me. The snow is falling fast and thick, but the storm is windless and still. It’s so deadly silent out here that I can hear the crunch of each footstep, as the fresh snow gives way to the harder crust beneath.
Michael grabs my arm for balance, reeling toward me to mutter in my ear. “Hate to tell you this, but that thing’s not loaded.”
It’s too hard to walk with the gun in my hand; I’ve tucked it into the waistband of my soggy jeans so that I have both hands for balance. “Actually, it is,” I say. “I checked.”
He scrunches his face. “Huh. Wonder when she did that.” He steps into a snowdrift up to his knee, and swears. “Do you think there’s actually a boat? Or you think she’s trying to pull something over on us?”
“Like what? She’s about as threatening as a kitten. Besides, there’s two of us and one of her. What could she possibly do to us?”
“It’s weird, is all.” He sighs. “She’s a fucking liar, that one. Said she had no money.”
I sink so deep in a drift that my boot comes off my foot. I reach into the snowbank and retrieve it, jam it back over my soggy sock. “So what were you planning? You might as well tell me.”
He scowls. “It was gonna be divorce, right? Get hitched, no prenup, simplest con there is. Legal, even! California is a community property state, right? I figured, probably couldn’t get half of everything she had, but I’d at least get her to give me a couple million just to go away. But then she finally informs me that she has no real money, it’s all tied up in the fucking house. Which makes everything a lot harder, divorce-wise, yeah? Not like her lawyers are going to let me walk off with the keys to Stonehaven. So then I figured, I’d play nice husband instead, get her to rewrite her will and leave everything to me. Wait it out for a bit, and then…” He shrugs.
“Kill her.” I fail to keep the disgust out of my voice.
He gives me a sideways look. “Don’t get like that. For chrissake, isn’t that what you’re getting at, here? Waving that gun around? Because, darling, we’re not going to be able to just let her go. She’ll go straight to the police.”
“I’m aware of that.” But he shrugs, skeptical, as if he can’t quite envision me as a murderer. And I wonder, with a jolt of panic, if this is the gaping hole in the plan, after all: the plausibility of me killing in cold blood, if I needed to.
Snowflakes are catching in his eyebrows; he wipes his face violently with the arm of his coat. “Jaysus, this fucking snow.” He stumbles and rights himself. “Just so you know, you can’t just shoot her, either. It’s going to have to look like suicide, yeah? Good news is that her family is barmy—her mum offed herself, and there’s that schizo brother of hers. No one’s gonna question it.”
“You already had it figured out, then. How you were going to do her in.”
“Sedative in the martini, knock her out, string her up from the staircase. Boom: She hung herself. Hell, I thought maybe I’d even talk her into doing herself in. She’s halfway there already, the loony git.” He kicks petulantly through another hillock of snow. “That plan won’t work now. We’ll have to come up with another way. An accident, maybe. She fell in the lake and drowned?”
The lake appears out of nowhere, a black void suddenly opening up at our feet. Vanessa is waiting for us on the edge of the shore, her hands jammed in her pockets, pale face moonlike in the dark. Her hair is so full of melted snow that it’s starting to freeze into icicles around her face.
“There.” She points to a stone boathouse, just a few steps farther down the shore. The building huddles there in the trees, buried in snow, waiting.
* * *
—
Michael kicks the snowdrifts from the threshold of the boathouse so that we can pry the door open (the wood splintering under his