“I brought the rope,” Bernie said, shattering Marta’s alternate reality. “The fire looks hot enough to take it now.”
“Wait,” Marta blurted. “Are we really doing this?” Her heart pounded as she looked across the fire at Bernie and Imogen. Flickering shadows danced across their faces, making their eyes appear like dark pits in their skulls.
At first, no one spoke. Then Imogen, in a soft voice, said, “Marty. It’s the only way now. Our lives are over if the police get involved.”
Our lives areoverif we dothis—we’ll never be the same.Marta shook her head, but didn’t say anything else.
Bernie used a plastic garbage bag over her hand to pinch the edge of the bloodstained coil and toss it onto the flames. Marta watched as the rope burned away to nothing, heat and ash sealing their terrible pact. Now that they’d destroyed evidence, there was no going back, not ever.I’m an accessory to murder.
After a couple of hours, the fire finally died, its embers thrumming with an orangey glow that faded slowly to black. Marta sat motionless, the smell of smoke in her hair and a chill stealing into her bones. If she moved, then she would be flung forward into what was coming next.
Eventually, Imogen broke the spell. “I’m fucking freezing. Let’s go inside and get ready.”
A sliver of moon lacerated the cloud cover, spearing the water’s surface and casting an eerie light over the lake. Frigid waves slapped against Marta’s shins as she struggled to pull the kayak and paddleboat into the water. She’d rolled her sweats above her knees, but she could feel the edges dampening, creating a cold heaviness, and she resigned herself to being fully wet when she felt the first raindrops hit the top of her head. It felt like a punishment, a punishment they all deserved. When the watercraft were positioned against the dock, she put her shoes back on and walked up the short incline to the rocks where Bernie and Imogen were kneeling by Celeste’s body.
It was raining steadily now, a sound that would have been relaxing if the four of them had been inside with hot toddies and a plate of cookies. As it was, the sound of drops hitting the lake made Marta’s mind patter wildly—what if they were hit by lightning out on the water, what if they ran into another boat, what if they weren’t strong enough, what if they weren’t fast enough, whatifwhatifwhatif. She wished she could windshield-wipe the frantic thoughts from her brain.
Imogen and Bernie had already removed the tarp, and Imogen was swearing softly under her breath. “Shit. My ring.” The large rectangular emerald looked out of place on Celeste’s mud-flecked hand. “Should I . . . is it wrong if . . . ?” Imogen wondered out loud. Neither Marta nor Bernie answered. Marta thought it didn’t really matter one way or the other—Celeste wasn’t going to get any more dead—but if she were in Imogen’s shoes, she’d never want to see that ring again. Every time she wore it, she’d picture how it looked against Celeste’s dead flesh. “Okay, I’m going to try . . .” Imogen spoke softly as she grabbed hold of Celeste’s index finger. Marta watched, horrified, as Imogen tugged hard, then tugged again. Celeste’s hand was stiff and swollen in death and refused to release the ring.
When Imogen yanked on Celeste’s finger a third time, jerking her arm in a gruesome parody of life, Marta couldn’t take it anymore. “Leave it,” she rasped. “Just leave her alone, please. You don’t need it.” Imogen looked up at her with glazed eyes, gave her head a little shake, then let go of Celeste’s hand and got to her feet.
“You’re right, it’s stuck. I . . . I don’t know what came over me,” said Imogen. “She should have it—she loved it. It’s the least I can offer her. Sorry. Let’s do it.”
They’d made a visit to the boathouse earlier in the evening to see what they could find to wrap Celeste’s body in. Bernie found a dusty fishing net on a high shelf and Marta unearthed a long coil of rope. Nobody said anything about the fact that the rope was the same kind that they’d found under Imogen’s bed. Now they planned to use these materials to secure Celeste’s body in a netted cocoon, including several heavy rocks they’d retrieved from the shoreline.
But before they could begin wrapping her, Bernie shot to her feet and commanded them to wait. She took off at a trot for the cottage, leaving Marta and Imogen alone with the corpse. Marta found that she couldn’t look away. The death mark was lurid against Celeste’s white neck, crusted with blood in the spots where the rope had abraded her skin. Marta knew that this visual would be joining the carousel of images that kept her up at night.
“Okay, ladies.” Bernie had returned, and she was holding a chef’s knife. “This is obviously going to be extremely unpleasant, but we need to puncture her abdomen.”
“What?” Imogen said, and at the same time Marta said, “Oh my god, you’re right.”
Weighing the body down with rocks was all well and good, but even concrete blocks and chains wouldn’t be able to compete with the decomposition gases her body would produce. Marta remembered listening to aWicked Wordspodcast episode that described a situation where a woman’s body had floated to the surface like a grisly balloon in a matter of days, despite having been thoroughly weighted down.
Bernie nodded at Marta. “Of course I’m right. The depth of the lake is in our favour, because that means increased water pressure holding the body under the surface. Even more importantly, the temperature in the depths is quite low. Bodies decompose more slowly in cold water . . . Actually, if it’s cold enough, then the type of bacteria that causes those decomposition gases doesn’t grow. Like in Lake Superior—there’s a saying that she doesn’t give up her dead. But I don’t know if our lake is deep enough or cold enough, so we can’t be too careful.”
Imogen and Marta stood back to let Bernie do her work. She moved with surgical efficiency, drawing anXacross Celeste’s abdomen then inserting the blade once on either side of her rib cage to puncture each lung. There was surprisingly little blood, but of course Celeste’s heart hadn’t been pumping for quite some time. When Bernie finished, she dipped the knife in the lake to rinse it off. “This is going back in the kitchen. If it ever gets to the point where luminol is involved, we’re all fucked anyways.” Then it was time to cocoon the body.
Marta felt she must be dissociating, because how could she possibly be enjoying the feeling of teamwork when this was what they were doing? She felt her eyes pulled to Celeste, magnetized to the awful mark that encircled her neck, and she realized that Celeste wasn’t wearing her heart locket. That was unusual—Marta didn’t think she’d ever seen Celeste without it. She made a mental note to find it in the cottage and make sure that Milly got to keep her mom’s favourite piece of jewellery.
Manoeuvring Celeste’s rigid body was difficult, and there was no hope of repositioning the arm that was raised permanently above her head. They ended up leaving that hand poking out the top of the macabre package. It took all three of them to lift Celeste—Marta at the top, Bernie at the bottom, and Imogen in the middle. They had to stop once on their way down to the dock so that Imogen could readjust her grip, so they lowered Celeste gently to the ground. It crossed Marta’s mind that they could have just dropped her, and the fact that they didn’t was a good thing; it showed they were still clinging to their humanity.
When their funeral procession reached the dock, the women carefully placed Celeste in the back of the paddleboat. Marta covered the body with the tarp they’d used earlier, tucking the edges for secure coverage. While it was unlikely they would run into anyone out on the lake so late, especially in this weather, there was no need to take unnecessary risks.
“Are we all good?” asked Marta. She shone her flashlight (also retrieved from the boathouse) over the group, casting their features into shadows.
“Ready,” said Imogen.
“Let’s get it done,” said Bernie.
Imogen and Bernie clambered into the front of the paddleboat. Marta gave their boat a push to get it going, then stashed the flashlight under a chair on the dock. She strapped on a life jacket, got into the kayak (almost capsizing herself in the process), then glided out onto the water. The lake was lit only by the meagre light of the moon, which was struggling to shoulder its way through the clouds.
Rain whipped Marta’s face as the lake became increasingly rough. Her hands were freezing, fingers cramping from gripping the paddle, and her legs below the knees were soaking wet. As shitty as she felt, she preferred to focus her energy on the physical discomfort rather than the raw horror of disposing of a corpse. Even though they weren’t going all that far, it took them almost an hour to reach the part of the lake that (according to the depth map) was the deepest, at almost two hundred metres. Bernie had memorized the arrangement of islands nearby, and was confident they had the right place. Imogen turned around to remove the tarp covering Celeste, while Marta pulled her kayak up behind the paddleboat. All three women looked at the netted bundle.
“Goodbye, Cee,” whispered Imogen.
“Rest in peace,” said Bernie.
Marta wanted to say something, but the words balled up in her throat and she felt like she was choking. She met Bernie’s eyes, then Imogen’s—who did this?—then gave a slight nod. Bernie slid both hands under Celeste’s body and tipped her into the water. She slipped out of sight in an instant.
