Page 108 of Guess Again
Lake Morikawa, Wisconsin Monday, July 13, 2026
NEARLY A YEAR AFTER HE’D FOUND THE LETTER IN THE STORAGE unit, it was weathered and worn from having been read so many times.
He opened his first beer of the night and began reading.
Dear Ethan,
Prison takes just about everything from the incarcerated.
But the one thing it provides is time.
Without the interference of the Internet or television or books—or anything, really, to distract my thoughts—prison allowed me time to plot and plan.
If things have gone according to how I had organized them in my mind, then I am a free man right now.
Maddie Jacobson, the only woman to have escaped from your father and me, is dead. She’s been a burning passion of mine for over thirty years. The one that got away. The one I can’t forget.
Before I head for parts unknown, I thought I owed you an explanation.
The less humane part of me revels in the idea of tormenting you with the photos of your father.
But another part of me is delighted to tell you the full story of how your father and I got started together.
Despite a well-maintained fa?ade, Hank Hall was an unhappy man.
Discontent with his life in every sense.
Hopeless in his marriage.
Disheartened with his family.
And bitter about his career. The only time he found joy, he told me, was when he and I were on the hunt for our next girl. And when we found her, he lit up with anticipation. When Maddie Jacobson came around, I’d never seen your father so excited. And we had fun with her. But when the time finally came to bring her to the shores of Lake Michigan, things went tragically wrong. She managed to escape us, and our relationship fell apart from there.
If you want to know what happened the day I killed your father, listen to audiocassette number 18.
As I did with nearly every interaction with your father, I recorded our final conversation because I knew where it was headed.
I know you’ll find no peace knowing that your father is gone and I’m still out there.
But peace is something you earn.
It is not free.
—Francis
Ethan dropped the tattered letter onto the kitchen table, took a long sip of beer, and pressed play on the audiocassette player he had purchased the year before.
The thirty-three-year-old recording was staticky.
Ethan had listened to it so many times over the last year that the tape had warped, making the voices it held nearly inaudible.
But by now Ethan had the entire conversation memorized.
He sat back and listened.
Ethan assumed the audio had been taken secretly.
Judging by the muffled voices, Francis had likely placed the audio recorder in his pocket when he answered the door the night Ethan’s father showed up at his house.
The recording started with the sound of a lock disengaging, and then a door squeaking open.
Henry Hall: We need to talk.
Francis: I figured.
Henry Hall: My department is already speaking with her at the hospital.
Francis: There’s nothing she can tell them.
Henry Hall: We don’t know that.
We don’t know what she remembers.
Francis: I want her to remember.
We’ll wait until she’s back home and then send her a reminder.
Send her an audio clip of her screaming in terror.
It might be better that she got away.
This will be more fun.
Henry Hall: No.
The forensics team will analyze something like that, and it’ll lead back to us.
We shut this whole thing down. Now.
Francis: You mean, shut it down as in no more girls?
Henry Hall: That’s exactly what I mean.
Francis: That’s not happening, Hank.
You know it and I know it.
Neither of us can exist without this.
Henry Hall: You don’t know how these people work.
The forensic teams, the detectives, the psychiatrists.
They’ll pick that girl’s body and mind apart until they find what they need.
And by the time they’re done, she’s going to lead them back here.
You need to leave town. Get far away from here.
Francis: I’m not going anywhere.
Henry Hall: Yes you are! We’re done! No more girls.
Francis: I don’t want any more girls.
I want the one that got away.
Henry Hall: That is not happening.
I won’t allow it.
Francis: It’s not up to you.
Henry Hall: The hell it isn’t.
My life is on the line here and—
BANG!
Despite the fact that Ethan had listened to the recording hundreds of times, he still jumped at the sound of the gun being fired.
The recording continued for another hour, although Francis never spoke again.
It was left to Ethan’s imagination to fill in the details of what he heard.
But he knew enough to paint a realistic picture of what was happening during the recording.
Francis shot his father in the face and then spent an hour packing up the basement where they had brought their victims to torture them and brand them each with a black heart.
Then, with Ethan’s father dead in the front foyer and the video and audiocassettes packed up for Ethan to find thirty-two years later, Francis lit his home on fire to erase any evidence of what had transpired there.
Ethan finished his beer in one, long swallow.
Then, he rewound the tape and listened again.