- Ready to jump back into the past again?
- Twenty years have passed since Sam's murder, and Katherine (now going by Kate) Barlow has returned to Green Lake. The town is "a ghost town on a ghost lake" (28.1), and Kate is living in an abandoned cabin on the edge of the old lakebed. She still thinks of Sam – hey, true love is tough to get over.
- One morning, Trout Walker and his wife show up. Trout's wife Linda is a freckle-faced woman with dirty, scraggly red hair.
- Trout and Linda have a rifle, and they threaten Kate, demanding that she show them where she's buried the loot from all her robberies.
- Strong-willed Kate refuses, telling them that they can dig for "the next hundred years" (28.25) and they'll never find it.
- In response, Trout and Linda drag Kate outside. They tie her legs together and make her walk around the hot, dried-out lake barefoot, hitting her on the back of the legs with a shovel. (This is what we at Shmoop call torture.)
- Never wavering, she still refuses to tell them where she's buried the loot.
- At that moment, a yellow-spotted lizard suddenly leaps toward them. It lands on Kate, biting her on the ankle. Knowing she is about to die, Kate tells Trout and his wife to start digging. And then, well, she dies laughing.