Dean goes back to work and she stays home, watches a lot of TV, takes a lot of naps. Dean has taken the kitchen table out to the garage and is sanding it down when he has free time. He’s going to refinish it, put new fabric over the seats. He’s going to make it beautiful again, but it will take time. All good things take time, he says, watching her. For the first time, her husband has gray in his hair, at the temples.
Six months after Ethan’s death, she sits down at her computer. Slowly types in a word, pecking at the keyboard with her pointer finger. Seever. All of this is about him, it started with him and ended with him, and she thinks it might be time to suck the poison from the wound and get rid of him, once and for all. Write about Seever and Ethan until they’re both worked out of her system. It’ll be slow work, but that’s life, isn’t it? You get dressed one pant leg at a time, you live one breath at a time.
And Sammie, she’ll heal one word at a time.
*
And what about those fingers, you might be asking? Between Seever and Ethan and all the death they left in their wake, that’s a helluva lot of missing digits. What happened to them all? That, unfortunately, will remain a mystery for all time, because it doesn’t look like either of the two men who know the actual truth are talking.
*
Glen and Ruby Wachowski are found in their basement, near the furnace. The police found evidence that Ethan had held the others—Abeyta and Brody, and Jimmy Galen—down in the basement as well; he’d turned the place into his own personal torture chamber, where he could do whatever he wanted without interruption.
And Ethan had also started doing art in the basement. He’d set up an easel, bought watercolors. There are dozens of paintings, but they’re nothing like Seever’s. They are crude, sloppy. Mostly they are houses, brown boxes with curlicues of smoke rising from the chimneys, big loopy clouds in the sky and a smiling yellow sun in the corner.
Those paintings, they are the work of a child.
*
Frank Cho, the man who owned the guesthouse where Carrie Simms was murdered, had it torn down not long after her death. It was bad luck, he thought, to leave such a building standing, and he was probably right. Thirty minutes before the cottage was torn down, Cho walked through it one last time, stepping carefully over the bloodstains left on the floors, and stopped to read the words still scribbled on the bedroom wall.
It’ll never be over.
Those words didn’t mean anything to Cho, although the police had fussed over them enough, he’d heard them arguing over how they’d ended up there, until finally they’d let the matter drop. None of them ever guessed that it was Carrie Simms who’d written the words above her bed, balancing on her mattress not long after she first rented the place. Seever had first said the words to her in the garage, although she didn’t remember it, but some part of her must have, because they echoed through her dreams, they drove her crazy until she got them out of her head and onto the wall, but every time she looked on the phrase she felt an unsettling anticipation, as if she were waiting for something, although she didn’t know what.
Ethan first read the words after he’d knocked Carrie Simms unconscious, when he was sitting on her chest and listening to her rattling breath drawing in and out and waiting for her to wake up again. He puzzled over them, then forgot them entirely. He was busy with other matters, you see.
So the little house was torn down and the debris was carted away and Frank Cho sold the entire property for much less than it was worth, but he felt a pressing need to get away, and he wanted to move closer to his family. Particularly his granddaughter, a pretty nine-year-old who called him Pop-Pop, and when she disappears a year from now, vanishes into thin air on her walk home from school, Frank will listen to his daughter’s haunted cries and look at his trembling hands and remember those words on the wall, and he’ll think that it’s true, it’ll never be over, that there’s never an end to suffering.
But perhaps it’s best to save that story for another day.
*
Detective Ralph Loren finally stops dressing like Seever. He puts away the three-piece suits and the tinted glasses, throws away the hair gel. Loren goes back to normal for him, which isn’t very normal at all, and for the first time, Hoskins is thankful for it.
*