“Esmé.” The name sounded odd through the tape, but it caught her attention.

“Yes, Ben.” Marla knelt beside him. She kept aligning Ben’s body with the pit to dump him alongside Todd Sutton. She motioned toward the body. “It was easy to get Todd here that day. I’d been helping him find photos of a vintage truck that he was giving Lara as a wedding gift. Touching, isn’t it?” She rolled her eyes. “As he was leaving, I hit him with the lion doorstop we bought at Vic’s garage sale last year. You remember the one?”

What was he supposed to do? Nod that he recalled the garage sale?

“I don’t have to choose one of their loves, it could be any man, but it makes it more poetic for me somehow. I keep seeing Cecile’s face when I kill them. Her naive, stupid face. Then I place their cars at Wickelow Bend because it reminds me of the White Forest. A little offering for him so he knows that I haven’t forgotten, either.

“The thing is that they—what I like to refer to as Father’s victims—have to bleed. That’s the requirement.” She was on her hands and knees, getting him positioned, and she blew her hair out of her eyes. “You won’t count, though; the spell doesn’t work that way. I’ll be on the hook for another man in another thirty years.” She thought about something. “Sorry.”

How had he missed this? Had he been so stubborn that he failed to see the signs? This woman he’d lived with for ten years was going to dump him in a shallow grave and then pretend to mourn his disappearance.

Marla swayed a little and she got up then sank onto the nearby iron bench, finally looking down into the hole. “You were right. I need to sell this house and get out of here, go back to Rome or Los Angeles and live again. I thought I’d try domesticity with you, but it just didn’t fit.” She smiled sadly, gazing at her nails as though worried she’d gotten dirt under them. She looked down at Todd’s body. “I’m glad we can’t see his head. I hit him on the side of his head above his ear. The doorstop kind of stuck in his head.” She touched her hair lightly to demonstrate her aim.