“What are they going to find in that field when they dig it up?” He looked at me like he didn’t know who I was, as if he were seeing me for the first time and he didn’t like the face staring back at him.
When I didn’t answer, he started the car. We didn’t speak on the way back to my house. He didn’t say good-bye when he left me in my driveway.
Vero was wringing her hands by the door when I finally came inside. “What’s going on?”
A balloon drifted across the ceiling. The children played in the next room. Vero’s uneaten ice cream had melted into a puddle on her plate.
“We have to move Harris’s body. Tonight.”
CHAPTER 39
Vero and I stood in front of the open trunk of Ramón’s loaner car. The dim light illuminated the contents with an eerie glow that only made the surrounding darkness feel more sinister. At least this time, the kids weren’t asleep in the back.
Getting past Officer Roddy hadn’t been as difficult as it probably should have been. I’d begged my sister to take my children for a sleepover, explaining that I was behind on my deadline and needed a quiet night alone in the house to work. After a lot of whining and bribery on my part, she’d agreed. Vero had driven the kids to Georgia’s apartment, slipping them casually out of the garage in her Charger while I stayed in plain view of the kitchen window, where Officer Roddy and Mrs. Haggerty could clearly see I was home. On the way back from Georgia’s, Vero had swapped the Charger for the loaner car I’d left at Ramón’s. The old blue sedan would be far less conspicuous than Vero’s muscle car or my minivan, and if we made a crime scene of the trunk and had to scrap it for parts to cover it up, I was pretty sure no one would miss it.
Vero had then driven the loaner to our rendezvous point at the park down the street. Meanwhile, I’d fished a few Christmas-light timers from a dusty box in the basement, connected them to the lamps in my office, my bedroom, and the kitchen, and programmed them to turn on and off every few hours. After dark, I’d tied my hair back in a tight ponytail and changed into a pair of black yoga pants, black gloves, and a black hoodie. Then I’d drawn the curtains closed and snuck out the back door, praying my neighbors didn’t catch the flash of my white sneakers cutting through their yards and decide to shoot me on my way to the park.
We’d made it to the rear entrance to the sod farm by eleven o’clock without a hitch.
The air was cold and dry. My breath billowed in clouds as I stood behind Ramón’s car, taking inventory of our supplies.
“Why do we have three thousand feet of cellophane in the trunk?” I asked Vero.
“Costco was having a special.”
I screwed up my face. “And you decided to stock up now?”
“You told me to bring plastic wrap.”
“I told you to get plastic sheeting.”
“Same thing.”
“No, it’s not. Plastic wrap goes around sandwiches. Plastic sheeting goes around dead people. It’s bigger and sturdier. More like a shower curtain.”
“You told me not to bring a shower curtain because it would make us look guilty!”
“Because nothing screams innocent like a rotting corpse in three thousand feet of Cling Wrap!” I grabbed the shovels and stuck one in Vero’s hand. The slam of the trunk echoed for miles, the frost-crusted ground crunching loudly under our feet as we approached the edge of the field.
The headlights cut bright swaths across the dirt, stretching our shadows across it. Vero poked at the soil with the tip of her shovel.
“Are you sure this is where we left him?” She pointed a few feet to the right. “I thought he was farther that way.”
“No,” I said, standing beside her. “This is definitely it.” I didn’t tell her I wasn’t one hundred percent sure. We’d been careful to leave the car on the gravel road this time, angling the headlights into the field rather than leaving another set of tread marks in the soft ground for the police to follow. Between the shrouding darkness and the eerie tunnel of light cast by Ramón’s car, it all felt a little disorienting. But we had to start somewhere. And this seemed close enough.
She cast a longing sideways glance toward the hulking yellow tractor in the next field. “Are you sure you don’t want me to bring in the heavy artillery? I watched some videos on YouTube—”
“We are not digging him up with a front-end loader!” The last thing we needed was a grand theft charge on top of everything else. “He’s not very deep. We can do this ourselves.”