A Stranger in the House

Detective Rasbach thinks Karen must be terrified. He assumes she probably faked her death to escape an abusive husband.

That evening, Karen is about to take a bath when she notices that the stopper of her perfume bottle is missing. She panics and calls Tom. He suggests that maybe she is just mistaken about the stopper because of the head injury and stress. She tells him that she is hypervigilant about details like the stopper “because for years, if [she] didn’t do something just right […] [she]’d get the living shit beat out of [her]” (185). He is shocked at her raw emotion. Tom says that since Robert is dead, someone else must have been in their house. She tells him not to call the police.

Brigid smells the perfume on her wrist while she waits for Tom and Karen to go to sleep. Her husband, Bob, is away at work. She does not have much in her life besides her knitting and watching the Krupps. She has a fantasy of living their life. When they are out, she uses the copy of a spare key she had made while she was seeing Tom to let herself into the Krupp residence and go through their things.