Page 74 of Don’t Tell Me How to Die

SEVENTY-TWO

twenty-six years before the funeral

I remember every detail of that day vividly. It was the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, and I was a senior at Heartstone High School. The previous day Johnny and I had broken into Connie’s house, and we’d discovered the manila folder with my mother’s obituary and the details of our family life that Connie had highlighted when she was looking for her next widower to victimize.

I was determined to stop her, but how does a seventeen-year-old girl go up against a career criminal?

Beth. Beth Webster. Saint Beth. The librarian who cared so deeply about my father’s pain that she had sent him a book that he of course never bothered to open. I liked her, trusted her, never once dreaming that she’d one day become my surrogate mother, Grandma Beth to my kids, and one of my closest confidants.

Years later she told me how uncharacteristically reticent I was that day. “After you asked me how to get background information on someone, I knew that it wasn’t a school project,” she said. “I could see the troubled look on your face. And then you very meekly said, ‘Her name is Connie... or maybe it’s Constance... Gilchrist,’ and I knew I was about to dive into treacherous waters.”

Treacherous waters or not, Beth dove in headfirst. She drilled down into those LexisNexis files and gave me the ammunition I needed. Grand larceny. Three victims. Prison time. Genghis Connie was everything I’d feared she was and worse.

My father and Connie had taken the train to New York, and later that day he called to say they wouldn’t be home until the following morning.

That night I had the dream. More like a vision. My mother and I were sitting on a blanket on the grass at Magic Pond. The red Mustang came out of nowhere, barreling toward us. Connie was behind the wheel. My mother stood up, but she was powerless to stop the stranger who had run off with both her car and her husband. Then she turned to me, her eyes pleading, “Don’t let that woman take Daddy.”

I woke up that Sunday morning determined to confront Connie, to throw her criminal past in her face, to threaten her, to bargain with her if I had to—I was ready to do anything to drive her out of our lives.

No, not anything. I hadn’t planned on killing her.

That afternoon I taunted her with everything I’d unearthed about her, every crime she’d committed, every lie she’d told, every trust she’d violated, but she didn’t go down easily. She laughed in my face, challenged me, and threatened to have me arrested for breaking and entering.

But I kept at it, exercising my budding litigation skills, my harangues beginning to sound less and less like toothless teenage tirades and more like serious threats of exposure that could result in dire consequences.

And in the end, she buckled under. I’d won. She agreed to leave town. But she couldn’t go gently. She lashed out at me by prodding the rawest nerve in my body. She attacked my mother.

“Finn McCormick couldn’t possibly have fathered a piece of shit like you,” she said. “My best guess—you’re the product of some lowlife dirtbag who fucked your worthless tramp of a mother. I hope she rots in hell.”

Those were the last words she ever spoke. Tears streaming down my face I lunged at her, hurling her backward against the fireplace. I could hear the crack as her skull met stone. I think she was dead before she sank to the floor.

I knew in an instant that my life was over. College, a career, my entire future gone in a moment of blind rage. Unless...

I paged Johnny. He knew what to do. First, we wrapped the body in plastic bags and dragged it to the garage. Then we cleaned up the blood.

“Don’t they have some kind of chemical that can tell you if blood was there even if it’s wiped up?” I said.

“Luminol,” he said. “You spray it, and if there’s any trace of blood, it glows blue in the dark. Right now this place looks clean, but I guarantee you it would light up like a Christmas tree.”

“Then we’ll get caught.”

“Only if they spray it, and they won’t. Connie is a grifter, a con artist. She’s going to steal a bunch of shit from your father, and then she’s going to take off. The cops are going to have a warrant out for her arrest. They won’t be coming around here spraying the place with Luminol. Any other questions?”

“Just one,” I said. “What do we do with the body?”

“You’re right!” he said, smacking his forehead like he’d forgotten one small detail. “We can’t leave her wrapped up in the garage. Sooner or later, she’s going to start to stink up the joint.”

“It’s not funny, Johnny. If they find her, I’m going to go to jail.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re not going to jail. Next year this time, you’ll be in college.”

“Are you sure?”

He flashed me a smile. “Trust me,” he said. “I got it all worked out in my head.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I owe you one.”

Ten years later, at a crime scene on East Shore Road, while the four-hundred-pound body of a drug dealer named Sammy Womack was being pried out of the wreckage of his Escalade, I broke every ethics code in the book and finally made good on my debt.