Opening
A dawn scream rattles Casey Fletcher out of a blackout and into a mystery she can’t ignore. When her neighbor Katherine Royce goes silent, Casey’s hangover haze hardens into urgency, pushing her from watcher to participant—and straight toward danger.
What begins as gut-deep worry turns into a full-on investigation, as a fake alibi, a hacked-together cover story, and a trail of poisonous clues point to a predator hiding in plain sight.
What Happens
Chapter 3: Now
Morning hits hard. Casey wakes sick and scattered, recalling whiskey, binoculars, the Royces’ fight—and a woman’s scream slicing through dawn. Her uncertainty spirals: did she really hear it? Her guilt over past mistakes drags at her, coloring everything with Guilt and Atonement and deepening the pull of Trauma, Grief, and Substance Abuse. Katherine won’t answer calls or texts; the voicemail chirps instead.
Casey phones Eli Williams, the lake’s caretaker. He slept late, heard nothing, and suggests a fox could explain the scream. Casey half agrees, half refuses; the sound felt human. With Katherine still silent, she refuses to wait another second. She decides to go to the Royces’ house herself—a shift from passive watching to pursuit that feeds her growing fixation and the pull of Voyeurism and Obsession.
Chapter 4: Before
At the dock, Tom Royce greets Casey with smooth answers. He says Katherine left at sunrise for their New York apartment, worried about the hurricane; she doesn’t check her phone while traveling, he adds. Casey spots a red mark on his cheek—the aftermath of yesterday’s slap—and pushes. Tom admits the fight and frames Casey as a hysterical snoop. She leaves, stung but unconvinced, haunted by Katherine’s razor-edged warning: “He’d kill me before letting me leave.”
Casey recruits her friend Marnie to verify Tom’s story at the NYC building. While waiting, an Instagram post appears from Katherine’s account—a cozy apartment shot captioned, “There’s no place like home.” Relief evaporates when Marnie calls back: the doorman says the Royces are in Vermont, and Katherine hasn’t been to the city in days. Casey studies the post again—September calendar, and Tom’s reflection in a gleaming teakettle. It’s an old photo, repurposed. On Tom’s startup app, Mixer, she confirms Katherine’s phone is still across the lake.
She goes to Boone Conrad, who confirms he heard the same scream at dawn. The two stake out the Royce house from Casey’s porch. Their dread spikes when Tom returns with a plastic tarp, rope, and a hacksaw. Boone, a former cop, calls Detective Wilma Anson. Wilma arrives, cool and skeptical, warns Casey about illegal surveillance, and agrees to dig discreetly—on the condition that they stand down.
They don’t. The next morning, as Tom leaves again, Casey breaks into the Royce house. Inside, the truth piles up: Katherine’s rings, clothes, luggage—everything—still there. Her phone, too. On Tom’s laptop, Casey finds searches about Harvey Brewer, a man who poisoned his wife with rat poison after seeing Casey’s Broadway play, Shred of Doubt. She flashes to Katherine’s recent mysterious illnesses: Tom has been poisoning her. A boat distraction from Boone buys Casey time to escape.
Back on Casey’s porch, Boone points out a problem: her evidence is inadmissible. Casey thinks fast and retrieves a shard from the wineglass Katherine used the night she collapsed—potentially laced with poison. When Wilma returns, they hand it over. Convinced by their persistence, Wilma shares a bombshell: police suspect Tom in three other disappearances. An anonymous postcard—likely from Katherine—tipped them off right before she vanished. This isn’t just a missing-person case. It’s the hunt for a serial killer.
Character Development
The section transforms a shaky observer into a reckless but effective investigator, while peeling back the charm and lies of the man across the lake.
- Casey: She channels shame and fear into action, shifting from watchful passivity to bold intrusion. Her addiction and self-doubt cloud her judgment, but her instincts are sharp—and right. Breaking into the Royce house marks a point of no return.
- Tom: The polished, patient husband reveals as a manipulator who constructs tech-savvy alibis and studies slow, deniable murder. The red cheek, the fake post, the hardware-store trio—his calm is a mask for calculation.
- Boone: The closed-off neighbor becomes a grounded ally. His training tempers Casey’s impulsiveness, yet he risks himself to help, staging a diversion that keeps her safe.
- Wilma: A professional skeptic who listens. She draws legal boundaries, tests the evidence, and reframes the mystery with the serial-killer revelation, becoming a crucial institutional counterweight to Casey’s rogue tactics.
Themes & Symbols
Online performance versus lived reality takes center stage in Deception and Misleading Appearances. Tom’s recycled Instagram proves how easily curated images erase truth, while the placid lake and perfect marriage veneer cloak violence. The teakettle reflection and the out-of-season calendar turn domestic details into forensic tells.
Voyeurism and Obsession fuels the plot: binoculars, stakeouts, and illegal entry blur the line between seeing and trespassing. Casey’s compulsion is both skill and self-medication, a way to avoid her own pain. That pain—anchored in Guilt and Atonement and Trauma, Grief, and Substance Abuse—sharpens her suspicion but endangers her judgment.
Shred of Doubt turns art into motive. The Harvey Brewer case linking performance to poison collapses the distance between stage and life, casting Casey’s past work as an eerie blueprint for current crimes. And the tarp, rope, and hacksaw act as a grim, visual shorthand for premeditated violence—objects that pivot the story from absence to presumed murder.
Key Quotes
“He’d kill me before letting me leave.”
Katherine’s line reframes everything Tom says. It plants a seed of credible danger that outlives the hangover haze, primes Casey to read every inconsistency as threat, and becomes the moral engine behind her most reckless choices.
“There’s no place like home.”
The caption on the staged Instagram weaponizes nostalgia. Paired with the September calendar and Tom’s reflected face, it exposes the gap between curated image and reality, proving deception and catalyzing Casey’s break-in.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters raise the stakes from a neighborly worry to a serial-killer investigation. Casey’s shift from observer to actor accelerates the plot and puts her squarely in the killer’s path, while Wilma’s disclosure transforms Tom from possibly abusive husband to suspected predator with a pattern. The serial angle recontextualizes every clue—the scream, the fake alibi, the poison research—binding them into a broader arc of predation and making the hunt for Katherine part of a larger fight to expose a history of violence.