Once Upon a River (21 page)

“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 of the fingerprints. She re-covered the body and the shotgun with the tarp.

“Margaret, honey, we’ll tell them he raped you. We’ll tell them he threatened to kill me. You said I’ve got a mark on my throat.” He reached up and felt his neck. “Let’s call them right now.”

“I’ll go to jail, won’t I?”

“I don’t know,” Michael said. “God, you’re so young, too young for this. Too young to know a man like that. When I learned your real age, I should have sent you home.”

Margo thought of Billy, how the police took him, and he was a Murray. Murrays could do about anything without paying a price.

“They’ll want to question you,” Michael said. “And me. Both of us. Let’s get in the Jeep right now and drive to the police station. Tell them the whole story.”

Margo squinted downstream into the setting sun. Darkness often crept in without her noticing, until suddenly the riverbanks were black. Now she was grateful to sense night coming on.

“Say something, Margaret. You’re scaring me.”

“You don’t have to worry,” she said.

“You’ve never done anything like this before. They won’t be hard on you. Though I hate to guess what they’ll think of me when they find out I’m with a seventeen-year-old girl.”

Margo resisted the urge to go into the house to retrieve her rifle for fear she might change her mind or lose confidence in her plan. Really she didn’t want to go upstream with Paul; she wanted to stay with Michael and soothe him, try to make him understand how dangerous Paul had been, how he wasn’t like other people. She had saved Michael’s life, but so far he wasn’t listening to her.

She took a few breaths, absorbed the river’s movement through her feet and legs. Fish and turtles and water birds were her family, she supposed, not humans, despite the comfort she might get from food and beds, from hot showers and lovemaking. Even when she had lived in her father’s house, every morning in summer and winter the river had spoken to her more clearly than he had.

She sat in the driver’s seat, started up the boat’s engine, and studied the dashboard. Gasoline fanned out on the water behind the boat, glistened in colors that became psychedelic in the fading light.

As she moved upstream in the growing darkness, she heard a
crunch
behind her. Cleo tore through the screen of the aluminum storm door. She jumped out through the hole she had made and ran to the edge of the river, out to the float. The last time Margo turned around, she saw Michael sitting cross-legged, hugging the fishing dog.

When she returned on foot just before five a.m., Michael was in the shower. She dug a T-shirt out of her backpack, put it on, and checked to make sure her jeans were dry before sitting on the edge of the bed. She ran her hands over King Cleo’s head and waited. When Michael entered the bedroom and saw her, he dropped the towel he’d been adjusting around his waist.

“I should go to the police,” he said. He picked up his towel and covered himself. “I’ve thought about it all night.”

“The boat is in Heart of Pines,” she whispered. “It’s tied up in his regular spot, upstream of the Gas and Grocery. They might not find him under the tarp for days. Maybe weeks.” She reached her hand out to Michael, and he automatically accepted it.

“Don’t tell me any more,” Michael said and let her hand go.

“I didn’t leave any fingerprints. I hid out until dark and then parked the boat. Nobody saw me.” Then she had walked back along the river road. She’d tied her bloody T-shirt around a rock. She’d filled her work gloves with muck and sunk them.

“You can’t kill a person and not pay the consequences.”

She pulled her hand back into her lap. She didn’t know if that was true, or whether any of Michael’s rules would hold up over the long haul. After all, Brian had gotten away with killing a man up north, until he’d stupidly attacked Cal. Maybe she would pay different consequences than the ones Michael expected.

She knew Michael hated it when she clammed up. She had hoped he would’ve changed his mind during the night, but if anything, now he was more certain they should call the police.

“Over this last year, I thought you’d changed,” he said and closed his eyes.

“Changed how? I thought you liked me how I was.”

“But you haven’t learned anything.”

“What do you want me to learn?”

“That you can’t live like a wolf girl. That there are laws for a reason, that laws allow us to live together. Even finishing school—there’s a reason for it, so you can be a better citizen. Now I see that. If you turn yourself in this morning, I’ll do anything for you. I’ll hire you the best lawyer I can afford. I’ll spend every penny I have to get you free. Maybe you won’t even go to jail. I could tell them he was crushing my throat, like you said.”

She studied his face, tried to figure out whether he would really turn her in, whether he would be able to lie for her. He was an honest person, and she didn’t want him to have to lie.

“Stop it,” Michael said. “Stop sitting there looking like a kidnapped Indian maiden. I didn’t steal you, Margaret Louise. You came to me. Remember. You came to me.” He shook his head. “You came to me with no home, and I took you in.”

She went back to petting the fishing dog. Maybe Michael had seen her the way he saw Cleo, as a pleasant creature for whom he could provide a home.

“I’m trying, Margaret, but I’m scared,” he said. “Tell me you’ve never done anything like this before. Tell me you’ve never shot anybody.” He let his face fall into his hands. “Oh, God, you have killed someone before.”

“No. I just shot him. I didn’t kill him. He did something. I was just getting even so I didn’t have to send
him
to jail. Jail is worse than being shot for some people.” Margo looked out through the sliding door, settled her gaze on the reflection of Michael’s security light on the surface of the dark river.

Michael sat at the end of the bed beside her. “Why did this have to happen?” he said. “Tell me what you’re feeling, Margaret.”

“He could have killed you,” she said. She didn’t know how she felt except that she was scared.

“You’re probably right he could have hurt me,” Michael said. “Was that his shotgun?”

“His brother gave me that shotgun. I didn’t steal it.”

“Maybe it would be just a little while in jail. A juvenile home, maybe, with other kids.”

“I don’t think I could stand one day,” she said. “Would you turn me in?”

“I’d have to. Or I’ll go to jail, too, for being an accessory. But you’ll turn yourself in, won’t you?”

“Why don’t we just wait and see what happens?”

“I can’t live that way, dreading what might happen. Knowing I’m guilty of a crime. Thinking any day the hammer could fall.”

Margo herself had lived with dread, like every other creature in the wild. Dread about what she might lose or who she might encounter that day, maybe someone who wished her harm.

“You can’t stay here if you don’t turn yourself in,” Michael said.

She was startled to hear the words spoken so bluntly, but it all made sense. She’d known this orderly, comfortable place wasn’t her home. Michael had given her clothes and books, but he hadn’t changed who she was.

“I can’t have anything to do with you ever again if you don’t turn yourself in,” he said.

The dog raised her head from Margo’s thigh and looked at her.

Margo stood up and dragged her backpack from the closet. If she turned herself in, not only would she be locked away, but Michael might spend all his money and destroy his own life in the process of defending her. She had no choice. She would give up the comforts here and return to her real life on the river.

“Oh, Margaret. This is all a mess,” he said.

Margo took her hairbrush off the dresser. She moved as deliberately as she could, putting her few stray things into her bag, which was already packed, as it had been the whole time she’d been there. She pulled her rifle from the wooden rack Michael had built. She slung it over her left shoulder, dropped the four boxes of .22 cartridges into her bag, and looked around for any other evidence she had been there. She hadn’t brought much into the house other than what they’d eaten. She took the new Annie Oakley book from the bedside stand. She wanted to take the Indian hunter book, but Michael had not given that to her. She said goodbye to the fishing dog and to Michael without looking at either of them and headed toward the river.

• Chapter Thirteen •

When Margo arrived at the marijuana house, the midnight crickets were screaming. On her twelve-hour, thirty-some-mile trip downstream she had passed swampy places croaking with bullfrogs, but here the tree frogs chirped like insects. Margo pulled her boat onto the sand and climbed up the bank. The place was overgrown, spooky in its neglect. The dock was pulled out of the water, and grass and weeds poked up through the slats. Plywood was nailed over several of the windows, and glass shards in the dirt reflected moonlight. Both doors had padlocks on them. She lit the kerosene lantern she’d swiped from Brian’s cabin before heading down the river. She held the lantern up and read the signs posted on both doors: K
EEP
O
UT
N
O
T
RESPASSING
, with T
HIS
M
EANS
Y
OU
spray-painted beneath. Junior’s pot leaf had been painted over. When neither of the uncovered windows would budge, she began to pry at one of the pieces of plywood.

Before coming down the river, she had hung around downstream from Michael’s house for a few days, but did not see any police. She knew they would eventually find Paul, and they’d almost certainly investigate the cabin on stilts. She’d slipped inside the cabin to procure a few items for her journey: the lantern, a small folding military shovel that she was now using to pry at the plywood, a fishing pole, a bottle of bug dope, and a jug of water. She had wiped clean all the surfaces that might contain fingerprints, but if the police brought drug-sniffing dogs, they would smell her. She hoped that Michael had not contacted the authorities. She was sorry to have hurt him.