Page 11 of Ardently Yours

“Bury him in the woods?” she asks.

“It’s the first place they’d take cadaver dogs, and the ground is frozen solid.” I pace and ignore the pain.

I open the door to the backseat and offer Bronnie her pacifier. She screams harder in response.

“I know,” I soothe. “Mommy will feed you in a couple minutes. I’m so sorry, baby.”

“I’m not trying to be dramatic, but we have to triage. Dusty will be home in fifteen minutes,” Rochelle says.

I ease out of the backseat, then freeze when I look at her. “That’s it. The community theater building.”

Rochelle squeaks and shakes her head.

“It’s perfect.” I count off the ways on my fingertips. “It has a dirt floor basement. There are heaters and heat guns there to thaw the ground if it’s partially frozen. It has the garage bay doors to the scene shop, so we can drive the car straight inside, close it behind us, and we won’t have to take his body out in the open. It’s been there for forty years. It’ll be there for another century. Plus, there is zero budget for renovations. Nobody will touch it. If someone does find him from construction in fifty years, no one will know who the skeleton is for sure. The ghost-in-the-theater rumor has existed since at least the seventies.”

“I can’t lift him into the car or drag him down those stairs myself.”

“I can help. I’m like the Hulk. Fueled by adrenaline. If I have to, I’ll take one of my pain pills.”

“Your stitches—“

They’re already torn. “I’ll tell my OB I had an accident on the farm.”

“How do we get into the theater?” she asks.

“I have a key for working on costumes at odd hours. The building will be empty right now. The next show doesn’t audition until the middle of April.”

She blows out a controlled breath. “It could work.”

It better.“Do you have a plastic tarp and some bungee cords? We’ll wrap him up and stuff him in the trunk. I’ll drive my car. You put a ski mask on and drive his. There’s a place less than a mile from here where we can put it in neutral and push it down the ravine and into the river. After that, we go to the theater. The scene shop doors are in the back. No one will even know we’re there.”

“Okay, yes. Okay.”

I pop the trunk. The kitty litter and shovel I keep there for when the car gets stuck in the snow are in the way, so I move them to the driveway while Rochelle races to her garage.

She returns two minutes later with a blue tarp and a handful of bungee cords. “Dusty is going to bitch about all this going missing. I’ll have to come up with some reason they’re gone.”

“One crisis at a time. Lay it out in the trunk.”

She does.

“I’ll take his shoulders, you take his feet. We pick him up on ‘three’ and stuff him in there. Then we wrap the tarp around him,” I say.

Her eyebrows lift in the center. “Thank you for taking the gross part.”

“All of Jeremy Polford is ‘the gross part,’ but right now, we think of him the way we would a package of raw hamburger. He’s nothing but meat. Don’t get squeamish.” The pep talk is as much for me as it is for her.

“I don’t like this. I don’t like this. I don’t like this,” Rochelle chants as she bends and wraps her arms around his knees. “Charlotte, we killed someone."

I blow out a breath, crouch to pick him up, and do my best to angle his head so he doesn’t contaminate me. “You saved my life. You savedmy baby. No matter what else happens or how bad it gets, don’t you ever forget it.”

Crazy

Charlotte

April 1995

Apolice siren blaresits distinctive WOOP behind me. I squeeze the steering wheel and slam the back of my head against the seat.

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