*
What Dean never tells anyone, partly out of shame and partly because he’s not sure how to put it into words: He’d almost let Ethan Hobbs kill his wife. He’d considered this when he saw Sammie on the floor and Ethan kneeling over her, cutting away her fingers—oh, he wouldn’t have left her entirely, he would’ve gone out to his car and called the police and waited, but she would’ve been dead by the time they arrived, there’s no doubt in his mind. It was only a single stray moment, lasted no longer than a heartbeat, but he’d still thought it, and afterward, when Ethan’s dead and Sammie’s recovering in the hospital and people are calling him a hero, saying he’d saved his wife, he feels like a coward, he feels guilty, and that’ll stay with him for the rest of his life. He’ll never tell Sammie, though, because he loves her, and this one time he’s not a disappointment.
*
Three days after Ethan’s death, the police break down Gloria’s front door. They’d come to follow up, to tell her that Chris Weber’s killer had been found, but she never came to the door, and wouldn’t pick up her telephone. It smells like something’s gone bad in there, the cops tell one another. She might’ve fallen. Broken a hip and couldn’t get up, doesn’t have anyone checking on her. Those sorts of things happen all the time. So they kick in the door.
But they weren’t expecting the carpet to be soaked through, and there is something floating on the surface of all that standing water, like the scum of grease on a pond. Later, the medical examiner will tell them that it was skin they’d seen, thin layers of epidermis that had been flayed away from the flesh by the pounding jets of water from the showerhead. The shower’s still running, they can hear it quite clearly, and when they push open the bathroom door one of the officers stumbles away, gagging wetly on his own breakfast. It’s not only the smell, although it’s worse in the bathroom, stronger, but it’s more the sight of Gloria Seever, who has swollen up like a balloon, her skin gray and pulled taut, splitting in certain areas where the maggots are already roiling and feeding. The shower curtain is ripped down—she fell, the examiner later guesses, when all those pills took hold she lost her balance—and she’s half out of the tub, stiff and swollen as a waterlogged piece of wood, but the worst part, the absolute worst is her mouth, wide and gaping and cracked, partly open, so it no longer looks like a mouth at all but a bottomless maw, hungry and demanding and angry.
Later on, they’ll have to identify her by her teeth, since the rest of her is so bloated and warped that she’s not recognizably Gloria Seever. She no longer even looks human—she’s more like a monster. And maybe—probably—she would’ve taken some comfort in that.
*
Ethan Hobbs had thirty-one of Seever’s paintings in his possession, he’d turned the Wachowskis’ dining room into his own personal art gallery. He was the one who’d broken into Gloria Seever’s home and stolen them, and if the police had taken her burglary report seriously, if they would’ve launched a full investigation, they might’ve arrested Ethan Hobbs before he was able to kill anyone, but that’s life—there are the paths you take, and the paths you ignore, and that’s that.
The paintings were of the clowns Seever liked so much, frolicking and grinning and blowing up balloon animals, and landscapes, one of the night sky. Harmless, and worthless. The violent paintings had all sold at the gallery or were taken by police, and Gloria had kept the one of Sammie hidden, and maybe that was best, because if Ethan had seen it to begin with, if he’d realized what Seever had intended for Sammie, she might’ve been his first victim, not his last.
At least, that’s the theory Loren and Hoskins come up with.
*
The pinkie and ring finger on her left hand are gone. Most times it doesn’t bother her at all, until she catches someone staring at her mutilated hand, wondering what the story is behind it, and she’ll tuck it behind her back, out of sight. The fingers sometimes ache, even though they’re gone. Phantom pain, the doctors call it, and she’s tired of being haunted by things that aren’t really there.
She should write the book, Corbin says. And the articles. Everything, as soon as she’s able. There’s no more competition, because Weber is dead, and besides, she has the story of the year. She was Seever’s lover, she reported his arrest, she was the one who got away. The girl who lived.
But the words seem to have dried up.