Doug shook one of the pea-sized white pills from the bottle into his quivering hand and pushed it under his tongue. The panic that always came in the moment between taking the pill and the two to three minutes it took for the pain in his chest to subside was when he prayed. This time he was making general apologies for what he had just done. He was feeling guilty about hitting Sunny in the head with a paving stone, but not guilty enough to regret doing it. She kept moaning and trying to crawl after the first strike, so he had to bash her head twice. That was what he regretted. He’d never been the type to want anyone or anything to suffer. Doug wanted his wife’s death to be efficient. To be kind.
There on the garden sidewalk at the rear of the house, Sunny’s body lay bundled in her favorite tablecloth. Doug thought she would want it that way. She’d bought the white cotton cloth at Dicky’s Antique Barn in Cave Spring, just outside of Rome, Georgia, one of her favorite summer getaway spots when the weather got too hot to bear in Alabama. He’d become nauseous walking from the parking lot to the spring, and they had to sit at a picnic table waiting for his nitroglycerin tablet to kick in, but Sunny never complained. Later, he drank a beer right after eating a cherry-chocolate ice cream cone and threw it all up right next to the RV. It had been a shit day, but Sunny got her tablecloth.
Her feet hung out the bottom, and Doug noticed one of her Keds had come untied. He wanted to retie it, but the thought of bending down was too much at the moment. “Hey, is it really done?” Marjorie came running around the house, her sandals clicking too loudly on the stone sidewalk.
Doug put up a finger to shush her. “Keep it down.” He pointed at Mr. Wylie’s house across the field. The lights were out, but old Mr. Wylie was a light sleeper. Doug and Marjorie stood side-by-side looking down at Sunny wrapped up like a Christmas popper. Marjorie swung her arms around Doug. “I told you she’d go down easy, baby. What did I tell you?”
Doug hesitated, but then he smiled and pulled her close. “I know.” His heart was settling down, and holding Marjorie close made him forget, for a moment, the sound the stone had made when it impacted Sunny’s head. He had anticipated a crack, a loud one like in the movies, but the sound was just a dull thud, like dropping a sack of flour on the ground. The second one was even softer and slightly wet.
“Alright,” said Marjorie, stepping back. She took his hand and tried to pull him toward the back door of his house. “Let’s have a drink to celebrate.”
“Shouldn’t we,” he motioned toward the body. “We said we’d bury it.” The sound of it made a discordant twang, and he put a finger in his right ear to dislodge the weirdness inside.
“We will, but dang, honey. We’ve waited two years for this moment. Let’s have a drink first. We deserve it,” she purred and put a hand on his chest. “And then after that, we deserve something else, huh?” She rolled her fingers over his sweaty chest until she reached the flesh near his neck. Marjorie had never before touched him in front of his wife, and Doug felt a need to take a few steps back out of what he perceived was his wife’s line of sight.
Inside the kitchen, Marjorie put her hands on her hips and surveyed the room. Sunny’s collection of pig salt and pepper shakers lined the shelves of a cabinet. Stacked in the sink were lasagna smeared bowls, plates, and forks in a heap from supper. Sunny had been about to wash them when Doug called her to the backyard saying, “Honey, come out here and see this.” And she did.
Marjorie opened the pantry and spotted a bottle of cabernet. “Can you get us a bottle opener?”
Doug stood at the window over the sink, staring out. Sunny lay on the stones, her form shining dully in the backyard safety light. He pulled back from the window and looked down at the sink. Why didn’t I wait until she finished the dishes?
“It’s done. She’s not going to get up and walk away,” said Marjorie.
Doug pushed his hands in his pockets and turned away from the mess. “I know. I just don’t like having it, having her out there where anybody can see.” He handed her a bottle opener from a drawer and pushed it shut quietly.
Marjorie rolled her eyes. “How many times have you and I had to worry about somebody ‘seeing’?” She rocked her head from side to side in a gesture that said the whole thing was an inside joke.
“This is different.” Doug took the wine glass from Marjorie and drank a big sip before remembering the nitroglycerin tablet in his system.
“For two years we’ve hidden and looked away anytime we made eye contact for too long. I mean, shit Doug, let’s enjoy all this for a minute before we have to separate again. Please?” She placed her wine glass on the table and wrapped her arms around his waist one more time. “You know,” she whispered, “when the six weeks goes by, the first thing I’m going to do is buy me some new lingerie.”
Doug was beginning to feel dizzy. He pulled a chair from the table and eased himself down. “I don’t feel so good.”
“Do you need your pills?”
“Already took one.”
“I thought you were doing better. You said you hadn’t needed one in weeks,” said Marjorie, taking a seat next to him.
“I hadn’t killed nobody in those weeks! Hell, it’s stressful,” said Doug. His forehead was broken out in sweat and he was sure he was going to throw up. “Just give me a minute.” He laid his head on the table and focused on breathing.
For several minutes, Marjorie quietly sipped her wine and rubbed Doug’s back, scratching between his shoulder blades with her lacquered nails, just the way he liked. Then she said in a soft voice, “I guess we need to get it done.”
Doug replied without lifting his head. “Now you want to get her buried. Geesh.” He sat up and rubbed his eyes, groaning lightly. “You weren’t here for the hard part. It just wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. I hope I never have to do that again.”
Marjorie’s face made an involuntary little tic, but she didn’t reply.
“We just, we just have to stick with the plan,” he said, repeating what they’d said a dozen times over the past few weeks. “Stay apart for two months.”
“You said six weeks,” said Marjorie.
“Well, you know what I mean, six weeks. Two months. ”
She smacked her hand on the table. “Two months is longer than six weeks. It’s two whole weeks longer.”
“I know how long it is. I’m just saying we have to give it time. There’ll be lots of relatives coming over bringing food and whatnot. You know how family can be.”
“They’re not going to stay six weeks, are they?”
“Of course not, but we’ve got to keep up appearances for as long as it takes. We talked about this ‘til we were blue in the face,” said Doug. He reached for her hand and held it tenderly. “Let’s finish this. I got the shovels out already.”
“And you got the money for me?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Something in his voice made her stop. “You said you’d have it tonight. I was going to make that down payment Monday. That real estate agent’s supposed to meet me out at the lake house so we can sign the paperwork. There’s all kinds of stuff I’ve got to sign and—”
“I know all about buying a house. I bought this one.”
“You said you’d have the money. I’ve been wanting one of those lake houses for five years. That was the fucking plan, Doug! I buy the house ‘cause no one’s paying attention to me. Then later, when we get married, we sell this shit dumpster and the lake house’ll be our house. That was the plan!”
“I know it was—” His chest was hurting, and he felt as if his chest was bandaged up in a heating pad. “I know the plan. I came up with the plan if you remember. But I had a problem.”
“What problem?” Her face had turned hard the way it did at work when she was irritated with a customer. Her forehead scrunched together and made an “11” between her eyes. Doug imagined how it would look in twenty years of irritation.
“The account. The savings account is in Sunny’s name. I didn’t know it until I tried to get the money Monday. If I try to get it again now that she’s dead, they’ll get suspicious.”
“Wait, you knew this before you did it?”
Doug shrugged and kept his eyes on the floor. “Sunny’s always made the deposits. I just never paid attention.”
“I’m beginning to think Sunny wasn’t nearly as dumb as you always made her out to be.” Marjorie pushed up from the table and refilled her wine glass. “How do you run a tire store and not even know where your money is?” Before he could answer, she interjected again. “Take the money from the store. It’s your business.”
“The tire store doesn’t have that kind of cash.”
“What if somebody else buys that house? The real estate agent’s not going to hold it for me,” said Marjorie.
“Then you’ll find another house.”
“I don’t want another house. I want that house and I want you! That was the plan. I’ve been patient for two years. You promised!” Her eyes smoldered with anger but there was something else; she was afraid. He hadn’t seen her this way since he had to cancel their weekend together in Atlanta because Sunny had emergency gall bladder surgery. It was beginning to occur to him that Marjorie was being a tad unreasonable.
“Look, it’s temporary. I can front you,” he calculated for a few seconds, “two thousand. You cash out your savings and do the down payment. I’ll get you the rest when things get sorted out. We’ve got two months to wait anyhow.”
“Six weeks!” She slammed the wine glass down in the sink so hard the stem broke in two, and then she stormed out the back door.
“Marjorie? Where are you going?” He hurried out after her.
Marjorie was by the lawnmower shed, grabbing the shovels he’d propped against the door. The ground was saturated with spring rain, also part of the plan. Kill her when the digging is at its easiest. Put her way out in the pasture next to the old hay barn where the cows tromp around the watering trough and the ground is always pocked by a hundred hooves. No one would ever know the ground had been dug up.
Marjorie shoved her cell phone in her back pocket. “Let’s do it.”
“I can’t carry her,” said Doug. “My heart.” He put a hand over his chest as if he were saluting the flag.
Marjorie rolled her eyes and dropped the shovel on the ground. “Don’t you have a wheelbarrow or something?”
In minutes, they had Sunny’s body folded over in a wheelbarrow and Doug pushed it, bumping her along over the uneven pasture ground to the area behind the barn with Marjorie following, carrying their two shovels. Away from the artificial lights of the house, it was almost too dark to see the ground where they planned to dig. Doug halfway wished he had thought to bring a flashlight, but then decided it was a bad idea. A flashlight would have been a beacon to old Mr. Wylie should he decide to get up for a late-night pee.
Marjorie dropped her shovel on the ground and held his toward him, handle side out. “You get the first digging shift.”
“Why me? I’ve done every bit of this, so far,” argued Doug, taking the shovel.
“Except the getting the money part,” said Marjorie.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, will you give it a rest?” Doug dropped his shovel. “Did you think this was going to be easy?” He took a calming breath and closed his eyes, willing himself to relax before opening them again. “We’ve just had some setbacks with the plan. That’s all. Everything’s going to be okay.” His eyes had adjusted to the darkness. Marjorie’s blonde hair shined even in the gloomy light of the pasture.
The woman he had killed for stared into his eyes. “Doug? Do you love me?”
Baffled, he shook his head. “Why would you even need to ask me that? After all I’ve done?”
“I just need to hear it.”
“Now? While we’re burying my wife?”
“Especially while we’re burying your wife.” The night wind came down from the pines and lifted her bleached hair playfully around her cheeks. She was as beautiful as the day he hired her to run the front counter at the tire store.
“Hey, are you even listening to me?” she asked.
“Of course, I love you. I.” He was going to say he killed Sunny for her, but somehow voicing that part uglied up the ‘I love you’ part. He wondered if he’d ever be able to say ‘I love you’ to Marjorie again without thinking of Sunny growing stiffer by the minute in her tablecloth. He was glad he couldn’t see her face.
“I know you do.” She cupped his left cheek with her hand, and he felt so relieved to feel her warm fingers on his face. He was in love with Marjorie Scarborough, and in that single instant he would have killed Sunny ten times over for her. “It’s okay. I’ll take the first shift,” she said.
After half an hour she had made a shallow place a body length long and nearly ankle deep in the mud. She leaned on her shovel and took a deep breath. “We might should have included a backhoe in this plan.”
Doug motioned for her to move aside so he could take over. She stepped out of the muck she’d been digging in and stood next to the body. He stabbed at the ground with his shovel and after a while he began to sweat despite the cool night air. A light breeze blew in every now and then, bringing the distant lowing of a distressed cow from the next property over. Doug wondered if she was in labor, as most cows were quiet in the night. The sound was comforting to him, like a train whistle in the night, or the way cars sound when they pass on wet highways. He paused to listen.
“Why’re you stopping? You’ve hardly made a dent,” said Marjorie.
The digging was harder than he had anticipated despite the days of rain that preceded the culmination of their plan. He had to kick the step down hard with his boot to get the blade more than a few inches into the ground. Ideally, he wanted to get Sunny at least six feet under, as the saying went, but he was beginning to think getting a hole long enough to lay her out in flat was not a feasible idea. He put his shovel down and leaned over her body, pushing her knees toward her chest. The tablecloth prevented him from folding her up completely.
“What the hell are you doing?” asked Marjorie.
“I thought if we could put her in a ball, she’d be easier to get in the hole. We wouldn’t have to dig it so wide,” said Doug. He got down on his knees and began unwinding the tablecloth from around her, but he hesitated, his hands hanging in front of him like a man about to plunk out a tune on a piano. “I have to take her out of the tablecloth,” he looked at Marjorie as if asking permission.
“So, do it, then,” she replied.
He lifted the corner, revealing his wife’s left hand. Her nails were yellowed and stubby with snags. Somehow, even with only a few hours of death, her flesh looked oddly drawn around the fingers, and her wrinkles looked even more pronounced across her knuckles. The one and a half carat diamond ring on her finger was what he’d given her as a replacement for the miniscule engagement ring from their youth. The new ring had been his way of making a guilt payment without her knowing the reason during the early days of his affair with Marjorie. He flipped Sunny’s hand over, but it was too late. Marjorie had spotted it even in the dim light of the pasture. “Take that off,” she demanded.
“What?”
“The ring! Take it off. I can sell that in Birmingham. It’ll go a long way to help make up some of that missing money for the down payment.”
Doug lifted Sunny from the ground and unfurled the cloth from her torso. “Can’t. That ring could get traced back here.”
“Nobody’ll know where it came from. I’ll tell them it was my old wedding ring.”
“Records are kept on stuff like that,” said Doug. “Appraisals by the sellers. There was paperwork on that ring from the shop where I bought it. Cops trace stuff all the time through pawn shops and diamond dealers. Don’t you ever watch TV?”
“Doug, there’s no diamond police out there. I could sell that ring all over hell and half of Alabama and nobody’d know where it came from.” She bent down to reach for Sunny’s hand sticking out of the tablecloth, but Doug pushed his dead wife’s hand back underneath the fabric. “Doug, let me have that ring,” she hissed. “Leaving it on her finger’s nothing but throwing money in the ground!”
“It’s asking for trouble. You, going off selling a ring worth eight thousand dollars right after my wife disappears? Maybe not now, but later, after we’re together, somebody somewhere is gonna get suspicious and put two and two together.” He pulled the tablecloth from around Sunny’s legs and laid her back down on the ground. Pushing her knees up to her chest, he pulled her skirt down neatly over her knees. If only she’d put on capris this afternoon after returning from her trip to Lowe’s. When he had her body folded into the fetal position, he pulled the tablecloth back around and over her like a burrito.
“That’s why you didn’t get me the cash from that account, isn’t it? If anybody’s going to put two and two together, it’s when a man withdraws money the same time his wife disappears. Am I right?” Marjorie put her muddy hands on her knees and waited.
“We’ve come too far to get impatient now and make a mistake we’ll both regret,” he said over Sunny’s body.
“What I’m going to regret,” said Marjorie, her nostrils flaring in anger, “is losing that house, my dream house, because the man who said he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me in that house is too damn cheap to pay up like he promised!” She snatched the corner of the tablecloth and grabbed Sunny’s left hand lying across her chest. Doug’s hand shot out and took Marjorie’s wrist and held it firmly. The two of them wrestled in a death grip over Sunny’s inert hand.
Surprised at Marjorie’s unrelenting grip on his wife’s hand, Doug gritted his teeth. “I said you are not taking that ring. I can hide it somewhere and we can sell it later,” he said, fighting Marjorie’s twisting arm.
“That’ll be too late. I need the money tomorrow!”
“Marjorie! Let go,” he grunted. “You’re gonna ruin the plan!” Still holding tight to the ringed palm, Marjorie pushed Doug with her free hand and he lost his balance, falling over his wife’s body and nearly bumping into her bloody head with his own.
Doug felt pressure in his chest like a boulder had been dropped on top of him. “Marjorie,” he said, and released her hand. She yanked Sunny’s diamond ring off her finger and clenched it in her grimy left hand. “My pills,” he whispered. His body shook and his face had gone as white as Sunny’s. He lay gasping on the ground next to his wife. Her skirt, now muddy from the struggle, was wound up in the tablecloth.
Marjorie held the ring up and tried to view it in the moonlight, but it was too dark to make out any sparkle. She’d clean it as soon as she got home. How a frumpy, homely woman like Sunny ever should have scored a big diamond ring like this was beyond her.
“Doug? Doug, get up. I can’t do all this myself,” said Marjorie. She shook his shoulder, but he lay there, his eyes open wide. “Doug?” She pulled her hand away instinctively, still clutching the ring against her palm. His face shone a dull blue in the night, and his cheeks glistened with perspiration. She pressed a finger against his flesh with her free hand and jerked it back. “Oh God, Doug. You ruined the plan.”
She slid the ring into her jeans pocket. Careful to pick up the shovel she’d been using, she placed the other one next to his arm, now flopped out on the dirt next to his dead wife, and she headed back across the darkened pasture as the rain began to fall.
Cathy Adams’ latestnovel,A Body’s Just as Dead, was published by SFK Press. Her writing has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. She is a short story writer with publications in The Saturday Evening Post, Utne, AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, Barely South, Five on the Fifth, Southern Pacific Review, and 55 other journals from around the world. She earned her M.F.A. at Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University, Washington, and currently teaches at the American University in Bulgaria.
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