Page 95 of The House Across the Lake

“Because I came up with it, remember? I even used it the last time we talked, hoping you’d get the hint.”

My heart hopscotches in my chest as I think back to that late-night phone call and Katherine’s enigmatic wave from the window.

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 killedme.”

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 mightlooklike 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 memoirHow 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.

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