The Bodies Left Behind

there wasn’t much. She’d stolen from poor Graham’s truck everything that contained her fingerprints—the map she’d given Hart and her purse. And when she’d swapped boots with her poor dead “friend,” Michelle had wiped down her Ferragamos with glass cleaner (Brynn, leaving $1,700 Italian leather? God, I hate you).
    Now, the evidence from Lake Mondac was no longer a threat. But one very real risk remained. It needed to be disposed of.
    And that would happen today.
    Michelle dried her toenails with a hair dryer, pleased with the results, though irritated that she hadn’t been able to get to the salon; with Hart loose she had to limit her trips out.
    She left the luxurious bedroom and stepped into the living room where Rolfe sat on the couch with her daughter, Tory, five, and her son, Bradford, a skinny boy of seven, who didn’t smile much but had a wad of blond hair you just could not resist ruffling. She couldn’t look at her children without her heart swelling with a mother’s love.
    Rolfe had a pleasant face and lips that weren’t too disgusting. On the negative side, he needed to lose about forty pounds and his hair smelled of lilac, which was gross. She hated his tattoo. Michelle had nothing against tats in general but he had a star on his groin. A big star. The pubic hair grew through part of it and his belly covered up another part depending on how he sat.
    Oh please . . .
    But Michelle was no complainer if the script didn’t call for complaining. Rolfe had plenty of money from his trucking company and she could put up with making her sculpted body frequently available to him in exchange for . . . well, just about anything she wanted.
    Michelle was an expert at spotting the Sam Rolfes of the world—men who heard, saw and believed. If God gives you a lazy streak, a slow mind for school or a trade, expensive tastes, a pretty face and better body, then you damn well better be able to sniff out men like that the way a snake senses a confused mouse.
    Of course, you had to be watchful. Always.
    Now, seeing her son and Rolfe laugh at something the TV judge was saying, looking like father and son, Michelle was enraged with jealousy. She had a momentary urge to tell Rolfe to go fuck himself and to walk out the door with her children.
    But she pulled back. However angry she became, which was usually red-hot angry, she was usually able to control it. Survival. She did this now and smiled, though she also thought, with some glee: No blow jobs tonight, dear.
    She wondered if he’d been talking about her to the children. She sensed he had been. She’d interrogate the boy later.
    “Something wrong?” he asked.
    “Nothing,” she said and ushered her son off the couch and ordered him to get her a soda from the kitchen.
    She watched Brad wander off. And the jealousy switched, finger snap, to overwhelming love.
    Unable to have children, despite trying since shewas sixteen, Michelle Kepler had been lucky enough to befriend a single mother in Milwaukee’s netherworld, on the pretext of volunteering with a nonprofit organization to help the disadvantaged.
    HIV-positive from sex or drugs or both, Blanche was often sick and would leave her son and daughter in Michelle’s care. Despite her prescription-drug cocktails to keep AIDS at bay, the poor woman’s condition worsened fast—but she could take some solace in her written agreement to name Michelle as the custodian of the children if anything happened to her.
    Which was fortunate because the woman died much sooner than expected.
    A sad event.
    Not long after which Michelle spent some time flushing down the toilet the six months’ worth of prescription AIDS medicines she’d withheld from Blanche, substituting Tylenol, Prilosec and children’s vitamins (which, thriftily, she also gave to the kids).
    Now these two children were hers. She loved them with all her being. Doing what they were told, adoring her and—as the therapist told her in a court-ordered session years ago—validating an otherwise unremarkable life. But fuck the therapists; Michelle knew what she wanted. Always had.
    In fact, one of the tragedies of that night in April—thanks to the unexpected appearance of Brynn’s husband with a gun—was Michelle’s loss of Amy, another girl she could have brought into her family. After killing Brynn and Hart (Lewis too, if Hart hadn’t done that for her), she’d have slipped away with her new daughter.
    But that hadn’t worked