Every year when Casey was growing up, she and her family (including her cousin/ best friend Marnie) would stay at a lake house at Lake Greene.
Fast-forward and Casey is now a 36-year-old actress who reluctantly followed in her famous mother’s footsteps (mostly just because acting was the only world Casey really knew). One day, Casey shows up super drunk to a play called “Shred of Doubt”. As soon as she walked on stage, she immediately forgot all her lines and then passed out, causing her to become fodder for the tabloids.
Rather than going to rehab, Casey’s mother urged Casey to stay low at the family lake house until the bad publicity dies down and until Casey can come to terms with the incident that caused her drinking to start getting out of hand (which was the death of Casey’s husband, Len, who drowned in Lake Greene while he and Casey were alone on vacation).
There are 5 houses surrounding Lake Greene:
1. Casey’s family’s house.
2. Eli’s house. Eli is like Casey’s non-biological uncle). Eli has spent a lot of time hanging out with Casey’s family whenever they visited, and he looks after Casey.
3. The Mitchell’s house. The Mitchells are not staying at their lakehouse when Casey comes (as mid-October is off-season for vacation), but a hot ex-cop handyman named Boone is. A year and a half ago, Boone’s wife died after she fell down the stairs one day shortly after he left for work, and for six months after that, he became an alcoholic. But for the past year, he’s been sober thanks to AA. Boone never went back to the stressful job as a policeman after his suspension (of being drunk on duty) was up (to avoid the need to unwind with alcohol), so he took up the new job of being a handyman. He’s temporarily staying at the Mitchell’s house both to help fix it up and to take his mind of things.
4. The Lawrence's house. The Lawrences also aren’t staying at their lakehouse when Casey comes. Their house is empty.
5. The glass house across the lake (now owned and occupied by former supermodel Katherine and her tech titan Tom). Tom founded a social media platform called “Mixer” (which is basically a mix between Facebook and LinkedIn).
Katherine leaves quite a heck of a first impression on Casey when Casey rescues her from drowning. Katherine is a strong swimmer and has swum across the lake before, but for some reason had cramped up midway across this time. At first, Casey wasn’t sure if she would like Katherine (since she thought that all supermodels must be stuck-up), but the two become friends.
The next day, Katherine and Tom visit Casey and they gift her with two expensive bottles of wine to thank her for rescuing Katherine. Some time after Tom pours and distributes the wine to everyone, Katherine mysteriously cramps up again and passes out for seemingly no reason. She regains consciousness and then she and her husband leave.
The next morning, Katherine texts Casey (somehow obtaining Casey’s phone number… foreshadowing!) to apologize for the night before. Casey invites Catherine over for coffee and the two bond more. Katherine even confides in Casey that Tom is secretly broke (since all his money is tied up in Mixer, which is currently losing followers), so he relies on Katherine’s money. Because of this, Katherine admits that Tom would probably kill her before letting her divorce him due to their unhappy marriage.
Katherine makes plans with Casey to have coffee together at Casey’s house again the next morning, but Katherine never comes over (and doesn’t answer her phone when Casey repeatedly calls). Casey notices that there’s a new post on Katherine’s Instagram that shows her supposedly back home in New York, but the calendar in the background reads September (one month prior), and a tea kettle shows Tom’s reflection as he takes the picture (so the photo was stored on his phone). Casey suspects that Tom killed his wife (likely from slowly poisoning her, like in “Shred of Doubt”) and is covering his tracks by posting a fake update on his wife’s Instagram. Casey gets even more suspicious when she observes Tom buying a tarp, a hacksaw, and a rope.
Casey sneaks into Tom’s house while he’s out so she could look for clues (which Detective Wilma later strongly is upset over since any evidence obtained illegally cannot be used in court and can be played off as planted). Casey mysteriously finds Katherine’s phone hidden in a drawer, and there are several missed calls displayed from someone not listed in Katherine’s contacts. Casey a picture of this number on Katherine’s screen just in case. Case barely leaves before Tom catches her (although it’s revealed later that he knew she had snuck in since she forgot to lock the door).
As the story progresses, more and more shocking things get brought to light:
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Detective Wilma pays Casey a visit to ask if she knows where Tom is (since he’s now discovered missing in addition to his wife when he was going to be questioned again, and it’s unlikely that he ran off since his keys and wallet are still at the glass house). Casey claims that she doesn’t know anything, but as soon as the detective leaves, Casey heads upstairs where someone is tied to a bedframe and gagged. Casey asks what they did with Katherine, so we assume that it’s Tom.
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Casey calls the number that was on Katherine’s screen, and surprisingly Boone’s phone starts ringing (even though he claimed that he barely even knew Katherine). Then Casey begins assuming that Boone also pushed his wife down the stairs a year and a half ago (instead of it being an accident). So now the tied up man who Casey is questioning can be assumed to be Boone (even though he seemed so innocent and caring until then).
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Casey emphasizes how Eli is the only person on Lake Greene who she could trust now (which made me think that maybe Eli would turn out to be the killer, if the author wanted an out-of-the-box shocking ending).
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Detective Wilma tells Casey that it’s likely that Katherine‘s “murder” (even though no body’s been found yet) could be connected with the disappearances of three other girls in the area. After all, there was once an anonymous tip a year ago that those three missing girls might have been dumped into Lake Greene (which is also where Katherine was seen last). Casey asks the tied-up man about this, and he admits that he killed those three girls and that he knows where Katherine is (which is someplace Casey will supposedly never find her). So now we’re dealing with a serial killer.
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Casey observes Tom prepare soup in a thermos and go into Larence’s empty house. She enters after he leaves and sees a new locking system over the basement door (which is what he used the hacksaw for). In the basement, she finds Katherine tied to a bed (which explains the tarp and rope). Tom re-enters the house and warns Casey that the person tied up is not his wife but rather Casey’s dead husband (whose spirit had been roaming Lake Greene and somehow entered Katherine’s body when she drowned, resurrecting her before almost fully taking over her body). Tom lets Casey have a few minutes alone with “Len”, during which Casey asks for information that only the two of them would know. He passes this test by revealing that Casey killed Len (plot twist since all this time we assumed that Len had innocently drowned by going fishing while both drunk and drugged on his allergy medication, and all this time Casey seemed to be grieving him by remembering their good times together!).
Turns out that on that seemingly perfect vacation night a year ago, Casey stumbled upon the driver’s licenses of those three missing girls (which Len had kept as sick momentos of his “victories”). Len’s bad mental health could potentially be a result of being abandoned by his mother, abused by his father, and passed around between foster homes. Len truly loved Casey and never thought about harming her while he was alive, but he could not restrain himself from the thrill of harming others while he was supposedly traveling for work for a movie that he was producing in LA. He relates to Casey’s later admitted struggles of willpower:
“Resistance also has its drawbacks. It makes me want something -- watching the Royces, knocking back a drink -- even more. I know how denial works. You withhold and withhold until that mental dam breaks and all those bad urges come spilling out, often causing harm in the process” (83).
Instead of turning Len in to the police (which would have ended Casey’s career since either people would judge her for not knowing Len’s secret sooner, or assume that she was in on it somehow), she staged Len’s death as an accident, hid the driver’s licenses behind a dresser, and sent an anonymous tip to the police to search Lake Greene. And then Casey began a routine of heavy drinking (not to feel good, but to forget), and she also uses sarcasm to numb her sadness.
Now that Casey has the chance to get clearer answers of where the missing girls are (so that the police can finally find their bodies and give their families closure), she makes a deal with Len for that information in exchange for his freedom. Once he carries through with his side of the deal (after which Casey sent a picture of the location to Eli to send to the police and subsequently locked her phone in a Ziploc bag as backup in case the text doesn’t go through), she looks like she’s about to carry through with her side by going to untie him, but first she asks for a kiss (to lure him into entering her body and leaving Katherine’s body). When he does, she unties him and tells Katherine that she should use the cover story that she had gotten lost in the woods after a fight with Tom. Before Len takes over more control of Casey’s body, Casey ties an anchor around her ankle and dives into the water. Len leaves Casey’s body right before she herself dies, and Katherine rescues Casey (and Casey alone).
Everything looks like a happy ending until the next day, when Casey remembers that Katherine began acting strangely BEFORE Len started taking over more and more. And then she remembers that the wine glass that Katherine drank out of (obtained legally since it was at her house) had white spots on it when it dried (which Casey thinks might be poison that Tom was using to slowly kill her… so he’s not so innocent after all!).
As if reading her mind, Tom shows up at Casey’s house and tries to silence her before she can warn Katherine. In self defense, she drowns him in Lake Greene, and Len enters his body. Casey then pulls Tom/Len completely ashore and kills him there so that he can no longer haunt the Lake Greene waters.
Now that Katherine is alive, the bodies of the three girls were found, and Boone’s name got cleared (since Katherine found out that his wife actually committed suicide and left him a note, but he doesn’t want others to remember her badly), all finally seems like a happy ending. Casey is even motivated to finally give up drinking and try to instead fill her life with the true, the good, and the beautiful. Although she braces herself for the new inevitable wave of publicity.
“The press lost their collective minds. I can only imagine how many editors needed smelling salts after hearing Mixer founder Tom Royce tried to poison fashion icon Katherine Royce but was stopped by Troubled Casey Fletcher, who had just learned her dead husband was a serial killer. // Talk about a headline” (346).