It was so different from what she’d imagined. It was better. A tiny house on three acres of land overlooking Goose Cove in Trenton, Maine. Good thing she stole that blowup paddle board from an empty camp along the way there four years ago. This way she could take the rotting corpse out to Barred Island on it, in her wetsuit, during high tide overnight, when visitors were far and few in between, especially this time of year. After, she’d walk home before dawn along the cove, back to Trenton during low tide with the paddle board folded away in her knapsack that also carried a pointed shovel. This way, her tracks would be covered up when the tide came in.
She knew she’d be tired after burying the body, but she had been rehearsing this task ever since she’d arrived, just in case her man came around. She dug flower bed after flower bed on her property, which wasn’t really her property. She excavated all the rockiness and created perennial beds everywhere until it was drop-dead gorgeous, pun intended.
Her best friend Theresa was the brain-child of this organization which helped her and other battered women escape. It was an off-the-grid, zero paper trail movement, kinda like the Underground Railroad. In this case it was almost exclusively women who were hidden away, after being slaves to a repetitive cycle of abuse. She held a lifetime of gratitude for the sad bit of serendipity: that her best friend had begun this organization upon her own mother’s lifetime sentence for killing her abuser in Cleveland, Mississippi. It was there that the two friends had grown up in tiny houses across the road from each other.
Hillary never in a million years thought abuse would happen to her. She was just glad, in the end, that she and Henry had never had children. This was the only way, or at least the easiest way that she knew, to upend the cycle. Not that she had planned to not have children. It’s just that Henry had beaten the only one she thought she might be carrying out of her. After that, she never missed taking a pill.
What would be Hillary’s undoing in terms of getting caught was the fact that she could not clean her vengeful heart. This stemmed from still loving Henry deep down and believing that this psychoanalytic curse had been transferred to him from his father. Which is why she would bury Henry, her husband who became her stalker, on Barred Island, a preserve with slippery rocks, only accessible by foot via a sand bar during low tide; a place Henry’s father frequented because he was the ranger there.
If Theresa had known that a family member of Henry’s lived in Maine, she never would have agreed to this location for Hillary’s hiding place. But Hillary didn’t think that Theresa would ever find any of this out, because hatred could be buried deep.