A Simple Plan

JACOB HANSEL MITCHELL

JOSEPHINE MCDONNEL MITCHELL

December 31, 1927-

May 5, 1930-

December 2, 1980

December 4, 1980

Twofold is our mourning

Below this were two blank spots, sanded smooth. These were for Jacob and me: our father had bought four plots before he died, to ensure that we might all be buried together one day.

I stood perfectly still before the grave, staring intently at the stone, but I wasn't thinking about our parents, wasn't remembering their presence, or grieving for their loss. I was thinking instead about Jacob. I was searching for a way to enlist his aid in our plot against Lou. That was why we were at the cemetery tonight: I was reminding him of the bond we shared as brothers.

I waited several minutes, letting the silence build around us. I was wearing my overcoat, a suit and tie, and the cold bit at me, the wind pressing through my pant legs like an icy hand, firm, insistent, as if it wanted me to step forward. My eyes moved furtively from the stone to the dark shape of the church, then sideways toward Jacob, who stood beside me, swaddled in the tightness of his jacket -- silent, massive, immovable -- a giant red Buddha. I wondered briefly what he was thinking about, standing there so still: perhaps some private memory of our parents, or of Mary Beth Shackleton, or of the mysteries of fate, and the gift it'd brought him, the doors it promised to open now, finally, when his life already seemed so far along. Perhaps he wasn't thinking of anything at all.

"Do you miss them?" I asked.

Jacob answered slowly, as if rousing himself from sleep. "Who?"

"Mom and Dad."

There was a brief silence while he thought this over. I could hear the packed snow beneath his boots creaking as he shifted his weight from foot to foot.

"Yes," he said, his voice sounding flat in the cold air, honest. "Sometimes."

When I didn't say anything, he went on, as if to explain himself. "I miss the house," he said. "I miss going over there on the weekends to eat dinner, and then sitting around afterwards to play cards and drink. And I miss talking with Dad. He was someone who listened when I spoke. I don't know anyone like that anymore."

He fell silent. I could tell that he wasn't quite through, though, so I just stood there, staring up at the sky, waiting for him to go on. Off to the west, above the church's spire, I could see the blinking lights of two planes moving slowly toward each other. For a second it looked like they were about to collide, but then they passed. It was only a trick of perspective; up in the air they were miles apart.

"Dad would've understood what we're doing," Jacob said. "He knew the importance of money. 'It's all that matters,' he used to say, 'the blood of life, the root of happiness.'"

He glanced toward me. "Do you remember him saying stuff like that?"

"Only toward the end. When he was losing the farm."

"I kept hearing him say it, and it seemed so simple that I never really listened. It wasn't until just recently that I began to understand. I thought he was talking about how you can't eat without money, or buy clothes, or keep warm, but that's not it at all. He was talking about how you can't be happy without money. And not a little money either, not just enough to get by; he meant a lot of money. He was talking about being rich."

"They were never rich," I said.

"And they were never happy, either."

"Never?"

"No. Especially not Dad."

I tried quickly to retrieve an image of my father happy. I could picture him laughing, but it was drunken laughter, shallow, giddy, absurd. I couldn't come up with anything else.

"And they got sadder and sadder as their money ran out," Jacob said, "until finally, when it was gone, they killed themselves."

I glanced at him, startled. Suicide had always been Sarah's theory; I'd never heard my brother even consider it before.

"You don't know that," I said. "They were drinking. It was an accident."

He shook his head. "The night before it happened, Mom called me on the phone. She said she just wanted to say good night. She was drunk, and she made me promise her that I'd get married someday, that I wouldn't die without having had a family of my own."

He paused, and I waited, but he didn't go on.

"And?" I asked.

"Don't you see? She'd never called me before. That was the first and only time. Dad was the one who always made the calls. She telephoned me that night because she knew, because they'd just finished planning it out, and she realized she wouldn't see me again."

I tried quickly to analyze what he'd just told me, to search for holes. I didn't want to believe him. "They would've done it differently if they were committing suicide," I said. "They wouldn't have driven into a truck."

He shook his head. He'd already thought this through on his own; he could anticipate my questions. "They had to make it look like an accident. Dad knew we'd need his life insurance to cover all his debts. It was the only way he could think to pay them off. The farm was mortgaged -- they had nothing left of any value except their lives."

"But they could've killed the truck driver, Jacob. Why wouldn't they just've driven into a tree?"

"Driving into a tree still looks like suicide. They couldn't risk that."

I tried to imagine our parents sitting in the darkness at the bottom of the exit ramp, waiting for a pair of headlights to appear before them, and then, when they finally did and my father shifted into first, their final hurried words to each other, things they'd planned out earlier that day, assertions of love, the last parts of which would be lost in the rumble of the approaching truck, the horribly impotent screech of brakes before the impact. I balanced this image against another, the one I'd held in my head for the past seven years, that of them drunk, laughing, the radio thumping out music, a window down to let in a cold rush of air and the accompanying illusion of sobriety, the two of them oblivious of their error until that final, irrevocable moment when the truck loomed before them, impossibly large, its huge mass of metal towering over the hood of their car. I tried to decide which I preferred -- their knowledge or their ignorance -- but they both seemed too pitiful, too sad, for me to accept. I didn't know which to choose.

"Why didn't you tell me this before?" I asked.

Jacob took several seconds to search for an answer. "I didn't think you'd want to know."

I nodded; he was right. Even now I didn't want to know, didn't want to pick through what he'd just said, to weigh its various particulars and decide if I believed them. An onslaught of conflicting emotions swept over me -- jealousy that our mother had contacted Jacob that last night rather than myself; surprise that he'd managed to keep the whole thing so secret from me for all this time; grief over the possibility that our parents -- good, hardworking people -- could've been driven by their need for money to such a hopeless act, literally sacrificing their lives and risking that of an innocent bystander to save themselves and their children from their debts.

Jacob started to stamp his feet, trying to stay warm. I could tell that he wanted to leave.

"Jacob," I said.

He turned toward me, looked me in the face. "What?"

Mary Beth moved around us in the darkness, clinking, like a tiny ghost wrapped in chains.

"Sarah knows about the money. I had to tell her after Lou came looking for it."

"That's all right," he said. "She's probably the safest of us all."

I shrugged. "The thing is, she's terrified of Lou. She's scared he'll end up getting you and me put in jail for killing Pederson." I waved off to the left, toward Pederson's grave. Jacob followed my gesture with his eyes.

"Lou's okay," he said. "He just wants to make sure you give him the money. Once you do that he'll leave you alone."

"I'm not going to give him the money. Sarah and I talked about it, and we agreed we shouldn't."

Jacob stared at me for several seconds, pondering the implications of this. "Then I guess we'll see if there's anything behind his bluff."

I shook my head. "It's not going to come to that. We're going to do something first."

He glanced at me, a quizzical look on his face. "What do you mean?"

I told him about Sarah's plan. He listened all the way to the end, his shoulders hunched in his jacket, his hands sunk deep in its pockets.

When I finished, he asked, "Why're you telling me this?"

"I need your help," I said. "It won't work unless you help."

He scuffed at the snow with his boot, frowning. "I don't think I want to do it. Lou isn't a danger."

"He is a danger, Jacob. He always will be."

"It's not like--"

"No," I said, "think about it. Even if I were to give him his split, it wouldn't stop. There's no statute of limitations on murder. Ten years from now, when he's wasted his share, he'll be able to track you down and blackmail you with what he knows."

Jacob didn't say anything.

"Are you willing to live with that?" I asked. "Year after year, just waiting for him to come and find you?"

"He wouldn't do that."

"He's already done it to me. He's done it twice. I'm not going to let him do it again."

Mary Beth reappeared from the darkness, wagging his tail, his breath coming fast and hoarse, as if he'd been chasing something. He jumped up on Jacob, and Jacob pushed him down.

"You had your chance, Jacob. You were responsible for him, and you let it get out of hand. Now I'm going to take responsibility."

"You're blaming me?"

"He found out about Pederson through you, didn't he? That's what got us into this position."

"I didn't tell him about Pederson." It seemed very important to him that I believe this, but I ignored it. "If it's anyone's fault," he said bitterly, "it's yours. You were the first one to act suspicious. You soured all our relations with it. Lou's only acting like you expected him to right from the start."

I turned to face him. I could tell from the tautness of his voice that I'd hurt his feelings. "I'm not blaming you, Jacob. I'm not saying it's anybody's fault. It just happened, and now we have to deal with it." I smiled at him. "It's fate, maybe."

He frowned down at the grave.

"It's either this or burn the money."

"You're not going to burn the money. That's an empty threat."

It was true, of course, and I nodded. "It's not that big of a deal, Jacob. It's not like I'm asking you to kill him."

He didn't respond to that. He flipped up the collar of his jacket so that it covered the lower half of his face, then turned from the grave and glanced back across the parking lot toward Main Street. I followed his gaze. I could see Raikley's from there, could see my office window. I could see the town hall, the post office, the grocery store. Everything was quiet.

"I need your help," I said.

"I can't trick him like that. He'd never forgive me."

"He's going to be drunk, Jacob. He's not going to remember how it happened." I realized as soon as I said it that this was the hook I needed. It wasn't the idea of betraying Lou that bothered my brother, it was Lou's knowing about it. "You can pretend to be surprised if you want," I continued quickly, reeling him in, "like you didn't know about the tape recorder. You can pretend that it was all my doing, that I was tricking both of you."

Jacob debated for a second. "It would only be a threat?" he asked. "We'd never actually use the tape?"

I nodded. "It's just to make sure he doesn't turn us in." I could tell he was wavering, so I put my finger on the scale. "You told me that if it came down to it, and you had to make a choice, you'd choose me."

He didn't say anything.

"It's come down to it now, Jacob. Are you going to stand by your word?"

He was silent for a long time, watching me. The dog rolled in the snow at his feet, grunting, but we both ignored him. Jacob wrapped his arms around his stomach, stared down at our parents' headstone. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and I could make out his face now, could see his eyes behind his glasses. He looked cold and anxious. Finally he nodded.

I tried to think of something to say, something reassuring.

"Why don't you come for dinner tonight?" I asked him, surprising myself. "Sarah's cooking lasagna." Even now I'm not sure why I said it, whether it was out of pity for him or fear that if he were to go home alone that night he might call Lou and warn him about our plot.

Jacob continued to stare down at the grave. I could see what was happening inside him: his core passivity, his traditional mechanism for dealing with stress, was rising to the surface, and I knew now that if I could just keep ahold of him, I'd be able to make him do whatever I wanted. I took a step toward the parking lot. Mary Beth came up out of the snow, ears erect. He wagged his tail, thumping it against Jacob's pants.

"Come on," I said. "She uses Mom's recipe. It'll be just like old times." Then I put my hand on his arm and turned him back toward the path.

SARAH was in the kitchen when we got home.

"Jacob's come for dinner," I yelled as we stepped into the entranceway.

Sarah leaned out through the doorway to give us a wave. She was wearing an apron and had a metal spatula in her hand. Jacob, looking large and sheepish, returned her wave, but he was a second too late: she'd already disappeared back into the kitchen.

I took him upstairs to the bedroom. Mary Beth followed at our heels. The room was dark, the curtains pulled. When I flicked on the light, I saw that the bed was unmade. Sarah, though she'd recovered with remarkable rapidity from her delivery, was still a little run-down, and she'd spent much of the previous six days prone beneath the sheets, the baby sleeping at her side.

I shut the door behind us, guided Jacob toward the night table. I sat him down on the edge of the mattress, then picked up the phone, carefully untangled its cord, and placed it in his lap.

"Call Lou," I said.

He stared at the phone. It was an old one, black plastic with a rotary dial. He didn't seem to want to touch it. "Now?" he asked.

I nodded. I sat down beside him, leaving about a foot of space between us. We were on my side of the bed, facing the windows. The sound of pots clinking together came faintly up the stairs. Mary Beth moved about the room, sniffing. He inspected first the bathroom, then the crib. When he reached the bed, he stuck his head beneath it. I pushed him away with my foot.

"That was our crib," I said to Jacob. I pointed toward the crib. "Dad built it."

Jacob seemed unimpressed. "What do I say?" he asked.

"Tell him I invited you two out for drinks tomorrow night, to celebrate Amanda's birth. Tell him I'm buying."

"What about the money?"

I debated this for a second. "Tell him I agreed to split it up," I said, thinking it might lower Lou's guard. "Tell him we'll get it next weekend."

Jacob shifted his weight, and the phone wobbled in his lap. He set one of his hands on top of it. "Have you thought about the farm yet?" he asked.

I stared at him. I didn't want to talk about the farm right now. Mary Beth jumped onto the bed and settled down behind Jacob, right up against his back. He put his head on my pillow.

"Not really," I said.

"I was kind of hoping you would've made a decision by now."

He was going to trap me into it, I realized suddenly; he was going to make the farm his price for Lou's betrayal. The teddy bear was lying on the floor beside the bed, and -- to fill the silence that my reluctance to answer created -- I picked it up and wound its key. Its music started to play. The dog lifted his head to watch.

"Jacob," I said, "are you blackmailing me?"

He gave me a startled look. "What do you mean?"

"Are you saying you won't help me unless I promise you the farm?"

He thought about it; then he nodded. "I guess so."

The bear sang, "Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous? Sonnez les matines. Sonnez les matines."

"I do something for you," Jacob said, "then you do something for me. That's fair, isn't it?"

"Yes," I said. "I suppose that's fair."

"So you'll help me get it back?"

The bear's music gradually slowed. I waited until it stopped, until the room was absolutely still, and then -- knowing full well that I was making a promise to my brother that I never intended to fulfill -- I nodded.

"I'll do whatever you ask me to," I said.

AS SARAH and I were putting dinner on the table -- lasagna, garlic bread, and salad -- Jacob excused himself to go to the bathroom. The bathroom was down the front hallway, beneath the stairs, and I followed him with my eyes as he lumbered out of the kitchen. I watched him until he disappeared inside.

"He's going to do it?" Sarah whispered, gesturing with her knife toward the bathroom. We were standing over the table together, Sarah cutting the bread while I poured out two glasses of wine. Sarah was drinking apple juice with her meal; until she finished nursing, she wasn't allowed to have any alcohol.

"We just called," I said. "We're picking up Lou tomorrow at seven."

"Did you listen to their conversation?"

I nodded. "I sat right next to him."

"He didn't give him any hints?"

"No. He said exactly what I told him to."

"And he doesn't mind doing it?"

I hesitated before I answered, and Sarah glanced up at me. "He made me promise to help him buy back the farm."

"Your father's farm?"

I nodded.

"I thought we already agreed--"

"He didn't give me a choice, Sarah. It was either that or he wouldn't help us."

The toilet flushed, and we both looked toward the hallway. "But you're not really planning on letting him stay, are you?" she asked.

The bathroom door opened, and I turned from her, taking the jug back toward the refrigerator.

"No," I said, walking away. "Of course not."

Amanda was sleeping in the family room, in her Portacrib. Sarah brought her out for Jacob to see before we ate. He didn't seem to know how to act around the baby. He blushed when Sarah made him take her in his arms and held her out, away from his body, as if someone had spilled something on her and he was afraid to get himself dirty. She started to cry a little as soon as he took her into his hands, and Sarah had to soothe her, whisking her quickly back to the family room.

"She's so tiny," Jacob mumbled, as if he hadn't expected this. That was all he could think to say.

It was a peculiar dinner. At first it appeared that only Sarah would manage to enjoy herself. She looked pretty, alluring, and seemed to know it. Her body was already reclaiming the tightness it had lost in her pregnancy, and though I knew that she must have been exhausted -- the baby had not let her sleep for more than four hours straight since they'd returned from the hospital -- she still looked vibrant, healthy. She rubbed my calf with her foot while we ate.

Jacob, in his shyness around her, focused on his food. He ate rapidly, gorging himself, his forehead breaking out into a sweat. Everything about him hinted at his social discomfort -- he exuded it like a miasma -- and after a while it began to feel contagious. I, too, started having difficulty finding things to say, started overthinking before I responded to his or Sarah's questions, so that my answers came out sounding unnaturally terse and formal, as if I were angry with them and afraid to show it.

It was the wine that saved the evening. Sarah seemed to sense it first: each time Jacob or I emptied a glass, she stood up and refilled it for us. I'm not a drinker -- I've never enjoyed the disinhibiting effect of alcohol, that gradual slipping of self-control -- but tonight it worked exactly as I'd always been told it was meant to, as an anodyne, a lubricant, a builder of bridges. The more I drank, the easier it became for me to talk with Jacob, and the more he drank, the easier it became for him to talk with Sarah.

My inebriation, as it grew, filled me with an unexpected feeling of hope. It was a physical sensation, something warm and liquid that spread outward from my chest -- from my heart, I remember thinking -- to the tips of my fingers and toes. I began to wonder if my brother was not so unreachable as I'd always imagined. Perhaps it was still possible to reclaim him, to invite him into my family and bind him to my heart. He was across the table from me now, saying something to Sarah, almost flirting with her, in fact, but shyly, like a child with a teacher, and at the sight of it I felt a surge of love for the two of them, an overwhelming desire to make things come out right. I would help Jacob buy some land out west, I decided, in Kansas or Missouri; I'd help him set it up just like our father's farm, help him build a replica of the house we'd been raised in, and it would be a place to which Sarah and Amanda and I could return over the years, a respite from our travels across the globe, a surrogate home for us to leave and then come back to, bearing gifts for Jacob and his family.

I watched them talk and laugh with each other, and though I knew I was drunk, sensed it in everything I said and did and thought, I still couldn't help but believe that everything was going to be okay now, that it was all going to work out exactly as we planned.

AS WE were finishing dinner, the baby started to cry. Sarah took her upstairs to nurse while I did the dishes. By the time she returned -- having put Amanda to sleep in her crib -- I'd finished, and Jacob was in the bathroom again.

We'd decided to pass the evening playing Monopoly. Sarah began laying out the board on the kitchen table while I sponged down the counter. I'd stopped drinking toward the end of the meal, and now the wine was settling on me like a heavy cloak, so that everything I did seemed to require more effort than it ought to. I was beginning to think that what I wanted to do was go upstairs and fall asleep.

When I finished with the counter, I went over to the table and sat down. Sarah was dealing out the money. She went in ascending order -- ones, fives, tens, twenties, fifties. When she got to the hundreds, she glanced up at me, smiling mischievously.

"You know what we should do?" she asked.

"What?"

She flicked her finger at the tray full of money. "We should use real hundreds."

"Real hundreds?" I was so tired, I didn't understand what she meant.

She grinned. "We could bring down one of the packets."

I stared at her, thinking this through. The idea of removing the money from its hiding place gave me a distinctly unsafe feeling, an irrational mixture of panic and fear. I shook my head.

"Come on. It'll be fun."

"No," I said. "I don't want to."

"But why not?"

"I don't think we should take the risk."

"What risk? We're just going to use it to play the game."

"I don't want to disturb it," I said. "It seems like it'd be bad luck."

"Oh, Hank. Don't be silly. When'll you have another chance to play Monopoly with real hundred-dollar bills?"

I started to answer her, but Jacob's voice interrupted me. He'd returned from the bathroom; neither of us had heard him approach. "It's hidden in the house?" he said. He was standing at the edge of the kitchen, looking tired and overfed. I frowned at Sarah.

"Some of it," she said. "Just a couple packets."

Jacob shuffled toward his chair. "So why don't we use it?" he asked.

Sarah didn't say anything. She poured my brother another glass of wine. They were both waiting for me to speak. And what could I say? There was no reason not to do it, just my own amorphous suspicion that it was wrong, that in dealing with the money we should be painstakingly rigorous, treating it as something potent and malevolent, like a gun or a bomb. I couldn't think of a way to express this, though, and even if I had, it would've come out sounding silly. It's just a game, they would've said; we'll return it when we're through.

"All right." I sighed, slouching back in my chair, and Sarah ran upstairs to get a packet.

JACOB was the little dog, Sarah the top hat. I was the racing car. The thrill of the hundred-dollar bills wore off with surprising celerity, so that soon they seemed just like the other denominations we were playing with -- rectangles of colored paper, a little larger, a little thicker than the others, but nothing more. We were using them for imaginary transactions, and this cheapened them somehow, robbed them of their value. They ceased to feel real.

The game took several hours, so it was almost midnight before we finished. We quit when I went bankrupt. Sarah and my brother agreed to call it a draw, but Jacob would've won. He had more properties, more houses and hotels, and a great big, messy pile of money. It wouldn't have been long before he ran her out of business.

I put the game away while Sarah gathered all the hundred-dollar bills together and carried them back upstairs.

I didn't realize how drunk my brother was until he stood up. He heaved himself out of his chair and took two weak-kneed steps toward the counter, his face looking panicked, his arms held out rigidly before him. It was as though he'd suddenly been transformed into some sort of thick-bodied marionette and someone else was now controlling his movements, dragging him across the room by invisible strings. He rested one of his huge hands on the counter and stared down at it, as if he were afraid it might jump away when he turned his head. He gave a short giggle.

"Why don't you stay here tonight?" I said.

He looked around at the table and chairs, the dishwasher, the sink, the stove. "Stay here?"

"In the guest room. Upstairs."

Jacob frowned at me. He'd never spent the night at our house before, not in all the years we'd lived there, and it seemed like the idea of doing so now made him nervous. He started to say something, but I interrupted him before his words emerged.

"You can't drive home like this. You're too drunk."

"What about Sarah?" he whispered loudly, glancing toward the hallway.

"It's all right," I said. "She won't mind."

I helped him upstairs, feeling like a child beside his oversized body, pushing against its soft mass, straining to guide it forward. Every now and then he let out another little laugh.

I put him in the guest room, across the hall from our bedroom. He sat down on the bed and fumbled with his shirt. I crouched on the floor in front of him and started to untie his boots. The dog had followed us upstairs. He sniffed at each piece of furniture in the room, then climbed up onto the bed and curled himself into a tight, compact ball.

When I got the boots off, I looked up to find Jacob staring in bewilderment at the bed's headboard.

"It's all right," I said. "I'm putting you to sleep."

"It's my bed."

I nodded. "You're sleeping here tonight."

"It's my bed," he said again, with more insistence. He reached out to touch the headboard, and I realized what he meant. He meant that it was the bed he'd slept in as a child.

"That's right," I said. "Dad brought it over here just before he died."

Jacob glanced hazily around the room. Nothing else in it belonged to him.

"It's a new mattress, though," I said. "The old one was all worn out."

He didn't seem to understand me. "It's in the guest room now," he said.

He stared at the headboard for another moment or so, then lifted his feet from the floor and eased himself down onto his back. The bed rocked like a boat. The dog lifted his head, seemed to frown at us. I watched Jacob close his eyes. He appeared to fall asleep instantly, his breathing deepening within seconds to a snore. His face went slack, and his jaw fell open, so that I could see his teeth. They seemed too large, too wide and thick, for his mouth.

"Jacob?" I whispered.

He didn't answer. His glasses were still on, and I stood up to take them off. I pulled them from his ears, folded them shut, and set them on the table beside the bed. His face looked much older without the glasses, years older than it really was. I bent and kissed him lightly on the forehead.

Across the hall, the baby started to cry.

Jacob's eyes flickered open. "Judas kiss," he whispered hoarsely.

Still leaning over him, I shook my head. "No. I'm just saying good night."

He struggled to bring me into focus but didn't seem to manage it. "I'm spinning," he said.

"It'll stop. Just wait it out."

He smiled at that, seemed to fight down a giggle, then suddenly turned serious. "You kissed me good night?" he asked. His voice slurred a bit.

"Yes."

He stared up at me, blinking. Then he nodded. "Good night," he said thickly.

When he closed his eyes, I backed quietly out of the room.

ACROSS the hall, I found Sarah just climbing into bed. She'd soothed Amanda, and the baby was making a soft gurgling sound as she fell asleep in her crib.

The money was stacked in a pile on my dresser. After I got into my pajamas, I went over and picked it up.

"That was stupid, Sarah," I said. "I can't believe you did it."

She stared at me from the bed. She looked surprised, hurt. "I thought it would be fun," she said. Her hair was pinned up in a bun, like a schoolteacher's. She was naked except for a pair of panties.

"We don't touch the money," I said. "We agreed about that."

"But it was fun. Admit it. You had fun."

I shook my head. "It's how we'll get caught, taking out the money."

"It's not like I took it out of the house."

"We aren't going to touch it again, not until we leave."

She frowned across the room at me. I could tell that she thought I was being too hard, but I didn't care.

"Promise?" I asked.

She shrugged. "Fine."

I brought the stack of money over to the bed and began to count it. I was still a little drunk, though, and I kept losing track of the numbers.

"He didn't take any," Sarah said finally. "I already checked it."

I froze, startled. I hadn't realized why I was counting it.

LYING in bed, waiting to fall asleep, we whispered back and forth at each other.

"What do you think will happen to him?" Sarah asked.

"To Jacob?"

I sensed her nod in the darkness. We were both on our backs. All the lights were out, and the baby was asleep in her crib. Sarah had forgiven me for lecturing her.

"Maybe he'll buy a farm," I said.

I felt her body go tense beside me. "He can't buy the farm, Hank. If he stays--"

"Not my father's farm. Just any farm. Someplace out west maybe, in Kansas, or Missouri. We could help him set it up."

Even as I spoke, I realized it would never happen. It had been the wine that had allowed me to hope for it earlier that evening, but now I was sobering up, seeing things as they actually were rather than as I wished them to be. Jacob knew nothing about agriculture: he'd have just as much of a chance succeeding as a farmer as he would becoming a rock star or an astronaut. It was simply childishness on his part to keep on dreaming of it, a willful sort of naivete, a denial of who he was.

"Maybe he'll travel," I tried, but I couldn't picture that either -- my brother climbing on and off planes, dragging suitcases through airports, checking into expensive hotels. None of it seemed possible.

"Whatever he does," I said, "things'll be better for him than they are now, don't you think?"

I rolled over onto my side, draping one of my legs across Sarah's body. "Of course," she said. "He'll have one point three million dollars. How could things help but be better?"

"What's he going to do with it, though?"

"Just spend it. Like us. That's what it's for."

"Spend it on what?"

"On anything he wants. A nice car, a beach house, fancy clothes, expensive meals, exotic vacations."

"But he's so alone, Sarah. He can't just buy all that for himself."

She touched my face, a soft caress. "He'll find somebody, Hank," she said. "He'll be okay."

I was tired, so I tried to let myself believe her, but I knew she was probably wrong. The money couldn't change things like that. It could make us richer, but nothing more. Jacob was going to remain fat and shy and unhappy for the rest of his life.

Sarah's fingers moved up my face, a shadow in the darkness above me, and I shut my eyes against them.

"Everybody's going to get what they deserve," she said.

SOMETIME before morning I awoke to the sound of someone moving through the house. I rose onto my elbow, my eyes focusing instantly. Sarah was sitting beside me, her back against the headboard, nursing Amanda. An icy wind was rattling the windows in their frames.

"Someone's in the house," I said.

"Shhh," she whispered, not looking up from the baby. She reached out with her free hand and touched me on my shoulder. "It's just Jacob. He's using the bathroom."

I listened for a bit, listened to the walls creak against the wind, listened to Amanda softly cooing as she drew the milk from Sarah's body. Then I lay back down. After another minute or so, I heard my brother pad heavily back down the hallway to his room. He groaned as he lowered himself onto his bed.

"See?" Sarah whispered. "Everything's okay."

She kept her hand on my shoulder until right before I fell asleep.

6

WE PICKED up Lou just after seven and drove into Ashenville, to the Wrangler. The Wrangler was one of two taverns in town, each an exact replica of the other. Years before, it had sported a western theme, but all that remained of that now was its name and the huge, graffiti-ridden skull of a longhorn steer slung up above the doorway. The building was long and narrow and dark, with a bar running down one wall and a line of booths down the other. In the rear, through a pair of swinging doors, was a big, open room. There was a pool table here, some pinball machines, and a broken-down jukebox.

Things were relatively quiet when we arrived. There was a handful of older men at the bar, sitting alone with bottles of beer. A few of them seemed to know Lou, and they grinned hello. A young couple was seated in one of the booths, leaning toward each other across the table and whispering fiercely, as if they were fighting but afraid to make a scene.

We went into the rear, and Jacob and Lou set themselves up for a game of pool while I bought the drinks. I got a boilermaker for Lou, a beer for Jacob, and a ginger ale for myself.

Jacob lost to Lou, and I bought another round. This happened three more times before some people came back and we had to give up the pool table. We went up front then and sat down in one of the booths. By now it was after eight, and the place was getting busier.

I continued to buy the drinks. I told Lou my ginger ale was scotch and soda, and he laughed, calling it an accountant's drink. He wanted to buy me a shot of tequila, but, smiling, I refused.

It was interesting, watching him get drunk. His face took on a deep redness, and his eyes went watery, their pupils slowly sinking beneath a flat, glassy sheen. He started to use the bathroom between every round, and by nine o'clock the meanness had begun to unshroud itself, the petty spitefulness, the essential Lou. At odd moments he seemed to forget that I was buying him his drinks: he'd begin to call me Mr. Accountant, start his winking routine with Jacob, his sneers and giggles. Then, just as quickly, he'd bounce back, slap me on the arm, and all three of us would be the greatest of friends again, coconspirators, a gang of gentlemen thieves.

Whenever a fresh drink arrived, he'd make a toast, the same one each time. "Here's to the little lady," he'd say. "Blessings on her downy head."

The tape recorder was in my shirt pocket. I reached up and scratched at it every minute or so, obsessively, as if it were some sort of talisman and I were touching it for luck.

After we'd been drinking for about an hour, I turned to Lou and asked, "Would you really've told the sheriff if I hadn't agreed to split the money?"

We were alone; I'd given Jacob my wallet and sent him up to the bar to buy another round. Lou pondered the question, his head bowed. "I needed the money, Hank," he said solemnly.

"You couldn't wait till the summer?"

"I needed it right away."

"Five months? You couldn't have held on for five more months?"

He reached across the table and took a sip of Jacob's beer. There was only a little left, but he didn't finish it. He smiled weakly at me. "I told you how I had some gambling debts?"

I nodded.

"Well, I lost some of Nancy's savings."

"How much?"

"See, I knew I could afford to lose because I had the money from the plane coming, so I put some big bets on a couple of long shots. I thought that even if I got just one, I'd be all right." He gave a little, nervous-sounding laugh. "I didn't get one, though. I lost it all."

"How much?" I asked again.

"Seventeen thousand. A little more. It was from her mother's will."

I was stunned, silenced. I couldn't imagine betting that much money on a horse. I watched him finish off Jacob's beer.

"We're broke, Hank. We don't have anything. Not to buy food, not to pay the rent, not anything till I get ahold of those packets."

"You're saying you would've told?"

"I needed the money. It didn't seem fair, your keeping it all this time when it's obvious no one's looking for the plane."

"I want to know if you would've told," I said, leaning across the table toward him.

"If I say no" -- he smiled--"you might back out on your promise."

"My promise?"

"To split it up."

I didn't say anything.

"I need the money, Hank. I can't get by without it."

"But let's say you hadn't found out about Pederson. What would you've done then?"

Lou pursed his lips. "I guess I would've begged you," he said. He thought about this for a second; then he nodded. "I would've gotten down on my knees and begged."

The bar was crowded now, pulsing with voices and laughter. Clouds of cigarette smoke hung in the air, mixing with the sour smell of beer. I could see Jacob across the way, paying the bartender.

"You think that would've worked?" Lou asked.

I tried for a second to imagine him down on his knees before me, begging for the money. In many ways it seemed more threatening than the idea of him blackmailing me. It would've called on things I considered virtues -- pity, charity, empathy -- rather than simple fear, and thus, when I refused him, as I would've had to, it would've been a judgment not of him but of me. It was what he was probably going to do after we got the tape, I realized, and the thought of this gave me a tired feeling in my head.

"No," I said. "Probably not."

"Then I guess it's a good thing I found out about Pederson, isn't it?"

My brother was returning to the booth, so I didn't answer. I just pushed the empty glasses off to the side of the table and said, "Here come the drinks."

Lou reached out and touched my wrist. His fingertips were cold from holding Jacob's glass. "I had to get the money, Hank," he whispered quickly. "You understand that, don't you? It's nothing personal."

I stared down at his hand. It was gripping my arm like a claw, and I had to resist the temptation to pull myself free. "Yes," I said. It seemed like a small thing to give him. "I understand."

Around nine-thirty, Lou rose to his feet and headed off, a little unsteadily, to use the bathroom again. I watched him until he was safely out of earshot. Then I turned to Jacob.

"Can you tell when he's solidly drunk?"

My brother's nose was running; the skin above his lip was shiny with snot. "I guess."

"I want him drunk enough so that he's not thinking straight, but not so much that he slurs his words."

Jacob sipped at his beer. His glasses were fogged up, but he didn't seem to notice.

"When he looks like he's going to start slurring, stand up and say you want to head back to his house, that you've got a bottle of whiskey in the truck."

"I still don't think--" Jacob started, but I silenced him with a touch of my hand. Lou had emerged from the bathroom, swaying a bit. He stumbled against a barstool, and when the young man on it glanced over his shoulder, Lou loudly accused him of trying to trip him.

"You think that's funny?" Lou asked. "You think you're some kind of comedian?"

The young man, full bearded and twice Lou's size, stared in astonishment at him. "What's funny?" He was too surprised to be angry yet.

Lou hitched up his belt. "Tripping people coming back from the can. Sneaking up on them for laughs."

The young man turned all the way around to face him. The bar started to quiet.

"Sit down, Lou," someone said from one of the nearby stools. "You're gonna get yourself killed." A few people laughed.

Lou glanced around the bar. "Mocking me," he said. "I could've fallen and cracked my head." He pointed his finger at the young man. "You'd have gotten a kick out of that, wouldn't you? A big kick."

The young man didn't say anything. He stared down at Lou's finger.

"I'll give you a kick," Lou said. "You want a kick? I'll give you a good solid kick."

"Listen, buddy," the young man said. "I think maybe you've had a few too--"

"Don't buddy me," Lou said.

The young man started to climb off his stool. Simultaneously, Jacob stood up.

"You're not my buddy," Lou said.

Jacob, given his size and relative lack of sobriety, moved with surprising agility across the room. I watched from the booth as he rested his hand on Lou's shoulder. Lou turned, his scowl changing instantly to a beaming smile. "You're my buddy," he said to my brother. He glanced at the bartender. "He's my buddy," he shouted. Then he waved over toward me in the booth. "He's my buddy, too."

Jacob shepherded him back across the bar. I ordered another round of drinks.

IT WAS eleven o'clock before my brother stood up and suggested that we head back to Lou's house.

The dog was waiting for us in the cab of the truck, looking cold and dejected. He didn't seem to want to climb into the rear, so Jacob had to pick him up and shove him, whimpering, back through the torn plastic window. Lou urinated against the side of the building, a long, steady hissing in the darkness.

I drove. I'd bought a bottle of whiskey that afternoon at the liquor store, and now I told Jacob to take it out and offer it to Lou. Lou accepted gladly.

It was one of the coldest nights of the year. There were no clouds. The moon was just rising, a thick, white sliver, like a slice of cantaloupe, sitting cocked against the edge of the horizon. Above it hung a brilliant infinity of stars, high and bright in the deep blackness of the sky. The road out of Ashenville was empty of traffic, and Jacob's one functioning headlight, the left one, made it look narrower than it actually was. As we drove, the wind whipped through the cab, buffeting us, tugging at our jackets, and cracking the plastic window back and forth behind our heads like a bullwhip.

I turned off the lights before I reached the house so that I wouldn't wake Nancy. I parked at the bottom of the driveway.

"Well?" Jacob asked. He was on the passenger side. Lou was sitting between us, slouched over a little, one hand on the dashboard. Jacob had to lean forward to see me.

"Let's go inside," I said. "Bring the bottle."

"That's right," Lou said. "Bring the bottle." He slapped me on my leg. "You're okay. You know that? You're not half bad."

We climbed out, leaving the dog in the truck, and walked up the driveway to the house. Jacob and I went into the living room and sat on the couch while Lou used the bathroom. We could hear him urinating through the open doorway. It seemed to go on for several minutes.

The living room was down a step from the entranceway. It was wide and shallow, with a dark green shag carpet. There were two upholstered chairs in it, a black leather couch, an old-looking TV, and a long, low coffee table cluttered with magazines. It was nicer than I would've expected, but not by much.

Lou went into the kitchen after he finished peeing and got us some glasses. When he returned, Jacob poured the whiskey. I wasn't used to drinking hard liquor, especially not straight, and it burned my throat as it went down. The smell of it reminded me of my father kissing me good night, his head appearing suddenly above my bed, bending closer and closer but always stopping just before he touched my forehead, as if he were afraid to wake me. Some nights I didn't open my eyes, and there would only be the sweet fragrance of the alcohol on his breath to indicate his presence, along with the creak of the floorboards as he came forward, bowed toward me, and then retreated from the room.

Lou sat in one of the upholstered chairs, on the opposite side of the coffee table. Neither he nor Jacob seemed like they wanted to talk, and I couldn't think of a way to begin on my own. I kept glancing toward my brother, willing him to help me, but he didn't respond. His eyes were puffy from the liquor, so that he seemed like he was about to fall asleep.

It was several minutes before anyone spoke. Then Lou chuckled to himself and asked Jacob if he knew what you called a man with no arms and no legs in a swimming pool.

"Bob," Jacob said, sending them both into laughter.

They started talking about a man I didn't know, a friend of Lou's who'd lost his arm in an accident on a construction site last summer. He'd been feeding brush into a wood chipper and had gotten dragged into the machine. Lou and Jacob debated whether or not the man should blame himself for the accident -- Lou thought he should, that it could only have happened out of carelessness or stupidity, but Jacob disagreed. The man was working in an auto supply store now. He'd told Lou that his arm had weighed ten and a half pounds. He knew this because that was how much lighter he was after the accident.

I sat there, quietly working at my drink, the tape recorder a tiny weight against my chest. Jacob and Lou seemed to forget about my presence, to talk as if I weren't there, and it gave me a glimpse of their friendship that I'd never had before. There was something about their dialogue -- the sparse gruffness of their statements, the lengthy silences between responses -- that reminded me of the conversations I used to overhear between our father and his friends. It was how I'd always imagined men were supposed to speak with one another, and to hear my brother do so now threw him suddenly into a different light, made him, for perhaps the first time in my life, seem more mature, more worldly, than I was.

When I finished my drink, Jacob refilled it.

They started arguing about one of their fishing spots, Devil's Lake, and how it had gotten its name. Jacob said that it was shaped like a head with two horns, but Lou didn't believe him. The whiskey was beginning to make me feel very warm, and when I noticed this, when I stopped and thought it through, a little spasm of panic shot across my body, like the trilling of an alarm bell. To be drunk in this situation was to fail, I knew; I needed to think clearly, to choose my words and actions with precision.

I set my glass down on the coffee table and, concentrating, tried to find an entry into their conversation, tried to think of a question or a statement, something subtle, a little verbal push to redirect things toward Pederson and the money. I strained and strained, but my mind refused to help me. It kept veering back toward the man who'd lost his arm, kept offering guesses about how heavy my own arms were, weighing them in my lap.

Finally, in desperation, I simply said, "What if I were to confess?"

It came out loud, almost a shout, surprising all three of us. Jacob and Lou turned to stare at me.

"Confess?" Lou asked. He grinned at me. He was drunk, and I think he must've thought I was, too.

"Could you imagine that?" I said. "Me confessing?"

"Confessing to what?"

"To taking the money, to killing Pederson."

He continued to smile at me. "You're thinking about confessing?"

I shook my head. "I just want to know if you can imagine me doing it."

"Sure," he said. "Why not?"

"Can you?" I asked Jacob. He was sitting slouched beside me, looking down at his hands.

"I guess," he managed. It came out fast, like a squeak.

"How?"

Jacob gave me a baleful stare. He didn't want to have to answer.

"You'd turn state's evidence," Lou said, smiling. "You'd rat on us so they'd let you off."

"But what would I say?"

"The truth. That you smothered him with his scarf."

I felt Jacob stiffen on the couch beside me. Lou's knowing about the scarf could mean only one thing -- that Jacob had told him how I'd killed the old man. Lou might've guessed in the beginning, but once the issue had been raised, my brother hadn't held anything back. I noted this in my head, filed it away. It was something I could deal with later.

"Pretend you're me," I said to Lou. "Pretend Jacob's the sheriff and you've just come into his office to confess."

He gave me a suspicious look. "Why?"

"I want to hear what you think I'd say."

"I just told you. You'd say you smothered him with his scarf."

"But I want to hear you say it like you're me. I want you to act it out."

"Go ahead, Lou," Jacob prodded him. He glanced toward me, gave a mean little laugh. "Pretend you're an accountant."

Lou grinned at him. He took a swallow of whiskey, then stood up. He mimed knocking on a door. "Sheriff Jenkins?" he called. He made his voice sound high and shaky, like a nervous child's.

"Yes?" Jacob said, using the deep baritone he associated with authority.

"It's Hank Mitchell. I've got something I want to tell you."

"Come on in, Hank," Jacob boomed. "Have a seat."

Lou pretended to open the door. He walked in place for a moment, grinning stupidly, then sat down on the edge of his chair. He kept his knees primly together, his hands in his lap. "It's about Dwight Pederson," he started, and I reached up to scratch at my chest. There was a soft click as I pushed in the button, and then the tape recorder began to hum.

"Yes?" Jacob said.

"Well, he didn't die in an accident."

"What do you mean?"

Lou feigned glancing nervously around the room. Then he whispered, "I killed him."

There was a pause after that, while Lou waited for my brother to respond. I think Jacob was hoping that I'd stop it there, that all I wanted was that simple statement, but I needed something more. I needed him to say how he'd done it.

"You killed Dwight Pederson?" Jacob asked finally. He pretended to be shocked.

Lou nodded. "I smothered him with his scarf, then I pushed him off the bridge into Anders Creek. I made it look like an accident."

Jacob was silent. I could tell just by the way he was sitting that he wasn't going to say anything more, so I reached up and turned off the tape recorder. It seemed like we had more than enough: if a taped confession was going to frighten Lou into submission, then this ought to work as well as any other.

"All right," I said. "You can stop."

Lou shook his head. "I want to get to the part where you offer to testify against us." He waved at my brother. "Keep asking me questions, Jake."

Jacob didn't respond. He took a long swallow of whiskey, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. I removed the tape recorder from my pocket, rewound it to the beginning.

"What's that?" Lou asked.

"A tape recorder," I said. The machine made a soft thumping noise when it finished rewinding.

"A tape recorder?" my brother asked, as if confused.

I pressed the play button, turned up the volume with my thumb, then set the machine down on the coffee table. There was a second or two's worth of hissing before Jacob's voice jumped out at us: "Yes?"

"Well, he didn't die in an accident," Lou's voice said.

"What do you mean?"

"I killed him."

"You killed Dwight Pederson?"

"I smothered him with his scarf, then I pushed him off the bridge into Anders Creek. I made it look like an accident."

I reached forward and pressed the stop button, then rewound the tape to the beginning.

"You recorded us?" Jacob said.

"What the fuck're you doing, Hank?" Lou asked.

"It's your confession," I said. I smiled at him. "It's you saying how you killed Dwight Pederson."

He stared at me in bewilderment. "That was you confessing," he said. "I was pretending to be you."

I leaned forward, pressed the play button, and the machine began to spin out their dialogue again. We all looked down at it, listening. I waited till it was finished, then I said, "Sounds more like your voice than mine, doesn't it?"

Lou didn't respond. He was drunk, and though he knew he was unhappy with what I'd done, it didn't seem like he could figure out exactly why.

"We're not going to split up the money till the summer," I said.

He appeared to be genuinely surprised by this statement. "You said we'd do it next weekend."

I shook my head. "We're going to wait till the plane's discovered, like we planned from the start."

"But I already told you, Hank. I need it now." He glanced toward Jacob for help. Jacob was staring down at the tape recorder, as if still trying to overcome his shock at its sudden appearance.

"I'll tell," Lou said. "I'll tell the sheriff about Pederson." It was only now, I think, as he spoke these words, that he realized why I'd taped him. He sneered at me. "Nobody's going to believe that thing. It's obvious I'm just kidding around."

"If you and I both went to Sheriff Jenkins tomorrow and claimed that the other killed Dwight Pederson, who do you think he'd be more likely to believe? You?"

He didn't say anything, so I answered for him. "It'd be me, Lou. You can see that, can't you?"

"You fucking--" he started. He leaned forward and tried to grab the tape recorder from the table, but I was too quick. I snatched it away from him and slid it back into my shirt pocket.

"You aren't going to tell anyone anything," I said.

Lou stood up then, like he was going to come around the table and get me, and I stood up, too. I knew he wasn't a threat -- he was smaller than me, and drunk -- but I was still frightened enough by the idea of exchanging blows with him that I would've run to avoid it, would've sprinted straight across the room, up the step to the entranceway, and out the door. I'd gotten what I'd come for; now all I wanted to do was leave.

Lou scowled at me across the coffee table. Then he waved toward Jacob. "Grab him, Jake," he said.

Jacob jumped a little, sliding backward on the couch. "Grab him?"

"Sit down, Lou," I said.

"Come on, Jake. Give me a hand."

A short, heavy silence descended on the room while we waited to see what my brother would do. He cringed, seemed to pull back away from us, his head retracting into his shoulders like a turtle's. This was the moment he must've been dreading all evening, the point where he'd have to demonstrate his allegiance in a concrete way, where he'd have to choose, publicly, one of us over the other.

"The tape doesn't hurt you," he said, his voice sounding pathetically timid. "It's just to keep you from hurting him."

Lou blinked at him. "What?"

"He's not going to use it unless you tell on him. That seems fair, doesn't it?"

Jacob's words were like little pellets; they seemed to fly at Lou and bury themselves beneath his skin. Lou swayed a little on his feet, an empty look coming across his face. "You're in this together, aren't you?" he said.

Jacob was silent.

"Come on, Lou," I said. "Let's sit back down. We're still friends here."

"You set me up, didn't you? The two of you together." Lou's body went taut. Muscles I'd never seen before appeared on his neck, quivering. "In my own fucking house," he said. He closed his hands into fists, glanced around him as if searching for something to hit. "Let's pretend you're me," he said, mimicking my voice. He sneered at Jacob. "Jacob, you be the sheriff."

"I didn't know--" my brother started.

"Don't lie to me, Jake." Lou's voice dropped a notch, coming out hurt, betrayed. "You're just making it worse."

"Maybe Hank's right," Jacob said. "Maybe it's better if we wait till the plane's found."

"Did you know?"

"You can make it till then. I can help you out. I'll loan you--"

"You're gonna help me out?" Lou almost smiled. "How the fuck do you think you're gonna help me out?"

"Listen, Lou," I said. "He didn't know. It was all my idea."

Lou didn't even bother to look at me. He pointed at my brother. "I want you to tell me," he said. "Tell me the truth."

Jacob licked his lips. He glanced down at his glass, but it was empty. He set it on the table. "He promised he'd help me buy back my farm."

"Your farm? What the fuck're you talking about?"

"My dad's farm."

"I forced him to do it," I said quickly. "I told him he couldn't buy the farm unless he helped me trick you."

Again, Lou ignored me. It was as if I'd ceased to exist. "So you knew?" he asked Jacob.

My brother nodded. "I knew."

Very slowly, so that there was a certain majesty to the gesture, Lou raised his arm and pointed toward the door. He was expelling us, a king banishing a pair of traitors from his realm. "Get out," he said.

And this was exactly what I wanted to do. I thought that if we could leave, if we could just make it out to the truck before anyone said anything he couldn't take back in the morning, we'd be all right.

"Come on, Jacob," I said, but he didn't move. He was focused on Lou, his whole body leaning toward him, pleading for understanding.

"Can't you see--" he began.

"Get out of my house," Lou said, his voice rising toward a yell. The muscles on his neck reappeared, straining.

I picked up my jacket from the couch. "Jacob," I said.

He didn't move, and Lou began to scream. "Leave!" he shouted. He stamped his foot. "Now!"

"Lou?" a woman's voice called. We all froze. It was Nancy; we'd woken her up. Her voice seemed to come down out of the ceiling, as if it were the house itself that was speaking.

"Jacob," I said again, making it a command, and this time he rose to his feet.

"Lou?" Nancy called. She sounded angry. "What's going on?"

Lou backed away from us, out of the living room and into the entranceway. He stood at the bottom of the steps.

"They tricked me," he yelled.

"I have to go to work in the morning. You guys can't keep shouting like that."

"They made me confess."

"What?"

"They aren't going to give us the money."

Nancy still didn't understand him. "Why don't you go to Jacob's?" she asked.

Lou stood there a moment, swaying a little on his feet; then he turned suddenly, as if he'd come to some decision, and headed off down the hallway toward the bathroom. Jacob and I put on our jackets. I walked quickly toward the front door, and he followed right behind me. I wanted to leave before Lou had a chance to reappear.

"Lou?" Nancy called again.

I opened the door and was just about to step outside when I heard a noise off to my left. It was Lou. He hadn't gone to the bathroom after all; he'd gone to the garage and gotten his shotgun. He was carrying it now, jamming shells into its breech as he came.

"He's got a gun," Jacob said. He reached up and pushed at my back with his hand, urging me forward, and then, when I didn't move, rushed past me through the door. When he reached the walk, he broke into a run. I just stood there, watching Lou approach. He'd left the garage door open behind him, so that he came toward me out of a square of darkness, like a troll emerging from his cave. I was thinking that I could calm him down.

"What're you doing, Lou?" I asked. It seemed silly for him to be acting like this, like a thwarted child throwing a tantrum.

Nancy called his name again, her voice sounding as if she were already halfway back to sleep. "Lou?"

Lou ignored her. He stopped about five feet away from me, then raised the gun until it was leveled at my chest. "Give me the tape," he said.

I shook my head. "Put the gun down, Lou."

Behind me I heard Jacob opening the door to his truck. There was a moment's pause, and then it slammed shut. He's leaving me, I remember thinking. He's running away. I waited for the cough of the engine turning over, waited for the crunch of the tires on the gravel as he pulled out of the driveway, but it didn't come. Instead I heard the heavy clumping of his footsteps returning toward me, and when I glanced back over my shoulder, I found him running up the driveway, his rifle held out in front of his chest. It was my older brother, finally, after all these years, coming to protect me.

But it was all wrong: so wrong, in fact, that at first I couldn't believe it was actually happening. An image floated up into my mind, absurdly, of Jacob playing army as a child: I saw him emerge from the cover of the south field, hesitate there like a real soldier, then scuttle toward the house, panting with the effort, a toy machine gun cradled in his arms, our uncle's World War II helmet balanced loosely on his head, bouncing forward and backward with every step, so that he had to keep reaching up and pushing it away from his eyes. He'd been coming to get me then, to capture me off the porch -- a boys' game with make-believe weapons -- and that was how he looked now, as if he were playing but pretending to be serious.

The sight of him, the sight of the rifle in his hands, sent a surge of terror through my body. It felt electric; my fingertips seemed to crackle with it. I held up my hand, waving him off, and he stopped at the foot of the walk, twenty feet away. I could hear his breath, a sawtoothed sound in the darkness. I turned back toward Lou, trying to fill the doorway with my body. I knew I couldn't let him see my brother, knew implicitly that if it reached the point where they stood facing each other with their guns, anything could happen. It would be out of my control.

"Give it to me, Hank," Lou said. His voice came out sounding remarkably controlled, and this hint of composure, tiny as it was, momentarily reassured me.

"Why don't we talk in the morning, Lou?" I said. "Everybody'll be calmer then, and we'll work things out."

He shook his head. "You're not going to leave until you give me the tape."

"Hank?" Jacob called from the foot of the walk. "You okay?"

"Go wait in the truck, Jacob."

Lou craned his neck to see outside, but I blocked his view. I stepped backward onto the porch, dragging the door shut behind me. I was trying to separate them, but Lou misinterpreted it. He thought I was running away, thought I was scared of him, and it gave him a burst of confidence. He took two quick steps forward, grabbed the edge of the door with his right hand, and yanked it open. He waved his gun in my face.

"I said you're not going to--" he started.

"Leave him alone, Lou," Jacob shouted.

Lou froze, startled, and we both turned to look. My brother was squinting down the barrel of his rifle, aiming it at Lou's head.

"Stop it, Jacob," I said. "Go back to the truck." But he didn't move. He was focused on Lou, and Lou was focused on him. I was being shoved off to the periphery, a prop in their drama.

"You gonna shoot me, Jake?" Lou asked, and then, together, they both began to yell, each trying to outshout the other: Jacob told him to leave me alone, to shut up, to put down the gun, that he didn't want to hurt him; and Lou started in about their friendship, about being tricked in his own house, about how much he needed the money, and how he was going to shoot me if I didn't give him the tape.

"Shhh," I kept saying, pleading now, and ignored by everyone. "Shhh."

In the midst of all this, I saw a light come on in one of the upstairs windows. I stared up at it, waiting for Nancy to appear, hoping that her voice, drifting down like an angel's from the sky above our heads, might stop this insanity, might silence their shouts and make them put down their guns. She didn't come to the window, though; she opened her bedroom door and ran down the hallway to the head of the stairs.

"Lou?" I heard her call. She was out of sight, but I could imagine how she looked from the sound of her voice -- sleepy and bewildered, her hair tangled and matted, her face puffy around the eyes.

Instantly, Lou fell silent, and when he stopped yelling, my brother did, too. My ears were ringing from their shouting. The night seemed to settle around us, softly, in little pieces, like falling snow.

Nancy came down a few steps. I could see one of her feet now through the upper frame of the doorway. It was bare and very small. "What's going on?" she asked.

Lou's face was a brilliant red, his nostrils flared. He seemed to be having a hard time catching his breath. He was pointing his gun at the center of my chest, but he wasn't looking at me. He was looking at Jacob. "You fucking piece of shit," he said, very quietly. Then he glanced at me. "The two of you. Pretending to be my friends." He raised the gun until it was pointing at my face. "I ought to blow your fucking brains out."

"Come on, Lou," I said, keeping my voice low and calm. "We can talk this out." I didn't think he was going to shoot me; I thought it was just bluster, like a dog barking. Nancy's presence was a good thing; if we let her, I knew, she'd bring us out of this danger. Another few seconds and Lou would lower his gun. Then she'd take him inside, and it would all be over.

Nancy came down another step. I could see two feet and a shin now. "Put down the gun, baby," she said, and the softness of her voice was like a balm to me. I felt myself relax beneath its touch.

But Lou shook his head. "Go back to bed," he said. He pumped a shell into the shotgun's chamber, adjusted his aim at my face. "I'm just going to shoot these two pieces of--"

He didn't finish his sentence. There was an explosion behind me, a flash of blue light followed instantly by a sense of movement over my left shoulder. I ducked, shutting my eyes, and heard Lou's gun clatter to the tiled floor.

When I lifted my head, he'd disappeared from the doorway.

There was perhaps a second's worth of silence before Nancy began to scream. It was just long enough for me to make out the sound of the wind sighing though the branches of the trees above me, and then it was over, and there was only her voice. It filled the house, strained against the walls.

"Noooooo," she screamed. She went on and on, until she ran out of air, and then she began again. "Noooooo."

I knew what had happened: it was the absolute stillness behind me, and the utter horror which this stillness implied, that made it undeniable. My brother had shot Lou.

I stepped forward and up, across the porch and into the house, and found Lou lying on his back a few feet from the door. The bullet had hit him in the forehead, about an inch above his eyes. It had left a very small hole in front, but there was a large puddle of blood on the floor, working its way out across the entranceway, so I knew that the hole in back must be bigger. His face was absolutely expressionless, almost serene. His mouth was partly open, his teeth visible, his head tilted slightly back, so that it looked as if he were about to sneeze. His right hand was thrown flamboyantly out across the floor; his left was covering his heart. The shotgun was lying beside his shoulder.

He was dead, of course. There was no doubt about this: Jacob had killed him. And so, I thought to myself, just like that, in an instant, it was over -- everything was going to be revealed now, all our secrets, all our crimes. We'd let things slip out of our control.

Nancy came down the stairs one step at a time. She was a big woman, larger than Lou. Her hair was shoulder length and dyed a peculiar, unabashedly artificial tint of orange. She was holding her hand over her mouth, her eyes locked on Lou's body. I watched her approach, feeling as if I were in some sort of trance. Everything seemed to be happening at a distance, as though I were observing it from behind a sheet of glass.

"Oh my God," she said, the words coming out at double speed, as if they'd been glued together. She kept repeating it, over and over again. "Oh my God oh my God oh my God."

She was wearing a Detroit Tigers T-shirt. It was extra-long, like a nightgown, and came down to her thighs. I could see her breasts moving beneath it, full and heavy, swinging a little each time she took a step.

I glanced back through the doorway at Jacob. He was still out on the walk, standing there like a statue, peering into the house. It seemed as if he were waiting for Lou to get up.

Nancy reached the bottom of the stairs, moved at a crouch across the entranceway, then stooped down beside Lou's corpse. She didn't touch him. She still had her hand over her mouth, and the sight of her like that sent a wave of pity through my body. I stepped forward, my arms held out to embrace her, but when she saw me coming, she jumped up and backed away toward the living room.

"Don't touch me," she said. Her legs were stocky beneath her T-shirt, pallid, like two marble pillars. She was beginning to cry a little; a pair of tears were moving in tandem down either side of her nose, as if in a race.

I tried to think of something soothing to say to her, but all I could come up with was a feeble lie. "It's okay, Nancy," I whispered.

She didn't react to this. She was staring past me, toward the doorway, and when I turned to see what she was looking at, I found Jacob standing there, the rifle cradled in his arms like a baby, a blank, mannequinish look pasted on his face.

"Why?" Nancy asked.

He had to clear his throat before he spoke. "He was going to shoot Hank."

The sound of my brother's voice pulled me out of my trance. If we could act together, I realized, the thought fluttering upward into consciousness on a pair of panicky wings, we could still salvage something from this horror: we could still save the money. It would simply be a matter of our agreeing to look at things in a certain way.

"He wasn't going to shoot anyone," Nancy said. She was staring down at Lou's body now. The puddle of blood was still growing, moving slowly out across the tiled floor.

"Nancy," I said softly, "it's going to be all right. We're going to work this out." I was trying to calm her down.

"You killed him," she said, as if in disbelief. She pointed her finger at my brother. "You shot him."

Jacob didn't say anything. His rifle was clenched tightly against his chest.

I took two steps toward Nancy, edging my way around the puddle of blood. "We're going to call the police," I said. "And we're going to tell them it was self-defense."

She glanced toward me, but not at me. It didn't seem like she understood.

"We're going to tell them that Lou was about to shoot him, that he was drunk, that he'd gone berserk."

"Lou wasn't going to shoot anyone."

"Nancy," I said. "We can still save the money."

She reacted to this statement as if it were a slap in the face. "You bastards," she hissed. "You shot him for the money, didn't you?"

"Shhh," I said. I made a quieting motion with my hand, but she started toward me, her fists clenched, her face distorted with rage. I backed away from her.

"You think I'm going to let you keep the money?" she said. "You fucking--"

I retreated all the way across the entranceway, past Lou's body, toward the door and my brother. She kept coming at me, yelling now, calling me names, shouting about the money. As she passed Lou's body, she stumbled against the shotgun, kicking it with one of her bare feet. It made a loud metallic noise as it slid across the tiles, and we all stared down at it.

There was a pause, while Nancy seemed to consider. Then she was bending to pick it up.

I stepped forward to grab it first, not to threaten her, only to keep her from getting it. We both got ahold of it, and there was a brief struggle. The gun was black and oily, and surprisingly heavy. I pushed, then pulled, then pushed again, and Nancy lost her grip. She stumbled back toward the stairs, fell against them, and, shrieking, lifted her arms to protect her head.

I realized with a shock that she thought I was going to shoot her.

"It's okay," I said quickly. I crouched down, began to lay the gun on the floor. "I'm not going to hurt you."

She started to back up the stairs.

"Wait, Nancy," I said. "Please."

She kept moving away, one step at a time, higher and higher, and I came after her, the gun in my hands.

"No," she said. "Don't."

"It's okay. I just want to talk."

When she got to the top of the stairs, she turned to the right and broke into a run. I sprinted after her, up the last few steps and then down the hallway. Her bedroom was at the very end. Its door was open, and there was a light on inside. I could see the foot of the bed.

"I'm not going to hurt you," I yelled.

She reached the door and tried to slam it shut, but I was right behind her. I caught it with my arm, forced it open. She backed away from me. The room was larger than I'd expected. There was a king-size water bed directly in front of us, pushed up against the wall. To the left was a little sitting area -- two chairs and a table with a TV on it. There was a door behind the chairs, shut, which I assumed must've led to the bathroom. To the right, pressed up against the house's front wall, were two huge bureaus and a dressing table. There was a doorway there, too. It was open and led to a walk-in closet. I could see some of Nancy's dresses hanging inside.

"I just want to talk," I said. "Okay?"

Nancy fell backward against the bed and started crawling, crablike, across it. A sloshing sound came from the mattress, and the covers rose and fell with the rolling of the water beneath them.

I realized that I was pointing the shotgun at her. I took it in my left hand and held it out, away from my body, to show her that I wasn't going to use it. "Nancy--"

"Leave me alone," she cried. She reached the headboard and stopped, trapped. Her face was smeared with tears. She wiped at it with her hand.

"I promise I won't hurt you. I just want to--"

"Get out," she sobbed.

"We have to think about what we're doing. We have to calm down and--"

Her right hand shot out suddenly, reaching for the night table. At first I thought she was going to pick up the phone and call the police, so I stepped forward to snatch it away. Her hand wasn't moving toward the phone, though; it was moving toward the night table's drawer. She pulled it open, reached inside, fumbling blindly, in a panic, her eyes locked on me and the gun. A box of tissues fell out, landing on the floor with a hollow thump, and then, right behind it, came her hand. It was holding a small black pistol. She had it by the barrel.

"No," I said. I retreated toward the door. "Don't, Nancy."

She pulled the pistol toward her, worked her hand around to the grip. Then she raised it and aimed it at my stomach.

My mind was sending out a jumbled stream of contradictory orders, screaming at my body, telling it to leap forward and grab the pistol, to run away, to duck, to hide behind the door, but my body refused to listen. It acted on its own. My arms lifted the shotgun, and then my finger found the trigger, found its cold metal tongue, and pulled it backward.

The gun fired. Nancy's body was flung back against the headboard, and a tiny fountain of water sprang up at her side.

I stood there in shock. The spray of water made a sound like someone urinating when it landed on the bedspread. Nancy's body slumped over to the right, balanced for a second on the edge of the bed, then slipped with a thud to the floor. There was blood everywhere -- on the sheets, the pillows, the headboard, the wall, the floor.

"Hank?" Jacob called. His voice sounded scared, shaky.

I didn't answer him. I was trying to absorb what had just happened. I took a step into the room, crouched down, set the gun on the floor.

"Nancy," I said. I knew she was dead, could tell just by the way she'd fallen from the bed, but the desire for this not to be true was overwhelming. I waited for her to answer me; the whole thing seemed like an accident, and I wanted to explain this to her.

"Hank?" Jacob called again. He was at the base of the stairs, but he sounded farther away. I had to strain to hear him.

"It's all right, Jacob," I yelled, though it wasn't, of course.

"What happened?"

I stood up and moved around the bed to get a better look at her. Her T-shirt was stained black with blood. It had hitched up a bit when she fell, so that now I could see her rear end. Water was sprinkling down off the bed onto her legs, making them glisten. She wasn't moving.

"You want me to come up?" Jacob called.

"I shot her," I yelled.

"What?"

"I shot her. She's dead."

Jacob didn't say anything. I listened for the sound of his feet on the stairs, but he didn't move.

"Jacob?"

"What?"

"Why don't you come up here now?"

There was a pause; then I heard him begin to climb. The water continued to shoot in a fine spray from the mattress. I picked up a pillow and set it on top of the leak. After a few seconds a little puddle started to form on the bedspread. There was the smell of urine in the air, an acidic tartness -- Nancy had lost control of her bladder. The urine was mixing with the blood and the water on the floor, the whole mess seeping down into the carpet.

When I heard my brother's footsteps approach the doorway, I turned and said, "She had a pistol. She was going to shoot me."

Jacob nodded. He seemed to be making a conscious effort not to look at Nancy's body. He was still carrying his rifle. I could tell he'd been crying downstairs -- his face was damp and his eyes red -- but he'd stopped now.

"What should we do?" he asked.

I didn't know what to say. I still couldn't believe that I'd shot her. I could see her body lying there, could see the blood and smell the urine, but I couldn't connect all that to anything I'd done. I'd just raised the gun and pulled the trigger: it seemed like too simple an action to have resulted in all this carnage.

"I didn't mean to shoot her," I said to Jacob.

He glanced toward Nancy's body now, a quick, furtive movement, like a peck, then looked away. His face was extremely pale. He started toward the bed, as if to sit down on it, but I stopped him.

"Don't," I said. "It's broken."

He froze, shifting his weight from foot to foot. "I guess we should call somebody," he said.

"Call somebody?"

"The sheriff. The state police."

I stared across the room at the phone. It was sitting on the night table, above the open drawer. Nancy's body was slumped on the floor beneath it. Her hair was all wet now, a thick, dark clot. It was wound around her neck like a noose. Jacob was right, of course. The mess we'd made had to be cleaned up, and the police were the only people who could do this.

"They're not going to believe us," I said.

"Believe us?"

"That we shot them out of self-defense."

"No," he said. "They won't."

I edged my way around Nancy's body toward the night table.

"Will we tell them about the money?" Jacob asked.

I didn't answer him. An idea had come to me suddenly, a way to postpone for a few more minutes the exposure of our crimes.

"I'm going to call Sarah," I said. I tried to imply that this was a rational step, tried to make my voice come out sounding confident and resolute, but in reality there was no logic behind it. I simply wanted to speak with her, wanted to tell her what had happened and warn her of the storm that was about to engulf us.

I half-expected Jacob to argue with me, but he didn't, so I picked up the phone. It was dark brown, the same color and style as the one in my office, and I found this oddly reassuring. When I started to dial, my brother turned and shuffled back across the room toward the doorway. I watched him disappear into the hall.

"Don't worry, Jacob," I called after him. "It's going to be okay."

He didn't answer me.

Sarah picked up on the third ring. "Hello?" she said. I could hear the dishwasher going in the background, which meant she was in the kitchen. She'd been waiting up for me.

"It's me," I said.

"Where are you?"

"At Lou's."

"Did you get him to say it?"

"Sarah," I said. "We shot them. They're both dead."

There was an instant's silence on the other end, like a skip on a record, and then, "What're you talking about, Hank?"

I told her what had happened. I took the phone and walked around to the other side of the bed while I talked, to get away from Nancy's body. I went to the window and looked out toward the road. I could see Jacob's truck, parked down at the base of the driveway. Everything was dark.

"Oh God," Sarah whispered when I finished, an echo of Nancy's cry. "Oh God."

I didn't say anything. I could hear her trying to catch her breath on the other end of the line, as if she were about to cry.

"What're you going to do?" she asked finally.

"I'm calling the police. We're going to turn ourselves in."

"You can't do that," she said. Her voice was quick, panicky, and it made me scared to hear it. I realized now why I'd called her: so that she might take control, fix what I'd broken -- Sarah, my problem solver, my rock. But she was letting me down; she was just as bewildered by what had happened as I was.

"I don't have a choice, Sarah. This isn't something we can just walk away from."

"You can't turn us in, Hank."

"I won't involve you. I'll tell them you didn't know about any of it."

"I don't care about that. I care about you. If you give yourself up, they'll send you to jail."

"They're both dead, Sarah. I can't hide that."

"What about an accident?"

"An accident?"

"Why can't you make it look like an accident? Like with Pederson?"

I almost laughed, the idea seemed so absurd. She was flailing about, clutching at straws. "Jesus, Sarah. We shot them. There's blood everywhere. It's on the walls, the bed, the floor--"

"You said you shot Nancy with Lou's gun?"

"Yes."

"Then you can make it look like Lou killed Nancy, and Jacob killed Lou in self-defense."

"But why would Lou kill Nancy?"

Sarah didn't say anything, but I could sense her thinking over the phone, could feel it like a vibration. An image appeared in my mind of her pacing up and down through the darkened kitchen, the telephone pressed against her cheek, its cord wrapped tightly around her fist. She was regaining her composure; she was searching for a way out.

"Maybe he discovered she was cheating on him," she said.

"But why shoot her tonight? It's not like he found her in bed with someone. She was all alone."

There was a pause of perhaps ten seconds; then Sarah asked suddenly, "Did Sonny hear the shots?"

"Sonny?"

"Sonny Major. Are his lights on? Is he up?"

I looked out the window again. There was only darkness down the road; Sonny's trailer was hidden behind it. "It doesn't look like it."

"You have to go get him."

"Get Sonny?" I had no idea what she was talking about.

"You have to make it look like Lou came home and found Nancy in bed with him."

I felt a dizzying wave of nausea rush over my body when she said this. It was all falling into place; she was making everything come together. Sonny was the only other person who knew about the money; if we killed him, it would just be us and Jacob. This was what I'd called her for, a solution to our trouble, but now that she'd found it for me, I didn't want it. It was too much.

"I can't shoot Sonny," I whispered. I could feel my back sweating, could feel beads forming along my shoulder blades.

"You have to," Sarah said, pleading now. "It's the only way it'll work."

"But I can't just drag him over here and kill him. He doesn't have anything to do with this."

"They'll send you to jail. Both you and Jacob. You have to save yourselves."

"I can't, Sarah."

"Yes, you can," she said, her voice rising. "You have to. It's our only chance."

I didn't say anything. My mind felt dull, numb, my thoughts viscous and unmanageable. I could see what she was saying: by killing Lou and Nancy, we'd taken two steps out over an abyss. We could either stop now, and fall into the pit beneath us, or take this third step and cross to safety. The idea shot through my mind, quickly, more wish than thought, that I didn't really have a choice. For one brief moment I allowed myself to believe it, that I'd lost control. It was a simple, easy feeling. Everything had already been determined for me -- I was just following along now, handing myself over to my fate.

I let the feeling pass, and then I chose.

"This is bad, Sarah," I said. "It's evil."

"Please," she whispered. "Do it for me."

"I don't even know if he's home."

"You can go check. You have to at least check."

"And what about Lou?"

"Lou?"

"How do we explain Jacob's shooting Lou?"

Sarah answered me quickly, her voice breathless. "You tell the police you heard a gun go off as you were pulling out of the driveway. You thought Lou had surprised a burglar, so you stopped the truck and ran up to the house, Jacob with his rifle. As you came up the walk, Lou opened the door. He was drunk, enraged. He saw Jacob running toward him with the rifle, and he raised his shotgun at him. Then Jacob shot him in self-defense." She paused, and then -- when I didn't respond immediately -- said, "But you have to hurry, Hank. You're running out of time. They'll be able to tell if the shootings happen too far apart. They'll be able to tell who died first."

The urgency in her voice was contagious. I felt my pulse thump out from my chest into my arms and head. I started to move back toward the night table. The carpet was soaked with Nancy's blood. I had to walk along the edge of the wall to keep from getting it on my boots.

"Is Jacob okay?" Sarah asked.

"Yes," I said. "He was crying before, but I think he's all right now."

"Where is he?"

"He's downstairs. I think he's getting a drink."

"You have to talk to him. The police are going to question him. You have to make sure that he understands the story, that he doesn't break down and confess."

"I'll talk to him," I said.

"This is important, Hank. He'll be the weak link. If he breaks down, he'll send you both to jail."

"I know," I said. "I'll take care of him. I'll take care of everything."

Then I hung up the phone and ran downstairs.

I FOUND my brother in the living room, sitting on the couch. He'd unzipped his jacket and was drinking from a glass full of whiskey. His rifle was lying propped up against the foot of the stairs. I didn't look at Lou's body, just scanned it once as I passed through the entranceway, to make sure Jacob hadn't moved it, then stepped quickly down into the living room.

There was a woman's bathrobe draped across the arm of the couch. It was sky blue, silky. I picked it up and sniffed at it -- a sweetish mix of perfume and tobacco. I unzipped my jacket and stuffed it inside.

"Are they coming?" Jacob asked.

"Who?"

"The police."

"Not yet."

"Did you call them?"

I shook my head. I saw a pack of Marlboro Lights sitting on the coffee table. Beside it were a lighter and a tube of lipstick. I scooped all three of them up and slid them into my jacket pocket. "I'm going to go get Sonny," I said. "We're going to make it look like Lou shot him and Nancy together."

I could see Jacob struggling to make sense of this. He frowned up at me, his forehead wrinkling, the glass of whiskey trembling a bit in his hand. "You're going to shoot Sonny, too?"

"We have to," I said.

"I don't think I want to do that."

"It's either that or go to jail. That's our choice."

Jacob was silent for a moment. Then he asked, "Why can't we run? Why can't we go get Sarah and the baby and the money and just drive off? We could head down to Mexico. We could--"

"They'd catch us, Jacob. They always do. They'd track us down and bring us back. If we want to save ourselves, this is how we have to do it." I was feeling panicky with the loss of time, jittery. It seemed like I could actually sense the two corpses cooling, draining, indelibly marking the chronology of their passing. I didn't want to have to argue with Jacob; I'd already made my decision. I turned and started toward the entranceway. "I'm not going to jail," I said.

I heard him stand up, as if to come after me. When he spoke, his voice came out high and tight, stopping me in midstride. "We can't kill all these people."

I turned to face him. "I'm going to save us, Jacob. If you let me, I'll be able to make it right."

His face took on a scared, frantic expression. "No. We have to stop."

"I'm just going to--" I began, but he didn't let me finish.

"I want to leave. I want us to run away."

"Listen to me, Jacob." I leaned forward and took his sleeve in my hand. I held it very lightly, just a small fold of red nylon between two of my gloved fingers, but it created a sudden, nearly palpable tension in the room. We both fell silent.

"I'm telling you how it's going to look," I said.

He met my eyes for the briefest of moments. He seemed to be holding his breath. I let go of his jacket.

"Lou comes home. He finds Nancy in bed with Sonny. She thought he was supposed to be out till late. He's drunk, violent; he gets his shotgun, and he shoots them both. We're just pulling out of the driveway. We hear the shots, think that he must've surprised a burglar. We run up to the house, you with your rifle from the truck. Lou opens the front door. He's gone berserk. He points the shotgun at us, and you shoot him."

Jacob was silent. I wasn't sure if he'd understood it all.

"It makes sense, doesn't it?" I asked.

He didn't answer.

"It'll work, Jacob. I promise. But we have to hurry."

"I don't want to be the one who shoots Lou," he said.

"All right. Then we'll tell them I shot him. It doesn't matter."

There was a long pause. I could hear the tap dripping in the kitchen.

"I just stay here and wait?" Jacob asked.

I nodded. "Put your gloves back on. And wash those glasses."

"You'll shoot him yourself?"

"That's right," I said, backing toward the door. "I'll shoot him myself."

SONNY lived in a house trailer, a tiny one, set up on cinder blocks about three quarters of a mile down the road from Lou's. There were sawhorses littered about the front yard, covered with snow, and the side of the trailer had S. MAJOR, CARPENTER painted on it in large, black letters. Below that was written HIGH QUALITY, LOW PRICE. Sonny's car, an old, rusted, and badly battered Mustang, was wedged into a gap in the snowbank lining the road.

I parked Jacob's truck alongside the car and left the engine running. Mary Beth was sound asleep on the front seat; he barely even lifted his head when I climbed out. I jogged up the shoveled path to the trailer and, very quietly, tried the door. It was unlocked; it opened with a faint squeak.

I stepped up and in, crouching through the low doorway. The trailer was dark, and once inside I had to wait for half a minute, holding my breath, while my eyes adjusted to the lack of light. I listened for sounds of movement around me, but there was nothing there.

I was in Sonny's kitchen. I could see a small counter-top, a sink, a stove. By the window there was a card table with three chairs. The place was dirty, cluttered, and smelled stalely of fried food. I unzipped my jacket, careful not to make too much noise, took out Nancy's robe, and draped it over one of the chairs. I set the lighter and the cigarettes on the table.

I took my time moving across the kitchen toward the rear of the trailer. I placed a foot, paused, shifted my weight forward, paused, placed my other foot, and continued this all the way into the adjoining room, listening every instant for sounds of Sonny stirring.

The next room was a tiny sitting area -- a couch, a coffee table, a TV set. I took out Nancy's lipstick and tossed it onto the couch. From where I was standing I could see, through an open doorway, the foot of Sonny's bed. Sonny was lying there. I could see the shape of his legs beneath the gray whiteness of the sheets.

I listened very closely, holding my body still, and, barely, made out the sound of his breathing. It was soft and low, just this side of a snore. He was sleeping deeply.

"Sonny," I called, my voice echoing against the trailer's walls. "Sonny!"

I heard an abrupt movement through the doorway, skin sliding across sheets. The legs pulled up and out of sight. I took a heavy step toward the bedroom.

"Sonny," I called. "It's Hank Mitchell. I need your help."

"Hank?" a voice came back. It was thick with sleep but a little edgy, too, a little scared.

I took another heavy step. A light came on in the bedroom, and, a second later, Sonny appeared through the doorway. He was a small man, wiry and stunted, like a little elf. He had brown, shoulder-length hair. He was naked except for a pair of white underpants, and in the dim light his skin looked pale, soft, like it'd be easy to bruise.

"Jesus, Hank," he said. "You scared the hell out of me." He was holding a screwdriver. It was clenched in his right fist, like a knife.

"Jacob's hurt," I said. "He's puking blood."

Sonny gave me a blank look.

"We were drinking at Lou's, and he started puking blood."

"Blood?"

I nodded. "Now he's passed out."

"You want me to call an ambulance?"

"It'll be quicker if I bring him in myself. I just need you to help me lift him into the truck. Lou's too drunk to do it."

Sonny gave his eyes several rapid, exaggerated blinks, as if to clear them of tears. He stared for a moment at the screwdriver in his hand, then glanced around him, looking for a place to set it down. I could see that he wasn't really awake yet.

"Sonny," I said, forcing a note of panic into my voice. "We have to hurry. He's bleeding inside."

Sonny stared down at his underpants. He seemed surprised to be wearing them. "I have to put on some clothes."

"I've got to get back," I said. "You run over when you're dressed."

Without waiting for his answer, I turned and sprinted toward the front of the trailer. I ran outside and down the walk. I climbed into the truck and was just about to reverse it back up the road to Lou's when I saw Mary Beth sitting in the middle of Sonny's front yard. I opened my door and leaned out into the night. "Mary Beth," I whispered.

The dog sat up straight, ears erect.

"Come on." I made a clicking sound with my tongue.

The dog wagged his tail in the snow.

"Get in the truck," I pleaded.

He didn't move. I tried to whistle, but my lips were too cold. The dog stared at me.

I called his name one more time. Then I slammed shut the door and sped back up the road.

WHEN I got to Lou's, I found Jacob exactly as I'd left him. He was sitting on the leather couch, his hands still gloveless, sipping from his glass of whiskey.

I stood in the entranceway for a good ten seconds, absorbing the scene. He'd taken off his boots, too.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" I asked.

He looked up at me, startled. "What?" he said. He hadn't heard me come in.

"You were supposed to wash those glasses."

He held his glass up and stared into it. It was half full. "I wanted to wait till I finished."

"And I told you to put on your gloves, Jacob. You're leaving fingerprints."

He set his glass down on the coffee table. He wiped his hands on his pants, then glanced around the room for his gloves.

"We've got to clean up," I said. "It has to look like we weren't even here."

He found his gloves tucked inside his jacket pockets. He took them out and put them on.

"Your boots, too."

He bent forward to pull on his boots. "I can't tie them with my gloves on."

I waved my hand in the air. "Then take them off. We're running out of time."

He took off his gloves, tied his boots, put his gloves back on. When he finished, he rose to his feet, picked up the glasses from the table, and started off toward the kitchen.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

He stopped halfway across the room, blinking at me. "You told me to wash the glasses."

I shook my head. "Later. Sonny'll be here any second." I went over to the foot of the stairs and picked up Lou's shotgun. "Where does he keep his extra shells?"

Jacob stood there with the glasses held out in front of him. "In the garage."

"Come on. Show me."

He set the glasses down on the coffee table with a little clinking sound, then followed me out to the garage. There was an open cabinet there, just beyond the doorway, and on its floor was a cardboard box full of shells. I had Jacob show me how to load them into the gun. It held five shells in all. You had to pump a new one into the chamber each time you fired. I emptied the box of shells into my right-hand jacket pocket, and we went back inside.

When we got to the entranceway, I picked up my brother's rifle and held it out toward him. "Here," I said. "Take this."

Jacob didn't move. He stood there, about five feet from Lou's body, and stared at the rifle. He seemed undecided as to what he should do. "You told me you were going to shoot him."

I stepped forward, shaking the rifle. "Come on. You're just going to point it at him. We have to use Lou's gun to shoot him."

He hesitated. Then he reached out and took the rifle from me.

I went over to the front door, cracked it open, and peered outside toward Sonny's trailer. It was all lit up now.

"I'm going to wait for him on the porch," I said. "You stand in here. When you hear us talking, step outside and point your rifle at him. Don't say anything, and don't let him see inside. Just stand there and point the gun at him."

Jacob nodded.

I stepped out onto the porch and shut the door behind me.

IT WAS another minute or so before I heard Sonny's car start. It revved twice; then the headlights flicked on, and it shot out onto the road, made a tight U-turn, and sped toward me. He parked at the top of the driveway, right next to the garage, shut off the engine, and came sprinting up the walk. He was almost to the door before he saw me standing there, waiting for him.

"Where is he?" he asked, out of breath. He was wearing a light brown winter parka with a big, fur-lined hood on it. His hair was still uncombed. He glanced down at the gun in my arms, then touched the corners of his eyes with his fingertips. They were watering from the cold. He stepped up onto the porch. With the door closed, the house looked perfectly normal. You couldn't tell what had happened.

"I had to--" Sonny started, but then, hearing the front door begin to open, he stopped. Jacob appeared through a crack in the doorway.

"You're all right?" Sonny asked, surprised.

Jacob didn't answer him. He squeezed his body out onto the porch and shut the door. Then he raised his rifle until it was pointing at the center of Sonny's chest. I stepped down onto the walk, in case Sonny tried to run back toward his car.

Sonny stared at Jacob's rifle for a moment. Then he glanced back toward me.

"Hank?" he said. He still hadn't caught his breath. He touched his eyes again.

I raised the shotgun until it was pointing at his stomach. The gun felt heavy in my hands, and its weight gave me a sudden sense of power. It felt exactly like it ought to, dense, potent, like something capable of killing. This is craziness, I thought to myself, briefly, and then I let go, slipping into it. All my fear, all my anxiety fell away: I felt capable of anything. I smiled at Sonny.

"What the fuck, Hank?" he said. "You think this is funny?"

"Take off your jacket," I said. I kept my voice very quiet.

He just stared at me.

"Come on, Sonny. Take it off."

He glanced from me to Jacob, then back to me again. He started to smile, but only got halfway. "This isn't funny, Hank. You woke me up."

I took a step forward and raised the gun until it was right in front of his face. "Do it," I said firmly.

Sonny's hands started to stray toward the zipper of his jacket. Then they stopped and fell back to his sides.

"Sonny," I said. "This is very important to me. I don't want to hurt you."

He glanced back at Jacob; then he looked for a bit into the barrel of the shotgun. "You woke me up," he said again.

I took another step forward. I touched the gun's barrel against his forehead. "Take off your jacket, Sonny."

He stepped back, staring at me. I tried to make my face into a stone, and, after a moment, it worked. He unzipped his jacket. Beneath it, he was wearing a blue flannel shirt and jeans.

"Take it," I said to Jacob.

Jacob stepped forward and took the jacket from Sonny. He folded it carefully over his arm. Sonny watched him do this. I watched Sonny.

"Now your boots," I said.

Sonny hesitated for about five seconds. Then he crouched down and took off his boots. He wasn't wearing any socks. His feet were small and bony, like a monkey's.

"The boots," I said to Jacob.

Jacob picked up Sonny's boots.

"Your shirt," I said.

Sonny tried out a little laugh. "Come on, Hank. Enough's enough. It's cold out." He wrapped his arms around his chest, glanced back at my brother. "Jacob?" he said. Jacob looked away.

"Take off your shirt, Sonny," I said.

He shook his head. "This is fucked, Hank. This isn't funny at all."

I stepped forward and hit him in the mouth with the shotgun. It was the strangest thing -- I didn't consciously will it, it simply happened. I'd never struck anyone before in my life. Sonny took a step backward, but he neither fell down nor cried out. He gave me a dazed, vacant look.

"What?" he asked. His mouth was bleeding. He put his hand up to it and shut his eyes. He still seemed, on some level, to think that this was some sort of practical joke. When he opened his eyes, he looked at me as if he were expecting me to smile, to say that it was all right, that we were just fooling around.

"Take off your shirt," I said.

He took off his shirt and dropped it to the ground.

"Your pants."

"No, Hank," he started to plead.

Without thinking, I hit him again, this time in the side of the head. He fell to one knee. He rested there a moment, then got back up on his feet.

"Do it."

Sonny looked from me to Jacob. We were both pointing our guns at his chest. He took off his jeans.

"Your underpants," I said.

He shook his head. "This isn't a joke anymore, Hank. You've taken this too far." He was shivering now, from the cold, his whole body trembling.

"Don't talk, Sonny. If you talk, I'm going to hit you again."

He didn't say anything.

"Your underpants," I said.

He didn't move.

I lifted the shotgun until it was level with his face. "I'm going to count to three. When I get to three, I'm going to shoot."

He still didn't move.

"One."

He glanced at Jacob. Jacob's hands were shaking so much that his rifle quivered in the air.

"Two."

"You're not going to shoot me, Hank," Sonny said. His voice came out raspy and unsure.

I paused but saw no way out. "Three."

Sonny didn't move.

I tightened my grip on the gun, aimed down the barrel at his face. "I don't want to do this, Sonny," I said. He was ruining my plan.

Sonny just stared at me. With each passing second he was gaining confidence. "Put the gun down," he whispered.

But then I had a revelation. I could shoot him here, I realized, he was undressed enough. It would look just as good: Lou discovered them, shot Nancy in her bed, then chased Sonny downstairs and killed him by the front door. It had the disorderly verisimilitude of reality.

I gave him one more chance. "Take them off," I said. My finger brushed lightly against the gun's trigger.

Sonny watched me, and his confidence seemed to waver. He licked at the blood on his lip. "What's this about, Hank?"

"Go inside now, Jacob," I said. I didn't want him to get any blood on his clothes. I took a deep breath, then climbed up onto the porch. I was going to edge around him toward the doorway, so that I'd be facing the road when I shot him.

Jacob cracked open the door and slipped into the house.

Sonny watched him disappear, and then, as if suddenly intuiting what I was about to do, dropped his hands to his sides. He slid his underpants down off his legs.

Naked, he looked tiny, like a boy. His shoulders were hunched, skinny, his chest virtually hairless. He held his jeans over his crotch. I could tell just from his posture that I'd broken him. It was no longer a struggle for control: he was cowering, waiting to see what my next order might be.

"Drop them," I said.

Sonny let his jeans and underpants fall to the ground. He kept one hand over his groin, the other on his lips. His mouth was beginning to bleed in earnest now. There was blood all over his chin, and some of it had dripped down onto his chest.

"Put your hands on your head."

He put his hands on his head, exposing his groin. I pointed the shotgun at his chest.

"All right," I said. "Now turn around and open the door."

Very slowly, he spun around. I stepped forward, over his little pile of clothes, and pressed the gun's barrel into his spine. I sensed him stiffen, his back muscles clenching at the cold touch of the metal against his naked skin. It was like the tightening of a knot.

"Don't panic when you open the door, Sonny," I said. "Just stay calm, and everything'll be okay."

He dropped one of his hands, turned the knob, and pushed open the door.

After the darkness of the porch, there was something almost surreal about the brightly lit entranceway. It was like stepping up onto a stage. Lou's body was laid out across the tiles, his head thrown back, as if in laughter. The floor must've tilted a little toward the living room, because that's the way the blood had spread. It looked darker than it had before, almost black, and it glistened in the light.

The door swung away from Sonny, all the way around on its hinges until it banged into the wall. Jacob was standing off to the right, his rifle pointing down toward Lou's corpse; there was a startled expression on his face. He stared at us, waiting to see what we were going to do. Sonny didn't move, but I felt him inhale sharply, his back expanding against the barrel of the gun.

"Come on, Sonny," I said. "Just walk right by it."

I pushed him with the gun, forcing him to step forward into the house, his bare foot slapping down against the tiled floor. He stopped like that -- one foot inside, one foot outside -- bucking a little, like a mule. I pushed him again, harder this time, and suddenly he wasn't there. Jacob blocked the route to the garage, and Lou's body lay in front of the living room, so there was really only one place for Sonny to go. He ran straight up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

I sprinted after him.

When he reached the top, he turned to the right, and we raced down the hallway toward the master bedroom. I have no idea what drew him in that direction, to the exact spot where I wanted him most -- perhaps he knew that they kept a pistol there, hidden away in the top drawer of the night table, or maybe it was simply the light seeping out through the half-open doorway, with its implication of refuge and protection -- but it must've been an awful shock when he burst into the room and saw the ruin there, saw the blood and the water and heard my footsteps pounding so close behind him. He must've known then -- if he still had any doubts after seeing Lou's body laid out across the entranceway -- that I'd brought him over here to kill him.

His momentum carried him into the room, right up to the foot of the bed. I didn't see him look down at Nancy's body, but he must've seen it, must've caught at least a glimpse of it before he turned, his hands raised in a pair of fists, as if to strike me. His nakedness made him seem savage, like a caveman. His face was contorted, a horrible mixture of terror and rage and confusion. His chin was smeared with blood.

I was in the doorway, blocking his escape. I pumped the gun, and it ejected an empty shell -- the one I'd killed Nancy with -- onto the floor at my feet. Then, without pausing to think, I fired into Sonny's chest.

There was a kick against my body, a loud explosion, and a fresh spray of blood slapped wetly across the blankets.

Sonny was knocked onto the bed. He landed with a splashing sound, throwing a little wave of water off the edge of the mattress. His chest was a ragged mass of red and pink and white, but he was still alive. His legs were kicking, and he was trying to lift his head. He was staring at me, his eyes bulging from his head, showing more white than anything else. His right hand was clutching at the covers, pulling them toward his side.

I pumped the gun again, the empty shell falling to the carpet. Then I stepped forward and aimed down at his face. As I pulled the trigger, I saw him shut his eyes. The mattress literally exploded, showering the headboard and the wall behind it with water. I had to jump back to keep from getting it on my clothes.

From the safety of the doorway, I fired the last two shells into the ceiling above the bed. Then I reached into my pocket, put five new shells into the gun, and fired these indiscriminately around the room -- at the armchairs off to the left, at the bathroom door, at the mirror above the dressing table.

I checked myself for spattered blood and reloaded the gun.

Descending the stairs, I fired once into the ceiling. When I got to the bottom, I turned and aimed out into the living room. I shot the leather couch, then the TV set, and finally the coffee table with our glasses on it.

I left one shell loaded in the gun.

I FOUND Jacob hiding in the bathroom. He was sitting on the closed lid of the toilet. His rifle was lying on the floor at his feet. Sonny's parka and boots were resting in his lap.

"All right," I said. I was standing in the doorway.

"All right?" Jacob asked. He didn't look up at me.

I took a deep breath. I felt shaky, high, a little out of control. I had the vague suspicion that I might not be thinking very well, and I tried now to slow things down. The hard part was over, I told myself; the rest was just a matter of us acting out our parts.

"It's finished," I said.

"He's dead?"

I nodded.

"Why'd you shoot so much?"

I didn't answer him. "Come on, Jacob. We have to get going."

"Did you have to shoot so much?"

"It's supposed to look like he's pissed. Like he's gone insane." I wiped my face with my hand. My gloves smelled of gunpowder; I realized I'd have to remember to hide them in the truck before we called the police. A string of water began to drip from the ceiling in the corner. It fell onto the ceramic toilet lid, making a sound like the ticking of a clock. It was from the water bed: it had already started soaking through the plaster.

Jacob removed his glasses. His face seemed off balance without them -- the skin of his cheeks and jowls red and shiny, bloated to the point of distension, as if he were gout ridden, while up top his eyes seemed sunken, dim, weak looking.

"Aren't you afraid of later?" he asked.

"Later?"

"Guilt. Feeling bad."

I sighed. "We did it, Jacob. We had to do it, and we did it."

"You shot Sonny," he said, as if surprised by this.

"That's right. I shot Sonny."

"Dead," Jacob said. "In cold blood."

I didn't know what to say to that. I wanted to avoid thinking about what we'd done, knew implicitly that nothing good would come from self-analysis. Up to now I'd felt a comfortable sense of inevitability in all my actions, as if I'd merely been looking on, watching myself on film, thoroughly engaged in what was happening but harboring no illusion that I could alter even the most trivial of events. Fate, a voice seemed to whisper in my ear, and I let the reins slip from my hand. But now Jacob, with his questions, was eroding this. He was making me look back, see that the bloody water dripping down through the ceiling was there because I'd willed it into being. I pushed the thought away and immediately replaced it with an angry surge of resentment toward my brother, sitting there on the toilet, fat, passive, judging me while it was his own panic, his own rashness and stupidity that had trapped me into my crimes.

"None of this would've happened if you hadn't killed Lou," I said.

Jacob lifted his head, and I saw with a shock that he was crying. There were tear tracks running down his cheeks, and the sight of them filled me with regret: I shouldn't have spoken so harshly to him.

"I saved you," he said, his voice choking a little on the words. He turned his head to the right, trying to hide his face.

"Don't do this, Jacob. Please."

He didn't answer. His shoulders were shaking. He had one hand pressed against his eyes. The other one, the one that held his glasses, was resting on top of Sonny's boots in his lap.

"You can't fall apart now. We still have to deal with the police, the reporters--"

"I'm okay," he said. It came out like a gasp.

"We have to be composed."

"It's just...," he started, but he couldn't find the words to finish. "I shot Lou," he said.

I stared down at him. He was making me scared. I was beginning to see how, if we weren't careful, it could all unravel on us. "We have to get going, Jacob," I said. "We have to call it in."

He inhaled deeply, held it for a moment, then put his glasses back on and struggled to his feet. His face was wet with tears, his chin shaking. I took Sonny's parka and boots from him and carried them out to the hall closet. The living room was a shambles. The coffee table was shattered, the TV imploded. Great, white, round hunks of stuffing protruded from the couch, like clouds, the way children draw them.

Jacob had forgotten his rifle in the bathroom, so I had to go get it for him. He followed me there and back like a dog. He was starting to cry again, and hearing him gave me a hollow pit in my stomach, a vertiginous sensation, as if I were falling off a building.

I opened the front door. "Go out to the truck," I said. "Call the police on the CB."

"The CB?" His voice sounded far away, like he wasn't really paying attention. I shivered. I could feel the cold air rising along the damp, sweaty skin of my back. I zipped up my jacket. Like my gloves, it smelled of gunpowder.

"It has to look like you're calling in scared," I said. "Like you saw me shoot him and, instead of going inside, ran back to the truck."

Jacob was staring down at Lou's body again, his face limp.

"Don't tell them too much, just that there's been a shooting. Tell them to send an ambulance, then get off."

He nodded but didn't move. His tears kept coming, seeping out the corners of his eyes one after the other and dropping down his face. They were dripping onto the front of his jacket, darkening the fabric.

"Jacob," I said.

He dragged his eyes upward, glanced over at me. He wiped his cheek with the back of his hand.

"We have to be alert now. We have to remember what we're doing."

He nodded again, took another deep breath. "I'm okay," he said. Then he started out the door.

I stopped him when he reached the porch. I was in the doorway, right where Lou had been standing when Jacob shot him. "Don't forget your rifle," I said. I held the gun toward him, and he took it. I was still out over the abyss, I realized. There was a fourth step to be taken before I could reach the other side.

As I watched him begin to pick his way down the icy walk, I brought the shotgun up against my body and pumped the last shell into its chamber.

Because he was my brother, I'd forgiven him for telling Lou about Pederson, and for lying to me about Sonny being in the car, but I couldn't forgive him for his weakness. That, I saw now, was a greater risk even than Lou's greed and stupidity. Jacob would break down when they questioned him tonight; he'd confess and turn me in. I couldn't trust him.

When he reached the end of the walk, I called his name. I was tired, exhausted with what I'd already done so far that evening, and this made it easier.

"Jacob," I said.

He turned around. I was standing in the doorway, with Lou's gun leveled at his chest.

It took him a moment to realize what was happening.

"I'm sorry," I said.

He tilted his head, like a giant parrot, confused.

"I didn't plan to do this, but I have to."

His body seemed to settle somehow, to freeze and solidify. He understood finally. "I'd never tell, Hank," he said.

I shook my head. "You'd fuck up, Jacob. I know it. You wouldn't be able to live with what we've done."

"Hank," he said, pleading now. "I'm your brother."

I nodded. I tightened my grip on the shotgun, raised it a little, adjusting my aim. But I didn't fire. I waited. It wasn't that I was wavering -- I knew that I couldn't go back now, that it was as good as done -- it was simply that I felt like I was forgetting something, skipping some crucial step. Something had to happen still.

Mary Beth appeared suddenly out of the darkness, making both of us jump, dog tags clinking together on his collar, his tail wagging madly. He went up to Jacob and pressed close against his legs, asking to be petted. Then he started toward me.

Jacob, when he saw me glance down at the dog, quickly raised his rifle and pulled the trigger. It made a clicking sound. The chamber was empty. There'd only been the one bullet in it, the bullet he'd loaded back on New Year's Eve, at the very beginning of all this, when we'd set off into the woods after the fox. My brother's face settled into a rueful smile. He seemed almost, but not quite, to shrug.

I fired the gun into his chest.

BEFORE calling the police, I went inside to pee. The bathroom floor was covered with water. It dripped through the ceiling now at several points, like a miniature rain shower. The plaster was stained a light brown from it.

I picked up Sonny's clothes from the porch and carried them to the bedroom. I dropped them into the water beside the bed, then retrieved the pistol, dried it off with my jacket, and returned it to its drawer.

Downstairs again, I took the leftover shells and stuck them into Lou's pocket. I laid his gun on the floor beside his shoulder. His expression hadn't changed. The puddle of blood had spread to the edge of the living room and was dripping quietly onto its shag carpet.

Sonny had left his lights on, so I had to drive over there quickly and turn them out. While I was there, I hung Nancy's robe in the trailer's bedroom closet and set her tube of lipstick on the sink in the bathroom.

As I drove back to Lou's, I looked for the dog, but he'd disappeared, scared off by the sound of the shotgun.

I called the police from Lou's driveway. I was brief on the radio, trying to sound panicked. I gave the address, said there'd been a shooting. I didn't answer the dispatcher's questions. "My brother," I said, forcing a sob into my voice. Then I clicked off the radio. I sounded good, I knew, convincing, and I felt a sudden infusion of confidence.

It's believable, I said to myself, it's going to work.

I took the tape recorder from my shirt pocket and played it one last time. It was eerie, sitting in the cab of the truck like that, listening to their voices go back and forth, and knowing they were dead. I stopped it before it was through, erased the whole thing, and hid the machine beneath the seat.

I waited in the truck for a while, then climbed out and went up the walk. I wanted to be by my brother when the ambulance arrived, crouching there, holding him in my arms.

I tried calling Mary Beth, but he didn't come. I stood on the walk for several minutes, shivering in the cold, listening for the sound of the dog's tags. I'd hidden my gloves with the tape recorder and was hoping that the wind would air the smell of gun smoke from my jacket.

I could just make out the ambulance's lights, far away across the fields but coming fast, flickering red and white off the horizon, when Jacob reached out and grabbed my ankle. His grip was tight, violent. I had to yank my leg twice to get it free.

A gurgling sound came out of his chest, very faint. As soon as I heard it, I realized that it had been going on for some time.

I stooped down beside him, just out of reach. His jacket was torn and soaked through with blood. I could see the lights coming closer. There were three sets of them -- silent, no sirens, converging on Lou's house, two approaching from the east, still far away, and one from the south, which was closer.

Jacob tried to lift his head but couldn't. His eyes took a moment to find me; then they focused a little, faded, and focused again. His glasses were lying beside him on the walk.

I could hear the ambulance's engine now, racing.

"Help me," Jacob gasped.

He said it twice.

Then he lost consciousness.

7

THE NEXT morning, just after eight, I was sitting in an empty room on the second floor of the Delphia Municipal Hospital, watching myself on TV. First an announcer talked from the studio, reading something off a sheet of paper. The television was broken, so I couldn't hear what he was saying, but I knew that it was about what had happened the previous night because from the studio they cut to a shot of me, just a short one, perhaps five seconds, as I walked from a police car into the hospital. I was hunched over, hurrying, head down. I didn't look like myself, and this reassured me. I looked shaken, shocked, like I belonged there, on the news.

Next there was a reporter, a woman, talking into a microphone in front of Lou's house. She had on a heavy down jacket and thick yellow ski gloves. As she spoke, her long brown hair lifted itself an inch or so from her shoulders, trembling in the wind. Several police cars were parked behind her in the driveway. The yard was crisscrossed with tire tracks. Lou's front door was wide open, and I could see two men crouched inside the entranceway, taking pictures.

The woman talked for a bit, her face serious, grief-stricken. The announcer reappeared when she finished, and he seemed to say something consoling to her. Then the newsbreak was over.

There was a commercial next, and after that a cartoon. Elmer Fudd chasing Daffy Duck. I turned away from the screen. I was sitting with Sarah and Amanda in what was once a two-bed, semiprivate room. For some reason it had been emptied of furniture. The beds were gone, the night tables, everything. Except for the two folding chairs Sarah and I sat in, the room was barren. The floor was light blue. I could see where the beds had stood; the tiles were a little darker there, two perfect rectangles against the wall, like shadows. There was a single small window, a slit in the side of the building, the same size and shape as the ones they used to have in castles, to shoot arrows through. It looked out onto the hospital's parking lot.

The television set hung on a bracket hooked into the ceiling. Though it gave me a sick feeling to look at it, I found it hard not to watch. It was the only thing in the room besides Sarah, and I didn't want to look at her. If I looked at her, I knew I'd start talking, and I didn't feel safe talking there.

We'd been put in the room as a courtesy, for our privacy. There were reporters down in the regular waiting room. I'd been up all night, had not eaten since the previous day. I was unshaven, dirty, shaky.

The FBI hadn't been called in. It was just the Fulton County Sheriff's Department. I'd spent two hours talking with them, and it had been fine. They were normal people, like Carl Jenkins, and they saw things exactly as Sarah and I had anticipated they would: Lou coming home drunk, finding Sonny and Nancy in bed together, getting his gun and shooting them; Jacob and I hearing the shots as we pulled away, Jacob running up to the house with his rifle, Lou opening the door, pointing his shotgun, two explosions ripping through the night.

The sheriff's deputies had treated me with great care and courtesy, like a victim rather than a suspect, mistaking my unconcealable distress over the possibility of Jacob's regaining consciousness for a brother's heartfelt grief.

Jacob was in his third hour of surgery.

Sarah and I sat in the room and waited.

Neither of us seemed to want to talk. Sarah tended Amanda. She nursed her, whispered to her, played little games with her. When the baby slept, Sarah closed her eyes, too, slouching forward in her folding chair. I watched the silent TV -- cartoons, a game show, a rerun of "The Odd Couple." During commercials I went over to the window and stared down at the parking lot. It was a big lot, like a field of asphalt. The cars clustered around the building, leaving the far edge empty and forlorn looking. Beyond the parking lot was a real field, buried in snow. When the wind came up, it carried grains of this snow across the asphalt in little semitransparent waves and threw them up against the hospital.

Sarah and I waited and waited. Doctors and nurses and policemen walked by outside the door, the clicking of their shoes echoing up and down the tiled hallway, drawing our eyes to their passing, but no one stopped to tell us anything.

Whenever the baby started to cry, Sarah hummed a little song to her, and she quieted down. After a while, I recognized the tune. It was "Frere Jacques." Listening to Sarah, I got it in my head, and then I couldn't get it out, even when she stopped.

Just after eleven, a sheriff's deputy came into the room. I was sitting in my chair, and I stood up to shake his hand. Sarah smiled and nodded, her arms wrapped around the baby.

"I don't want to impose at a time like this," the deputy began. Then he paused, as if he'd forgotten what he'd come to say. He stared up at the television, a Toyota commercial, and frowned. He wasn't one of the men I'd spoken to earlier. He looked too young to be a policeman, looked like a kid dressing up. His uniform was a little too big, his black shoes a little too shiny, the crease in his trooper's hat a little too perfect. When he frowned up at the TV, his whole face frowned, even his eyes. It was a perfectly round face, lightly freckled, a farm boy's face, flat and pale and moonlike.

"I'm real sorry about your brother," he started again. He glanced shyly at Sarah, taking in the baby in one swift glance, then turned back to the TV.

I waited, guarded.

"We have his dog," he said. "We found it at the crime site." He cleared his throat, pulled his eyes away from the TV, and gave me a hesitant look. "We were wondering if you wanted to look after it yourself."

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. His shiny black shoes made a creaking noise.

"If you didn't," he said quickly, "if it's too much to think of right now, we can put it in the pound for a while." He glanced at Sarah. "Until things settle down."

I looked toward Sarah, too. She nodded at me.

"No," I said. "We'll take care of him."

The deputy smiled. He seemed relieved. "I'll drop him off at your house then," he said.

He shook my hand again before he left.

FORTY minutes later a doctor came in to tell us that Jacob was out of surgery. He'd been moved to the intensive care unit and was listed in critical condition. The doctor told us that the blast from the shotgun had damaged both of Jacob's lungs, his heart, his aorta, three of his thoracic vertebrae, his diaphragm, his esophagus, his liver, and his stomach. He had a foldout chart to show Sarah and me where all these parts were in the body. As he listed off their names, he circled them with a red pen.

"We've done all we can for now," he said.

He gave Jacob a one-in-ten chance of surviving.

LATER, when I was at the window again, Sarah turned to me and whispered, "Why didn't you check to see if he was alive?"

I could tell from her voice that she was on the edge of tears.

"If he lives...," she said.

"Shhh." I glanced toward the door.

We watched each other for a moment, in silence. Then I turned back to the window.

JUST before three o'clock, a new doctor appeared. It was as if he'd snuck up on us; neither Sarah nor I heard him approach, he simply materialized in the doorway. He was tall and thin and good looking, with short gray hair and a white lab coat. Underneath his coat, he was wearing a red tie -- bright red -- and it made me think of blood.

"My name's Dr. Reed," he said.

He had a firm handshake, quick and tight, like a snake striking. He spoke rapidly, as if he were afraid he might be called off at any moment and wanted to get his say in before this happened.

"Your brother's regained consciousness."

I felt a surge of heat rush up my neck and into my face. I didn't look at Sarah.

"He's incoherent," the doctor said, "but he's calling your name."

I followed him out of the room, leaving Sarah sitting there with the baby. We walked down the hallway at a brisk clip. The doctor had long, efficient strides, and I had to break into a jog to keep up. We went to the elevators. Just as we arrived, one of them opened its doors for us, as if by magic. Dr. Reed pushed the fifth-floor button, a chime rang, and the doors slid shut.

"He's speaking?" I asked, slightly out of breath. I felt suspicious saying it and looked away.

The doctor was watching the numbers above the door. He held his clipboard clasped behind him in his hands. "Not really," he said. "He's drifting in and out of consciousness. All we've picked up is your name."

I closed my eyes.

"Normally I wouldn't let you in to see him," he said. "But to be frank, it may be your last chance."

The doors slid back, and we stepped out onto the fifth floor. The lighting was dimmer here. A group of nurses were whispering together behind a big counter right across from the elevators, and they glanced up when we appeared, looking at the doctor, not at me. I could hear soft beeping sounds coming from somewhere behind them.

Dr. Reed went over and spoke to one of them; then he came back and took me by the elbow, leading me quickly down the hall to the left. We passed several open doorways, but I didn't look inside them. I could tell which room was Jacob's. It was at the very end of the corridor, on the left-hand side. Carl Jenkins was standing outside it, talking to the deputy with the farm boy's face. They both nodded to me as the doctor led me inside.

My brother was lying in a bed just beyond the doorway. He looked huge beneath the covers, like a dead bear, but at the same time somehow depleted, as if he'd been drained and what was left now was merely his husk. His body was perfectly still. There were tubes everywhere, draped over the bed rail, trailing out haphazardly across the floor. Jacob was stuck full of them, like a puppet on a set of strings.

I went up to the bed.

There was an orderly on the other side, a very short, dark-haired young man, working at the tubing. He ignored my presence. A large boxlike machine with a tiny yellow video screen sat on a cart behind him, beeping steadily.

The room was large, a long rectangle, and had several other beds in it, hidden behind white curtains. I couldn't tell if they were occupied.

The orderly was wearing translucent rubber gloves. Through them, I could just make out the hair on the backs of his hands, black and wirelike, and pressed down close to the skin.

Dr. Reed stood at the foot of the bed.

"You can only stay a minute," he said. Then he turned to the orderly, and they whispered back and forth. While they talked, the doctor scribbled on his clipboard.

Holding my breath, I took my brother by the hand. It was cold, heavy, damp, like a hunk of meat. It didn't seem to belong to Jacob anymore. It was revolting. I had to grip it tightly to keep myself from throwing it away.

His eyes flickered at the pressure. When they opened a second later, they fell right on me. Then they didn't move at all. A set of tubes was stuck up his nose. His face was absolutely bloodless, so pale it seemed transparent. I could see the veins in his temples. His forehead was beaded with sweat.

He stared at me for a second, and then his lips moved, as if by reflex, into a smile. It wasn't Jacob's normal smile, it was unlike any I'd ever seen before. His lips stretched out straight across to either side of his face, so that he looked like a dog baring his teeth. His eyes didn't move at all.

"I'm here, Jacob," I whispered. "I'm right here."

He tried to respond but couldn't. He made a harsh, gasping sound at the back of his throat, and the machine's beeping increased its tempo. The doctor and the orderly glanced up from their discussion. Jacob shut his eyes. The beeping gradually slowed back down.

I continued to hold his hand for another minute or so, until the doctor asked me to leave.

DR. REED remained in the room with the orderly, so I made my way back to the elevator unaccompanied. Carl was at the opposite end of the hallway now, talking with a nurse. The farm boy had disappeared.

As I stepped into the elevator, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Carl turn from the nurse and start to walk quickly toward me. Without thinking, I pressed the door-closed button. It was more from a simple desire to be alone than from any fear of him, but as soon as I did it, I recognized what it might look like -- a guilty man's attempt to escape further interrogation. I jabbed my finger at the door-open button. It was too late, though; the elevator was already sliding slowly down its shaft.

When the doors opened again, I stepped out and turned to the left. I'd gone about ten feet before I realized that I was in the wrong place. In my hurry to avoid Carl, I'd pressed the third-floor button, rather than the second. It was the maternity ward; I recognized it from my visits to Sarah. I spun around, but by the time I returned to the bank of elevators, the one I'd arrived on had already shut its doors and disappeared.

There was a nurse's station directly across from the elevators, a long L-shaped counter, painted bright orange, just like the one on Jacob's floor. Three nurses were seated behind it. I'd seen them look up when I'd gotten off the elevator, and I could feel them staring at me now. I stood with my back to them, wondering if they knew who I was, if they'd seen me on TV or heard about me through the hospital's rumor mill. "That's the man whose brother was shot last night," I imagined them whispering, while they eyed me for signs of grief.

Somewhere down to the left a baby was crying.

The elevator on the right emitted its electric chime, and the doors slid open. Inside was Carl Jenkins. I blushed when I saw him but forced my voice to sound calm.

"Hello, Carl," I said, stepping forward.

He beamed at me. "What're you doing down here, Hank? You have another baby on me?"

I returned his smile, pressing the button for the second floor. The doors slid shut. "Got so used to visiting Sarah, I punched the wrong button out of habit."

He laughed, short and soft, a polite chuckle. Then his face turned serious. "I'm real sorry about all this," he said. He was holding his hat in his hands, playing with the brim, and he stared down at it while he talked.

"I know," I said.

"If there's anything I can do..."

"That's awful kind of you, Carl."

The chime rang, the doors parted. We were at the second floor. I stepped outside. Carl held the doors open with his arm. "He say anything to you while you were in there?"

"Jacob?"

Carl nodded.

"No," I said. "Nothing."

I glanced up and down the hallway. There were two doctors off to the right, talking quietly together. To the left, I could hear a woman's laughter. Carl kept his arm across the doors.

"What were you three doing together last night, anyway?" he asked.

I looked closely at him, searching his face for some sign of suspicion. He'd been there when the deputies had asked the same question, and he'd heard my answer. The elevator tried to close, bucking his arm, but he held it back.

"We were celebrating the baby. Jacob took me out."

Carl nodded. He seemed to be waiting for something else.

"I didn't really want to go," I said. "But he was all excited about being an uncle, and I was afraid I'd hurt his feelings if I turned him down."

The elevator tried to close again.

"Did Lou say anything to Jacob before he shot him?"

"Say anything?"

"Did he swear at him, or call him names?"

I shook my head. "He just opened the door, raised his gun, and pulled the trigger."

Down the hallway, the doctors parted, and one of them started to walk toward us. His shoes squeaked against the tiled floor.

"Going down?" he called. Carl leaned his head out and nodded.

"What about that night when I saw you three over by the nature preserve?"

My heart jumped at the mention of our encounter there. I'd hoped that he'd forgotten that by now. "What about it?" I said.

"What were you three doing then?"

I couldn't think of anything to say to that, couldn't remember what, if anything, I'd told him at the time. I strained and strained, but my mind was too tired. The doctor was nearly upon us. "It was New Year's Eve," I said, trying to stall. It was all I could come up with.

"You guys were going out?"

I knew that this was wrong, but I couldn't come up with anything else, so I nodded slowly at him. Then the doctor was there, sliding past me into the elevator. Carl stepped back.

"Don't hesitate to call me if you need something, Hank," he said, as the doors slid shut. "You know I'd be glad to help any way I could."

THOUGH the doctors said I might as well leave, I stayed at the hospital for the rest of the afternoon. Jacob drifted in and out of consciousness, but I wasn't allowed to see him again. The doctors remained pessimistic.

Around five, as it was starting to get dark, Amanda began to cry. Sarah tried nursing her, then singing to her, then walking her around the room, but she refused to be quieted. Her crying got louder and louder. The sound of it gave me a headache, started to make the room seem smaller, and I asked Sarah to take her home.

She told me to come with them.

"You're not doing anything here, Hank," she said. "It's out of our hands now."

Amanda wailed and wailed, her tiny face red with the effort. I watched her cry, trying to think, but I was too tired. Finally, with a horrible wrenching feeling, as if something heavy were slipping from my grasp, I nodded to Sarah.

"All right," I said. "Let's go home."

I FELT a wonderful sense of release as I climbed into the car. All day long I'd been hoarding secrets way down inside myself, things I could say only to Sarah.

I could tell her now what had happened. Then I would go home, get something to eat, and fall asleep. And while I did that, while I slept, Jacob's torn body, in its battle for life, would decide my fate.

Sarah put the baby into her safety seat in back, then climbed behind the wheel. I sat beside her, slumped over, my body drooping, drained. My muscles ached with fatigue; I was nauseated with it. Outside, the sun had set; the sky was a deep navy blue, edging each second a little closer to black. Stars were coming out, one by one. There was no moon.

I rested my head against the window, letting its coolness keep me awake. I didn't begin to talk until we were out of the parking lot and on our way home. Then I told Sarah everything. I told her about the bar and the drinking, about the drive back to Lou's, and how we tricked him into confessing. I told her about Lou getting his gun, about Jacob shooting him, and me shooting Nancy. I told her about going to Sonny's trailer, about undressing him on the porch, and then chasing him up the stairs to the bedroom. She listened to me carefully, her head tilted toward me across the darkened seat. Every now and then she nodded, as if to reassure me that she was paying attention. Her hands pulled the wheel back and forth, guiding the car home.

Amanda, strapped into her seat behind us, continued to cry.

When I reached the point where Jacob began to break down, I paused. Sarah glanced at me, her foot easing just perceptibly from the accelerator.

"He started crying," I said, "and I realized I had to do it. I realized he wasn't going to hold up, that when the police and the reporters arrived, he'd end up confessing."

Sarah nodded, as if she'd guessed this.

"There was no way he was going to pull himself together," I said. "So I shot him. I made the decision and I did it. And it felt right, too. The whole time I was doing it, I knew it was right."

I stared out the window, waiting for her response. We were passing the Delphia High School. It was a huge building, modern, brightly lit. There was something happening there tonight, a game or a play or a concert. Cars were pulling into the circular driveway. Teenagers congregated in loose groups at the edge of the pavement, cigarettes glowing. Parents streamed across the parking lot toward the big glass doors.

Sarah remained silent.

"But then," I said, "after I called the police and realized he was still alive, I was just frozen by it. Even if I could've thought of a way to finish him off, I wouldn't have done it."

I looked at Sarah.

"I didn't want him to die."

"And now?"

I shrugged. "He's my brother. It's like I'd forced myself to forget it, and then it came back and surprised me."

Sarah didn't say anything, and I shut my eyes, let my body tug me toward sleep. I listened to Amanda's crying, listened to the rhythm of it, how it came in waves. It seemed, gradually, to be moving farther away.

When I opened my eyes again, we were pulling into Fort Ottowa. A trio of boys popped up from behind a wall of shrubbery and launched a barrage of snowballs at our car. They fell short, skidding across the pavement before us, yellow in the headlights.

Sarah slowed the car. "If he lives, we'll both end up in jail."

"I wanted to do the right thing," I said, "but I couldn't figure out what it was. I wanted to protect us, and I wanted to save Jacob. I wanted to do both."

I glanced at Sarah for a response, but her face was expressionless.

"I couldn't, though," I said. "I had to choose one or the other."

Sarah dropped her voice to a whisper. "You did the right thing, Hank."

"Do you think so?"

"If he'd broken down, we'd be in jail right now."

"And do you think he would've broken down?"

I needed her to say yes, needed this simple reassurance, but she didn't offer it to me. All she said was, "He's your brother. If you thought he was a danger, then he probably was."

I frowned down at my hands. They were trembling a little. I tried briefly to make them stop, but they wouldn't obey me.

"Tell me the rest," Sarah said.

So I did. I told her about shooting Jacob, about driving back to Sonny's and turning out the lights. I told her about calling the police, and how my brother grabbed my ankle. As we pulled up into our driveway, I was describing my interview with the sheriff's deputies. Sarah eased the car into the garage, and we sat there -- the engine off, the air growing cold around us -- until I finished. Amanda continued to cry, her voice sounding merely tired now rather than angry, as it had before. I reached back and unstrapped her from her seat, then handed her to Sarah, who tried unsuccessfully to comfort her while I talked, by bouncing her on her lap, and kissing her on the face.

I told her about going to see Jacob.

"He smiled at me, like he understood," I said, not believing it. I looked at Sarah to see if she did, but she was making a face at Amanda. "Like he forgave me."

"He's probably in shock," Sarah said. "He probably doesn't even remember what happened yet."

"Will he remember later?" I wanted desperately to believe that he wouldn't; I clung to the idea. I wanted him to live and forget -- about the money, the shooting, everything.

"I don't know."

"If he talks, we probably won't have much warning before they come and get us."

She nodded, then leaned her head down and kissed Amanda on her forehead. The baby was still crying, but quietly now, in little hiccoughs. Sarah whispered her name.

"We should get the money out of the house," I said, the words seeming to speed up on me as they came out, a thread of panic stitching them tightly together, squeezing out the spaces between them. "We should bury it somewhere, or take it--"

"Shhh," Sarah soothed. "It's all right, Hank. We're going to be okay."

"Why don't we just run?" I asked quickly, the idea coming to me as I spoke it.

"Run?"

"We could pack right now. Take the money and disappear."

She gave me a stern look. "Running would be a confession. It's how we'd get caught. We've done what we've done; now we just have to wait and hope for the best."

A car drove by on the street outside; Sarah watched it pass in the rearview mirror. When she spoke again, her voice came out very soft.

"The doctors think he's going to die."

"But I don't want him to die," I said, less because it was true than because it made me feel better to say it.

She turned and looked at me full in the face. "We can survive this, Hank, if we're careful. We just can't allow ourselves to feel guilty over what we've done, not for a single instant. It was an accident, the whole thing. We didn't have a choice."

"Jacob wasn't an accident."

"Yes, he was. From the moment Lou went out and got his gun, the whole thing became an accident. It ceased to be our fault."

She touched Amanda's cheek with her hand, and the baby, finally, fell silent. Without her crying, the car seemed suddenly to fill with space.

"What we've done is horrible," Sarah said. "But that doesn't mean we're evil, and it doesn't mean we weren't right to do it. We had to save ourselves. Everything you did, every shot you fired, was in self-defense."

She turned to look at me, pushing the hair out of her eyes with her hand, waiting for my response. And she was right, I realized. This was what we had to tell ourselves, that what we'd done was understandable, forgivable, that the brutality of our actions had stemmed not from our plans and desires but from the situation in which, through no fault of our own, we'd been trapped. That was the key: we had to envision ourselves not as the perpetrators of this tragedy but simply as two more unfortunates in its extensive cast of victims. It was the only way we'd ever be able to live with what we'd done.

"Okay?" Sarah whispered.

I stared down at Amanda, at the round dome of her head: my baby girl.

"Okay," I whispered back.

AS WE were climbing from the station wagon, the garage filled suddenly with light. A car had pulled into the driveway. I turned to squint at it.

"It's the police," Sarah said.

Hearing her say this, I felt my entire body shiver with exhaustion. If I panicked at all, it was purely intellectual. Jacob's spoken, whispered a voice in the back of my mind. They've come to arrest you. The thought flickered and danced through my skull, birdlike, but it didn't sink in, it didn't touch my depths. I was too tired to be moved like that; I was too near the end of what I could do.

The lights went out, and the police car took shape, a shadow in the driveway's darkness. The door opened.

I heard myself moan.

"Shhh," Sarah said. She reached toward me across the top of the car, her hand stretched out flat against the roof. "They're just here to tell you he died."

But she was wrong.

I forced myself down the driveway and found the deputy with the farm boy's face waiting for me by the car.

He'd come by to drop off Jacob's dog.

INSIDE, Sarah heated up the leftover lasagna. I ate it at the kitchen table, and she sat across from me. She put some of the lasagna into a bowl for Mary Beth, but he wouldn't eat any of it. He simply sniffed at it, then turned and walked out of the kitchen, whimpering. As I ate, I could hear him moving about the house.

"He's looking for Jacob, isn't he?" I asked.

Sarah looked up from her own lasagna. "Shhh, Hank," she said. "Don't."

I picked at my food. The sight of it made me think of my last dinner with my brother. I felt a wave of emotion at this, not so much sadness or guilt but rather some nameless surge of warmth, a tidal sense of movement within my chest. I was tired enough to cry, but I didn't want Sarah to worry.

She got up and took her dish to the sink.

Amanda started to wail again. We both ignored her.

The dog came into the kitchen, whimpering.

I stared at my food for a while; then I rested my head in my hands. When I shut my eyes, I saw the doctor's chart with the diagram of Jacob's body on it.

Sarah was running water in the sink.

There were red circles everywhere.

I WOKE up in the bedroom. I was sore, logy. My body felt leaden, as if it had been sewn to the mattress. I assumed that Sarah must've put me to bed, but I didn't remember. I was naked; my clothes were folded in a pile on a chair across the room.

Judging from the gray light filtering in from behind the shades, I decided it was morning. I didn't feel like turning to see the clock. I wasn't disoriented; I had no trouble remembering what had happened. There was a tender spot on the side of my rib cage, the beginning of a bruise, from where the shotgun had kicked me when I fired it.

Only gradually did I realize that the phone was ringing. I heard Sarah pick it up downstairs, heard the murmur of her voice. I couldn't make out what she was saying.

The dog was still whimpering, though he sounded far away now, like he'd been put out in the yard.

I started to drift off, still tired, but I was pulled back by the sound of Sarah climbing the stairs. Half asleep, my eyes just barely slitted open, I watched her come into the room.

I could tell by the way she moved that she thought I was still sleeping. She went first to the window, carrying Amanda to her crib. Then she came up beside the bed and began, very slowly, to undress. I watched her body through my eyelashes as she gradually unveiled it, taking off first her sweatshirt, then her bra, then her socks, then her jeans, then her underwear.

Her breasts were swollen with milk, but she'd already lost much of the weight she'd gained during her pregnancy. Her body was slim, compact, beautiful.

Amanda started to cry again, mimicking the sound of the dog beyond the window, a slow, soft, and melancholy whimpering.

Sarah glanced from me to the crib and back again. She seemed to hesitate; then she took off her earrings one at a time and set them down on the night table. They made a clicking sound when they touched the wood.

Naked, she slipped beneath the covers. She pressed her body tightly against my own, her right leg creeping up across my groin, her arm slipping around my neck. I lay perfectly still. Her skin was soft and powdered, and it made me feel unclean. She kissed me lightly on the cheek, then put her lips up to my ear.

I knew what she was going to whisper before she even began, but I waited for it, tense, as if it were a surprise.

"He's dead."

8

IT TOOK the media thirty-six hours to locate my house. I suppose they must've thought I lived in Ashenville rather than Delphia, or perhaps they held off for a bit out of some archaic sense of decorum, but by Sunday afternoon they'd arrived in full force. There were vans from each of the three Toledo television stations -- channels 11, 13, and 24 -- as well as one from Channel 5 in Detroit. There were reporters and photographers from the Toledo Blade, the Detroit Free Press, the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

They were all surprisingly polite. They didn't knock on our door, didn't peer through our windows, didn't harass our neighbors. They simply waited until Sarah or I appeared, as we pulled either into or out of the driveway, then they clustered excitedly around the car taking pictures and shouting questions. We passed them with our heads down. I'm not sure what else they might've expected.

Their ranks gradually thinned in the following days. The television crews left first, that very night, then the newspaper reporters, one by one, drifting off to other, more pressing stories, until finally, a week later, the yard was suddenly empty, quiet; the dark oval scars of boot prints in the snow and the crumpled remains of coffee cups and sandwich wrappers along the curb were the only signs to remind us of their presence.

The funerals came and went in quick succession, one right upon the other -- Nancy's on Tuesday, Sonny's on Wednesday, Lou's on Saturday, Jacob's on the following Monday. They were all held at St. Jude's, and I went to each of them.

The news media came to these, too, and I got to see myself on TV again. Each time I was astonished at how I appeared. I looked somber and mournful, limp with grief -- more serious, more dignified than I'd ever felt in real life.

Jacob hadn't owned a suit, so I had to buy one for him to wear in his coffin. Though it seemed wrong in a way -- he never would've worn it in real life -- I was still pleased with its effect. The suit made him look young, even fit, a brown paisley tie knotted beneath his chin, a handkerchief sticking up crisply from the breast pocket of his jacket. The casket was closed for the funeral -- all of them were -- but I got to see him before the service. The undertaker had fixed him up; you couldn't have guessed how he'd died. His eyes were shut, and they'd put his glasses on. I stared down at him for a few seconds, then kissed him on the forehead and stepped back, allowing a young man with a white carnation in his lapel to come forward and screw shut the lid.

Sarah brought Amanda to Jacob's service, and the baby cried through the whole thing, whimpering softly against her mother's chest. Occasionally she broke into a sudden, startling wail, and the sound of it would echo off the low dome of the church, stretching itself out like a scream in a dungeon. Sarah jiggled her and rocked her, hummed songs to her and whispered in her ear, but nothing helped. She refused to be consoled.

The church was fairly full, though none of the mourners were Jacob's friends. They were people who'd known us growing up, people I was associated with through Raikley's, people who were simply curious. His only real friend had been Lou, and he was already buried, waiting for Jacob in the earth out behind the church.

The priest had asked me if I wanted to say a few words, but I declined. I said that I wasn't up to it, that I'd break down if I tried, which was probably true. He was understanding and did the eulogy himself, pretending, with a fair amount of success, that he'd known Jacob intimately and thought of him as a son.

After the service we walked out to the cemetery, where the grave was waiting, a rectangular hole in the snow.

The priest said a few more words. "The Lord giveth," he said. "The Lord taketh away. Blessed is the name of the Lord."

It started to snow a little as they lowered the coffin into the earth. I threw a handful of frozen clay in on top, and it landed with a hollow thud. A photo of me doing this showed up in the Blade that evening -- me set off a few feet from the other mourners, dark suited, leaning over the open grave, the dirt falling from my hand, flecks of white drifting down through the air around me. It looked like something from a history book.

Sarah came forward and dropped a single rose on the casket, Amanda weeping in her arms.

As we were leaving, I turned to take one last look at the open grave. An old man with a backhoe was already preparing to fill it in, tinkering at his machine. A half dozen yards beyond him there was a woman playing hide-and-seek with two tiny boys among the tombstones. She jogged off and crouched behind a large marble cross, and the boys, giggling, came stumbling toward her through the snow, shouting with glee when they found her. She stood up to run to the next stone, but then, halfway there, saw me watching and froze. The two boys circled her, giddy with laughter.

I didn't want her to think that I was insulted by her lack of mourning, so I gave her a little wave. The boys saw me, and they waved back, hands high over their heads, like people departing on a cruise, but the woman whispered something to them, and -- instantly -- they stopped.

I could sense Sarah behind me, waiting to leave, could hear Amanda mewling in her arms. I didn't turn, though; I stood perfectly still.

It was the closest all that day I came to weeping. I don't know what it was -- perhaps the two boys reminded me of myself and Jacob as children -- but I got a shaking feeling, a tightness in my chest and head, a ringing in my ears. It wasn't grief, or guilt, or remorse. It was simply confusion: a sudden, nearly overwhelming wave of bewilderment over what I'd done. My crimes spread themselves out before me, and I could find no sense in them. They were inscrutable, foreign; they seemed to belong to someone else.

Sarah brought me back with a touch of her hand.

"Hank?" she said, her voice soft and concerned.

I turned slowly toward her.

"Are you okay?"

I stared at her, and she smiled calmly back at me. She was wearing a long, black woolen coat and a pair of winter boots. Her hands were tucked into thin leather gloves; a white scarf was wrapped around her neck. She looked startlingly pretty.

"Amanda's getting cold," she said, taking me by my arm.

I nodded and then, like a senile old man, allowed myself to be led back down the path to the car.

As we climbed inside, I heard the backhoe's engine rumble to life.

IN THE following days the world reached out to us. Neighbors dropped off casseroles on our doorstep, jars of homemade jam, loaves of fresh-baked bread, Pyrex containers full of soup. Acquaintances and coworkers called me up on the telephone, expressing sympathy. Strangers, moved by my story, wrote me letters, quoting psalms and self-help books on grief, offering advice and consolation. It was astonishingly generous, all this unsolicited solicitude, but it had a strangely unsettling effect on me, pointing as it did to an absence in my and Sarah's life that I hadn't really been conscious of before: we had no friends.

I couldn't exactly say how this had happened. We'd had friends in college; Sarah'd had whole troops of them. But somehow, after we'd moved to Delphia, they'd disappeared, and we hadn't replaced them with new ones. I didn't feel their lack -- I wasn't lonely -- I was simply surprised. It seemed like a bad sign, that we could exist all this time as a closed system, totally satisfying each other's needs, neither of us desiring any outside connection with the world. It seemed deviant, unhealthy. I could imagine what our neighbors would say if we were ever caught -- how they weren't at all astonished, how we'd been so reclusive, so antisocial, so secretive. It was always loners who you heard about committing murders, and that this label might apply to us led me on to further considerations. Perhaps we weren't the normal people trapped in extraordinary situations that we'd been pretending to be. Perhaps we'd done something ourselves to create these situations. Perhaps we were responsible for what had happened.

I only half-believed this, if at all. In my mind, I could still go through the long succession of events that had culminated, ultimately, in Jacob's funeral and logically explain how each one had led inexorably to the next, how there'd been no alternatives, no branches in the path, no opportunities to turn back and undo what we'd already done. I'd shot Jacob because he was going to break down because I'd shot Sonny because I needed to cover up shooting Nancy because she'd been about to shoot me because Jacob had shot Lou because he'd thought Lou was going to shoot me because Lou was threatening me with his shotgun because I'd tricked him into confessing to Dwight Pederson's murder because Lou'd been blackmailing me because I didn't want to give him his share of the money till the summer because I wanted to make sure no one was looking for the plane...

It seemed as though I could keep working my way back like that forever, each cause's existence obviating the need for me to accept responsibility for its effect. But the mere fact that I felt the need to do this -- and I was doing it frequently, obsessively, repeating it like a mantra in my head -- seemed reason enough for worry. I was starting, just perceptibly, to doubt myself. I was beginning to question our motives.

WITHIN a week of Jacob's funeral, the public attention suddenly faded.

I returned to work that Monday, and my life immediately resumed its daily routine. Every now and then I'd overhear people in town talking about what had happened, and invariably they used words like tragedy and shocking and horrible and senseless. No one seemed to suspect a thing. I was above suspicion: there was no motive; even to speak of the possibility would've been cruel, tactless. After all, I'd lost my brother.

They found Nancy's robe and lipstick in Sonny's trailer. I saw an interview with one of her coworkers, and she said she thought the affair had been going on for quite some time. She didn't say why she thought this, and the reporter didn't ask her; her retroactive suspicion was enough. People talked about how belligerent Lou had been at the Wrangler that night, how he'd accused some kid of trying to trip him. They remembered him as being angry, combative, a drunk teetering on the edge of violence. And finally, to add the last note of credence to our story, the Toledo Blade published an article about Lou's gambling debts. His life had been falling apart, they said, disintegrating. He'd been a time bomb, a calamity waiting to happen.

The baby grew. She learned to roll over, which her mother claimed was precocious. Sarah started her job at the Delphia library again, part-time. She brought Amanda with her and laid her on the floor behind the checkout counter while she worked.

February slowly passed.

I KEPT putting off cleaning out Jacob's apartment. Finally, toward the end of the month, his landlord sent me a note at the feedstore, saying it had to be done by the first of March.

I continued to procrastinate right up to the twenty-ninth. It was a Monday, and I left work an hour early, swinging by the grocery store first to pick up some old boxes. I carried these, along with a thick roll of tape from Raikley's, over to the hardware store and climbed the steep flight of stairs to Jacob's room.

Inside, I found things exactly as I'd remembered them. There was the same smell, the same sordidness, the same disarray. The same dust motes floated through the air, the same empty beer bottles studded the floor, the same dirty sheets sat half stripped in a shapeless mound at the foot of the bed.

I began with his clothes, since that seemed the easiest. I didn't fold them, I simply jammed them into boxes. There wasn't that much: six pairs of pants -- jeans and khaki dungarees -- a half dozen flannel shirts, a bright red turtleneck, a large, hooded sweatshirt, a motley assortment of T-shirts, socks, and underwear. There was a single blue tie hanging from a hook, a picture of a bounding deer embroidered across its front; there were two pairs of sneakers and a pair of boots; there were hats and gloves, a black ski mask, a pair of bathing trunks, jackets for the different seasons. There were the gray slacks and the brown leather shoes he'd worn the morning he asked me to help him buy back the farm. Whenever I filled a box, I took it downstairs to my car and loaded it in the back.

From the clothes I moved to the bathroom -- toiletries, towel, shaving kit, a plastic squirt gun, a stack of Mad magazines -- and from the bathroom to the little alcove Jacob had used as a kitchen -- two pots, a frying pan, a tray full of mismatched utensils, four glasses, a half dozen plates, a ragged-looking broom, and an empty can of Comet. Everything was greasy, grimy. I threw out the food -- a can of ravioli, a box of Frosted Flakes, a putrid carton of milk, an unopened bag of chocolate donuts, a molding loaf of bread, three slices of American cheese, a shriveled apple.

I cleaned out the trash next -- the beer bottles and old newspapers, the candy wrappers and empty bags of dog food. Then I moved to his bed. I stripped his sheets, wrapped his clock radio in a pair of thermal underwear, and stuffed it all into a box. I tossed his pillow over toward the door. Everything smelled faintly of Jacob.

The furniture in the apartment belonged to the landlord, so when I'd packed the sheets and pillow, there was nothing left to go through except his trunk. This was an old army footlocker -- it'd been our uncle's during the Second World War, and he'd given it to Jacob on his tenth birthday. I was planning on just taking it downstairs unexamined, but then, at the last moment, I changed my mind, dragged it over to the bed, and swung open its lid.

The trunk's interior was surprisingly tidy. On the left, neatly folded and stacked, was an extra set of sheets and bath towels. They were from our parents' house; I recognized them immediately: powder blue towels, worn looking, monogrammed with our mother's initials. The sheets had little roses on them. On the right-hand side of the trunk there was a red tackle box, an old Bible, a fielder's glove, a box of bullets for Jacob's rifle, and a machete. The machete had belonged to the same uncle who'd given my brother the trunk; he'd brought it back from somewhere in the Pacific. It was long and menacing looking, with a thick, delicately curving blade and a light brown, wooden handle. It looked like something you might see in a museum, primitive and deadly.

Beneath the machete was a large, ancient-looking book. Curious, I picked it up out of the trunk and sat down on the edge of Jacob's mattress. The sun had set since I arrived, and the apartment was dark. There was a light on in the bathroom, but that was all, so I had to strain to read the book's title. It was stamped in gold ink on the binding: Farm Management from A to Z.

I opened the cover, and on the inside, on the clean whiteness of the facing page, I found, written in pencil, our father's name. Beneath it, Jacob had scrawled his own name, in ink. I assumed that it must've been one of the trivialities granted to my brother in our father's will, a pathetic substitute for the promised farm itself. But when I began to flip through the pages, I saw that Jacob had treated this particular segment of his inheritance as anything but trivial. The book was heavily underlined, its margins clogged with scribbled notes. There were chapters on irrigation, drainage, equipment maintenance, fertilizers, grain markets, government regulations, shipping rates -- all the things I'd told Jacob he'd never understand.

He'd been studying to be a farmer.

I flipped back toward the front of the book and checked its copyright date. It had been published in 1936, more than fifty years ago. There was no mention in its pages of pesticides or herbicides or crop dusting. The government regulations it discussed at such great length had been superseded several times over. My brother had been struggling through a uselessly outdated text.

I found a large, folded-up sheet of paper tucked into the back of the book. It was a diagram of our father's farm, drawn, from the looks of it, by Jacob himself. It showed where the barn was supposed to be, the machine shed, the grain bin. It showed the boundaries of the fields, with precise measurements from point to point and little arrows to indicate the drainage patterns. Paper-clipped to the diagram's top-right-hand corner was a photograph of our house, taken -- I could tell by the lack of curtains in the windows -- just before they knocked it down. Perhaps Jacob had driven out there to watch its demolition.

It's difficult for me to articulate exactly the way I felt, looking down at that photo, at that diagram and that book full of notes. First there was regret, I suppose, the simple wish that I'd been wise enough to leave the trunk alone, that I'd followed my original inclination and carried it down to the car with its contents undisturbed. I'd planned to be quick here, brutally efficient. I'd anticipated the danger my brother's possessions might hold for me and thus had set about my task with the greatest of care, treating the room as if it were booby-trapped, the most innocent of objects wired with little bombs of sorrow and regret. I'd almost pulled it off, too, had reached the very end before, careless with curiosity, I'd paused over the trunk. And now I was sitting here on the edge of Jacob's bed, the tears welling up in my eyes, the dark, empty apartment echoing with the staggered sound of my breathing, the soft precursors to my sobs of grief.

Grief: that's the closest I can come to describing what I felt. It was as though a tumor had blossomed suddenly in my chest, pushing aside my lungs, taking up the space they needed to breathe, so that I had to gasp out loud to fill them with air. I still believed what Sarah had said, that we'd done the right thing -- the only thing we could do, which was to save ourselves -- that if I hadn't shot Sonny and Jacob, we would've been caught and sent to jail. But at the same time I wished with all my heart that none of it had happened. I thought of the pain Jacob must've gone through, his body stuck full of tubes, his insides torn apart; I thought of his plans for the farm, his notes and diagrams; I thought of his coming to my rescue in the end, shooting his best friend to protect me, his brother; and everything was layered with grief.

Jacob, I realized, was an innocent, a child. No matter what Sarah said about accidents and self-defense and lack of choices, I was still to blame for what had happened to him -- I was the murderer, there was no escaping that -- it was my guilt, my sin, my responsibility.

For ten, maybe fifteen minutes I sat there, weeping into my hands. And then, without really wanting to -- crying like that, I felt as good as I had in months; I felt virtuous, clean, as if I were being purged -- I stopped. I fell silent as one falls silent after a bout of vomiting; my body, of its own accord, simply ceased to cry.

I waited for a moment, breathing deeply, to see what would happen next, but nothing did. It was getting late. I could hear someone walking back and forth in the apartment above my head. The floorboards creaked beneath the footsteps. Intermittently, from outside the window, there was the hush of cars moving up and down Main Street. A soft popping sound came from the steam in the radiator.

I wiped my face with my hand. I refolded the diagram and slid it back into the book. I set the book on the floor of the trunk and shut the lid. I'd rolled up my shirtsleeves to do the packing, and now I carefully rolled them back down, buttoning the cuffs.

I felt shaky, a little fragile, as if I hadn't eaten all day. I was conscious of the weight of my clothes pressing down on my body. My face was still moist from the tears, and I could feel my skin tightening a little as they dried. There was the taste of salt on my lips.

Before I even stood up, I knew how I was going to approach what had happened here tonight. I'd look on it as an anomaly, a parenthesis within my life, a tiny lacuna of despair into which I'd stumbled and then extracted myself. I would not tell Sarah about it, would keep it hidden, a secret. And when it happened again, as I knew it must, I'd repeat this process. Because even while I'd been weeping, even while I'd been sitting there gasping for air, I'd realized that it meant nothing, that it could not undo my crimes, could not even alter how I felt about them. What I'd done, I'd done, and the only way I could continue to function, the only way I could survive my brother's death, was to accept this. Otherwise, if I gave it the chance, my grief would deteriorate slowly into regret, my regret into remorse, and my remorse into an insidious desire for punishment. It would poison my life. I had to control it, discipline it, compartmentalize it.

After another minute or so, I rose to my feet and put on my jacket. I went into the bathroom and washed my face at the sink. Then I carried the footlocker and the box of sheets down to the street, locking Jacob's door behind me.

I left the boxes in the back of my car. I knew that if I took them out, it would be to throw them away, and I didn't feel like doing that just yet.

MARY BETH was the only one besides myself who seemed to mourn Jacob's absence. The dog went through a remarkable personality shift in the weeks following his arrival at my house. He became angry, a barker. He started to growl at us and would bare his teeth if we tried to pet him.

Sarah was worried about Amanda's safety, afraid the dog might attack her, so I decided we should keep him outside. Each morning as I left for work, I would tie him up by a piece of clothesline to the hawthorn tree in our front yard, and at night I'd stick him in the garage. This new routine seemed only to increase the dog's irritability. All day long he sat in the snow out front and barked at cars passing by, at the children waiting on the corner for the school bus, at the mailman making his rounds. Raw spots appeared on the skin beneath his collar from tugging at the rope. At night he would howl in the garage, over and over again for long stretches of time, and the sound would echo up and down the street. Among the children in the neighborhood, the rumor even sprang up that our house was haunted -- that the nightly baying wasn't from the dog, it was from my brother's tortured ghost.

Amanda, as if it were infectious, also became short-tempered, loud, difficult to please or quiet down. She cried more than she used to, and there was a sharper edge to her voice now, as if she were complaining about real pain rather than mere discomfort. She became inflexibly attached to her mother and started to scream if she couldn't see her, or feel her touch, or hear her voice. Horribly enough, it was Jacob's bear that did the most to keep her calm. As soon as the man's voice within the toy's chest began to sing, she'd freeze, her whole body seeming to listen, to follow along with the tune:

Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques,

Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?

Sonnez les matines. Sonnez les matines.

Ding, dang, dong. Ding, dang, dong.

I could quiet her down only at night, when it was dark and she was very sleepy.

AFTER much debate, I sold Jacob's truck to the feedstore, and now, each morning when I drove in to work, I saw it parked there in the street, its rear end sagging down with sacks of grain.

A WEEK after I cleaned out my brother's apartment, the sheriff came by my office. He asked me what I was going to do with Jacob's rifle.

"To tell the truth, I haven't really thought about it, Carl," I said. "I suppose I'll sell it."

He was sitting in the chair beside my desk. He was wearing his uniform and had his dark green police jacket on over it. His hat was in his lap. "I was guessing you might do that," he said. "And I was hoping you might let me put in the first bid."

"You want to buy it?"

He nodded. "I've been looking for a good hunting rifle."

The thought of him owning Jacob's gun gave me a distinctly unsafe feeling. It seemed like a piece of evidence somehow, and I didn't want him to have it. But I couldn't think of a way to put him off.

"I don't think it'll be a matter of bidding, Carl," I said. "You just offer me a price and it's yours."

"How's four hundred dollars sound?"

I gave my hand a little wave. "I'll give it to you for three hundred."

"You're not much of a bargainer, Hank." He smiled.

"I wouldn't want to overcharge you."

"Four hundred's a fair price. I know my guns."

"All right, then. Whatever you feel more comfortable with. But I'll give it to you for three."

He frowned. I could see that he wanted to pay less now but felt like he'd trapped himself into paying four hundred.

"How about I drop it off at your office tomorrow morning," I asked, "and you can just send me a check after you give it a closer look?"

He nodded slowly. "That sounds like a good plan."

We talked about other things then: the weather, Sarah, the baby. But when he rose to leave, he returned to the rifle. "You're sure you want to sell it?" he asked. "I wouldn't want to pressure you into it."

"Can't say I have much use for it myself, Carl. Never hunted in my life."

"Your father never took you hunting as a boy?" He seemed surprised.

"No," I said. "I've never even shot a gun."

"Not once?"

I shook my head.

He stood there before my desk, staring at me for several seconds. His hat was in his hands, and he was playing with the brim. For a moment it seemed like he might sit back down. "You'd know how to shoot one, though, wouldn't you?"

I thought about this, suddenly cautious. His voice had changed, become less casual. He wasn't asking the question just for conversation now; he was asking because he wanted to know the answer.

"I suppose," I said.

He nodded, standing there as if he expected something more. I looked away, staring down at my desk, at my hands spread out across it. In the bright light from my reading lamp, the hair on the backs of my fingers looked gray. I closed them into fists.

"How well did you know Sonny?" he asked, out of the blue.

I glanced up at him, my heart quickening in my chest. "Sonny Major?"

He nodded.

"Not that well. I knew who he was, he knew who I was. That's about all."

"Acquaintances."

"Yes," I agreed. "We'd say hello when we passed on the street, but we wouldn't stop to talk."

Carl took a second to absorb this. Then he put his hat on his head. He was about to leave.

"Why?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Just wondering." He gave me a little smile.

I believed him, could tell somehow that he was simply curious rather than suspicious: just as his feelings about my character had blinded him to the possibility of me killing Jacob and Sonny and Nancy, his feelings about Lou had made it hard to accept our story. He sensed, I think, that something was wrong with it, but he couldn't guess exactly what. He wasn't investigating; he was simply reviewing things, idly probing for missing pieces. I knew this, could see that he wasn't a threat. But still the conversation upset me. After he left, I went over and over everything I'd said, every gesture I'd made, searching for mistakes, subtle confessions of guilt. There was nothing there, of course, simply a vague aura of anxiety, growing more and more diffuse every time I tried to pin it down.

I told Sarah about selling the rifle to the sheriff but not about his questions.

THE NIGHT after Carl came by my office, Amanda kept us up late with her crying. We lay in bed with her, the lights out, the room dark, Sarah cuddling the baby in her arms while I wound and rewound Jacob's teddy bear. It was well after midnight before she fell asleep. Sarah and I both sat there in the silence that followed, as if stunned, terrified to move lest we startle the drowsing infant back awake. Our legs were touching beneath the blankets; I could feel Sarah's skin, a little patch of heat along my calf.

"Hank?" she whispered.

"What?"

"Would you ever kill me for the money?" Her tone was playful, joking, but within it, snaking deviously through her voice, I could hear an earnest note.

"I didn't kill them for the money," I said.

I sensed Sarah turning to glance at me through the darkness.

"I did it so we wouldn't get caught. I did it to protect us."

Amanda made a sighing sound, and Sarah rocked her back and forth. "Would you kill me to keep from getting caught, then?" she whispered. The earnest note had grown, pushing aside the playfulness.

"Of course not," I said, sliding down onto my back. I nestled into my pillow, making a show of it, trying to end the conversation. I was facing away from her.

"What if you knew you could get away with it, and that if you didn't, I'd turn you in?"

"You wouldn't turn me in."

"Let's say I had a change of heart. I wanted to confess."

I waited a moment; then I rolled over to face her. "What're you saying?"

Sarah was a dark shape outlined against the ceiling above me. "It's just a game. A hypothetical situation."

I didn't say anything.

"You'd go to jail," she said.

"I killed them for you, Sarah. For you and Amanda."

The bed made a creaking sound as she shifted her weight. I felt her leg move away from me. "You said you killed Pederson for Jacob."

I thought about that for a second. It was true, but it seemed like it wasn't. I tried to work my way around it.

"I couldn't do it," I said. "I'd just go to jail. You two are all I have." I reached out to touch her but brushed against Amanda instead. She woke up and started to cry.

"Shhh," Sarah said. We both listened, holding our bodies still, until the baby quieted down.

"Would you've thought you could kill Jacob before you did it?" Sarah whispered.

"That's different. You know that."

"Different?"

"I can trust you. I couldn't trust him." As soon as I said it, I realized how it sounded. It was only half what I meant, but I didn't say anything else. It seemed like I'd only make it worse by trying to take it back.

Sarah sat there thinking.

"You know what I mean," I whispered.

Just barely, I could see her nod. After a moment, she slipped out of bed and took Amanda to her crib. When she came back, she snuggled up close against me. I could feel her breath on my neck, and it made me shiver.

I debated for a bit before I spoke. Then I said, "Would you kill me?"

"Oh, Hank." She yawned. "I don't think I could kill anyone."

Outside, in the garage, as if he were much closer than he actually was, I heard the dog begin to howl. Jacob's ghost, I thought.

Sarah lifted her head and kissed me on my cheek.

"Good night," she said.

WEDNESDAY evening I came home from work and found three pieces of paper sitting on the kitchen table. They were photocopies of articles from the Toledo Blade. The first one was dated November 28, 1987, and its headline said:

DEADLY DUO KILLS SIX, KIDNAPS HEIRESS

Huge Ransom Demanded

The article told the story of Alice McMartin, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the Detroit millionaire Byron McMartin. On the evening of November 27, Alice was abducted at gunpoint from her father's estate in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The kidnappers, dressed as police officers, with badges, service revolvers, and truncheons, bluffed their way into the house shortly before 8:00 p.m. A security camera filmed them as they handcuffed six of the McMartins' household employees -- four security guards, a maid, and a chauffeur -- with their arms behind their backs before making them kneel with their faces against a wall. The kidnappers then took turns shooting their victims in the back of the head, using the security guards' own revolvers.

Byron McMartin and his wife discovered their daughter's absence, as well as the six corpses, when they returned home from a social function just after ten o'clock. The article quoted an unidentified source as saying that the kidnappers had left a ransom note behind, demanding as much as $4.8 million in unmarked bills.

The second article, like the first, came from the Blade's front page. Its headline read:

HEIRESS' BODY ID'D BY FEDS

Father Loses Daughter, Ransom

This article was datelined "Sandusky, OH, Dec. 8," and it told how Alice McMartin's gagged and handcuffed corpse had been pulled out of Lake Erie three days before by a local fisherman. The body had apparently been in the water for some time, because the FBI needed the young woman's dental records to confirm her identity. She'd been shot in the back of the head before being dumped into the lake, probably within twenty-four hours of her abduction.

A ransom had been paid, the article said, after the FBI told Alice's father that it would help them catch the kidnappers.

The final article was from page 3 of the Blade.

It began:

FBI ID's McMARTIN KIDNAPPERS

Detroit, Dec. 14 (AP) -- Using a security camera's film of the November 27 kidnapping of Alice McMartin, the daughter of the millionaire and former paper cup manufacturer Byron McMartin, during which six employees of the McMartin estate were murdered, the FBI has established the identity of two suspects and begun a nationwide manhunt for them.

The two men, identified as Stephen Bokovsky, 26, and Vernon Bokovsky, 35, both of Flint, Michigan, are brothers.

The FBI, acting on a hunch that one or both of the kidnappers were former employees of Mr. McMartin, searched through thousands of personnel files, trying to match employee photographs with the grainy, low-quality images taken from the security camera. A match came when they opened the younger Bokovsky's file. He'd worked as a gardener on the McMartin estate in the summer of 1984.

Vernon Bokovsky, the elder brother, was identified after FBI agents interviewed the brothers' parents, Georgina and Cyrus Bokovsky, of Flint. The two suspects reportedly stayed with their parents throughout the month of November. Cyrus Bokovsky, reached by phone, told a Blade reporter that he hasn't seen either of his sons since November 27, the night of the kidnapping.

Vernon had been paroled from the Milan Correctional Facility in 1986 after serving seven years of a twenty-five-year sentence for the 1977 murder of a neighbor in a dispute over the sale of a car. The FBI expressed confidence in their ability to track down and apprehend the suspects. "Now that we've ID'd them," one of the agents said, "it's only a matter of time before we bring them in. They can run all they want, but sooner or later, whether it's next week or next year, we'll get them."

The article ended with a quote from the same agent, expressing outrage at the brutality of the brothers' crime:

"It was coldly methodical," Agent Teil said. "It's clear that these guys had planned it out with extreme care. They weren't killing out of panic. The thing you come away with after watching the film is how calm they were. They knew exactly what they were doing."

Teil speculated that they murdered the six McMartin employees to eliminate the possibility of Stephen Bokovsky being recognized.

"They saw it as tying up loose ends," he said. "Fortunately for us they forgot about the camera."

I went back to the first article and read it again. Then I reread the other two articles. Included with the third one were three photographs. The first was a head-and-shoulders shot of Stephen Bokovsky. It was from his employee ID at the McMartin estate. He was small, dark haired, with a thin-lipped smile. His eyes were sunken and tired looking.

The second photo was of Vernon. It was a mug shot, from when he'd been in jail. He was bearded, intense, his jaw clenched tightly, as if he were in pain. He was much bigger than Stephen. They didn't look like brothers.

The third photo was a magnified image from the estate's security camera. It showed Stephen aiming down his arm at the back of a kneeling man's head.

I glanced around the kitchen. There was a pot on the stove, making bubbling sounds. It smelled like beef stew. Sarah was upstairs, with the baby. I could hear her, the low hum of her voice. It sounded like she was reading out loud. Her knitting was across from me on the table in a messy pile, the long needles pointing straight up into the air, like a booby trap.

I reread the articles again. When I finished, I went upstairs.

SARAH was in the bathroom, taking a bath with Amanda. She looked up when I came in, glancing quickly at the photocopies in my hand. I could tell that she was pleased with her discovery. Her face was radiant, triumphant. She grinned at me.

The bathroom was full of steam. I shut the door behind me and sat down on the closed lid of the toilet, loosening my tie.

Amanda was lying on her back in the warm water, smiling broadly, kept afloat by Sarah's thighs. Sarah was leaning forward, her hands clasped behind the baby's head. One of Amanda's little feet was pressed up against her breast, denting it slightly.

Sarah was making up a story for Amanda. She paused only briefly when I arrived, then continued, picking up where she'd left off.

"The queen was very mad," she said, rocking the baby a little in the water. "She stormed out of the ballroom, casting angry looks from side to side. The king ran after her, his whole court following at a distance. 'Beloved!' he yelled. 'Forgive me!' He ran out into the street, glancing this way and that. 'Beloved!' he yelled. 'Beloved!' He sent his soldiers out to search the city. But the queen had disappeared."

Amanda giggled. She slapped one of her hands at the water, and it made a hollow clapping sound. She kicked her foot at Sarah's breast. Sarah giggled too.