Chapter 4 #2
It was Bonnie calling, one of her best friends. She’d been a little lost since her husband had died. She’d had a forty-year marriage to a man who’d treated her like a queen. She and Mark had been attached at the hip.
The poor thing had taken it hard. Christine knew how that felt. Jon had only been forty-two. The widow-maker had lived up to its name. Christine had been a widow at thirty-nine.
Bonnie had not yet found her new normal.
Everyone had their own pace for this sort of thing.
She was trying though. She’d picked up a dozen hobbies to fill her days, but the only ones that had stuck were food-related ones.
Growing and foraging weeds she called herbs, a small veggie garden in the back yard, and of course the baking, but she’d always done that.
She was re-emerging slowly but surely from the ashes of widowhood.
She was also the undisputed cookie queen.
Christine liked to tell herself that she’d be perfectly fine if her current husband dropped dead tomorrow.
That was a good thing, since he ate as if a heart attack was on his bucket list. It was their chief source of conflict, her nagging about his diet, and him defying her and eating like shit anyway.
“The way you eat’s gonna kill you,” she’d tell him, to which he’d reply, “Yeah but I hear the food’s great in heaven.”
She smiled a little and rolled her eyes, then answered her phone. “Hi, Bonnie. What’s new?”
“I killed someone,” Bonnie said.
Christine went very still. She looked longingly at her vodka. “What’s this now? You what?” Bonnie could not possibly have said what she had just said.
“I didn’t mean to. He was choking me, and I grabbed the pan—”
“Ugh, I just realized it’s April Fool’s day! My God, what a horrible joke.” She slugged back her drink in one gulp and thought what great progress Bonnie was making to try to pull such a big gag.
“Please shut up and listen to me!” Bonnie yelped the words. And it was that, a yelp, like a kicked dog. “I’m at the Starlight Diner almost to Stafford. I took a Lyft here. I need a ride and…help.”
Christine looked at her empty vodka glass. Shit. She said, “Let’s conference in Diane and Rosa.”
“I tried Diane. She didn’t answer. Besides, I don’t want everyone to know!”
“Listen, honey, you’re either having a nervous breakdown or you’re in some deep trouble. Either way, you need us. All of us. You and I aren’t going to figure this out alone.”
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Should I call the police?”
“No! Fuck no, woman. Just hang tight until we get there and figure this out, okay?”
“All right.”
“Text me the address while I get the others.”
Christine called Rosa first. Rosa picked up on the first ring. “Hey, girl.”
“I’ve got Bonnie on the line,” Christine said. “She’s in trouble. Hold on while I pull in Diane.” She clicked over and dialed Diane, then clicked back again and said, “Okay, now we’re all here. Talk slowly, Bonnie.”
“I don’t think I should say on the phone. Maybe I already said too much. Can you just come? Please? I need you.”
“Of course we’re coming,” Diane said, not asking what the trouble was. “Just tell us where. I’ll even drive. I’ll bring the new SUV. The thing has everything, you won’t even believe—”
“Hurry, please hurry,” Bonnie said. And then she hung up.
Rosa said, “What the hell, Christine?”
“She really sounds upset,” Diane said.
“Bonnie’s right,” Christine replied. “Not on the phone. Let’s meet at Sam’s Lakefront, okay? Rosa, you can leave your car there and we’ll carpool in Diane’s. Be as quick as you can.”
She hung up the phone, made another drink and poured it into a travel mug, because for her, Sam’s Lakefront Tavern was within walking distance.
4:30 p.m., 8 hours before the cemetery
Bonnie’s best friends stood in Phillip Terrence’s small living room, not touching anything. She’d called them from the payphone at the diner, and they’d picked her up there. Now they were standing around the body of the man she’d killed.
She hadn’t returned until they’d arrived at the diner and picked her up, so the house was just the way she’d left it. Beef tips and mushrooms scattered on the floor, the frying pan lying where she’d dropped it. The man, lying where she’d killed him.
His head was flattened on one side and dented on the other. His eyes were closed, the one that showed anyway. The other one was crushed into his skull somewhere. There was more blood than she’d thought.
“I didn’t really believe you until right this minute,” Christine said. “I thought it was either a joke or a stroke.”
Diane crossed herself at the word “stroke.”
“So lemme see if I have this straight,” Rosa said. “You found out he was abusing a student, and then you put on a disguise, followed him home, and bashed his head in with his own frickin’ frying pan. That about sum it up?”
“I didn’t come directly here,” Bonnie said. “I had Coy drive me to the diner and drop me there.”
“Coy?” Rosa repeated. “Who the hell is Coy?”
“My Lyft driver. I told him we were following my son’s friend home because my feeble elderly brain had forgotten the address. I hate that I lied. It kind of makes this look…premeditated.”
Christine blinked slowly. “So you lied to your Lyft driver, then were seen at the diner. And then you lied your way into Mr. Terrence’s house?”
Bonnie had filled them in on the ride from the diner, but she went over things again. “I told him my phone was dead and I needed to make a call. I saw his conversation with Sara. There’s no doubt what he was up to, so I texted her from his phone to cancel.”
“Make sure we wipe down that phone,” Diane said. She was at the computer desk, using tissues from a nearby box to push a button on the computer. The screen lit up, showing the well-lit sofa.
“He was filming, I think. See the camera on that shelf?” Bonnie said. “I only spotted it when the little red light went off. And if it was on—”
“Then it was filming,” Diane said. “Or streaming. Or both.” She looked at the camera, then returned to the keyboard and clicked keys.
Bonnie moved closer, looking over her shoulder as she opened a file. The sofa scene changed to a recording of Bonnie standing near it, using his phone and glancing occasionally and very suspiciously, toward the kitchen.
“Okay good,” Diane said. “He was recording to the computer, so we can delete it.”
In the video, Bonnie got up and went to the door, walking right out of the frame.
Terrence followed her, looming a foot and a half taller.
Seconds later he lurched into the frame again with one side of his head caved in, and smashed the other side into the mantel, crushing his skull, sending blood spatter everywhere before he sank to the floor.
Then Bonnie returned to the frame, knelt to check his pulse, picked up her phone, and left again.
Diane clicked delete, then clicked on the trash can. “I’ll just empty this, and… Wait these are all video files,” she said. She clicked on one.
A girl Bonnie didn’t know took off her clothes in front of the camera as a man muttered instructions off screen.
Diane gasped and stopped the playback. Then she clicked on another as Bonnie said, “Don’t!”
Another naked child, thirteen at most, this one holding her arms over her head and turning in a slow circle as instructed. Diane closed the file before the girl faced front. “There are dozens of these.”
“This guy was more than your garden variety pervert, wasn’t he?” Christine asked, then she kicked the body with her pointy-toed designer bootie. “Pig! If you were still alive, I’d kill you myself.” She kicked him again.
Bonnie winced and turned away. Christine noticed and stopped her tantrum. She pushed her caramel side bang off her face.
Diane said, “I’m afraid your story isn’t gonna hold up, Bonnie. You followed him home and bashed his head in, even wore a disguise at one point.”
“He had me by the neck, though,” Bonnie said softly.
“We know that, but it was off camera,” Diane replied. “Come here in the light, let me see your neck.”
Bonnie moved closer and Diane looked at her neck. “No bruises. No proof.”
“Well, what do we do then?” Bonnie’s voice emerged, a high-pitched squeak. “What do we do?”
Christine looked at Diane. She was the leader, kind of a nerdy good girl, in a good marriage, with a good life. One kid, Tim, single and gay and all the way across the country, so no drama. Diane always knew what to do.
Diane said, “Well, I guess…if we’re not reporting this—”
“And we’re not,” Rosa said.
“Then we need to get rid of the body. Maybe we could make it look like he was about to be exposed and skipped town. Leave all this for the police to find, except that last one.” That as she deleted the recording from the trash. “We do that, they’re not gonna worry too much about his well-being.”
Rosa said, “They’ll be looking for him to arrest him, though. No, we have to do better than that.”
“But they’ll never find him and think he’s on the lam,” Diane said. “It makes perfect sense.”
Everyone nodded, except for Rosa and the corpse on the floor. Christine finally spoke. “So what do we do with the body?”
Bonnie said, “We should wrap it in something so he keeps his DNA to himself when we move him in Diane’s new ride.”
Diane nodded. “Then we wipe every trace of Bonnie from this house. That’s job one.”
Bonnie and Christine walked through the place in search of something to wrap him in. Christine opened doors with her hand over her sleeve until they found the bedroom. She yanked a bedspread off the four-poster bed, revealing leather restraints on all four posts.
Bonnie gasped.
“Fucking sicko,” Christine muttered. She took Bonnie’s hand on the way back to the living room.
“You did a good thing here, kid,” she said as she laid the bedspread on the floor beside the dead pervert.
Then she, Diane, and Rosa knelt on the other side of him and rolled him onto it.
Bonnie just couldn’t bring herself to touch him.
They wrapped and tucked the ends of the blanket around him like a burrito.