second, and slipped a ring from a finger, a diamond that had once been Anna Plummer’s mother’s engagement ring. Now it was Ellen’s own memento of the dead.
Ophelia did not feel the cold. Last memories: a Montauk sunset, the day she married, the piglet pink of her children’s toes as they squirmed when they were babies.
Had she felt the final moments, or just the fierce betrayal?
Death was dark, but it was not cold. It had come for her.
She had waited for it. She had opened her arms, and it had embraced her in the carriage house.
I love you, she thought, as the hitched last breath was leaving her body.
She was talking to Denny, to Louisa, to her sweet little boy, Ben.
The things she had wanted to do, well, those opportunities were now gone.
Gerhard Richter. Sonic Youth. There was never enough time, she had not had enough time, and all the battles she had fought, maybe they were the wrong ones. Now she would never know.
I have always loved you. A body. A porcelain doll. A light extinguished.