The Last Dance Read Online Free PDF Page B

certificate finds him dead in bed of natural causes? Then there’d be no problem with the insurance company, and she and Bob would be able to collect on however much the policy is for. She thinks about this for a moment. She is amazingly calm. She has grown used to the silence of the apartment, her father hanging there still and lifeless. She looks at her watch. It is a quarter to ten. Has she been in the apartment for only ten minutes or so? Has it been that short a time? It seems an eternity.
    She is thinking she will have to take him down and carry him to the bed.
    She moves up close to the body again. Looks into his dead greeneyes, studies the pores on his face, the pinprick points of blood, the ugly protruding tongue, summoning the courage she needs to touch him, thinking if she can stand this close to death without vomiting or soiling herself, then surely she will be able to touch him, move him.
    The fabric around his neck looks like the belt from a robe. She sees that her father knotted the ends so that it formed a loop and then slipped the loop over his head and around his neck. He must have used a stool or something to climb onto when he put the loop over the hook, and then he must have kicked the stool away in order to suspend himself. But where’s the stool? Or did he use something else? She can’t worry about that just now.
However
he
did
it, he did it, and unless she can take him down and carry him to the bed, she and her husband will lose out on the insurance, it’s as simple as that.
    She does not in these next few moments even once consider the fact that she is doing something that will later enable her to commit insurance fraud, she does not for an instant believe she is breaking the law. She is merely correcting an oversight, her father’s stupidity in not realizing that committing suicide might negate the terms of the insurance policy, if what she heard is true. She’s sure it must be true, otherwise how could she have heard about it?
    Well, she thinks, let’s do it.
    The first touch of him—his face against hers as she hunches one shoulder under his arm and with her free hand hoists the belt off the hook—is cold and repulsive. She feels her flesh puckering, and almost drops him in that instant, but clings tight in a macabre dance, half-dragging, half-carrying him to the bed where she plunks him down at once, his back and buttocks on the bed, his legs and feet trailing. She backs away in revulsion. She is breathing hard. He was heavier than she expected he would be. The belt is still looped around his neck like a wide blue necklace that matches his grotesque blue hands and feet. She puts one hand behind his head, feels again the clammy coldness of his flesh, lifts the head,and pulls the belt free. She unfastens the knot, and then carries the belt to the easy chair across the room, over which the matching blue robe is draped. She debates pulling the belt through the loops on the robe, starts to do that, her hands trembling now, loses patience with the task, and simply drops it on the floor, alongside his shoes and socks.
    She looks at her watch again.
    It is almost ten o’clock.
    Somewhere a church bell begins tolling the hour.
    The sound brings back a poignant memory she can’t quite recall. A Sunday sometime long ago? A picnic preparation? A little girl in a flowered sunsuit? She stands listening to the tolling of the bell. The sound almost causes her to weep. She continues standing stock still in the silent apartment, the church bell tolling in the distance. And at last the bell stops. She sighs heavily, and goes back to the bed again.
    Her father is lying crosswise on it, just the way she dropped him, on his back, his legs bent at the knees and trailing to the floor. She goes to him and lifts the legs, turning the body so that he is lying properly now, his head on the pillow, his feet almost touching the footboard. She frees the blanket from beneath him, draws