The Scent of Rain and Lightning

40

MERYL STOOD in the shower in the spare bathroom on the second floor with his clothes on, holding a naked Laurie by her upper arms as she screamed and wept. Hugh-Jay’s blood washed from his face, his hair, his neck and arms, his clothes. Her arms where he held her washed pink from the blood on his hands and from the spots on her body where it had splattered onto her. A bit of it had reached her lips, which terrified her when she realized it by tasting it. He thought she might claw her own tongue out in her frantic attempts to get the blood off of it.

Afterward, he wrapped her in a towel and held her.

“What will we do?” Laurie cried, shaking and sobbing. “What will we do?”

Meryl went over multiple scenarios in his head, just as if he were still in law school reviewing evidence from case histories and trials. There were no working phones. They couldn’t call the sheriff, or call for help for Hugh-Jay, even if it weren’t too late for that. He was dead, not instantly, but quickly from the gushing blood they were helpless to stem.

They could drive to Henderson City to report it, they could…

We could what? Meryl asked himself as his own teeth chattered with cold fear.

He made himself keep thinking: If they told the story truly, then Laurie was an adulterer and he was as good as one, and they would forever be held responsible for Hugh-Jay’s death even if nobody thought they’d meant to kill him. But how many people would believe that? Who would believe it was an accident?

Not many, Meryl thought, wanting to throw up.

And the Linders… oh, God, he thought, the Linders.

“I can’t have been here,” he finally said to her. “I was never here tonight.”

“What about me?” she screamed at him.

“You have to leave.”

“Leave? But-”

“This house. Rose. So people think somebody took you.”

“What?” She looked at him as if he were insane.

“Laurie, we have to get you out of here. It has to look as if somebody broke in here and raped and kidnapped you and killed Hugh-Jay when he tried to protect you.”

“I can’t do that!” She looked stunned, confused. “Where would I go?”

“We’ll figure that out. I’ll take you somewhere tonight, and then we’ll figure out the rest of it.”

“Come with me!”

“What?”

“Meryl, come with me. We’ll go away together! It will be all right.”

“No, it won’t, it will never be all right if we do that. I have to stay here. I have to go back to my office and get up in the morning and act as if I was there all night after I left Belle. You have to be gone, where nobody can find you, and then when they do, you have to pretend you were taken.”

“I can’t do that!”

“Yes, you can. You have to. Get dressed. Don’t bring anything. Not your purse. Nothing.”

“I don’t want to, Meryl!”

“Would you rather be charged with his murder?”

“What? But we didn’t-”

“Can you prove that? They’ll want us to prove that, and we can’t.”

“Maybe he killed himself, we could say he-”

“Because he found us in bed? No, I don’t think we want that, either.”

“Meryl, I can’t do what you say I should do. I can’t-”

“Go put on some clothes. Whatever you need later, I’ll get it for you.”

When she wouldn’t budge, he ran into her bedroom and took the first thing he saw: her yellow sundress. He came back and put it over her head, pulling it down over her body. Then he picked her up and carried her outside before he remembered he didn’t have his truck. “Shut up,” he told her, so the neighbors wouldn’t hear her during moments when the storm died down. Fearful of being witnessed now, she acquiesced to his plan, even telling him to use Billy Crosby’s truck, which was behind the garage.

They rolled it silently down to the street.

With the storm still boiling all around them, Meryl drove her out to Testament Rocks over dirt and gravel roads that made the going slippery and treacherous and threatened to dump them into ditches. They drove through low places where the water came halfway up the tires, and once the truck got stuck and he had to rock it from drive to park and back again several times in order to rock it into moving again.

“Why here?” Laurie screamed at him when he stopped the truck. The windshield wipers revealed glimpses of the huge rock formations that loomed over the dark, desolate landscape.

“Because nobody else in the world will be here during this storm.”

“What if you get stuck on your way back into town, or on your way back to pick me up?”

“I won’t get stuck. You saw how I got out of that already.”

“You can’t leave me here alone like this!”

“I have to go back and take care of things at your house before the storm stops,” he yelled back at her. He knew he couldn’t think straight about how to cover their tracks if he also had to cope with her hysteria. “You can get under that shelf of rock over there. You’ll be okay. Wait for me-”

“Like I have a choice!”

“I’ll come back for you when I finish cleaning everything up and we’ll figure this out.”

When she wouldn’t budge from the truck, Meryl came around to her side, flung open her door and forced her out. She was sobbing and screaming about rain and Hugh-Jay and Jody, and she beat on Meryl as he picked her up again and carried her to where he wanted her to be.

“Laurie, our lives depend on this. I swear I’ll come back for you!”

She clung and he forced her to let go and pushed her away. She tried to run after him but he was faster. He left Laurie standing in the middle of nowhere with only the furious storm and the huge rocks for company.

When he drove away, leaving her in rain, thunder, lightning, and isolation, she was so terrified and furious that she half climbed, half ran up one of the huge rock formations to watch his headlights abandon her.

She was forty feet up when her shoes slipped and she fell, landing not only on chalky ground but on rock as hard as centuries could build it.