Beware the Woman

ALSO BY MEGAN ABBOTTThe TurnoutGive Me Your HandYou Will Know MeThe FeverDare MeThe End of EverythingBury Me DeepQueenpinThe Song Is YouDie a LittleThe Street Was Mine G. P. PUTNAM’S SONSPublishers Since 1838An imprint of Penguin Random House LLCpenguinrandomhouse.comCopyright © 2023 by Megan AbbottPenguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.LCCN: 2023933987Hardcover ISBN: 9780593084939Ebook ISBN: 9780593084946Cover design: Tal GoretskyCover images: (composite) Ivan Ozerov / Tetra Images / Getty Images; David Sailors / Corbis Documentary / Getty ImagesBook design by Nancy Resnick, adapted for ebook by Maggie HuntTitle page photograph by Camille Hyytinen/Shutterstock.comThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.pid_prh_6.0_143670463_c0_r0 CONTENTSCoverAlso by Megan AbbottTitle PageCopyrightDedicationEpigraphPrologueDay OneDay TwoNight TwoDay ThreeNight ThreeDay FourNight FourDay FiveNight FiveThe DreamDay SixNight SixDay SevenNight SevenDay EightNight EightDay NineDuskNight NineAcknowledgmentsAbout the Author_143670463_ For Dan, who plucked me from the sea Beware of the man who wants to protect you; he will protect you from everything but himself.—Erica Jong We should go back,” he said suddenly, shaking me out of sleep.“What?” I whispered, huddled under the thin bedspread at the motor inn, the air conditioner stuck on HI. “What did you say?”“We could turn around and go back.”“Go back?” I was trying to see his face in the narrow band of light through the stiff crackling curtains, the gap between every motel curtain ever. “We’re only a few hours away.”“We could go back and just explain it wasn’t a good time. Not with the baby coming.”His voice was funny, strained from the AC, the detergent haze of the room.I propped myself up on my elbows, shaking off the bleary weirdness.We had driven all day. In my head, in my chest, we were still driving, the road buzzing beneath us, my feet shaking, cramped, over the gas.“But you wanted this,” I said, reaching for him. “You said we should go before the baby comes.”He didn’t say anything, his back to me, the great expanse of his back, my hand on his shoulder blade.“Jed,” I said. “What is it?”“You’re dreaming,” he said, his voice lighter, changed. It was like a switch went off.“What?” I said again, looking at the back of his head, lost in shadow.“You were dreaming,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”A strange feeling came over me. It hadn’t been Jed at all. It had been some boogeyman shaking me awake, warning me to go back, go back.Some boogeyman.Like Captain Murderer, the smeary white man I used to dream about when I was little.• • •Captain Murderer.Who? my mother used to ask me. Someone from one of your comic books, or a grown-up movie you snuck over to the Carnahans to see?The Carnahans, with six kids from ages four to twenty-four, lived next door in a rambling house, and two of the Carnahan boys fed me warm beer in the basement once when I was ten, and another time I split my lip when one of the girls slammed a screen door on my face, and they loved to set off firecrackers in the driveway all summer long, once burning down the old sycamore everyone loved and it changed the light in our house forever.But no, Captain Murderer didn’t come from the Carnahans’ big console TV, videogame cords dangling like spider legs. He didn’t come from my comic books or the slumber party stories swapped in our sleeping bags.He didn’t come from anywhere at all. He was always already there.But who is he? my mother kept asking, unease creeping into her voice.Captain Murderer, I kept repeating because I assumed she knew him, too, deep down. Like the tooth fairy, the devil with his pitchfork and his flaming tail, like on the can label in the cupboard. Captain Murderer!My mother, face drawn together in worry, would stop what she was doing, folding laundry or wiping glasses in the drying rack, and make me start at the beginning.And I’d tell her how he was all white, white as milk, head to toe, with white nails and white lashes, teeth like little bones, and one red spot in the middle of his back, between his shoulder blades.How he moved like bedsheets snapping. How he bit you and his teeth popped out, leaving you with little bones under your skin that everyone would say was a mosquito bite, a fire ant, chiggers.But where did he come from? my mother would plead. Was it a story someone told you at camp? Where did he come from?Later those nights, after she thought I’d fallen back to sleep, I would hear her moving from room to room, checking all the locks on every window and door.Click-click, click-click, bolt.I would hear her breathing all through our little house.Captain Murderer came from nowhere. But you couldn’t tell your mother that.He came at night, for me.Captain Murderer came for me!• • •Later, the hint of blue dawn, I felt for Jed’s wrist. Half lost in sleep, I clambered for him, the crazy, dream-thick thought: What if Captain Murderer got him?But he was in the bathroom, the light under the door, the drone of the automatic fan.When he came out, a blue shadow in that blue dawn, he stood at the foot of the bed looking at me, his face too dark to see. Only the flicker of the whites of his eyes, wide and wary. Somewhere, a snarl of mosquitoes buzzed, a light sizzling.Jed, I said, my voice gluey with sleep.His hands clenching at his sides, looking at me as if I were this strange thing, landed in his