Only She Came Back, page 24
“You look so scared now.” His tone was gently amused. “You consume too much of that true-crime bullshit, Samantha. I’m not a psychopath.”
And my name isn’t Samantha. “Real psychopaths are actually more likely to be the victims of crime than the perpetrators,” I said, reciting something Lore had told me.
“Ha, is that so?” He swung us left at a sign that said CHEMIN DE LA GROTTE DE LA CASCADE. “I’ll have to tell Kiri that. The way she acted after Natalie’s ‘accident’—well, it certainly makes me wonder about her mental health.”
“You pushed her,” I said. “You made her think she wasn’t good enough.” And then you filmed her in that moment and told her she was “amazing.” No wonder she was confused about what was real.
We were on a dirt road now, bumping up and down, so maybe he didn’t hear me. Anyway, he didn’t contradict me, only steered us into a grassy, vacant parking area surrounded by trees.
He pulled in the Range Rover and killed the ignition. “Twenty minutes to noon,” he said. “It’s about a mile to the caves. Lucky thing this place is too far out to be much of a tourist attraction on weekdays.”
Getting out, I heard the river, farther off than before. “If she’s coming, she must really love you,” I said meekly, hoping it wasn’t true, as I followed him to the head of a wide trail. The haze had cleared, and it was hot but not humid, the sun making shimmering green curtains of the trees.
Callum gave me that friendly smile of his. “She knows she belongs with me. She doesn’t like to be alone. But believe me, I don’t underestimate her anymore.”
He lifted his arm so I could get a good look at the bandage, a bulky mass of gauze stretching up from his elbow. Kiri had given him more than a little gash with her knife.
“That’s a nice bandage—where did you get it? I’m guessing you didn’t visit the ER before you disappeared.”
“You card, Sam! You’re just dying to hear the whole story from my perspective, aren’t you? So you can add it to your big scoop?”
I grimaced at him. After another few strides, he said more seriously, “Kiri was out of her mind after what happened to Nat—and after she saw I’d been filming everything. If I hadn’t run off and hidden, I honestly think she might have killed me for real. I tried to get the knife away from her, but she clawed me like a wildcat. And I was bleeding pretty bad, so I got away and made my shirt into a tourniquet and kind of collapsed in a crevice. Spent the night there.”
He sounded awkward for the first time since we’d met, as if he didn’t like admitting he hadn’t been in control of the situation.
“But not the whole night,” I said. “You came back to the campsite, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, just before dawn.” Callum flicked a mosquito off his neck. “I wanted my phone, and I lucked out—she hadn’t brought it into the cave with her. It was sitting right there on a stone by the firepit.”
That must have been when he left boot prints. “Most people would have, I don’t know, called nine-one-one. But you didn’t, because you already wanted to disappear.”
“Kiri told you about that?” He frowned, probably wondering if I knew about Arianna.
“West told me.”
“West.” He spoke the name as if West were a sweet but incorrigible child. “I thought about going back to our van and just driving it to Canada. But it was a long hike, and I’d lost some blood. So I scurried back to my hidey-hole, and I called West and told him what had happened and asked him to be my white knight and rescue me.”
“And he did?”
Ahead of us, the river’s burble swelled to a roar. I caught glimpses of what looked like a tall cliff rising through the trees.
Raising his voice to be heard over the torrent, Callum said, “He didn’t want to. He said this was the last thing he’d ever do for me. But he agreed to drive me to a place we know up north, where a person could hide out for a while.”
The doomsday cabin.
“But you never got to that place!” I yelled to be heard over what had to be a major waterfall; it grew louder with each step. The cliff loomed high above us, with dark slits like windows marring the rock face at intervals too regular to be natural. It made me think of the round cave in New Mexico, hollowed out by human beings, where Kiri had taken refuge.
“Nah. I made West take a detour!” The closer we got to the cliff, the faster Callum moved. To my surprise, I managed to keep up with him—all those bike trips to and from Kiri’s house must have done me some good.
He grabbed a slender maple trunk and swung himself to face me. “Once I had my phone back, I checked out the stuff Kiri was posting on my feed. I nearly freaked when I saw new posts. I thought she might trash me to my subscribers, or just embarrass herself by confessing everything.”
If he planned to vanish, why would he care what his subscribers thought? But I could guess the answer: Callum Massey would never stop seeing himself as the star of his own drama.
“But I was wrong! She wasn’t trashing me. And she was going viral—pulling better numbers than I have in seven whole years!” Admiration shone on his face—this was what he valued most. “When she acted normal, a lot of viewers didn’t like her. They thought she was a stuck-up princess. But when she started being weird, she was—”
His last word was lost in the roar. “What?” I shouted.
“Incandescent! She glowed.”
“She was starving—that’s why she acted weird. She was in pain. Out of her mind.” But he wasn’t wrong. I’d been fascinated with Kiri, hadn’t I? Drawn in like a moth to the flame.
Callum stepped closer to me, his face turning serious. “You wouldn’t know about this, Sam, but there’s a certain kind of girl who’s eager to punish herself, to put herself through hell because she thinks it’ll make her a better person. Or maybe she thinks she deserves it—I don’t know! But when a girl like that reaches her breaking point, it’s kind of beautiful.”
I remembered all the time I’d spent hating myself for not being cool enough for Reggie. “Kiri thought she loved you,” I said.
And I’d thought I loved her. Maybe, despite everything, I still did. Not because she was “incandescent” or broken or iconic, but because she was the girl I knew from the diary—vulnerable, a little goofy, painfully sincere. She was that girl when we were in school, too, but I hadn’t bothered to get to know her then. I’d passed over her as if she weren’t there.
Callum had veered back toward the cliff and was practically there now, too far away to hear me. “C’mon!” he called. “Save your breath for the climb.”
He headed for a door-like opening at the base of the cliff, at least twice my height. The cliff itself was the size of a four- or five-story building. The chill of the interior radiated outward, and I shivered as it touched my skin.
Callum paused in the opening, spanning it with his long arms. The rough doorway was reinforced with masonry and plaster.
We walked through it into a roundish room about the size of Theater Six of the Grand Nine, and just as frigid with no aid from air-conditioning. The green light of the woods shone through window slits every ten feet. A concrete stairwell spiraled up on the left.
The white noise of the falls seemed to come from everywhere at once; it was hard to believe we weren’t underwater. Echoes bounced off the rough, natural walls, filling the space with a strange feedback that sounded like singing.
Callum liked other people to be overwhelmed. If I let the echoing caves awe me, I would give him control. So I told myself the sound was those distant explosions from Theater Three, shrunk smaller than firecrackers, and shut it out and followed him to the stairs.
Callum took them two or three at a time, not bothering to use the cast-iron railing. “Monks built this place in the nineteenth century,” he called down to me. “They had a shrine here, but now it belongs to the government.”
I trudged up the seemingly endless steps, my lungs starting to strain. What did Callum think was going to happen here? He’d admitted to me that Kiri had made him run for his life, yet he didn’t seem worried about facing her again.
Confidence was his strength, and maybe it would again be his undoing. She brought a gun.
The stairs ran halfway around the cylindrical shaft to the second floor. Here, just four “windows” let in the daylight. The openings reached almost to the ceiling, but they were narrow—slightly wider than my body, I found, stepping closer to one.
Cool spray hit my face. I held tight to the masonry edge and peered down to see the massive waterfall twenty feet below. The foaming torrent surged over dark rocks until it disappeared into a churning green pool. From there, the river hurtled on, around the curve of the hollowed-out cliff and back the way we’d come. Nothing could stop it.
“Careful!”
Fingers clamped my shoulders, pulling me backward. An electric shock went through me, and I struck out without thinking—a jab of the elbow to the place where his guts should be.
Before I could connect, Callum was already stepping away from me—laughing, his hands in the air. “Easy, Sam. I just don’t want to see you getting washed downstream.”
Adrenaline fizzed inside me with no outlet. Hitting him would have felt good, but now all I could do was follow him up the second flight of stairs, which began ninety degrees from the end of the first. “Why can’t we just wait for her at the bottom?”
“Don’t you want the best view?”
Once I got into the rhythm of climbing and breathing, it wasn’t so bad, and I managed to reach the third floor without being winded. The roar of the falls was a more distant echo now, static instead of something that itched under my skin.
Callum was waiting for me, his narrowed eyes gleaming in the daylight that filtered through the openings. “I’m trying to figure out what Kiri likes about you,” he said. “What you give her.”
So apparently my efforts to seem harmless and pathetic had been successful—cold comfort, since I wasn’t sure I’d even been pretending. I trudged past him across the chamber to the base of the third stairway. “A ride across the border, I guess.”
“No, it has to be more than that.” A couple of strides, and he was leading the way again, taking the stairs two at a time. “Why was she so eager for you to sneak over every night? I gave her structure and goals—and attention, of course. What did you give her?”
I couldn’t talk and climb; my whole body was suddenly awash in sweat, my mind blank. What had I ever given Kiri besides a connection to the outside world, an adrenaline rush when we jumped off the cliff, and then a way back to him?
What did I have to give anybody? Consumed by my Kiri obsession, I certainly hadn’t been treating Owen or Lore too well this past week. If I came back without the Legacy, I might find myself with no friends.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Callum raised a finger, gazing into midair. “Shh. You hear that?”
I strained my ears, and a new sound separated itself from the roar of the falls. From below us came a faint tapping like someone climbing stairs.
Callum was beside me instantly, latching onto my elbow before I saw him move. “Just one more flight,” he said, pulling.
“That could be anyone. It could be West.”
“West?” His eyes widened as if I’d said something absurd. “He’s probably on his way back to Arizona. When I booked, I left him a note to let him know he wouldn’t have to worry about me anymore.”
See ya. But West’s coded message had been a private heads-up for Kiri—Callum didn’t know about that. West hadn’t wanted her to fall under Callum’s spell, and maybe he wouldn’t abandon her so easily.
Callum was tugging me with him up the final flight of stairs. The last chamber was smaller than the others, with just three openings. “Here’s our view,” he said, hauling me toward the one in the center.
The opening was narrow enough that I didn’t fear falling by accident but wide enough to step through. Sunlight flooded it; we were well above the treetops now.
Below, a sea of green stretched to the purple mountains on the horizon, every leaf glinting in the sun. The waterfall sparkled from its chasm, which narrowed as the river twisted through the woods. The sky was cloudless, the sun directly overhead.
The backs of my thighs prickled at the height and hugeness of it, yet some childish part of me couldn’t believe anything bad would happen in such a beautiful place. Not here. Not now.
Callum spun me to face him. “Listen,” he hissed, leaning down so close that I finally saw the angry circles of fatigue around his eyes. “How would you like to shoot a video of Kiri and me, Sam? A goodbye video to the world that would make you viral beyond your wildest dreams?”
One part of me, the part that had ached to go viral with a podcast, said Yes, yes, yes. But the other part knew that Callum would never give up control of his camera to anyone. He just wanted to see how far he could push me.
I shook my head. “I’d probably end up in jail.”
“Then come with us! You can ride the wave, too.”
“The… wave?” He was still holding my shoulders. My whole body itched to shove him away, but with the opening behind me, I didn’t dare. Then I remembered what he’d said about Kiri going viral after he disappeared. “You mean, like, her trending? What good is that? You can’t keep posting and expect them not to catch you!”
“You could post for us. We’ll use a VPN.” His lip curled, and I knew he hadn’t figured out the details yet. “We’ll find a refuge and post from there, like Julian Assange.”
I opened my mouth to say that he wasn’t a political figure, that he wasn’t anybody, and shut it again. Of course he fantasized about being a famous fugitive, leading the national media on a chase all over the continent.
“What if Kiri doesn’t want to?” I asked. “What if she’s done with all that?”
He released me. “She’s not done.”
The footsteps rang louder, right below us. I willed them to be a random tourist, a monk’s ghost, literally anyone but Kiri. I willed her away from Callum forever.
But this choice wasn’t mine to make.
A dry whisper came from my throat: “I’ll come with you. But only if she wants me to.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said I’ll come with you.” The footsteps again—slow, tentative. I wasn’t sure what I was saying anymore, only that it might distract him. “I’ll shoot your goodbye video—but it won’t really be goodbye, will it? I could spend some time in your hideout and tape a podcast. It would connect you with your followers. You could both tell your sides, maybe throw a government conspiracy angle in there. It would be riveting.”
Callum frowned. “We’re better on video.”
“Then I’ll do that. Whatever you want.”
He chuckled. “I can’t tell if you’re in love with Kiri or just the thirstiest person I’ve ever met.”
The footsteps were climbing the last flight of stairs. I remembered how Kiri had run straight off the cliff, and I willed her not to embrace danger this time. Turn around. Turn and run.
Callum swung toward the stairs. In a flash, I saw the glitter of calculation vanish from his eyes, replaced by swelling tears. He was becoming the Cal that Kiri needed to see.
“Here’s our star,” he said.
28
AUGUST 14, APPROXIMATELY HIGH NOON
Kiri reached the top of the steps and stood statue still. Her gaze flicked from Callum to me and back. Her eyes widened. Her hoodie was gone and her hair loose on her shoulders, except where it caught in the straps of her black backpack.
“Sam?” she said in a small voice—then pressed her fingers to her mouth, as if she’d already said too much.
“We met at the cottage.” Callum draped his arm across my shoulders as if we were the best of friends. “She’s been catching me up on everything. I’m so glad you came, Kiri. I wasn’t sure you would.”
I didn’t try to pull away from him. I was focused on her.
Her eyes glistened. Her mouth twisted—into an ugly grimace. “Why is she here?” she asked, her gaze moving from me to Callum. “I left her at the cottage so we could be alone. We don’t need her anymore.”
We. The word stabbed the breath out of me. Her voice was colder than I’d ever heard it before. A flash of memory came to me: the two of us in the car this morning, so close to each other. Had she just been acting?
Something in that coldness must have spoken to Callum. He dropped me like a hot potato and sped to Kiri—then stopped short, an achingly tentative expression on his face, as if he longed to throw his arms around her but didn’t dare. If he was faking, he was doing it well. “I missed you,” he said.
Don’t fall for his bullshit!
She raised her eyes to him—they were red-rimmed but tearless. “I thought I killed you,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “You shouldn’t be alive.”
“I know.” Callum took another step, so careful. “But I’ve missed you so much.” His voice was broken, even as he approached her with the stealthy self-possession of a cat. “I fucked up so badly. It took a shock”—he touched the bandage on his arm—“to make me see it. But I was weak, Kiri. What happened with Nat and the food—that’s the proof that I’m weaker than you.”
He was targeting her need for praise. He knew her so well.
“You’re so full of shit!” I couldn’t stop the words from bursting out, flinging them at him because if I even looked at Kiri again, I might cry. “You don’t deserve her. You don’t even know her!”
Run now, Kiri, while I’m distracting him. Run.
Callum acted as if he hadn’t heard me. And Kiri didn’t run. She slid her backpack off her shoulders onto the stone floor.
“Let Sam go,” Kiri said in that cold voice, not looking at me. “She’s not part of this.”
Maybe Aliza Deene was right about her all along.
I tried to make her look at me. “You don’t have to go with him. What happened to Natalie was an accident!”
