The Winters(80)

“Then she came back again. Dani’s mother. She showed up at the door that hot summer night almost two years ago. You know a part of the story. The air-conditioning was broken. The house was an oven. We sent Dani to bed. There was a knock at the door. But I left out the part about how Dani’s mother . . . she looked different. She said she hitchhiked to East Hampton from Florida, where she’d been living after getting out of prison for some minor drug charge. That’s where she got clean. I mean, I don’t know if she was clean, but she looked healthy, almost pretty again. I asked if anyone saw her come out here or knew she was coming back to Long Island. She said no. She had no home, no friends, no family would talk to her anymore. This time, she said, she came for Dani. She wanted to get to know her daughter, and for Dani to know her. She’d changed, she said. She’d seen her on the local news campaigning with me and was so proud of her. We were months away from the election and I was doing well in the polls. Now I was the one offering her money to go away. But she said she didn’t want money. Rebekah said, You promised this would stop, that this was over. I offered two hundred thousand, three, five, name your price, I said. I couldn’t imagine this woman in our lives. She was clean now maybe, but for how long? I slapped car keys into her hand and said, Take the Jaguar. She threw the keys on the floor. I want to see Dani, she said. She’s all I have left.

“That’s when I said, Let’s go into the greenhouse, so we don’t wake Dani. I thought we’d reason with her. I thought we’d tell her about Dani’s troubles, convince her how disruptive it would be to introduce them now, in the middle of the campaign. If we could just wait until later, we could introduce them the right way. I think I meant that. I really do.

“But once we were in the greenhouse she turned into her old threatening self again, saying, wouldn’t everyone want to know that the future senator’s wife was a shady criminal, that his Russian princess bought a baby from a desperate teenage drug addict? Isn’t that illegal? Isn’t that thirty years in prison? And guess what? I’d get custody of Dani, she said, your heir. Isn’t that funny. I’d get the money and the baby. Maybe I’d even live here. I’d win in the end, she said, because the courts always side with the mother. The real mother.

“Then Rebekah laid into her, screaming at her, threatening her, telling her that our lawyers would annihilate her, unearth every rotten crime she’d ever committed these past thirteen years. I told her to keep it down. I ducked out quickly to check on Dani, in case she woke up. I couldn’t have been gone more than two minutes, but when I returned . . . There’d been a struggle. I don’t know who started it, but Dani’s mother had . . . sunk gardening shears into Rebekah’s neck. I’d never seen so much blood. I tried to stanch the flow with an old blanket, telling Dani’s mother to call an ambulance, but she just stood there mumbling, I didn’t mean to do that, I was defending myself, she came at me first.

“Rebekah just . . . bled out onto the dirt floor. She was dead in less than a minute.”

Max clasped his hands in his lap, as if in surrender. A cold dread crept over me. The ghosts I’d felt were real. They’d been here all along.

“It finally dawned on Dani’s mother what she’d done. She looked at me and . . . she ran. And all I could think was, I can’t let her get away. What if she disappeared again? She was homeless, indigent. What if they think I killed Rebekah? Everything would come out. Buying a baby, faking an adoption, the payoffs. I threw a tarp across Rebekah’s body and tipped a table in front of her, propping it up like a shield in case Dani came down looking for us. I shut off the lights. I locked the door behind me. Dani’s mother had found the keys she’d thrown and taken off in the Jaguar. I ran to the garage to get my car. I remember Rebekah’s blood on my hands.

“She was driving fast, reckless like Rebekah. I could see her taillights ahead of me, swerving to stay on the road. I knew the curves well. She didn’t. I worried what I’d do if I caught up to her. What then? Would I kill her? I was afraid I would kill her. But sadly, she did me the favor.”

He told me he heard the impact before he drove up to the scene of the crash, the front of the car accordioned into an old oak, Dani’s mother slumped over the steering wheel, her hair a tangled curtain covering bone and blood where a pretty face used to be.

“She was almost dead,” he said, “her body just crumpled. I couldn’t get her out if I’d tried. And . . . I didn’t try. I just . . . left her there. I left her there, knowing she was almost dead, knowing the gates were closed and that no one would find her for hours.”

His face was impassive.

“It all fell together, a plan. I had to create a scenario where there was just one dead body, just Rebekah’s. And if Dani had to grieve the only mother she ever knew, she could not know her real mother had killed her. She’d never recover. There are things you do when you’re desperate, things that would shock you. I raced back to the house. I had to make sure Dani stayed asleep. I had a lot to do. I washed my hands, put on a clean shirt, then I woke her, or so I thought. You see now what a terrifying thought it is, that she was awake that night after all. Anyway, I gave her some water with a crushed sleeping pill and rubbed her back until it knocked her out. Then I went downstairs, unlocked the greenhouse. I knelt by Rebekah’s body. I said a prayer. I asked for her and for God’s forgiveness for what I was about to do, but that it was the only way to put this all in the past for good. I removed her wedding rings. I wrapped her body in a large linen tablecloth, tied it with belts. Then I got out that portable backhoe and dug a hole. The whole time I comforted myself with the idea that were this legal, it’s where she’d have wanted to be buried. I lowered her body down. I covered the hole with compost, clean dirt, and then a table.”