A Simple Plan Page 12

  I shrugged, lifted my hands. "I'll lie, Jacob. If we get caught because of Lou, I'm going to make you pay."

  He grimaced, as if he were in pain. His nose was running, and he rubbed at it with his glove, then wiped his glove on his pants. "I don't want to be responsible for him," he said.

  "But that was the deal. That was what we agreed upon."

  He shook his head. The folds of flesh beneath his chin, white and marbled, continued to tremble for a second after he stopped. "I can't control him."

  "You have to talk with him, Jacob."

  "Talk with him?" he asked, his voice exasperated. "Talking's not going to keep him from doing stuff."

  "Threaten him," I said.

  "With what? You want me to tell him I'll beat him up? Say I'll burn his house down?" He gave a snort of disgust. "Threaten him."

  We both fell silent. I could hear people moving about in the lobby, getting ready to head home for the night.

  "I don't want to be responsible for him," Jacob said.

  "Then I guess we have a problem."

  He nodded.

  "Perhaps," I said, "we ought to just burn it."

  It was only a bluff, I didn't mean it, and Jacob didn't respond to it. He stared down at my desk, his forehead creased. I could tell that he was struggling to think.

  "Lou's not going to get us caught," he said.

  "That's right. Because you're not going to let him."

  Jacob didn't seem to hear me; he was still lost in thought. When he finally spoke, he did so without glancing up at me. "And if it looks like he is, he could always just get into an accident."

  "An accident?"

  "Like Pederson."

  "You mean we could kill him?" I asked, appalled.

  He nodded, staring down at my desk.

  "Jesus, Jacob. He's your best friend. You can't be serious."

  He didn't answer me.

  "The big-time murderer," I said.

  "Come on, Hank. I'm just--"

  "Ice him, right? Grease him." I sneered, my voice rising to mimic his own. "'He could always just get into an accident.' Who do you think you are, Jacob? A gangster?"

  He wouldn't look at me.

  "You make me sick," I said.

  He sighed, frowning.

  "How did you want to do it?" I asked. "Did you have a plan?"

  "I thought we could make it look like a car accident."

  "A car accident. That's brilliant. And how were you going to manage that?"

  He shrugged.

  "Maybe put him in his car and push him over the bridge into Anders Creek?" I asked.

  He started to say something, but I didn't let him.

  "We were lucky with Pederson. Everything worked in our favor. That's not going to happen again."

  "I was just thinking--"

  "You aren't thinking anything. That's the problem. You're being stupid. Remember how you felt out by the park? You were crying. You were bawling like a baby. You want to go through that again?"

  He didn't answer.

  "Look out the window," I said. "Look across the street, at the cemetery."

  He looked toward the window. It was completely dark now; we couldn't see outside anymore. The glass reflected my office back in at us.

  "They buried Dwight Pederson last week. He's out there because of you, because you were greedy and you panicked. How does that make you feel?"

  I stared across the desk at him until he looked me in the eye. "If I hadn't done it," he said, "he would've found the plane."

  "You should've let him find it."

  Jacob gave me a perplexed look. "You killed him," he said. "You could've saved him, but you didn't."

  "I killed him to save you, Jacob. It was either him or you, and I chose you." I paused. "Maybe I made a mistake."

  He didn't seem to know how to respond to that. He continued to gaze at me, the same confused expression on his face.

  "But I'm not going to do it again," I said. "Next time I'll give you up."

  "I can't be responsible for him," Jacob whispered.

  "Just talk to him. Tell him I'll burn the money if I think he's screwing things up."

  He stared morosely down into his lap, and I noticed for the first time that he was beginning to get a bald spot. It startled me. If he had lost some weight, he would've looked exactly like our father had at the time of his death. He looked beaten down, defeated.

  "I wish we could just split the money up right now," he said. "Split it up and run away."

  "That's not what we planned, Jacob."

  "I know." He sighed. "I'm just saying what I wish."

  THE NEXT day was Friday. That evening, during dinner, Sarah asked me if I'd talked with Lou yet.

  I shook my head. "Jacob's going to do it."

  We were eating spaghetti, and Sarah was in the midst of helping herself to seconds. "Jacob?" she asked. She held the serving spoon poised in midair, pasta dangling off it toward her plate. She was wearing a dark blue dress. In the brightly lit kitchen it made her face look wan and anemic.

  I nodded.

  "Shouldn't you do it yourself?"

  "I thought it'd be better if he did it. Lou'll listen to Jacob. He won't listen to me."

  She finished serving herself and set the pot down in the center of the table. "Are you sure Jacob realizes how serious this is?"

  "I scared him a bit," I said.

  Sarah glanced up at me. "Scared him?"

  "I said I'd tell about Pederson if we were caught because of something Lou did."

  "And?"

  "At first he panicked a little, but I think it's going to work." I smiled. "He even suggested that we kill Lou."

  She seemed unimpressed by this. "How?" she asked.

  "How what?"

  "How did he want to kill him?"

  "He wanted to make it look like a car accident."

  Sarah frowned. She picked her fork up, twirled some spaghetti onto it, then stuck it into her mouth, chewed, and swallowed. "I don't think you should threaten Jacob," she said.

  "I wasn't threatening him. I was trying to wake him up."

  She shook her head. "If Jacob can think about plotting with you against Lou, then it'll be just as easy for him to plot with Lou against us."

  "Jacob's not going to plot against us," I said, as if the idea were absurd.

  "How can you be sure?"

  "He's my brother, Sarah. That counts for something."

  "But who's he closer to, you or Lou? Lou's more of a brother to him than you are."

  I considered that. It was true, of course. "You're saying Jacob would try to kill me for the money?"

  "I'm saying don't scare him. All you'll end up doing is forcing him into Lou's arms. They don't have families like you. They could just walk in here, shoot you, take the money, and run off."

  "The money's hidden. They don't know where it is."

  "Let's say they came in here with a gun, held it to your head, told you to show them where it was."

  "They'd never do it."

  "Let's say they held the gun to me." She patted her stomach. "Held it right here."

  I pushed the spaghetti around my plate with my fork. "I can't really imagine Jacob doing that, can you?"

  "Can you imagine him killing Pederson?"

  I didn't answer. Here was another opening; I sensed it beckoning to me, and I hesitated. It would merely be a matter of speaking, no more than a few words, a simple declarative sentence. I sat there for perhaps thirty seconds, staring across at Sarah, trying desperately to survey all the possible consequences, both of speaking and of keeping silent, but they evaded me, hovering just beyond the edge of my vision, so when I finally made my choice, I did it blindly.

  "Can you?" she prodded.

  "Jacob didn't kill Pederson," I said, and, as in my office the day before, there was the sudden lightening of confession. I shifted my body in the chair, searched Sarah's face for a reaction.

  She stared across the table at me, expressionless. "You
told me--"

  I shook my head. "He knocked him out, and we thought he was dead. But when I picked him up to set him on his snowmobile, he let out a moan, and I had to finish him off myself."

  "You killed him?" she asked.

  I nodded, a great wave of relief rolling over my body. "I killed him."

  Sarah leaned across the table. "How?"

  "I used his scarf. I smothered him."

  She touched her chin with her fingertips, shocked, and for a brief moment her face seemed to open, so that I could look inside and watch my words slowly taking hold. I saw bewilderment there, a quick flicker of fear, and then a glance at me that had something like repulsion in it, a glance that put a distance between us, pushing me away. For an instant she was frightened, but then, as quickly as it had come, it passed; her face closed, and she brought me back.

  "Why didn't Jacob do it?" she asked.

  "He was already gone. I'd sent him off to meet me at the bridge."

  "You were alone?"

  I nodded.

  "Why didn't you tell me before?"

  I struggled for a truthful answer. "I thought it might frighten you."

  "Frighten me?"

  "Upset you."

  Sarah didn't say anything. She was following some thought inside her head, rearranging things to fit this new scenario, and it gave me a panicky feeling to watch her, as if she were hiding herself from me, pretending to a composure that she didn't really feel.

  "Does it?" I asked.

  She looked at me for a second, but only halfway, with her eyes and nothing more. Her mind was still somewhere else. "Does it what?"

  "Upset you?"

  "It's...," she started. She had to concentrate to find a word. "It's done."

  "Done?"

  "I don't think I would've wanted you to do it, but now that it's happened, I can understand why."

  "But you wish I hadn't?"

  "I don't know," she said. Then she shook her head. "I guess not. We would've lost the money. Jacob would've been arrested."

  I thought about this for a second, searching her face for some further reaction. "Would you've done the same thing? If you'd been there instead of me?"

  "Oh, Hank. How could I..."

  "I just want to know if it's possible."

  She shut her eyes, as if attempting to imagine herself crouched over Pederson's body, his scarf balled up in her hand. "Maybe," she said finally, her voice a whisper. "Maybe I would've."

  I couldn't believe this, refused to, and yet, even as I did so, sensed that it might be true. She might've killed him just like I had. After all, would I have imagined Jacob knocking Pederson down, kicking him in the chest and head? Or, more to the point, would I have imagined myself smothering the old man with his scarf? No, I thought, of course not.

  I saw with a shudder that not only couldn't I predict the actions of those around me, I couldn't even reliably predict my own. It seemed like a bad sign; it seemed to indicate that we'd wandered, mapless, into a new territory. We were as good as lost.

  "Jacob doesn't know?" she asked.

  I shook my head. "I told him."

  Sarah winced. "Why?"

  "It seemed like he was falling apart. He was crying. I thought it'd be easier on him if he knew that we shared the blame."

  "He's going to use it against you."

  "Use it against me? How could he use it against me? If one of us is going to get in trouble, we both will."

  "Especially if you threaten him. He'll go to Lou, and they'll use it to plot against us."

  "This is paranoia, Sarah. This isn't real."

  "We're keeping secrets from Jacob, aren't we?"

  I nodded.

  "And you and Jacob are keeping secrets from Lou?"

  I nodded again.

  "Then why can't you believe that he and Lou are keeping secrets from us, too?"

  I didn't have an answer for that.

  LATE IN the evening, around eleven, Sarah's stepmother, Millie, called, long distance from Miami. Sarah's mother and father, like mine, were both dead. Her mother had died when Sarah was very young, her father right after she and I were married.

  Millie had become Sarah's stepmother when Sarah was still in her early teens, but they'd never been very close. The last time they'd seen each other was at my father-in-law's funeral. They talked once a month on the phone, though, a ritual that they both participated in seemingly more out of a sense of familial obligation than from any desire to speak with each other.

  Sarah had grown up in southern Ohio, just across the river from Kentucky. Millie had been a nurse in the hospital where Sarah's mother died, slowly, of leukemia. That's where she'd met Sarah's father. She was originally from West Virginia and, even after a full decade in Miami, had a slight southern accent, which Sarah picked up from her whenever they talked.

  Their calls were long collective monologues -- Millie drawled on about the mundane activities of her small coterie of friends, bemoaned the increasing decrepitude of Miami in general and her apartment complex in particular, and ended with an irrelevant anecdote or two from Sarah's father's life. Sarah talked about her pregnancy, about me and the cold weather we'd been having, about things she'd read recently in the paper or seen on TV. They never asked each other questions; there was very little interaction between them at all. They talked at each other for twenty minutes, and then, as if they'd agreed beforehand upon a mutually acceptable time limit, said good-bye and hung up.

  Tonight Millie called just as we were getting into bed. When I realized who it was, I whispered to Sarah that I was going downstairs to get a snack. I didn't like being in the room with her when she talked on the phone; it made me feel like I was eavesdropping.

  In the kitchen, I poured myself some milk and made a cheese sandwich. I ate standing up at the counter, in the dark. Through the side window, ten yards away across a thin strip of lawn, was my next-door neighbor's house, a mirror image of my own -- everything exactly the same, but reversed. A TV was on in the master bedroom; I could see its bluish flickering through the upstairs window, like light reflected off a pool.

  I stood there in the darkness for several minutes, finishing my sandwich, while I reviewed my earlier conversation with Sarah. I was relieved by the calmness of her reaction to my confession, immeasurably so. I'd been worried that what I'd done would frighten her, that she'd treat me suddenly as some sort of psychopathic monster, but nothing of the sort had happened. There was no reason for it to have, I saw now -- just as I still looked upon myself as a good man despite my crime, Sarah did too. We had our entire past together to weigh against this one anomaly. There'd been that initial shock, of course -- I'd seen it -- that flash of fear and repulsion, but in a matter of seconds she'd filed it away somewhere, pragmatic as always, and resigned herself to what had happened. It's done, she'd said and then moved forward, focusing on the future rather than the past. Her concerns were simply practical -- whether or not Jacob knew of the crime and what effect this would have on our relations with him and Lou. She was imperturbable, a rock. If all else failed, I realized, standing there in the kitchen, she'd be the one who'd carry us through.

  Next door, the television flicked off, and the house went dark. I set my empty glass in the sink.

  On my way upstairs I noticed that the dining-room door was partway open. I flipped on the light, peeked inside. There were papers scattered across the wooden table, magazines and brochures.

  Upstairs I could hear Sarah's voice, talking on the phone. It sounded soft, muffled, as if she were speaking to herself. I slid the dining-room door open all the way and stepped inside.

  I approached the table hesitantly, as if I were afraid Sarah might hear me, though that wasn't a conscious thought. I scanned its surface. There were all sorts of brochures, at least thirty, probably more, travel brochures with pictures of tanned women in brightly colored bikinis, of families skiing and riding horses, of men on tennis courts and golf courses, of tables laden with exotic food. "Welcome to Beliz
e!" they read, "Paris in the Spring!" "Crete, Island of the Gods!" "Come Sail the Pacific with Us!" "Nepal, the Land Time Forgot!" Everything was shiny, slick looking; everyone was smiling; all the sentences ended in exclamation points. The magazines -- Conde Nast Traveler, Islands, The Caribbean, The Globetrotter's Companion -- were exactly the same only larger.

  There was a notebook off to the side, folded open, with Sarah's handwriting in it. At the top of the page was written "Travel." Below it were listed the names of cities and countries around the globe, each one numbered, apparently in order of preference. The first one was Rome, the second Australia. On the facing page was another list, this one headed "Things to Learn." Below it were listed such things as sailing, skiing, scuba diving, horseback riding. It was a very long list, reaching to just above the bottom of the page.

  These were Sarah's wish lists, I realized with a pang; this was what she dreamed of doing with the money. My eyes ran up and down the pages: Switzerland, Mexico, Antigua, Moscow, New York City, Chile, London, India, the Hebrides.... Tennis, French, windsurfing, waterskiing, German, art history, golf.... The lists went on and on, places I'd never heardher mention, ambitions I'd never dreamed she had.

  Ever since I'd met her, I'd thought of Sarah as more confident and decisive than myself. She'd been the one to ask me out on our first date; she'd been the one to initiate our first sexual encounter; she'd been the one to suggest that we get engaged. She'd picked the wedding date (April 17), planned the honeymoon (a ten-day trip to Naples, Florida), and decided when we'd begin trying to have a baby. It seemed like she always managed to get what she wanted, but I realized now, standing there looking down at the magazines and brochures scattered across the table, that she hadn't really, that behind her facade of assertiveness and drive there must lay an enormous reservoir of disappointment.

  Sarah had received a B.S. in petroleum engineering from the University of Toledo. When I first met her, she was planning on moving down to Texas and landing a high-paying job in the oil industry. She wanted to save up her money and buy a ranch someday, a "spread" she called it, with horses and a herd of cattle and her own special brand, an S embedded within a heart. Instead, we got married. I was hired by the feedstore in Ashenville in the spring of my senior year, and suddenly, without really choosing it, she found herself in Delphia. There weren't many openings in northwestern Ohio for someone with an undergraduate degree in petroleum engineering, so she ended up working part-time at the local library. She was a trouper; she always made the best of things, yet there had to be some regret in all this; she had to look back every now and then and mourn the distance that separated her present existence from the one she'd dreamed of as a student. She'd sacrificed something of herself for our relationship, but she'd never attracted attention to it, and so it had seemed natural to me, even inevitable. It wasn't until tonight that I saw it for the tragedy it was.