Only She Came Back, page 16
“He said it was time to leave the world behind and get serious about survival.”
“And this ‘doomsday cabin’—is it a real place?” It was the least threatening way I could think of to ask her about West’s message. “On Vancouver Island, for instance?”
Kiri sighed. Then she rose, bent gracefully to pick up her shorts, and started dressing. “What happened at the cabin—Cal called it a potlatch. It’s an Indigenous tradition where you destroy a bunch of stuff to show everybody how little material things mean to you. He sold Parsley—the goat—to a cheesemaker, but he did want to slaughter the chickens.”
I shuddered, reaching for my own clothes. “Did you?”
“I told him that was cultural appropriation, and then I put the chickens in the Prius and drove them to the farm down the road where he got them. The farmer was nice. She was happy to have a few more laying hens.”
So there was a happy ending for the chickens, anyway. I scrambled to my feet, feeling self-conscious now as a cool breeze hit my skin, and pulled my shirt over my head. “But you were there for this potlatch thing? You helped him do it?”
“I guess.” Kiri’s laugh was nervous, as if her strange bravado were draining away, leaving her as anxious as she’d been during our earlier conversations. “Cal wanted to make it look like he had badass enemies after him. When he got settled in Canada, he’d weave it into the narrative of his brand—being on the run. He said we could be an outlaw power couple like in Natural Born Killers, only without the killing.”
Drea Flint and her boyfriend had been obsessed with that movie, too. That sure hadn’t ended well for them. “So Callum planned to keep posting videos? How was he supposed to disappear, then?” If anyone would try to reconcile being famous and being invisible, it was Callum Massey.
“I don’t know. He stopped talking about it because I told him I needed time to decide. I really wanted to go to college.” Another sigh. “But I helped him trash the house, because he said his fans would find it and post pics and it would be legendary. It was the least I could do.”
Now was the moment to ask. I couldn’t let it slip by. “I saw what you wrote on the wall. With the Sharpie.”
But she wasn’t listening to me. Her head had whipped halfway around, and she was scrutinizing the woods behind us. “What was that?”
“Where?”
“Shh.” Her gaze stayed on the tree line. “I thought something was moving.”
Nothing looked to me like it was moving but the gray blurs of cedars and maples, their crowns shifting in the breeze. “You’re not used to the woods,” I said, remembering what Owen had told me yesterday.
“I used to be. All this time in the house, it’s been messing with my head.”
We walked back through the park in silence, shivering in our damp clothes. Every time a twig cracked, our heads swiveled as one.
“Why did you ask if I’d seen West?” Kiri asked. “Have you?”
I shook my head.
“Are you sure? That he’s not still following you, I mean?”
“I haven’t seen him or his Grand Cherokee.” I didn’t feel ready to tell her about the See ya message, since I’d also have to tell her how I’d found it. “Look, I keep thinking about West’s weird message. The doomsday cabin and the footprints. Why do you think he’d tell you that he made those prints in the campsite?”
“I don’t know!” But she said it too quickly, her voice high with discomfort. “Maybe that’s not what he actually…” She broke off. “Look, Sam, did it scare you seeing the stuff I wrote about Cal on the walls?”
It was a sudden change of subject, but I was glad to get back to that. “Yeah. I guess it did.”
“Did it make you wonder if I could have done something to Cal?”
Katydids trilled from the long grass. “Yes,” I said, then remembered the card I’d found. Love you to infinity. “Was there another girl? Is that why you were pissed at him?”
“A girl?” Kiri sounded genuinely confused. “No! There wasn’t any other girl that I know of. I was pissed because I didn’t like his plan to trash the cabin—it was wasteful. And he asked me to write creepy stuff on the walls, so… I let my feelings out. If it bothered him, he didn’t say.”
We turned off the path into the woods, heading for her backyard. Someone’s distant porch light bobbed through the darkness. “If I were you, I would have been pissed at Callum for a lot of reasons,” I said, remembering everything I’d read in the diary.
I waited for her to defend Callum. But she said, “I wish I were more like you, Sam. You don’t let anybody push you around.”
“Me?” I had to laugh, thinking of everything that had happened today. I’d let Tierney provoke me not once but twice. Aliza Deene’s theories had pissed me off and so I’d told the world about the cabin. “I don’t think you know me that well.”
“You wouldn’t have fallen for Callum, though.” She spoke in a small voice. “Everybody looks up to him. People think I wasn’t good enough, or maybe I resented him for being perfect, and so I had to… to…”
“Everybody does not think that.” Never mind Aliza Deene and her followers. “Anyway, Callum isn’t some untouchable, perfect ideal. He was—is—human.”
“But if he wasn’t perfect, then there wasn’t any point.” She seemed to be shrinking into herself.
“Point to what?”
“I don’t know. Everything. Do you think I’m stupid to say that? After reading my diary—after finding out how much I let him change me—do you think I’m stupid?”
I held back the tree branches so we could step onto her lawn. “I’m not the one to judge. I did the same thing with Reggie sometimes—put her on a pedestal. People make mistakes.” But we don’t have to keep making them.
“I guess so.” Paused on the edge of the lawn, Kiri rubbed her cheek with the back of one hand. “It’s just—I feel like everybody’s closing in on me. They think I’m a horrible person. No matter what I did or didn’t do, they won’t let me go.”
I wanted to throw my arms around her and say it would all be okay. I wanted to touch her in the easy, reassuring way she’d touched me in the lake. But I didn’t know how to start. “You’re telling the truth. I know that.”
Not something a reporter or podcaster would say to a subject. Just something I wanted to believe right now.
It was a relief to return to the warmth and comfort of the basement den. I tossed my backpack on the sectional while Kiri flicked on the TV—a Friends rerun with the volume low.
“I thought you didn’t watch TV.”
“I started last night. It keeps me company. But only the old sitcoms. I stay away from news channels. Sam…”
She bent and slid something out from under one of the couch cushions. Her face was suddenly as stiff and solemn as a marble statue, and I knew there was something she hadn’t told me.
“Today I found this tacked to one of the trees on the edge of our backyard,” she said, holding out the object to me. It was a piece of paper folded to the size of someone’s palm.
I unfolded it—and instantly recognized the dark, spiky handwriting, a perfect match for the See ya note I had in my pack.
This one said: IF YOU’RE WILLING TO GO NORTH, FINALLY, MEET ME 8/14 AT HIGH NOON, WHERE THE ECHOES FLY LIKE OWLS.
“West.” He was lurking around the park. He was in the motel room. The handwriting had to be his, and he could have written the See ya note to tack to another tree, wherever they were supposed to meet, if she didn’t show up there before he headed out.
“So he still wants that meeting with you,” I said, my heart sinking. Maybe that was the reason for her strange excitement tonight. When West saw I wasn’t going to help, he’d found a way around me. “But where’s this place with the echoes? And what does he mean by—”
I stopped, because Kiri clearly wasn’t listening. She was staring at the TV behind me, violet light flickering on her face.
I turned to look, too. And the breath left me—all at once with a hard jolt, the way it had when I hit the water.
It was a news break. Above the logo of a Plattsburgh TV station, the flashing lights of police cruisers illuminated a desert landscape.
A woman’s voice said: “These are images from a little earlier tonight in Lost Village National Monument, New Mexico, where the National Park Service reports they’ve discovered human remains in a crevice at the foot of a cliff wall. This was just about a mile and a quarter from the spot where Vermonter YouTubers Callum Massey and his girlfriend, Kiri Dunsmore, had their campsite in July.”
18
AUGUST 13, 5:37 AM
Birds were singing everywhere, warbling and trilling, so loud they might have been trapped inside my skull.
I groaned and opened my eyes to the flicker of television light. Beyond the muted flat-screen, gray dawn shone through the curtains. I bolted upright on Kiri’s sectional, throwing back the blanket she’d given me last night. A gray hump on the middle section was her.
The station was playing a cheery morning show, but all I saw in my mind’s eye were the orange-red rocks, the flashing lights, and the serious-looking reporters who kept saying the same thing:
Human remains found in the desert.
Transported to the medical examiner. Still unidentified.
Bile rushed into my throat as I swung my bare feet onto the carpet. I was so tired, and I needed to think, and I couldn’t do it with her beside me.
I’d wanted to ask so many questions last night, but the set of Kiri’s shoulders told me that if I tried, she might fly apart—scream at me, shove me out the door. Or worse, she might dissolve into wordless, unending sobs.
And I wouldn’t be able to comfort her, because I couldn’t be sure what she was grieving. Until I knew whether the remains were Callum and how he had died, I couldn’t be sure of anything.
So I sat beside her in the dark room and waited patiently, close enough to feel the shiver of her indrawn breath. She flipped through the news channels, stopping whenever we reached that same desert scene. Once I heard her sniffle, and I reached for her hand and clasped it. She didn’t pull away, but she didn’t meet my eyes, either.
My clothes still smelled of the lake. How could a night begin so well and go so wrong?
As I stood up, Kiri raised her head. Her hair was wild, her eyes red-rimmed. “Wait,” she said. “Not yet.”
“Your folks will be up soon.”
“I need to give you something!” Again she slid a hand under the couch cushions, and I braced myself for some new find as unsettling as the note West had left her.
Kiri clutched whatever-it-was in her hand. “Sam, remember last night, when you said you could tell I was telling the truth?”
“Yeah.” But when I said that, I hadn’t known there was a body in the desert—a body that would soon be identified. A body that could lead to an arrest.
She must have seen the hint of doubt on my face. “I need to know if you still think I’m not a bad person, after you know what really happened out there. But you have to know everything.”
What she handed me was a stack of paper, but the minuscule handwriting on it was Kiri’s own. Pages from a notebook, folded into a tight packet about the size of a wallet.
“This is the rest of my diary,” she said. “I kept it on me, always, so he wouldn’t find it. It was hidden in the back pocket of my shorts when I walked out of the desert. Nobody’s ever read it but me—and now you.”
I stared at the pages. Words leapt out at me, sloppy and urgent—diary, phone, snit. I wanted to open it, and I was afraid of what I’d find inside. You have to know everything, she’d said. But now, with a corpse recovered from the desert, those words rang sinister.
“I can’t promise you anything,” I said after a moment. “About how I’ll react.”
She nodded as if she’d expected that. “It doesn’t go all the way to the end anyway. Tonight, when you’ve read that, I’ll tell you the rest.”
VIDEO POSTED TO CALLUM MASSEY’S CHANNEL ON JULY 25 AT 9:10 PM
Strips of neon pink glow over a desert horizon, mingling with tatters of cloud, all of it so bright that we can’t see much of anything else.
Kiri speaks off-camera: “Check out the sunset! How’s this for staying on-brand?”
Cut to a blurry, upside-down view of the landscape as Kiri walks with the phone. A campfire winks in one corner.
Cut to her face with firelight throwing every feature into relief. Her eyes are dark pits as she says, “I know I need to start hiking out, just like he told me to, even if there’s nothing to go back to. If I stay here, I’ll end up a pile of bones. Or like the German who lost his head.”
All of a sudden, she smiles—goofy, childish. “I’m so silly, right? Running around like a chicken with her head cut off. Poor Miranda. I didn’t want to forgive you for that, but I did, and then we went to those caves for my birthday, and the echoes flew all around us like owls, and I knew I loved you. Even if the world’s ended, I do want to walk out of here alive. I do.”
FROM KIRI DUNSMORE’S DIARY
JUNE 8, DC
Well! Apparently it’s not a good idea for me to write a diary on my phone. It could be hacked. Or maybe I’d get in a snit and suddenly decide to send the whole thing to Dad or Mom or a friend (ha, what friend?), and then our privacy would be compromised. People might know exactly where we’re going and what we’re doing.
His privacy would be compromised.
I can’t be trusted. I’m overdependent on my phone in general, like so many girls. Worse, I posted a selfie on the beach that was from an unflattering angle. I just don’t understand brand management. So this afternoon he took my phone away.
It’s not permanent. Of course. I’m learning how to use the phone only when it’s really necessary, how to post Intentionally, and when I’ve mastered that, he’ll give it back.
Fine. But I needed my phone at the party, and it wasn’t fair to leave me staring at the freaking wall.
I didn’t want to go anyway, but Cal said this might be his last chance to see his friends, ever, and he needed me to be there so they could be dazzled by my beauty. Always with the compliments. This time I didn’t smile back at him.
We drove to the huge house of some girl named Susanna who went to private school with C. Her house was perfect. So was she. I felt like a dirty troll that crawled down from Vermont.
They all sat on an outdoor terrace drinking microbrews and smoking special organic weed, both of which Callum and I couldn’t do because substances blunt your survival reflexes. They talked about people they knew from school. Another perfect girl ran up and grabbed C’s hand and whispered in his ear, and they disappeared together.
I sat there and watched the sunset, pretending I didn’t care, until finally a guy sat down with me. It was C’s best friend, West—I was finally meeting him.
West seemed cool at first. He has big brown eyes that you could vanish into, and when he asked me questions about my life, I got the sense he wanted to know the real me, not just me as “Cal’s girlfriend.”
Some of the questions were a little weird, though. He asked why I wasn’t eating the party food, and whether it’s tough on me how C likes to control every aspect of a shoot. He asked how I’m getting home after Lost Village National Monument. So apparently he knows about C’s plan to disappear, which I didn’t expect. I thought it was our secret.
When C came back, I worried he’d think we’d been flirting, but he didn’t seem bothered. On the way home, though, he said, “I’d be careful with West. When we were in high school, this creepy thing happened between him and this thirteen-year-old girl, my neighbor. He sweet-talked her because he wanted her to steal things for him. He would’ve gone to juvie if I hadn’t talked to the girl’s parents and saved his ass.”
I said I couldn’t believe he hadn’t warned me about West sooner, and why would he lie to protect someone like that? We kind of got into an argument. C kept saying that nothing really happened, and the girl just made a big deal out of it because she had mental issues, and anyway, she’s twenty years old now, so who cares?
Well, I care. As I listened, I started having this nagging feeling that C might not be telling the entire truth. I’ve seen him lie in his videos—he’s good at it. He says that lying online is different from lying to people you love, it’s “creative fictioning for engagement,” which apparently is fine.
Apparently.
Now he’s out running, and I’m in his old room in his parents’ house. I found this empty notebook and tore out a bunch of pages so I can keep writing without my phone. So there!
The more I think about what we did to C’s cabin, the more his whole plan feels wrong. I keep waiting for him to say it’s just a stunt to get more subscribers to his channel, or some kind of loyalty test for me.
If you love someone, you should be willing to drop everything for them—family, college, future. You should always believe they’re telling the truth.
I hope C’s just testing me. Maybe the phone thing is no different from when he asks if I want to stop at McD’s or Burger King and of course I say no, always no.
I still wish he hadn’t taken the phone away. I wish he’d trusted me and let me control it so I could show him how little I really need it when I have him. I feel like we’re climbing the same mountain and he’s always ahead of me, but I’ll reach his altitude eventually! I don’t want him to leave me behind.
The thing no one tells you about being in love is that sometimes it makes you the loneliest person in the world.
19
AUGUST 13, 2:35 PM
Want to lay bets on when they arrest her? I’m guessing today.
Nah. Takes at least 24 hrs for the ME’s report to come in.
I wasn’t even listening to Aliza’s monologue anymore, just reading the comments. A three-hour-old post already had nearly five hundred of them.
They won’t need the ME report if they found a kn1fe stuck in his chest.
