Chapter 32

Henry found the key hanging on a hook near the basement stairs. After I was unshackled, we sat together and made a plan. Then we searched for a place to put Saltz's body. There was a large pantry through a flimsy door in the basement. It was musty inside, with old shelving on the walls, and a dirt floor that looked like it had once been covered with cement that had given way to roots and frost heaves. There was a plastic tarp on the floor and when I moved it, I found that a grave had already been dug about three feet deep. On the shelves were bags of calcium oxide.

"That was for me, I guess," I said.

Seeing what was going to be my permanent resting place made my stomach turn. I told Henry I was going to go upstairs and use the bathroom. While I was up there I tried to be sick. The bathroom was cheaply outfitted but clean, and the medicine cabinet was full of products, soap and Q-tips and ibuprofen. I washed my face in the sink, then stripped off all my clothes and stepped into the shower and scrubbed my whole body clean. Then I dried off and wrapped the towel I used around me. I found a box of Band-Aids plus a tube of antibiotic cream and worked on my ear for a while. I took four ibuprofen, swallowing them with water directly from the tap.

In the kitchen I found a large garbage bag and put my clothes in it, then I went upstairs to the second floor. The room where it looked as though Ethan Saltz occasionally slept had a similar feel to the downstairs bathroom. Cheap furnishings but neat. The single bed was made and there were a few paperback novels on the bedside table. Old stuff. A V. C. Andrews book. Stephen King's It. Underneath the books was a copy of New York magazine. I flipped through it and found an article with Saltz's byline. It was called "A Teenage Guru in Terlingua, Texas." I suspected there were other relics from Saltz's past throughout this house, but I wasn't particularly interested in finding them.

I looked through his closet and found a pair of old skinny jeans plus a flannel shirt, and pulled them on. They were too big for me, but they'd do.

I returned to the basement and found that Henry had already dragged Saltz's body into the hole. He saw me in my new outfit, holding the garbage bag containing my clothes, and said, "Shower feel good?"

"You have no idea."

We added my clothes to the grave, plus the sheets from the cot and the shackles that had crusted blood on them, then covered everything with the quicklime. I found a bottle of bleach and we cleaned up the rest of the basement as best we could. On a worktable I found the bag I'd taken with me when I'd gone into the Shepaug town center. In it was the granola my mother liked, plus my wallet and house keys.

"We should really cement over this floor, and that way he'll never be found," Henry said.

"I'm not too worried about it," I said. "He'll be found eventually, but I don't think it will be for a long time. And when they find him, I don't think they'll make a connection with either Ethan Saltz or with Robert Charnock. Maybe they will, but I don't think it will matter much at that point. And there'll never be a connection to either of us."

"It'll be a mystery," Henry said.

We did put the tarp back over the floor and both of us stood and looked at it for a moment. "Any last words?" Henry said.

"Good riddance to bad rubbish."

Henry said, "At least he dug his own grave for us."

"That's true." Neither of us immediately moved, and I said, "Got a limerick for the occasion?"

Henry thought for a moment then said, "There once was a killer named Ethan, who murdered without a good reason. Now he's dead in a hole, both the man and his soul, having excreted his final excretion."

I didn't say anything right away, and Henry said, "The excretion is the blood."

"No, I got it. I liked it. You do have a real talent."

Henry smiled, but when I took his hand in mine I could feel that it was trembling.

Before leaving, we went through the entire house, wiping any spots where we might have left prints. Then we locked the house behind us, and Henry said, "We should drive the Jaguar back to Philadelphia and park it. When they start looking for Charnock they'll also be looking for his car. Can you drive a manual?"

I told him I could and followed him back to Philadelphia. Henry kept to the exact speed limit the whole way. It was just before dawn, the sky beginning to fill with streaks of pale orange light, and there were not a lot of cars on the road. We left the Jaguar about a quarter mile from the gallery, wiped clean and unlocked. I threw the keys in a dumpster.

After getting back in Henry's car, I said, "There's one last thing I have to do."

"What's that?"

"Ethan Saltz made a list of everyone he killed. He kept it in a fake book in his library and he told me which book. I need to get that list."

"Why?"

"He kept that list in the hopes that someone would find it after he died. He wanted to be famous, to be known as one of the most prolific serial killers in history. That was his real dream."

"So why do you need to get it first?"

"Because I promised him I'd burn it, make sure that no one ever knew his name."

"You promised him that?"

"It was when he was dying," I said.

Henry paused, then said, "Do you think it matters?"

"What?"

"Do you think it matters if you keep that promise, I mean. He's dead now. Maybe it's enough that he died thinking he'd never be remembered."

"No, it matters," I said. "I know it's risky and stupid, but I want to get that book. I made a promise."

"Okay," Henry said.

We found a twenty-four-hour diner and got ourselves big breakfasts, then Henry left me there alone, and I found a newspaper on the diner counter, bringing it back to my booth to read. He was gone for a little over an hour, and when he came back he told me that he'd seen Rebecca, Ethan's wife, leave the brownstone, and that he'd used one of his picks to unlock the low-entry door that had been built into the side of the steps just below street level.

"Do you think you tripped an alarm?"

"I waited twenty minutes and no police arrived, so no. But when you go in there I wouldn't linger."

I got a to-go bag of sandwiches from the diner, figuring it couldn't hurt to look like a food delivery person, and went straight to Saltz's house and through the door that had probably, once upon a time, been a servants' entrance. I emerged into a kitchen with a stone floor and a butcher-block table and shouted hello into the house just to make sure I was the only one there. No one shouted back.

Moving quickly, I went up three sets of stairs and found Ethan's study, happy that it wasn't locked. One entire wall was a built-in bookshelf and I began to scan the spines, then realized that the books were strictly alphabetized by author. I found the Cheever book, recognizable by its red spine, and opened it up, finding the small cutout where Saltz had made a hiding space. Inside was a sheet of paper, folded up, and what looked like an old metal toy soldier. I left the soldier and took the list.

Henry drove me back to Shepaug. Along the way we stopped at a shopping complex that had a Marshalls, where I bought underwear, a pair of jeans, and a cotton sweater. We threw Saltz's clothes in another dumpster.

Back in the car, maybe knowing that we were only two towns away from my parents' house, Henry didn't immediately start the engine. He turned and said, "What are you going to tell your parents?"

"I haven't exactly figured it out yet, but I think the easiest thing to tell them is that I ran off to meet someone, that it was a mistake, and that you came and rescued me. If I make it about a romance, somehow, they'll ask fewer questions."

"They've involved the police."

"I know. We'll just tell them it was all a big mistake. It'll be a mess, but it will pass."

"And what are you going to do with the list? Are you going to burn it?"

"I won't burn it, no, but I'll make sure no one else ever sees it."

"Wouldn't it be better if it did end up with the police? It could help close the files on some cases, and maybe it would console some grieving families."

"I've thought of that," I said, "but I don't want Ethan Saltz to win. He was truly evil, just a mistake of nature, I think. The people who got killed by him might as well have been struck by lightning. Does that make sense?"

"I guess so."

"And it's not my job to do the police's work for them."

"I don't know," he said. "Right now I'm just glad you managed to kill him before he killed you."

"I keep thinking that, too, but if I'm honest, I was ready to die. It would have been worth it."

"What do you mean?"

"Like I said, he was evil. If I'd died trying to stop him, then it still would have been the right thing to do."

"You think so?" Henry said.

"I do."

Before pulling out of the shopping complex, Henry asked to look at the list. I'd already read through it myself and handed it over.

"He numbered it," he said.

"Yes, he did."

He was quiet for a moment while he read, then gave it back, saying, "I think someone's missing."

"Josie Nixon's name, the woman who died in Shepaug."

"Right. Maybe she was actually a suicide."

"Maybe," I said.