The House Across the Lake(73)

I’m fine. See.

Now I understand what she really said.

I’m fine, Cee.

But I also understand it was Katherine who said it. There’s no other person it could have been. Which means I had to have mentioned Len’s nickname at some point. Katherine remembered it and made it just another brick in her vast wall of delusion.

“That’s not enough,” I say. “I’ll need more proof than that.”

“How about this?” Katherine grins, the smile spreading like an oil slick across her face. “I haven’t forgotten that you killed me.”





NOW





You still haven’t answered my question,” he says after I let a minute pass without speaking. “What about Tom?”

“He’s fine,” I say. “Right now, the least of my concerns is your husband.”

I freeze, noticing my mistake.

Until now, I’ve been good about not thinking I’m talking to Katherine. But it’s easy to slip up when she’s the person I see tied up and spread wide across the bed like this is some controversy-courting fashion shoot from her modeling days. Although the clothes are different, Katherine looks eerily similar to when I pulled her from the lake. Lips pale from the cold. Wet hair clinging to her face in dripping tendrils. Bright eyes open wide.

Yet I also know that Katherine is no longer present. She’s now just a vessel for someone else. Someone worse. I suppose what’s happening is a lot like demonic possession. Innocence subsumed by evil. I think of Linda Blair, spinning heads, pea soup.

“It’s you I’m worried about,” I say.

“Nice to see you still care.”

“That’s not why I’m worried.”

I’m concerned he’ll break loose, escape, run free to resume all the horrible things he’d done when he was alive.

He murdered Megan Keene, Toni Burnett, and Sue Ellen Stryker.

He took them, then killed them, then dumped their bodies into the pitch-black depths of Lake Greene.

And although right now he might look like Katherine Royce, inhabiting her body, speaking through her mouth, seeing through her eyes, I know who he really is.

Leonard Bradley.

Len.

The man I married.

And the man I thought I had removed from the face of this earth for good.





BEFORE





When I joked with that editor acquaintance of mine about naming her proposed memoir How to Become Tabloid Fodder in Seven Easy Steps, I should have included one more in the title. A secret step, tucked like a bookmark between Five and Six.

Discover your husband is a serial killer.

Which I did the summer we spent at Lake Greene.

It was by accident, of course. I wasn’t prying into Len’s life, searching for any dark secrets, because I’d foolishly assumed he didn’t have any. Our marriage had felt like an open book. I told him everything and thought he had been doing the same.

Until the night I realized he wasn’t.

It was less than a week after our picnic on the bluff at Lake Greene’s southern tip. Since that afternoon, I’d given a lot of thought to Len’s suggestion that we become like Old Stubborn poking from the water and stay here forever. I’d decided it was a fine idea, and that we should try it for a year and see how it went.

I thought it would be nice to tell him all of this at night as we drank wine outside by the fire. Complicating my plan was the fact that, thanks to a morning drizzle that had soaked the ridiculously long fireplace matches we’d left out overnight, there was no way to start said fire.

“There’s a lighter in my tackle box,” Len said. “I use it to light my cigars.”

I made a gagging noise. He knew I hated the cigars he sometimes smoked while fishing. The stench lingered long after he was done with them.

“Want me to get it?” he said.

Since Len was busy opening a bottle of wine and slicing some cheese to pair with it, I told him I’d go to the basement and fetch the lighter. A split-second decision that changed everything, although I didn’t know it at the time.

To the basement I went. There was no hesitation back then. Just a quick clomping down the stairs followed by a straight shot to the mudroom and the long wall rack filled with our outdoor gear. Above it was the shelf on which Len kept his tackle box. It was a stretch to reach it. Standing on my tiptoes with my arms extended, I grabbed it with both hands. Everything inside the box rattled together as I lowered it to the floor, and when I opened it, I saw a tangle of rubbery lures colored like candy but bearing barbed hooks sharp enough to draw blood.

A warning, I know now. One I instantly ignored.

I found the lighter at the bottom of the tackle box, along with a couple of those blasted cigars. Beneath them, tucked in a back corner, was a red handkerchief folded into a lumpy rectangle.

At first, I thought it was weed. Although I hadn’t used marijuana since my drug-fueled teenage years, I knew Len still occasionally did. I assumed it was something else he smoked while fishing when he wasn’t in the mood for a cigar.

But instead of a baggie full of dried leaves, when I unfolded the handkerchief I found three driver’s licenses. A lock of hair was paper-clipped to each one, colored the same shade as the hair of the woman pictured on it.