“Howie, what are you doing here?”
He ignores his mother and stares at the floor.
“You’re . . . oh my God, you’re done. You’re going to turn yourself in right now. Okay? Right now.” Jules’s voice quakes with grief. “But listen to me. This is important. Are you listening? The cops—they’ll shoot you if they see your katana.”
She kicks the sword out of his reach.
“Your knives. Your pellet guns, too. Anything that looks like a weapon. Just stay calm, and I’ll call the police back here, and we’ll turn you in safely and get this all sorted out. Okay?”
Anxiety stirs in Emma’s gut.
She hasn’t told the police yet.
“I’m . . . I’m so sorry.” Jules turns to her. “I knew there was a trespasser. I knew my internet was down. But I didn’t know it was you, Howie.”
Until the police performed their wellness check.
Until the conversation on the porch.
Until Emma looked Jules in the eye and mouthed her son’s name.
Howard understood his mother’s horror.
It was perfectly justified.
Jules Phelps, née Kline, was faced with a soul-wrenching dilemma that night. In statements given thereafter, both Corporal Grayson and Officer Hall would recall her unusual behavior following Emma’s wellness check. After swerving abruptly in front of their vehicle to get the officers’ attention, Jules had exited her Lincoln and approached with one hand raised, wearing what Corporal Grayson would later describe as a “haunted and faraway look.”
“I left something at my house,” she told them. “I’m driving back.”
Then, over her shoulder:
“I’ll call you again if I need anything else.”
“Emma, I am so sorry for all of this. My son . . . he’s a writer. He’s always researching for his horror books. I promise, he’s so gentle. He’s so, so sweet. But he’s also troubled. He has issues understanding personal boundaries—”
“No shit,” Emma says.
“He house-sat here before you. But he moved out, months ago.”
This washes over her.
It feels apocalyptic, nearly bringing her to her knees.
This is his house.
Howard Grosvenor Kline grew up here, on Strand Beach. The yard is his. The old toys in the basement are his. The teenager’s bedroom, the strange and stuffy space with the fetid odor of adolescence, which Emma herself feared to enter. All Howard’s. The samurai poster wasn’t a coincidence. Tonight there are no coincidences.
He infiltrated the house so easily because he’s kept a key. He knew to avoid every creaky floorboard because he’s had years of practice. And as for how he found her address so quickly on the Strand? There was no black magic involved.
He’s spent his adult life raging over negative online reviews, wishing he could strike back at his faceless critics. And now, for the first time ever, he’s discovered a critic within his house. In his childhood home. Alone. Vulnerable. How could an ego as frail as Howard’s resist revenge? That’s why my review was so special, Emma realizes.
It wasn’t my words at all.
It was me.
“Please,” Jules pleads. “Both of you. Lower your guns.”
“Nope,” says Deek.
“He’s surrendered. He’s no danger.”
He’s still dangerous, Emma knows. He poisons dogs and sucks on human teeth. He’s already slashed a man to pieces tonight.
And something Jules said to her son moments ago—your knives, your pellet guns, too—snags in Emma’s mind. Without speaking, she aims the suspiciously light pistol out the window to the ocean (Deek notices: “Emma, what are you doing?”) and pulls the trigger. It fires with a dry click. It’s the same click she remembers from hours ago when Howard shot out the motion lights.
She sighs. “It’s a pellet gun.”
“Obviously it’s a pellet gun,” Jules says. “Howie has struggled with schizoaffective disorder his entire adult life. He can’t legally own a firearm.”
Of course.
Deek laughs. “Fuckin’ dork.”
She’s glad Deek’s antique revolver is real, at least. It’s now the only threat keeping the killer on his knees. But still she worries: what if her neighbor didn’t conveniently find his ammunition after all? What if Deek’s weapon is unloaded—still—and once Howard realizes this, the fragile bluff will explode into violence?
Even kneeling, cradling broken fingers, Howard is the largest person in the room. The heaviest. The strongest. She’s seen his katana sever human limbs and cleave an inch into solid plywood. Howard Grosvenor Kline won’t be taken into police custody. Not tonight.
He has something else in play.
“By the way . . .”—Deek manages a woozy smile—“nice to see you again, Julie.”
She refuses to look at him. “Go to hell.”
“You couldn’t have told the cops like Emma asked?”
“You caused this,” Jules snarls. “All those years, my son idolized you—”
“Your kid broke into my fucking house. He stalked my daughters. I was so sick of his manuscripts. He kept leaving them at my door like flaming turds. All this gory slasher drivel. He kept begging to meet my agent, my editor, my publicist. And I lost my temper, yes. I said something I wish I could take back. I told your son that his garbage-juice, amateur attempts at writing would never succeed, because it wasn’t coming from a real place. It was just gore and cruelty. Stuff he’s cribbed from horror movies. It was inauthentic.”
So Howard didn’t mail his endless manuscripts to Deek as a crazed superfan. He dropped them off by hand—a crazed superfan who lived next door.
Here.
“And . . .”—Deek hesitates—“and the day after I told him that, his classmate went missing.”
Jules gasps.
Everyone understands. No one dares utter the name. And Emma knows it, too.
Laura Birch.
Strand Beach’s decade-old unsolved disappearance.
Deek swallows. This next part must be difficult to say: “I inspired him to abduct that girl, I think. For research or practice or worse.” He tightens his shaky aim. “And I’ll carry that guilt forever. Whatever he did to Laura Birch ten years ago is partially my fault. And I could never prove it was Howard who took her, and I called in every favor I had with the police chief trying to, because I knew in my soul that he murdered that poor girl. And my drinking got out of control, and my marriage fell apart, and my daughters won’t talk to me, and my publisher stopped buying my book proposals. So don’t lecture me about guilt, Julie.”
Emma gets it now.
She wants to squeeze the old man’s shoulder. She knows what it’s like to feel responsible for the unspeakable.
I’m sorry, Deek.
“My son . . . he has nothing to do with that,” Jules hisses. “They cleared him.”
“They never cleared him. They just didn’t have enough evidence to—”
“He killed someone tonight,” Emma interrupts. “In front of me.”
Everyone falls silent.
The wind growls outside and the rain intensifies.
Jules blinks furiously, as if struck between the eyes. She looks between them, then down to her sulking son. “Is . . . is that true?”
He says nothing.
“Howie?”
No answer. The killer stares downward, his whiskered face betraying nothing.
“Howie, I’m your mother.” Her voice cracks, then hardens. “Is it true?”
He wished his mother didn’t have to witness this.
She wasn’t even supposed to be in the same area code. Howard’s carefully choreographed night had veered disastrously off course. It had been resisting his efforts from the beginning—first an unplanned FedEx delivery, then Emma’s startling counterattack in the basement. And now, Howard found himself held at gunpoint by his intended victims in the very living room where he once opened his presents under the Christmas tree.
This living room is widely believed to be the site of the massacre.
But like much of Howard’s rampage that night, the truth is more nuanced. Certainly the forensic photographs taken in this room are some of the grisliest. Jules didn’t know it yet, but at that moment she was standing exactly where her body would be found—at the dining room’s adjacent edge, at the foot of her own grandfather clock. Police would find her blue-faced and cold with smeared eyeliner, crestfallen horror drawn permanently across her features. And her death was arguably the most merciful of the night’s tally.
Through the standoff, Howard remained focused on Emma.
Only Emma.
Smart, gutsy Emma Carpenter, who should’ve died hours ago, who defied her planned fate and fought tooth and nail for a razor-thin advantage. She’d saved her dog. She’d saved her neighbor. She was even beginning to relax, rubbing her goose-bumped arms.
No one knew.
Howard waited patiently for his moment.
Emma has a bad feeling.
About everything.
Even with tonight’s killer cornered before his own heartbroken mother, the monster unmasked as a lonely, sweaty virgin with mental illness. The tragic reality of it. No demonic powers. No Michael Myers slow-walk with a sword. Just folly, grief, and despair.
And still the dread remains. Somehow Howard’s story is already written on paper somewhere. We’re going to die. She feels it in her soul. Tonight.
All of us.
Something else bothers her. Now that she’s had a moment to think about it—what are the odds that she’d read a shitty book that just so happened to be written by a psychopath who grew up in this very house? Out of hundreds of thousands—no, millions of books in the world?
Another coincidence.
There’s another dark layer to this. No one in this room is safe.
“Julie, listen to me.” Deek lowers his voice. “We need to call the police back.”
The woman wipes her eyes.
“Can you do that?”
She nods through tears. She fumbles into her purse for her phone.
“That won’t work,” Emma says. “He cut the internet.”
Deek points. “Howard, empty your pockets.”
Obediently the killer digs through his coat and sets items on the floor. Night vision binoculars. A black e-cigarette. Duct tape. Braided rope. With a heartsick flutter, Emma recognizes her own sterling silver locket from Shawn, the chain broken from the moment Howard tore it off her neck. She feels a stab of hatred for him. Then, atop it, he places a squashed rubber mask, pale and horned and mouthless.
Her stomach fills with ice. Demon Face.
Last item . . . a jingling key chain.
Deek points. “Give me those.”
Sullenly he tosses them to the floor at Deek’s feet.
“Emma.” He kicks the keys to her. “Someone needs to drive downtown and get the police.” He glares at Jules. “Again.”
She studies the key chain. She recognizes a set of house keys similar to her own—these must open every lock in the house—and a Honda key, which she assumes must be for Howard’s personal vehicle. Lastly a Ford key, smudged with blood.
The slain FedEx employee. A young man with a family, relationships, and dreams, carved to pieces on the rain-soaked driveway.
“Actually.” Deek reconsiders and glances back to Jules. “You ride with Emma, too.”
“I’m not leaving my son alone with you.”
“It’ll be ten minutes.”
“I don’t trust you. You’ll shoot him.”
“I promise, Julie—”
“You’ll shoot my Howie and tell the cops he ran at you, that it was self-defense.” Jules refuses to back down. “I’m staying. To be a witness.”
Deek says nothing. His finger is on the trigger.
Emma can feel the nervous electricity in the room. She can’t help but wonder—is Jules right? If left alone with “Howie,” will the old man take a chance for revenge?
And . . . when the chips are down, whose side is Jules really on?
With a shiver, Emma realizes she’s heard the name Howie before: the Amazon user HowieGK’sTopFan. Days ago. If nothing else, her guess was exactly right. That five-star review really did come from the author’s own mother.
“Fine.” After a pause, Deek huffs. “Stay here if you want to babysit me. But give Emma your keys, too. That big black loaf of shit you drive. If Howard attacks us and gets free, I don’t want him to escape the Strand. This ends tonight. No one else dies.”
Jules rolls her teary eyes.
“Just do it. Then tie your son up.”
Emma finds herself impressed by how capably Deek has taken charge of a dangerous situation. Even with a serious wound. Deacon Cowl is certainly a man of many skills—and, it must be remembered, Howard won’t be the first killer he’s helped catch.
Reluctantly, Jules presses her key chain into Emma’s hand.
Howard watches.
“Em, I’ve got this.” Deek keeps his sights trained. “Take her car, drive until you have cell signal, and let’s put this whole mess on a police report.”
She closes a fist around the keys. “Can you last that long?”
“I’ll be okay.”
“You’ve lost a lot of blood.”
The old man smiles weakly. “So drive fast.”
She studies the revolver in Deek’s blood-crusted hands, but it’s too dark to see the cartridges in the cylinder. She wishes she could ask her injured neighbor up front: Be honest with me. Do you really have bullets? If this revolver is really just a bluff, she can’t afford to let Howard figure it out. And she can’t leave Deek unarmed. Not after he has saved her life tonight—and she has almost killed him in return.
She can’t say it aloud without shattering the stalemate. But with the toe of her shoe, Emma pushes Howard’s katana across the floor toward Deek, holding eye contact. Just in case.
He doesn’t touch it.
He only nods with appreciation.
“I’m . . .” She’s not sure how to say it, but it’s going to burn a hole in her chest if she doesn’t try: “I haven’t always trusted you, Deek. I suspected you were working with Howard somehow. I had no idea. I’m sorry.”
A heartbroken shadow falls over his face. “Why?”
“Something Howard said.”
It hurts, but it’s true. She’s embarrassed to have distrusted the man who has saved her life twice tonight. “And . . . I’m sorry for what you’ve been through.”
He smiles gently. “I’m sorry for your loss, too.”
“I’ll be okay.” She touches his brittle shoulder. “When this is over, I’m taking you up on your offer.”
“Ginger tea in person?”
“Deal.”
She hopes to God that they get the chance. That the tense standoff and the improvised bandage around Deek’s throat holds.
That everything holds.
“When this is over,” Deek whispers, “I’ll call my daughters. I swear it.”
She nods.
All this time, she’d assumed Deacon Cowl’s daughters were dead—he’d lost them both, in his own whiteboard words—but there are many forms of death, aren’t there? It’s possible to screw up in ways that transcend death, to kill yourself without killing yourself. As a fellow ghost on the Strand, Emma understands. And she empathizes, perhaps more than Deek knows.
She wishes she’d opened up to him sooner.
“Thanks, Deek. For everything.”
As she turns away with Jules’s keys, Howard whispers something after her. His voice is just a soft murmur, but it slides under her ribs like an ice pick. “You lied, Emma.”
She stops.
What?
In the distance, a bolt of lightning strikes the ocean. The flash lights the room.
“You lied to the cops, at the door.” Slowly Howard stands upright, glaring at her. “About why you’re hiding on the Strand. About what you really did.”
“Hey.” Deek’s aim follows him. “Don’t move.”
“Howie, sit down,” Jules begs.
But those eyes remain fixed on Emma, unblinking as he reaches his mountainous full height. Crowding the room. “You’re not like Laura Birch,” he whispers. “You’re worse.”
“Howie, stop—”
“Leave her alone,” Deek says. “Talk to me. Not her—”
“I know your secret.” The human Chucky doll’s lips curl into a hateful smile. “What you really did to your husband Shawn. You weren’t honest with your little car accident story.”
How does he know this?
Her heart squeezes. She takes a step back.
“Last warning,” Deek shouts. “Howard, I will shoot you—”
Too late.
Howard lunges for her.