When she first moves into Erich's house, Jenny rearranges things in one of the rooms and places the plants she brought from her old flat there, too. She's woken up by the sounds of someone shifting furniture and strongly suspects Erich is changing things back around. The next morning, Jenny finds that the room has been set up exactly how it was before and her plants are missing; Erich acts like it never happened and Jenny decides not to confront him, chalking it up as a grief response. She later stumbles across her plants thrown into an outside bin. It might seem minor at first, but it's a chilling indicator of how determined Erich is to always have his way and keep the house frozen in time, and his willingness to literally destroy Jenny's attempts to put her own personality into the place.
Erich shooting Joe's puppy is as horrific as it is heart-wrenching. Jenny sees the puppy running about near the Krueger family cemetery and thinks about trying to catch him, when she suddenly sees Erich emerge from the trees with a shotgun. Without a moment of hesitation or remorse, Erich shoots the puppy, even as Jenny runs forward, desperately screaming for Erich to stop. The first shot doesn't kill the dog, merely wounding it, and it gives a horrible yelp. Erich coldly shoots the dog again as he's lying on the ground, leaving Jenny utterly horrified. Erich tries to claim that he thought the dog was a stray, framing the killing as protecting Jenny's children, and that he had to put him out of his misery, but the sheer ruthlessness of the act means Jenny has a hard time buying Erich's excuses. It's implied that Erich really shot the puppy to spite Joe for letting him run loose and because the puppy trampled some of the flowers on Caroline's grave. Jenny even suspects that if she hadn't witnessed it, Erich wouldn't have even told Joe about it and would've let him believe his beloved pet had 'gone missing', just like his previous dog.
Joe's mother watches helplessly as her son is mauled by a mad horse; it kicks and tramples him, crushing his chest with his hooves. Joe is extremely lucky to have survived. The other farmhands are forced to shoot the horse to save Joe and it later turns out the horse was slipped poison, driving it insane. Jenny watches the whole thing go down as well and it's made even worse when Joe's distraught mother begins screaming that it's all her fault and that something awful will happen to her own child.
Jenny finding her baby dead - seemingly of cot death - would be horrible for any parent, but it's made even worse when people start to suggest she killed her own child. Jenny is so vulnerable and mentally frail at this point, she starts to believe it could be true. It's later revealed Erich - dressed in a wig and shawl to resemble Jenny and/or his mother - smothered the baby in his crib and tried to gaslight Jenny into believing it was her.
It turns out that Beth likely witnessed her baby brother's murder but because she's so young and was half-asleep at the time, she didn't fully understand what she was seeing, including mistaking the disguised Erich for Jenny. When Beth tells Jenny this at the funeral, Jenny begins freaking out a bit, thinking she really did kill her own baby unknowingly.
Jenny opens a closet and finds a black mink coat Erich bought her as a wedding gift. She notices that it seems to be hanging lopsidedly on the hanger and tries to readjust it, only for pieces of the coat to fall off. Confused, Jenny takes a closer look and realizes that the coat has been deliberately slashed into ribbons and left hanging in the closet for her to find. It's not stated outright that Erich did it, but it's not really necessary; Jenny and the reader both instinctively know it was him, and the message is clear.
The moment where the novel finally catches up to the opening scene and gives context to what Jenny finds in Erich's cabin that terrifies her so much. Jenny is poking around the dark cabin, alone in the snowy woods, looking for any clue as to where Erich has taken her daughters. She notices something off about one of his new paintings; it has another signature, Caroline Bonardi. Catching on, Jenny checks another painting, then another, and another, realising they're all signed by Caroline. At first, Jenny thinks Erich has been copying Caroline's paintings, until the real explanation soon dawns on her: Caroline is the real artist everyone so admires and Erich has been forging his name to her works. Not five minutes ago, Jenny had been admiring one of the paintings, wondering how a man who is so suspicious, jealous and manipulative can paint something so stirring, sensitive and beautiful. She now realises the truth: Erich never painted them at all and everything she thought she knew and loved about the man based on his art is an utter lie. She has no idea who she's married at all. It also immediately raises another unsettling question for Jenny: if Erich is just forging his name to his mother's works, what the hell does he do all that time he spends in the cabin?
Exploring the cabin further, Jenny goes upstairs and discovers one of Erich's real paintings, and it's absolutely the stuff of nightmares, revealing just how twisted Erich truly is. It appears to depict Caroline as an evil half-woman, half-snake wraith, smothering a helpless baby in a crib and guiding a horse's hooves to trample the terrified Joe. And in the centre is Jenny, her face twisted in agony, with her two daughters lying dead at her feet with belts tied around their necks and Erich's laughing face leering at her through curtains. Jenny then realises that the face of the snake woman is not Caroline's, but Erich's. It's at this moment Jenny finally realises what's been happening: Erich is the one who poisoned his horse so it would attack Joe, killed her baby and has been dressing up like Caroline to frame Jenny. And now he has Jenny's daughters with him and Jenny has no idea if the image of them strangled is something Erich is planning to do...or has already done. It's not surprising Jenny rips the painting off the wall and then flees from the cabin, screaming for help the whole way.
When Jenny returns to the cabin with Clyde, Mark and Sheriff Gunderson, they find more of Erich's twisted paintings and it somehow gets worse. They find a painting revealing that Erich, at the age of just ten, was in fact the one who caused his mother's so-called accident, shoving her into the stock tank and intentionally knocking in a lamp to electrocute her, enraged that she'd told him she was leaving him. Then they find another painting depicting Clyde and Rooney's missing teenage daughter, Arden, peering into the cabin window and Erich with his hands around her throat. It becomes very clear that Arden didn't run away; she had the misfortune to disturb Erich at the cabin and he strangled her to death for it.
