A Talent for Murder

Lily remembers walking through a cool night, then a house that smelled of rot, and a staircase leading down to the basement. When she wakes, she’s lying on a cot in a dank basement, with a shackled ankle chaining her to the floor.

She notices Ethan watching her sleep. He points out a bucket to her, and Lily vomits into it. She asks him how long he plans on keeping her in the basement, and he responds that he doesn’t know—he’s never kidnapped anybody before. Amused, Ethan explains to her what he’s been doing with Alan, killing the women he tried to sleep with at conferences. Understanding that Ethan is only keeping her alive to gloat, Lily tells him how she’s been tracking him down, leaving Henry out of the conversation.

Ethan confronts Lily about helping Martha break up with him back in graduate school. Lily says that she did it because Ethan had been manipulating and gaslighting her. Ethan confesses that he’s killed 26 people in his life, claiming that murder, to him, is like a sport or game. He finds regular life boring. He also admits to his alias, Robert Charnock, telling Lily that he runs an art gallery in Philadelphia.

Ethan continues to brag about his talent for murder, explaining how he was able to get away with so many. He tells her that he killed Martha as a way to get back at her. He says that he finds Lily interesting. Lily asks why he’s kept her alive, and Ethan says that he wants to keep her around to talk to her for a while. He leaves to get Lily some food.

In Philadelphia, Henry parks across the street from a building owned by Ethan’s wife. He receives a call from Lily’s mother, who tells him that she’s disappeared. Henry cuts his surveillance short, approaching the front door and knocking.

When Ethan’s wife answers the door, Henry claims to be a private investigator, employed by a person who was conned out of a great deal of money. While Ethan’s wife refuses to give Henry Ethan’s cell phone number, she directs him to Chris Salah, who runs the operations of Ethan’s art gallery.

In the morning, Henry goes to meet Chris to find out where Ethan is in hopes of finding Lily. Chris lets Henry into the gallery, and Henry looks around Ethan’s office. Chris confirms that Ethan and Robert Charnock are one and the same. He also tells Henry that Ethan is up in Maine for a work trip.

Chris mentions that the gallery has a client named Evan Saltzman, a name that sounds suspiciously close to Ethan Saltz. Henry convinces Chris to give him Evan’s address by threatening to include him in his investigation of Chris’s boss. Back in the car, Henry plugs Evan’s address in Pennsylvania into his GPS.

After Ethan leaves the basement, Lily investigates her confines, trying to figure out a way to escape her shackles. She discovers that, without the key, escape seems impossible, so she puts her hope in Henry finding her before Ethan has a chance to kill her.

Ethan returns around noon. He whistles a tune as he enters the basement, bearing a paper bag of food. Lily asks where they are, and Ethan reveals that they are in Tohickon, Pennsylvania, the same town where Henry was sent by Chris. Lily and Ethan discuss their values: Lily tells him that she thinks that her work and her family are the most important aspects of her life, while Ethan argues that, for him, leaving a legacy is most important. He tells her about the list of kills in his safe that will keep his legend alive.

Lily admits to Ethan that she’s also killed in the past. He asks who the first person she killed was, and she tells him that the person was a man named Chet, one of her parent’s guests who had acted inappropriately toward her. She describes how she got away with the crime, and, in response, Ethan tells her the stories of how he killed the victims he planned to use to frame Alan.

Ethan argues that he and Lily are similar, but Lily disagrees—she’s never enjoyed killing like he does. He accuses her of stalling for time to delay her death, which she admits. Ethan leaves, promising to bring her better food next time.

Arriving in Tohickon, Henry feels surprised by how small the town is. Chris told him that Robert Charnock drove a green Jaguar, so Henry drives around town looking for a green Jaguar in the driveways. Henry calls Lily’s parents, who tell him about the search for Lily. Henry promises to let them know if he finds any information about her.

In a local bar, Henry discovers that Ethan goes by “Brad” in Tohickon, but the locals don’t know his last name. Driving around town again, Henry spots a car in a driveway covered by a tarp, which seems suspiciously close to the shape of a Jaguar.

Ethan heads back to Philadelphia to deal with work tasks and consider his next steps regarding Lily. Chris, surprised to see Ethan, lies about the visit from Henry. Sensing that Chris is hiding something, Ethan confronts him, and Chris confesses the truth. In a rage, Ethan resolves to kill Chris, but he wants to deal with Henry and Lily first.

Stuck in traffic en route to Tohickon, Ethan wonders why he’s left Lily alive for so long. He thinks he might be in love with Lily, as he’s never met someone who lies in the same way that he does. Regardless, he still plans to strangle her to death.

Ethan enters the house, sensing that something is wrong—the air is too still. In the basement, he finds Lily wrapped in the sheets. Her head hangs at a strange angle, and blood pools beneath her head.

The narrative flashes back to Ethan leaving Lily in the basement. Lily tries to find any possibility of escape she can. Using a dime from her pocket, Lily extracts a nail from the wall where it was painted over. She tears her bedsheets, wraps the strips around her hand, and slides the nail between her fingers, making an improvised weapon. She then cuts her ear and smears the blood on her neck to trick Ethan into coming close to her when he gets back to the house.

After a few hours, Lily hears a creak on the floorboards. Ethan gasps and rushes toward her. When he bends over her, Lily swings her fist and hits him in the temple. Ethan struggles against her, and Lily hits him again, this time in the chin. The nail stabs him, and a spurt of blood comes from his jaw. He tries to strangle her but loses his grip and falls to the side, clutching his throat. As Ethan dies, Lily leans over him and promises to go to his house and burn his list so that no one will know the truth of his kills.

Henry checks under the tarp but only finds a Kia, not a Jaguar. He spends a few more hours driving around town, looking for any sign of Lily. Eventually, he finds a Jaguar in a driveway, and, taking out a revolver, he enters the house through the back door. Henry hears Lily’s voice calling from the basement. Lily tells him that Ethan is dead, and he promises to find the key to her shackles.

After freeing herself from her chains, Lily and Henry find the grave in which Ethan had planned to bury her. Lily goes upstairs to wash the blood off herself while Henry drags Ethan’s corpse into the grave. They decide to drive the Jaguar back to Philadelphia since they don’t want to lead the authorities to Ethan’s corpse. Lily breaks into Ethan’s home once his wife, Rebecca, has left for the day. She steals the list of murders and escapes without detection.

Henry wonders whether Lily should turn the list into the police to help close the cases for the grieving families of Ethan’s victims. Reading through the list, however, they find that Josie Nixon’s name isn’t on it.

The October following Martha’s death, Alan decides to attend an annual technology conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In the months since Martha’s passing, Alan has sold the house they lived in and moved to Hampton.

Alan considers himself a different person while traveling than he is at home. He married Martha because he genuinely felt like he loved her and wanted to be with her, a new feeling in Alan’s life. Alan frequently sleeps with women while on the road, letting his feelings of dissatisfaction build while he’s home with Martha, increasing the pleasure of his trysts at conferences.

Alan remembers the conference in Shepaug, where he met Josie. After speaking to her during the party, she invited him up to her room, and he went up to the sixth floor after midnight to meet her. After having sex, Josie asked whether he was scared of sexually adventurous women. In response, Alan asked her to join him on the balcony. He put his hands around her waist and threw her to her death. Alan feels unsure as to whether he’d planned on killing Josie the whole time or if he had acted impulsively. He also wonders whether killing Josie had invited death into his life, as Martha was murdered shortly afterward.

At the conference in Ann Arbor, Alan is unable to find anyone to sleep with and, feeling woozy, goes to bed. He awakes in the middle of the night with a slim, redheaded woman straddling him. She tells him that she’s a friend of his wife from long ago. She asks what he remembers of Josie, and Alan, thinking that she’s a dream, a figment of his imagination, or a ghost, tells her that he hadn’t meant to hurt her but that he had thrown her off the balcony.

The “ghost” tells Alan that she’s come to his room to kill him. Alan, who long ago accepted that death would come for him, steps out onto the balcony and jumps.