Sami was unconscious and caked with orange clay mud, but alive. Tom followed on foot, Pog now peacefully walking on his leash.
“You go to the hospital with her,” Tom said. “I’ll take care of the dog and make sure the horses are okay and that the house is locked up once the investigators are finished.”
Matt nodded and stumbled after the ATV. He waited for them to load Sami onto a gurney. The EMTs helped him into the back of the ambulance, where they worked on both of them.
It was tempting to close his eyes and let exhaustion take him, but he didn’t want to rest until he knew she’d be okay. One EMT cut Sami’s soaked shirt off, wrapped her in a thermal blanket, and tucked hot packs around her, trying to bring her body temperature up. Her lips had turned blue and her skin pale, where she wasn’t caked by orange clay muck, but she was alive and didn’t appear to have any serious injuries.
Matt drifted in and out of awareness and caught snatches of the EMTs’ conversation. He fixed his gaze on Sami’s face and willed her to wake up.
Then the ambulance bounced across the cattle guard at the main gate. Sami’s eyes flew open and she screamed, violently thrashing against the gurney straps.
Matt found the strength to shoulder the EMT aside and put his hands on Sami’s cheeks, cradling her. “Sam, it’s okay, it’s over. You’re safe. I’m here.”
Her eyes widened as the scream died on her lips, replaced by cries of relief as she snaked a hand free and tightly clutched his. “I saw him hit you. He told me he killed you. He said you were dead!”
Matt leaned over despite the pain in his ribs and kissed her, reassuring her. “He almost did. But we’re okay. We’re alive. We made it.”
Sami closed her eyes and sobbed, but didn’t release his hand. Matt slid from his seat onto the ambulance floor so she could hold his hand as he finally gave in to the darkness.
* * * *
Matt awoke hours later in the hospital. The clock on the wall showed it was a little after nine. A deputy stood guard next to his bed. Matt felt like hell.
He tried to talk and couldn’t. He licked his lips and tried again. “Where’s Sam?” he croaked.
A hand closed around his and squeezed. It hurt to turn his head, but there she was, sitting beside him. “I’m here.”
He closed his eyes and relaxed. We’re safe.
The deputy called for a nurse, who checked Matt’s vital signs and paged the doctor.
“We’re waiting on your radiology reports,” the doctor said. “Looks like you’ve got a hell of a concussion and a few cracked ribs. I want to make sure you don’t have anything else to go with it.”
Sami sat next to Matt, refusing to release his hand. Matt tilted his head to look at her. She was now mud-free and dressed in hospital scrubs, her hair loose and damp, a blanket wrapped around her. He touched her cheek, convincing himself the nightmare had ended.
“Where’s Steve?”
Her expression went flat. She dropped her gaze, tears filling her eyes. “He’s dead. He fell into the lake.”
* * * *
A detective and Tom Jenkins arrived to question Matt.
“Mrs. Corey, I know it’s been a rough day for you, but we have to question him alone.”
She reluctantly let a nurse lead her from the room.
Matt recounted the afternoon and the events leading up to it, leaving out details like Steve’s possible demonic possession by some sort of evil spirit.
Upon her return, Sami asked, “Where’s Pog? Did anyone catch him?”
“He’s fine,” Tom Jenkins said. “My wife has him. She bathed him and said he’s snoring on our couch.”
Early the next morning, once Sami knew Matt was okay, a deputy drove her home. It was still raining, off and on, but the wind had calmed and the rain was expected to give way to overcast skies by the end of the day as the tropical storm shifted even further north and made landfall around the Big Bend area.
The park was closed to everyone except residents and law enforcement. Sami insisted on observing the recovery operation. Wearing a yellow Forestry rain slicker against the persistent drizzle, she sat on the back of Tom’s ATV at the edge of the lake, watching while the dive team searched the pit.
Until she saw for herself, she couldn’t believe he was dead.
The lake was deep, over one hundred feet deep in places. Even on a good day, the lake’s visibility was like orange skim milk. After days of torrential rain, it had turned the color of diarrhea, with nearly the same consistency.
They found his body late that morning, in the coldest, deepest part of the lake. One of the divers walked over after emerging from the orange, soupy water and removing her gear.
“Mrs. Corey?” she solemnly asked.
Sami nodded. The woman extended her hand. “Mitch Jackson. I know this is a difficult time for you. We’ve located your husband. We’ll be bringing him up shortly. I wanted to let you know in case you wanted to step away for a few minutes.”
Sami shook her head. “I want to see him.”
Mitch considered her for a moment. She eventually nodded. “Okay.”
It took them ten minutes to bring him to the surface. Sami stopped them before they loaded the litter onto an ATV for the trip to the ME’s van. Her fingers trembled as she unzipped the body bag, tearfully nodding as she identified Steve.
He looked more at peace in death than he had in years. The few dead bodies she’d viewed at funerals just looked dead.
Steve looked relieved, released.
“Can I have a moment?” she asked. They nodded, stepping away.
She reached out and touched his face, brushing the hair from his eyes. Steve wasn’t a bad man, but what took him over had been pure evil.
“We know it was George,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. We tried, we really did. We know it wasn’t your fault. I love you, Steve. I hope you’re at peace now.” She cried, kissed her fingers, and touched them to his cold lips before zipping the bag.
Tom took her back to the house. She drove Matt’s rental to the hospital to break the news to him.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Two weeks after Steve’s death, Matt and Sami scattered his ashes in the Oriole cemetery, in a private ceremony performed by a friend of Julie’s. Matt wasn’t sure if the woman would agree to do it at first. When he explained what happened, she volunteered.
“For Julie,” she explained. “She’d want me to help.”
They held no public memorial. In Steve’s obituary, Sami requested people make donations to the charity of their choice in Julie’s memory.
The ME listed the official cause of Steve’s death as drowning. The autopsy revealed his liver was cirrhotic from years of severe alcohol abuse. His blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit. Retests showed the same results.
No one could explain why lab tests didn’t reveal his liver problems earlier, when he was in the hospital.
He’d also ripped open internal and external sutures. If he hadn’t drowned, he would have bled to death, the ME opined.
DNA evidence tied Steve to Julie’s rape and murder. The ME reviewed Steve’s medical history from the weeks preceding his death and ruled Steve probably suffered from alcohol-related psychosis, and maybe even alcohol idiosyncratic intoxication. The complications from his infection and reactions with medication only intensified his problems.
Investigators found a file on Steve’s laptop containing a journal. Started nearly three years earlier, the final entry was the afternoon Steve died, written after he had drugged them. It explained how he stumbled upon the secret basement room—and the cache of old whiskey—the first day at the house while Sami was out running errands. Even Steve seemed at a loss to explain his behavior in the final weeks and days, as if two separate personalities controlled his thoughts and actions. “Steve” talked about the visions and voices, while “George” ranted and rambled.
Steve had drank heavily throughout the years. Matt worried how this news would hit Sami.
She didn’t want to talk about it. He knew she’d deal with it in her own way.
The statements Matt and Sami gave investigators matched the evidence. George’s psychotic ramblings, which Matt and Sami knew were attributable to George, were discounted by authorities as part of Steve’s mental illness. The circumstances surrounding Steve’s death led investigators to label it a “death by misadventure.” They cleared Sami of any wrongdoing, considering she fought for her life.
The investigation was closed.
* * * *
Sami’s physical injuries healed quickly even though she would always bear the scars on her wrist.
Once Matt was released from the hospital, they stayed at the hotel by the park for a couple of days until Sami bought a travel trailer. They parked it in the yard, near the barn. She couldn’t stay in the house. Not yet.
Sami didn’t want to sell the house, especially after what happened. She decided to completely renovate it. First, she had to take care of loose ends.
Three weeks after “the incident,” as they referred to it, they returned to Ohio. Matt helped her search the house and they found a safe-deposit box key. When they opened it, they found Steve’s handwritten journals, what he used before he switched to the computer format. He had stopped drinking for nearly a year after the intervention, then hid it better, switching to hard liquor, mostly vodka, which he could easily conceal from Sami.
Steve was wracked by guilt and self-loathing and fear she would discover his secret. He never stayed sober more than a few months. They found secret caches of vodka, small mini bottles, carefully hidden in numerous places around the house, mostly in his office and the basement. Sami thought she was good at finding his stashes, but it turned out Steve had gotten better at hiding them. Which explained why he’d blown up at her over the missing banker box of manuscript notes.
It hadn’t been out of anger, but fear. He’d been afraid she would find his booze.
This was a major blow, although in light of their other discoveries, not unexpected. Sami thought she had fine-tuned her radar enough to sense these things, but Steve simply got better at hiding them after the intervention.
So many things fell into place after reading his journals. Fights she realized were because he was drunk, or drinking. It explained why he was content to let her do most of the driving when they went out together. Or why his mood would drastically change from one hour to the next.
It took two weeks to empty the Ohio house and put it on the market. While her home for many years, she couldn’t bring herself to live there knowing the lies she’d unwittingly lived. Every memory was now tainted by regrets, what-ifs, and wondering how drunk Steve was at the time. It would be easier to hold on to the good and release the bad living over a thousand miles away in Florida.
Her biggest regret was she couldn’t reveal the truth to the public, that Steven Corey wasn’t a murderer and rapist, but merely a weak-willed man overtaken by an evil parasite far stronger than himself, a parasite that took advantage of him. She hated that people would always believe him to be a monster, never knowing the sweet man she fell in love with and thought she could change, the man who, despite his imperfect character, even at the end begged her to protect herself at the expense of his own life.
The man she had once loved.
The elephant in the corner was her relationship with Matt. He hadn’t broached the subject, even though he rarely left her side. They shared a bed every night, at his house, but he made no move to be intimate, waiting for her to decide when to take that step.
Sami was still traumatized, grieving, and for now she needed Matt for safety and comfort more than intimacy. He knew she still loved Steve, and while she’d been prepared to divorce him, she wasn’t prepared to bury him.
And Steve was his friend. Their grief united them.
One afternoon, while she inspected the growing pile of boxes for the movers to transport to Florida, she approached Matt. It was time to have this conversation. Her emotional paralysis over Steve’s death had finally lifted enough for her to force the words out.
“I don’t want to leave you.”
He pulled her to him. “Then don’t.”
“But your home is here.”
“Sam, I go where you go.”
She studied him. “Do you mean it?”
He nodded. “You asked me to fight for you. I won’t lose you again.”
Later that night in bed, she turned to face him and kissed him, deeply, passionately. He knew it was time.
“Are we horrible for wanting this so soon?” she asked.
He brushed a stray hair from her eyes. “No, sweetie,” he whispered. “We’re human.”
* * * *
One of the first things Sami did upon their return to Florida was take the axe and systematically destroy every bottle of whiskey. She declined Matt’s help. He sat back and watched, knowing it was therapeutic.
It took her over an hour, and she pummeled each bottle into tiny shards. When she finished, she broke down and cried in Matt’s arms.
Sami donated the old currency to several local charities in Julie’s memory. It was auctioned off for many times its original face value of nearly eighty thousand dollars. She didn’t want George’s money around to possibly call his spirit back to the property. George could do some good, like it or not.
She supervised the removal of every piece of furniture, every appliance, every carpet, every cabinet and fixture from the house. Stripped to the bare walls, Matt arranged for Julie’s friend to cleanse the house before the remodeling began.
Construction triggered interesting events. The workmen learned to ignore tools being moved behind their backs. They learned to ignore phantom touches and the ghostly sound of a woman’s laughter, even when Sami was nowhere on the property.
At Sam’s request, Matt went through George’s papers, alone, one cold evening after she went to bed. With the barbecue blazing, Matt burned each page. Nothing deserved saving. The only reason he read them was to make sure there wasn’t anything else they needed to know about the house.
Or what happened to Evelyn and the children.
The grasp George had on Steve’s mind was obvious. Matt chose to believe his friend had been supernaturally driven, not deliberate of purpose or mentally ill. Matt knew that, despite his friend’s many character flaws, Steve never would have tried to hurt Sam or him, certainly never would have attacked and murdered Julie, but the public loves a tragedy. Steve’s books enjoyed a resurgence, and Sam was newly rediscovered by his fans.
They converted the two unused upstairs bedrooms into a master suite with a new bathroom. The old master bedroom was remodeled and became Sami’s office. She hung pictures of the house’s victims, including Evelyn and her children, Lisa Prescott, Ben Caleb—who she also considered a victim of the house—Peter Michaels, Jim Johnson, and Julie. She also hung a picture of her and Steve, taken in their early days when he was happy and truly sober. Matt didn’t begrudge it. He knew it wasn’t Steve who tried to kill them. That had been all George.
Julie’s crystal pouch had been overlooked by investigators, who assumed it belonged to Sami. She created a small shrine to her almost-friend, arranging the stones in a small crystal bowl with a sprig of sage under Julie’s picture. Sometimes Sami found the stones arranged differently than she left them. Once she found them arranged in a happy face.
Sami took it as approval and enjoyed the creative energy the room brought her.
Matt and Sami left a few small, simple, antique toys in the attic for the spirits of the three children, who liked to play tricks by moving keys and other small objects to different places. Sometimes they heard their laughter on bright, sunny days.
Lisa never again cried for her father to stop.
They left a blank journal and pencil on the attic window seat. Even though there was no writing in it yet, sometimes they found it moved from one side of the seat to the other. Sami occasionally found her laundry basket moved.
They felt at ease with these presences.
Pog never again refused to cross the kitchen threshold.
They renovated the downstairs offices into one large room, without a secret closet, that Matt used for his home office. They also remodeled the basement and you’d never know a secret room ever existed.
Topped with a coat of cheerful yellow exterior paint, with the trim and porch ceiling in haint blue, the house felt like new, only better. When they moved in shortly after winter solstice, they had Julie’s friend come in and cleanse the house again, blessing it.
Sami made an appointment with Dr. Smith to get back on the Pill. Matt told her it wasn’t necessary, if she didn’t want to. Instead, she bought condoms.
One spring night in the new house, Sami stayed Matt’s hand when he reached for the bedside table drawer where they kept the condoms. He noticed she’d switched her wedding rings from her left hand to her right.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
She nodded.
He took her into his arms and kissed her, slowly at first, cherishing every second. This wasn’t the way he had wanted them to get back together, but he wouldn’t refuse the gift from the Universe.
He wouldn’t deny what they survived had realigned his belief system a little. There were things in the Universe beyond his explanation. And he was okay with that as long as he had Sami by his side.
Sam twined her fingers in his hair, holding him to her, as if afraid to let go.
“I love you,” she whispered when he lifted his head to stare into her beautiful eyes.
He smiled. “I love you, too. And I won’t lose you again. If you want to get married, have children, whatever you want. I want to spend the rest of my life making you happy.”
Her fingers stroked his jaw as she studied his eyes. “You do make me happy.”
He trailed kisses down her chin, along her throat, feathering his mouth and tongue along her sweet flesh until he reached her breasts. Her back arched, offering them to him, her fingers once again tangled in his hair.
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