Nothing happens.
The figure never appears. All night.
As sunlight breaks through rain-dewed windows, Emma carries her knife downstairs and clears the house room by room, eliminating every hiding place. Then she checks the sand under each entry point—all untouched. Zero evidence.
Until the final window in the teenager’s bedroom. There, her heart pounds with excitement at a disturbance in the sand—before she recognizes a pawprint.
“Damn it, Laika.”
Sorry, Mom.
Maybe this figure is only imagined. Or maybe the police have already scared him off—after all, Jules’s son survived last winter just fine, didn’t he?
Somehow, it doesn’t matter. This is Emma’s project, something she can’t leave unfinished. Anything to make it to the next night, because the nights don’t scare her. It’s the gray and endless days, as mushy as cold oatmeal, when the Strand’s maddening isolation is most acutely felt. The house feels like an organism that’s slowly rejecting her, an alienating hodgepodge of stainless-steel appliances and sleek glass built around ancient pipework and spiderwebbed laundry chutes. It’s both warm and cold, cozy and smothering, luxurious and fetid with rot. It’s a home—and it’s very much not. At night, you can pretend it’s full of ghosts and serial killers to give you purpose.
But the days are long.
Without purpose.
Beyond the e-books and whiteboard games, all that’s left is the green Osprey backpack loaded with rocks by the back door, like a trip she’s already packed for.
“I’m not crazy,” she tells her golden retriever.
Laika ignores her, licking her food bowl as the sun traces its slow path behind a soup of thick clouds. You already said that, Mom.
Yes. She remembers.
Definitely not crazy.
But she did solve one mystery last night: her neighbor’s former life. This explains the old man’s conspicuous vocabulary, his heaped books and documents, his reclusive lifestyle. Even why he might recommend a shitty novel as a joke.
The clue was propofol—Deek’s very first Hangman word. On a hunch, Emma was cross-checking the full name “Deacon” with “propofol” on Google’s fifth or sixth page when an article came up on the Stockyard Slayer, a Fort Worth–area serial killer who preyed on women during the late eighties and early nineties. He was ostensibly a well-respected anesthesiologist, but his mug shot showed a chinless little bald man with vacant bovine eyes. The kind of man you’d barely notice as you passed him on the sidewalk—but you might hear the plop in your drink or maybe feel the prick of a needle. Then comes slushy, wide-eyed terror as his custom anesthetic cocktail melts the muscles, leaving his victims near-paralyzed but still horribly cognizant. It’s nightmare fuel. In their final hours, some of these women assuredly experienced hell on earth.
To clarify: no, Deek is not the Stockyard Slayer.
The state of Texas barbecued his ass in 2008.
But the bestselling 1996 true crime novel Silent Screams—a vividly written and exhaustively researched account of the Stockyard Slayer’s thirteen confirmed kills, which was widely acclaimed for exposing shoddy police work, catapulting the missing women into the national eye, and even aiding detectives in finally pinpointing the killer—was authored by a Dallas-based journalist named . . . Deacon Cowl.
She has it now.
YOU WERE A WRITER!
She underlines it.
A quarter mile away, Deek checks his telescope. A hold-your-breath moment as he reads—then he looks up, smirks, and guiltily spreads his arms. You got me.
“Hell, yes.”
Honestly, she’s a bit relieved. She’d half expected to learn he was a retired assassin or a child molester or a mob informant in hiding. Something disgusting or dangerous. You never know who your neighbors are, after all. But at least he’s on the right team. And famous, even.
Deek shakes his head modestly: LONG TIME AGO. RETIRED
YEAH, Emma writes. RETIRED IN A BIG-ASS BEACH HOUSE
He laughs soundlessly.
She’s pretty sure she’s seen yellowed paperbacks of Silent Screams on shelves before, in thrift stores and garage sales. She might have even picked it up once or twice.
Somehow it saddens her to know Deek was once famous. She’s seen how much he drinks now, some afternoons tripping over his own slippers. He’ll pace restlessly around his house like a caged animal, appearing and reappearing behind stacks of heaped furniture while gulping from a generously poured glass. He’s not enjoying himself. There’s desperation to it.
Alcohol has always secretly scared Emma. Back in September, Jules left a pricey Cabernet on the kitchen counter as a housewarming gift, and it’s still there now. The only person she’s ever felt truly safe to drink around was Shawn. Losing control—even a little—is terrifying. She remembers the way her mother would belch loudly on the sofa while clutching her giant box of Walmart wine—these terrible gaseous watery belches that shook the house. No embarrassment or self-awareness. Like a dog. As a child, Emma used to giggle at her mother’s burps. As a teenager, she was saddened by them.
Deek writes: SEE YOUR STALKER LAST NIGHT?
She shakes her head.
For a time, she’d suspected the figure in Jules’s doorbell camera was just her neighbor in a Halloween mask, given his penchant for dark jokes. But she’s ruled him out. The figure in the photo is too tall, and as barrel-chested as Jason Voorhees. It’s not Deek.
He erases and writes: DID JULIE MENTION ME?
It takes her a moment to realize who he’s talking about.
Julie. Jules.
Figures he’d know her.
And Emma doesn’t have the heart to tell him the truth. Amid yesterday’s hectic firehouse of text messages, of Tasers and incident reports and accounts of unknown men barking like dogs in the night, she’d offered to warn Deek of the strange visitor. Jules’s answer had been swift and unsparing, almost as if it were pretyped.
Don’t bother talking to the neighbor. He’s a drunk + liar + all-around 100-karat asshole. He’s the reason I took my son to Portland. If there’s any justice in the world, Demon Face will show up at his door next time.
Damn, lady.
Maybe she hated Deek’s fireworks. Maybe his weird sense of humor offended her. Maybe they were past lovers and he still carries a torch for her. He does look vaguely hopeful right now, still staring. Awaiting her reply.
Say something, Emma.
After a long pause, she uncaps her marker.
NOPE, she writes.
DIDN’T MENTION YOU
Scritch-scratch.
She hears it from the next room. Her heart heaves, a sickening plunge.
Scritch-scratch.
It’s . . . just Laika, pawing at the back door.
Emma lets her retriever outside but stands in the doorway to watch. Although the backyard is fenced, she doesn’t trust the sagging chain link. She’s thinking more and more about that strange meat that cut Laika’s gums, and yesterday, on a worried hunch, she’d even returned to the beach for a closer look at it. She dug three holes but found only wet sand. Maybe she was just misremembering where she buried it—or maybe someone took care to retrieve it.
“Recall,” she orders.
Laika obeys, and Emma locks the door.
Back in the living room, she texts Jules a final time to ask if there’s any other way into the house. Any crawl spaces or secret passages to the basement.
The answer is immediate.
Nope, just the two locking doors + main floor windows. Don’t worry, Emma. The police are on it. And this house can play tricks on you.
Maybe.
Maybe it’s just in her head. The rubber-masked stranger at the door is one of the Strand’s transients searching for an unguarded house to steal from, already come and gone. The figure in her bedroom is just a dream. The real H. G. Kane is a harmless sweater-wearing forty-something living in his mother’s basement in Michigan and utterly baffled by her email. Maybe she truly is alone with her thoughts in this maddening place.
Maybe. But Emma doesn’t think so.
Buzz.
By the way—MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Today’s date surprises her.
Honestly, she forgot.