Only She Came Back, page 1
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2023 by Margot Harrison
Cover art copyright © 2023 by Peter Strain. Cover design by Jenny Kimura.
Cover copyright © 2023 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Interior design by Jenny Kimura.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Harrison, Margot, author.
Title: Only she came back / Margot Harrison.
Description: First edition. | New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2023. | Audience: Ages 14 & up. | Summary: When true-crime fanatic Sam discovers her former classmate is the prime suspect in a potential murder case, their newfound friendship reveals there is more to the case than anyone knows.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022058568 | ISBN 9780316536080 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316536295 (ebook)
Subjects: CYAC: Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | Missing persons—Fiction. | Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Mystery and detective stories. | LCGFT: Detective and mystery fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.H375 On 2023 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022058568
ISBNs: 978-0-316-53608-0 (hardcover), 978-0-316-53629-5 (ebook)
E3-20231007-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Compilation of Leaked Security Footage Posted Anonymously on August 4 at 5:05 PM
Police Search for Missing Influencer in Lost Village National Monument
Video Posted to Callum Massey’s Channel on July 24 at 11:05 PM
1
2
3
4
5
6
From Katie Dunsmore’s Senior-Year Diary
7
Video Posted to Callum Massey’s Channel on July 25 at 6:21 AM
From Katie Dunsmore’s Senior-Year Diary
8
From Katie Dunsmore’s Senior-Year Diary
9
From Katie Dunsmore’s Senior-Year Diary
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From Katie Dunsmore’s Senior-Year Diary
11
12
From Katie Dunsmore’s Senior-Year Diary
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From Katie Dunsmore’s Senior-Year Diary
14
From Katie Dunsmore’s Senior-Year Diary
15
The Last Note in Katie Dunsmore’s Diary
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17
18
Video Posted to Callum Massey’s Channel on July 25 at 9:10 PM
From Kiri Dunsmore’s Diary
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From Kiri Dunsmore’s Diary
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From Kiri Dunsmore’s Diary
21
From Kiri Dunsmore’s Diary
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Video Posted to Callum Massey’s Channel on July 26 at 8:18 AM
24
From Kiri Dunsmore’s Diary
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26
27
28
29
30
Transcript of Video Posted on January 28 by Aliza Deene of Murder Most F**ked Up
Acknowledgments
Discover More
Also by Margot Harrison
To my dad, Harvey Sollberger, who raised me on the creepy legends of the old Southwest
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COMPILATION OF LEAKED SECURITY FOOTAGE POSTED ANONYMOUSLY ON AUGUST 4 AT 5:05 PM
She walks out of the desert painted with his blood.
It’s July 28, 6:30 PM, in a convenience store on a sandy two-lane highway in New Mexico. I’ve never been there, but you can see it on Street View. It looks like the last gas station for miles around, a few red-and-white pumps and a squat building in a seething sea of sun and sand and dirt.
We see her walking up to the counter: a tall, lanky girl with platinum-blond hair in a ponytail, wearing a tank top and shorts and a sweatshirt tied around her waist. She takes her time, head held high.
The sweatshirt is his. She left all the rest of her gear—their gear—back at the campsite. The cops and park rangers will have to recover it later.
From the cam behind the counter, her expression looks serious, as if she’s giving a presentation in school. On the way back to Los Alamos in the state police cruiser, she’ll pass out from fatigue and dehydration. But here you can’t tell how close she is to the edge.
You also can’t see that the sweatshirt is stiff with dried blood. You can’t see the additional traces—much of it rubbed off after five days—that still show on her hands and forearms and collarbone.
The stains are faint enough that the clerk probably thinks she’s seeing only the remnants of windblown sand. “Can I help you?” she asks, used to dealing with hikers and campers who look ragged after a few days or a week in Lost Village National Monument.
The girl speaks so softly the clerk asks her to repeat herself.
“My boyfriend is in the park, out past Lonely Mesa. No one’s answering his phone. You have to help him. I think he’s dead.”
POLICE SEARCH FOR MISSING INFLUENCER IN LOST VILLAGE NATIONAL MONUMENT
Los Alamos, NM, July 29
By Lani Sandoval for the Associated Press
The disappearance of a young “survival guru” with hundreds of thousands of YouTube followers has rocked the rural towns surrounding Lost Village National Monument and raised questions about the lengths to which social media influencers will go for a viral post.
Callum Massey, 24, disappeared from the site where he and his girlfriend, Kiri Dunsmore, 18, were camped on the west side of Lonely Mesa, 22 miles from the park entrance in a rarely traveled area.
On July 28, Dunsmore entered the Phillips 66 service station in White Ledge, on the edge of the park, wearing a sweatshirt covered with dark stains, according to employee Lyla Garrison-Cruz. Dunsmore told Garrison-Cruz, and later the state police, that on July 23, she and Massey had left the campsite separately to gather firewood.
When she returned to the campsite, Dunsmore said, she found Massey’s bloody sweatshirt. Panicking, she barricaded herself in a cave on the mesa for the night.
The next night, July 24, Dunsmore posted a video using Massey’s account. She would post three more short videos before hiking out of the park, eventually hitching a ride in a family’s RV. While she spoke only vaguely of Massey’s disappearance in the videos, they alarmed some viewers of the feed. In one video, she pointed out what she claimed were a stranger’s footprints in the campsite. Dunsmore’s parents began trying to reach her on July 25, according to a press release from the National Park Service’s Investigative Services Branch (ISB), but she did not pick up their calls.
Both young people are residents of Vermont, where Massey built a large following with videos portraying his “ultra-minimalist, apocalypse-ready lifestyle.” On June 5, the couple left on the road trip that eventually brought them to Lost Village. There they planned to hunt for the notorious German’s Gulch treasure, which has fascinated thrill seekers since it was reportedly buried near Lonely Mesa in 1908. In videos shot along the way, Massey described the trip as a test of his desert survival skills. The last video in which he appears was posted on the morning of July 23.
Massey is the son of Jared Massey, a vice president at Brauer Pharmaceutical, and constitutional lawyer Amanda Tripp-Massey. The couple reside in Annandale, VA, and are well known in Washington, DC, social circles.
At a press conference this morning in Los Alamos, Park Ranger Randy Michaels said he had seen no recent reports of suspicious activity in the park. Emily Garza of the ISB, which investigates crimes within the National Park System, asked for volunteers to aid in the extensive search for Massey.
Asked why Dunsmore did not use her phone to call for help from the park, or answer her parents’ calls, Michaels said the young woman was malnourished and dehydrated when she was found.
“This was a gal who was shaken and not thinking clearly,” he said, noting that the
When asked if Dunsmore was a person of interest in Massey’s disappearance, Investigator Garza declined to comment.
VIDEO POSTED TO CALLUM MASSEY’S CHANNEL ON JULY 24 AT 11:05 PM
Darkness.
Then a flash of light on a tear-stained white face. Trembling lips. Bright, scared eyes. The camera darts away to give us a blurry view of a rounded, clay-walled chamber that looks barely large enough to stand up in.
She keeps the camera there, off her face, and talks:
“Everybody’s wondering where Callum is today, right?” A nervous giggle. “Right. I hope you’re okay out there, Cal.”
Her breath catches. “I hope you aren’t too lonely, but I guess you wouldn’t be. You’re so much stronger than me. Stay strong. Stay safe.” Pause. “I know you told me not to sleep in these caves. They were spiritually important to the people who lived here, like, seven hundred years ago.”
Another raspy sound—a laugh? “And I respect that! But I’m so scared, Cal, and I’m alone. I know you think I don’t listen to you, that I don’t care about you and the things you try to teach me. But I do.”
Thirteen seconds of silence, except for her breathing.
“Can I tell you a secret, Cal? I didn’t always believe you when you said the world was ending, but now I feel it’s true. We dropped off the edge of the planet, and nobody’s left but you and me. Or maybe just me.”
1
AUGUST 4, MIDNIGHT
The first time the video popped up in my feed, I recognized her straightaway.
But not the name, because I’d known her only as Katie, never as Kiri. And all the posts in my feed were screaming “Kiri’s Eerie Cave Video” and “Does Kiri’s Story Hold Up?” and “What Was Really Happening with Kiri and Callum?”
I recognized that face, though, and that voice, low-pitched and wispy, from more than a year earlier when Katie Dunsmore sat behind me in junior English.
Katie was a girl who took up space, maybe six feet tall with long legs and broad shoulders—a girl who looked like a Valkyrie even in those days, when her hair was mousy brown, but who seemed to try to minimize her Valkyrie-ness by hunching over and crumpling into herself. She ran track and sat alone in the cafeteria or with some teammate friends. No boyfriend or girlfriend that I knew of.
We paired up for the final project in that class because there was nobody else for us to pair up with. Katie focused on the work, which was fine with me, and I don’t remember a single in-class conversation about anything else. No nudging, no private jokes, no texts that weren’t about meetings and deadlines. She made a label for our joint portfolio—strange, fey hand lettering wrapped in intricate flowers and vines—and when I complimented it, she said, “I used to want to be an artist, but I can’t do perspective.”
On the last day of school, Katie gave me a ride home. Pulling up at my place, she said, “We aren’t that far apart.”
For a second I thought she meant we were both shy, or both antisocial, but then I realized she was talking about where we lived. Geographically, it was true. But when she told me her address—“The very last house on Dumont Street in Queen City Park”—I felt the gulf between us. My mom and I live up by the highway in a rental duplex with mangy vinyl siding and a view of Kinney Drugs and the neighborhood sports bar where people get rowdy on weekend nights.
If Katie’s saying we were close was a shy way of asking me to hang out, I didn’t take the bait. Back then, I spent all my free time taping and editing my podcast about serial killer Drea Flint, thinking I could be the next true-crime sensation. By the time I realized I had nothing new to say and no subscribers except my friends and my mom, it was summer. I ditched the podcast and started working at the multiplex and met Regina Chen—Reggie. She made my life more exciting, so I basically blew off fall semester. I barely cared that I was tanking my grades until later, after the January night when everything went to pieces.
I didn’t graduate with honors the way Katie probably did. I spotted her after the ceremony on the UVM campus green, one arm around a man who was probably her dad and the other around a hot guy with black hair tumbling in his eyes. I noticed Katie’s new hair color and threw her a wave. If she saw me, she gave no sign.
The hot guy was Callum Massey—you can see the graduation pics online—but I didn’t know that. I’d never heard of him until he went missing.
It’s a strange thing to go looking for random distraction, lying in the dark with your phone because it’s too hot to sleep, and to find videos describing your English project partner as an “ice queen” and a “murderous femme fatale” and a “stone-cold killer.”
I watched video after video, starting with Kiri/Katie’s videos from the park. They were hard to watch, because she didn’t make a lot of sense and moved the phone so the angles made me seasick, but it was her. It was Katie. And everybody was talking.
Murderer. Victim. Killer. Survivor.
After that, I went down the rabbit hole: the local and national news reports, the top influencers’ takes, Callum’s videos, especially the ones with Kiri in them. There were a bunch from their road trip and Lost Village National Monument, some a whole half hour long.
I watched the road trip videos over and over: Katie driving on heat-hazed highways toward glowing pink horizons, her skin burnished gold. And this is going to sound weird, but I was jealous.
I’d spent the summer pedaling the four blocks between home and my job through molasses-thick air, helping my friends pack to leave town for fancy colleges and knowing that all I had to look forward to were shitty blockbusters and smoke breaks outside a half-abandoned movie theater. Every night I scrolled through videos in the dark, here in my mom’s apartment where the moments were sticky and endless and even the crickets sounded like they’d given up on the possibility of change.
Meanwhile, Katie was frolicking in the spray on the Jersey Shore. She was climbing the Washington Monument; running her fingers through the tassels of midwestern cornstalks; munching on authentic tamales at roadside stands; watching sunsets with her head on her boyfriend’s shoulder. It made me itch a little, imagining myself so close to someone. Imagining her head on my shoulder, her long hair tickling my cheek.
But even though Kiri was usually the one on-screen, the story still belonged to Callum. It was his channel. He was the one behind the camera, making everything look good.
Then Kiri walked into that gas station. And the story became hers.
When I was twelve, the whole town was plastered with posters of a college girl named Kelsey Detwiler who’d gone missing after a night out. Weeks later, they found her strangled body in the woods, and after a month, they caught the killer—a guy who’d lent her his phone, then followed her back to campus. He was a family man with a loving wife and two daughters, and everyone who knew him said he was kind and generous—he attended church every single Sunday, so he must be, right? But my dad became a churchgoer, too, after spending years as a raging, ass-kicking drunk and walking out on us when I was nine. These days, he acts like he invented human goodness.
I hate hypocrites. If you’re going to be a waste of space in this world, own it.
After what happened to Kelsey, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the evil out there—the fine, upstanding family men I passed on the street who might secretly be rapist-murderers. I craved more stories about killers, so I ate up library books and went down Wiki rabbit holes. When Mom and I took the long drive to see my dad, we listened to murder podcasts, and that made it easier to tolerate my stepmom’s sanctimonious eyebrows and knowing that I could never be as sweet and picture-perfect as my half siblings.
Stories about serial killers get depressing, though, because most of them are insecure creeps who try to make themselves feel bigger by hurting women (or whoever else they can get away with hurting). Even the cleverest killers, the ones who lead elaborate double lives, basically just do variations on that same ugly MO.
Every now and then, though, I found a story about a woman who tried to even the score, and those were my favorites.
