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Until the night I realized he wasn’t.
It was less than a week after our picnic on the bluff at Lake Greene’s southern tip. Since that afternoon, I’d given a lot of thought to Len’s suggestion that we become like Old Stubborn poking from the water and stay here forever. I’d decided it was a fine idea, and that we should try it for a year and see how it went.
I thought it would be nice to tell him all of this at night as we drank wine outside by the fire. Complicating my plan was the fact that, thanks to a morning drizzle that had soaked the ridiculously long fireplace matches we’d left out overnight, there was no way to start said fire.
“There’s a lighter in my tackle box,” Len said. “I use it to light my cigars.”
I made a gagging noise. He knew I hated the cigars he sometimes smoked while fishing. The stench lingered long after he was done with them.
“Want me to get it?” he said.
Since Len was busy opening a bottle of wine and slicing some cheese to pair with it, I told him I’d go to the basement and fetch the lighter. A split-second decision that changed everything, although I didn’t know it at the time.
To the basement I went. There was no hesitation back then. Just a quick clomping down the stairs followed by a straight shot to the mudroom and the long wall rack filled with our outdoor gear. Above it was the shelf on which Len kept his tackle box. It was a stretch to reach it. Standing on my tiptoes with my arms extended, I grabbed it with both hands. Everything inside the box rattled together as I lowered it to the floor, and when I opened it, I saw a tangle of rubbery lures colored like candy but bearing barbed hooks sharp enough to draw blood.
A warning, I know now. One I instantly ignored.
I found the lighter at the bottom of the tackle box, along with a couple of those blasted cigars. Beneath them, tucked in a back corner, was a red handkerchief folded into a lumpy rectangle.
At first, I thought it was weed. Although I hadn’t used marijuana since my drug-fueled teenage years, I knew Len still occasionally did. I assumed it was something else he smoked while fishing when he wasn’t in the mood for a cigar.
But instead of a baggie full of dried leaves, when I unfolded the handkerchief I found three driver’s licenses. A lock of hair was paper-clipped to each one, colored the same shade as the hair of the woman pictured on it.
I flipped through the licenses a dozen times, the names and faces shuffling like a slide show from hell.
Megan Keene.
Toni Burnett.
Sue Ellen Stryker.
My first thought, born of naïveté and denial, was that they had been placed there by someone else. It didn’t matter that the tackle box belonged to Len and that few people came to the lake house. My mother’s visits had grown less frequent as she got older, and Marnie and my aunt had stopped coming entirely years earlier. Unless there was some renter I didn’t know about, that left Len.
The second thought, once that initial hopefulness had worn off, was that Len had been fucking around. Until then, I’d never given infidelity much thought. I wasn’t a jealous wife. I never questioned my husband’s faithfulness. In a business full of philanderers, he didn’t seem like the cheating kind. And even as I held three strangers’ IDs in my hand, I continued to give Len the benefit of the doubt.
I told myself there had to be a rational explanation. That these licenses, all of which were current, and strands of hair were simply props kept from a film he’d worked on. Or research for a future project. Or that the licenses had been sent to him by crazed fans. As someone who’d once been met at the stage door by a man trying to give me a live chicken he’d named after me, I knew all about weird fan gifts.
But then I took another look at the licenses and realized two of the names were vaguely familiar. Leaning against the mudroom’s ancient sink, I pulled out my phone and Googled them.
Megan Keene, the first familiar name, had gone missing the previous summer and was assumed to be the victim of foul play. I’d heard about her because Eli told us all about the case when Len and I had spent a week at the lake the summer she disappeared.
Sue Ellen Stryker, the other name I recognized, had been all over the news a few weeks earlier. She disappeared and was thought to have drowned in a different lake several miles south of here. As far as I knew, police were still trying to recover her body.
I found nothing on Toni Burnett except a Facebook page started by friends of hers seeking information about where she might be. The last time anyone saw her was two months after Megan Keene vanished.
Instantly, I became ill.
Not nauseated.
Feverish.
Sweat formed on my skin even as my body shook with chills.
Still, a part of me refused to believe the worst. This was all some horrible mistake. Or sick joke. Or strange coincidence. It certainly didn’t mean Len had made those three women disappear. He simply wasn’t capable of something like that. Not my sweet, funny, gentle, sensitive Len.
But when I checked the calendar app we both used to keep track of our schedules, I noticed an unnerving trend—on the days each woman went missing, we weren’t together.
Sue Ellen Stryker vanished during a weekend in which I had returned to New York to do voice-over work for a commercial. Len had stayed here at the lake house.