Chapter 39 The Hot Tub
The Hot Tub
Usually when Sam was in the hot tub, she imagined herself as a dumpling in a vat of soup, bobbing gently, skin steaming. Now,
as she crouched beneath the lid, weighted down by her and William’s sodden clothes, she felt like a rock. The water was lukewarm,
as she’d hoped, and she’d pulled the cover back over the tub to the best of her ability, preserving the temperature. Hopefully
it would look aligned from the outside. Hopefully the snow would continue to fall and mask the area Sam had brushed off, as
well as any tracks she’d left. Hopefully William was searching in her car or the forest or had wandered onto the lake. Or
his faulty heart had finally given out from the strain.
Sam floated, suspended in the dark. Feeling was returning to her feet, hands, and face, and it was excruciating, a burning
as if she were filled with bees. At least that meant they weren’t badly frostbitten. Sam clenched her jaw and breathed through
her nose, as quietly as possible. She had no idea how long she’d been in here. She tried to count the seconds, one Mississippi two Mississippi, and how long would be long enough? How much time had to pass before it was safe? What was the plan, since she couldn’t be
sure where William was? Should she try her luck in the woods or—
There was a grinding noise, and with a blast of cold and whirl of snow, the tub cover slid back.
“Well, look at you!” said William. “How clever you are, Simone.”
He beamed down at Sam, framed in the white rectangle between lid and tub. His face, surrounded by a fur-lined hood, was red
with cold, one of his eyes much smaller than the other beneath a raw bleeding lump. How had he injured it—had he run into
a tree branch? No goggles for him after all.
“I’m glad I found you,” he said, extending a gloved hand. “You led me a merry chase. Come get warm. I’ve got your robe ready
for you by the fire, and a towel—”
Sam heard herself growl. She thought she might have bared her teeth at him.
“No?” said William. “Simone. Please. This is ludicrous. You’ll die out here.”
“I’d rather do that!” Sam shouted suddenly. She was shuddering, from cold, adrenaline, rage. “I know what you’re going to
do to me in there. You did it to them. Didn’t you. The dead girls. The writers. You killed them all!”
William just looked down at her, his face sagging, a little jowly. Usually when Sam saw him from this angle, gazing at her
from above, he was doing much more pleasant things.
“Why?” Sam said. She was crying. “Why did you? Why did you do it? I know why, so you could take their books. But why, William?
Why? Why? Why?”
He laughed, his face split in his old sunshiny grin.
“Oh, Simone,” he said. “You’ve got it all wrong. I helped them. Do you think any of those women could have made it on their own? Do you think even one of those novels would have seen
a bookstore shelf, let alone the bestseller list? At best they might have self-published. None of them had the talent—not
Becky, nor poor sad Kaelynn, nor Cyndi—”
“Don’t you even talk about Cyndi!” Sam yelled. “Don’t you even say her name!”
“—or the Irish one,” said William, as if she hadn’t spoken, “I forget her name now, or what’s-her-face, Medusa.
They didn’t have the skill. All they had was story.
I provided the rest. The words. The power.
My reputation. My name. Who were they? A bunch of nobodies.
Community college instructors. Adjuncts.
Library aides. Literary primordial soup.
I elevated them. I plucked them from their quotidian existences and gave them what every writer wants: eternal life, via print. Now
come out of there, love. Let’s do this gently.”
“Fine,” said Sam. “Okay. You win.” Smiling, William reached down to help her out. Ignoring him, Sam used one hand to drag
herself up, the other to heave William’s boot, which she’d been gripping underwater, against the side of his face. Soaking
wet, it weighed as much as a cinder block.
William fell back and vanished into the white. Sam was struggling to her feet, amazed this had worked, when he reappeared,
his hood knocked askew and another bleeding purple welt on one cheek.
“That was unkind, Simone,” he said.
He lunged for her, and Sam tried to scramble back under the lid, but in her waterlogged state she was too slow. His hands
in their thermal gloves closed around her neck.
“Why, Simone?” he said. His thumbs found the base of her throat, the suprasternal notch, the little bowl he loved to kiss
and lick. He began to press. To squeeze.
“You think I didn’t know what you were doing in my study? Digging like the untrustworthy little bitch you are. Trying to steal
my work. To ruin my good name.”
Sam slapped at William’s iron grip on her throat. She kicked and thrashed. Somewhere in the back of her mind she couldn’t
believe this was happening. She’d read that all people who were about to die felt this incredulity—But I was driving to my sister’s house! But I was going to have the good salad for lunch! But this was William. Silent flowers bloomed before her eyes, white, then black.
One of William’s hands slipped, maybe because Sam’s neck was wet. Sam heaved up out of the tub, choking in a huge breath.
She tried to crawl out and past him. But he grabbed her braid, pulled her back, pushed her down into the water, his hands
resuming their deadly work.
“If I let you go,” he said, “you’d probably die fairly quickly, but what if you didn’t? What if? I can’t let you send me back
there, Simone. To the mountain. To the mist. To the place I was before I became William Corwyn. The writing, the books, that
is how I escaped that terrible place. Pen helped me. By dying she gave me her book, and by her book she gave me life. You
know the saying Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime? Pen taught me to fish. The other women, they’re my catch. And I need them because I have the talent, the words; what I don’t
have are the What Ifs, the stories. I never did. I can’t invent them on my own. Even when we were children, Pen had the ideas
and I had the talent. A cruel division, don’t you think? Jayne called me a vampire, but that was mean; I’m more a literary
diabetic, unable to produce on my own what I need to survive. I’ve accepted it and found a workaround and given back, and
I thought, I hoped and prayed, with you it might be different.”
Sam twisted and bucked. William’s face was an inch from hers, red and quivering with effort, a thin white line of drool dangling
from one side of his mouth. His eyes were like black raisins, his expression neutral, as though he were reading the paper.
“I loved you so much that I stuck with you when you stopped writing our book. So much I gave you another chance after you
tried to steal my life for your so-called thriller. So much I even ignored the fact you’re a thief. So much I even invited
you into my home,” he growled. “If only I’d trusted my instincts. If only I hadn’t let you back in. If only you could be trusted.
I warned you, numerous times. You brought this upon yourself, Simone, my darling . . .”
His voice grew faint. The black flowers had eaten most of Sam’s vision. Her hands fell, beating against the bottom of the tub, a final spasmodic jerking. Her right fingers touched something on the slick surface, a long cylindrical object.
“I love you, Simone,” William was saying sorrowfully. “But now our story must end—”
With the last of her strength and consciousness, Sam made her fingers close on the object and swung it up and out as hard
as she could. William’s grip slackened, then dropped, and as Sam struggled to breathe, to force air into her swollen throat,
she saw what was sticking in William’s: her fountain pen, which must have fallen out of her braid, now lodged in the side
of his neck.