After turning the penlight off and returning it to my pocket, I pulled the stake out of the ground, dropping it and the greased-up rope into the well. Then I walked back and forth from my pile to the well and dropped about six more large rocks down toward Chet. I would cover him more later but figured that it wouldn’t hurt to get a head start on the process. I would have kept going but the light in the sky was fading, the clouds now purple and dark, the meadow and the surrounding woods losing their color, fading into grainy variations of gray. My initial plan had been to return to the apartment above the studio, and start packing up Chet’s things, bring them back through the woods to the well and dump them in. Then I would cover everything over with rocks and re-cover the well hole. But as I walked back through the blackness of the woods, my penlight’s beam only carving out a small patch of forest floor in front of me, I decided that I could pack up Chet’s things now, and move them to the well in the early morning. I knew that my parents would sleep late.
I was very familiar with the small apartment above the studio. It was one of my favorite places when it was empty, but I hadn’t seen it since Chet had moved in at the beginning of the summer. I had been worried that he would have a lot of stuff that I would need to pack up, but he didn’t. He was still living out of a large army-green duffel bag that was spread open by the single bed. I began to search the place using the penlight, then realized I could simply turn the lamp on. On the off chance that either of my parents looked out their bedroom window toward the studio they would hardly be surprised to see a light on in Chet’s apartment. In fact, they’d be more surprised if there wasn’t a light.
The lamp cast dim yellow light across the whitewashed walls and the wide, bare planks of the floor. There was very little furniture in the studio apartment, just my beloved beanbag chair, looking deflated, and two upholstered chairs, each with rips in its fabric, foam coming out. The chair with the pastel sprigged print was another of my favorite reading spots. I was glad to see that Chet had used it to stack some books. It meant he hadn’t been sitting in it.
There were some clothes scattered around the cot, a couple of T-shirts and a pair of white underpants. I used one of the T-shirts to scoop the underwear off the floor and put both in the duffel. A stale, itchy smell of body odor came out of the half-filled bag, but the apartment didn’t smell as bad as I thought it might. Mainly turpentine and ash. In the center of the floor was a coffee can nearly filled to the brim with cigarette butts. I picked it up, and tried to think where to put it, then realized I could dump it in the duffel. Chet would not be wearing his clothes anymore.
From the bathroom I grabbed Chet’s toothbrush, a nearly empty tube of toothpaste, a white crystal stone in some packaging that said it was a deodorant, a bright green bottle of Pert. I left behind the sliver of hairy soap in the dish. From the kitchen—really a corner with a sink, a few cabinets, and an electric hot plate—I grabbed two packages of ramen noodles and a large plastic bottle of Popov vodka. I dumped the vodka down the sink and left the bottle in one of the cabinets. I suddenly worried that I was leaving my fingerprints all over the apartment, that I should be wearing gloves. But I would have time tomorrow to wipe things down. Besides, if things went the way I thought they would, then no one would suspect that Chet had been killed. It would simply look as though he had taken off. It was hard to imagine that anyone would miss him.
After filling the duffel, I zipped it closed and lifted it, making sure I would be able to carry it in the morning. It was heavy but manageable. All that was left of Chet’s in the apartment were his painting supplies. There were four canvases, three that were leaning against the wall, faced so