Third Degree (A Murder 101 Mystery)

store. I hope he had learned, like I did, that men didn’t want to think about their prostates when a cup of coffee was all they desired.
    “How many ways can a man die?” I asked. I was thinking out loud. “Carter Wilmott had a lot of strikes against him and he was going to die one way or the other. He had a terminal illness—”
    “He did?”
    I nodded. “And then there was the car that was destined to blow up, coupled with the fight,” I said, making my way closer to Greg as I began to exit the vessel. “And finally, the poisoning.”
    Even in the faded light, I saw Greg’s face change and it was then that I knew what was going to happen next.

Thirty-Two
     
    Dying turned out to be not quite as dramatic as I would have thought.
    Greg, a lumbering six foot five—and, if I had to guess, a good two hundred and eighty pounds—would have been the perfect person to save me if my house was on fire. He threw me over his shoulder, obviously accustomed to executing this move in far more dangerous and desperate situations, situations that required immediate and courageous action. But in this case, his intent was not quite so courageous, and as he attempted to hoist me over the side of the boat, me screaming bloody murder the entire time, he was muttering what sounded like some kind of prayer of contrition. In Hebrew, no less. Either that, or he was counting the Hebrew alphabet until he could throw me overboard. I kicked him and clawed at his face, not really making any headway in harming him before he tossed me overboard. He finally released me and I only had about three seconds to hold my breath before I realized that this was the end and that I was powerless to stop it.
    I entered the water and now knew what it meant to hit something like “a ton of bricks.” My descent wasn’t pretty or especially graceful. I didn’t know what hurt worse: the feeling in my chest from doing a complete belly flop or the icy sting on my skin from water that should have been a lot warmer considering it was the end of the summer. Either way, it was damn uncomfortable, so uncomfortable, in fact, that I didn’t even register that I was drowning.
    I sank deep beneath the surface of the water, watching the twinkling lights of the village and the dock become less defined and take on a golden glow the lower I went in the brown water. As I sank, I became aware that we weren’t as far from shore as I would have thought and, for some reason, this gave me comfort. Would my lifeless body be found sooner as a result? The water was deeper than I had imagined it would be and I sank like a stone, trying not to flail too much and exert too much energy. My dress pants, which had felt like the appropriate weight for wear on a summer day, were now heavy and weighing me down, along with the light linen shirt that I had donned that morning. My shoes, lovely black pumps, were gone, having fallen off somewhere between being flung into the river and my rapid descent. They were lost to the watery depths of the Hudson, never to be seen again.
    The pictures of Ginny Miller and Carter Wilmott, in flagrante delicto, floated out from my waistband and away from me, lost forever to the dark depths of the Hudson River. In all probability, George Miller would never learn of Ginny’s infidelity. Too bad Ginny and I both had to die in order to protect her secret.
    As I continued to sink, I observed Greg’s blurry face looking down at me from above, obviously not concerned at all that I was going to drown. After a few seconds, he turned and walked away, and it was then that I began to panic. The flailing began as I tried to hold my breath, even as I knew my lungs were close to bursting.
    I thought about my mother, and if I hadn’t already been completely soaked, I would have begun to cry. A deep sadness welled up in me as I thought about how I had been manipulated by Ginny into helping her, not really knowing if she had attended to my mother during her illness or not. Maybe she had. Or maybe she had just used that information, easy enough to find out if one had access to hospital records and online obituaries, to make me feel sympathetic toward her. I had gone along with the whole thing, using my heart instead of my head, a sure recipe for disaster, particularly in this instance. My mother’s beautiful face appeared in front of me, the picture of health. I relaxed, filled with a kind of peace that I had never experienced in my life. The flailing stopped and