Her use of the wordwewhen talking about Edison angers me more than anything else she’s just said. She forces me to picture it: killing Edison—myEdison—in haste so that my sisters can help me haul him up some nondescript mountain. Chiseling his teeth and leaving him for the coyotes.
No lingering kiss before I take his breath away. No peaceful burial before they pour the asphalt in the new subdivision. No coming back to visit him when the homes are built and children are playing over his grave.
“No,” I tell her. “That isn’t the plan.”
Iris gestures to the TV. “The plan’s ruined, Sis. You need to take care of this, or we need to go.”
I don’t like this. “That trucker threw us off,” I say. “This is the first time we broke our rules about who to kill, and look what it’s done. Breaking another rule by leaving early will only get us caught. It’s sloppy.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve had to abandon a kill,” Moody says. “I had to give one up in Iowa because it turned out his brotherwas in law enforcement, remember? We all have to make sacrifices.” I glare at her, and she frowns sympathetically at me. I don’t buy her feigned penitence in the face of what she’s cost me. She’d be all too happy for me to murder Edison in haste and lose my final months with him, just like she was happy when my preteen antics got me kicked out of Elaine’s house and we were reunited in a group home. Moody loves me too much. She hates sharing me. There is no room for me to have any shred of happiness for myself.
“We don’t do anything for now.” I extend both arms to take my sister’s hands. “The best thing is to stick to the plan. It’s never failed us before.” My eyes linger on Moody. “We don’t act without planning, and only if we all agree. Same as before.”
I hope they can’t hear my wild heartbeat in the silence that follows my words. If they understood how deeply I cared about making things perfect with Edison, they would kill him themselves just to teach me a lesson about getting too attached.
“We work together,” Moody says, and I catch the taunt in her voice. Her eyes stare into mine, and even though we’re identical, I can see something distinctly Moody about that look she gives me.Togetheris the word she used. She knows there are things I haven’t told her. She knows I’m hiding something.
After a moment, Iris shakes her head. “I don’t have a good feeling about this,” she says. “I think we should go.”
I’m on borrowed time. My sisters want me to kill Edison or abandon him. To forfeit my last precious months with him. I’m walking the precarious tightrope of their patience, and I know that everything I do from here forward will have to be more transparent.
For the rest of the afternoon, we talk strategy. We corroborate our stories if anyone asks Jade or Lisa what they think of the man on thehiking trail. I’ll attend the inevitable church prayer vigil with Edison to get a climate check. We will avoid the crime scene, avoid police at all costs, and we won’t panic.
There’s comfort in the planning, and I try to draw strength from that, rather than letting myself think of what will happen if Ifail.
20
Early the next morning, I knock on Dara’s door. It’s been eerily quiet without her music thundering through the wall. I understand now that she used it to cover up so much of what was happening over there. I never heard her and Tim shouting. I never heard furniture being knocked over or punches being thrown. Only some dance melody I couldn’t quite identify.
“Dara?” I call in a soft voice. “It’s me.”
There’s no response, and the persistent, nettling worry I’ve had since I left her reaches a fever pitch. The car is still in its space, so she hasn’t gone anywhere. But she could have hurt herself.
I knock again. I’ll give her five seconds, and if she doesn’t answer, I’ll break in. “Dara—”
The door opens just a crack. She looks terrible, but not quite so bad as when I left her. Dark circles from a sleepless night join the bruises on her face, which have shifted and adopted new hues ofyellow, purple, and gray. “Hi,” I say, with the tone one might use with a baby bird that has fallen from its nest. “Can I come in?”
Wordlessly, she moves aside, and I’m able to nudge the door open. Her wrist is in the same brace I saw her wearing a few weeks back, though the swelling looks less angry.
There’s a peppermint candle burning on the kitchen island. The place looks tidy again, her yellow sandals resting on the mud mat by the door. There’s no stench of bleach. She didn’t panic. Good girl.
“I’m making coffee,” she says, her back already to me as she heads into the kitchenette. She stands over the spot where Tim’s body was slumped only hours before and slides a mug under the spout of the Keurig. “How do you take it?” Her voice is flat, and it’s as though she were sleepwalking.
Before I catch myself, I wonder if caffeine is bad for an unborn baby. If one sip is enough to kill it, or damage its heart.
It doesn’t matter.
“Black,” I say, even though I’m not sure I’ll take a sip. I don’t want to interrupt this fragile dance Dara is performing. I don’t want to upset her when I don’t know what might make her fall apart, if she will at all.
We sit on the barstools, and I watch Dara pour creamer into her mug.
“I cleaned the bins,” she says after a long silence. “The way that you said. But after that, I didn’t know what to do.”
“We have to use cleaning chemicals that oxidize the bloodstains,” I say. “It’s the blood’s response to oxygen that makes it show up on the chemicals forensics teams use.”
Dara isn’t looking at me. “Were you really into science in high school or something?”
“I’ve always liked watching true crime,” I say. A partial truth.There’s a lot to be learned from forensics documentaries, and it’s a hell of a lot less conspicuous than running a computer search. Hey, Siri, how do I get rid of a body? What’s the best way to dismember a corpse? If the police confiscated my phone right now, they’d find searches for random celebrities, puzzle games, and bookmarked pages about the best restaurants to try in Scottsdale. I haven’t shut it for a suspicious amount of time or disabled the Wi-Fi in the middle of the night. Nothing out of the ordinary.
