Chapter 25

I had a faint memory of being walked through a cool misty night, my legs like jelly, a strong arm around my waist. Then there was a house that smelled of mildew and rot and there was a staircase that led down and then I was on some sort of cot and everything went dark again.

When I woke and opened my eyes I was on my side, staring at a wall that had been painted maroon. My body hurt and my mouth felt as though it were coated in glue. I didn't know where I was, but I remembered who had taken me there. I was surprised to find myself alive.

Moving my head made my stomach lurch and bile rise up in the back of my throat. I stayed still a little longer, until the feeling passed. I blinked rapidly because my eyes were dry, then I tried slight movements with my limbs, assessing my situation. I was still in the clothes I'd been wearing when I'd been on my walk: my green corduroys and white Irish sweater, plus my windbreaker, zipped almost all the way up to my throat. I could feel the zipper teeth against my neck. I moved my toes and my feet and could tell that my shoes were still on. There was another sensation as well, something cold and sharp around my right ankle, which meant I was most likely chained to the bed, or to the wall. I took deep breaths, in through my nose and out through my mouth, and then swiveled my head around a little more. The nausea had mostly passed, and now I was aware of how much my head and neck ached. I stretched my body out, listening to the crackle and pop of my back, then turned over onto my back, the cuff around my ankle cutting into my skin.

"You're awake," came a voice from a few feet away, and I was startled, only because I had felt that I was alone in whatever room this was. I turned my head to look at Ethan, sitting on a wooden chair about five feet away. The room spun some more and I squeezed my eyes shut.

"There's a bucket right below you if you need to throw up," Ethan said. "Or just go ahead and throw up on yourself if you'd like. I don't care."

I opened my eyes and the room stayed still. Ethan was sitting cross-legged, wearing dark jeans and a black hoodie. He had a to-go cup of coffee in his right hand that rested on his knee. There was another cup of coffee down by his feet.

"How do you feel?" he said, as though we were old friends, like maybe I'd had too much to drink at his house the night before and crashed in his guest room.

"Nauseous," I said.

"Yeah, well, I hit you with a tranq dart. Do you remember that?"

"Yes."

"I'm surprised it didn't kill you, that dosage, but I'm glad you're still with us. It's nice to see you again, Lily."

I closed my eyes, wondering if I should just keep them that way. I didn't particularly feel prepared for a genial conversation with Ethan. But something told me it was an opportunity, so I said, "Is that coffee for me?" Then I opened my eyes again.

"This one?" He looked down at the coffee on the floor. "It is, if you're up for it."

"Got any Advil as well?"

"That I don't have, I'm afraid. Depending on how long I keep you here, though, maybe I can get some next time I'm out."

"That would be swell."

"Are you up for the coffee now?" He bent down and put his hand around the cup. It was one of those generic Greek diner to-go cups adorned with the words we are happy to serve you.

"Let me see," I said, and swung my legs off the side of the cot, sitting upright, the room swimming. I spied the bucket on the floor and picked it up. I retched a little, but nothing came up. Still, I held on to it, and looked at the room we were in. It was a finished basement that looked as though no one had lived there in about ten years. There were patches of black mildew along one wall and the drop ceiling was covered with a network of water stains. But the electricity was working, two fluorescent lights filling the room with a sickly white light. I held on to the bucket—a small metal trash bin, really—and wondered if throwing it at Ethan would be a good idea. But if I was going to get out of this, it wasn't going to be through fighting my way out.

"I think it was a man cave of some kind," Ethan said, his head swiveling, and I was confused for a moment, before I realized he was talking about the basement. I looked where he was looking and saw a bar area backed by an enormous mirror, engraved with the logo of the Philadelphia Eagles. "Can you imagine being a suburban husband who has to create a subterranean space to get away from his wife and kids?"

"Can you imagine being a serial killer?" I said.

Ethan lit up like I'd just told him how good he looked for his age. "Oh, I knew there was a reason I kept you alive," he said.

"Whose house is this?"

"It's mine. I own it, even though the name on the deed is Brad Anderson. There are no other houses around, not for at least a half a mile. I'm just telling you this so you don't get ideas about escaping or screaming your lungs out down here. You're at my mercy. The sooner you realize that, the better we'll get along."

I looked down at the chain that was shackled to my leg. It was hard to tell from the angle, but it looked as though it was about five feet along and it was secured to some kind of bracket screwed into the floor. Next to the bracket was a bedpan.

"Do you need to go?" Ethan said. "I can leave for a moment if you'd like me to."

"I'm fine," I said. "How long are you planning on keeping me here?"

"I don't know. I've never kidnapped someone before, and I don't know how long this will stay interesting."

I arched my back and turned my head, my neck popping and strands of pain radiating up through me. I needed time to think, but I had already decided that if Ethan Saltz was keeping me alive in order to talk with me, then I should do what he wanted and talk back. And I'd decided to tell the truth, about everything except Henry Kimball. There was no reason to bring him into this.

"So I was right," I said. "You followed Alan Peralta from conference to conference and you killed women he came into contact with?"

" ‘Came into contact with,' " he said, making quote signs. "He's a bit of a hunter himself."

"But not a killer."

"Doubtful."

"And you did this why?" I said. "To get revenge on Martha Ratliff?"

He was smiling, awkwardly I thought, like a politician in the middle of a televised debate. "How'd you get involved? Martha came calling for help again?" he said.

"She said she thought that her husband might be some kind of serial killer, that she'd found blood on one of his shirts—"

"Oh, she found that?"

"You put it there?"

"I did. Honestly, I was starting to get bored with the Peralta game. I mean, how many high school teacher conferences can one man take? I thought the Jane Austen pin might speed things along."

"We found out about that," I said.

"You two researched, like good little library students. And you found a long line of dead women."

"Basically."

A look of smug superiority was passing across Ethan's features. I told myself to keep telling the truth, though. That was why he'd kept me alive, wanting to hear about his triumph. Wanting validation.

"Why didn't she call the police?"

"She wasn't a hundredpercent sure it was him, and she knew that if she called the police and he found out about it—which he would have—then that would mean the end of their marriage. She didn't want to lose that."

"He was a serial cheater, you know? Hit on women at the conferences, went to prostitutes, the whole thing."

"I know."

"So Martha Ratliff called you to bail her out, the same way you bailed her out when she was dating me?"

"Is that how you see it?"

Ethan finished the last sip of his coffee and put the cup on the floor, then picked up my coffee and said, "You ready for this now?"

"Sure," I said.

He stood up and brought it over to me, getting close enough so that if I'd wanted to, I could grab him, punch him, try to lash out. I took the coffee, the cup lukewarm, and Ethan settled back onto his chair, crossed his legs again. I opened the tab on the plastic lid and took a sip, and it tasted good, even though I preferred tea.

"Is it okay?" Ethan said.

"Not bad. I usually drink tea, but I like coffee fine."

"Ah, noted." He looked at his watch, then uncrossed and recrossed his legs. He rubbed at the side of his neck as though he had a kink there.

"What were we talking about?" he said.

"I asked if you thought I'd bailed Martha out of her relationship with you back at Birkbeck College."

"Oh right. Yes, of course you did. You told her what to say and then you showed up that night at the bar and took her home with you. You remember all that, don't you?"

"I do."

"What did you think I was doing to your friend?"

"I knew what you were doing. You were manipulating her, talking her into sex games she didn't want to play, hurting her. I don't know what you had planned for after that."

"She liked it, you know."

"Yeah, I'm sure that's what you told yourself."

Ethan laughed, not performatively but in a genuine way. His laugh had an almost imperceptible snort at the end. "No, you're right. She didn't like it, exactly, but she would have gone farther if I'd gotten the chance. And you took that away from me. You took her away from me."

"I'm confused, Ethan," I said. "She meant so much to you that you waited fifteen years and then concocted an elaborate plan to make it look like her husband was a serial killer, all to do what... to get revenge?"

Ethan appeared to be thinking, his lips pressed hard together, and I wondered if I'd made a mistake by using his name. Finally, he said, "Do you want to know how many people I've killed in my life?"

"Sure," I said.

"Twenty-six," he said.

"That's a lot."

"Yes and no. I mean, twenty-six people probably just died in the last hour by falling down the stairs. But, yes, I've committed twenty-six separate murders and I got away with every one of them. I do think that's impressive."

"So, it's kind of like a sport for you. A game."

He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward a little. "That's it. That's why I do it. Do you have any idea how boring regular life is for someone like me? Actually, I think you might know. But when they write books about me, and they will, I'm sure they'll try to find something in my childhood, something that went wrong, but nothing in my childhood made me this way. I was just bored, and I found out how easy it was to play with people, to wreck lives, and eventually I figured out how easy it was to murder people."

"Who was the first person you killed?"

He leaned back a little and I thought he looked uncomfortable for the first time, as though he didn't want to tell me. Then he said, "I killed my grandfather. He was sick already, nearly dead, and I suffocated him. I was eleven years old."

"Maybe you did him a favor," I said.

"I definitely did him a favor. And I did myself a favor, because I got my own room back. He was living with us and he was in my bedroom. So, my grandfather... he's the first on my list."

"Have you actually kept a list, besides in your head?"

"I have, every name and place and date. I've hidden it in a place that will be found after I'm dead, and that's when they'll realize."

"You'll be like the Emily Dickinson of serial killers."

He laughed, the genuine laugh, again. "I like you, Lily. I didn't like you at all back when we first met, but now is different."

"Because now you've got me chained in a basement."

"Yes, that's true."

We were both quiet for a moment and I could hear and feel my empty stomach. "I'm hungry, Ethan," I said.

"When I come back, I'll bring some food," he said. "That's what you want to hear, right? That I'm not going to kill you right away. That I'm going to leave you down here and you'll have a chance to get out."

"I suppose so," I said.

"I do need to go soon. For one, I need a change of clothes and to check in with my other life. You understand?"

"I wondered about that. I couldn't find you anywhere and figured that you were going under a different name now."

"I haven't been Ethan Saltz for about six years."

"Who are you now?"

He hesitated briefly, then said, "My name is Robert Charnock. I run a gallery in Philadelphia. I'm married. My wife doesn't mind that I'm gone half the time."

"Your wife?"

"Does that surprise you?"

"Not really. You always struck me as the kind of man who had to have a woman in his life. I'm just surprised you're married."

"She insisted, but I find that I like it. There's a sense of comfort in knowing that I always have someone to have dinner with."

"And she knows nothing about Ethan Saltz?"

"No, why should she? Besides, Ethan Saltz doesn't do much of anything these days. All my wife knows is that she married a successful gallery owner who doesn't like to talk about his past. My Charnock birth certificate is real, by the way, as is my marriage certificate. I'd be worried about being found out, but normal people just aren't that smart. When they get introduced to someone at a cocktail party, they just assume that the name they've been given is a real one."

"And she doesn't suspect anything?"

"No, nothing. I mean, maybe she wonders what I get up to when I go off on my art-scouting trips but, honestly, I'm not sure she cares too much about it. She's got her own life to lead."

"So do you attend teacher training conferences as Robert Charnock, gallery owner?"

"Oh, I have other names as well. One of those is Brad Anderson. He attends the conferences. As I mentioned, he also owns this shitty house that we're in right now. And he has a very convincing driver's license. No birth certificate, but you can't have everything."

I shrugged, trying to look unimpressed, and decided to stop asking questions about how clever he was. Ever since he'd told me he was going to bring me food I was hungrier than ever, but I did want to keep him talking. I said, "You never answered my earlier question. Killing all those women and pinning it on Alan Peralta... you did all that just to get back at Martha Ratliff?"

"No, not really. I was annoyed when you pulled Martha away from me, but it was the same level of annoyance I feel when the kitchen at a pricey restaurant cooks my steak wrong. No, the truth is that I spotted Martha on Facebook crowing about getting married and then I saw that her husband was some kind of traveling salesman, and the idea just came to me. You didn't ask me how I got away with so many murders. It's something I've gotten very good at."

"Tell me, Ethan," I said. "How have you gotten away with so many murders?"

A corner of his mouth went up, listening to my tone, but then he said, "I disguise them as something else. Make it look like an accident or kill someone who's in the middle of an ugly divorce and it looks like someone else did it. Using Peralta was all about padding my numbers. I figured I could shadow him and kill people he came into contact with, and eventually he'd be nabbed for the crimes. It would wreck Martha's life as well, so two birds...

"But then it turned out that Peralta was coming into contact with the type of people easiest to kill, really. Street prostitutes, drunk women at bars. It's been almost too simple, and I keep waiting to see Peralta's ugly mug on the cover of USA Today, but nothing.

"And then there I was in Saratoga Springs, utterly bored, and who do I see? Lily Kintner, disguised—maybe?—as some kind of slutty teacher, and I knew that you were there to keep an eye on Peralta. It was too good to be true."

"Why was it good?"

He tilted his head back to think. "Because Peralta is boring, and Martha is boring, and I don't really know you, but I don't think you're boring."

"So you went and killed Martha?"

"I wanted to make you pay for poking your nose into my business again. I always thought I should have killed Martha after you took her away from me, back at college. Although then it would have been risky—I would have been a suspect, for sure. But not now. Now I have nothing to do with her or with you or even with Ethan Saltz."

"Did she suffer?"

"God, no. Do I look like a sadist? I'm a collector, Lily. Martha Ratliff is now on my list. That's all that matters." There was a smug look on his face, like he'd just placed the winning bid at an auction.

My mind conjured up a quick image of Martha, her limp body on the floor of her own bedroom in her own home. I pushed the thought aside, knowing that the only thing I could do for Martha at this moment was find a way to kill Ethan.

"So why am I alive?" I said.

"Well, I'm not going to torture you or anything. Maybe I just want to talk with you, get to know you a little bit."

"Okay," I said, then lay back on the cot. "You'll bring me some Advil when you get back, plus some food." I figured that if he wanted to hear me talk, I'd at least get something out of it for myself. I turned and faced the wall and listened as Ethan left the room.