Karen crossed the living room heading toward the front door.
She failed to notice that the cartons of steamed rice and sesame beef were gone, or that a large gray trashcan now stood between the television and the antique desk she’d inherited from her grandmother.
She peeked through the peephole.
A young man stood in the hallway holding an enormous bouquet of rubyred roses.
She smiled, turned the deadbolt, opened the door.
"I have a delivery for Karen Prescott."
"That’s me."
The delivery man handed over the gigantic vase.
"Wait here, I’ll get you your tip." She slurred her words a little.
"No ma’am, it’s been taken care of." He gave her a small salute and left.
She relocked the door and carried the roses over to the kitchen counter. They were magnificent and they burgeoned from the cut-glass vase. She plucked the small card taped to the glass and opened it. The note read simply:
Look in the coat closet
Karen giggled. Scott was one hundred percent forgiven. Maybe she’d even do that thing he always asked for tonight.
She buried her nose in a rose, inhaled the dampsweet perfume. Then she cinched the belt of her bathrobe and walked over to the closet behind the couch, pulling open the door with a big smile that instantly died.
A naked man with black hair and a pale face peered down at her. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and swallowed.
The cartons of leftover Chinese food stood between his feet.
She stared into his black eyes, a strange coldness spreading through her.
"What do you think you’re doing?" she said.
The man grinned, his member rising.
Karen bolted for the front door but as she reached to unhook the chain he snatched a handful of her wet hair and swung her back into a mirror that shattered on the adjacent wall.
"Please," she whimpered.
He punched her in the face.
Karen sank down onto the floor in bits of glass, anesthetized by wine and fear. Watching his bare feet, she wondered where her body would be found and by whom and in what condition.
He grabbed her hair into a ball with one hand and lifted her face out of the glass, the tiniest shards having already embedded themselves in her cheek.
He swung down.
She felt the dull thud of his knuckles crack her jaw, decided to feign unconsciousness.
He hit her again.
She didn’t have to.
2
ON the same Friday evening, Elizabeth Lancing lay in the grass at her home in Davidson, North Carolina, watching her children roughhouse in the autumn-cooled waters of Lake Norman.
Her husband Walter was on her mind.
Tomorrow would have been their seventeenth anniversary.
Pushing against her thighs, she rose and strolled barefoot down to the shore.
Jenna had wrangled John David in a headlock and was trying to dunk her younger stronger brother as their mother walked the length of the pier.
Beth sat down at the end where steps descended into the water.
She moved her fingers through wavy carbonblack hair just long enough to graze her shoulders. Her fingertips traced the lines these last brutal years had channeled into her face.
Beth knew she was plain. That was fine. She’d been plain her whole life.
What wasn’t fine was having the hard countenance of a fifty-year-old when she’d just turned thirty-eight. Lately she’d noticed how lived-in she looked. If Walter were still here maybe what few looks she had wouldn’t be deserting her.
She rolled her jeans up to her knees.
A rogue jet ski skimmed across the middle of the lake, invisible save for its brief intersection with a streak of moonlit water.
Beth’s feet slid into the liquid steel, touching the algae-slimed wood of the first submerged step.
It was a chilly night and she rubbed her bare arms, thinking, October is the cruelest month. Darling, has it been seven years?
In one week Beth would have to contend with another anniversary—this coming Halloween night would mark seven years since Walter’s disappearance.
The writer and murderer Andrew Thomas had been a close friend of her husband. Andrew’s old house still stood in the trees on the opposite side of the cove. Someone had taken up residence there in the last year and it was strange to see those lights across the lake again.
The circumstances attending Walter’s disappearance had grown no less bizarre or mystifying through the passage of seven years.
On a cold and wet Halloween night in 1996, he’d sat Beth down at the kitchen table and informed her that their family was in terrible danger.
He’d told her to take the kids away.
Refused to explain what was wrong.
Said all that mattered was getting Jenna and John David out of the house immediately.
She could still remember her husband’s eyes that night, carrying a component she’d not seen in them before—real fear.
Out beyond the steps, bubbles broke the surface and the water-slicked head of Jenna blossomed out of the lake.
My last image of my love—I see Walter in the rearview mirror as I drive away with our children into the rainy Halloween darkness. He is standing on the front porch signing "I love you," his hands held high in the orange porchlight.
She never saw Walter again.
His white Cadillac was found two weeks later in Woodside, Vermont, parked near a dumpster, the driver seat slathered in his blood.
Beth knew in her heart that Andrew Thomas had killed her husband.
She could not begin to fathom why.
"Come in, Mom!"
Beth descended two more steps, the water now at her knees.
"It’s too cold, sweetie."
"You’re such a wimp," Jenna taunted, treading toward the steps. "I might just pull you in."
"Oh no you won’t."
Jenna’s head disappeared and Beth climbed back up onto the pier, smiling as she scanned the water.
"I see you!" she yelled though she couldn’t. "I see—"
Wet arms wrapped around her own and Beth screamed.
"Got you," John David said. "You’re going in."
"No, J.D.," Beth pleaded as he muscled her toward the edge. Though only a prepubescent boy of eleven he was strong and quick. "I’m your mother and I am telling you that if you push me into that water I’ll ground you forever. Is it worth it?"
John David sighed and let go.
Beth stepped away from the edge and faced her son, thinking, You’ll be taller than me in two years.
Beads of water glistened on his hairless littleboy chest.
"Now I want to tell you something," she said with convincing parental sternness. "You listening to me?"
"Yes ma’am."
His voice was still high, at least a year from turning.
"I want to tell you…this!"
Beth shoved him off the pier and he screamed as he hit the water. She laughed, raised her hands in victory, and shouted, "Never underestimate the Mom!"
As John David bemoaned the injustice Jenna jerked him underwater by his ankles. The ripples made by the jet ski had begun to lap against the beams of the pier.
"I’m going in!" Beth yelled. "Don’t stay out long!"
"Come on, Mom, it’s Friday night!"