Howard made several errors on the night of his attack.
He failed to anticipate his mother’s Amazon delivery and police wellness check. He fell for Emma’s ambush in the basement, where his katana was too cumbersome to swing and she rewarded his arrogance with two broken fingers. And most fundamentally, he misunderstood the true nature of Emma’s past. While studying the woman in her bedroom during the nights prior, he’d overheard her whispering her husband’s name in her sleep. He’d observed that she still wore a wedding ring. And he reasoned, logically enough, that her husband, Shawn, was dead, perhaps in the gruesome car accident that left Emma guilt-addled and broken.
But that wasn’t true.
In fact, Shawn Carpenter was very much alive. Back in Salt Lake City.
Emma and Shawn were still married, albeit estranged. They hadn’t spoken in months. At the time, Shawn didn’t even know his wife was in Washington.
That July, after an unknown but presumably heated argument, Emma had packed a bugout bag, taken Laika, and vanished. She severed every social thread from her life in Utah. She left her job and emptied her bank account. She ditched her iPhone. She’d always been a solitary and fiercely intelligent woman, and she dropped off the grid with slick tradecraft. She retreated into her books and made herself unreachable, unfindable.
And to be candid: I agonized over whether to include this detail. It’s heart-wrenching. It’s unspeakable. It’s also, frankly, no one’s business. But it is integral to understanding the depth of Emma’s pain. I don’t want readers to judge her.
Emma and Shawn had an infant daughter.
Her name was Shelby.
She was four months old.
And on July second, Emma and Shawn were driving to see family in Denver. Shawn was in the passenger seat; Shelby’s car seat was in the back. When Emma took her eyes off the highway to look at her phone, for just a moment, an eighteen-wheeler changed lanes in front of her. Her reaction time was delayed. At seventy, Emma hit her brakes and lost control.
Even still, the collision was miraculously minor. She’d slowed significantly by the moment of impact. No airbags were deployed. The total damage to Emma’s vehicle was a single cracked headlight cover and a crunched front panel; technically a fender bender. The semitrailer, too, was almost entirely undamaged.
Emma was unhurt.
Shawn was unhurt.
In the back seat, Shelby died instantly.
It’s well documented that infants face the greatest risk of death in automobile accidents, but this particular tragedy has been described as “one in a million.” It can only be inconceivably cruel misfortune that Shelby’s tiny head would be turned exactly so, that the car seat would be positioned exactly so, that the glancing collision would send a kinetic jolt to travel exactly so through the vehicle in such a way as to surgically fracture the still-developing bones inside her neck.
And as a math teacher, Emma had to understand—acutely—that every element of this intricate physical equation was directly responsible for the outcome. Change one integer, and Shelby would have survived. The position of the sun in the sky. The weight of the gasoline in the tank. The tread on the tires. The fine layer of gritty dust on the pavement.
Emma’s decision to look away from the road, to check her phone.
Just exactly so.
Deek raises a gun to Emma’s chest. “Don’t answer your phone.”
She stops with her hand outstretched. On the tabletop between them, the phone continues to ring on silent, vibrating harshly against wood.
Her mouth is suddenly dry.
Buzz.
“I’m sorry,” Deek whispers.
Buzz.
“I wish . . .” His voice cracks. “I wish there was another way.”
Icy fear climbs Emma’s throat. She recognizes the gun in his hand—it’s the same silver Smith & Wesson .38 Special she killed Howard with, the weapon that almost took her life. It should still be bagged up in police custody. How is it here?
Buzz.
She sets her palm down flat. Six inches from her phone.
“If you touch your phone,” the old man whispers without blinking, “I will shoot you. I swear on my daughters’ lives, Emma.”
Buzz.
She takes a breath and says it. “Howard was supposed to kill me, wasn’t he?”
Deek says nothing.
Buzz.
“That’s why you just conveniently found your bullets that night.”
And why the old man waited so long before intervening to “help.” Only after the katana-wielding killer had cornered Emma in the basement and her death appeared certain—
Buzz.
“I wish this didn’t have to happen.” He takes a long breath. “Please believe me, Emma. I’d sell my soul for it. I’ve always enjoyed our conversations.”
“I considered you a friend,” she whispers.
“I still am.”
“I trusted you.”
“No. You didn’t.” He winces. “That’s the problem.”
She doesn’t understand.
“Three words,” he says. “You said them that night. Don’t you remember?”
She . . . can’t.
“That’s why I’m here.” He rubs his eyes with knobby fingers. “I’m not going to prison, Emma, and I’m not living the rest of my life in paranoia. We could have gone our separate ways, you and me, as survivors, if not for three fucking words.”
She remembers now.
When Deek captured Howard at gunpoint and Emma was about to leave with Jules’s keys, she’d confessed that she hadn’t always trusted him: I suspected you were working with Howard somehow. She remembers the mournful shadow that fell over the old man’s eyes, the deep seismic shift she couldn’t comprehend, as she uttered those last three words.
Something Howard said.
Now a loose end.
Her own death sentence.
“You were right. All along.” He smiles grimly, keeping his gun trained on her. “You should’ve stuck with your gut.”
“That’s the thing,” she says. “I did.”
He blinks.
He wasn’t expecting that.
Between them, the phone has stopped vibrating—Shawn’s call has gone to voicemail. Emma’s heart flutters, and she knows she’s close to the end. She’s so close. She hardens and compartmentalizes everything she’s feeling, because she has one more thing to do. One final, crucial thing.
Say it, Em. Don’t you dare self-edit.
“Deek, I have a question for you.”
Silence.
He’s listening.
“Out of all the millions of e-books available to download in the entire world, I just happened to read Murder Mountain. And the author just happened to grow up in this very house. What are the odds, right?”
He watches her.
“That’s a mind-blowing coincidence. Utterly insane. Distracting, even. I’d one-star a thriller for such a believability gap. And don’t get me wrong—it’s perfectly possible. People get struck by lightning and win the lottery multiple times over. And after what happened to my daughter, I know all too well how random and improbable and shitty life can be. And the police are fine with it. They love you. You’re a local celebrity, so you even got your fancy little gun back early. They turned over every stone and told me not to overthink things, that I was letting Howard win. But it’s still a coincidence.”
Deek says nothing.
“Coincidences are fine in real life. But in fiction, they’re bad writing.”
His eyes narrow.
“Until I realized it wasn’t a coincidence at all.” She lowers her voice. “Because I didn’t read Murder Mountain by chance, did I?”
Still, he says nothing.
“Don’t you remember?” She leans forward, her voice a scratchy whisper. “You recommended Howard’s shitty book to me.”
In the distance the breakers pound ashore, thousands of tons of crashing seawater. In. Then out.
In. Then out.
Finally Deacon Cowl shrugs. He’s not used to being confronted, but he’s adapting, leaning forward to match her stance with his finger on the trigger. The remorse was just an act and it fades now, replaced by a reptilian cunning. He flashes a wrinkly smile, revealing yellow teeth, and she smells whiskey and coffee.
“Then how come I still got the drop on you, Emma?”
She smiles back. “You didn’t.”
With her left hand still concealed under the table—where it’s been this entire time—she presses the stun gun’s prongs into the old man’s nuts and unleashes forty thousand volts.