A Simple Plan

"All right," she yelled. "Come in."

I stepped forward, nearly silent in my stocking feet, tucked the paper bag beneath my left arm, and slid open the door.

"Voila!" Sarah said triumphantly.

She was lying on the floor, propped up on her elbows. She'd taken off her bathrobe and picked up the bearskin rug from the hearth. It was wrapped around her body, like a blanket, and she was naked beneath it. Her hair, draped seductively over her face, hid her expression, but I could tell just from the way she held her head that she was smiling at me. On the floor by her elbow was the bottle of champagne. Beside it sat two glasses.

All the lights were off; the room was illuminated solely by the logs burning in the fireplace, the reflection of which trembled off of the mirror on the opposite wall, making it seem to shake slightly, as if someone were pounding his fist against the outside of the house. The front curtains were pulled shut.

I saw the duffel bag before I saw the money. It was standing by the entrance to the kitchen, buckled over, empty. The money was on the floor. It had been meticulously laid out, packet by packet, to form a seamless green surface across the carpet. Sarah was lying on top of it.

"This is the plan," she said huskily, through her mask of hair. She lifted the bottle toward me. "We're going to get a little drunk, and then I'm going to fuck you on the money."

The mock sexy baritone of her voice failed her on the last few words, and, suddenly shy, she finished with a giggle. "We've made our bed," she said, gesturing with her hand toward the money, "and now we're going to sleep on it."

I didn't move from the doorway. I still had my hat and parka on. There was a long pause, while she waited for me to say something. I didn't; my mind was blank, numb.

"Do you want to eat something first?" she asked, her voice taking on a note of concern. "Have you had dinner yet?"

She sat up a little, the rug slipping down her shoulder, revealing one of her breasts.

"There's some cold chicken in the fridge," she said.

I slid the door shut behind me, then turned back toward her. I didn't know how to tell her; I was waiting for an opening. I felt as if I were about to do something very cruel.

"Where's Amanda?" I asked, unable to think of anything else to say.

Sarah flicked the hair away from her face. "Upstairs," she said, "sleeping." And then, after a pause, "Why?"

I shrugged.

She sat up a little more, leaned back on her hand. She gave me a long, inquisitive look. "Hank?" she said. "What's wrong?"

I came into the room, edging my way around the money, and sat down behind her on the piano bench. I leaned forward to drop my boots to the floor, but then decided against it and placed them in my lap instead, resting them on the bag of money. It made a crackling sound beneath their weight. The boots were stained black around their soles. They stank of wine.

"Have you been drinking?" Sarah asked. She had to spin around to see me, and as she did so, she sat all the way up, crossing her legs.

I gave her a slow shake of my head. "The money's marked," I said.

She just stared at me. "You're drunk, Hank. I can smell it." She pulled the rug up around her shoulders, covering her breast. Her left knee stuck out down below, hard and pale in the firelight, like marble.

"It's marked," I said again.

"Where did you go? A bar?"

"If we spend it, we'll get caught."

"You reek, Hank. You smell like Jacob." Her voice rose on this last statement, becoming angry. I was ruining her celebration.

"I haven't had anything to drink, Sarah. I'm perfectly sober."

"I can smell it."

"It's on my boots and pants," I said. I held the boots out toward her. "They're soaked with wine."

She stared first at my boots, then at the dark splash marks on my jeans. She didn't believe me. "And where were you that they got like that?" she asked, her voice taking on a litigious tone.

"Out by the airport."

"The airport?" She looked at me like I was lying. She still didn't get it.

"The money's marked, Sarah. They'll track us down if we spend it."

She stared up at me, the set, angry look slowly slipping from her face. I could see her shuffling the pieces about in her head, could see them, one by one, falling into place.

"The money's not marked, Hank."

I didn't answer; I knew I didn't have to. She understood now.

"How can it be marked?" she asked.

In my head I was silently going over everything I'd done after killing the woman, checking things off one by one. I felt tired, stupid, like I was forgetting something crucial.

"You're being paranoid," she said. "If it were marked, they would've said so in the paper."

"I talked to the FBI men. They told me themselves."

"Maybe they suspect you took it. Maybe they're just trying to scare you."

I smiled sadly at her and shook my head.

"They would've said something in the paper, Hank. I'm sure of it."

"No," I said. "It's their trap. It's how they plan on catching whoever's taken it. They copied down the serial numbers before they paid the ransom, and now the banks are looking for them. As soon as you start spending it, they'll track you down."

"They couldn't have done that. There were forty-eight thousand bills. It would've taken them forever."

"They didn't copy them all. Just five thousand of them."

"Five thousand?"

I nodded.

"So the rest are still good?"

I could see where she was heading, and I shook my head. "There's no way to tell the good from the bad, Sarah. Every time we went out and spent a bill, there'd be a one-in-ten chance that it was marked. We couldn't risk it."

The firelight threw quick, flickering shadows across her face while she considered this. "I could get a job at a bank," she said. "I could steal the list of numbers."

"You wouldn't find it at a normal bank. It'd only be at a Federal Reserve bank."

"Then I could get a job at one of those. There's one in Detroit, isn't there?"

I sighed. "Stop it, Sarah. It's over. You're just making it harder."

She frowned down at the mattress of money. "I already spent one," she said. "I spent one tonight."

I reached into my front pocket and took out the hundred-dollar bill. I unfolded it and held it toward her.

She stared at it for several seconds. Then she looked down at my boots.

"You killed him?"

I nodded. "It's all over, Beloved."

"How?"

I told her how I'd done it, how I'd called the police about the hitchhiker, how the cashier had come after me when I tried to rob him, and how I'd hit him with the machete. I lifted my shirt to show her my bruise, but she couldn't see it in the dim light. She interrupted me before I got to the woman.

"Oh God, Hank," she said. "How could you have done this?"

"I didn't have a choice. I had to get the money back."

"You should've just let it go."

"He would've remembered you, Sarah. He would've remembered the baby, and your story about the money. They would've tracked us down."

"He didn't know who--"

"You were on TV at Jacob's funeral. He would've described you, and someone would've remembered. They would've put it all together."

She thought about that for a few seconds. The rug had slipped down her shoulder again, but she ignored it.

"You could've brought five twenties to the store," she said, "asked him to return the hundred-dollar bill, said that your wife had spent it, and that it had sentimental value."

"Sarah," I said, losing my patience, "I didn't have time to get five twenties. I would've had to come all the way back here. I had to get there before he closed."

"You could've gone to the bank."

"The bank wasn't open."

She started to say something more, but I didn't let her.

"It doesn't matter," I said. "It's already done."

She stared at me, her mouth still open to speak. Then she shut it and nodded.

"Okay," she whispered.

Neither of us spoke for the next minute or so. We were both thinking about where we were, and what we were going to do next. A log collapsed in the fireplace, sending up a shower of sparks and a tiny, just perceptible wave of heat. I could hear the clock ticking on the mantelpiece.

Sarah picked up one of the packets, held it in her hand. "At least we weren't caught," she said.

I didn't say anything.

"I mean, it's not the end of the world." She forced a smile at me. "We're just right back where we started. We can sell the condo, sell the piano..."

At the mention of the condo, I felt a sharp pain in the center of my chest, as if I'd been hit by an arrow. I touched my sternum with my fingertips. I'd forgotten all about the condominium, had forced it from my mind.

Sarah continued. "We did bad things, but only because we had to. We were trapped into them, each one led us on to the next."

I shook my head, but she ignored me.

"The important thing," she said, "the thing that really matters, is that we didn't get caught."

She was trying to turn things around, trying to put them in the best possible light. It was how she dealt with tragedies; I recognized it immediately. Usually it was something I admired -- her doing it made it easier for me, too -- but now it seemed too simple, like she was taking it all too lightly, forgetting what we'd done. Nine people had been murdered. I'd killed six of them myself. It seemed impossible, but it was true. Sarah was trying to hide from it, trying to obscure the fact that they were dead because of us, because of the plans we'd made along the way, because of our greed and fear. She wanted to avoid what would follow from this admission, wanted to escape the damage we both knew it was going to do to our lives. We couldn't escape, though; I understood that even then.

"We can't sell them back," I said.

She glanced up at me, as if she were surprised to hear me speak. "What?"

"I got the piano on sale." I reached behind me and touched its keyboard, pressing down one of its keys, a high one. It made a plinking sound. "They won't take it back."

She shrugged this off. "We can put an ad in the paper and sell it ourselves."

"I didn't buy a condominium," I said, shutting my eyes. When I opened them she was staring at me, confused.

"It was a scam. I got ripped off. They stole my money."

"I--" she started. "What are you talking about?"

"It was a fake auction. They took my check and cashed it. The condo doesn't exist."

She shook her head, opened her mouth to speak, then shut it, then opened it again.

Finally she said, "How?"

I readjusted the boots in my lap, lining them up. They felt stiff now; the blood had dried. "I don't know."

"Did you tell the police?"

I smiled at her. "Come on, Sarah."

"You just let them take it?"

I nodded.

"All our savings?"

"Yes," I said. "Everything."

She put her hand up to her face, touched the back of it to her forehead. She was still holding the packet. "We'll be stuck here now," she said, "won't we? We'll never be able to move."

I shook my head. "We've got our jobs. We can start to save again."

I was trying to console her, but even as I spoke, I began to feel the full weight of her words. In a single day we'd gone from being millionaires to virtual penury. We had $1,878 in the bank; it was nothing. Any day now we'd have to start dipping into it -- for our monthly payments on the house and cars, for our phone bill, electric bill, gas bill, water bill. We'd have to pay off our credit cards. We'd have to buy food and clothes. From here on out, everything was going to be a struggle, a constant battle to make ends meet. We were poor; we were what I'd sworn all my adult life we'd never be: we were like my parents.

We wouldn't be able to leave Fort Ottowa either; by the time we saved up enough money for a move, we'd be worrying about Amanda's education, or a new car, or my retirement. We were going to stay here forever, and we'd never be able to purge the house of what we'd done. Its rooms, and their awful freight of memories, would always be there, waiting to ambush and accuse us. The floor beneath our bed would never cease to be the place where we hid the duffel bag, the guest room where Jacob spent his last night, the kitchen where we packed the baby pouch, the piano where we tried to baptize our new life together with a drunken act of love.

We weren't simply returning to where we'd begun, as Sarah had tried to claim. We'd lost all that, had given it up that very first day without even realizing it, and now we'd never, no matter how long we lived, be able to get it back.

"We've still got the money," Sarah said. She held the packet out toward me.

"It's just paper. It's nothing."

"It's our money."

"We have to burn it."

"Burn it?" she asked, as if surprised. She lowered the packet into her lap, readjusted the rug around her shoulders. "We can't burn it. Some of it's still good."

"I've got to get rid of my boots, too." I held them up to the light, turning them around in the air. "How should I get rid of my boots?"

"I'm not going to let you burn the money, Hank."

"And the bottle of champagne you bought, and his wallet and watch and keys."

She didn't seem to hear me. "We can run with it," she said. "We can just get out and spend as we go. We can leave the country, go to South America, Australia, somewhere far away. We can live like outlaws, like Bonnie and Clyde." She trailed off, staring down at the packets spread out around her. They looked shiny in the firelight. "Some of it's still good," she whispered.

"A purse, too," I said. "And a fur coat."

"Maybe if we wait long enough, they'll forget about the numbers. We could keep it till we're old."

"How can I get rid of a fur coat?"

Her gaze returned to me, focusing sharply on my face. "A fur coat?"

I nodded, feeling a little dizzy. I hadn't eaten since that morning. My body was so tired and hungry that it ached. I probed at the bruise on my rib cage, trying to see if anything was broken.

"Where did you get a fur coat?"

"An old woman," I said. "She came in while I was there."

"Oh, God. Oh, Hank."

"I'd taken off my mask. I tried to make her go away, but she wouldn't leave."

Upstairs, directly above our head, the baby began to cry.

I stared across the room at the fire. My mind felt unfocused, anchorless, like I couldn't trust it. For some reason I started to think of the pilot in the plane, Vernon's brother, and the pull I'd felt toward his corpse that first day, that inexplicable urge to touch it. Then I thought about Alexander's, and how, just before I left, when I tried to mop up my boot prints from the floor, the blood seemed to get redder and redder as I smeared it, losing all hint of blackness, moving closer and closer to pink. Next came an image of Jacob, standing in the snow in his red jacket, his nose bleeding, crying over Dwight Pederson's body. And as that last picture, the one of my brother, melted away within my mind, I felt a shiver of foreboding. There were going to be more than just monetary debts coming due now, I realized. There were going to be things I'd have to account for to myself, explain and rationalize, things I'd have to live with that would make the loss of the money seem almost inconsequential.

We've nothing left, I thought to myself, the words rising unbidden in my head. We've nothing left.

"Oh, God," Sarah whispered again.

I set my boots down on the piano bench, rose to my feet, and edged my way carefully around the blanket of bills to the fireplace. She turned to watch me.

"Hank," she said.

I pulled open the fire screen and, with a quick movement, threw the paper bag full of money onto the burning logs.

"Let's keep the money," she said. "We can keep it and see what happens."

The bag caught quickly, contracting in upon itself, like a fist. As it began to dissolve into flame, the coins started to fall out one by one, plopping musically to the cement floor beneath the logs. One of them, a blackened quarter, rolled lazily out across the hearth. I flicked it back inside with my foot.

"Hank," she said. "I'm not going to let you burn it."

Amanda raised her volume, screaming now, her cries echoing down the stairs. We both ignored her.

"We have to, Sarah. It's the last piece of evidence."

"No," she pleaded, with a tremor in her voice, as if she were close to tears. "Don't."

I crouched down before the fire. I could feel its heat on my face, opening my pores. "I promised you I'd burn it if things got out of hand," I said. "Didn't I?"

She didn't answer.

I reached out behind me across the floor until I felt one of the packets. I picked it up and, forcing myself not to look at it, tossed it onto the logs. It took a while to burn; the paper was too densely packed. It just smoked around the edges a bit, the ink going black, giving the flames a greenish tint. I reached back for another packet and tossed it in on top of the first. It was going to take a long time to burn them all, I realized. And then I'd have to get rid of the ashes, bury them in the backyard or flush them down the toilet. And the boots, and the ski mask, and the sweatshirt, and the purse, and the fur coat, and the machete, and the woman's jewelry, and the cashier's watch and wallet and keys.

I heard a rustling sound behind me. She was picking up the money.

Amanda was still crying, but it seemed more distant now, just background noise, like traffic passing outside a window.

I turned to look at Sarah. She was sitting folded in upon herself, the bearskin wrapped around her body, so that she looked like an old squaw. She was staring past me, toward the fire.

"Please," she said.

I shook my head. "We have to, Sarah. We don't have a choice."

She lifted her face to me, and I saw that she was crying, her skin shiny with tears, a thin strand of hair pasted across her cheek. As I watched, the rug fell from her shoulders, revealing her lap. She'd collected about twenty packets there, as if she hoped to save them from the flames.

"But what'll we have without it?" she said. Her voice caught on the words and ended with a sob.

I didn't answer her. I just leaned forward and, very slowly, pried her hands away from the money. Then I took the packets one by one out of her lap and set them in the flames.

"We'll be all right," I said, lying to soothe her. "You'll see. We'll be just like we used to be."

It took me four hours to burn the money.

THE FRONT page of Sunday's Blade was dominated by the story of Carl's murder. There were pictures of the plane, the bag full of money, Vernon's corpse. There was nothing about Alexander's, though; the bodies weren't discovered until a little after five that morning, so it had to wait until the evening news.

The old woman's name was Diana Baker. She'd just dropped her son off at the airport and was on her way to a dinner party in Perrysburg. When she didn't show up at the party, her host called her house, and then, having received no answer, the police. A passing patrolman noticed her car in Alexander's parking lot early the next morning. He stopped to investigate, peered through the store's front window, and saw the bloody smear marks I'd left on the floor when I tried to mop up my footprints.

Besides the son, who was a lawyer in Boston, the old woman had a daughter and four grandchildren. Her husband had died seven years before, though her obituary didn't say how. The cashier's name was Michael Morton. He had parents in Cincinnati but no brothers or sisters, no wife or children.

The state police released a composite sketch of a suspect based on the description I'd given them over the phone. It looked exactly like you would've expected, like a young, addicted drifter, a derelict. The woman's son ran ads in all the major Florida papers begging whoever had called the police that night to come forward with more information, and lots of people did, adding further murk to the investigation. Once the cashier and the old woman were buried, the story stopped making the news.

After I burned the money, I flushed the ashes down the toilet. I still have the rest of the stuff -- the duffel bag and the machete and the ski mask and the sweatshirt, the old woman's purse and jewelry and fur coat, the cashier's watch and wallet and keys. I'd planned to go out into the woods somewhere once the ground thawed and bury it all in a big hole full of lye, but it's been five and a half years now, and I haven't done it yet, so I doubt I ever will. I keep everything stored away up in the attic, hidden in Jacob's trunk. It's dangerous, I know, foolish, but if it ever reached the point where people were knocking on our door with a search warrant, I'd just as soon have them find something decisive, so that it would all be over quickly.

A few months after the killings, I saw in the paper that Byron McMartin had filed suit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation for negligence in his daughter's death, but I never heard what happened with the case.

Sarah and I had another baby two years ago, a boy. In a fit of what I can only call penance, I suggested that we name him after my brother, and Sarah, still groggy from the pain of labor, surprised me by agreeing. There are times when I regret it, but not as often as you might think. We call him Jack rather than Jacob.

It was in June, six weeks after her brother's birth, that Amanda had her accident. We'd set up a little plastic wading pool in the backyard for her, and somehow, in the time it took me to go inside the house, use the bathroom, and return, she managed to fall face down in the water in such a way that she couldn't get back up. She was unconscious when I found her, her hands and lips blue, her body cold to the touch. I yelled for Sarah to call an ambulance, then started pushing on Amanda's chest and breathing into her mouth like I'd seen people do on TV, and by the time the paramedics arrived, I'd managed to revive her.

The paramedics took her to the hospital, where she remained for the next two weeks. There was some brain damage, hypoxia, though the doctors weren't sure how much. They recommended that she spend some time down in Columbus, at a clinic for head injuries -- promising us that it would speed her recovery -- but our insurance wouldn't cover it. When word got out in Ashenville about our trouble, St. Jude's started raising money to help us. They ended up collecting six thousand dollars, enough for a one-month stay at the clinic. Everyone who donated signed a giant get-well card, which they gave us with the check. Both Ruth Pederson's and Linda Jenkins's names were on the card.

It's hard to tell what good the clinic did, but the doctors all seemed pleased with the results. Even now, though it's clear to Sarah and me that Amanda will be damaged for life, they still speak of a young body's resiliency, of similar cases with sudden, almost miraculous recoveries. They say we should never give up hope, but Amanda's physical maturation has slowed to the point of stasis; she still looks like the two-and-a-half-year-old I pulled from the pool that afternoon, still has the same thin arms and legs, the same large, round skull waiting impatiently for the body beneath it to begin to grow. Her speech hasn't developed, her coordination is poor, her bowel and bladder control erratic. She's still attached to Jacob's bear and won't go anywhere without it. Sometimes she wakes in the middle of the night and winds it up, so that I'll surface suddenly from a deep sleep to the sound of "Frere Jacques" drifting into our bedroom from the darkness across the hall. Amanda sleeps in what used to be the guest room, in Jacob's old bed.

Sarah takes a surprisingly fatalistic attitude toward the accident. She's hinted several times now that she believes it's a form of punishment, a way of paying for our crimes, and in the way she hovers over Jack, I can tell she thinks something might happen to him, too, unless we're vigilant and protect him.

I still work at the feedstore, in the same position. I've had some raises over the years, but just enough to keep up with inflation. Sarah's back at the library, full-time now, because we need the money. Amanda's accident used up the small amount of savings we'd managed to accrue.

You'll want to know how we spend our days, I suppose, how we manage to live with what we've done. Sarah and I never discuss the money or the murders; even when we're alone together we pretend that none of it ever happened. There are times when I want to talk, of course, but never to Sarah. It's to strangers I want to speak, people who could, perhaps, offer me an objective opinion about what I've done. It's not an urge to confess -- I feel nothing like that -- but rather a desire to go through things step by step with someone impartial, so that they might help me discover where I first began to go wrong, help me pinpoint that one moment after which everything became inevitable.

The children will never know about any of it, and there's some solace in that.

There are days during which I manage not to think of our crimes at all, but these are few and far between. Other times, when I do think of them -- of me standing in Alexander's with the machete raised above my head, or in Lou's doorway with the shotgun in my hands -- they seem unreal, like they never really happened. I know in my heart that they did, though, know exactly what I'm capable of, know it in a way that you probably never could, not unless you've been there, immersed in a similar situation, making your own fateful choices.

For a while I used to have dreams where I let the old woman escape, let her run out the door to her car and drive away, but that's stopped now.

Since we never talk about it, I don't really know how Sarah feels. All I have are hints, like her agreeing to name our son after my brother, or the time I found her sitting on Jacob's trunk in the attic, lost in thought, the old woman's fur coat draped across her knees, its collar matted with dried blood. I imagine she feels much like I do -- that we're not so much living now as simply existing, moving from one day to the next with a hollow, bewildered feeling, trying all the time, but never with much success, not to remember what has happened.

When things get especially bad, I force myself to think of Jacob. I picture him as he was the day he took me out to our father's farm. He's in his gray flannel slacks, his leather shoes, his bright red jacket. His hairless head looks cold without a hat, but he doesn't seem to notice. He's spinning on his heels, pointing out where our barn used to be, the tractor shed and grain bins. In the distance, when the wind blows, I can hear the creak of our father's windmill. I return to this moment again and again because it always makes me weep. And when I weep, I feel -- despite everything I've done that might make it seem otherwise -- human, exactly like everyone else.

About The Author

Scott Smith was educated at Dartmouth College and Columbia University. He lives in New York City.

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