Page 63 of Kill Your Darlings

She kissed her brother on the cheek. He had long hair now, longer than hers, and it suited him. Once outside in the diminishing light Wendy put her head down to make her way to the pool house. She could smell cigarette smoke in the breeze and knew that someone was around. When she got to her door a voice said, “Wendy, hold up.”

She turned to see Sloane, cigarette burning between her fingers, unsteadily making her way to her across the tarmac. Wendy thought, not for the first time, just how much Sloane looked like Bryce. They had the same small eyes, the same jawline, only Sloane tried to make up for it with neon makeup and teased hair that added six inches to her height. “Wendy, let’s talk,” she said.

“Sloane, I’m exhausted. I just want to get into bed early and try and fall asleep.”

“Sure, sure. I get it, honey. Let’s just... Do you want the rest of my cigarette? It’s making me dizzy.”

“No, thanks. Sloane, you should go to sleep as well. You’re staying here, right?”

“In my old room. Did I tell you what Daddy did? He turned it into a guest room with, like, little”—she was mimicking something with her hands, pinching at the air—“little soaps in the bathroom, and little things on the pillows.”

“I’m sorry, Sloane,” Wendy said, taking a step toward her house.

“Look, Wendy,” Sloane said, lowering her head and flicking her cigarette away. “You don’t care about my room, do you? I mean, why should you? You’re a rich widow now. You’ve got the Cooper Bryce, Bryce Cooper trust-fund money. Do you know how much money I got when I turned twenty-one? I didn’t get ten thousand million dollars. No way. Because I was born first, right, but I was a girl, so I got a lousy one thousand million dollars. Can you believe that? Because I’m a girl. Do you want to know what my friend Billy said about you? Do you know Billy?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, Billy’s my gay friend. And he told me that he thinks you killed my brother for all his money. Can you believe it?”

“Sloan, I...”

“I told him, no way, but he was like, bitch, of course she did, and I was like, Wendy wouldn’t do that. She loves my brother. But now...” Sloane was waggling a finger, and Wendy had a brief thought that if this scene were in a soap opera it would be way over the top. “But now I don’t know. Did you love my brother, or did you just kill him for all his money?”

“Good night, Sloane,” Wendy said, and turned and went through the door of the pool house.

She could hear Sloan shout out “Bitch!” and for a moment she wondered if she should go back outside, try to talk Sloan down a little, but she just didn’t care. Until that moment she’d told herself that she would need to stick around Lubbock for at least a month orso, just to make it look good, but now she wondered if it even made a difference. Everyone was probably thinking what Sloane was thinking, but would that matter? She’d been interviewed by a very friendly police officer after returning to Happy Lake, and he’d asked her some questions in an almost apologetic tone—“Was Bryce seeing anyone else that you know of?”; “Did he have any enemies?”; “Do you think he might have had a problem with alcohol?”—even though it had been abundantly clear to her that there was no evidence of any kind of foul play. Still, it didn’t surprise her now to find out that at least one member of the family suspected she’d orchestrated this death. It was a lot of money, after all.

She turned off all the lights in the pool house so that no one would come and check on her, see if she was still awake, and then she got into bed with a flashlight and the Milan Kundera novel she’d been slowly trying to work her way through. She eventually fell into a thin version of sleep, but before that she went over and over both what she’d done to arrive in this moment and what she would be doing next. She thought more about telling the family she was planning on leaving sooner rather than later, that she needed to visit her mother, and then she would be looking for somewhere new to live. If they were going to think of her as a villain, then who was she to stop them?

1992

August22

10:23 p.m.

The first stab of the knife, deep into her neck, had probably killed her. Or it would have, eventually, the way that she was bleeding out. But he ended up stabbing her two times more, some small voice in the back of his head telling him to make it look like a crazed killer because that’s who was doing this. A crazed killer.

Before getting back into his rental car he looked down at the hunting knife in his hand. He was still wearing gloves. The knife had blood on it and so did his glove. There was a sidewalk grate just behind his rental and Thom bent, slotting the folded-open knife through the narrow grate, and then pushed both gloves through as well. He stood up fast and for a moment he thought he was going to go down again. His head felt loose on his neck, and everything was out of focus. But he recovered and moved to the driver’s-side door. He looked around briefly before getting inside. There was no one else on the street, just him, and the woman’s body on the sidewalk. He’d rolled her so that she lay up against the side of a brick building, looking as if she were sleeping there, some kind of vagrant and not a murder victim. But that wasn’t really what she looked like. Evenon her side she looked distinctly dead. Someone would spot her very soon.

Thom drove away. Later, he couldn’t really remember how he’d done it, but he managed to wend his way out of the city of Lubbock and back onto Route 84, heading to Austin. He had driven an hour, focusing on maintaining the exact speed limit, when the Please Refuel light went on. He kept driving, the miles sliding by, no sign of a gas station, and began to wonder if this was the end of the story. He’d run out of gas and that was how they’d catch him, a murderer marooned on the side of the road. But he reached an exit that promised gas and food and pulled off the main road, eventually locating an indie gas station called Plangman’s Filling Station, which was self-service. There was also a restroom with an outside entrance. He worried it would be locked, but the door swung open and he stepped inside. There was no urinal, just a sink and a toilet, all of their dried-on grime illuminated by a single tube of white fluorescence. He locked the door behind him, and then, without even knowing he was nauseous, he bent over the toilet and threw up violently, tears streaming from his eyes. Then he went to the cracked mirror screwed in above the sink and looked at his face. He was pale, his eyes puffier than usual, but other than that, he looked like himself. He was a murderer now, and would be for the rest of his life. That was a fact that would never change. Suddenly he remembered the blood that had been dripping from his hand in Lubbock and began to check his clothes for other evidence of the crime he’d just committed. He stepped back so he could see himself better in the mirror. There was nothing on his face, nothing in his hair or on his clothes. He ran his hands down the back of his legs to see if anything felt sticky or damp, but they were clean. How was it possible that he hadn’t gotten any blood on him at all? Had he imagined the whole thing? Was he in the midst of a lucid dream, all logic suspended? Then he spotted one dark spot near his hairline,a single drop of blood, and he spent a minute rubbing at it with the corner of a paper towel until it was well and truly gone.

Before leaving the bathroom he splashed cold water on his face, drinking some of it from his cupped hands. Inside the gas station he gave a twenty-dollar bill to an old man wearing a straw cowboy hat, then he went and pumped his own gas. The trigger on the pump turned itself off when the meter hit $20.00, and Thom replaced the nozzle. It took him a moment when he was back in the car to remember which direction he was going in, but he managed to get back onto the quiet highway.

Twenty minutes later he began to shake. He noticed it in his mouth first, his teeth chattering if he didn’t keep them clamped together. But then his whole body was starting to vibrate, and a deep cold was suffusing his core. He tensed all his muscles, tightening his grip on the steering wheel, but that only made it worse. A sign indicated that there was a truck stop a mile ahead and he told himself he could pull off there. As soon as he made that decision, his shaking got worse, his whole body racked with involuntary movement, and he wondered if he was dying, having a heart attack or stroke. He pulled into the truck stop, managing to maneuver the car around the back of a dimly lit restaurant into a parking space under a busted streetlamp. He cut the engine and curled tightly into himself, still shaking rapidly. Sweat was beginning to build up on his scalp and the back of his neck, even though he still felt impossibly cold. He clambered over the two front seats and lay down on the backseat, curled up. He didn’t know how long it was, but he stopped shaking eventually. Maybe that was the worst of it, he told himself, sitting up in the backseat. In the distance he watched a truck driver leaning against the rear of his vehicle, smoking a cigarette. Thom was in a brief period of not smoking cigarettes but knew that as soon as he was back in Austin, he would need to find an all-night convenience store to buy a pack.

He got out of the car to shake out his limbs.

No one will ever know about this, he said to himself. Wendy would know some of it, of course, but not what happened in downtown Lubbock. And not how he felt right now. Somehow this decision calmed him, and he took a deep breath of Texas air. Before getting back into the car he looked up at the enormous sky. That song went through his head again—bigand bright, stars at night. He’d heard it recently but maybe it had only been in his head.

1992

August22

9:55 p.m.

Thom moved forward on the balls of his feet, racing across the concrete apron and shoving Bryce in the lower back. Wendy’s husband expelled a sound, a squeal that seemed to come more from being frightened than from the physicality of being shoved. He landed in the water, awkwardly, his arms flailing, his face slapping the surface. For five seconds he churned in place, his head coming up, shouting something unintelligible. Thom had already spotted the pool skimmer used to scoop leaves and made his way to it, thinking that if he could get the net around Bryce’s big head he could hold him under that way. But when he reached the skimmer Bryce was still flailing in the water, being dragged down by his waterlogged sweatshirt, now clearly shouting out “Help!” whenever he could get his mouth above the surface. Bryce was so frantic that it wasn’t even clear if he knew that Thom was there. Thom crouched, keeping an eye on him, now steadily but slowly working himself to the edge of the pool, trying not to swallow water. He was nearly there when he went under again, quietly almost. Then he seemed to have one last burst of energy and managed to get a hand on the pool’s edge, lifting his headone last time above the water and seeing Thom looming above him. Bryce’s eyes lit up with hope at the sight of Thom, and he seemed to say something, but his mouth was full of water. In his excitement his hand had come off the pool’s edge. Thom went down to his knees and leaned forward, placing his hand on the top of Bryce’s head and pushing. There was no resistance, Bryce went under again and Thom held him there for half a minute—or longer; he wasn’t sure. When he took his hand away, Bryce had stopped moving. His cigar, snuffed out now, bumped against the edge of the pool. For one absurd moment Thom thought ofCaddyshack, a film he’d loved when he was twelve, the cigar reminding him of the candy bar floating in the pool that everyone thought was something else.

Thom stayed where he was, watching Bryce bobbing in the pool, his arms outstretched. Another film crept into his mind. A dead man in a pool, filmed from below.Sunset Boulevard. The night was quiet again, not even the sound of coyotes in the distance. He kept waiting for a team of police to race in from somewhere, or for Bryce’s father to emerge from the big house, but nothing had changed. Except that Bryce had fallen into the pool and drowned.

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