Page 10 of Ardently Yours

“I know. We have to call the police.”

She steps toward the house, and I lurch for her. “Stop.”

Rochelle’s lower lip trembles.

“Don’t cry. Bronnie’s already crying. If you start, then I’ll join you, and you’re the one who always sayswe can’t think when we’re crying,” I say.

Her face crumples. “We can’t call the cops, can we? I heard him. He said he was framing you for a murder/suicide. That gun isn’t going to be registered to him.”

“Neither of us has a mark on us. The last time he came after me, I had his blood under my fingernails and bruises all over me. The sheriff said there was no way to prove I wasn’t the one who attacked him first.”

“Everyone knows we hated him. They’re going to say we lured him out here and killed him,” she says.

I crouch carefully beside him, pain spearing through me from my torn stitches, and attempt to locate a pulse.

His eyelids drift open.

Rochelle screams.

I scream.

Lightning fast, I grab the shovel from her hands and smack him in the head again. This time, his eyes stay open.

“His head is bashed in. What did you think he was going to do to us with half a brain?” she whisper-screams.

“I don’t know. I panicked!”

I stand and blow out a hard breath. “Nobody knows he’s here. He wouldn’t have told anyone he was on his way to follow me around and frame me for murder.”

She nods. “This is good.”

Nothingis good right now.

“No one can see us from the road. We take care of it ourselves. We make him disappear,” I say.

“Maybe you could call that lawyer,” she says.

“Even if he believes us, which is a huge ‘if’, what’s he going to do? He’ll tell us to turn ourselves in, and we’ll end up convicted. This looks like we murdered him. Ididmurder him.”

“That could have been his eyes popping open like dead people’s eyes do. Or if not, then he was probably going to die from his previous injury already, which was definitely self defense.”

“You’re right. That’s how we’re thinking of it from here on out.”

“What do we do with him?” she wails.

“We have to think,” I say.

“What about feeding him to the pigs? Pigs could work,” she says, her voice too fast and too high.

“It would be lovely to have a whole farm full of pigs, but we have two, and I don’t trust the ones we have toeat himin atimely fashion, Rochelle.” My tone rides the edge of hysteria. “Mabel’s been off for the last two days. Dad said the vet was coming to check on her this afternoon.”

Rochelle moans. “How do we get rid of his body? What do we do with his car?”

I nudge the corpse with the tip of my sneaker and swallow. “We’ll work out a plan.”

“We could put him in his car and push him over a ravine into the river.”

“That’ll work for his vehicle. But if they find it, and he’s in it, that shovel-shaped dent will look suspicious.” The longer we stand here with his body cooling, the more urgency floods through me. We have to do something now.

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