Page 107 of The House Across the Lake

I peer at her through the steam rising from my coffee mug, trying to read her thoughts. It’s impossible.

“Have you watched the Royce house at all this evening?” Wilmasays.

NOW

I take a sip of bourbon and stare at the person restrained to the bed, consumed with both fear and fascination that someone so evil can be contained inside someone so beautiful. Such a thing shouldn’t be possible. Yet it’s happening. I’m witnessing it with my very own eyes. It makes me keep the bourbon glass pressed to my lips.

This time, I take a gulp.

“I remember when you used to get tipsy after a single glass of wine,” Len says as he watches me drink. “That’s clearly changed. I suppose I had a little something to do with that.”

I swallow. “More than a little.”

“Am I allowed to say I’m worried about you?” Len says. “Because I am. This isn’t like you, Cee. You’re very different from the person I fell in love with.”

“The feeling is mutual.”

“And because of that you’ve decided to drink yourself to death?”

“You, of all people, have no right to judge me,” I say. “I don’t want your fucking concern. Because this”—I raise the glass of bourbon still clutched in my hand—“is your fault. All of it. Now, we can talk all about why I drink, but only after you tell me more about those girls you killed.”

“You want to know how I did it?”

Len smiles. A sick, ghoulish grin that looks profane on Katherine’s kind and lovely face. It takes every ounce of restraint I have not to slap it away.

“No,” I say. “I want to knowwhyyou did it. There was more to it than simple enjoyment. Something compelled you to act that way.”

A noise rises from outside.

A gust of wind, shrieking like a banshee across the lake.

It slams into the lake house, and the entire place shudders, sending up a communal rattle of windowpanes. The bedside lamp again starts to flicker.

This time, it doesn’t stop.

“You don’t really want to know, Cee,” Len says. “You only think you do. Because to truly understand my actions, you’ll need to confront all the things about me that you overlooked or ignored because you were too busy nursing wounds from your own shitty childhood. But you weren’t abandoned by your whore mother. You didn’t have a father who beat you. You didn’t grow up getting passed around foster homes like an unwanted mutt.”

Len wants me to feel sorry for him, and I do. No child should experience what he went through. Yet I also know that many do—and that they easily manage to go through life without hurting others.

“Those girls you killed had nothing to do with that,” I say.

“I didn’t care. I still wanted to hurt someone. I needed it.”

And I’d needed him to be the man I thought he was. The kind, decent, charming man I wrongly assumed I’d married. That he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—do that fills me with a sticky combination of anger and sadness and grief.

“If you felt this way, why did you insist on dragging me into it?” There’s a quiver in my voice. I’m not sure which emotion is causing it—rage or despair. “You should have left me alone. Instead, you let me fall in love with you. You let me marry you and build a life with you. A life that you knew all along you were going to destroy.”

Len shakes his head. “I didn’t think it would get so bad. I thought I could control it.”

“Our marriage should have been enough to stop you,” I say, the quiver growing to a quake. “Ishould have been enough!”

“I tried not to act on it,” Len says. “The urge refused to go away, no matter how much I wanted it to. Some nights, while you were asleep, I’d lie awake and think about what it would feel like to watch the life go out of a person’s eyes and know I was the cause of it. The more I thought about it, the more I resisted. And the more I resisted, the stronger the urge became.”

“Until you came here and did it.”

“Not at first,” Len says, and my gut tightens at the thought of him killing others elsewhere. “In LA. Sometimes, when I was out there alone for work, I’d scour the streets, find a hooker, take her back to my room.”

I don’t flinch at the news. After knowing your husband murdered at least three women, finding out he also cheated doesn’t have the sting it would under normal circumstances.

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