Beth sat down at the end where steps descended into the water.

She moved her fingers through wavy carbonblack hair just long enough to graze her shoulders.  Her fingertips traced the lines these last brutal years had channeled into her face.

Beth knew she was plain.  That was fine.  She’d been plain her whole life.

What wasn’t fine was having the hard countenance of a fifty-year-old when she’d just turned thirty-eight.  Lately she’d noticed how lived-in she looked.  If Walter were still here maybe what few looks she had wouldn’t be deserting her.

She rolled her jeans up to her knees.

A rogue jet ski skimmed across the middle of the lake, invisible save for its brief intersection with a streak of moonlit water.

Beth’s feet slid into the liquid steel, touching the algae-slimed wood of the first submerged step.

It was a chilly night and she rubbed her bare arms, thinking, October is the cruelest month.  Darling, has it been seven years?

In one week Beth would have to contend with another anniversary—this coming Halloween night would mark seven years since Walter’s disappearance.

The writer and murderer Andrew Thomas had been a close friend of her husband.  Andrew’s old house still stood in the trees on the opposite side of the cove.  Someone had taken up residence there in the last year and it was strange to see those lights across the lake again.

The circumstances attending Walter’s disappearance had grown no less bizarre or mystifying through the passage of seven years.

On a cold and wet Halloween night in 1996, he’d sat Beth down at the kitchen table and informed her that their family was in terrible danger.

He’d told her to take the kids away.

Refused to explain what was wrong.

Said all that mattered was getting Jenna and John David out of the house immediately.

She could still remember her husband’s eyes that night, carrying a component she’d not seen in them before—real fear.

Out beyond the steps, bubbles broke the surface and the water-slicked head of Jenna blossomed out of the lake.

My last image of my love—I see Walter in the rearview mirror as I drive away with our children into the rainy Halloween darkness.  He is standing on the front porch signing “I love you,” his hands held high in the orange porchlight.

She never saw Walter again.

His white Cadillac was found two weeks later in Woodside, Vermont, parked near a dumpster, the driver seat slathered in his blood.

Beth knew in her heart that Andrew Thomas had killed her husband.

She could not begin to fathom why.

“Come in, Mom!”

Beth descended two more steps, the water now at her knees.

“It’s too cold, sweetie.”

“You’re such a wimp,” Jenna taunted, treading toward the steps.  “I might just pull you in.”

“Oh no you won’t.”