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“Oh God, yeah. Taxies are for pussies.”
“And then what?”
“Then he pours himself a big glass of Jack and Coke and goes out by the pool and smokes a cigar.”
“Really?”
“Yep. Every night.”
“So, we just need an exploding cigar.”
“Yes, that would probably work.”
“What’s your idea?”
“Well, my secret dream is that he runs his Porsche headfirst into a tree on his drive home at night, but knowing my luck, and his luck, he’d drive headfirst into someone else and kill them. Then he’d walk away without a scratch.”
“Heisgoing to kill someone eventually,” Thom said.
“Oh, no doubt. It’s only a matter of time.”
“I feel like I’ve seen half a dozen movies where someone cuts the brake lines of someone’s car. Is that a real thing?”
“You’d know better than I do, but it doesn’t sound like a real thing.”
“So what else you got?” Thom said.
“I keep thinking about how I should just push him into the pool when he’s smoking his cigar. He’d sink like a stone.”
“He can’t swim?”
“I don’t think he can, at least not well. And definitely not if he was wearing clothes and drunk. The only time I’ve seen him in the open water is on a Jet Ski, and he wears a life vest. If he gets into the pool at all, he walks into the shallow end and stays there. Or else he lays on a float. Once, some cousin was over with her awful twin boys and they flipped him off his float. He wasn’t even completely in the deep end—he was kind of at the midway point where the bottom of the pool starts to slope—but he completely panicked. I asked him later, not that night, but a week or so later, if he liked to swim. He told me he was good at it, but it wasn’t really his thing. Which I interpreted as: he can’t swim.”
“So I think you’re onto something. It’s kind of a perfect crime if you think about it. Cause of death would be drowning, and they’d test his blood and find out he was drunk.”
“Yeah, I just think everyone would know I’d done it. Everyone in his family anyway. I think they know how I feel about him, and they definitely know how much money is involved.”
“But there’s a prenup, right?”
“Yeah, I can’t divorce him. Or, rather, I can divorce him, but I’d get nothing. But if he dies, as far as I know I’d get his money. I mean, there’s no house or anything because his parents own that, but he came into a trust fund from his grandfather when he turned twenty-one.”
“And how much is that?”
“Ten million dollars,” Wendy said. “Give or take.”
“Jesus.”
“Well, minus what he spent on the Porsche.”
“It’s still a lot of money.”
“It is.”
Thom was quiet for a moment. Wendy said, “Maybe we can change the subject.”
“Yes, let’s talk about what we would do if we had ten million dollars.”
It was dark when Wendy walked back from the hotel to Rachel’s apartment. She walked along Massachusetts Avenue instead of Oxford Street, past bars and restaurants that were filling up. The night had turned cold, but she didn’t mind. She’d already decided that this was where she wanted to live. Here in Cambridge with its old brick buildings and crisp fall weather. Or anywhere in New England, really. Just not Texas. Not with Bryce. And as much as she loved her mother, she had no interest in living in Wyoming. She wanted to be near culture, surrounded by theaters and great restaurants and universities. And she wanted to live near the ocean. This was despite,or maybe because of, the fact that she’d seen the ocean so few times in her life. Her father had moved her mother and her brother and her at least fifteen times in the course of her childhood, all around the country in search of get-rich schemes, or maybe just in search of places where he could start over again, but most of those places were out west. The two years in New Hampshire were an outlier, her father lured there by some shady friend trying to develop condos on an old racecourse. That was the first time she’d seen the ocean. They’d parked in a sprawling gravel lot, just her and her mother, and walked on a boardwalk that took them over a dune. The sight of the ocean, spread out in front of her in all its enormity, had filled her with a peculiar feeling of homecoming. This was where I should be living, she remembered thinking. It was summertime, but her mother and she had driven to the beach without suits or a beach blanket or even hats, since they owned none of those things. But they sat on the sand and took their shoes off and watched the ocean roll in and roll out again.