Gavin snapped a picture—no flash—the aperture set for the low light of the patio.

Amy brought the brick down on the back of Richard’s head.

Gavin’s chest filled with a breath that refused to leave. What had she done? He snapped another picture.

Richard crumpled to the ground, falling onto his back at the edge of the pool. Amy dropped the brick and took a step back, her hands pressed against her mouth as if to hold in a scream.

Gavin dropped his camera and ran downstairs. When he got to the patio, he saw his mother with a phone in her hand—she was dialing.

“What are you doing?”

“He’s hurt. I need to call for help.”

Gavin took the phone away from his mother. The look of shock on her face made no sense to Gavin. “You can’t call for help. You’ll go to jail.”

Amy began to shake. “But he’s…”

“He’s a jerk. We don’t need him.”

“But…”

“If he wakes up, he’ll tell the cops what you did. You’ll be arrested. You’ll go to prison.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

Gavin put his mother’s phone down and knelt beside Richard, who looked like he was simply asleep. He grabbed the man’s shirt and lifted to try to roll him over. He never asked his mother to help. He had planned to do it all himself, but when he failed at his first attempt, Amy joined him at Richard’s side. Together they rolled him into the pool.

Richard never moved. He didn’t struggle or kick. As Gavin watched him drift, facedown, his only thought was that Richard Balentine had been killed by Amy’s “retarded” son.

His mother tossed the brick into a shrub and suggested that they now call the cops—the woman was hopeless. Gavin told her to clean up the shards of glass from the Scotch bottle. There could be no signs of a fight. Gavin pulled the brick out of the shrub and cleaned it in the pool before replacing it in the flower bed. Then, using a paper towel to prevent leaving a fingerprint, he drained a full bottle of Scotch into the kitchen sink and placed the empty bottle on the patio next to Richard’s chair.

When he finished the cleanup, Amy again suggested calling 911.

“We can’t call until morning,” Gavin said. “We need that brick to be dry.”

Gavin stepped back to survey the scene, re-creating it in his head. Then he pointed at the stub of a cigar in a nearby ashtray. “You went to bed, and he stayed up to finish his cigar. You have no idea what happened—got that? I’ll find him in the pool in the morning and call the police. If they ask, you were celebrating and drinking, but you don’t know what happened after you went to bed.”

He made his mother repeat the story three times before they left the patio. Even then he didn’t trust that she wouldn’t screw it up.

Yet, she now sat on the visitor side of the video screen while he was in jail. He shook the thought away and reminded himself that being locked up was all part of the plan.