Once Upon a River Page 0,61

have gotten a restraining order. Or something.”

“That wouldn’t have stopped him.” She couldn’t bear the way Michael’s face was falling apart.

He reached out and grabbed at her shotgun. She jumped away from him and dropped the gun on the planks between them.

“It all happened so fast,” she said. “But you don’t realize. He was really going to hurt you.”

“We were the happiest people on earth. That’s what we were at noon, the happiest people in the world. Do you remember?” His voice increased in pitch until it was shrill like the sound of the cicadas.

Margo kept her eye on the shotgun. Yes, she remembered. She remembered eating lunch today. The sunlight on the table, the yellow-and-white-patterned plates speckled with crumbs.

“There’s no blood on the float. Nobody saw,” Margo said. Though blood continued to run in red ribbons down the side of the boat, there was not even a drop visible on the planks. She glanced up and down the river and saw no one approaching or departing, no one milling about near the water. The next-door neighbor’s driveway was empty. If she did this right, she thought, then tomorrow they could have breakfast as usual, eggs and toast, butter and jelly. The river’s surface glimmered gold with the setting sun. Her first thought was to push Paul the rest of the way into the boat and launch it from the float, send it down the river, but it might not drift far enough away before it was discovered adrift or pushed onto shore by the current, as her rowboat had been when she’d fallen asleep in it.

“We have to call the police.”

“Nobody saw, Michael. Let’s get him onto the boat.” Her voice sounded weak. She wished she hadn’t spoken aloud. This was not the time for talking.

“This is a crime scene. We can’t move the body.” Michael continued to shake his head. “I need to think, Margaret. Let me think a minute.”

Margo recalled the buck she had shot across the river in Murrayville. She had struggled with the big body before figuring out the trick of negotiating herself beneath the corpse and lifting it using the strength of her legs. She should have been able to do that when Paul was on her in Brian’s bed, should have been able to lift him with her shoulder and topple him. Should have then put a knife to his throat and prevented him from going any further. Then she wouldn’t have had to shoot

him in front of Michael. While Michael stepped away slowly, Margo got herself beneath Paul’s legs and shoved. The body slid sideways, rolled up over the siderail, over the bench seat, and onto the Astroturf floor, where Johnny had once fallen onto her tarped deer. Paul’s work shirt rode up and revealed his pale stomach. Margo splashed water over the side of the boat and kept rinsing until the blood disappeared from the fiberglass. The current carried the residue downstream. Her own T-shirt was plain black, so blood would not show on it. She bent down and rinsed her hands in the water and smoothed her hair. Then she picked up the shotgun.

“This is a crime scene, Margaret. Disturbing it is a whole new crime. You don’t understand. You need to stop now and do the right thing. You need to realize the gravity of what’s just happened.” He backed up farther, until his heel hit the end of the gangplank, and he tripped and almost fell.

Margo tugged a folded blue tarp from a compartment beneath the bench seat at the back of the boat. She unfolded it over Paul’s body, covered the pool of blood forming around him, soaking through the Astroturf that carpeted the boat’s floor.

“Talk to me,” Michael said. “Tell me you realize what you’ve just done to another human being.”

The only regret she felt at that moment was what was happening to Michael, the way he was moving away from her when she needed him.

“Nobody will know.”

“Margaret. You’re not thinking clearly. We have to report this. The authorities will understand you were protecting me.”

Margo turned the key in the boat’s ignition, and it fired right up. She checked the gas tank and the gauge registered more than half full. She turned off the engine and looked around, grateful to see nobody else, no lights coming on in the nearby houses. She dug in the boat’s toolbox for work gloves and put on a brown cotton pair. She rubbed the shotgun all over to get rid