She’s in a car.
The hum of a motor. The creak of suspension.
She’s riding down a black coastline, someplace cold and damp and far from home. No headlights. The driver must be navigating by moonlight. Pinpricked stars, sand, and whitecaps race outside. She’s stuffed in the back seat. The seat belt holds her upright.
A man sits beside her.
It’s Howard.
Her chest hitches with terror, but he’s only a fellow passenger. He’s buckled in, too. His neck twists to face her—a knuckle-popping crack of bone—and on his breath she smells vape juice, Mtn Dew, and a new earthy odor. Decay.
She braces for more hate, for vitriol. You can’t create, Emma. The only thing you’ve ever created in your entire life, you killed.
It never comes.
In his lap, Howard holds gleaming handfuls of steel. The shards of his katana. He looks down at his broken toy, then up at her with milky eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says.
She can’t speak. Her mouth is too dry.
They’re not alone. In the seat row behind them, Emma recognizes Jules Phelps sitting silently with her face buried in her hands. And a man whose name she can’t remember. His eyes and nose are slashed away. His wrists are glistening stumps.
Emma shuts her eyes.
The Jeep keeps cruising up the dark beach.
The visage of Howard leans in closer to her, his bones creaking, now uncomfortably close with his neckbeard tickling her cheek. “You didn’t get the full dose. You threw some of it up.” He glances forward, to the driver. Then he whispers in her ear: “You can still make it, Emma. If you want it badly enough.”
She ignores him. She’s had enough of Howard. She’s in a car full of slumped corpses riding to eternity, and of course the only person she wants to see isn’t here. Shawn is a thousand miles away.
She calls to the driver with a creaky voice. “Hey.”
Deek glances up into the rearview mirror.
“Can you please add something to that suicide note?” she asks, fighting the drowsy slur in her words. “A message to Shawn. I . . . I disappeared when he needed me most. After Shelby died, I didn’t know how to grieve. I just shut it out. I was afraid to feel it, with him, and that’s no excuse. I need Shawn to know . . .”
She chokes. Even though her face is numb, she feels tears coming.
“I just need him to know I’m sorry.”
Silence. The suspension jostles over a sandy rise.
Deek nods.
He glances forward at the dark horizon and then back at her in the rearview. “No,” he says finally. “I like what I wrote better.”
There it is.
Her green Osprey backpack rests in the center of the rocky path. She can see that it’s stuffed again, bulging with sixty or seventy pounds of rocks. Deacon Cowl, in his thoroughness, has packed it heavier than she ever did.
Maybe his version really is better.
She’s vaguely aware of his wrinkly hands on her body, lifting her out of his Jeep, dumping her onto packed gravel. They’re a hundred yards out onto the boulder seawall at the island’s northernmost tip—as far as he can safely drive his rig—and the sky is cloudless, a vast and starry void. She can see galaxies. She remembers pointing out constellations to Shawn, boozy and giggling together on their roof. That, right there, that big cluster, is Cygnus. The Swan.
That’s Serpens.
And Sagittarius.
Now Deek is guiding the weighted backpack over her shoulders—first the right strap, then the left—and pulling the buckles tight. She’s too weak to resist. Her muscles feel like slush. She can’t even hold up her head. Deek slips off her sneakers, one at a time, and sets them neatly atop a boulder beside her phone and wedding ring. A nice touch.
“Almost forgot.”
Beside it, he places Emma’s silver locket, opened to reveal the face of Shelby Lynne Carpenter, red-cheeked and yawning, less than six hours old.
“I lied about calling my daughters tomorrow.” Deek sighs. “I’m sorry, but there’s no point. I broke their mother’s cheekbone when they were fourteen. I don’t even remember hitting her. Or why I did it. I just remember frantically apologizing, trying to drive her to the emergency room, but I was too drunk to notice Alexis had hidden my keys. Then Annie locked me outside. Like an animal. I sat in the driveway and cried while the ambulance came. It was the worst low of my life, the biggest mistake I’ve ever made, and a single phone call a decade later won’t change it. They’ll never, ever forgive me, and I’ve made my peace with that.” He looks down at her. “I know you’ll understa—”
He stops.
Then he frowns. Roughly he lifts Emma’s forearm and thumbs away the drying blood to reveal her carved letters. The message etched in her flesh.
She croaks: “Surprise, asshole.”
He studies it.
Then he lets her wrist drop. “Doesn’t matter. You’ll be fish food.”
She feels another stab of hatred for this man, dulled by anesthetic. She understands now that the carefully mixed cocktail isn’t intended to kill by overdose. It’s only to paralyze her, to render her helpless and unable to free herself from the weighted backpack when she’s underwater. A new take on the Stockyard Slayer. Deacon Cowl studies serial killers for a living, after all.
By the time her remains wash ashore—in weeks or months or maybe never—they’ll be unrecognizable. She’ll become the clay-faced specter she used to imagine in mirrors; her eyes and mouth gone, her flesh soggy gray. Her carved message will be gone. All traces of the chemicals in her system will be gone, too. He’s planned everything.
The canny and precise mind that dismantled her at Hangman, that knew Emma’s name long before she ever gave it to him.
He sits her upright now. Eye to eye in starlight.
“I’m finishing my first draft tonight.” He kisses her forehead. She barely feels his papery lips and focuses on the sky above.
Orion.
Taurus.
Mensa.
“I wish it ended differently for you.”
She’s too drugged to feel panic or fear. She’s past it anyway. All that remains is a dense sadness that fills her chest like wet cement, heartbreak for what she’s leaving behind.
And that. See that group of stars? That’s my favorite, the Andromeda Galax—
She’s not sure how exactly the old man drops her over the jetty’s edge. Maybe he shoved her. Maybe he dumped her like garbage. She only knows she’s suddenly weightless, cold air whistling in her ears. Then she hits a barnacle-encrusted boulder. Then another, and she rag-dolls sideways, a sprawling tumble, and then an ice-cold blackness rushes in from all sides and she realizes she’s now underwater.
Already.
It happened so fast.
She didn’t even have time to take a full breath. And she’s sinking. The weighted backpack twists her faceup and she watches the watery stars fade as she’s dragged deeper, deeper into darkness. Her fingers are numb, sluggish in frigid seawater. She tugs the backpack’s straps but they’re fastened impossibly tight. Her fingernails bend. And she’s running out of oxygen.
She now understands: her recurring nightmare of drowning in the ocean was real. It was always real. Everything else was the dream. In a sickening way, she’s just finally woken up, in the cold, dark place she was always destined for.
Even without air in her lungs, she wants to scream at the unfairness of it. She’s fought so hard. So fucking hard.
She struggles, flails, kicks.
No difference. She’s still sinking.
But still . . . pulling, pulling, she unclasps one backpack strap. It snaps open—yes!—and she twists her left shoulder out.
Halfway free—but not really. Her right shoulder is the problem; the plastic buckle is bunched up under her armpit. Unreachable. Too dark to see. She’s far below the surface now, somewhere in the graveyard of the Pacific, the starlight waning, the backpack dragging her deeper still.
She tries. She can’t.
She’s fading.
Above, the stars are now gone. Even they will die someday.
Her mouth and sinuses are full of salt water, but somehow she tastes the acrid odor of rubber smoke. Burnt brake pads. The black water opens up and white-hot sunlight stings her eyes. She remembers thrashing to her right, holding a protective hand to the lip of Shelby’s car seat in the back seat as they skidded, just a split-second instinct, and she’s fully aware that this tiny reflex added one more integer to the terrible equation.
Her phone lands faceup. Her Outlook app open.
Her seat belt constricts her throat.
In the surreal silence after impact, Shawn grabs her shoulder. “Holy shit. That was close.”
And he’s right. It looked like a fatal collision but became only a glancing hit. Barely a fender bender. And now Emma expects to hear Shelby amid the disorientation, rudely jolted from her nap, starting to cry—but she hears nothing from the back seat. Nothing at all.
The air seems to thin.
“Shelby?”
Her words are thick with coppery blood. It doesn’t matter how minor the collision was—there’s no such thing as minor when you have an infant on board.
Please, God.
All that matters is Shelby.
Please—
She twists out of her seat belt, a heartbeat faster than her husband, and swings the door open into sweltering July heat, and the driver of the semitruck is already climbing out of his cab and asking if they’re all right, and she ignores him, skidding on shaky feet and grabbing the back door handle, tugging it open—
Please-please-please—
She unbuckles the car seat, grabs Shelby’s frail body, so light and so terribly limp, and lifts her upright and out of the car, falling to the gravel shoulder and holding her daughter, knowing what she’s always known, that inertia and gravity and kinetic force and her own selfish desire to avoid Shawn’s family have aligned exactly so—
Shelby’s eyes are open.
She’s alive.
Emma realizes this as she lands hard on her tailbone. She can’t believe it. Shelby’s eyes are the clearest blue, pupils searching and locking onto hers, full of life and curiosity. It’s impossible. It’s not how it happened. But it’s real.
She presses her daughter to her chest.
“I’m here.”
She breathes through a swirl of fine hair. Blond, just like Shawn’s. She hasn’t smelled that sweet, soapy dandruff scent for months. She was so certain she’d never smell it again. She feels the tiny body stir again in her embrace with grasping fingers, in that special way that’s both heartrendingly weak and alarmingly strong, and Emma stares up at the hard blue sky and lets out a strange, choked gasp. It explodes out of her, five months of compressed agony, all gone in an instant as Shelby touches her face with soft, developing fingers.
“I’m here.” Emma knows it’s impossible. She doesn’t care. Somewhere far away, in a cold dark vault, her fingernails remain clenched around the final plastic backpack strap, which is holding someone else underwater.
Shelby is alive.
Shelby is okay.
Everything is okay.
“I’m here, baby.”
In her final moments, I hope she found peace.
There’s one solace we can all take in Emma Carpenter’s memory—the knowledge that wherever she is now, she isn’t hurting anymore. My heart breaks so utterly for her, because in the immensity of her silent and unceasing pain, suicide truly appeared to be the only way out. As a parent myself, I can’t fathom what it must have been like to lose an infant daughter in such a way. Such guilt must be seismic, earth-shattering. Emma coped with the unthinkable the only way she knew how—by leaving her husband, isolating herself in a controlled environment, and attempting to process it one small bite at a time. Like eating a mountain. Sometimes it’s simply not possible alone.
This account of Howard Grosvenor Kline would be remiss without including the brave woman who stopped him—and her own tragic fate in the weeks that followed. In this way, it’s as much Emma’s story as it is Howard’s. To me, she wasn’t just an extraordinary young woman who fought to save the lives of strangers and her golden retriever alike.
She was also my friend.
I hope she knew how much I admired her. I’ll always remember our long-distance games of Hangman, played via telescope over many lazy afternoons on the Strand. She always beat me! She guessed my words with supernatural intuition, every time. To this day, I don’t know how she did it. And our countless whiteboard conversations, discussing books we’d read, movies we’d loved. She was so sharp. Incisive. Opinionated. She may have been a quiet woman, reluctant to speak, but when she put her thoughts into writing? Watch out. Sometimes to this day, while I brew my morning coffee, I still look out my window at the Kline house and half expect to see a whiteboard message in Emma’s handwriting. I wish.
God, I’d kill for a chance to speak to her again.
Just one more time.
I would tell her this: What happened to your daughter was not your fault.
But—and this is hard to say—perhaps I do understand her pain. Because the truth is, a part of me will always blame myself for what happened to Emma. Yes, I’ll always feel personally responsible for her death. I’m sure I did everything I reasonably could as her neighbor and friend—and we’d saved each other’s lives multiple times that night—but still I wish I could have helped her more. If only I’d known.
If only.
They say the greatest battles we fight are internal. And it’s true. During the Strand Beach massacre she won every external battle with Howard Grosvenor Kline—his blade and bullets alike—but on that near-freezing January night two weeks afterward, under a clear and starry sky, Emma Carpenter lost her greatest battle within herself.
The End