“Girl, you should see your face,” she said, laughing and refilling her glass. “You’re so naive. It’s adorable. Oooh, I’d be in so much trouble if Ethan heard me talking about this, but I don’t care. Who are you going to tell, right?” She giggled, took a long swallow. “Ethan was never going to prison. He’s got connections. It all would have been taken care of.” She shrugged. “But then the case fell apart, so we got to stay put. Just as well. I fucking hate Moscow.”
“They have cash stashed everywhere,” I said to Dwayne. We were leaning back against his truck, smoking cigarettes from a pack that he’d had to reach past Ethan Richards’s stiffening body to retrieve from his glove compartment. “Maybe even passports, I don’t know. Plus whatever she’s got in her accounts—if I get my hands on that, we’d be golden.”
Dwayne frowned. “Do you know her ATM code or something?”
“Dwayne. People like this don’t use ATMs. They have financial advisors. If I go there, tell him I need to liquidate some assets . . .”
“Don’t you think he’ll notice that you’re not her?”
I pressed my lips together. “No. No, I don’t. He’s only met her a couple times, and I don’t think it was recently. If Adrienne Richards makes an appointment at his office, and then a woman shows up driving Adrienne’s car, wearing Adrienne’s clothes, walking and talking like Adrienne . . . I think he’ll see what he’s expecting to see. I looked enough like her to make you look twice, didn’t I? And you knew she was dead.”
He took a drag on his cigarette. “How much money are we talking about?”
“A lot. Maybe even enough to last us the rest of our lives, if we plan it right.” My voice was getting animated, my heart beginning to pound. After the horrors of the day, all the things we had both done that couldn’t be taken back, the thought of escape was enough to make me giddy. There was a dead body in the truck behind me and another cooling on the bedroom floor, but I was alive, and so was my husband. Maybe it wasn’t too late for us. Maybe we could begin again, and this time, we’d do it right.
“We could go anywhere, Dwayne,” I said. “We’d have to be careful, stay off the grid for a while. Maybe a year. We’d have to be smart. But we could start over. You can get sober”—he looked sharply at me, and I grabbed his hand again—“You can. I know you can. I’ll help you.”
He took a last drag on the cigarette before dropping it and stubbing it out in the dirt. I bent to pick it up, marveling at how quickly my brain had adjusted to the idea that we should be leaving no trace. I stubbed out my own cigarette and pitched both butts into the bed of the truck. Dwayne chewed his lip.
“Do you really think you could do that?” he said. “I mean, get that extra money.”
“Yes,” I said. I sounded more confident than I felt. The truth was, I didn’t know for sure. But having begun to imagine what might be possible, how much more was possible if I just played my part correctly, it seemed foolish not to try. We were already running. I was taking a risk regardless. Why not take the slightly bigger risk for the far greater reward?
“Florida,” Dwayne said suddenly, and I snapped back to reality.
“What?”
“We could go to Florida. There was a guy at the logging camp back in the day, he said that you can hunt wild pigs down there in the swamps.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. You said off the grid, so—”
“Yeah, of course,” I said quickly, ignoring the fact that the idea of Florida made my skin crawl. Mosquitoes, alligators, cockroaches the size of a fucking shoe, the endless and inescapable heat. But I needed Dwayne on board, and if the prospect of hunting wild swamp pigs would get him there . . . I smiled. “Florida. Perfect.”
Dwayne nodded. “Yeah. They wouldn’t think to look for us there.”
“Well, if we’re lucky, they won’t look for us anywhere.”
He gave me a quizzical look. “They won’t?”
“Nobody comes looking if they think you’re already dead.”
It was just after midnight when we left, pitch black and breezy. My last glimpse of the lake house was in my rearview mirror, nothing but a dark shape surrounded by the swaying, creaking pines. I drove Dwayne’s truck, my fingers wrapped tightly around the wheel, carefully chauffeuring Ethan Richards’s lifeless body to its final resting place. I’d buckled him in—the last thing I wanted was to take a turn too fast and end up with a dead man facedown in my lap—but there was nothing I could do about his head, which lolled grotesquely back and forth every time a stray rock or pothole jolted the cab. I could just make out the lights of the Mercedes far behind me on the straightaways, Dwayne behind the wheel and following at a distance. There was no need to caravan; we both knew the way.