The House Across the Lake(74)

I flipped through the licenses a dozen times, the names and faces shuffling like a slide show from hell.

Megan Keene.

Toni Burnett.

Sue Ellen Stryker.

My first thought, born of na?veté and denial, was that they had been placed there by someone else. It didn’t matter that the tackle box belonged to Len and that few people came to the lake house. My mother’s visits had grown less frequent as she got older, and Marnie and my aunt had stopped coming entirely years earlier. Unless there was some renter I didn’t know about, that left Len.

The second thought, once that initial hopefulness had worn off, was that Len had been fucking around. Until then, I’d never given infidelity much thought. I wasn’t a jealous wife. I never questioned my husband’s faithfulness. In a business full of philanderers, he didn’t seem like the cheating kind. And even as I held three strangers’ IDs in my hand, I continued to give Len the benefit of the doubt.

I told myself there had to be a rational explanation. That these licenses, all of which were current, and strands of hair were simply props kept from a film he’d worked on. Or research for a future project. Or that the licenses had been sent to him by crazed fans. As someone who’d once been met at the stage door by a man trying to give me a live chicken he’d named after me, I knew all about weird fan gifts.

But then I took another look at the licenses and realized two of the names were vaguely familiar. Leaning against the mudroom’s ancient sink, I pulled out my phone and Googled them.

Megan Keene, the first familiar name, had gone missing the previous summer and was assumed to be the victim of foul play. I’d heard about her because Eli told us all about the case when Len and I had spent a week at the lake the summer she disappeared.

Sue Ellen Stryker, the other name I recognized, had been all over the news a few weeks earlier. She disappeared and was thought to have drowned in a different lake several miles south of here. As far as I knew, police were still trying to recover her body.

I found nothing on Toni Burnett except a Facebook page started by friends of hers seeking information about where she might be. The last time anyone saw her was two months after Megan Keene vanished.

Instantly, I became ill.

Not nauseated.

Feverish.

Sweat formed on my skin even as my body shook with chills.

Still, a part of me refused to believe the worst. This was all some horrible mistake. Or sick joke. Or strange coincidence. It certainly didn’t mean Len had made those three women disappear. He simply wasn’t capable of something like that. Not my sweet, funny, gentle, sensitive Len.

But when I checked the calendar app we both used to keep track of our schedules, I noticed an unnerving trend—on the days each woman went missing, we weren’t together.

Sue Ellen Stryker vanished during a weekend in which I had returned to New York to do voice-over work for a commercial. Len had stayed here at the lake house.

Megan Keene and Toni Burnett both disappeared when Len had been in Los Angeles, working on the superhero script that had bedeviled him for months.

That should have been a relief.

It wasn’t.

Because I had no proof he truly was in LA both of those times. We traveled for work so much—both together and separately—that I never stopped to wonder if Len’s stated destination was where he had actually gone. According to the calendar, those two LA trips were weekenders. Fly out Friday, come back Monday. And even though I was certain Len had called me from the airport each time before taking off and after landing, it dawned on me that he also could have made those calls from a rental car heading to and from Vermont.

On the day Megan Keene disappeared, Len had stayed at the Chateau Marmont. At least, that’s what the calendar app claimed. But when I called the hotel and asked if Leonard Bradley had checked in that weekend, I was told no.

“A reservation was made,” the desk clerk informed me. “But he never showed. Because he didn’t cancel, we had to charge his credit card. I’m assuming that’s what this is about.”

I hung up and called the hotel he’d allegedly stayed at the weekend Toni Burnett had vanished. The answer was the same. Reservation made, room never canceled, Len never arrived, weekend charged to the credit card.

That’s when I knew.

Len—my Len—had done something horrible to those girls. And the locks of hair and the licenses in his tackle box were mementos. Sick souvenirs kept so he could remember his kills.

In the span of minutes, I experienced every terrible emotion you can think of. Fear and sadness and shock and confusion and despair, all colliding in a single, devastating moment.

I cried. Hot tears that, because I was trembling so hard, shook from my cheeks like raindrops off a windblown tree.

I moaned, shoving my fist into my mouth to keep it from being heard by Len upstairs.

The anger, hurt, and betrayal were so overwhelming I honestly thought they would kill me. Not a horrible prospect, all things considered. It certainly would have put me out of my misery, not to mention saved me from facing the dilemma about what to do next. Going to the police was a given. I had to turn Len in. But when? And how?

I decided to tell Len that I couldn’t find his lighter and that I needed to run to the store to buy more matches. Then I’d drive straight to the nearest police department and tell them everything.

I told myself it was possible. I was an actress, after all. For a few minutes, I could fake not being sick and terrified and veering between wanting to kill myself and wanting to kill Len. I shoved the licenses and locks of hair in my pocket and headed upstairs, prepared to lie to Len and run to the police.