She finds thecopied pages on the coffee table, right where she left them, next to the half-completed Escher jigsaw puzzle. The pile is thick; she knows it will take a while to find his name. And he probablyused a false one when he picked up girls, when he did what he did to them. But the license plate: that won’t be a lie.
She whips the notebook from her purse and hastily flips it to the correct page, finds the details she took down in the Farrers’ kitchen. Then she turns the pages, one by one, running her finger slowly down the correct column.
When it happens, something slots together inside Elsie, as if the bones of her spine have been out of alignment but suddenly click back into place.
There it is. Hank Farrer’s license plate number.
Her eyes dart to the neighboring column, where the specifics of each interaction have been jotted down, the chilling details of each violent incident. As she takes in the words, her stomach drops. Fingertips buzzing, she reaches for the phone.
Thirty-Four
Beverley takes anothergulp of her whiskey sour and collapses on the couch. Margot and Elsie have just left, and the walls still ring with their chatter.
Elsie found it in the Beware Book: Hank’s license plate number. He’d used a different name, unsurprisingly, but from the physical description, it was indisputably him. What was most alarming, however, was the description of the encounter. “Erotic asphyxiation,” the book said. When she told the women what it meant—the act of choking someone for sexual pleasure—and when she told them she’d seen photos of the very same act in the magazines Albert stuffed between the bed slats, a sense of horrific certainty descended on them all.
Sharon seemed so very terrified, so on edge, and how else could they explain the bracelet in Hank’s car? Things were starting to add up. They were close; she could feel it. They were identifying a dangerous predator, but they had no concrete evidence to prove irrefutably that Hank Farrer was their man.
Now Beverley’s head is muddled, thoughts of the murders eddying around her brain. They make her infuriatingly alert, even though her bones are exhausted. She sighs, her eyes restlessly roaming the room until they land on a familiar spot on the bookshelves. She hesitates. She knows she shouldn’t, but fatigue has chipped away at her resolve. She stands, moves to the shelf and picks out a well-worn title. She thumbs to the binding at the middle, pulls out a card. She returns to the couch and opens it, warmth weaving through her blood at the sight of the handwriting.
My life was only complete when I met you.
She shoves the card back in the book, tosses it away. She has wondered, often, why she keeps these things—mementos of someone who has done so much harm. This card is not a card from a killer. It’s a card from the man she loved, the man she married—not the man Henry became, the man she didn’t know at all.
Her head throbs, eyelids heavy. She knows what she’ll have to do to get some rest: the same thing she does night after night when thoughts of Henry threaten to take over. The kids are upstairs. They’re safe. If she can sleep, the facts will order themselves, everything will slot together and she’ll wake up with answers.
She shifts in her seat, plunges her arm under the couch cushion and rummages until she finds what she has stashed in there, hidden from the children. Her fingers meet foil and she pulls it out, pushes a few pills from the blister pack, places them in her mouth and washes them down with whiskey.
Then she waits for the numbness, the warm absolution of sleep.
When she wakes, sometime later, the room is dark. There is a crick in her neck—she has been slumped at an awkward angle—and the skin of her cheek is pulled tight by the remnants of drool. The hangover has already kicked in, and her head thuds. She needs water. Her eyes roam the room. Everything seems to be in its correct place, butshe can’t help feeling that there’s something uneasy about the way the air fills the room.
A sound comes from the hallway, and Beverley flinches.
A banging.
She stiffens, alarmed. It comes again. She looks in horror at the vase on the table—the vase she usually remembers to place atop a pile of books, atop the sideboard that she usually remembers to push up against the door. But she was too depleted, too distracted, to complete her nightly routine.
She jumps from the couch and rushes to the hallway. The banging comes again, and with a wash of terror she locates its source. The front door is open, knocking on its hinges.
Alarm seizes every centimeter of her skin. She sprints up the stairs, her lungs screaming, her head pounding from the drink. She can see, once she reaches the landing, that Benjamin’s bedroom door is open. She knows, as she hurls herself toward it, that she will find his bed empty.
In a panic, she runs to Audrey’s room, pulls the bedsheets back and is relieved to find her daughter sleeping soundly. She whisks the girl, who complains groggily, into her arms and rushes back down the stairs.
Out on the street, she scans the road, ignoring the scratch of the pavement on her bare feet, ignoring Audrey’s sleepy whines in her ear. Benjamin has to have been sleepwalking, and if he has been sleepwalking, he can’t have got far. He’s just a boy.
She will not allow herself to consider the other possibility, that Benjamin did not leave the house of his own accord. She will not, cannot, allow her mind to go there.
The downstairs curtains twitch across the street. Of course Christopher Appleton is awake. His television is always on, the stark light of it roving across the windows at all hours. She hears his front door open, sees him step out. He calls out to her, asking if she’s okay.
“My son!” she yells accusingly at the old man. “Do you have my son?”
“What?” Mr. Appleton shakes his head, eyes wide with alarm.
“He’s so small,” she cries desperately.
Audrey begins to whimper.
Beverley takes off at a run, frantic, her daughter heavy in her arms. She cannot waste any time.
