You still haven’t answered my question,” he says after I let a minute pass without speaking. “What about Tom?”
“He’s fine,” I say. “Right now, the least of my concerns is your husband.”
I freeze, noticing my mistake.
Until now, I’ve been good about not thinking I’m talking to Katherine. But it’s easy to slip up when she’s the person I see tied up and spread wide across the bed like this is some controversy-courting fashion shoot from her modeling days. Although the clothes are different, Katherine looks eerily similar to when I pulled her from the lake. Lips pale from the cold. Wet hair clinging to her face in dripping tendrils. Bright eyes open wide.
Yet I also know that Katherine is no longer present. She’s now just a vessel for someone else. Someone worse. I suppose what’s happening is a lot like demonic possession. Innocence subsumed by evil. I think of Linda Blair, spinning heads, pea soup.
“It’s you I’m worried about,” I say. “Nice to see you still care.” “That’s not why I’m worried.”
I’m concerned he’ll break loose, escape, run free to resume all the horrible things he’d done when he was alive. He murdered Megan Keene, Toni Burnett, and Sue Ellen
Stryker.
He took them, then killed them, then dumped their bodies into the pitch-black depths of Lake Greene.
And although right now he might look like Katherine Royce, inhabiting her body, speaking through her mouth, seeing through her eyes, I know who he really is.
Leonard Bradley. Len.
The man I married.
And the man I thought I had removed from the face of this earth for good.
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