“Why here?”

  “Why not here? It’s quiet, secluded. Plus, I could rent a car, drive here for a weekend, come back, and pretend I was in LA. You never suspected a thing.”

  “I found out eventually,” I say.

  “Not until it was too late for Megan, Toni, and Sue Ellen.”

  I feel a pain in my gut, as sharp and twisting as if I’d taken the knife on the bed next to me and shoved it into my side.

  “Tell me where you left their bodies.”

  “To atone for my sins?”

  I shake my head and take another sip of bourbon. “To atone for mine.”

  “I see,” Len says. “Then what? And don’t pretend you haven’t thought it through. I know exactly what you plan on doing. Once you learn where those bodies are, you’re going to kill me all over again.”

  When he was alive, I found it uncanny how well Len could read my thoughts. Sometimes it felt like he knew my every mood, whim, and need, which I absolutely loved. What a pleasure it was to have my spouse know me so well. In hindsight, it was more curse than blessing. I suspect it’s how Len was able to hide his true nature from me for so long. I’m certain it’s how he knows exactly what I have planned now.

  “Yes,” I say, seeing no point in lying. He wouldn’t believe me if I did. “That’s what I intend to do.”

  “And what if I refuse?”

  I set the glass on the nightstand, next to the lamp that continues to flicker. It’s like a strobe light, plunging the room into microbursts of darkness and light as my hand once again moves toward the knife. “Then I’ll kill you anyway.”

  “I don’t think you want that much blood on your hands, Cee,” Len says, pronouncing the nickname with an exaggerated hiss. “I know from experience you won’t hesitate to kill me. But it’s your other victim that should give you pause.”

  “What other victim?”

  “Katherine, of course.”

  He doesn’t need to say anything else. I now understand exactly what he means.

  If I killed him, I’d also be killing Katherine Royce.

  Riding on the coattails of that revelation is another bit of clarity. One that’s more hopeful, if no less complicated.

  “She’s still there,” I say.

  Len doesn’t get a chance to respond. He’s blocked by another screaming wind outside.

  Coming closer.

  Swooping in.

  It rams against the house and everything shakes, me included. I reach for the nightstand to steady myself. In the hallway, something falls to the floor and shatters.

  The nightstand lamp stops flickering long enough for me to see the rattling bourbon glass, Len straining against the ropes, the smug grin on his face.

  Then the lamp, the room, and the entire lake house go completely dark.

  The plunge into darkness is so sudden and quick it makes me gasp. The sound of it slithers through the room, made louder by the all-encompassing blackness. Now this is darker than a coffin with the lid shut.

  I remain on the bed, hoping it’s just a blip and that power will return in just a few seconds. When a minute passes and the lights remain out, I resign myself to the task ahead—finding flashlights and candles and making the place as bright as possible.

  While I don’t trust Len in the light, I trust him even less in the dark.

  I stand and leave the room, using muscle memory from a thousand nights here to navigate between the beds and out the door.

  In the hallway, something crunches beneath my sneakers.

  Broken glass.

  A pool of it spreads across the hardwood floor. I try to step over it, accidentally nudging the source of the glass—a picture frame that fell from the wall when the house shook.

  I keep moving to the stairs. Rather than walk down them, I sit and scoot step by step to the bottom. By now, my eyes have adjusted to the darkness enough for me to make my way to the den, where an emergency supply of flashlights and candles is kept. I find an LED lantern, a flashlight, and several fat candles that can burn for hours.

  And I find a lighter.

  One that’s likely been here for ages.

  At least since last summer.

  And since Len was the person responsible for gathering and keeping track of the supplies, he knew of its existence.

  That son of a bitch.

  I turn on the lantern and carry it from room to room, lighting candles along the way. Some are from the emergency stash. Others are decorative ones in glass jars that have accumulated over the years, unlit until this very moment. Their scents mingle as I make my way through the house. Spruce and cinnamon, lavender and orange blossom. Such pretty scents for what’s become a very ugly situation.

  Upstairs, I light a candle in the master bedroom before returning to the room where Len remains tied up.

  I place the lantern on the bed and put a candle on the nightstand. I flick the lighter and hold it to the candle’s wick, which lets off a small sizzle as the flame takes hold.

  “You wanted me to find those driver’s licenses, didn’t you?” I say. “That’s why you sent me down to your tackle box and not to the lighter with the storm supplies. You wanted me to know what you did.”

  Len shifts on the bed, his shadow large and flickering on the wall next to him. The candlelight paints his face in shifting patterns of brightness and shadow. In each snatch of darkness, I think I get a glimpse of Len in his true form, almost as if Katherine is mutating into him. A cruel trick of the light.

  “It was more of a game,” he says. “I knew there was a chance you could find them, just as I knew you could completely overlook them. It was exciting trying to figure out if you did or not. I found out eventually.”

  “Not until it was too late for you.” I lift the glass of bourbon to my lips and take a triumphant swallow. “But it’s not too late for Katherine, is it? She’s still present.”

  “She is,” Len says. “Somewhere deep. I thought you understood that.”

  He’s wrong there. I still don’t understand any of it. Not just the perversion of nature that allowed the situation to happen, but how it works.

  “Is she aware of what’s going on?”

  “You’d have to ask her,” Len says.

  “Is that possible?”

  “Not anymore. It was back when she still mostly had control.”

  My thoughts drift to my few interactions with Katherine. Talking in the boat after pulling her from the lake. Downing her husband’s five-grand-a-bottle wine. Drinking coffee the next morning, bemoaning the state of her marriage. That was all Katherine. Or most of it. I presume that sometimes Len broke through, like when he saw his binoculars sitting on the porch or texted me even though Katherine didn’t know my phone number.

  “When did you take over?” I say.

  “It happened gradually,” Len says. “It took me a while to get my bearings in a new form, to understand the logistics of how it worked, to learn how to control it. And, boy, did she resist. Katherine refused to go down without a fight.”

  Good for her, I think, before being consumed by another thought.

  “Is there a way to bring her back?”

  Len doesn’t answer.

  “There is,” I say. “Otherwise you would have told me no.”

  “There might be a way, yes,” Len says. “Not that I plan on sharing it with you.”

  “You can’t stay like this. You’re trapped. Not just here, in this room, but in another person’s body.”

  “And what a lovely body it is. I suspect it’ll make things easy for me.”

  Len looks down at Katherine’s breasts with an exaggerated leer. Seeing him do it unleashes an anger I’ve probably been keeping in my entire life. Not just at him, although he’s left me plenty to be angry at, but at all men who think life is somehow easier for women, especially the pretty ones.

  “Easy?” I say. “You have no idea how hard it is to be a woman. Or how maddening it is to always feel at risk because that’s just how our fucked-up society is. Trust me, you’re not equipped to handle it. Wait until you have to walk down the street alone at night or stand on a subway platform and wonder if one—or more—of the men around you will try to harass you. Or assault you. Or kill you just like you killed those three girls who are now somewhere in that lake.”

  The knife is in my hand, although I have no memory of picking it up. Now that it’s in my grip, I fly across the room and, seething with pent-up rage, bring the blade to Len’s neck. He gulps, and the rippling of his skin scritches against the steel of the knife.

  “Maybe I should do it right now,” I say. “Just so you know how it feels.”

  “Remember what I told you,” he says. “You kill me, then you also kill Katherine. Stab me, and you’re stabbing her, too. My blood is her blood now.”

  I don’t immediately remove the knife. Anger bubbling inside me like hot tar makes me keep it there another minute, the blade on the cusp of breaking skin. During those sixty seconds, I feel bright and wildly alive and finally in charge of the situation.

  This, I think, is what being a man must feel like.

  But then I catch Len looking at me, and in those gray-green eyes that once belonged to Katherine Royce but are now his, I see approval.

  “I always knew we were a good match,” he says as the knife blade continues to scratch his flesh.

  Horrified, I recoil, drop onto the other bed, let the knife slip from my hands.

  I’d become him.

  Just for a minute.

  Long enough for me to feel something inside that I’m certain wasn’t part of me.

  It was Len.

  Curling around my organs and skittering between my ribs and tugging on my muscles and growing in my brain like a tumor.

  I huff out a single, shocked breath.

  “What did you just do?”

  Len keeps grinning. “Tom warned you I could be tricky.”

  He did, but it never occurred to me that Tom meant this.

  “How did you do that?” I say, even though I have a good idea. It happened earlier, when he’d sighed into my face as I was binding his right wrist. That foul breath had felt like an invasion because it was.

  Len had planted a part of himself inside of me.

  “Neat trick, right?” he says.

  I scoot farther onto the bed, backing away from him until I’m pressed against the wall, more worried than ever about being too close to him. He’s contagious.

  “How was that possible? How is any of this possible?”

  Len stares up at the spot where the wall meets the ceiling and the bit of his long shadow that crosses that divide. “When I was alive, I never gave much thought to the afterlife. I assumed that when we die, that’s the end. But now I know better. Now I know that something stays behind. Our souls, I guess. When people die on land, I suspect it rides out with their final breath and eventually dissipates into the atmosphere. But when I drowned, it—”

  “Went into the lake,” I say.

  “Exactly. I don’t know if it can happen in all bodies of water or if there’s something special about Lake Greene that causes it. All I know is that I was trapped there.”

  “What about Megan, Toni, and Sue Ellen?” I say. “Are their souls also trapped in the lake?”

  “You need to die in the water for that to happen.” Len pauses, knowing he just gave me a hint about what happened to them. Completely intentional, I’m sure. “So, no, I’m afraid it was just me.”

  While I’m not nearly as knowledgeable about Lake Greene as someone like Eli, I do know there hasn’t been a drowning there since my great-great-grandfather built the earliest version of the lake house. Len had been the first since at least 1878.

  Until Katherine came along.

  “How were you able to enter Katherine? Or me, for that matter?”

  “Because our souls—if that is indeed what it is—don’t need to vanish into the ether. They’re like air and liquid and shadow combined. Slippery. Weightless. Shapeless. In order to remain, all they need is a vessel. The lake was one. Katherine’s body is another. I’m like water now, able to be poured from glass to glass. And what you experienced, my sweet, was a mere drop. How did it feel?”

  Horrifying.

  And powerful.

  A realization that makes me reach for the glass of bourbon, desperate for another sip. It’s empty. I hadn’t realized.

  Seized by both the need for a drink and the urge to get away from Len before he can slide into me again, I climb off the bed, grab the lantern, and back out of the room. In the doorway, I pause and fix him with a look of warning.

  “Do that again and I will kill you,” I say.

  Downstairs, I pour a splash of bourbon into the empty glass, shuddering at how it reminds me of what Len just said.

  A mere drop.

  That’s all it took.

  I’d turned into him, and it’s left me feeling violated, dirty, tainted.

  I dump more bourbon into the glass, filling it the way Len could have filled me, emptying out of one vessel into another. I suppose that’s what Lake Greene is. A vast bowl in which his evil thrived like a virus in a petri dish, waiting for the right host to come along.

  Now that it has in the form of Katherine Royce, I can think of only two ways to make it stop.

  The first is to kill him on land and hope his soul evaporates into the atmosphere. Not an option when he’s currently inside Katherine. Len was right. I don’t want any more blood on my hands.

  The second way is to pour him into a different vessel.

  I look to the French doors that lead to the porch. The combined light of the lantern and a candle burning in the kitchen has turned the glass into a makeshift mirror. I approach it, my reflection getting more pronounced with each step. Looking at myself, I put a hand to my heart before sliding it over my breasts and down my stomach. Then I touch my head, my face, my neck, my arms—all the places I’d briefly felt Len—making sure he’s gone.

  I think so.

  I feel like my usual tormented, self-destructive, trainwreck self.

  I move closer to the door until I’m only an inch from the glass, staring at my reflection, which in turn stares back at me. We look into each other’s eyes, both of us knowing what needs to be done next.

  I step away from the door, grab the lantern, and leave the kitchen, forgetting the bourbon entirely.

  I climb the stairs, pausing at the top step to take a deep breath, bracing myself to face Len again before continuing. Then it’s on to the landing and into the hall, where I crunch once more over the broken glass from the fallen picture frame. I then push through the doorway and into the bedroom, lit by the flickering glow of candlelight.

  “If you tell me where the girls are, I’ll—”

  My voice withers and dies.

  The bed is empty.

  Where Len’s arms should be, two lengths of rope dangle from the bedposts. The ropes at the foot of the bed are shorter and their ends ragged, clearly sawed apart. Their other halves are curled in the spot on the floor where the knife had been.

  It, like Len himself, is now gone.

  I freeze in the middle of the bedroom, listening for signs as to where Len went. While I was downstairs, I didn’t hear a door open or close, which is both a pro and a con.

  The pro: He hasn’t left the house.

  The con: He’s still inside, carrying both a knife and a grudge.

  I raise the lantern and rotate slowly, my gaze sliding over the entire room, seeking out places where he could be hiding. Under both beds, for starters. Those dark spaces have me expecting to see Len’s hand springing out from under them, knife swinging. I jump onto the bed Len should still be in, barely able to breathe as I locate another potential hiding spot.

  The closets.

  There are two, both narrow spaces made for little clothes worn by little girls like Marnie and I used to be. Neither would be big enough to contain someone Len’s size.

  Katherine Royce is a different story.

  Her willowy frame could easily fit inside.

  I step to the foot of the bed, cursing the squeak of the mattress springs. Gripping the bed frame with clammy hands, I force my feet onto the floor, one at a time. I then tiptoe forward, as quick as a ballerina, toward the first closet.

  Holding my breath, I reach out.

  I grab the doorknob.

  I give it a twist.

  My heart halts when the door clicks open.

  I pull it, slowly, as hinges neglected for years groan into use.

  The closet is empty.

  I sidestep to the other one in the room, ready to perform the dance all over again. Breath held. Doorknob grabbed and twisted. Hinges protesting. It all leads to the same outcome.

  An empty closet and my mind full of thoughts.

  Len has escaped to other parts of the house.

  It’s a big place, with so many spots to hide and wait.

  Every moment I spend inside is one moment too long and I should get out.

  Now.

  I bolt from the bedroom, cut a hard left in the hall, and splash through the pool of broken glass on my way to the stairs. I fly down the steps so fast my feet barely touch them. I slide to a stop in the living room, which is a sea of shadows undulating in the candlelight. I skip my gaze from corner to corner, doorway to doorway, wondering if I’ve just stepped into a trap.

  Len could be anywhere.

  In a shadow-filled corner. Or that dark space by the fireplace. Or the gloom of the nook under the stairs.

  It’s hard to tell because everything is dark, quiet, still. The only sounds I hear are the rain outside and the grandfather clock. Each tick from it is a reminder that every second I remain in this house is one second more I’ve spent in danger.