parquet floor woke him up. Linda was standing above him, wearing an old Whalers jersey that hung halfway to her hips and nothing else. She took Corbin by the hand and led him back into her bedroom. “You’re shivering,” she said, when they were under the sheets together.
“Why don’t you warm me up?” Corbin answered, knowing that her fate was now sealed.
Two weeks later, Henry lured Linda to an abandoned Boy Scout camp on a swampy pond forty-five minutes west of Hartford, telling her he was bringing her to a friend’s luxurious cabin. Corbin was waiting there, posed as before, like he’d been stabbed to death. It felt so similar to being in the cemetery in London, but it also felt completely different. Lying there, the dampness of the ground spreading through his clothes, the fake blood drying along his collarbone, Corbin knew what they were planning, knew that Linda was about to die a painful, scary death, and something close to terror swept through him. It was a cold, paralyzing terror, the kind he used to get as a small child when the lights were turned off, but he couldn’t sleep, and the monsters that hid in the walls began to whisper. He felt light-headed—he hadn’t slept or eaten in the last eighteen hours—and sat up to take a deep breath of the piney air.
Henry and Linda were ten yards away, Henry’s hand on Linda’s arm.
When she saw Corbin sitting up, blood-splattered, she tore away from Henry’s grip and ran, screaming, into the woods. Henry took off after her. And Corbin, once he stood on his weak legs, followed. Maybe it wasn’t too late to tell her it was just an awful joke? But when he caught up to them, Henry had already killed her, using a large sharp-edged stone. “Sorry, man, I think she’s dead,” he said, smiling, looking down at her caved-in skull. Corbin’s skin broke out all over in cool sweat, and for a moment he thought he was going to faint. Henry snapped his fingers. “Dude, you okay?”
“Yeah, man,” he said back. It was done. Linda was dead.
Together, they dragged her body back out of the woods, and Henry sent Corbin back to his SUV to grab the shovel he’d brought.
It was a quarter-mile hike to where Henry had left his vehicle—Corbin telling himself that what they’d done was what made them special, better than the rest of the world—and when he got back to the camp, shovel in hand, he was ready to embrace the ritual act of burying the body. But he was stopped by the sight of Henry standing over Linda’s body, grinning, his hands palms out as though he were presenting a gift. Corbin looked down. Henry had sliced Linda with his knife, a deep cut from her hairline down the center of her face, that continued down her torso, her clothes and skin split open.
Corbin turned, dropped to his knees, and emptied his stomach onto the weed-choked gravel.
“Sorry, man,” Henry said. “I thought you’d like it. Half for you, and half for me. We split everything right down the middle.”
“It’s just . . .” Corbin began but couldn’t finish.
“A little theatrical?” Henry said and laughed.
Corbin looked up. Henry was holding out a pair of rubber gloves, the same flesh-colored style that he was wearing himself. Corbin noticed that he was also wearing a thin ski cap that he hadn’t worn before.
“Let’s bury her and get the fuck out of here,” Corbin said as he took the gloves.
Corbin tried as hard as he could to not look at her while they dug her grave, then rolled her body into it, but that single glance, her skin pulling away from the center of her face, black flies beginning to gather in the bright July sunshine, stayed with him after Henry and he cleared the crime scene and went their separate ways. It stayed with him—permanently burned onto the undersides of his lids—for weeks after that afternoon. Every time he shut his eyes, every time he blinked, there she was. His insomnia got worse, and so did his paranoia. He kept waiting for the police to show up at his door, especially since he’d learned from Henry that Linda Alcheri never knew Henry’s real name. He’d told her it was Hank Bowman, and lied about where he worked and where he was from.
“I gave her my real fucking name at the party,” Corbin said over the phone.