The world seems to wobble underfoot. Her mouth is paper-dry. She sets the bottle on the table’s edge but misses.
Deek watches.
She tries to think of something else to say, to rebuke him, because she knows it’s impossible. She would have felt the prick of a syringe. She hasn’t even allowed him close enough to touch her. For twenty minutes, she’s carefully coaxed the dangerous man into her trap while the audio recorder listened. She’s been watching his hands, studying his breathing. Holding her concealed stun gun under the table an inch from his crotch, the twin silver fangs ready to bite.
But she can’t deny the sluggish, woozy terror that now washes over her. It feels like being suddenly and uncomfortably drunk.
I was watching you the entire time, she wants to snarl.
How did you do that?
Her voice comes out weak. Childish, almost petulant: “I don’t believe you.”
Deek says nothing.
“I said, I don’t believe you.”
He smirks.
“Say something.”
He doesn’t have to.
Only now does he crawl to his feet like a heap of old bones assembling itself, all elbows and knees and cracking joints. Near his throat, she sees the Frankenstein stitches and pink scar tissue where her screwdriver missed his carotid artery by less than a centimeter. He watches her as he rises, just dispassionately watching, a cool and unsympathetic intelligence. She’s felt those eyes on her through her windows. On the beach. He knows every detail of her life. He knows about Shawn. About Shelby. Her isolation. Her self-destruction. Her escape into books, her secret daily cigarettes, her nine-hundred calorie diet, her ginger tea—
My tea, she realizes with a jolt of slithering fear.
He poisoned my ginger tea.
She spent almost two weeks at Holy Family. Deek could have entered the Kline house at any night and dosed her tea bags or her bottled water or even her creamer and sugar. Exactly how he did it doesn’t matter.
She glances down at her mug.
Empty. She finished it minutes ago.
“I’m sorry,” the old man says. “It won’t hurt.”
He’s barely over five feet tall, but she feels smaller. He seems to grow as she shrinks, as she feels her thoughts slip backward. Her heart is slowing. Her muscles are turning heavy, mushy, starting to tingle.
Those cold eyes watch her fade.
I take no pleasure in writing this final chapter. The story should be over. The monster is dead. But ultimately, and tragically, Emma Carpenter still lost her life. Not to Howard Grosvenor Kline’s bloody attack on that now-infamous night.
Two weeks afterward.
Shortly after her discharge from Holy Family.
It’s heartbreaking that this remarkable young woman could fight Howard so tenaciously, and even survive a close-range gunshot, only to succumb to her own demons just weeks later. Emma improvised and adapted. She used the layout of the killer’s own childhood home against him. Even while making her hard-earned escape in a stolen vehicle, with the safe city lights of Strand Beach just miles down the road, Emma chose to pull over, rip a stun gun from its packaging, and walk back into danger to save her beloved golden retriever.
And maybe that’s it.
She fought for her dog’s life. She fought for the life of a FedEx employee whose name she didn’t know, and the two responding Strand Beach officers at the door. Not least of all, she fought to save my life, too, as I lay bleeding and unconscious on the living room floor. There’s no telling what grisly mockery of samurai seppuku Howard might have planned to force upon me. And I truly believe, hand over heart, that I’m alive today to write this book because of Emma’s actions that night. I wish I could thank her.
But when there was no one left to save, and she was left to her own devices on the foggy loneliness of the Strand, it finally happened on January twelfth.
Emma Carpenter took her own life.
She jams her fingers down her throat. Her gag reflex is alarmingly delayed—but finally she wretches, her eyes watering, and spits up a milky brown fluid. Tea, creamer, stomach acid.
“Doesn’t matter,” Deek says. “It’s already in your nervous system.”
She coughs and spits.
“Emma. Stop fighting it—”
She shakes her head, her throat raw. Her stomach is empty. She’s purged what she can. But unlike Laika’s poison pellets, she’s already absorbed the fatal dose, because liquids enter the bloodstream much faster than solids.
“It’s too late.”
She ignores him. The house is tilting. She nearly doubles over.
“Sit down. It’s almost done.” She feels his bony hand on her shoulder. That deranged anesthesiologist in Texas may have done unthinkable things to his paralyzed victims, but Deacon Cowl is a gentler soul. “You should know, you were wrong about Howard—”
She pulls away. Refusing to look at him.
“He couldn’t stomach the idea of taking an innocent life. But I’d found him the perfect compromise: a woman on the verge of taking her own life. You were dead anyway, and your life would either go to waste, or it wouldn’t.”
It gives her a sickening chill. The coldness of what he says, how he says it.
“He’d been watching you for weeks. Long before you read his shitty little book. Living in his SUV parked up by the seawall, coming and going freely in the big house. I think he even slept in his old bedroom a few nights. Did you ever feel haunted? Did Laika behave strangely? It probably stank of Howard, like a phantom roommate.”
The bedroom. The fetid odors of butter vape juice and sweat. The toilet that seemed to flush autonomously. All of it.
“And he was developing a crush on you. Like Laura Birch all over again.”
Scritch-scratch.
Even fading, it gives Emma a revulsive shiver.
“He just liked living around you, I think. Close quarters with a female. I think that’s why he resented your dog so much: he was jealous of the attention you gave her. And even though you were getting closer to drowning yourself every day, Howard couldn’t bring himself to finish you off. He wasn’t truly a monster, as much as he liked to write about them. He was just a lonely, envious kid with no social skills, wishing for fame, wishing for validation, maybe most of all wishing for a girlfriend.”
She feels something new. A stab of sympathy, crystalline in its power.
“And finally, he told me he’d changed his mind, that he wouldn’t kill you after all. That left me with a problem. I needed him to hate you. Somehow.”
She can sense the muscles in his face moving beside her ear.
A wrinkly smile.
“So I stirred things up. I recommended you read his newest dumpster fire, Murder Mountain. Just to get you talking about it.”
Her online conversation with Howard is still thudding in her memory. The betrayal in his words. What had made her criticism sting so acutely, a perfect stranger among millions? Now she knows it’s because she wasn’t a stranger at all. Howard was watching her, perhaps even from the next room. Close enough to identify the species of bird that hit her window and inject its name into their conversation as a subtle, spooky hint.
I won’t ask you again.
Good.
“You had no idea your killer was about to pack up and leave town,” Deek whispers. “Until you typed up your own death sentence on Amazon.”
In a way, Emma’s fate was inevitable.
She’d isolated herself on the Strand. She’d fled her job, her husband, and her life. The beach can be a site of spiritual renewal—it’s why I moved to Strand Beach myself, after the success of Silent Screams blessed me with the means to escape the bustle of Dallas. The chance for my twin daughters to grow up in an idyllic coastal town, for my wife to find her own second act, and for me to focus on bettering myself. But the sad truth is, Emma was not here to recover.
She was here to disappear.
And every day brought her closer to the moment she’d vanish under those rolling gray waves. She’d started this grim trajectory months prior to Howard’s attack. Her death occurred neither because of him nor despite him. I only wish I could have spoken to her first.
I wish this, so badly.
Just a simple conversation. Or one more whiteboard game of Hangman. Or that face-to-face meeting for ginger tea (she loved ginger tea) that we’d always promised each other. It’s hard not to become emotional as I write this. I’m a solitary man with deep-running flaws. I’ve never formed friendships easily, and neither did Emma, but I would give anything to speak to this extraordinary woman one last time.
My dear friend, to whom I owe my life.
Emma, if you could speak to me, what would you say?
“Fuck you.”
She presses the stun gun into Deek’s chest to deliver another nerve-frying blast—but he rips it away. His other hand grasps her biceps with surprising strength, pinning her. She feels her own desperation rising, an animal panic. She needs to get away.
“Stop,” he whispers. “This is hard for me, too.”
She clenches her other hand into a fist and swings—a drunken roundhouse that glances off his shoulder. He barely reacts.
Get away.
She fights his grip, dropping, hitting her kneecaps on hardwood. She tries to hit Deek again but misses entirely. Her arm feels like it’s made of wet bread.
“Emma. Please stop.”
Get away.
She twists free.
“Emma—”
She’s on the floor, bruising her elbows, kicking away from his grasp like a clumsy sea creature on land. She rolls onto her back. In her hands is an object she’s pulled from her waistband. Something she’s certain the old man has forgotten about.
His gun.
Now aimed at his forehead.
She sees surprise flash over Deek’s face. Just a blink. Then that icy judgment is back. Even staring down a gun barrel, the old man’s voice barely wavers. “You’re still dead.”
“Yeah.” Emma manages to grin, her cheeks turning to rubber, her tongue thick and alien inside her own mouth, as she pulls the trigger.
“But you first.”
The hammer strikes.
A hollow click.
“This isn’t a murder,” Deek says. “It’s a suicide.”
Disbelieving horror washes over her. She keeps pulling the trigger anyway, dry-firing into his face as the cylinder turns—click, click, click—and he wrests the gun away. She can barely hold it. Her fingers are alarmingly weak.
“I’m so sorry, Emma.”
He studies his revolver in the lamplight, as if checking it for scratches. Then he tucks it back in his raincoat, satisfied that the unloaded weapon has served its purpose. A deterrent, she realizes drowsily. In case I struggled while the drugs kicked in—
“Just let it happen. I’ll wait with you.”
Shut up, she wants to say. But she can’t speak.
“And I won’t hurt Laika.” He scratches the retriever’s ears. “She’s a lovely girl. Named after history’s first dog cosmonaut in 1957, right? It’s a good name.”
Of course he knows the exact year.
“I’ll handle everything.” The old man leans in close. “Okay? In a few days, after they rule your death a suicide, I’ll drive Laika out to Salt Lake City. I’ll find Shawn. And I’ll tell your husband, in person, that you were a hero. That you saved my life. I promise I won’t hurt either of them. I understand why you can’t trust me, but I give you my word. As your friend.”
The thought of the evil little leprechaun sitting in their dining room, consoling her husband, turns her stomach.
“You wanted to die, Emma. It’s why you’re here.”
No.
“Honestly, if I killed my baby, I would, too.”
No, no, no—
The house lists like a sinking ship and Emma grips the floor to hold on. Outside the waves are deafening through the tarp, a roaring chorus filling her mind. The raw power of the sea. Time seems to clot. She tries to scream, but her lungs are jelly.
“The working title is Murder Beach.” Deek lifts her audio recorder from the shelf and inspects it. “It’s an on-the-nose title, but Howard’s stupid novels are viral now, and my publisher wants to align clearly with that. Honestly, I’m just happy to be working again.”
Pocketing her recorder, he flashes a sad smile.
“More than you know.”
He seems to teleport around the room.
Blinking dizzily, Emma struggles to follow the human shadow. First . . . he’s staring down at her as he slips on his blue surgical gloves: “In my book, I’m trying to write Howard to be scarier. More evil, cold, calculating, something like Michael Myers with a katana. Any extra flourishes I can get away with that won’t . . . you know, contradict your statements to the police.”
Then . . . he’s rearranging glassware on the table. “I have to.”
Now . . . he’s mopping up spilled tea with paper towels. “You know as well as I do that the real Howard was a fucking dork. He couldn’t take a leak without catching his dick in his zipper.”
He’s staging the scene, she knows.
Suicide by overdose.
“That’s the big secret,” he grunts as he cleans. “In real life, most murderers are boring as hell. Sit down and interview one through prison glass, and after five minutes, I challenge you to give a shit about anything they have to say. They’re never smart, either. They’re the lowest and least of us, perverts or sociopaths or bedwetters who can’t control their feelings. True monsters, like the Stockyard Slayer? One in a hundred million.”
Knives, she remembers thickly.
The knife rack.
Behind her.
She heaves her body over and reaches up toward the kitchen counter. Her outstretched hand feels like it’s a mile from her face. She paws at the knife rack until it crashes to the floor. Blades skitter across tile.
Across the room, Deek glances up and frowns. He’s teleported to her laptop now. “Come on, Emma. You know I’ll just clean it up.”
With numb fingers, she grabs the closest knife. She raises it toward the old man in a shaky grip, blade out. If he touches her, she’ll slice him open. But he doesn’t need to touch her, and he knows it. He needs only to wait for her to die.
He glances back down to the laptop. Typing with blue surgical gloves.
A suicide note.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll make it respectful.”
Deacon Cowl has thought of everything. She may have tilted the story off course when she killed the villain and survived the night, but the author has a cruel and ingenious mind. Howard always liked to say something about that.
A stupid saying.
She can’t remember it.
And she doesn’t want to waste valuable brainpower on it. Because there’s one last thing she can do. She brings the knife’s serrated edge to her forearm and cuts. Her skin splits open and her blood seeps out, dark and tarry. To her horror, she can’t even feel it.
She carves one letter at a time. While Deek types a fake message across the room, she’s writing a genuine one of her own. Outrunning her own fading consciousness, her letters clumsy and childish—but she knows the medical examiner will find it.
Their long-distance friendship has always been about handwritten messages, right? Here’s one more for the road.
DEEK KILLED ME
She lets the knife drop and collapses onto her back.
Have fun, she thinks to Deek, who is now meticulously wiping the tabletop for fingerprints. You’ll go through all that work, and you’ll still get caught.
She’s falling into her own skull now. It’s a disturbing sensation, entirely different from falling asleep. She can feel the cells in her brain fading, withering, turning into little blue raisins. Before darkness wins, one last realization. A pierce of heartache, all the way to her soul.
Shawn’s voicemail.
She’ll never hear it.
T-Mobile ID 20775392
1/12/24 8:02:15 PST
Hey, Em. It’s me. I . . . (INAUDIBLE) so I got your new number from the police. They said you’re all the way out in Washington, and that some bad things happened the other week. They won’t tell me over the phone. I just . . . I hope to God you’re okay. I miss you. Wherever you are. Please call me or text me or something. I love you so much. Bye.
Wait.
There’s, uh . . . there’s one more thing I have to say. I’ve said it before, I know, but I’m saying it again. I’m sitting on the roof right now, where we used to watch the stars, and I just . . . I have a bad feeling tonight. I’m worried you’re in an especially bad place right now, and maybe you need to hear this before you do something drastic.
Listen to me. What happened to our daughter is not your fault.
I love you so much, Em.
Please, come home.