Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Diane opened her eyes and then widened them and jerked her head up off the dashboard. “We fell asleep!”
The others startled awake, looking around them confused, and then Diane was scrambling out of the car, looking down at her muddy clothes. “We have to get out of here. We can’t be seen like this.”
The other three followed, hurrying to the grave for a last look. The canopy was still standing. The body was still covered. The women looked at each other across the open rectangular hole.
“I think we’re okay,” Bonnie whispered.
“We look like we went mud wrestling,” Diane said. “I can’t go home like this. What will I tell Harry?”
“Drive me to my car, and then we’ll go to my place,” Christine said.
Bonnie said, “But won’t Jeff think it’s weird if we show up all muddy?”
“Jeff’s still staying in town most nights. You can clean up enough to go home, maybe even catch a nap. Then we’ll reconvene at the funeral, okay?”
Diane was struck by how helpful Chrissy was being. It was not her usual schtick, but she’d take it, so she nodded and they all got back into Rosa’s car.
Bonnie said, “I’m sorry about all this. If it comes out, I’ll swear I did it all on my own.”
“We wouldn’t let you do that,” Rosa said.
“I might,” Christine said. “Check back.”
There she was, Diane thought, relieved. “I don’t think what you did was wrong, Bon-Bon. That man was abusing little girls. It doesn’t feel wrong to stop a man who was hurting children and would’ve kept on hurting them, had he lived. I really don’t think it can possibly be wrong.”
“It really was self-defense,” Bonnie said softly.
“It was bad-ass,” Rosa said as she drove the station wagon out of the cemetery.
She stopped beside Christine’s white car but didn’t pull over.
Christine got out and opened her Beamer’s trunk.
She took off her coat and threw it in there, then unzipped the boots, heeled them off, and tossed those in, too.
Rosa rolled her eyes. Getting behind the wheel, Christine said, “See you at the lake house.”
She didn’t offer anyone a ride, and Diane knew why. They were dirty, and her car’s interior was white.
Christine hated death. It had a feeling to it, a smell to it that was just slightly outside the range of the human nose, and yet, you knew.
Driving home, she couldn’t seem to shake that scent.
She’d never been around it until Jon. It had been another lifetime it seemed.
She’d been Christine Hogan, then. Middle class house in the ’burbs, five minutes away from Bonnie and Diane, and ten from Rosa.
She’d worked at a travel agency—a job that barely existed anymore.
Jon was an electrician and a volunteer firefighter, and a round, happy man who was always making everyone laugh.
He loved his life, he loved good food and good beer, and he loved his friends.
And one day, she got a call at work, and the caller ID was Carl Hanlon. The fire chief.
Christine knew Jon’s crew had gone out on a call earlier that morning.
She kept a monitor in her office, so she always knew.
A two-story housefire in Homer. She was already shaking when she answered the phone.
Carl told her Jon was gone. He’d been carrying gear toward the burning house and just dropped in his tracks.
Later, his cardiologist would tell her that he’d died instantly, probably experienced a brief chest pain and nothing more.
The event, the doctor said, had not been survivable.
She’d put down the phone in a state of shock.
Her body kept functioning, but her mind was in a storm.
Somehow she got up from her desk, and she walked out of the travel agency, up the sidewalk, left onto Main Street, two blocks to the bookstore.
She’d opened the door, and the bells had jingled happily, like the entire world hadn’t just turned upside down. Nineteen years, she’d been with Jon.
Rosa looked up from behind the counter, and then her face changed and she came running, took her by her shoulders, folded her up close. “What’s the matter, baby, what’s the matter?”
Christine looked out from her mind storm and saw her friend. She couldn’t speak, just started crying.
Rosa wrapped her in a blanket, put her in a cozy reading chair, turned the CLOSED sign around on her door, and called Bonnie and Diane. And they’d spent the rest of the afternoon just holding her while her storm raged.
Then they helped her make the calls that needed making and they’d gone with her to the hospital to say goodbye to Jon.
Brushing a tear from her cheek, Christine pulled the car into the driveway of her lake house.
Jeff’s car still wasn’t there. Rosa pulled in behind her, and the girls emerged from the station wagon.
Christine just looked at them for a moment, shaking her head at how lucky she was to have Diane and Rosa and Bonnie in her life.
Her awareness of what they had, seemed to have expanded and deepened over the past twenty-four hours.
She walked them across the redwood deck, and opened the glass doors, turned to the girls and said, “You know… Okay, this is sappy but, I really love you guys.”
The admission morphed into a group hug that became a linked-arm circle. They leaned in, forehead to forehead.
“Me, too,” Rosa said. “I love you guys.”
“I love you,” Diane said.
And Bonnie said, “I love you all so much.”
The lake’s choppy waters slapped against the dock.
Later in the morning, when Diane finally came in through the back door of the house, Harry was in the kitchen.
He was wearing her holiday apron, and standing at the stove, making pancakes.
Her heart swelled at the sight of him. After all she’d been through, coming home to Harry was like sailing into a safe, familiar harbor after a storm at sea.
“There’s coffee on the counter,” he said. “Poured it when I heard Rosa drop you off.”
He looked over his shoulder at her and smiled, and in his eyes, she saw him at nineteen when she’d met him.
He still had all that hair, though it was gray now in shades from smoke to steel.
His eyes were still blue and still twinkled.
His rugged jawline sagged a little, but he was as good looking to her now as he’d ever been.
God, she’d missed him lately. “Thank you, hon.” She took the cup of coffee to the little table in the breakfast nook. It was already set. He’d even chopped fresh berries and warmed the maple syrup.
The girls had all showered at Christine’s while their muddy clothes ran through a wash cycle. So, at least she hadn’t come home looking like she’d spent the night in a muddy graveyard.
Harry brought a platter of pancakes and set it in front of her with a flourish, then leaned down and kissed her cheek. “I missed you.”
“Same,” she said.
“Bonnie must really be having a crisis, huh?”
“She is,” she said. “But we’ll get her through it. That’s what friends are for, after all.” She sipped the coffee and dug into the pancakes. It felt weird that she was ravenous. Apparently, hiding bodies was a great way to work up an appetite.
Honestly, it bothered her how okay she was. It bothered her more than what she had done bothered her.
She was also eating so she wouldn’t have to talk to Harry. Not that she didn’t love talking to him. She frequently complained that they didn’t talk enough. But not now, not when she felt like she was lying with every word that wasn’t “Bonnie killed a pedo last night and I helped bury the body.”
She swallowed a bite and said, “These are perfect. You’ve become such a great cook since you retired.”
“I don’t know how you did it all by yourself all those years and helped run the business, too,” he said.
“I enjoy cooking for you,” she told him.
“Same,” he said, echoing her earlier one-word answer. And then he leaned across the table and he kissed her again, on the lips this time.
She had been about to take another bite, but she paused with the fork halfway to her mouth, dripping syrup back down onto her plate. She said, “I’m uh, going to go to bed for an hour before I have to head to the funeral.” She met his eyes and gave him the look.
He averted his gaze fast. “That’s a great idea, hon. You should get as much sleep as you can. I can wake you before I head out to the golf course if you want.”
She bit her lip, lowered her head. “What time will that be?”
“Nine-thirty,” he said.
“Okay. That’ll give me time to put something on.”
“Okay,” he said. Then he dug into his plate of pancakes, put on his bifocals, and shook open the Cortland Standard.
April 2nd, 10 a.m.
Bonnie stood with her friends—the best friends anyone could have—surrounding her at Tommy Johnson’s graveside service. There were lots of other people there. She hadn’t known Tommy at all and she felt bad that she was using his death to cover up her own crime.
She’d thought it over, and yes, crime was the right word.
She was the mother of a law enforcement officer, and she knew what a crime was.
Even if killing Mr. Terrence had been self-defense, which it had, hiding the body was a crime.
She was a criminal. She’d made her beautiful friends into criminals with her.
And they were beautiful, even though their faces were starting to change.
Christine had work done whenever she got a sag or a wrinkle, but it wouldn’t work much longer.
Diane had laugh lines around her eyes and lips, much like Bonnie’s own—she considered those the product of a good marriage.
Rosa looked younger than any of them. She seemed to age more slowly than the rest of them, still had the cheekbones of a goddess, and brown eyes that would forever seem childlike.
She’d never been married. Maybe not having a man kept you younger?
Bonnie couldn’t tell what anyone was wearing, because they were all in coats. It was April 2nd, and the slightest breeze lowered the feels-like temperature (as the TV weatherman called it) by ten degrees.