Chapter four - What Drake did when he hit rock bottom. (Or: Dig.)
Drake stumbled over to a (genuine antique) tapestry on a wall and, grabbing the bottom edge, yanked the thing as hard as he could. It wasn't attached as firmly as he'd anticipated. (That, or he was stronger than he thought.) What followed was perhaps, a fortunate accident because it meant that when Bob and a bevy of personal stylists burst through the door he was struggling on the floor with a tapestry instead of a corpse.
Everyone froze. Drakes' fuzzy mind detected a flaw in his half-baked plan.
- Everyone, OUT!
The spectators scrambled.
- No, out out, I mean leave, the house, take everyone with you, right now, go go yes you too Bob,
Run on sentence style as he untangled himself and regained his feet. (It was easier to order minions around having attained the vertical.)
In a fit of paranoia he then ran through the entirety of his enormous property to make sure he was alone. He was. "Yes brilliant. No amount of therapy is ever going to help with my abandonment issues now!" (He chose to ignore that hysterical thought for now. It hurt.)
Having sat on the floor in front of the utility cupboard with the dead body inside it until his legs cramped gave him plenty of time to think.
Three things had become clear. Foremost of these was the need to dispose of any incriminating evidence. Calling his lawyer was out. He wasn't able to think of a single plausible explanation. No, it looked like he was on his own. ("Again.") The second - get his ring back from Horvath. But it was the third thing that was currently worrying him the most. Something was wrong with him beyond just the inability to cast. Most of the time he didn't even wear his ring, after all. "so why does it feel like a part of me is missing?" His vision still swam, he felt weak and dizzy. Everything hurt. The pain was more than just physical. At any rate, it could be ignored he decided. Back to thing one.
A moments' reflection hinted that his first plan of possibly cremating the remains ("don't think about it as a dead child, don't, you'll go spare") had a high probability of catastrophic failure. It had involved a bottle of kerosene and the gas powered decorative fire place in his study.
He settled on a less dramatic but more practical solution, as his restless gaze turned toward the tapestry hanging in front of him. He was almost positive his house had a garden. (he hadn't yet bothered to go out there, having only moved in a couple of months ago, who had the time? But he had hired a landscape architect.)
Now for the crucial detail upon which the success or failure of this new plan hinged;
- Do I own a shovel?
