feel the hurt that she’d caused him? He didn’t know now. But then Henry had come in with the knife, cut Claire’s throat, and when Corbin saw the spray of blood arcing high above her body, a sense of unreality had come over him, like he was suddenly watching everything through a distorted lens. It was a dream. But it wasn’t. It was real, all of it. The rain, the blood, the body twisted awkwardly on the ground, water pooling in her eye sockets, the eyes still open.
Henry pulled a Polaroid camera from the backpack he was wearing.
“Why do you have that?” Corbin asked.
“I told Claire I wanted to come here to take photographs. I needed a camera, didn’t I?”
It bothered Corbin that it was a Polaroid camera, somehow. Such a perfect camera for taking pictures of a murder. Still, he posed, and Henry took a picture of him standing over the grave, and then they changed positions, Corbin taking a picture of Henry. The plastic camera was yellow and black. It spit the picture out and Corbin watched the image develop. Henry’s shoulders were back, a toothy grin on his face. He looked proud.
Corbin handed the camera back to Henry, holding onto the picture. His hands were trembling, the tips of his fingers white as bone and starting to prune. He almost asked to see the picture that Corbin had taken of him, but decided he didn’t want that image in his mind.
Henry folded the camera back into its closed position and put it in his backpack, then they covered her, smoothing the dirt down and adding a layer of wet leaves. It looked untouched, like no one had ever been there. It was a relief that the body was no longer visible, that all traces of Claire had disappeared.
“Like no one was ever here,” Henry said, echoing Corbin’s thoughts. “Let’s go.”
They walked in single file along the path, each carrying his things. Corbin felt a little better now that they were moving, and talking about what to do next. The rain had even lessened, the clouded sky lighter than it had been. At the cemetery gate they stood for a moment before going their separate ways. “No contact,” Henry said. “Unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
“I agree,” Corbin said.
Henry smiled. “I can’t believe we did that, dude,” he said, and there was true joy on his face, like they’d just won the big game. Corbin smiled back, wanting to let Henry know he felt the same way.
Once Corbin was on his own, walking among the normal pedestrians—returning home from work or heading to early dinner dates—the enormity of what he had done filled him with mounting panic and disbelief. Claire was dead. This morning she’d been alive, going about her life, and now she was buried in the ground. Corbin stopped walking, and a man with an open umbrella bumped into him from behind. “Sorry,” Corbin said, ducking into an alley, where he put his hands on his knees. He was nauseous, and his heart fluttered in his chest. He took deep breaths, trying to fill his lungs with the sooty city air.
After a minute he began to feel better. He thought back to what Claire had done, trying to conjure up the rage he’d felt. It began to work, especially when he remembered the pitying look she’d given him in the cemetery, as though he were the asshole. He kept those thoughts in his head as he walked home. He needed to shower.
It was two days later when Corbin first heard about Claire.
“You knew Claire Brennan, didn’t you?” one of his fellow students, a girl from UCLA, asked.
“Yeah. I did. Why?”
“I heard she was missing.”
“Seriously?” Corbin had been terrified of being asked questions about Claire, but now that it was happening, he felt okay. His voice sounded natural.
“Yeah. She didn’t show up at the Lambs, and someone went to her place and she wasn’t there.”
“Maybe she went home early.”
Corbin braced himself for a visit from the police, but it never came. A few days later he was on a plane going home, drinking beer after beer in first class, and feeling the muscles in his chest and stomach finally unclench. He hadn’t realized how tense he’d been those last few days in London. He’d barely slept, and when he had, it was in that thin realm where dreams and memories overlapped. He’d wake, sweat filmed and guilty, unsure whether what had happened in the cemetery was real or imagined.