We Were Never Here, page 6
Two earsplitting beeps and the car’s trunk hinged open. “Quickly,” I whispered, pushing past Kristen in the doorframe. We’d spread the shower curtain along Paolo’s side and now we stepped onto its corners and dragged his body and backpack on top. We picked up the curtain’s edges, like two ladies folding linens, and counted to three.
Christ, it was heavy. Like we’d lifted a tarp filled with rocks. I felt it yanking away from me, back toward the earth, and thought wildly that this was weight I’d feel forever. The shower curtain tugged at our palms and we paused to make sure it wouldn’t rip at the bottom and spill pooled blood as Paolo rushed back to the floor. After a frozen moment, I murmured, “Let’s go.”
The load was bulky, awkward, swaying and knocking against our knees as we shuffled and whispered and stumbled outside. Oh God, was that Paolo’s head pushing against my shin, glued with blood to the inside of his backpack? My fingers cramped against the sweat-slick plastic, and the pain crept up my wrists, my forearms, my whole upper body tensing against the weight.
We reached the trunk and I almost cried out with relief. Another countdown and we lifted the bundle toward the back of the car—but Kristen raised her side too quickly, those toned arms like a lever, and for a wild second I thought we’d catapult him inside. My heartbeat scattered as we jostled the curtain, almost overcorrecting, but then we evened out and lowered him into the trunk. I dashed back inside and loaded my arms with his other clothes, whipping my head around to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. A migraine surged behind my eyes as I hustled back into the cool air and dropped Paolo’s clothes on top of him.
The trunk squealed as we pushed it shut, and we glanced around the small parking lot. No movement on the street or in the blackened windows of a nearby guest room. Of course, if someone was watching us from inside, we wouldn’t be able to see them. We were staking so much on luck, on the gamble that I’d understood the hotel receptionist correctly, that most of the property was vacant.
“Shovels,” I prompted, moving toward the stone steps. This was another reason we couldn’t just pack up and leave: We couldn’t dig with our hands, and borrowing and returning shovels from the hotel before dawn was another microstep in our gambit to remain forgettable, under the radar. A process that already felt painstaking and nearly impossible, like building a ship in a bottle.
Kristen followed me upstairs and to the end of the pool. The air up here had that cold, steely-clean smell, and it was oddly bright, as if the water weren’t just reflecting the night sky but actually amplifying it. A shudder ran through me, guilt like a sprinkler: Paolo on the bar patio earlier that night, a flesh-and-blood being with secrets and dreams and loved ones and—
No. He was a bad man.
He attacked Kristen.
She was fighting for her life.
She reached the shed and ran her palms over the door’s particleboard surface, then found the lock: a smooth padlock that hung from two strips of metal screwed into the door and the frame.
“Shoot.” She gave it a tug. “It’s locked.”
My brain recentered, an auto-refresh. I nudged her out of the way and lifted the lighter I’d brought from the suite. My problem-solving instinct clanged on, the same knack that makes me so good at escape rooms and brainteasers and my job as a project manager. Maybe focusing hard on this simple problem—door is locked; we need what’s behind it—would distract me from the larger and more horrifying issue on our hands. The stained backpack heaped in the trunk, and the pile of bones and organs and pooling blood inside. “Here, hold this.”
As Kristen clutched the lighter, I dug in my pockets, then selected the tiniest coin—an octagonal one-peso piece. I eased its side into a screw that held the lock against the door, then turned.
She gasped. “It’s working.” She held her fist to her mouth as I rotated the coin.
My mind scuttled ahead. “We have to leave everything exactly as we found it,” I whispered. “We should even mess up our footprints here.” Everything would need to look locked, secure, untouched—nothing to raise suspicion. Hopefully ever, but at least long enough for the signs of our presence to grind down to nothingness, for the hotel suite and walking paths to move back toward their median condition. Like we’d never set foot here.
I plucked out the screw with a surgeon’s care, then pulled on the still-locked padlock. The door swung toward me, and the hardware with it.
Kristen pushed in front of me. “You’re a genius. Let’s find those shovels.”
I almost couldn’t believe they were there: leaning against the back wall, caked in dirt and jumbled with rakes and hoes. Each tool looked like a deadly weapon, something meant only for pummeling human flesh. For a wild second, I pictured it: Kristen in Cambodia with the metal lamp held aloft, sa-wing batter batter batter. Her eyes as electric as a storm. The image flipped: Kristen in the same stance, but here, with a bottle of wine. I felt a brief swoop of fear and pushed it aside.
I grabbed a shovel from Kristen, and she ducked back into the shed, rifling around.
“Yes,” she hissed, then held out two flashlights. “Let’s go.” She plunged back toward the stone steps, the spade slung against her shoulder. Like she was one of the Seven Dwarfs. Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to bury a body we go.
CHAPTER 8
Kristen squinted out the windshield, her shoulders buckled in concentration as we rolled out of the driveway and down the mountain road.
“Can you see?” I whispered. Her night vision was better than mine, as we’d discovered on a stargazing tour a few nights ago, when she had to guide me by the hand to the massive telescope the guide had set up. My astigmatism made the darkness staticky and dull. Astigmatism and asthma—small defects mostly sidestepped in the modern world. It was the big things that got you: bottles of wine, the metal legs of a bed frame. A lengthy plummet from the lip of a cliff.
“I can see enough,” she replied. “I’ll turn on the headlights as soon as we get around the corner.”
“The last thing we need is to go over the side.” A laugh rose through me, neon and hysterical. I turned it into a cough and Kristen glanced at me sharply. “I’m fine.”
The engine seemed impossibly loud, a tank trundling through the silence. Of course, it had to work harder with a 180-pound man in the trunk. Another 40 with his backpack and belongings over and around him. We were lucky he had his bag with him, that he hadn’t checked in anywhere yet. If he’d left all his stuff in a hostel, surely—
Kristen ignited the headlights, then slammed on the brakes. A creature sat in the road, about a foot long, with rippling gray fur and enormous eyes. A rabbit—no, a chinchilla. It fixed us with an accusing stare, then sauntered over to the shoulder. Kristen exhaled and took her foot off the brake. I watched it through the window until its outline melted into the charcoal night.
I kept feeling its obsidian eyes on me, judging, seeing. The incident in Cambodia had felt improbable, out-of-body, the kind of thing that happened in movies and true-crime podcasts but not to me. And yet here I was, blackened by a lightning bolt a second time.
In Phnom Penh I’d been useless, shaking and crying and chattering at the jaw so violently that Kristen had cloistered us in the bathroom with the shower running, the steam turning my cheeks pink and drawing blood back into my hands and feet as if hypothermia were the real problem. She’d pulled it together, because she needed to. Remembered the rushing water of Tonle Kak, the spooky stories of women filling their pockets with rocks before flinging themselves off a cliff, hoping for a riptide. A disappearance if we were lucky, a probable suicide if the body turned up. The plan was harried and haphazard, but it had to work. It had worked.
Now Kristen clung to the wheel, her chin strained forward, the same posture she adopted when she drove through a blizzard. The reel of horror stories looped in my head again, unlucky Americans locked up abroad, and a new thought sent terror up my arms: If someone connected this to Sebastian, we’d be doubly, irreparably screwed. We couldn’t bring Paolo back to life, and just like in Cambodia, our priority must be making it home without leaving breadcrumbs behind.
Kristen hit the brakes in the middle of the street. I glanced around for a stop sign I’d missed. When I turned to her again, she was slumped against the steering wheel.
“This isn’t going to work,” she said, her voice muffled.
A stab of fear. “What?”
She looked up at me. “There are no trees, not even shrubs. We’ll be totally exposed. There’s nothing but red dirt.” She tipped her face back down and a drip hovered on the end of her nose.
A rushing sound filled my ears and I felt cold again, my shoulders and jaw tensing. She’s right. What the hell did I know about evading law enforcement, about ditching a goddamn body? It was hopeless; we were done for.
But then I looked at Kristen, sagging in the driver’s seat, and tenderness sprang up in my chest. I knew how she felt; my brave, beautiful best friend had just been attacked.
I blinked hard. She’d done this for me in Cambodia—I could dig deep, channel her confidence. Be there for her like she’d been for me. “The nothing—that’s why we’re safe,” I said. “There’s nothing out there, so no one will stumble onto the spot where we dig. No hikers or, or campers with their dogs or farmers or alpaca herders or anyone else.”
She wiped her silvery tears and nodded. The car began to move, imperceptibly at first and then with mounting assuredness, as if it, too, were growing in resolve.
There was only one road in and out of Quiteria, as well as all the towns before and after us, a twisty two-lane highway slithering through the valley like a lizard in the shade. I thought back to when we’d first trundled onto it, after a few confused loops around Santiago: flat, open road, how sunlight had beamed into the windshield, as cheery and charmed as the Latin pop Kristen found on the radio. Everything was blasting that day: the bass through the speakers, the sun through the windows, our zippy sedan down an endless road.
Neither of us remembered seeing any side roads up into the mountains—just sudden grids of streets when the road bloated up into towns and villages. Now we were in a barren stretch, with signs placing the next town at eighty kilometers away, and Kristen tasked me with looking for a swath of mountain we could walk out into, something remote and forgettable, and not near farmers’ fields. It was hard work, not least because I was also keeping an eye on the clock: We’d been driving for a half hour, and we needed plenty of time to get back and return the shovels before the sun rose. It was already after one, and the sun would be up at seven. And though I’d never dug a grave, I assumed it would take hours.
“What about here?” I said, so quietly I had to clear my throat and repeat myself. Kristen eased the car to a stop and opened her window. The cold rushed in, eager and uncaring. Foothills loomed on either side of the road, ragged outlines blotting out the stars. There were a few bushes near the road and a smattering of skinny pines, but no sound for miles.
“This could work,” she said. “I’ll drive down and see if there’s a big curve ahead—we don’t want another car appearing out of nowhere.”
We hadn’t seen another soul all night, but it was a smart thing to check.
“Go ahead,” I said after a confused, waiting moment.
“You should get out here.”
Cold splashed through my insides. “What? Why?”
“C’mon. Figure out which hill we should be climbing and make sure there are no signs of life—fencing or sheds or anything.”
“You’re going to leave me here alone?”
“Just for a minute. We’re going to lose our sense of where to stop otherwise.”
I stared at her, my heart thrashing.
“Emily, we don’t have all night. Can you please just do this?”
Wind whipped around the brush and through her open window, a hushed, zipping noise. It mingled with the warmth of the car, and with the oxygen churning in and out of my body, my chest heaving as if I’d run a marathon.
Okay, I thought, then realized it was aloud. “Okay. Okay. Okay.” I reached for the door handle and held my breath as I pulled. The dome lights flicked on, spooking us both. Kristen looked pale and childish in the sallow glow.
“I’ll be right back,” she murmured. “Aim your flashlight at the road when you see me.”
I nodded and stepped into the frigid darkness. I swung the door shut and she drove off into the night.
I was alone. The space around me was like something solid, chilled air and night sounds and the cosmos pushing in on me, vibrating on my lips, my scalp, my eardrums. I felt a sudden instinct to pierce it all with a wild scream. Instead I squeezed my fingers into fists and watched Kristen’s taillights shrinking in the distance. They hooked to the right, then disappeared altogether.
The cold air felt charged and fear mushroomed inside me, a huge desperate thrash. I’d be left alone forever; the whole world had evaporated and it was just me, alone in the Earth’s wrinkled fold. The sky overhead was too bright, too high, too deep. I clicked on my flashlight and swept the feeble beam onto the soil behind me. I wished I had my phone—its light put this one to shame—but Kristen had insisted we leave them at the hotel; even in airplane mode, she said, a phone was traceable, chattering with satellites in the night sky.
Over the last few days, we’d learned what a strange swatch of land the Elqui Valley was: tropical trees and bright flowers on bar patios, fields of tender vegetables stretching from one mountain base to another, but beyond that, an arid moonscape, mountains coated in pebbly gray-brown. The streak of green narrowed in points, like here, where the valley oasis was only as wide as the highway and a few roadside shrubs; in every direction, I saw sloped hills covered in desiccated dirt and the occasional rock. We’ll have to cover our footprints, I thought, and bent to find a bough that’d work as a makeshift broom.
Pinpricks of light in the distance, and my shoulders eased. Only now did I let myself indulge the hellish vision: me abandoned, wandering this mountain road as my tongue grew parched. Kristen speeding toward civilization, alone except for the body in the trunk.
I pointed the flashlight at the pavement, and the pale disc of light shook in time with my hand. Kristen rolled to a stop and climbed out of the car.
“Did you find a good spot?” She crossed to me and put her hands on her hips.
“What? Oh, not really.” How long had she been gone? It’d felt like hours, like days, but I hadn’t actually done any recon. “It’s just sloping land in every direction. Did you see anything?”
“There’s a curve up ahead so I followed it for a while. No signs of anyone using this area. If we’re smart, we should be fine.”
I turned to face uphill. “There are a few big rocks. If we dig right behind one, it’ll be hidden from the road.” I held a boulder in the flashlight’s beam, and Kristen nodded and opened the car door. The shovels leaned against the back seat like awkward teenagers, and they clanged as Kristen yanked them out.
We set off on the crumbly hillside. One step at a time. One foot in front of the other. One task, then another, then another.
“It’s just after one,” I said. “If we want the car back at the hotel before sunrise, we have maybe five hours here.” Car in the lot. Shovels in the shed. Padlock on the door, hardware screwed back into the frame. Our things folded in our suitcases, the hotel suite tidy, like we’d never been in that room, this valley, this country. This quivering, epic nightmare.
“It’s enough time if we keep our heads.” She hesitated on a stone, then pushed off.
My heart boomed. I could feel her listening, waiting for me to add something. “We’re almost there now,” I murmured. “This is almost behind us.”
We climbed in silence, calves clenching, the ground sucking on our toes as we leaned against the pitch. My breath hitched from the hard work—the hard work and the horror.
It’d seemed easier in Cambodia. Or was that only in hindsight? I could remember scenes from that night, the hotel-room cleanup, the search for smooth stones to slip into his pockets. But I’d been numb, so numb. An abrupt cessation of feeling, like someone had switched off a lamp.
The real horror had come afterward, a cocoon of pain.
I froze and looked back toward the car. “Shouldn’t we have brought him with us?”
“What?” Kristen gave her head a little shake. “Em, we’ll find a spot and dig a hole. Then we’ll go back and get the backpack and everything. It’d be awkward to drag all that weight with us.”
“So we’re just leaving him in the trunk and making multiple trips back and forth? Isn’t that pushing our luck?”
“We’re almost at the rock. Let’s go.” She squeezed my arm, gently at first and then hard enough to bruise, to break the blood vessels underneath. “Let’s. Go.”
I power-sighed, then turned my flashlight back uphill.
The rock was farther off than it’d seemed from below; in the darkness, I could barely make out the car now, or the road that snaked below it. Kristen reached the boulder first and pressed her palm against it gratefully. It was about her height, as wide as it was tall.
I stood the shovel in front of me and nosed it into the earth. Sucked in a breath, then set a foot on top and leaned my weight into it. The blade plunged into the crumbly ground and I lost my balance before rocking back and gouging out a silty chunk. My lats tightened and a sliver needled into my palm. I poked at the wound, then hurried to catch up to Kristen, who’d already cleared a small hole.
Crunch, hiss. Crunch, hiss. Over and over, we rammed our shovels into the arid ground and slid the dry dirt into a growing mound. It was hard work, but rhythmic, like paddling a canoe. We huffed as we raised each clump of soil and groaned as we tipped it onto the pile.
