Sam began to huff. Pulling the Arctic air into her warm, tender lungs. Which seared with ice, making her cough. It hurt. But the oxygen gave her the strength to do what she needed to do, which was sweep her arms like horizontal windshield wipers, pushing enough snow off the hot tub lid to expose the icy canvas. Then try to lift it. The lid was hinged so half of it could be opened at one time, and it was almost too heavy for Sam under normal circumstances. She hooked what she thought were her fingers beneath what she hoped was the lid and pulled up. Nothing happened. She tried again, grunting, straining, streaming tears of effort that hardened instantly on her cheeks.Don’t fucking cry. You’ll freeze your eyelids shut.
She felt the lid give. Lift a few inches. Sam pushed and pushed and got her shoulder under it and pushed more. The water was not superheated, of course. William set it to a hundred degrees before they got in and turned it off when they got out. But they had been in it last night, and the water would still be temperate, maybe even tepid, certainly warmer than what surrounded Sam now. If she could last only a little longer, maybe the snow would let up, maybe William would mistakenly chase her into the woods, maybe she could get back into the house, maybe she could take her car or his and batter through the drifts on the causeway somehow, maybe maybe maybe . . . Maybe was better than nothing. Maybe was a shot. Sam hoisted her legs over the side of the hot tub and plunged in.
The Rabbit
On my way across the basement I grab something from the worktable because like an idiot I left my trusty box cutter in the Rabbit Hole. It turns out to be one of those double-sided mallets that has rubber on it—I don’t know what you use those for, but it’ll do nicely for what I have in mind. William is standing in front of his desk, staring at his laptop, while wind and snow howl into the room like somebody blew a hole in a plane. Sam must have run out into the blizzard. His back is to me as I charge across the study and wham him in the head.
But my mother always said I move like an elephant, and apparently that must still be true, William must hear or sense me coming, because just as I swing the mallet he turns and it catches him not where I wanted to, on the base of his skull, but over his left eye. He staggers backward and rebounds against his desk. More bad luck: He doesn’t have his glasses on, so I didn’t even blind him, just raised a bloody lump.
“You,” he says. “She said you were in the house. I should have listened.”
And while I’m taking another swing he shoves his desk chair at me. It slams me in the stomach and I make a noise like a seal bark,Rark!as he uses it to bulldoze me across the room into the wall and pin me there.
He plucks the mallet from my hand like it’s a dandelion. “I don’t have time for this now,” he says. “Simone must be apprehended. I’ll deal with you later,” and the last thing I see is the look of stern concentration on his face as he raises the hammer.
Chapter 39
The Hot Tub
Usually when Sam was in the hot tub, she imagined herself as a dumpling in a vat of soup, bobbing gently, skin steaming. Now, as she crouched beneath the lid, weighted down by her and William’s sodden clothes, she felt like a rock. The water was lukewarm, as she’d hoped, and she’d pulled the cover back over the tub to the best of her ability, preserving the temperature. Hopefully it would look aligned from the outside. Hopefully the snow would continue to fall and mask the area Sam had brushed off, as well as any tracks she’d left. Hopefully William was searching in her car or the forest or had wandered onto the lake. Or his faulty heart had finally given out from the strain.
Sam floated, suspended in the dark. Feeling was returning to her feet, hands, and face, and it was excruciating, a burning as if she were filled with bees. At least that meant they weren’t badly frostbitten. Sam clenched her jaw and breathed through her nose, as quietly as possible. She had no idea how long she’d been in here. She tried to count the seconds,one Mississippi two Mississippi, and how long would be long enough? How much time had to pass before it was safe? What was the plan, since she couldn’t be sure where William was? Should she try her luck in the woods or—
There was a grinding noise, and with a blast of cold and whirl of snow, the tub cover slid back.
“Well, look at you!” said William. “How clever you are, Simone.”
He beamed down at Sam, framed in the white rectangle between lid and tub. His face, surrounded by a fur-lined hood, was red with cold, one of his eyes much smaller than the other beneath a raw bleeding lump. How had he injured it—had he run into a tree branch? No goggles for him after all.
“I’m glad I found you,” he said, extending a gloved hand. “You led me a merry chase. Come get warm. I’ve got your robe ready for you by the fire, and a towel—”
Sam heard herself growl. She thought she might have bared her teeth at him.
“No?” said William. “Simone. Please. This is ludicrous. You’ll die out here.”
“I’d rather do that!” Sam shouted suddenly. She was shuddering, from cold, adrenaline, rage. “I know what you’re going to do to me in there. You did it to them. Didn’t you. The dead girls. The writers. You killed them all!”
William just looked down at her, his face sagging, a little jowly. Usually when Sam saw him from this angle, gazing at her from above, he was doing much more pleasant things.
“Why?” Sam said. She was crying. “Why did you? Why did you do it? I know why, so you could take their books. But why, William? Why? Why? Why?”
He laughed, his face split in his old sunshiny grin.
“Oh, Simone,” he said. “You’ve got it all wrong. Ihelpedthem. Do you think any of those women could have made it on their own? Do you think even one of those novels would have seen a bookstore shelf, let alone the bestseller list? At best they might have self-published. None of them had the talent—not Becky, nor poor sad Kaelynn, nor Cyndi—”
“Don’t you eventalkabout Cyndi!” Sam yelled. “Don’t you even say her name!”
“—or the Irish one,” said William, as if she hadn’t spoken, “I forget her name now, or what’s-her-face, Medusa. They didn’t have the skill. All they had was story. I provided the rest. The words. The power. My reputation. Myname. Who were they? A bunch of nobodies. Community college instructors.Adjuncts.Library aides. Literary primordial soup. Ielevatedthem. I plucked them from their quotidian existences and gave them what every writer wants: eternal life, via print. Now come out of there, love. Let’s do this gently.”
“Fine,” said Sam. “Okay. You win.” Smiling, William reached down to help her out. Ignoring him, Sam used one hand to drag herself up, the other to heave William’s boot, which she’d been gripping underwater, against the side of his face. Soaking wet, it weighed as much as a cinder block.
William fell back and vanished into the white. Sam was struggling to her feet, amazed this had worked, when he reappeared, his hood knocked askew and another bleeding purple welt on one cheek.
“That was unkind, Simone,” he said.
He lunged for her, and Sam tried to scramble back under the lid, but in her waterlogged state she was too slow. His hands in their thermal gloves closed around her neck.
“Why, Simone?” he said. His thumbs found the base of her throat, the suprasternal notch, the little bowl he loved to kiss and lick. He began to press. To squeeze.
