Execution of Innocence Page 9

  “It's Dick!” she gasped. “He's drunk! He's going to kill you, Charlie!”

  Charlie stared at her as if she were the drunk one. “What is your brother doing out here?” he asked.

  Hannah grabbed Mary’s hands. “I ran into him down the road. He’s stoned out of his mind and carrying real bullets. We have to get out of here!”

  “And what are you doing here?” Charlie asked Hannah.

  “Where did he get the real bullets?” Mary demanded.

  “I don’t think he ever had blanks,” Hannah said, glancing back the way she had come. A car, also shining its high beams, was approaching rapidly. She grabbed both Mary and Charlie and dragged them toward Mary's car. “We have to get out of here!” she shouted.

  “What's going on?” Charlie protested as he got in Mary’s car.

  “We’ll explain later,” Mary said, slipping in behind the wheel. Starting the car, she glanced in her rearview mirror. Dick was hanging out the driver's side, the revolver in his hand. He fired off another shot and she turned in time to see the bark on the tree in front of them splinter. Mary felt a rush of terror. There was no question he was packing live rounds. She threw the car in gear and they shot forward.

  “Why is he shooting at us?” Charlie demanded.

  “Because he hates you,” Hannah said from the backseat, keeping her head low.

  “What did I do to him?” Charlie asked. “He's the one who stole my girl.”

  “He didn't steal me!” Mary shouted.

  They heard another two shots. God knew where they went.

  “Shut up and drive faster!” Hannah ordered Mary.

  “I'm not running from that punk,” Charlie swore.

  “He has a gun, you don't,” Hannah said. “You're running.”

  It was the wrong thing to say to Charlie. Hannah should have known that. In response Charlie reached over and yanked the keys out of Mary's ignition. The car engine died and the car rolled forward. Mary turned to him in shock and he smiled at her.

  “He won’t shoot me,” he said calmly. “He doesn't have the guts.”

  Mary swallowed. “No. Don’t get out. Please?”

  The car rolled to a halt and Charlie opened his door.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said. Famous last words.

  Behind them they could hear Dick’s car skidding to a halt. They heard his car door open and two sets of footsteps crunch through the snow. Hurrying over the flakes, like two animals—one prey, one hunter. For a moment Mary and Hannah sat as if they were made of stone, then they threw open their doors and leapt out. Suddenly there were four young people, of questionable states of mind, converging rapidly in the dark.

  And it was totally dark.

  No one had left car lights on.

  “You sonofabitch!” Charlie said as he reached Dick. Mary could just see their outlines, just glimpse them smashing into each other. As far as she could tell, Charlie ran up to Dick and shoved him hard in the chest. Then they both fell to the ground, wrestling in the snow.

  Then a third outline leapt into the fray. Hannah.

  There was shouting, screaming, cursing.

  Finally Mary rushed toward them, her mind fixed on the gun.

  There was another shot. Orange flame stabbed the black, and Mary saw the three of them entwined like lovers at a drunken orgy. Only now Dick was on the bottom and he no longer seemed to be moving. Indeed, there appeared to be something red and wet growing around his head. All this Mary saw in the flash of burnt powder.

  Then stunned darkness. Another flash.

  Mary must have blinked. This shot showed her nothing.

  But she could hear Hannah screaming, screaming bloody murder as the old cliché went. Mary rushed forward, grabbed Hannah, pulled her to her feet. They hugged each other and only knew they were doing so because they were both shorter and lighter than either of the guys. Their combined breath was not ragged but torn. It was difficult to say who was more hysterical because they both must have been in shock. Mary was already trying to tell herself that nothing bad had happened. They were only in high school, it was Friday night. This was a party that had gotten a little out of hand, but everyone knew that bad things didn’t happen at parties. The wet red stuff she thought she had glimpsed had been the afterglow on her retinas from the glare of the fired shot. The gun probably had blanks in it, anyway; the tree bark had splintered because it was an old tree and old trees splintered when they got old. And Charlie, her Charlie whom she loved more than anything in the whole world, would be getting up any second and telling her that she was right, everything was OK.

  “Is everything OK?” Mary wept.

  Hannah panted. “I don’t think so.”

  “What do you mean you don’t think so?” A long pause. “Charlie?” Mary searched the night sky and saw stars that weren’t there. Red stars that threatened to swell and explode into globs of splattered blood. “Charlie?” How painful the silence was, especially after the roar of the shots. Hannah let her go.

  “I’ll turn on the lights in Dick's car,” she said.

  Mary grabbed her, held her. “No! Don’t do that.”

  Hannah slowly unwrapped Mary’s arms. “We have to see what’s happened.”

  Mary swallowed and nodded with a head that was no longer attached to her neck. She felt as if she were floating and smothering at the same time. The sensation made her nauseous and she feared she'd be sick. But it was a tiny physical fear and could not compete with the big fear of what they would see when the lights came on. Charlie was not responding to her calls. Of course they were only in her head now, silent wails that shook to the core of her hollow being where she kept hidden horrors that she had never consciously imagined. A part of her knew she was losing her mind.

  Hannah hiked through the snow toward the shadow that was Dick's car.

  The headlights went on like a bomb exploding.

  The guys, to Mary’s surprise, were not right on top of each other. They were at least twenty feet apart. But they were both lying on their backs, and there was plenty of red stuff around both of them. Mary blinked and mentally tried to make the red stuff go away; it remained and so, finally, did the realization that Charlie was dead. No, Dick was dead as well. Yet Dick seemed but a footnote, a statistic for people who kept such records. She had never liked Dick and he had never liked her. Her own mind made her sick, that she could think that way. That she could for an instant blame Dick. She could see that his right eye was not well, that a bullet had burst through it and opened a hole into his brain. He deserved her sympathy as much as Charlie did.

  Charlie looked OK, if it wasn’t for the blood.

  Hannah reached her and touched her. Her hand felt like ice.

  “I don't know what happened,” Hannah said.

  “They're dead,” Mary whispered.

  “Shit,” Hannah said. Some epithet. “What are we going to do?”

  Mary looked at her, better her than Charlie. “What?”

  Hannah stepped forward to Charlie, and picked a revolver out of the snow. She handed it to Mary, and Mary took it because she was afraid it might come alive, on its own accord, and start shooting again. She hardly noticed that she didn’t have her gloves on. Hannah had borrowed them earlier that evening.

  “We can't take the blame for this,” Hannah said.

  Mary struggled to breathe. It hurt. The pain in her chest was molten lava. Each time the air went through the agony, sparks flew. She couldn’t understand how her heart could keep beating through such pain.

  “We have to call an ambulance,” she muttered. She knew she should kneel by Charlie, check his vital signs, see if he was really dead. It was just that her legs wouldn’t carry her in that direction. Yet she watched as Hannah crouched by Charlie, felt for a pulse at his neck, how she briefly closed her eyes and shook her head.

  “It’s too late for an ambulance,” Hannah said.

  “Is he dead?”

  Hannah sounded annoyed. “Yeah.” But when
she stood and looked at her brother—at his messy eye; please, could someone close it—there was no denying her grief. Her face seemed to shatter into a hundred tiny pieces. Perhaps the shock was wearing off. Hannah choked on her own voice. “Oh no. Oh God no.”

  They comforted each other in the night.

  Then Hannah was shaking her head again, pulling away.

  “We can’t take the blame for this,” she said again.

  “But it was an accident.”

  Hannah laughed bitterly. “An accident? We set this up. See that gun you're holding?”

  Mary realized that it was still in her hand. “Yes?”

  “It’s Charlie's gun. I sneaked it out of his house this afternoon when he was at the gas station.”

  “Why did you do that?” Mary asked, dropping it in the snow.

  “Because we needed a gun for our little fun and because the Spelling family doesn’t own a gun. But I knew Charlie’s father had one—he showed me how to shoot it once, with Charlie. We shot out here in fact.”

  “When? I didn't know that.”

  Hannah got loud. “It doesn't matter! What I’m saying is that this looks awful. Dick and Charlie are dead, and you and I arranged for them both to be here. I mean, our prints are on the gun.”

  “You didn't touch it,” Mary said.

  “Touch it? How do I know I didn't shoot my own brother with it? We were all rolling around in the snow. How can I prove I didn’t murder them? How can you?”

  “But I didn't do anything,” Mary said. “You did everything I did! You’re as guilty as I am!”

  Mary fought for reason. It was as if the night air refused to support it.

  “But we can explain to the police,” Mary said desperately. “We can tell them exactly what happened and say that no one was supposed to get hurt and that we—”

  Hannah stepped toward her and grabbed her by the shoulders.

  “We cannot explain that we all met here to pretend to shoot Charlie,” Hannah said. “That sounds patently ridiculous.”

  “But it's true.”

  “It doesn’t matter! No one will believe it. At the same time we won’t be able to convince anyone that my brother, Mr. Straight, came out here with a loaded gun to kill Charlie. He was going to be our goddamn valedictorian. Think, Mary, think hard. We’re talking about the rest of our lives.”

  Thinking was the last thing Mary could do. Her despair was a brick on top of her skull. She gestured weakly. “What can we do then?” she whispered.

  Hannah looked around, at the bodies, at the night.

  “What if we make it look like they killed each other?” she said.

  Mary didn't need all of her brain to know the trouble with that.

  “They would both have to have been armed,” she said. “There’s only one gun.”

  Hannah put her hands to her temples. “You’re right. That's a good point. OK, we don’t do that. We do something else. We…” She stopped. “We make it look like Charlie killed Dick and then took off.”

  “How?”

  “We get rid of Charlie's body. Put it where no one will find it. They’ll think he fled in fear.”

  Mary shook her head. “That’s crazy. The cops are smart. They’ll study things, reconstruct what happened.”

  “Not if we move Dick’s body.”

  “I thought you wanted to hide Charlie?” Mary said, and she couldn't believe how idiotic her words sounded to her own ears.

  “We hide Charlie; we move Dick. We’ll take my brother back to the Crossroads, and throw the gun into the trees there, where they’ll find it. They won’t be able to reconstruct what happened if they're looking in the wrong place. Besides, you’re wrong, cops are all fools. You have to be a fool to want to be one in the first place. Look at Howard.”

  “Howard is not the one we have to worry about.”

  “Everyone in town knows that Charlie was mad at you for going out with Dick. If they can't find Charlie, all the heat will fall on him. They'll never suspect us. Particularly since the bullets came from Charlie's gun. The cops will probably be able to prove that.”

  Mary had to close her eyes for a moment. “This is all happening too fast. I don't know—I don't know what to do.”

  Hannah was back by her side. Opening her eyes, Mary looked into a face she hardly recognized. Hannah was forty years older and from another dimension. She was talking about things that didn't happen in the real world. Yet Dick’s puddle of blood framed her head like a demonic halo. There was reality and then there was tonight.

  “There is only one thing that matters now,” Hannah said. “We'll never be able to explain this to anyone. They’d never believe us.”

  There was truth in those words.

  Mary wept. “I don’t want Charlie to be dead.”

  Hannah nodded tightly. “I hated my brother but I loved him, too. You know that. I don’t want him to be dead either. But they're gone, and we can’t help them now. We can only help ourselves.”

  Mary spoke like a child. “But what do we do with Charlie?”

  “There’s an old well on an abandoned farm out beyond Whistler. No one goes there. We can dump Charlie's body in there, and to the police it will be just like he ran off to Los Angeles.”

  Mary tried to dry her tears. “But his father—everyone—will think he was a killer.”

  “Mary. Everyone will think we’re killers. We have no choice.”

  From somewhere Mary found the strength to look at Charlie, to actually study his face. He could have been sleeping, as he had slept beside her in her warm bed in the days before Christmas. Back then the two of them had been safe in their love for each other, safe from all the evil that walked outside. Of course that was the greatest lie of the entire situation. In the end, Charlie had been sleeping with his own murderer. She had said she wanted to kill him and she had. Somehow the thought gave her a perverse form of strength, the strength to move forward.

  Mary nodded. “We have no choice.”

  They had much to do. Hannah took command. She refused to let them move the bodies until they had prepped the trunk of Mary's car with layers of plastic. To do that they had to drive to Hannah's house to get a box of plastic yard and lawn bags. There were no stores open in Maple in the middle of the night. While they were there, Hannah grabbed a bottle of Lysol, too. Mary couldn’t imagine what it was for. Hannah explained that her father went to bed early. He was sound asleep and hadn’t even heard her enter the house.

  “One drop of blood in your car and you're in trouble,” Hannah said.

  “I’m in trouble?”

  “Stop that, you know what I mean. We have to stick together for the next few hours. We move Dick and we dump Charlie and everything will be OK.”

  Mary had pain. “Quit using the word dump.”

  “Sorry.”

  Mary coughed. “The police will want to talk to us.”

  “We'll make up a story. We’ll keep it simple and stupid.”

  Mary spoke with bitterness. “Like your plan to scare Charlie?”

  “That's not fair. How did I know Dick would freak out?”

  “Because he was your goddamn brother. You should have known how much he hated Charlie.”

  “He never talked about Charlie to me. Listen, Mary, you can't wig out on me now. I’m not spending the next twenty years in jail. Think of college, think of all the things you want to do with your life. I know you cared for Charlie, but trust me you’ll love again. Tonight doesn’t have to change anything.”

  Mary buried her head in her hands. “I can only think of Charlie's face.”

  They returned to the bodies. They hadn’t moved. Hannah was full of energy; it was as if the Grim Reaper’s favorite pill percolated in her system. She layered the trunk with plastic bags and then bagged her own brother—one going over his head and chest, the other over his legs and lower torso. She produced a roll of duct tape and sealed the bags together at his waist. Mary stood and watched her and tried to remember to breathe. Jus
t in and out, let the air flow and life could go on.

  Hannah glanced up at her as she knelt beside Dick. “Help me lift him into the trunk,” she said.

  Mary hesitated. “How does he feel?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Does he feel like a corpse?” Mary asked.

  “He feels heavy. Help me, we don’t have all night.”

  They moved Dick back to the Crossroads and laid him in the snow. While they were gone, the blood around his eye had frozen. To Mary’s immense horror, the moment they stretched him out, Hannah stood up and stepped hard on his neck. The act was sick; blood began to spurt out of his right eye. Hannah continued to jump on him. She was trying to drain him as if he were an inflatable doll she wanted to stuff in a jammed suitcase. Mary turned away and came close to vomiting.

  “Don't do that,” she pleaded.

  “We have to make it look like he died here. We need more blood.”

  Mary gasped as she bent over. “I can't go through with this.”

  “It's too late to turn back.”

  They rubbed down the gun and threw it into the trees. Then they went back for Charlie. As before, Hannah bagged him and together they lifted him toward Mary's trunk. Yet they were careless. The trunk lid shot up and banged Mary in the head. She felt warm blood.

  Mary was shocked at how insubstantial Charlie felt, almost like an angel made only of golden light. She wept as she held his head. She wouldn't let Hannah get near the top of him.

  “Love you,” she whispered.

  They drove toward Whistler, Hannah behind the wheel. The abandoned farm, she said, was on their side of town, not far but very secluded. The well was deep, she assured Mary. No animals would get to Charlie. He would rest peacefully.

  “Shut up,” Mary muttered.

  Hannah fell into a watchful silence.

  The farm hardly existed anymore. There was a decrepit barn, a wooden house that looked as if it had been ravaged by a tornado. The well was made of stone, and stood alone in a barren snow-covered field like a portal into a subterranean realm of emptiness. Hannah parked beside it and jumped out, still riding on her post-killing high. Yet, even though Hannah had raised the possibility herself, Mary would have been reluctant to accuse Hannah of the deaths, at least directly. Dick had started with the gun, and Charlie reached Dick before Hannah did. The shots had been wild and unfortunate. Mary knew that much.