Two Sides to Every Murder, page 7
It’s not just any field; it’s the archery range that I was just looking at when I stood outside my mom’s office. Which means that’s not a shelter, it’s an equipment shed where they stored all the archery stuff.
I stop walking at once. I’m not in the woods anymore; I’m in Maeve’s living room, my knees pulled up to my chest, hearing the story of the Camp Lost Lake murders for the first time. Maeve’s high, little-girl voice sounds as clearly as if she were speaking directly into my ear: “Lori’s husband, Jacob, used to teach archery at Camp Lost Lake before he died. Lori confronted him on the archery range at camp and killed him with his own arrows.”
Blood thumps in my temples and, for a moment, fear rises inside me, so strong I can’t think of anything else. I’m alone out here. Far enough from my friends that they wouldn’t even hear me scream.
I’ve just about gotten the fear under control when I sense movement from the corner of my eye. I whip my head around, breathing hard.
The equipment shed. Something moved inside the equipment shed.
I bring a hand to my mouth, breathing hard. I wait for one moment. Two.
Nothing moves again.
I take a step toward the shed. It’s dark in there. Half the shed is open air, no walls, just one long bench stretched across a concrete floor, and the other half is a small square room, one door, no windows.
I lick my lips, eyes on the shed. The door is open, I notice. A thick padlock hangs from the doorknob, but it’s not locked, just dangling.
I take another step forward. I can see inside now. There’s an old gas lantern on the floor, a tin coffee cup with a ring of brown still sitting on the bottom, a pocketknife, and a camp stove. All things someone could find on campgrounds.
My heart starts beating faster. I think of the sleeping bag Hazel found. She said it was unrolled. Like someone had been using it.
The shed door sways slightly, and I jump backward, releasing a little scream. But it’s just the wind. There’s no one there.
I watch that door for the length of one breath, my heart thrashing around inside my chest like a caged bird. I want to know how long these things have been here. Has it been like this for sixteen years? Or has someone been here more recently?
“It’s nothing,” I murmur under my breath. It’s just an open door and a few camp supplies. No reason to freak out. Even if there was someone here recently, it was probably just some kid messing around, like Officer Knight said.
But when I take a step back toward the field, I notice the footprints. They’re all across the ground.
Fresh footprints.
The witch’s footprints, a voice in my mind whispers. I shiver, feeling like I’ve just been touched by something gross that I desperately want to shake off.
Stop it, stop it, stop it.
I keep my head ducked and hurry across the range, back into the woods. I can’t have gone more than a dozen feet when a shadow slides out from behind a tree.
I jerk backward, my heart suddenly in my throat. I want to scream, but it’s like my voice has dried up inside of me.
The shadow’s hands come up. “Hey, calm down, it’s just me.” The shadow—now a fully formed guy—steps onto the path in front of me, his hands held up in a classic “good guy” stance. I’m startled enough that it takes a second for my heart to stop rattling and my eyes to travel up to his face. And then—
Whoa. Okay, yeah, this guy is…distractingly attractive. I was not prepared for that. He’s tall and lean, with longish black hair and a good, strong jawline. He appears to be East Asian.
“Hi,” I say, dumbfounded. He’s maybe the hottest guy I’ve ever seen in real life.
“How’d you get back here? I thought you were a few yards ahead,” he says, turning to point deeper into the woods.
“You…what?” This makes no sense. Unless…
My throat feels suddenly tight. Was he following me?
The guy frowns at me, those frustratingly beautiful eyes moving over my face, my clothes. “Did you change your shirt?”
I touch the hem of my Antlers polo. This is getting creepy. I’m all alone with some guy, in the middle of the woods, far enough from my friends that I can’t exactly call for help if this interaction goes south.
I swallow, nervous now. I wonder if he was the guy who put all that camping stuff in the archery shed. Mom once told me that she knows people sneak into the camp sometimes, weirdos coming to the site of the murders to see “where it all happened.” I suddenly want to put some distance between the two of us.
“Excuse me,” I say, skirting the edge of the trail. The boy kind of blinks, and then shuffles out of my way. For a second it looks like he might follow me, but he doesn’t. I hurry down the dirt road before he can change his mind, the back of my neck itching. He’s definitely watching me walk away.
He was cute, though. I allow myself a fraction of a second to be thankful that I wore my jean shorts that make my legs look super long, then immediately shake myself out of it. For all I know, this guy’s some murder fanboy.
Once I’ve gone a few yards, something hits me: I changed my shirt at home, in my bedroom. How could he know about that?
I stop walking and quickly check behind me to make sure he isn’t following me. He isn’t. The dirt road behind me is long and empty, stray weeds and dandelions blowing lightly in the breeze to either side. No sign of life.
A nervous flutter skims my neck. I start walking again, faster now. Luckily, the lodge is right up ahead, a long, low building with a pitched roof and tons of dark windows. I look around for Sawyer, but don’t see him anywhere, which means my delay with the hot, creepy stranger made me too late to head him off before he went inside. Crap.
I try the front door—thank God, it’s unlocked.
“Hello?” I call and step into the dark.
6
Reagan
I’ve spent the last few months memorizing old maps of the campgrounds I found online and locate the path through the woods easily. Five minutes later, the lodge rises from beyond the trees like a mirage.
I stay out of sight for a while longer, considering my strategy. There’s the front door, but that’s probably how the guy with the camera’s planning to get inside. If he sees me, he’ll bolt and take the camera somewhere else.
I walk the perimeter of the lodge instead. There’s no back door, but there is a row of dusty windows. I try to open the first one, but it doesn’t budge. Either locked or rusted closed. Same with the next and the next. Great.
The way to break a window is you don’t let yourself think about what you’re doing. If you think about it too hard, you’re going to psych yourself out. I close my eyes and count down—three, two, one—and then jerk my elbow back as hard as I can, bracing myself for impact. My arm slams into the window with a sharp thwunk! and there’s a crash of breaking glass as it shatters like brittle candy. Pain vibrates up my arm. Luckily, my flannel’s thick enough that none of the broken shards pierce skin.
I shrug my sleeve down over my hand and use it to carefully brush the rest of the broken glass away from the frame. Once the glass is gone, I haul my body up and through the window.
I stay near the window for a long moment, blinking. The storm clouds outside have almost completely obscured the sun, and in here it’s so dark that it takes a long moment for my eyes to adjust. When they do, a chill creeps up my spine. It’s unnerving. The air in here feels wrong. Too still. It’s like time stopped back in 2008, like this air hasn’t been disturbed since the day Gia and Jacob and Matthew were murdered.
I’m in a smaller room—an office, maybe—that’s been sectioned off from a much larger area. You can tell because the eight-foot walls don’t even come close to reaching the soaring ceiling, and it gives the space a cubicle feeling. There’s another window on the wall adjacent to the one I just broke, but it’s layered with years of thick, yellow dust, and any light that filters in through the glass is muddy and dim. A heavy, wooden desk leans against another wall and, if I squint, I can make out the hulking outline of an ancient iMac sitting on top of it, the kind made of clear, teal plastic that you can see all the wires through. The air smells like old newspaper.
I cross the room, push the door open. There’s not a wide-open room on the other side, like I was expecting, but a narrow hallway. I feel something cold move down my neck. We did a Greek mythology unit at my old school. My final day in class, we were discussing a story about Theseus, who gets trapped in a huge labyrinth with a monster hunting him.
I can’t help thinking about poor old Theseus now, as I stare down the dark, dark hall. Did he ever get out of that labyrinth? Did he even survive? Mom pulled me out of school before I got a chance to finish the story.
I really wish I could think of something other than Theseus and the Minotaur right now.
“Get it together, Reagan,” I murmur, forcing myself to take one step forward, and then another. Deeper and deeper into the labyrinth.
My eyes are drawn to faded snapshots hanging on the walls, campers engaged in idyllic summer activities, canoeing and building elaborate art projects from Popsicle sticks, roasting marshmallows around a fire. Occasionally a member of the staff will be in the shot, too, standing shoulder to shoulder with the campers, grinning at the camera. You can tell when it’s someone who works at camp because they wear narrow gold name tags. I find myself squinting in the dark, reading the names as I walk:
L. Rubin, A. Murray, R. Whitmer, M. Edwards.
I jerk to a stop.
M. Edwards? My M. Edwards?
I look from the name tag to the woman who’s wearing it, and all the air leaves my lungs.
M. Edwards is a white woman with chin-length blond hair and wide blue eyes. She doesn’t exactly give violent killer.
Except that she’s holding a bow and arrow.
And she’s not just holding it. She’s gripping the bow expertly, one hand aiming, the other pulling the string taut, her arm lean and muscled in the sunlight. There’s an arrow nocked and aimed. Whoever took the photo caught her a moment before she let it fly.
I’ve started breathing again, but each inhale is shallow and short. This photo, it proves that M. Edwards had the ability to kill with a bow and arrow. And the key card evidence proves she was at camp when the murders were committed. All I need now is motive. Hopefully that’s what Gia caught on tape. The reason this woman killed her, too.
A sudden, sharp sound cuts through the quiet.
I go still. Somewhere deeper in the lodge there’s a click of metal on metal, the creak of old hinges: someone’s opened a door.
It’s that guy, I tell myself. The one with the camera. But my hands have gotten sweaty, and a rash of goose bumps rises on my arms.
As quietly as I can, I take the frame down from the wall and remove the back. Then, I slip the photo of M. Edwards out of the frame and into my pocket.
I hear a telltale click—a door closing—and a shuffle of footsteps as someone walks into the building. Whoever it is isn’t trying to be quiet, which calms me down some. This isn’t someone planning to sneak up on me. They don’t know I’m here.
I hold my breath and lean forward, peering around the corner—
My breath catches in my throat.
I can tell, immediately, that whoever just came in is not the dude with the camera. It’s dark in here and, from where I’m standing, I can only make out the outline of a body, but that body is small and slight and much shorter than the dude with the camera’s had been. It looks more like a girl about my size.
My chest clenches. I think of the photograph in my pocket. M. Edwards. Could it be her? Is she after the camera, too?
Whoever it is, she doesn’t appear to be armed. I’m not a fighter, but I used to train for an hour a day to stay in shape for swim. It’s been a year since I was in a pool, but I haven’t completely fallen out of shape. I think I could take her.
The girl doesn’t turn on any lights but moves quickly down the hall, the sound of her footsteps echoing off the walls and floor.
“Hello?” she calls. Her voice is loud and clear, not the voice of someone who’s afraid there’s a stranger waiting for her in the dark. “Sawyer?”
She’s still walking, but it looks like she’s got her phone out now, and if I squint a little, I can see that her head is all hunched over it. She’s heading my way, but she still doesn’t look up, which is good, because if she did, she’d definitely see me peering around the corner at her. Any second, she’s going to round the corner and walk right into me. I glance over my shoulder, but there’s only the narrow hall and that office room behind me. Dead end, unless I’m planning to call it quits and climb right back out the window I just broke. If I want to get the camera, I’m going to have to go through her.
Okay, here goes nothing.
I take another deep breath and step forward.
The girl is still fumbling with her phone, but my sudden appearance seems to scare the shit out of her.
“Oh my God,” she shouts, and jerks away from me, raising the hand that’s still holding her phone, like she’s planning to throw it at me.
She must’ve been trying to turn her flashlight app on because, in a weird twist of fate, a white beam blinks on at that exact moment, illuminating her.
It’s dark enough in here that I only catch the girl’s face in pieces, at first. There’s her pale skin, blue-green eyes that are just a tiny bit too close together on her face, nose dusted in light freckles. Her honey-blond hair falls a few inches past her shoulders—longer than mine, but not by much—and her face would be heart-shaped, except that her chin is short and a little square, a heart with the bottom corner snipped off.
I inhale, déjà vu twisting through my gut as I stare.
I know that face.
I know that when her freckles get too much sun they get darker and more pop up on her forehead and cheeks. And her eyes, I know they’re so exactly halfway between green and blue that it’s impossible to know what to write on forms that ask what color they are. I know her cheeks are so round she has a hard time finding flattering sunglasses and her hair is wavy in strange places, wavy enough that it seems like it would curl, but when she gets it wet and scrunches it up like everyone on TikTok says to, it just falls flat against her shoulders, all limp-looking and sad.
The girl standing in front of me is…
Me.
I exhale and words explode from my lips. “What. In the actual. Hell?”
“The…hell?” the girl repeats, sounding confused. Her mouth is wide and full and turned down at the corners, just like mine, and even though she isn’t smiling, I can see the bottom edges of her two front teeth beneath her top lip, in an expression so creepily reminiscent of one I’ve seen on my own face in pictures or the mirror that I actually shiver. She moves the light to my face.
For a moment I can’t think, can’t speak, can’t move. This doesn’t make sense. This isn’t possible. I can’t manage to catch my breath. My head feels light and full of hot air, like if it weren’t attached to my body, it would just float away. The room around me blinks in and out of focus.
“Who are you?” the girl asks.
“Reagan.” The name slips out before I can consider whether it’s a good idea to give it to her. I bite my lip to hide my nerves and add, “Who the hell are you?”
The girl doesn’t answer. She looks skittish. Her eyes keep jumping from my face to my arm to the wall. She reminds me of the character in the horror movie who screams when she should be keeping her mouth shut, who gets the whole group caught by the axe-wielding psychopath. It makes me nervous.
“Don’t move…” I tell her. My body feels tight and hot, like a live wire. “Don’t…don’t do anything.”
“I-I think I’m going to faint,” the girl murmurs.
“Do not faint!”
“It’s not really something your body gives you a choice about one way or another,” she says. Then, her eyes moving off my face, she adds, “I know this is jarring, but I don’t think hitting me is going to help with anything.”
I frown and drop my arm. I had no idea I’d even made a fist. “Sorry. Instinct.”
“Punching is your instinct?”
“Fainting is yours?” I throw back at her.
“This isn’t possible,” the girl says, ignoring me. She’s doing her skittish thing again, bouncing from one foot to the other, squeezing her hands together, then relaxing them. I want to grab her by the shoulders, tell her to hold still.
“Yeah, obviously,” I say, instead.
She looks like she’s going to say something else when a door suddenly slams open, interrupting her. We both jerk around to stare into the darkness.
Someone stands at the end of the hall. I can’t quite make them out. Whoever it is appears to be wearing a large black coat, and is all in silhouette, just a shadow backlit by the watery gray light streaming in from the windows behind them.
“Who’s that?” the other girl says softly.
“That guy—” I start, but she’s already shaking her head.
“That isn’t Sawyer,” she murmurs.
Whoever it is doesn’t speak, but I have a feeling they’re looking straight at us, that they can see us clearly in the dim light.
This isn’t okay. Something feels very, very wrong.
“Hey, you,” the other girl calls, her voice all false bravado. “What do you—”
I grab her arm. “Shut up,” I hiss through my teeth. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her head swivel around to face me, but I can’t explain why she should be quiet. I know something’s off, even if I can’t find the words to explain why.
Slowly, I pull my phone out of my pocket and hold it before my face. My hands are shaking, badly, and it takes me two tries to turn the flashlight on. A dim white glow appears, illuminating me and the other girl and a circle of dark floor.
