Chapter 38

Everyone in the yoga class stared at us as we moved through our sun salutations. William was oblivious to it or he relished in it, placing his yoga mat in the center of the room where everyone could see him.

"It's nice to feel like a regular person again," William told me over dinner one night. "I've never liked being the center of attention."

Despite his claims, I imagined it was difficult going from a scenario where everyone spent their days ruminating over the mundane details of his life to one where he was almost treated like an ordinary man. Almost.

The yoga women whispered amongst themselves.

"It's him. It's William Thompson," they said.

I knew they would go home, tell their spouses, their coworkers, their friends about whom they'd seen, because I was once them, gleeful with my little packet of letters that I carried around with me everywhere.

I thought I wanted to be the subject of attention until the yoga women trained their gaze upon me. My new yoga pants were tight and stiff. Unlike William, who moved easily through the poses, I struggled with balance and had to come out of a pose more than once. I worried that they wouldn't think me beautiful enough to be with him.

"I know he's an accused serial killer, but surely he could get someone hotter," I imagined them saying.

Although I didn't manage to achieve any kind of Zen, I left the class with aching glutes and arms from trying so hard to perform like the person I thought the women wanted me to be.

There was little for me to do once William left for work. There were housekeepers who came once a week to clean and he assured me that he didn't expect me to be any kind of homemaker.

"I want you to follow your dreams," he told me.

If only William knew that my dreams revolved around fantasies of him attempting to murder me. A fantasy I justified by telling myself that it would allow me to finally know the whole truth about what had happened to the women.

I went to a coffee shop down the street from the yoga studio with the intention of starting my novel. I ordered a latte and a fancy-looking pastry with the cash that William had given me.

"No strings attached," he told me as he handed over the wad of bills.

What a luxury it was to order food without worrying about how I was going to pay for it.

I got a table by the window and plugged my laptop in. Next to me, there was a group of college-aged kids doing Bible study. I couldn't imagine being so concerned with goodness at their age, a time in my own life in which I'd only wanted to be bad. I wished I could tell them that they were sitting next to William Thompson's fiancée.

I really did intend to write a novel. I opened a blank Word document and waited for the inspiration to come. I always presumed that it was lack of time that interfered with my creative life. If only I were given the time and financial freedom required, I was certain the words would pour out of me.

As a teenager, I started a novel about a vampire who was in love with a human and despaired because he could either turn her, thereby ripping her soul from her body, or watch as she aged and turned ugly and died. I didn't get much done on my vampire novel because it was hard to write scenes about kissing when I'd never been kissed myself. Additionally, much of the book was a rip-off of Twilight, a book that I claimed not to like and read in secret beneath the covers.

As an adult, I wanted to write a novel centered around three generations of a single family because that's what all the most serious novels I read did. I looked at my document and wrote down a sentence, deleted it, and then wrote another. How did a person begin? I finished my cup of coffee and got a refill.

I didn't know how it happened, but somehow, I found myself back on the forum. I didn't remember typing in the URL or even logging on to my account. It was like I was possessed. The truth was that I could only ever write about William. Serial killers inspired me more than generational trauma ever could.

I was dying to tell the forum about the things that I'd found in William's desk. The thing that stopped me was that in order to tell them about the things in the desk, I would also have to tell them how I'd gotten access to William's house, which would require explaining that we were engaged and had moved in together. There were several things that stopped me from doing this.

First, my own parents didn't know about our engagement and I didn't like the idea of strangers online hearing about that particular life event before the people who had raised me, regardless of how distant we were.

Second, to tell the forum about my search of the house implied that it was a strategic engagement, an investigative aid rather than an emotional act. Yes, it was true that I wanted to know that truth about William, but it was more than that. I thought about him all the time, as a lover, a fiancé, and a potential murderer, and to tell the forum about us would be to give them sway over our relationship, and I didn't want that.

Lastly, I was worried that some of the forum members would become vengeful toward me. I already knew from the trial the way that people behaved toward those who were sympathetic toward William, and that was without knowledge of our romantic entanglement. If anyone was going to threaten my life, I wanted it to be William. For those reasons, I kept my newfound discoveries inside and scrolled the updates of the less knowledgeable.

Because William had been acquitted, the police were looking into other suspects in the four original murders. They'd had little success. They found someone who went to law school with Anna Leigh and knew Emma through mutual friends, but they couldn't extend the connection to Kimberly, Jill, or Kelsey. Maybe the murders weren't connected after all. Maybe it was five unlucky women who somehow ended up in a ravine.

Some of the forum members continued to pursue William as a suspect even though he'd been found not guilty by the jury. They figured out that he was working for his father and even shared the address of the law office, which I found alarming.

"I understand that he's family, but if someone in my family did that I would disown them without a second thought," someone posted.

Someone else emailed the office to voice their complaints. In return, they got a form letter that said they "appreciated the concern" but had "full confidence that justice was served" and they "hoped the real criminal" would be found soon.

The forum, thankfully, had yet to find William's home address, though they were looking. I felt a giddiness from having information that they wanted and couldn't obtain.

Other users were investigating the Kelsey Jenkins murder, which they felt hadn't been properly looked into due to the chaos that was the end of William's trial.

"It has to be someone who knows William," one user reasoned.

"If not a copycat, maybe someone that he paid to murder her. You know, to throw people off his scent."

Try as they might, they hadn't yet been able to find a connection between William, anyone he knew, and the bar that Kelsey worked at.

I too was fixated on Kelsey Jenkins, but for a different reason than the other forum users. Kelsey's murder was the closest that I'd come physically to any of the killings. Sometimes, I still thought about being in that ravine, the sky darkening menacingly around me, the tension of the situation increased through my nostalgia. It was almost dying in the same way that having a lottery ticket one number off counted as almost winning the lottery, which was to say that it was mentally close and tangibly distant. The gulf between being murdered and alive was large and passable only a single time. But it made me feel close to Kelsey like we'd known each other or even like we'd been each other.

I started a new page in my notebook that I labeled with Kelsey Jenkins at the top and decorated with a variety of doodles as I scrolled the forum.

No evidence that William and Kelsey ever met,I wrote.

By the time that my half-drunk second cup of coffee had grown cold, I'd written only two sentences of my novel: Katie's mother was a bird-watcher like her mother before her and her mother before that. Katie came from a long line of bird-watchers.

"I started my novel today," I told William over dinner.

I could feel his support from across the table.

"I'm so proud of you, Hannah," he said.

I wondered if he would kill me if he knew the truth of what I was doing or if he would merely break up with me. I couldn't decide which outcome was worse. At night, I checked and double-checked to make sure my notebook was secure within my purse. I took pictures of inane things so that the photos I took of the items within his desk were hidden deep within my phone. I needed to ensure that he didn't find out what I was doing until the moment I wanted him to know. The uncertainty I had was whether that moment was when I went to the police or if it was an intimate reveal, something that tied us together through life and death.