surprise and murder of Coombs.

Coombs lay like a crumpled rag in the nearly nonexistent light on the kitchen floor; a shadow, a shape in a black-and-white photograph. “We can’t leave her,” Leslie said. “She’s got to disappear. She’s one too many dead people.”

“They’ll know,” Jane said, near panic. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“We’ve got to take her with us. We’ll go back to the house, get the van, we’ve got to move the van anyway. We’ll take her down to the farm, like we were gonna do with the kid,” Leslie said.

“Then what? Then what?”

“Then tomorrow, we go to see John Smith at Bucher’s, give him some papers of some kind, tell him we forgot something,” Leslie said “We let him see us: see that I’m not all bitten up. I can fake that. We tell him we’re thinking of a scouting trip…and then we take off.”

“Oh, God, Leslie, I’m frightened. I think…” Jane looked at the shadow on the floor. What she thought was, This won’t work. But better not to tell Les. Not in the mood he was in. “Maybe. Maybe that’s the best plan. I don’t know if we should go away, though. Going away won’t help us if they decide to start looking for us…”

“We can talk about that later. Get your flashlight, see if there’re some garbage bags here. We gotta bag this bitch up and get rid of her. And we’ve gotta pick up this sewing shit…What’d you do, you dumbshit, throw it at her?”

“Don’t be vulgar. Not now. Please.”

THEY SCRABBLED AROUND in the dark, afraid to let the light of the flash play against the walls or windows. They got the sewing basket back together, hurriedly, and found garbage bags in a cleaning closet next to the refrigerator. They stuffed the lower half of Coombs’s limp body into a garbage bag, then pulled another over the top of her body.

Leslie squatted on the floor and sprayed around some Scrubbing Bubbles cleaner, then wiped it up with paper towels and put the towels in the bags with the body. He did most of the kitchen floor that way, waddling backward away from the wet parts until he’d done most of the kitchen floor.

“Should be good,” he muttered. Then: “Get the car. Pull it through the alley. I’ll meet you by the fence.”

She didn’t say a word, but went out the back door, carrying the wicker sewing basket. And she thought, Won’t work. Won’t work. She moved slowly around the house, in the dark, then down the front lawn and up the street to the car. She got in, thinking, Won’t work. Some kind of dark, disturbing mantra. She had to break out of it, had to think. Leslie didn’t see it yet, but he would.

Had to think.

THE ALLEY WAS a line of battered garages, with one or two new ones, and a broken up, rolling street surface. She moved through it slowly and carefully, around an old battered car, maybe Coombs’s, paused by the back gate to Coombs’s house, popped the trunk: felt the weight when the body went in the trunk. Then Leslie was in the car and said, “Move it.”

She had to think. “We need supplies. We need to get the coveralls. If we’re going to dig…we need some boots we can leave behind. In the ground. We need gloves. We need a shovel.”

Leslie looked out the window, at the houses passing on Lexington Avenue, staring, sullen: he got like that after he’d killed someone. “We’ve got to go away,” he said, finally. “Someplace…far away. For a couple of months. Even then…these goddamn holes in me, they’re pinning us down. We don’t dare get in a situation where somebody wants to look at my legs. They don’t even have to suspect us—if they start looking at antique dealers, looking in general, asking about dog bites, want to look at my legs…We’re fucked.”

Maybe you, Jane thought. “We can’t just go rushing off. There’s no sign that they’ll be looking at you right away, so we’ll tell Mary Belle and Kathy that we’re going on a driving loop, that we’ll be gone at least three weeks. Then, we can stretch it, once we’re out there. Talk to the girls tomorrow, get it going…and then leave. End of the week.”

“Just fuckin’ itch like crazy,” Leslie said. “Just want to pull the bandages off and scratch myself.”

“Leslie, could you please…watch the language? Please? I know this is upsetting, but you know how upset I