He Started It(71)

If I weight him down, it will be obvious he was murdered. For this to be considered an accident, I have to get more creative. Luckily, the rocks along the side of the shore are helpful. Also luckily, bodies are easy to move in the water. It’s a fairly simple thing to lodge his body halfway behind the rocks. He stays under that way, like he got stuck and ended up drowning.

I take one last look before walking away.

Our marriage was never going to work.

When I met Felix, I had no one. My father was dead, my mother in prison, Nikki had been gone for years, and I certainly wasn’t close to Eddie or Portia. If I’m being perfectly, totally, 100 percent honest, I was so lonely, anyone I met could’ve become my husband. It just happened to be Felix. He was the one I latched onto, clung to, stayed with, and married. And for the most part, he’s been a wonderful husband—at least right up until he slammed his fist on the dashboard, reminding me that even the kind, easygoing men are capable of violence. I’m not waiting around to see if that fist hits me.

No, I don’t need Felix anymore, not the way I used to. Don’t even want him, because I’m going to find Nikki.

My mother would understand, because she realized the same thing about Dad. She just didn’t need him anymore. Not if he was going to insist Nikki was dead.

Remember, a cheating wife is just one deal breaker. Murder is the other, which means neither my mother nor I can be the heroine of this story.





We have to call the police.”

When Nikki disappeared, that’s what I said. We have to call the police.

Grandpa looked at me like I was the crazy one.

I turned to Eddie, who couldn’t hate our sister that much. “We can’t just leave her out here,” I said.

“You know what the police said when she ran away,” Eddie said.

Which time? There had been quite a few. The first was years earlier, and the police were pretty serious about looking for her, given that she had been fourteen, and young girls who disappeared were all over the cable news back then.

They found Nikki in less than a day. She was hiding at a friend’s house.

The second time she ran away, they didn’t take it as seriously. They said, “She’ll be back in a few days.”

The third time, they barely wrote a report. Nikki always came back whenever she stopped having fun or ran out of money. They usually happened at the same time.

“She’ll call Mom and Dad when she’s ready,” Eddie said.

“No,” I said. This wasn’t like when Nikki ran away at home, where she had friends and family and a town she was familiar with. This was the wilderness.

And she was pregnant.

“We have to find her,” I said.

“Where? How?” Eddie said. He was throwing his stuff in his bag, no longer looking for Nikki. “Just let her go. She knows how to use a phone.”

I went to Grandpa, who was cleaning up our cooking stuff. “Please,” I said. “I bet we can find her.”

He looked at me, his eyes hard. “Did you help her?”

“Of course I didn’t help her! No!”

Grandpa just stared at me.

“Do you really want to go back home without Nikki?” A threat, yes. I’m not even sure I knew I was making it. The question just seemed obvious. “Do you want to explain this to Mom?”

“Nikki!” Portia yelled. She may have been tricked by Nikki, but Portia still wanted to find her. “Nikki!”

She just kept yelling. No one answered.

Grandpa sighed. He looked off into the woods, maybe thinking about what to do next.

“We really should call the police,” I said.

He sighed. “Before we do that, let’s try to find her first. You know she runs away a lot.”

I had to agree with that.

“Do you have any idea where she would go?” Grandpa asked.

I smiled. Yes, I did know. “Ever seen Thelma & Louise?” I said.

“Your grandmother loved that movie,” he said. “I never understood it.”

“Nikki loves it, too. And there’s a desert in it. She always talks about seeing that desert.”

“Then let’s go see the desert.”

It was impossible for me to know, to visualize, just how big the desert was, or that there were so many of them. At least we were looking for her, though. That was the important thing.



* * *



–––––

No such luck for Felix. I went back to camp and gathered up his things before Eddie and Portia were awake. It wasn’t even seven in the morning. Sometimes daylight savings is a good thing.

I hid his things in the bushes near where we went swimming. They were buried well, so no one would stumble across them anytime soon. Last, I went back to our camp and made more instant coffee, like I had just woken up and hadn’t gone for a walk, hadn’t gone swimming, hadn’t killed my husband.

I make it sound easy, right? Like killing someone is an everyday thing for me. It isn’t, I promise.

What I can tell you is that the killing is the easy part. It’s the getting away with it that makes it so difficult. Eventually, Felix will be found. That’s a different set of problems than having him here.

Portia wakes up first. She holds her head as she walks over to me, obviously hung over.