“You want us—me—to leave the scene of an accident? An accident we caused?”
She looked into his eyes. The pupils were big. His hands were shaking. He was somewhere else again.
“What’s h-happened?” Olivia asked. Her curiosity had gotten the better of her and she’d come to see what was going on. Owen was ten feet behind her. “Is that blood?”
Heather turned. “Go back to the front of the car, please, Olivia. Take your brother.”
“Is someone dead?” Olivia said, her hand up against her mouth. She was pale, trembling, scared.
“Damn right someone’s dead,” Tom muttered.
Heather winced, took Olivia by the hand, grabbed Owen by the arm, and escorted them to the front of the Porsche.
“There’s been an accident. You two will have to be brave, OK?” she said softly.
She noticed that there was blood and a dent on the Porsche’s snorkel. They’d have to get that clean before they returned it to the car dealership. The big stainless-steel bumper at the front of the car was dented too; not badly, but it would still need to be explained.
Owen shook off her hand. “Dad killed her, didn’t he? He killed her,” he said strangely, distantly, as if from the bottom of a well. Owen, like Olivia, was both older and younger than his years. He was twelve, sometimes going on fifteen, sometimes a scared little boy.
Heather walked back to Tom.
“How are the kids?” he asked.
“The kids are going to be OK. Look, you did your best. You braked. You honked the horn.”
“Yes,” Tom exclaimed. “Yes, I honked the horn. And this wasn’t the car that I wanted. I wanted the other one.”
“You did everything you could. This wasn’t our fault. I think we should go now. I think we should get in the car and get to the ferry as quickly as possible.”
Tom nodded.
“We’ll get the body off the road and drive to the ferry,” Heather said.
“We really shouldn’t do that. It’s a crime,” Tom said.
“I don’t think we have a choice. They’re scary people. They have guns. It’s all one family. Do you trust them to call the cops?”
He thought about it. “I can see what you’re…but this is a huge decision,” Tom said. She noticed that the sweat was pouring off him. And the graze on his forehead was bleeding.
“You know what? It’s my fault, Tom. I’m making the decision,” Heather said. “You banged your head. This is my call, OK? You don’t have to think about any of this right now. All you have to do is help me get the body off the road. We’re going to put her in that long grass over there.”
“You want us to actually move her?”
“We have to. You’re going to take her by the ankles and we’re going to put her in the grass. OK?”
Tom got down on his knees and bent back the woman’s legs. They made a grotesque cracking noise that chilled the blood. Tom lifted the woman’s ankles, and Heather picked her up by the shoulders. Sticky warm blood oozed between her fingers. And now the flies were beginning to congregate en masse. They landed on Heather’s hands and arms and on the dead woman’s face.
“Are you sure about this?” Tom asked. “You don’t ever move a body. I remember when I found Judith…those stairs…I didn’t want the kids to think she’d done it on purpose. I wanted to change things. Hide the glass, hide the whiskey bottle. But I had to leave everything the way I found it…we shouldn’t be doing this.”
“We’ve already moved her. It’s too late now. Just go a few steps back. It’s easy. Please, Tom, do it now, I can’t hold her forever! Go!”
Tom began backing up toward the heath.
“That’s it, over the ditch and into the grass.”
Getting over the ditch was tricky but they managed it. They laid the woman down in the long, white dry grass. “Now the bike,” Heather said.
They dragged the front wheel of the bike from under the back tire of the Porsche. They carried the wrecked bike into the grass and hid it too. Heather adjusted some of the kangaroo grass stems, making them vertical again to hide their trail.
She ran back to the road and threw the bigger fragments of the bicycle into the grass. There was blood and smaller bike parts, but they couldn’t do anything about that. Heather closed her eyes for a few seconds and then opened them and tried to find where they had hidden the body in the heath. You couldn’t see a thing. Especially from a moving car.