Along a narrow ridge high above the creek he tripped over a rock and fell, scraping his right shin and landing heavily on a knee. He was lucky he didn’t slip over the side, skittering down the hillside with the pebbles he’d kicked loose. He pushed himself up, glancing down at the swollen creek rushing fast some twenty feet below. Among the green and brown, he noticed something pink in the water. He leaned forward, bracing his body against a maple sapling, blinking the water out of his eyes, but he couldn’t tell what it was.
He ran more slowly down the hill, trying to keep the thing in view as he drew closer, ignoring the stinging scrape on his leg and the pain in his knee. When he came to the bank of the creek he could see something resting under the water.
He undid his shoes and slid off the bank, the water frigid despite the heat of the day, his toes sinking in muck, a swirl of silt disturbing his view. He reached forward blindly, stirred his arm in the soup, and felt rocks and leaves and something harder, heavy, which had settled at the bottom. He tugged and it burst out of the water, spraying him in the face, a woman’s running shoe, white stained brown by the water with pink stripes and pink laces. It was Elsa’s.
For a moment he did nothing but stand there, staring at the dripping shoe dangling from his hand. Then he looked wildly around... expecting what? To see someone in the trees watching him? The rain fell in a steady curtain, but he plunged down the creek anyway, blindly searching, his hair sopping and stringy in his eyes, his feet long since numb.
He could feel his heart thudding in time with the rushing water. He didn’t think about the shoe in his hand, didn’t think about the slender foot it belonged to, didn’t think about what he was really looking for in the creek. Until suddenly he spotted her, lodged in the crux of an oak tree’s roots, which had spread from the eroding bank like fingers raking the water and acted like a sieve, capturing anything solid that came within reach. She was facedown, her head pinned by the tree, arms forward as if she were going for a swim, except one arm was at an odd angle, as if it had been twisted, and her long, bare, muscled legs bobbed uselessly behind her, the other shoe still on its foot.
He fought the current to get to her, sobbing at the sight of her pale, perfect skin and hair laced with flotsam — broken bits of fern, splinters of bark, the single teal claw of a crayfish. He grasped her shoulder, turning her over, and saw a large, gaping wound on one side of her head, a hole really, the hair near it matted and bloody. He thought he caught a glimpse of gray matter underneath that, before he let her flop facedown again in the water.
She was dead. The closest he’d come to a dead person had been a nine-year-old’s view of his grandmother lying heavily powdered and stiff in a shiny box, but he knew Elsa was gone even before he’d seen her eyes clouded over like a dead trout. He pictured her husband waiting along the trail and striking her with a tire iron as she turned the corner.
With shaking hands he pulled his cell phone free of his wet pocket to call 911 but stopped short, suddenly realizing that he had bigger things to fear than Elsa’s body floating in the water.
If he told the police about Michael Cantata’s violence they would ask how he knew and he would have to confess to the affair. And Christine would kill him if she found out about it. Divorce him at the very least. If he survived her wrath he faced a future in which he only got to visit Henry and Sam every other weekend and had to share the title of “Dad” with another man. He knew Christine wouldn’t live alone. She’d find someone just to spite him and someone who made more money or who wasn’t going to lose his hair or who already belonged to the stupid country club.
And this was his future only if the police believed that Michael Cantata and not Andrew had done the killing. Why should they believe him? He was the one standing in the water with the body.
Panicked, Andrew peeled off his soggy T-shirt, swiped roughly at the spot on Elsa’s shoulder that he’d touched, and then backed away from the body before turning and splashing back up the creek, fighting the current to get away. It wasn’t until he’d climbed out on the bank that he realized he was still holding Elsa’s shoe. He wiped it down frantically before hurling it back in the center of the creek where it sank with a horrific splash before bobbing slowly to the surface. He scrambled into his own shoes, fingers fumbling with the laces, feet squelching in the soles. He walked back along the trail, watching the rain eroding his footprints in the mud, until he got to the fork; he took the left path and ran down it fast, so that if someone had seen him, he could say that he’d taken this trail and had never been near the creek.
When Andrew got back to the parking lot there were no cars except his and Elsa’s. They were visible from the road. How many people had passed by and seen his car? His stomach cramped when he remembered that he’d touched the BMW, and he forced himself to walk casually over. When there were no cars whizzing by he rubbed his T-shirt across the windows to smudge any potential prints.
He didn’t remember driving home. He was in the mud room ineffectively drying himself with paper towels while water puddled around him when Christine appeared in the doorway.
He jumped. “Hi!” His voice sounded manic. “I didn’t expect you home so soon. Are the boys with you?”
“My mother’s bringing them home in a little while. They’re enjoying playing in the rain.” She stared at him and he forced his gaze up to her standing there in a terry cloth robe with comb marks visible through her damp hair. “You were out running in this weather?”
He nodded, ducked his head again. “Crazy. This rain is unbelievable.” He was shaking, but she didn’t comment. “Could you get me a towel?”
He stayed in the shower for twenty-five minutes, hoping the noise covered his sobbing. Then he ran his clothes through the washer. Christine joined him in the laundry room and said she would do it with the regular wash, but he insisted. He moved his shoes into the laundry room too, cleaning off every bit of mud before turning them upside down on an old newspaper to dry.
All that long afternoon and evening he expected to hear sirens, but they never came. He wondered if they’d found Elsa’s body yet and watched the evening news braced for an announcement, but there was nothing.
At night the magnitude of what he’d done weighed on him and he couldn’t sleep. He was letting a man get away with murder. He was sure Elsa’s husband had killed her. He thought of writing an anonymous letter to the police to alert them that this was no accidental death, but if he fingered Michael Cantata then that long finger would eventually touch him. They would find out about his affair, and when they found out, so would Christine.
It suddenly occurred to him that this was Michael Cantata’s intent: He’d killed his wife to frame Andrew, who’d been foolish enough to think that washing away his footprints and rubbing off her car windows could erase his presence from Elsa’s life. His fingerprints were all over her house.
What day did her cleaning service come? Did they clean well enough to remove all traces of him from the house? His stomach roiled. He couldn’t sleep until finally he did, only to dream over and over of Elsa’s body floating in the water.
They were eating breakfast at the kitchen table when he heard the faint sound of a siren. He finished chewing his bite of toast, swallowed down a dry throat. The wailing grew louder and louder. He forced himself to take a bite of eggs, but Henry pushed back from the table and ran to the living room window to see. “Henry, come back to the table,” Christine called.