I Let Him Bury Me

Three years. One contract. No questions.

Marnie Prentiss married Ward Hollis because she needed money, and he needed a wife his board would accept. When the term ran out she signed the papers without an argument, took her settlement in cash, and let him drive her to the airport himself.

She never got on that plane.

She walked out the far side of the terminal into the dark and got into somebody else's car. The charter went into the lake forty miles out that same afternoon with her name on the passenger list, and a town full of kind people buried a woman who was not in the water.

Eight years later she is a novelist two hours inland, living under a name a doctor read off a library card, with nothing in her head from before the night she came off a logging road.

Eight years later he is still dragging that lake.

Then he walks into a bookshop three hundred yards from his own dock, and the woman signing books looks up, and he goes down on one knee on the floor.

She tells him she has never met him.

And she is telling the truth.

But somebody put that car off the road on purpose. Somebody went down the slope in the dark and lifted her handbag off a dead woman's lap, and has spent eight years not knowing which of the two walked away.