THE FROZEN LAKE

by John Shirley

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John Shirley is the author of numerous books and many, many short stories. His novels include Crawlers, Demons, In Darkness Waiting and seminal cyberpunk works City Come A-Walkin’ and the A Song Called Youth trilogy. His collections include the award-winning Black Butterflies and Really Really Really Really Weird Stories. He also writes for screen (The Crow) and television.

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“We only have one computer,” Judith said. “We couldn’t have two lines.”

“This is ... 2019 Coolidge? Roy Breedlaw lives here?” The man from the internet cable company, looking closer at his clipboard, was a chunky Hispanic guy with a round, pleasant face and a mustache that made her think of her dad—who’d been dead forty years. His soft voice made her think of dad too, maybe because it was March. Dad had died in the frozen lake, back in Minnesota, one unseasonably cold March.

“Yes, that’s the right address, Roy’s my husband—but we don’t have a cable line for the attic.”

“Says here you do. Anyway I can see the cable there. You see it, there, ma’am?”

She covered her eyes against the drizzle and squinted up at the eaves over the driveway. She didn’t have her glasses on. She tended to wear them only when she was driving or watching television. “Oh gosh ... You sure that’s what that is? Maybe it’s the other line, that just passes through there.”

“No ma’am, that one’s over there, you see?”

“Oh.” So Roy had installed an extra line without telling her. This man must think she was clueless. It made her stomach clutch up to think about it. “And you need to go up into the attic?”

“Yes ma’am. The box’s got some kind of short in it. Probably water leaking in. Your husband asked to meet me here, on Monday, but you know how hard it can be for us with the timing. We missed him, so I came back today.”

“Yes, yes I...” Monday, she thought, when she wouldn’t be home. She was working three days a week now at Ronald Reagan Elementary. Mrs Ramirez had physical therapy three days a week for the rest of the term. Roy knew she was gone on Mondays. He didn’t want her to know about the cable in the attic. He didn’t like people up there. “I’ll get you a ladder, it’s the only way to get up there. You have to climb up from the outside.”

“From outside of the garage? That’s unusual.”

“I ... He took the original indoor ladder out, to keep the kids out. He was afraid they’d get into trouble there.” As she said it, she was conscious of how peculiar it sounded. She decided not to tell him about how Roy had rebuilt the attic just to house his model shop. Most men would have simply done the work on a bench in their garage—which was meticulous, uncluttered, with plenty of room to work.

“Not a problem, ma’am, I have a ladder, but thank you.”

“Oh wait—it’s locked. I do have a key...” Should she give it to him? Roy said to unlock it only if there was smoke coming out, a fire of some kind. Otherwise no one was to go in. But there was a short, which could cause a fire. That’s what she would tell Roy, anyway, when he asked why she’d given the man the key.

She took the keyring from the pocket of her housedress, twisted the padlock key off, and gave it to him. He took an extending ladder from his truck, climbed it to the little door over the deck, in back, that led into the attic room over the garage.

Judith waited on the front porch, watching the cat melting in and out of the geraniums, waiting, imagining what it would be like to be married to this internet cable man. He probably liked to barbecue with the family, take little camping trips. It’d be nice.

She kind of wished the weather would just get on with it and rain. But it didn’t rain that much, after February, this side of San Francisco Bay. She started to pull weeds from the garden, almost haphazardly, wondering why it bothered her so much to give someone permission to go in Roy’s attic. It was ludicrous, really.

The cable man was smiling when he came back out front, chuckling about all the models that Roy kept up there. “Someone sure can craft models. Airplanes and every sort of thing.” He handed her back the key.

“Yep, my husband doesn’t care, just as long as it’s a good model.” She’d actually only seen a few of them. Sometimes he brought one down when he was finished, to show, for a few seconds. No one was allowed to touch it, though.

He tilted his ladder and collapsed it down so he could carry it to the truck. “I guess the kids have a good time with that too,” he said, easily taking the ladder under his arm.

Almost immediately she said, “Oh sure, they have a good time with that.”

She didn’t want to tell this stranger that Roy wouldn’t let the kids up there, didn’t ever put models together with them.

Brandon would have liked the models, but Roy wouldn’t let him near them. Cherie had never seemed interested in doing things with Roy. It was enough if her stepdad came to her high school’s talent show, and only because she wanted two parents there. Of course, she’d have preferred Barry. But Judith had divorced Barry, after his affair, and he’d moved to Los Angeles to be with the woman he’d been sleeping with. They didn’t see him much. Roy didn’t like him coming around.

Judith waved as the man went to his van. She watched him drive away and then she went to get the ladder Roy used.

“Mrs Breedlaw?”

“Hm?”

“Paper or plastic.”

“Oh—paper ... Um, no—plastic. Plastic’s fine.” Judith had noticed a flicker of irritation on the bagger’s face when she said paper, because they already had the plastic bag laid out in a little metal frame, and it was easier for them. So she went with plastic, though she preferred paper bags. Maybe I should just up and say ‘paper’ and the heck with him, she thought. Joe Gorris, at the school, said she wasn’t assertive enough with her students. She ‘let them run roughshod’ over her in class. She knew she tended to be that way.

She looked to see if Brandon was still staring at the little shiny toys in the gumball machine, things he’d have swallowed and choked on just a few years ago when he was going through his swallowing phase. He was there, his lips moving silently. A small black girl in corn-rows and a Sponge Bob T-shirt came to stand near him, admiring the HomiePals dolls in the machine: wizened little hip-hop figures on shiny keychains. The girl turned to stare at Brandon, puzzled. He was a tall thirteen, too old to be enchanted by the machine. It was one of his autistic things—he didn’t do it so much as he used to, though.

“Brandon, let’s go!” she called, pushing the cart up near him, on the way to the door.

He didn’t acknowledge her directly, of course, but he turned to go toward the door with her, and they walked side by side without speaking. He didn’t ask for shiny things from gumball machines any more. The shiny things he looked at now were on MTV: Christina Aguilera especially. It kind of broke Judith’s heart to see it. Even if Brandon had a girl, not just a pretty girl like that but any girl, he’d probably be afraid to let her touch him.

Brandon was getting better, she reminded herself. He was more in control of himself. He didn’t do that spinning around anymore; he answered questions, most of the time. He was making some progress. The therapist she’d gone to for herself, before Roy had decided it was too expensive, had said she should look at the positive things going on in her life, to break up that depression spiral. She didn’t get depressed much anyway, now, with the Prozac. It was a low dose, but it worked well enough.

She and Brandon went out to the Explorer. It was still misting outside. About halfway through loading the groceries, Brandon started to help her.

The wind was rising, she noticed. She hadn’t gotten the palm trees clipped and they’d be throwing their old branches at the house again. Fronds, they’re called, she reminded herself. But they were five and six feet long, with a piece of wood on the end, when they dropped off, more like branches to her.

She hoped Roy wasn’t home when she got there, though she wasn’t sure why she hoped for it.

Judith kept a damp cloth in the freezer for her hot flushes, and she was pressing that to her head when Roy came in the front door. She could tell by the abruptness of the sound that it was him, and not Cherie. She put the washcloth back. When Roy saw her treating her menopause symptoms in any way, he acted as if she were trying to prod him into some outburst of sympathy. “I don’t want to hear about it,” he’d say. “If you need to go to a doctor, go, but all women dry up that way...” That last remark had been a stunning new level of insensitivity, even for Roy.

Now he came into the kitchen, frowning. “Has someone been up in the attic?”

How had he known, already? she wondered, drifting out to the living room. It was a bigger room—she didn’t like being with him in so small a room as the kitchen. She was glad of the menopause, in a way, because before the change she’d felt more like being in bed with a man; someone, but not with Roy, and now she didn’t much feel like sex with anyone. Roy hadn’t asked for a long time and it was just as well. She didn’t know if she could stand another of those sessions where he rubbed himself on her till he got excited, squeezing his eyes tight shut so she could tell he was picturing something else, and then making those oil-derrick pumpings into her. He’d made her feel like there was something wrong with her, when she’d tried to talk about their sex life. She had shrugged and accepted him that way—she hadn’t married him for sex, anyway. And she couldn’t go through another divorce.

“The cable man said there might be a short there or something, so I gave him the key,” she said, sounding as reasonable as she could. “You were going to have him up there anyway, on Monday.”

She could tell by the way her husband was moving around the room, almost running as he went from object to object, flattening wrinkles on doilies, wiping dust from the tops of picture frames, that he was going to start shouting. She noticed that he’d changed the part in his hair again, to the other side. Every so often he shifted the part, and when he parted his stiff brown hair on the right side of his head it looked all wrong, somehow. His eyebrows were too light for his hair and it was always difficult to see what color his eyes were, because of his heavy lids; you had to really look close to see they were a sort of greenish brown. When they met he’d looked slightly odd but the oddity had grown over the years, as if his face were put together from parts of the faces of three men. He’d grown into his penchant for khaki pants and those golf shirts with the little alligators over the breast, too. He even wore that outfit to church—he never missed church. He had been in the choir for a long time. He had a nice singing voice, a pure alto. It seemed more than fifteen years since they’d met in the choir. He’d come over to practice parts, and she’d play piano, and they’d sing. They started doing show tunes, and then he’d asked her out. He’d had a sense of humor, sometimes, in those days. He’d sold the piano, four years ago, to help pay for suing a man who’d sideswiped his car. He’d stopped singing in the choir about the same time.

“You were told: only if there’s a fire,” he was saying, adjusting the shade on a lamp.

“I was afraid there could be a fire, because he said there might be a short.” Change the subject, she thought. “We got calls from some attorney’s office asking when we’re going to make a payment on his legal bill? I didn’t know you’d sued anybody else till she said—”

“Have those kids been moving things around in here?” he asked suddenly, the volume of his voice elevating two notches. His eyes darted to the ceiling, in the direction of the garage. “That chair wasn’t so close to the wall.” He moved it six inches toward the center of the room.

He meant Brandon mostly. Cherie mostly managed to not be home when Roy was there. “No. Roy, the kids have hardly been here. Now please—how are we going to pay for this lawsuit? We can’t pay for it by winning, they told me you already lost it—”

“The man was letting his bushes grow over our fence, and it was dropping seeds all over our land, and sending up shoots, and the roots from them damaged our pipes!”

“It just doesn’t seem like ... like a priority thing, Roy—”

“Are you telling me what’s important in my life?” he demanded, turning to her, commencing the brittle monotone shouting that she’d known was coming.

When her first husband, Barry, had shouted at her, he looked right at her and it’d felt kind of good, because she’d known he was just letting off steam and afterward they’d make up and even make love. When they were signing the divorce papers, he’d said he was sorry he’d ever yelled at her. Funny time to say it.

Roy’s yelling was so much worse. He shouted at her but never looked at her as he did it.

“I have to ask, Roy, because we don’t want to have to move again.”

“I’m getting a settlement, is that what you want to hear? Well I am, from the county, and you’re driving my blood pressure up, you’re trying to kill me!”

She instinctively reached to pat his arm because the high blood pressure remark made her want to help him calm down, but he’d come to dislike being touched—maybe he’d always disliked it—and he pulled away, shouted at her to keep the kids away from his things.

“You didn’t tell me we had another computer in the house. A second line.”

“What is it, because your last husband had an affair, you’re putting that on me? Did he meet her on the internet? That’s not me. I am not him. Okay? I am researching things, the law, things like that. That’s what I need it for. I want to work undisturbed. I told you, you just weren’t listening. I have to research this, it’s complicated as all Hell...”

He lectured her about the court case for a while, and how he wasn’t going to let people damage his property. Judith was relieved when he finally went up to his attic.

He’d never told her about the extra internet line. She was sure of that.

She went to the family room, where Brandon was playing videogames. She leaned against the doorframe and watched him. It was a game with a Chinese name she couldn’t remember, where you had to move a doll-like man in a gaudy warrior’s outfit around, so that he fought giant wizards and dragons. But sometimes the hero had to interact with friendly figures, and Brandon was making him approach a voluptuous big-eyed girl, wearing a sort of scaly looking bikini and boots. He made his hero do a kind of dance-step near her, so that she jumped back. Then his character leapt backwards, and that made her jump toward him. It didn’t seem to be anything that advanced the game, but he kept at it, making the characters dance together as best he could.

Judith went to him, bent, and kissed him on top of the head. He took one hand off the controller, reached out, and patted the toe of her shoe, then went back to playing.

She smiled, feeling a little better, and went up to the sewing room she used as an office, to prep for class. It felt good to be teaching. If she could find a way to pay for the night school she could get a teacher’s certificate, work with special ed kids full time. Roy didn’t want to pay for the classes though. Money going to lawsuits couldn’t be spared for classes. Maybe she could get a second job.

Late afternoon, coming home from work, she looked at her watch and decided Roy wouldn’t be there for at least an hour. She had time to go into the attic.

She actually went into the attic room, this visit. After the cable man had left she’d gone up to lock the door and, really, to have a look inside. She just looked around at the models, and confirmed for herself he had a computer in there she didn’t know about. A Dell laptop, connected to an HP printer.

On the right side of the garage attic Roy had set up a big, pretty thick piece of fiberboard over two sawhorses. It was bright with coronas of spray paint, but all Roy’s modeling tools were neatly lined on it. To the left of the workbench, under the nailed-shut half-moon window with the frosted glass, a cable ran to a laptop computer on a small workstation desk that looked like it had come from Staples. She’d never seen the desk before.

Bent over, under the roof, she slipped down a narrow opening between the models and sat on the old piano stool he used for a seat in front of the laptop table. You had to sit or stoop, in here.

This time, looking around, she realized she just didn’t want to be around Roy any more than she had to, not because of the things she knew he was prone to do but because he was a stranger, really, and she was afraid of feeling she was alone in the house with a stranger. Strangers might do things you couldn’t anticipate.

People talked about finding out that they didn’t know the people they were married to. But she didn’t think they were experiencing it as completely as she was. She’d been married to him for ten years and she’d created a sort of model of him, her own glued-together model, in her mind. She used that model as her Roy. But that wasn’t him.

Looking at the models, now—by Revelle and Astra and PlasCo—she felt like she was in some kind of Indian medicine man’s cave. She didn’t know why, but it felt that way, like something she’d seen on the Discovery channel. Maybe it was partly the way the wind groaned over the roof. So much louder than you’d hear it downstairs. It sounded angry.

The models were hanging from the inverted-V ceiling on fishing line, some lines longer than others so the models were all at about the same level. Even the ones that weren’t models of flying things, like the PT boat from World War II, hung dangling from the ceiling. Lots of the models were from World War II, but some were from the Vietnam War, like the MiG and a helicopter. The Monitor and the Merrimac were from the Civil War. There were some cars, too, hanging from the ceiling. Who would hang cars from the ceiling? But plastic models of cars rotated slowly in the dusty air: a GTO and a Mustang and some kind of Mercury she wasn’t sure of.

All of the models were perfectly made, without too much glue, without fingerprints, with smooth, expert use of modeling spraypaint, no paint where it shouldn’t be. He trimmed the parts with emery boards and one-sided razorblades when they needed help fitting together. And all the parts fitted together exactly.

What especially made her think she knew Roy even less than she’d thought had to do with the miniature plastic people on the models. Roy had gotten them at Kroner’s Hobbies, probably, and he’d gotten a tiny little paintbrush, with just two hairs on it—she could see it on his work desk—and he had painted a crooked line across each figure’s neck. Every single one of the tiny figures, women in the cars and men in the planes and on the boats, was painted to show a purple and red line across their tiny little throats. The line was the color of a bruise.

She reached up and idly tapped one of the planes, a b-52, or something close to it. It spun around, with its tiny little man in the roof gunner’s bubble, staring out at the whirling attic, showing the mark on his throat when he turned her way, spinning to look at the other models, showing the mark again. She reached out to stop the spinning and there came a loud crunching bang from the ceiling and she recoiled, her hand knocking into the model so it rocked violently into the back of the GTO. The little plastic trunk of the toy GTO popped off.

She sat with her fists balled white in her lap, staring at the broken model, listening. But she knew what the bang was, it was the frond from a palm tree shedding in the high wind. There were serrated edges like little shark teeth on each frond and they came down hard on the roof like a drumstick on a tom-tom, the whole house vibrating when they struck. She was glad Brandon was at the training center, the thumps always scared him.

She shook her head, feeling sheepish. The branch hitting the roof had scared her. It had made her feel like Roy was shouting at her for being in his sanctum; for touching his things.

She looked at her watch, as she waited for her pulse to slow. It was four o’clock. Roy wouldn’t be home, likely, for another hour and fifteen minutes. Because of his blood pressure, Roy was working part time. His job for the county, assessing road damage and repair, was kind of dicey right now, since he was also suing the county, claiming they’d given him a disability—she didn’t really understand the claim. But there was no talking to him about his lawsuits.

Letting out a long breath, Judith got up, careful not to bump her head. She found the trunk lid of the model GTO on the floor. It looked like it would fit neatly back on the car. But when she went to put it on, she saw a papery something rolled up in the trunk of the model GTO. She hesitated, then plucked it out, using the tips of her fingernails to get at it. She unrolled the paper. It was a small cutting from a digital-photo printout. Someone had clipped it from a bigger picture.

It was a photograph of a girl in the trunk of a car. She had a ball-gag in her mouth and her arms and feet were tied with rope. That was Roy’s car. You could see the outline of the Taurus’s rear fender, and you could just make out the top of the bumper sticker that said: wwjd? What Would Jesus Do?

“I told her no way was I going to get into the play but she said, ‘Oh just audition’ and I did and they gave me the part of Betty Rizzo and it’s like the second best part in Grease—Mom are you listening?”

“What? Yes! Oh my God that’s so great, you got ... Betty Rizzo!”

Cherie laughed, not something she often did spontaneously, and flipped through the script in her lap. She was a bottle blonde, she had that straight hair with just the suggestion of a curl at the bottom that celebrities had been affecting last year, but to Judith it looked like a haystack. She had some acne, and Barry’s small nose, but she wasn’t an unattractive girl, by any means, and she had a decent singing voice. Her blue eyes—Barry’s eyes—shone with a kind of derisive joy now. “You don’t even know who Betty Rizzo is! You don’t even know that musical!”

“It’s true,” Judith said, “I’ve never seen it, but I’m going to learn all about it—I have to help you memorize your lines!”

She had found a picture in each of four other models, the ones she could open without leaving an obvious trace. Four different young women, about Cherie’s age. All were dead now.

“Mrs Duwitt said it’s the biggest play the senior class has done in years, and—and!—Nathan’s in it!”

Roy had killed all those girls, and some others. She recognized one of the girls from her picture in the paper, two years ago. Missing, foul play suspected.

“Nathan? Oh my gosh! Do you think you guys’ll get back together?”

“I think so. I think he wanted an excuse to. I’m not mad at him anymore. I don’t think he was really into Miranda.”

It all came together now. A hundred little suspicions, converged like loose bricks becoming a house. She had thought for a long time Roy was hiding things, more than just lawsuits. She’d thought it was an affair. But then she’d wondered about worse things. Could he be stalking someone? Taking pictures in some girls’ locker room? Something. But this ... She remembered when he’d videotaped the news shows, for a long time, months. He’d said it was so he could talk to Cherie about current events, but they never talked about them. At about that time, more than half the news shows contained something about the SP Killer. SP for Smile Pretty, because he would take photos of the girls, tied up and terrified and about to die, and he’d sent the first of them to the police, with the caption smile pretty! printed on it. He videotaped more than just the shows that mentioned the SP Killer. He’d been careful to do that. But he’d gotten all the SP stories, she realized now.

There were some closed boxes in the attic along one wall. He must keep the videotapes in there. What else was on them?

“Are you okay, Mom? You’re not doing those afternoon cocktails again.”

“What? No, you know I gave up drinking. I ... Why?”

“You’re so, like, distracted.”

“I’m just so amazed by this great development for you.”

Brandon came into the room, not looking at his sister, but he’d been listening and he said, as if to the air, “Great development. Cool Cherie.”

Cherie smiled. “Thanks Brandon.”

The papers speculated that the SP Killer met the girls on the internet. All the girls had been doing internet dating, or hanging about in chat-rooms. But so far no one had traced the murderer that way. They’d tried everything to catch him. He was careful. He tortured them to death. But he was careful.

It wasn’t careful, though, to keep the pictures. But then, all these people—it was hard to even think the words serial killer—almost all of them kept trophies. She’d seen a show about it on CourtTV. Roy had watched with her. He’d watched silently, closely. Annoyed when she ventured a comment.

“Tell Dad,” Brandon said, looking into the air.

Cherie and her mother looked at Brandon. Brandon was trying to say that Dad would be proud of Cherie, Judith supposed.

Cherie snorted. She knew better. Judith said, “I sure will tell him. We’ll both be there on opening night.”

She should go to the police right now. He was out tonight. He was supposed to be bowling. He did take a bowling bag with him. She’d never met the guys he bowled with. They’d never gotten a phone message from them on the answering machine.

He was out there right now, with that bag.

“And it’s just so cool,” Cherie went on, crossing the gap in her happiness, the ‘tell Dad’ lacuna. “I’ve got two songs with Nathan, we have to rehearse together a lot—”

Roy had tried to talk to Judith, once, about two years ago. Maybe he had been trying to tell her about his compulsions. Do you ever feel, Judith, like you’re already dead in your coffin and you’re just remembering your life? You’re laying in your coffin rotting and your ghost is stuck in there and whatever seems like it’s happening to you now is just that dead person remembering this day. So you have to find some way to get out of the coffin, you might have to be real destructive to get out...

No, she’d said. I can’t really imagine that. She hadn’t encouraged him to go on. She’d been terrified by this sudden confidence, the unmitigated blackness of this disclosure.

She should have drawn him out, she saw now. This was her fault.

“And Nathan loves to do choreography—are you listening, Mom?”

“Yes! Yes I am. So you’ll be dancing with Nathan as part of the show?”

He would tie them up and slowly strangle them, very slowly, the coroner had said. Making those red and brown marks on their necks, like the ones he’d painted on the miniature plastic people. Very slowly.

She had slept beside him for years.

“Mom? You are totally spacing on me. I’m gonna go call Lina anyway, she doesn’t know, she’s going to freak!”

She was sure there was a picture in every one of the plastic models, even the ones she hadn’t opened up.

He was out right now with his bag.

She should call the police. She could call them right now.

Roy didn’t say much when Judith told him she had decided she was going to sleep in her sewing room, “for awhile.” She would never be able to sleep beside him again.

He accepted her explanation about the hot flushes making her thrash around. Not wanting to disturb him. “Whatever, whatever,” he said, taking a new Revelle model, some kind of dragster, out of a paper bag. “I’m going to work on this model.” He folded the paper bag, put it carefully in the little kitchen closet he kept folded paper bags in, then carried the model out back, and set up his ladder.

She could hear him crossing the roof over the deck, and going into his attic room. He hadn’t taken the bowling bag with him. He had stashed it somewhere else. He must have the digital camera in his coat. They were small devices.

She went to her sewing room, and pulled out the bed in the compact sofa. The wind was still pushing at the house, outside. The walls creaked with it.

Judith locked the door, and lay on the sofa bed, stretched out, with just the small lamp beside her sewing machine turned on. She lay on her back, looking at the ceiling, wanting a drink so badly. She didn’t care about getting started drinking again, but she needed to think with clarity now. She couldn’t afford to be drunk.

Had he killed someone tonight? Was he printing the murdered girl’s picture now?

Judith remembered watching her father die, on the frozen lake, in Minnesota. It had been dusk, in early March. She’d been ten years old. Her father had been out on the lake, trying to fish through a hole in the ice with one of his friends. They’d had too much beer and they’d started pushing each other, laughing and floundering around, and the ice had broken. Only her daddy had fallen through.

Emergency rescue had been sent for and people tried different things to get him out. Her mother had kept her back from the lake but she’d climbed a tree to see what was happening to her daddy and from up above she could see the blurry outline of a man thrashing around under the ice, drifting too far away from the hole he’d fallen through. People were yelling at him, “Don’t use up your strength trying to crack the ice, Jim! Don’t do that, just tread water! Tread water and wait, you’ll make it, we’ll get you out in a minute, we’re gonna cut through! Just hold on—don’t do that, Jim!”

But Dad panicked and couldn’t keep himself from trying to break through the ice. He kept trying to hammer at it but his efforts were carrying him farther and farther from the hole and he was getting more and more exhausted and then he sank down, out of sight, and they didn’t get his body out for a couple of days...

Judith could hear her daughter in her bedroom, muffled through the wall so she couldn’t make out what she was saying. She was on her cellphone to one of her friends, telling them about being in the show; telling them every detail. The happiness was apparent in her voice, even if the words weren’t coming through to Judith.

Most of the time, Cherie was morose. Now she was going to be happy, at least for a while. She had a part in a musical at school, and the guy she wanted to get back together with was in the play, too. She might never be happier in life.

If Judith turned her husband in, that would end. Everything good in Cherie’s life would end, maybe forever.

Brandon was getting better. Measurably, anyhow. He had a really good special ed teacher who spoke warmly of him.

If she’d tolerated Barry’s affair, it probably would’ve run its course, and they’d still be together.

But this wasn’t like finding out about an affair. This was finding out your husband was a monster. She had to stop him. She had to turn him in.

Of course, with her husband in the papers and on the TV news, she would probably have to move away. Living here, with everyone knowing her husband was the SP Killer—unbearable. They’d have to start someplace else. If they were allowed to, by the police. They’d want her around to testify.

They’d have to sell the house to pay for lawyers. Roy would never accept a public defender. She paid for Brandon’s teachers, now. The public schools had done so little for him. Brandon would lose that.

The police might not arrest Roy instantly. He might take revenge on her. He might kill her and Cherie and Brandon. Especially Cherie. She wasn’t his daughter. He’d probably thought about killing her. But if he’d killed her, the police would look at him too closely. If she looked like she was going to turn him in, he’d have nothing to lose. He might kill them all.

And the people. “She married the SP Killer. She had to have known. Some way you’d have to know. How could you not know? Come on. She knew. She knew!”

She loved being a substitute teacher. That would end. The principal would be apologetic, but he’d let her go. “The parents get freaked out, Judith. You understand.”

She’d never be hired to teach again.

She ought to go to the police. Already someone more might’ve died because she’d delayed. If she knew and didn’t tell, she was in complicity, whether the police found out about her knowing, or not. It was moral complicity. She was helping him kill those girls. There was a greater good. She had to go to the police.

A thump! from the roof. The palm tree had thrown another clublike frond at her.

If she turned Roy in, Cherie would know that her stepdad was the SP Killer and she’d always have to live with that and it would ruin Cherie’s life. There was no telling what effect it could have on Brandon. How could it be good?

What else could she do? She imagined herself killing Roy—putting a pillow over his mouth as he slept. Putting all her weight on his face.

She wouldn’t mind that, not at all. If she thought it would work. But she wouldn’t be any good at killing him. He’d wake up and he’d grab her and he’d realize she knew and he’d kill her and then maybe Cherie and Brandon.

So she had to go to the police.

Cherie’s voice was still coming through the wall from her bedroom. It was wordless, and happy. Like a song hummed instead of sung, by someone happy to be alive.

Judith’s father had thrashed and struggled and tried to break out of the ice, and the cold water had borne him down and they’d found him face down, floating in a layer of muck near the bottom.

He should have just gone on treading water till they’d gotten him out.

She could do that. She could tread water. She could tread water until some chance came to get out of the frozen lake. Cherie could be happy until then; Brandon could go on as he was, until then. Maybe Roy would stop killing. He might. Sometimes they did. She’d read that. They stopped eventually.

She wasn’t murdering those girls. Roy was doing it. He was the one doing it. And after all most of these girls were either prostitutes or slutty girls he’d picked up on the internet. They shouldn’t be meeting men on the internet.

If a few more had to die, that had to be all right. She had to let it happen. She had to keep treading water. The lake was cold, and dark.

It was him. Not her. It wasn’t her doing. She could sleep in the sewing room.