Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

Quincy
and
The Love Boat
and 
Eight Is Enough
, but first comes 
Ellen
Abbott
, my new favorite show!

---

Nothing new, nothing new. Ellen doesn’t mind
speculating, believe me, she’s hosted an array of strangers
from my past who swear they are my friends, and they all
have lovely things to say about me, even the ones who
never much liked me. Post-life fondness.
Knock on the door, and I know it will be Greta and Jeff.
I switch off the TV, and there they are on my doorstep,
aimless.
‘Whatcha doing?’ Jeff asks.
‘Reading,’ I lie.
He sets down a six-pack of beer on my counter, Greta
padding in behind. ‘Oh, I thought we heard the TV.’
Three is literally a crowd in these small cabins. They
are blocking the door for a second, sending a pulse of
nervousness through me – why are they blocking the door?
– and then they keep moving and they are blocking my
bedside table. Inside my bedside table is my money belt
packed with eight thousand dollars in cash. Hundreds,
fifties, and twenty-dollar bills. The money belt is hideous,
flesh-colored and bunchy. I can’t possibly wear all my
money at once – I leave some scattered around the cabin –
but I try to wear most, and when I do, I am as conscious of it
as a girl at the beach with a maxipad. A perverse part of
me enjoys spending money, because every time I pull off a
wad of twenties, that’s less money to hide, to worry about
being stolen or lost.
Jeff clicks on the TV, and Ellen Abbott – and Amy –
buzz into focus. He nods, smiles to himself.
‘Want to watch … Amy?’ Greta asks.
I can’t tell if she used a comma: 
Want to watch, Amy?
or 
Want to watch Amy?

---

‘Nah. Jeff, why don’t you grab your guitar and we can
sit on the porch?’
Jeff and Greta exchange a look.
‘Awww … but that’s what you were watching, right?’
Greta says. She points at the screen, and it’s me and Nick
at a benefit, me in a gown, my hair pulled back in a
chignon, and I look more like I look now, with my short hair.
‘It’s boring,’ I say.
‘Oh, I don’t think it’s boring at all,’ Greta says, and flops
down on my bed.
I think what a fool I am, to have let these two people
inside. To have assumed I could control them, when they
are feral creatures, people used to finding the angle,
exploiting the weakness, always needing, whereas I am
new to this. Needing. Those people who keep backyard
pumas and living room chimps – this must be how they feel
when their adorable pet rips them open.
‘You know what, would you guys mind … I feel kinda
crummy. Too much sun, I think.’
They look surprised and a little offended, and I wonder
if I’ve got it wrong – that they are harmless and I’m just
paranoid. I’d like to believe that.
‘Sure, sure, of course,’ Jeff says. They shuffle out of my
cabin, Jeff grabbing his beer on the way. A minute later, I
hear Ellen Abbott snarling from Greta’s cabin. The
accusatory questions. 
Why did
… 
Why didn’t
… 
How can
you explain …
Why did
I ever let myself get friendly with anyone here?
Why didn’t
I keep to myself? 
How can I explain
my actions
if I’m found out?
I can’t be discovered. If I were ever found, I’d be the

---

most hated woman on the planet. I’d go from being the
beautiful, kind, doomed, pregnant victim of a selfish,
cheating bastard to being the bitter bitch who exploited the
good hearts of all America’s citizens. Ellen Abbott would
devote show after show to me, angry callers venting their
hate: ‘This is just another example of a spoiled rich girl
doing what she wants, when she wants and not thinking of
anyone else’s feelings, Ellen. I think she 
should
disappear
for life – in prison!’ Like that, it would go like that. I’ve read
conflicting Internet information on the penalties for faking a
death, or framing a spouse for said death, but I know the
public opinion would be brutal. No matter what I do after
that – feed orphans, cuddle lepers – when I died, I’d be
known as That Woman Who Faked Her Death and Framed
Her Husband, You Remember.
I can’t allow it.
Hours later, I am still awake, thinking in the dark, when my
door rattles, a gentle bang, Jeff’s bang. I debate, then open
it, ready to apologize for my rudeness before. He’s tugging
on his beard, staring at my doormat, then looks up with
amber eyes.
‘Dorothy said you were looking for work,’ he said.
‘Yeah. I guess. I am.’
‘I got something tonight, pay you fifty bucks.’
Amy Elliott Dunne wouldn’t leave her cabin for fifty
bucks, but Lydia and/or Nancy needs work. I have to say
yes.
‘Coupla hours, fifty dollars.’ He shrugs. ‘Doesn’t make
any difference to me, just thought I’d offer.’
‘What is it?’

---

‘Fishing.’
I was positive Jeff would drive a pickup, but he guides me
to a shiny Ford hatchback, a heartbreaking car, the car of
the new college grad with big plans and a modest budget,
not the car a grown man should be driving. I am wearing my
swimsuit under my sundress, as instructed (‘Not the bikini,
the full one, the one you can really swim in,’ Jeff intoned; I’d
never noticed him anywhere near the pool, but he knew my
swimwear cold, which was flattering and alarming at the
same time).
He leaves the windows down as we drive through the
forested hills, the gravel dust coating my stubby hair. It feels
like something from a country-music video: the girl in the
sundress leaning out to catch the breeze of a red-state
summer night. I can see stars. Jeff hums off and on.
He parks down the road from a restaurant that hangs
out on stilts over the lake, a barbecue place known for its
giant souvenir cups of boozy drinks with bad names: Gator
Juice and Bassmouth Blitz. I know this from the discarded
cups that float along all the shores of the lake, cracked and
neon-colored with the restaurant’s logo: Catfish Carl’s.
Catfish Carl’s has a deck that overhangs the water – diners
can load up on handfuls of kitty kibble from the crank
machines and drop them into the gaping mouths of
hundreds of giant catfish that wait below.
‘What exactly are we going to do, Jeff?’
‘You net ’em, I kill ’em.’ He gets out of the car, and I
follow him around to the hatchback, which is filled with
coolers. ‘We put ’em in here, on ice, resell them.’
‘Resell them. Who buys stolen fish?’

---

Jeff smiles that lazy-cat smile. ‘I got a clientele of
sorts.’
And then I realize: He isn’t a Grizzly Adams, guitar-
playing, peace-loving granola guy at all. He is a redneck
thief who wants to believe that he’s more complicated than
that.
He pulls out a net, a box of Nine Lives, and a stained
plastic bucket.
I have absolutely no intention of being part of this illicit
piscine economy, but ‘I’ am fairly interested. How many
women can say they were part of a fish-smuggling ring? ‘I’
am game. I have become game again since I died. All the
things I disliked or feared, all the limits I had, they’ve slid off
me. ‘I’ can do pretty much anything. A ghost has that
freedom.
We walk down the hill, under the deck of Catfish Carl’s,
and onto the docks, which float slurpily on the wakes of a
passing motorboat, Jimmy Buffett blaring.
Jeff hands me a net. ‘We need this to be quick – you
just jump in the water, scoop the net in, nab the fish, then tilt
the net up to me. It’ll be heavy, though, and squirmy, so be
prepared. And don’t scream or nothing.’
‘I won’t scream. But I don’t want to go in the water. I
can do it from the deck.’
‘You should take off your dress, at least, you’ll ruin it.’
‘I’m okay.’
He looks annoyed for a moment – he’s the boss, I’m
the employee, and so far I’m not listening to him – but then
he turns around modestly and tugs off his shirt and hands
me the box of cat food without fully facing me, as if he’s shy.
I hold the box with its narrow mouth over the water, and

---

immediately, a hundred shiny arched backs roll toward me,
a mob of serpents, the tails cutting across the surface
furiously, and then the mouths are below me, the fish roiling
over each other to swallow the pellets and then, like trained
pets, aiming their faces up toward me for more.
I scoop the net into the middle of the pack and sit down
hard on the dock to get leverage to pull the harvest up.
When I yank, the net is full of half a dozen whiskery, slick
catfish, all frantically trying to get back in the water, their
gaping lips opening and shutting between the squares of
nylon, their collective tugging making the net wobble up and
down.
‘Lift it up, lift it up, girl!’
I push a knee below the net’s handle and let it dangle
there, Jeff reaching in, grabbing a fish with two hands, each
encased in terrycloth manicure gloves for a better grip. He
moves his hands down around the tail, then swings the fish
like a cudgel, smashing its head on the side of the dock.
Blood explodes. A brief sharp pelt of it streaks across my
legs, a hard chunk of meat hits my hair. Jeff throws the fish
in the bucket and grabs another with assembly-line
smoothness.
We work in grunts and wheezes for half an hour, four
nets full, until my arms turn rubbery and the ice chests are
full. Jeff takes the empty pail and fills it with water from the
lake, pours it across the messy entrails and into the fish
pens. The catfish gobble up the guts of their fallen brethren.
The dock is left clean. He pours one last pail of water
across our bloody feet.
‘Why do you have to smash them?’ I ask.
‘Can’t stand to watch something suffer,’ he says.

---

‘Quick dunk?’
‘I’m okay,’ I say.
‘Not in my car, you’re not – come on, quick dunk, you
have more crap on you than you realize.’
We run off the dock toward the rocky beach nearby.
While I wade ankle-deep in the water, Jeff runs with giant
splashy footsteps and throws himself forward, arms wild.
As soon as he’s far enough out, I unhook my money belt
and fold my sundress around it, leave it at the water’s edge
with my glasses on top. I lower myself until I feel the warm
water hit my thighs, my belly, my neck, and then I hold my
breath and go under.
I swim far and fast, stay underwater longer than I
should to remind myself what it would feel like to drown – I
know I could do it if I needed to – and when I come up with
a single disciplined gasp, I see Jeff lapping rapidly toward
shore, and I have to swim fast as a porpoise back to my
money belt and scramble onto the rocks just ahead of him.

---