Keep Them Close(76)

“On the lawn? No—”

“Yes. Trust me. The lawn’s not really a lawn right now. C’mon.”

He rides away. I follow him slowly, headlights turned off, until I reach the property.

The house itself is half-gutted, windows boarded on one side. I navigate the Wagoneer around a tall piece of equipment with a drill dangling in front, an excavator next to it, and pull up in the back right next to the dumpster. Luke’s right; this is much more private. We are secluded behind the house and it’s dark as pitch. Almost too dark for our purposes—we need to see what we’re doing, and neither of us has a phone for a flashlight.

The dumpster, ten feet in height, is filled to about a third of capacity, with all sorts of construction debris—drywall, broken tile, floorboards, that kind of thing.

“Don’t open the trunk yet,” Luke says, stopping his bike. “Let’s open the dumpster door.”

“The dumpster has a door?”

“Of course. We just unlatch it.” He looks at me. “You haven’t used a dumpster before?”

“Um, no?”

“C’mon. It’s easier with two people.”

He clearly knows how to do this, narrating as he goes. Lifting a latch upward, removing a small chain, then raising a lever that starts the door opening. Luke and I catch it, quietly and slowly helping it to the ground. A few tiles and part of a floorboard slide out of the dumpster. “That’s okay,” says Luke. “We need stuff to fall out. We have to cover him with debris once we have him inside. You want him concealed, right? You don’t want his body discovered right away?”

“Correct.” We’re in a much stronger position if the police don’t find Fin for several days.

“Okay, you…ready to do this?” he asks.

Am I ready to bury my husband inside a construction dumpster under a pile of debris? A part of me still can’t believe any of this is happening.

Sensing as much, Luke takes the lead, opening the rear of the Wagoneer and pulling Finley out slowly, feet first, until Fin’s wrapped body is almost standing straight up. Luke wraps his arms around Fin’s upper body and walks backward, Fin’s shoes dragging in the dirt, until he reaches the dumpster.

“I’ll need your help for this part,” he whispers to me. “We have to lift him onto the top of the debris. Then we have to separate the debris until his body sinks low enough that we can throw stuff on top of him. Anything that slides out the side of the dumpster, no problem, we’ll throw that on top, too. Nobody will notice him. Not until this dumpster is full, and they unload it at some landfill or whatever. Probably several days from now.”

I blink hard; there lies my husband, wrapped like a mummy, halfway inside a garbage dumpster. My body starts shaking.

“Allison,” he says, gripping my arm. “You’ve gotten this far. Let’s finish it.”



* * *





Luke does the lion’s share of the work, using his hands and feet to jostle and push and pry and separate debris until Finley’s body disappears beneath several layers of drywall and floorboards and the like. Or at least as best we can tell in the dark.

He closes up the side door of the dumpster. The clank of the door jars me out of my funk. He’s right. We’ve come this far. I can’t let emotion overtake me now.

“What next?” he asks.

“I dump this car and ride home on your bike,” I say.

“And I suppose you don’t want me to know where you’re leaving the Jeep.”

“Less you know, the better.”

He picks up his bike and throws it inside the back of the Wagoneer. He lives only six blocks from here, but I don’t dare give him a ride. We don’t need hits from license plate cameras anywhere close to Luke’s house. He can walk.

“I’ll…call you in the morning,” I say. “That would be normal. A follow-up call after Finley acted so odd tonight.”

He hugs me, a good long embrace, back rub and all. “What you did for Trin tonight…I don’t know what to say—”

“Let’s just finish this,” I say. “Go home.”

“Right. Gray should still be asleep on the couch. He was totally depleted. Get home to him fast.”

“I will.”

“And, Allison?” he whispers as I pull away. “It’s scary that you’re so good at this.”





Book II





The DayS After April Fools’ Day





68


Allison

I spend the early next morning with Grayson, who moves through the house like he’s walking underwater. Every motion slow, deliberate, as if he’s afraid to disturb something fragile. He hasn’t said much since he woke around four in the morning. He’s wearing the same gray T-shirt he put on after showering last night, wrinkled, collar stretched. Shadows linger under his eyes.

He pours coffee, though he doesn’t drink it, just stares as the steam rises, his fingers wrapped too tight around the mug. His face looks older. Not in the way a boy becomes a man, but in the way grief presses down and leaves an indelible mark. When he finally looks at me, there’s a hint of something raw behind his eyes—confusion, guilt, disbelief.