You killed me,” Katherine says again, as if I didn’t hear her the first time.

I did, but barely. My whole body is vibrating with shock. An internal hum that gets louder and louder, building from a whisper to a scream.

That’s what I want to do.

Scream.

Maybe I am screaming and just don’t know it, the noise still rising inside me so loud it eclipses all outside sound.

I bring a hand to my mouth and check. It’s shut tight, my lips flattened together, my tongue still and useless. The inside of my mouth is dry—so parched and numb from surprise, fear, and confusion that I begin to wonder if I’ll ever be able to speak again.

Because there’s no way Katherine could know what I’d done to Len.

No one knows.

No one but me.

And him.

Which means Tom is right about Eli’s campfire tale being true. Even though it’s utterly preposterous, it’s literally the only explanation for what I’m experiencing right now. Len’s soul or spirit or whatever the fuck was left of him after life fled his body remained in Lake Greene, waiting in the dark water, biding its time until it could take the place of the next person to die there.

Who happened to be Katherine.

She was dead the afternoon I went out to rescue her. I’m certain of that now. I hadn’t reached her in time, a fact the state she was in—that lifeless body, those dead eyes, her blue lips and ice-cold flesh—made clear.

And I’d believed she was dead.

Until, suddenly, she wasn’t.

When Katherine sprang back to life, jolting and coughing and spitting up water, it was like some kind of miracle had occurred.

A dark one.

One that only the people Eli talked about seemed to believe.

Somehow, Len had entered Katherine, bringing her back to life. In the process, he’d resurrected himself, albeit in a different body. Where Katherine—the real Katherine and everything that makes her her—is now, I have no idea.

“Len—”

I stop, surprised by how easy it is to use his name when it’s not him I’m seeing.

It’s Katherine. Her body. Her face. Everything is hers except for the voice, which sounds more like Len’s with each passing word, and her attitude.

That’s all Len. So much so that my brain flips like a switch, making me think of her as him.

“Now you get it,” he says. “I bet you thought you’d never see me again.”

I don’t know which one of them he’s referring to. Maybe both. It’s true on either count.

“I didn’t,” I say.

“You don’t look happy.”

“I’m not.”

Because this is the stuff of night terrors. My worst fear made real. My guilt manifested into physical form. It takes all the strength I have not to faint. Even then, specks of blue buzz like flies across my vision.

I literally can’t believe this is happening.

It shouldn’t be happening.

How the fuck is this happening?

A hundred possibilities run through my shock-addled brain, trying to land on something remotely logical. That it happened because Len’s ashes had been scattered in Lake Greene. That there was a combination of minerals in the water that kept his soul alive. That because he died before his time, he was forced to roam the depths. That the lake, quite simply, is as cursed and haunted as Eli and Marnie say it is.

But none of those are possible.

It can’t be real.

Which means it isn’t. There’s no way it could be.

Relief starts to seep into both my body and brain as I realize that this is all a dream. Nothing but a bourbon-induced nightmare. There’s a very real possibility that I’m still on the porch, passed out in a rocking chair, at the mercy of my subconscious.

I run a hand along my cheek, wondering if I should slap myself awake. I fear it will only lead to disappointment. Because this doesn’t feel like a nightmare. Everything is too vivid, too real, from the mismatched antiques crowding the corners of the room like bystanders to the creak of the bed to the twin smells of body odor rising off Len and piss wafting from the nearby bucket.

A different thought occurs to me.

That instead of dreaming, maybe I’m actually dead and am only now realizing it. God knows how it happened. Alcohol poisoning. A heart attack. Maybe I drowned in the lake and that’s why I’m seeing Len in Katherine’s body. It’s my personal limbo, where my good and bad deeds are now colliding.

But it doesn’t explain Tom’s presence. Or why my heart is still beating. Or why sweat pops from my skin in the stifling basement. Or how the storm continues to rage outside.

“After what you did to me, of course you wouldn’t be happy,” Len says. “But don’t worry. I didn’t tell Tom about that.”

I’ve said exactly five words to my long-dead husband, which is five too many. Yet I can’t resist adding two more to the tally.

“Why not?”

“Because our secrets are as wedded together as we are. I did a bad thing, which caused you to do a bad thing.”

“Yours was far worse than mine, Len.”

“Murder is still murder,” he says.

“I didn’t murder you. You drowned.”

“Semantics,” Len says. “You’re the reason I’m dead.”

That part is true, but it’s only half the story. The rest—memories I never want to think about but am always thinking about—crashes over me like a thousand waves. All those details I’d try to chase away with whatever liquor I could get my hands on. They’re back.

Every.

Single.

One.

And I’m drowning in them.

I remember leaning over the edge of the boat, watching Len splash and sputter for what was probably minutes but felt like hours, thinking the whole time that it wasn’t too late, that I could dive in, save him, take him ashore and call the police, but also realizing I had no desire to do that.

Because he’d done terrible things and deserved to be punished.

Because I had loved him and trusted him and adored him and now hated him for not being the man I thought he was.

So I stopped myself from diving in. From saving him. From taking him ashore. From calling the police.

I stopped myself and watched him drown.

Then, when I was certain he was dead, I hauled up the anchor and rowed the boat back to shore. Inside the house, the first thing I did was pour a bourbon, beginning a pattern that continues to this day. I took it to the porch and sat in one of the rocking chairs, drinking and watching the water, fearful that Len hadn’t really drowned and I’d see him swimming to the dock at any second.

After an hour had passed and the ice in my empty glass had melted to shards, I decided I needed to call someone and confess.

I chose Marnie. She had a level head. She’d know what to do. But I couldn’t bring my finger to tap the phone and make the call. Not for my sake. For Marnie’s. I didn’t want to drag her into my dirty deeds, make her complicit in something she had nothing to do with. But there’s another reason I didn’t call her, one I only realized in hindsight.

I didn’t want her to turn me in.

Which she would have done. Marnie is a good person, far better than me, and she wouldn’t have hesitated to get the police involved. Not to punish me. Because it was the right thing to do.

And I, who had definitely not done the right thing, didn’t want to risk it.

Because this wasn’t a cut-and-dried case of self-defense. Len didn’t try to physically hurt me. Maybe he would have without that potent cocktail of alcohol and antihistamine churning in his system. But he was drunk and drugged and I had plenty of ways to get away.

Even if I did claim self-defense, the police wouldn’t see it that way. They would only see a woman who drugged her husband, took him out on the lake, shoved him overboard, and watched him drown. It didn’t matter that he was a serial killer. Or that those locks of hair and stolen IDs were proof of his crimes. The police would still charge me with murder, even though I hadn’t killed my husband.

He drowned.

I just chose not to save him.

But the police would make me pay for it anyway. And I didn’t want to be punished for punishing Len.

He deserved it.

I didn’t.

So I covered my tracks.

First I removed the hair and licenses from the dresser drawer, wiped them clean with the handkerchief I’d found them in, and hid everything behind the loose plank in the basement wall.

Then I brewed a pot of coffee, poured it into Len’s battered thermos, and returned to the basement. There, I grabbed everything Len took with him when he went fishing. The floppy green hat, the fishing rod, the tackle box.

When I exited through the blue door, I left it open just a crack to make it look like Len had also used it. I then carried everything to the boat, which wasn’t easy. It was dark and I couldn’t use a flashlight because my arms were full and I feared someone on the opposite shore would notice it.

Back in the boat, I rowed to the middle of the lake. After tossing the hat into the water, I lowered myself into it and swam back to shore. Once inside the lake house, I stripped off my wet clothes, put them in the dryer, changed into a nightgown, and crawled into bed.

I didn’t sleep a wink.

I spent the night wide-awake, alert to every creak of the house, every rustling leaf, every splash of waterfowl out on the lake. Each noise made me think it was either the police arriving to arrest me or Len, somehow still alive, returning home.

I knew which scenario was worse.

It was only once dawn broke over the lake that I realized the horrible thing I’d done.

Not to Len.

I don’t feel guilty about that. I didn’t then and I don’t now.

Nor do I miss him.

I miss the person I thought he was.

My husband.

The man I loved.

That wasn’t the same person I watched sink under the water. He was someone different. Someone evil. He deserved what happened to him.

Still, I’m filled with regret over what I did. Every second of every minute of every hour that I’m sober, it eats away at me. Because I was selfish. I had felt so angry, so hurt, so fucking betrayed, that I only gave a cursory thought to the women Len had killed. They’re the true victims of my actions. Them and their families and the cops still struggling to find out what happened.

By killing Len instead of turning him in, I denied all of them answers. Megan Keene, Toni Burnett, and Sue Ellen Stryker are still out there, somewhere, and because of me, no one will ever know where. Their families continue to live in some horrible limbo where a small possibility exists that they’ll return.

I was able to mourn Len—or at least the man I’d thought he was—at two memorial services, one on each coast. I sat through both racked with guilt that I was allowed to wallow in my sorrow, a luxury his victims’ families didn’t have. They weren’t granted one service, let alone two. They were never allowed to fully grieve.

Closure.

That’s the thing I murdered that night.

Which is why I drink until my head spins and my stomach flips and my mind goes deliciously blank. It’s also why I spend all my time here sitting on that porch, staring out at the water, hoping that, if I look hard enough, at least one of those poor souls will make her presence known.

My single attempt to make amends was to slip on a pair of gloves and dig out a postcard of Lake Greene I’d bought during a visit years before, for reasons I can no longer recall. On the back, I scrawled three names and four words.

I think they’re here.

When writing, I used my left hand. Wilma’s handwriting analyst was spot-on about that. I slapped a self-adhesive stamp on the back of the postcard and dropped it in a random mailbox as I walked to the nearest bar. While there, I had so much to drink that I was shit-faced by the time I showed up to the theater where Shred of Doubt was playing.

It was one p.m. on a Wednesday.

By the time I finally sobered up, I was out of a job.

The irony is that mailing the postcard ended up being worse than useless. It confused more than clarified, convincing Wilma and Boone that Katherine Royce had sent it—and that Tom was the man who’d committed Len’s crimes.

And I had to pretend I thought that, too. The only other option was to admit what I’ve done.

But now, as I watch a man who is definitely not my husband but also definitely is, I realize I’ve been granted an opportunity to right my grievous wrong.

Len is back. He can tell me what he did to his victims, and I can finally help give those who loved Megan Keene, Toni Burnett, and Sue Ellen Stryker the ending I had denied them.

I’m still not clear how or why this surreal turn of events happened. I doubt I’ll ever know the forces, whether they be scientific or supernatural, behind it. If this is some sort of fucked-up miracle, I’m not going to waste my time questioning it. Instead, I’m going to make the most of it.

I take a step toward the bed, prompting an intrigued look from Len. It’s strange how easily he’s replaced Katherine in my mind. Even though I’m conscious that it’s her I’m seeing, I can’t stop myself from picturing him.

“You’re planning something, Cee,” he says as I draw near. “You’ve got that gleam in your eyes.”

I’m beside the bed now, close enough to touch him. I reach out a trembling hand, place it on his right leg, retract it like I’d just bumped a hot stove.

“Don’t be scared,” Len says. “I would never hurt you, Cee.”

“You already have.”

He lets out a rueful chuckle. “Says the woman who watched me drown.”

I can’t disagree with him. That’s exactly what I did, and in the process I’d condemned an untold number of people to a life of uncertainty. They need answers. Just as much as I need to be relieved of the guilt that’s weighed me down for more than a year.

My hand returns to Len’s leg, sliding over the hump of his knee and down his shin, traveling all the way to the rope around his ankle. I reach for the other end of the rope, wrapped tight around the bed frame and capped off with a large, messy knot.

“What are you doing?” Len says.

I give the knot a tug. “Getting you out of here.”