Only She Came Back, page 17
Was there a kn1fe missing from the campsite?
They need to be thorough for probable cause. Anyway, they’re watching her. It’s not like they’ll let her go anywhere.
I shouldn’t be reading strangers’ uninformed opinions when I had to finish the diary. Kiri had as good as told me I didn’t know the whole story yet, and whether she was guilty or innocent, her words were the only route to the truth.
But the Grand Nine was unexpectedly busy—by our standards, anyway. Every time I picked up Kiri’s secretively folded packet of papers, a new customer drifted in. Then Lore texted me some videos of Puffball going wild with a new toy, and then Maren came by to have a heart-to-heart about last night.
I told her again that she had nothing to apologize for, that I understood acting on impulse. But her cheeks flushed, and I realized with a sinking sensation that she hadn’t just been hooking up with Tierney, at least not in her mind. She liked him.
“I keep telling myself it’s just a rebound thing,” she said. “But maybe there’s something actually there, you know?”
My nod must not have been convincing, because Maren added, “Last night, I told him to stop being a jerk to you. I honestly think he’s still a little jealous because Reggie liked you so much.”
Jealous? Reggie had ditched me without a second thought. But Maren looked so earnest that I thanked her for trying.
After the fifth or sixth interruption, I finally gave up and started scrolling on my phone, because comment sections were easier to read in bite-size pieces than Kiri’s diary was. Then, of course, I couldn’t stop, mesmerized by the parade of accusations and speculations. And then it was time to sweep the theaters after the first show.
I was cleaning Theater Three when someone started yelling out in the lobby—a man’s voice with a raw edge. Though I couldn’t make out words, I could almost see the veins bulging in his neck.
Occasionally a customer makes trouble. Maren was selling tickets alone, so I dropped the broom and jogged back to her.
But it was only Tierney, looking like he’d been on a bender. His eyelids were red and crusted, and he leaned on the counter as if he didn’t trust himself to stay upright. Maren had her arm around him and was making soothing noises.
“What happened?” I asked, not especially wanting to know.
Tierney opened his mouth and emitted a grating laugh that made me wince and sounded like it hurt him, too. “Got carjacked last night. They knocked me out and took the Range Rover.”
“Shit,” said Owen, who’d also come running in response to the noise. Our eyes met, and I saw a rivulet of sweat trickling down his neck.
Maren bent over her phone. “I’ll call the police, and then we’re taking you to the ER. You might have a concussion.”
Owen helped Tierney into a chair. “Do you have a headache? Or feel nauseous?”
Tierney kept his burning, angry gaze on me. “This little bitch. It’s all her fault.”
“Of course it’s not!” Maren said.
“Well, it happened right here in the parking lot, like two minutes after you left me.” He gave her a meaningful glance that Owen probably caught. “I go to open the door of the Range Rover and bam!” He mimed a blow to the back of his own head. “That asshole amburshed—ambushed me! Next thing I know, I wake up in the woods zip-tied to a fucking tree.”
“Sam didn’t knock you out.” Maren looked as if she were wondering whether he might have a traumatic brain injury.
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then who? Was it one person, or multiple?” Owen asked.
“One. Real big dude, huge dude, but I didn’t see his face.” Tierney lurched to his feet, throwing off Owen’s restraining arms, and brandished his hands at me. “Check this out, Sammy. You satisfied?”
What was he talking about? I stepped closer—and flinched at the sight of angry red ligature marks on his wrists. “How’d you get away?”
“Sawed the ties with a rock. Took me all night.” His bloodshot blue eyes were murderous. “When I finally got out of those woods, I realized I was up in the sticks, halfway to the border. That creep has my phone, so I had to hitchhike back here.”
Owen patted Tierney’s back. “You’re lucky to be alive, man.”
“No shit.” Tierney glared at me. “I could be chained up in a basement right now. You don’t care, do you? Look at that stone face.”
Owen looped an arm around Tierney’s waist and guided him out of the booth. “We’re gonna take a drive, okay? Just a nice, peaceful drive to the hospital.”
“Can you describe the guy who did it?” Maren asked in a panicky voice. “I should probably tell them all the—”
Tierney broke free of Owen and came toward me in two staggering strides. Close up, I could see dried blood in his hair and a tremor at the corner of his mouth. “Who is he?” He spat out the words, fists forming at his sides. “Your dad? Your brother? Your boyfriend? You really want to see me hurt, don’t you? Just because of Reggie?”
The floor pitched gently, and my mouth went dry. “I don’t understand.”
Tierney’s gaze stayed on mine, glassy with fury. “‘You leave the little redhead alone from now on.’” He made a sound like the beginning of a laugh or a sob. “That’s what he said to me—the only thing he said before he left me out there in the dark. And then—”
He hurled something at me—a crumpled piece of paper like a spitball. “That was pinned to my fucking jacket. You must know what it means.”
Owen got a long arm around Tierney and steered him toward the door, whispering calming things in his ear. I stood where I was, frozen, until they were outside.
Then I picked up the crumpled paper and unfolded it.
The spiky handwriting was sickeningly familiar.
TELL SAM TO DO EVERYTHING HER OLD FRIEND ASKS HER TO. ONLY WAY SHE’LL EVER KNOW THE TRUTH.
FROM KIRI DUNSMORE’S DIARY
JUNE 15
So busy all the time now. So tired. I guess I thought a road trip would be this leisurely thing, but it’s the opposite. We shoot every day, and then one of us edits while the other drives, and before we know it, it’s sunset and we have to find our campground for the night.
I guess this is what West meant when he kept asking me whether I can “keep up with” Cal. He must have been tired all the time, too. But he doesn’t understand C the way I do. C is still a little boy inside, a boy whose parents spoiled him but didn’t truly love him—which is why he needs everything just right, for everyone’s praise. That’s why he doesn’t trust anyone to love him as much as they should, and that’s why I show him over and over again that I can and I do love him, every day.
Sooner or later, he’ll believe me.
JUNE 19
We have a new game. We aren’t allowed to say more than a couple sentences to other people—servers, tourists, gas station attendants. We have to pretend that civilization has already collapsed and we’re focused on our own survival and nothing else. Any of them could decide to kill us for our supplies.
Sometimes when he’s not looking, I break the rules. Avoiding other people makes me jumpy.
JUNE 23
There is a gaping, gnawing pit in my stomach. It comes and goes; some days are fine. Not today. I’m in the best shape of my life, I look good on camera, and when I stand in the magic light (always magic light! Hurry, don’t miss the magic light!), he tells me, “You’re legendary.” But the pit does not go away. Or maybe there’s a gerbil in there, gnawing on my intestines. I’m getting enough daily calories and nutrients. We have a spreadsheet of our nutritional needs. I should be fine.
JUNE 25
Feel SO much better today! Like I ditched my shy, mousy childhood self when I flushed the sugar and carbs out of my body. I’m not scared anymore to gun it on these long, flat highways. I can control the van. I’m weightless and flying!
JUNE 26
We look at our phones together at 9:00 PM sharp, after we’ve built the fire. That’s the rule. The rest of the time, they stay together in the glove compartment, on the honor system. But today we got separated at a rest stop, and I glanced around the side of the building and saw him standing back there tapping on his phone, totally breaking the rules.
So maybe he has his weak moments, too, that he hides because he wants to set a good example for me. I wish he’d be more honest, but knowing he’s not perfect doesn’t make me love him less. Just the opposite! I wish he felt safe being his flawed, human self with me.
JUNE 28
I’m getting exponentially better on camera! (I was such a disaster at first.) I smile at all the invisible viewers out there and say we’re having the adventure of a lifetime. C says there are lots of comments about how pretty I am, but he won’t show me because some of them, predictably, are from gross guys. He doesn’t want me to feel unsafe.
JUNE 29
My favorite part of each day is cuddling by the fire. It makes everything worth it.
I feel like I’ve aged ten years since graduation. Being out here, driving across blistering hot Texas with the man you love, you get to know all sides of him. We might as well be an old married couple.
I haven’t brought up the phone incident, but it makes me smile inside. Sometimes I wonder, though: If I can love his weaknesses, why can’t he love mine?
JULY 2
Almost passed out today. I had to do a one-minute narration on camera in front of this place called the Sands Diner (classic roadside Americana, he said), and I kept messing it up. I repeated the script, I swear, thirty times, and he wouldn’t let me wear a hat, so the sun shone in my eyes, and suddenly my stomach went all swimmy and my knees buckled and I had to sit down.
I wanted to go again after he gave me some water and a PowerBar, but he said he’d just use the best take. Ugh. I wanted to get it right.
JULY 5
We talked to so many strangers yesterday, breaking the rules; if this were a real postapocalyptic scenario, we’d be dead. The pit was gaping inside me, and there was a Waffle House. Let’s not get into it.
Talked to Mom last night, and she said I look great in the vids—“So mature!” Did she survive the apocalypse, then? I hope so. We’ll be in Lost Village tomorrow, and Vermont is a million miles away. I can’t wait to stay put for a bit—travel is exhausting!
JULY 6
Tomorrow we’ll leave the van to hike all the way to the campsite, toting our gear in two trips. It’s stinking hot, but I don’t care because this is the strangest, most stunning place I’ve ever been! It’s like the surface of Mars, everything red and grainy as if it’s been decaying for millennia. You can see paths worn in the rock by the Pueblo peoples who lived here in the 1300s. The cliffs are full of little round caves where they made drawings. Lost Village really was a village once—or even a bustling city!—but now it’s empty, just sand and rocks and wind and junipers and the enormous, burning sky.
I’m so glad now that I didn’t listen to West when he showed up at the rest stop yesterday. He can say what he wants. But would he really come all the way from his summer job in Flagstaff just because he’s worried about me? No. He hates (or likes?) C too much, and he wants to come between us.
Everything he said could have been a lie.
West isn’t strong enough to survive the collapse. He doesn’t understand literally anything.
20
AUGUST 13, 3:39 PM
The comments went on and on:
This thing is open and shut. Can’t believe anyone ever thought the girl who was covered in his BLOOD is innocent.
I hope they put that b1tch away forever.
She’ll plead emotional abuse and get a suspended sentence.
Callum deserves justice.
Callum was an abuser and she was a fame whore. They deserved each other.
I raised my head to glance around the deserted lobby. From Theater Three came the muffled boom of a supervillain’s superweapon trying to destroy the world. My heart vibrated with it, and my head buzzed with something more than exhaustion.
All this time I’d been telling myself West didn’t seem like the violent type, even if he had been out there in the campsite. Now he’d carjacked Tierney and damn near killed him, and he’d done it to send me a message. Tell Sam to do everything her old friend asks her to.
He had to mean Kiri. But West had already arranged the meeting himself—tomorrow at noon, “where the echoes fly like owls”—and I couldn’t see why he needed me at all. What he’d done to Tierney sickened me, and I hoped Kiri would feel the same way.
Where the echoes fly like owls—what did that even mean? A place in the park? There was something naggingly familiar about it.
I grabbed my phone and searched Kiri’s first electronic diary, but nothing about echoes or owls came up. So I found the videos that she’d posted from the desert and watched them again in order.
When I reached the end of the one she’d posted at sunset on July 25, my heart leapt into my throat. She was speaking the very words:
“We went to those caves for my birthday, and the echoes flew all around us like owls.”
Something squeezed tight in my chest. I know where it is.
A man came up to buy a ticket for the 4:30 Czech movie, and I had to smile and sell it to him. It hurt to act normal. Outside, the sun muscled its way through the clouds and poured down on the plate glass.
When he was gone, I retraced my thought process. Where had Callum and Kiri gone on her birthday? His parents’ cottage and some caves, both in Quebec.
Canada. Across the border. That was where West wanted to meet her—in another country, out of the FBI’s jurisdiction.
I propped my elbows on the counter and wrapped my arms around myself, chills washing over my shoulders and down my spine.
Whatever exactly they’d done in the desert, West wanted to escape with Kiri, and he hoped she wanted the same. Maybe he’d stolen the Range Rover so he could cross the border in a car that wasn’t linked to him. But if so, why hadn’t he just picked Kiri up and taken her along? Too tricky to arrange? Too dangerous?
Must be. And that was why he needed me—why they needed me.
Kiri had no intention of being arrested. That was why she’d been so weird and giddy last night. Even before she heard the news about the body, her plan was set. And I was a piece of that plan—a plan that, if I went along with it, would make me a criminal myself.
Dread swept over me in waves. There was never going to be a podcast. There never could have been one. The closer I got to the case, the less I could see the whole story. And if I did emerge knowing everything, I would be too compromised ever to tell it.
Tears blurred my vision, and I closed my eyes and put my head down on the counter. Behind my eyelids, I saw Kiri splashing, laughing, skipping through the midnight park as if she were invincible. Had any of that been real, or was it all part of her strategy to draw me so close to her that I couldn’t tear myself away?
“Sam. Hey, Sam!”
A voice cut through my roiling thoughts, painfully familiar. It couldn’t be her, not after all this time. Not now.
But then I opened my eyes, and there she was.
“Sam! You sleeping on the job now?”
Reggie. Her mouth was a little too glossy, her smile a little too wide.
FROM KIRI DUNSMORE’S DIARY
JULY 9
I keep meaning to write, but we’re always together now and I’m just so tired. The gaping pit isn’t the problem—I think the desert burned all my hunger out of me.
Which is lucky, because from now until August 1, when we leave here, we live off our supplies and the desert. No restocking. I don’t feel optimistic about surviving on prickly pears, so we just have to make the dehydrated mush and grains and jerky last.
I wish C wouldn’t leave me alone by the fire like this. I don’t trust it to keep cougars away. He heard there’s a spring over by the bikers’ campsite, so he went there to get water.
The bikers creep me out. There’s this girl with them—maybe my age—wearing scruffy cutoffs, and when we met, she stared at me with the deadest eyes I’ve ever seen. Maybe she was born after the apocalypse and has never known a world where you don’t need to survive.
C says I need to drop all my oppressive value judgments if I’m going with him to Canada.
Which I am! I don’t know when I decided, but when I think about going home, my stomach clenches up. Even if I went back and Burlington were somehow still there, I would be waiting for the disaster that brings it all down. I feel so much safer out here where I don’t have to wait. I live in the after-times now; I can’t go back to the before.
The red dirt has turned my whole body a faint bronze color, and I could swear there’s sand under my skin.
I know the world hasn’t ended, of course. Lol. I’m not losing my mind. But to know that C was somewhere in the wilderness without me and I could never see him again, never ever, except maybe on his channel like I was just another fan—I wouldn’t survive that.
He says he’d never find a replacement for me, but I know he would. People are drawn to C.
The girl with the bikers, for instance: Her eyes didn’t look dead when they focused on him. They looked hungry. Just thinking about that, I feel the pit open inside me again.
Come back, C. When I finish writing, I’ll close my eyes and count—to 100, maybe 200, just to be sure. When I open my eyes, you’ll be back.
And I won’t think about what happened to the treasure-hunting German that German’s Gulch is named after. Some people say this place is cursed, but C says it’s the crucible where we’re being reborn.
I’ll count to 300. I won’t think about headless treasure hunters. When I’m done, C will be back.
21
AUGUST 13, 4:46 PM
Well,” I said, “look what the cat dragged in.”
Reggie’s hair was its natural black with a swoosh of cherry red now. She wore a midlength, conservative skirt with her halter, and the nose ring was gone. Her wiry body hadn’t changed, and neither had her bright, restless gaze—eyes like silver pinballs, always moving.
