twenty-one
Duke Dolce
“Remind me again, why couldn’t we go over to the other house for breakfast?” I ask, peering down into the bowl where my cereal bar is floating. I thought it was supposed to turn into cereal when you added milk, but it’s just floating there like a soggy, bloated turd.
“We don’t need a cook,” Mabel says, setting a plate with an English muffin and two perfectly poached eggs next to my bowl on the picnic table out back. “It’s really not that hard to put something in the toaster, and even a kid can scramble an egg.”
“You had a cook growing up,” I point out, deciding not to tell them what happened when I put some eggs in the microwave because I didn’t want to cook them on the stove and risk starting a fire. I’d probably just stand there watching it burn the house down, dumbass that I am.
“I didn’t like to bother her,” Mabel says. “I had to eat dinner with the family, but otherwise, I made my own meals and ate them by myself unless I was required to attend a special breakfast or luncheon.”
“Yeah, well, we can’t all be robots who don’t need anything from anyone,” I say, dumping an egg onto the English muffin. “I like my family, and I like having a cook.”
“You should know how to feed yourself,” she says.
“I’m feeding myself now, aren’t I?” I ask, stabbing my fork into the soggy cereal bar. I pick it up and start chewing on the end, letting milk dribble down my chin. Mabel makes a face and daintily breaks a yolk.
“We’re having breakfast here because we wanted to talk,” Baron says. “Make sure we’re all on the same page. I think we should go back to Tennessee.”
“What?” I ask, my fork clattering back into the bowl. The mushy bar plops into the milk, splashing it onto the weathered grey wood. I’ve lost my appetite, and all I want is to swallow a few blue pearls and reverse time, make this go away.
Baron hands me a napkin. “Next week would be ideal. I can get started on that new product we talked about.”
“I don’t care about that,” I say.
“We don’t want to leave too soon after the disappearance,” Baron says. “That might draw attention. But two people have died in Faulkner this week, and I don’t want any link between them to come up.”
“That’s unlikely,” Mabel says. “One is a philandering teacher at a fleabag motel, the other is the richest man in Faulkner having a simple accident at his estate. He was old and infirm. Preston lives with him, and he said so himself. Nothing suspicious about his death.”
“It’s all over the local news,” Baron points out. “Your grandfather was hugely influential in this town, but he had important ties all over the state.”
“Which means Mr. Harris’s death will be barely a blip,” I point out. “No one cares about teachers.”
“Maybe no one has to know,” Mabel says. “They haven’t found the body. Maybe we get rid of it. A disappearance instead of a death.”
“I thought only girls disappeared from this town,” I point out.
“What if it’s never reported?” she says slowly. “What if we make it look like he left.”
“How do you propose we do that?” Baron asks.
“Maybe he left a note for his wife,” Mabel says. “Sent her an email telling her what he did, saying he can’t live with the guilt anymore, and he can’t go back to the school where it happened, so he’s leaving.”
“That’s not something men like that do,” Baron says. “They don’t feel guilt.”
“Never?” Mabel asks, and I’m sure she’s disappointed to learn her grandpa never suffered, not even his own conscience.
Baron slices through the organic egg, letting the bright orange yolk spill out like blood. “They don’t think they’ve done anything wrong, so no. If anything, once they’re caught, they’re the victims, unjustly persecuted for taking what they’re entitled to.”
“How do you know that?” Mabel asks, narrowing her eyes at him.
Baron slides a wedge of muffin around in the yolk on his plate, soaking it up. I see the blood on the floor of Mabel’s house, spreading around the body of the man we killed.
“Because we lived with a man like that for eighteen years.”
I frown at Baron, surprised he would say something like that.
Out of all of us, Baron is the most loyal to our family.
Even if he didn’t show it, I assumed he was devastated about Dad.
Devastated enough to leave us all behind and move to another state so he didn’t have to deal with it, not even coming to the funeral, like Mom when Crystal disappeared.
But I also know that he’s the observer, and he wouldn’t say that if he hadn’t studied it long enough to come to that conclusion.
In his own way, Baron is the most accepting person there is.
He takes everything in, but because he doesn’t have a moral compass, he doesn’t place expectations on them to meet any standard or share his values to be considered a good person.
He accepts everyone and loves the ones that society tells him to as well as he is able, all along knowing exactly who they are.
Suddenly, I’m flooded with this swell of love for my brother, and I miss how it used to be so much that my ribs ache.
“You’re probably right,” I say. “But here’s the thing.
Most people aren’t like that. The majority want to believe that even the most vile predators have some redeeming quality that makes them human, because that means we are too.
Most everyone fears, deep down, that they aren’t a good person.
But if there’s someone worse, and he can be worthy of sympathy, then so are we. ”
Baron’s eyes light up, and I know in that moment that he feels exactly what I feel, that he misses me too, misses the way we’d play off each other, each playing to his own strengths, to challenge each other.
Two parts that are made to go together, reflections of each other and therefore mirror opposites—the sun and moon, the faces of comedy and tragedy, Batman and the Joker.
“Go on,” he says.
“That’s why people believe in death bed confessions,” I say.
“That even the worst person can change, and if they truly change in their hearts, they’re still deserving of heaven, no matter if they’ve committed the most heinous crimes.
It’s the same reason people watch documentaries about serial killers.
They want to dig into their pasts, know about their abusive childhoods and say that’s what made them that way.
They have to make sense of it. They don’t want to believe anyone can be simply evil with no reason.
That’s too scary to comprehend. That means anyone can be evil, even the people we love the most.”
“Or ourselves,” he says.
“Or ourselves,” I say, smiling at him.
“Okay,” he says. “It’ll be risky. An email creates a trail, and a trail can be followed, or come back to us, no matter how well I hide it. A written letter can have forensic evidence on it, not to mention handwriting.”
“Handwriting analysis isn’t as conclusive as they make it look in the movies,” Mabel says. “It’s often not even admissible in court. But hold up a second.” She looks back and forth between us, pointing her fork. “What just happened?”
A little smile tugs up the corner of Baron’s mouth as his gaze holds mine. “We need a place to bury a body.”
Reluctantly, I break eye contact and turn to Mabel. “Know anywhere? Maybe the woods over there?”
I nod to the forest beyond the yard, a curtain of green hiding dark secrets in its shadowy depths.
“I don’t want his body on my land,” Mabel says with a shiver. “Or the Delacroixs. Obviously Dahlia would be okay with that, but she doesn’t live there, and if someone else found it, they’d turn it over to the cops. But I still don’t understand.”
“We don’t want his disappearance to be cast as a tragedy, and we don’t want a big manhunt,” Baron explains. “If his wife thinks he’s a predator, she’ll be too ashamed to make a stink.”
“But what if she doesn’t tell the police that part?” Mabel asks. “Women cover for their husbands too. What if she just tells them he’s missing?”
“Then we post something online from a throwaway account,” Baron says. “Start a rumor at the school that he was inappropriate with students. People will spend a lot less time concerned about finding him if they think he’s not worth looking for.”
Mabel nods, chewing thoughtfully. “It’s not a bad idea. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. If we posted something, maybe the others would start to come out. Some of the girls might feel safe to come forward now that he’s gone.”
“Exactly,” I say. “If his wife is smart, she’ll foresee something like that.
She probably already has some inkling. She lives with him.
Most creeps can’t turn off the creepiness full time.
Even if she’s in denial now, I’m sure she’s seen something that she can look back on once she knows.
But she also wants to believe that if her husband is a pedo, at least he’s good enough to be ashamed of it.
So she’ll believe he left on his own, out of guilt, because she wants to believe it. ”
“Okay. I might know somewhere we can get rid of the body.”
“Where’s that?” Baron asks.
“The less people who know, the better,” she says.
My eyes narrow. “How do we know you’re not going to go to the cops? You could be setting us up.”
She just smiles that mysterious little smile of hers. “Haven’t you ever heard someone say that Darlings can get away with murder in this town? That’s not hyperbole. They can, and they have. Trust me, I can take care of it.”
“Why not have Dahlia do it?” Baron asks. “She did a good job in Maine.”
“I don’t have any way to contact her except to go hunting online, and that just creates another body.”
I shiver at her wording, how callously she says it. I’m beginning to think Baron’s not the biggest psycho among us. After all, she’s the one who had every single one of those men killed, including the ones Baron killed for her. I’m not sure I buy that she didn’t know he’d do that. She must have.