Only She Came Back, page 5
Bad word to use. “We had a whole plan,” I babbled on, unable to look at Kiri. “After I graduated, we were going to drive out to California and get jobs in San Francisco. I’d write news-feed and listicle stuff, maybe even be a reporter, and she’d audition for acting gigs and sell veggies at the farmers’ market. We’d get an apartment in one of those Victorians in Haight-Ashbury.”
Saying it out loud, I realized how absurd the plan had been. I’d need a BA to write for any decent website. And those cute Victorians in the Haight had been bought up by Google employees long ago.
It wasn’t even a real plan, just idle talk between us as we printed out tickets and scooped popcorn into bags. But the idle talk bloomed into a golden cloud that bled into my regular life and made it bearable. Sitting in trig, I saw the Golden Gate wink in the corner of my eye. I saw the highways we’d travel out West, the candy-colored California sunsets—just us, together in a whole new world.
“That would be so awesome.” Kiri’s voice jarred me back to reality, but she didn’t sound embarrassed by my ridiculous fantasy. She sounded wistful.
“Yeah, well.” I yanked the water bottle open. Tried to seem older and wiser. “Reggie decided I wasn’t cool enough for her, and she moved back to Massachusetts last spring.”
“Not cool enough?” Kiri looked really surprised. “How?”
Uptight was the main word that Reggie had used on that January night. She’d also mentioned something about my being a “scared little girl.” I rolled my eyes, trying hard to telegraph that I couldn’t care less. “Whatever. She was kind of a bitch.”
Kiri’s eyes opened very wide. “But you and she were… together?”
“I guess.” It hurt to talk about this, and I wanted to turn the pain back on her. “At our age, isn’t that all just about hormones?”
“You really think that?”
She sounded wounded, all right, and I was sorry I’d said it. “I don’t know. All I know is, I’m over it.” Yeah, right.
Kiri tucked her feet under her and propped her elbow on the back of the sectional, face half buried in her palm. “How, though? When someone comes along and turns you into a better person, the best version of you, and you make all these plans for your future together… how can it just be over?”
Plans. With Callum. I kept my mouth shut and my expression open.
“We were going to have a cabin and live off the land,” Kiri said. “Just the two of us, maybe on Vancouver Island with those towering firs everywhere. Every morning I’d get up and smell salt, and the colors would be brighter there than anywhere else.”
It sounded lonely, but I imagined it through her eyes—all fluid light and saturated colors, transformed by love. “That’s beautiful. Couldn’t it still happen?”
Kiri dropped her gaze. “I don’t know.”
We were in dangerous territory, but I needed to know what she’d meant this afternoon. “With his skills, couldn’t he be lost out there but…”
“Surviving?” Her bottom lip curved.
“I mean, it’s a huge place, right? It takes a while to search?” The parts we weren’t saying were sucking the oxygen out of the room. Callum hadn’t just wandered off. The sweatshirt, the blood.
And then Kiri burst through the barrier. “When I came back to the campsite and found the… his sweatshirt… well, you might laugh if I told you the first thing I thought. There are catamounts in that park. Cougars.”
“Yikes.” Here in Vermont, no one’s seen a catamount in fifty years or so.
“I was scared to walk too far alone, so Callum drilled me on what to do if a cougar showed up. Like, open your coat to make yourself bigger—but it was too hot for a coat!” She sounded frustrated, as if she were talking to Callum, not me. “Whatever you do, don’t run.”
“Did you see many cougars?”
“Only one, far away. When I found that sweatshirt, though”—she shuddered visibly, the tremor gripping her whole body—“that was my first thought. A cougar. But there were no rips, no… teeth marks. And then I thought maybe he planted it there to freak me out. Which made no sense.” A feeble giggle. “I mean, the blood. It was getting all over me. But I wasn’t thinking straight, and he’d left his phone in the tent, so I thought he had to be pranking me and he had to come back, so I waited for him. Till night came.”
I pictured her out there alone as the sun fell, their tent a white dot in the golden vastness. You could find snaps of the campsite everywhere, drone shots taken by people who’d defied the police tape. Nestled at the foot of a high ridge pocked with caves, screened by juniper bushes, it would be pure desolation after dark.
Then I realized something. “His phone was there? I thought…”
I broke off, not wanting to let her know I’d seen the convenience-store video in which she’d said Callum wasn’t answering his phone. If Callum had left his phone at the campsite, that made no sense. And wouldn’t the media have mentioned it?
Kiri didn’t seem bothered. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m getting to that part. I didn’t tell the investigators because I didn’t think they’d believe me.”
My breath caught.
She kept talking, staring straight ahead. “I thought of so many scenarios. Like, what if a cougar came to the campsite, and Callum tried to chase it away from our food and it wounded him, and he left the bloody sweatshirt and went to find me? And the cougar found him first?”
She’d seen human footprints around the campsite, not paw prints. But I couldn’t admit I knew that, either—the details would reveal that I’d spent hours obsessing over the case. “That seems pretty unlikely. I mean, how often do cougars attack people? And Callum knew how to handle them, right?”
“I know. I know.” Kiri covered her face with her hands. Another shudder rocked her shoulders. “But I was scared, and I had no way to reach him, so I slept inside a cave, the highest one I could reach. It wasn’t till sunrise the next morning that I saw footprints all over the campsite—ones that weren’t there the night before. We never had guests.”
“Oh my God,” I said.
“Right?” She spoke faster now, as if the words had been tamped down inside her and she needed to release them. “I started noticing other things that were off about the campsite, then, like a hammer that should have been on a milk crate and was on the ground instead. Nothing that would make you say a struggle happened, just things a little askew.”
As she paused for breath, I realized how still I was sitting—my shoulders rigid, my breathing shallow. As if there were nothing left of me but eyes and ears to take her in.
Tell me everything. Show me who you really are.
I made myself uncross my legs and stretch. A motorcycle revved in the distance, a sound from another world.
Kiri had drawn her knees up to her chin. “I just kept waiting,” she said softly. “For him to come back. The next night, the moon was full, and I thought my phone would ring and it would be him! Like, maybe he’d just gone to see the bikers who had a campsite a couple miles from ours. I knew I should go there and check, but those guys scared me. One of them had, I swear, a white power tattoo.”
I made a mental note: The news reports hadn’t mentioned any bikers.
“I tried to make a couple calls, but they kept dropping, and my battery was low, and I wasn’t sure how to use his solar power bank. He always handled that; he rationed the power we used. And then I cried because I didn’t know what to do without him. I was so hopeless. I went back up the cliff to the cave.”
That’s when she made the first video. The one where she said she was the last person in the world.
“You really couldn’t make a call go through?” I blurted out. And yet you posted a video? She couldn’t have been as helpless as she seemed to want me to think.
“I should’ve tried harder.” Her voice was shrinking. “But I didn’t want to talk to anybody, especially my parents. They started calling, I’m not sure when, and instead of picking up, I posted more videos. It felt like the only thing to do.”
“Why?” Surely she knew the videos had upset her parents.
“I still thought Cal would come back, and he didn’t want either of us to make calls from the desert. We were survivors of an apocalypse. We could only rely on each other.”
“You were… what?” She’d spoken as if it were the literal truth.
Kiri’s head gave a little jerk. “That’s what he told me. That’s what we told ourselves.”
“If it was supposed to be postapocalypse,” I said, “then why was he posting the whole time on YouTube and everywhere else? Who was gonna watch?”
She smiled—a tiny smile. “I asked him that a few times.”
“Who did you think was watching the videos you posted?”
I braced for her to ask if I’d watched them myself. But she just gazed past me, as if she were seeing the events unfold all over again.
“This is going to sound messed up, but I thought that if Cal was out there, he might see my videos and come back. I was trying to show him that nothing had changed, that I was still surviving the way he showed me how to. When I finally got up the courage to hike out, I wasn’t honestly sure if I’d find anybody alive.”
“But your parents’ calls…”
“I wasn’t thinking straight. Is it so hard to believe, though? That the end of the world seemed real to me?”
Sometimes, late at night under the covers with only my phone for company, I felt like the last person on earth, too. The people on my screen? They were illusions created to distract me while the world melted away.
But I had never fully believed it, and I could tell she had. Out there in the desert, she had lost track of the difference between reality and imagination. “No,” I said.
“I’ve seen a therapist a few times since I got back,” Kiri said after a moment. “She says a state of near-starvation can make you delusional. All I have to do is eat a balanced diet and practice my breathing exercises, and I’ll be fine. The real world will just… snap back around me.”
She motioned, her fingers snapping like a mouth, and I said, “But it hasn’t snapped back.”
“No. It hasn’t.”
Now I understood why her story had come rushing out of her. Her parents probably didn’t want her talking about the desert, but somewhere in her mind, she was still out there. She had never come home.
The realization made something crumble inside me. She was trapped in her own past, and I wanted to get her out of that spiral. But the only way out was through, wasn’t it? Whatever had happened, she’d have to face it. I could only try to help.
I forced myself to shift and stretch. To take a sip of water. To notice the framed Formula One racing posters on the walls, the bulbous porcelain base of the lamp, the distant wail of a siren.
Then I said, “This afternoon, you said there was another reason you think Callum’s dead. Besides the fact that if he weren’t, he would come back and help you.”
“I can barely see you.” Kiri rose from the couch, stretched—her calves were pure, sleek muscle—and walked across the room to switch on the recessed lights over the bar. I blinked at the sudden glare.
“Too much?” She switched off the lights and lit a second lamp. Then she sat down opposite me and huddled up again.
She said, “I checked Callum’s phone when I found it in the tent. The whole time we were out in the desert, he made only one call, to Simon Westlake. On the same day that he disappeared.”
“Simon Westlake?” None of my sources mentioned the name.
“Everybody called him West. He was Callum’s prep school friend; they climbed mountains in Peru together. I met him in DC at the beginning of our trip, and you wouldn’t forget this guy.” Her voice had gone hushed, as if someone might be listening. “He was huge—tall, muscly. He had these eyes—I can’t describe it! They stared through you. This deep, velvety voice. And a tattoo of a scorpion on his neck. He creeped me out, and Cal didn’t seem happy to see him, either. Especially when West popped up the second time.”
“The second time?”
“On the road trip. At the last rest stop before we got to Lost Village, Cal and I split up so I could wash my hair in the restroom. But before I could go in there, West appeared from nowhere and put his hand on my arm. Like an ambush! He made me go sit in the food court with him, and he said he was worried about me and I shouldn’t go into the park with Cal. He told me a bunch of things about Cal—bad things.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter.” Her pigtails swung with the force of her headshake. “They aren’t true. Callum told me something about West, too, months before we even met—that West got in trouble once, when they were in school, for being creepy with a much younger girl. So I knew not to trust him. Anyway, Cal came and found us. It turned out West was driving to Arizona to work at a summer camp, and the two of them had arranged to meet up on the road. So from Cal’s perspective, everything was normal. As we drove away, I told Cal what West had said to me—some of it. All he would say was ‘Poor old West. Gotta have some purpose in his life.’”
“But the phone call,” I said.
A hard nod. “Callum only called West the once. But in the weeks leading up to that, West called Callum three times. Texted him, too, just Hey, checking in and stuff like that. When I saw those texts, I remembered how Callum looked when I told him what West said to me at the rest stop. He tried to laugh it off, but inside he was shook. I could tell.”
“You think West has something to do with… Callum being gone?”
Maybe I sounded incredulous, because Kiri flinched. “I never saw him in the park. I don’t have any reason to think he was there.”
“But you told the investigators all this, right?”
Kiri lowered her gaze. Her eyes had such heavy lids, it was like drawing a curtain to shut me out. “No.”
“Why not?” I didn’t hide my shock. “I mean, don’t they need to know everything to have the best chance of finding Callum? If you suspect this guy, his friend—”
“I would tell them, right? Because that’s what an innocent person would do?”
“I didn’t say that.” I felt like she could see straight into my mind—the embarrassing memory of that whole week I’d spent wondering whether she’d killed Callum and, if so, why.
Kiri drank the last of her water and tossed the bottle to the floor. On the thick carpet, it barely made a sound. “Now you’re starting to understand why people don’t trust me,” she said softly. “Why people think I killed him.”
“I don’t think that.” I didn’t want her to have killed Callum. But I crossed my ring finger and pinkie under the edge of the blanket—a little-kid habit I never shook—because I couldn’t assume things were the way I wanted them to be. I had to keep my mind open. “I just don’t understand why you wouldn’t tell them everything you know about this sketchball West. He seems like a slam-dunk suspect.”
Kiri glanced at the stairs, then toward the slider. Her hand crept over the blankets and touched my arm, as if she needed me to steady herself.
“I didn’t tell them,” she said, “because I can’t prove that Cal called West on the day he disappeared. That first night without Cal, I left his phone in the campsite while I slept up in the cave, and when I woke up, it was just… gone.”
Her fingertips were cool and soft. I stopped breathing, waiting for her to look at me. Waiting for her to take her hand away.
“You think someone took his phone? That night? Someone like West?” The footprints could have been his.
“I don’t know. They’re probably tracking the phone, my lawyer says—the cell towers it pings off. So if West did take it somewhere, maybe it’ll lead them to him. Or… to whoever. But I can’t tell them about him, see? Or about how the phone disappeared. Because then it’s like I’m trying to throw suspicion on him and off myself.”
I was starting to see her logic. A lot depended on where the phone’s signal was and when, but she was right to fear that her story about an intruder in the campsite wasn’t the most convincing. No one had been able to prove yet that the footprints in her video had appeared overnight, as she claimed. “So you just want to let things play out? See what happens?”
Her fingers closed on my arm, squeezing a little. “Now you see.”
“So why are you telling me any of this?” The words just slipped out.
Her hand opened again. Slid off my arm and back into her lap. “I guess I trust you. Is that weird? I mean, we barely know each other. We’re barely friends.”
Don’t say it. Don’t think it. Don’t stop trusting me. “I shouldn’t be asking you questions,” I said in a rush. “You get enough of that from the cops. And what you want to tell them is your business.”
“I know. I guess… I just needed to tell someone.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “I know this won’t make sense to you, Sam, but I’m scared of him. West. I’m worried that whatever happened in the desert isn’t over yet.”
By the time I left Kiri’s house, it was nearly three. A wind had come up, clouds covering the stars, and the waves were whitecapped and whipping the shore. Clank, clank, clank went a boat’s mast, far out in the water, as I tore off the tarp, grabbed my bike, and wheeled it out of the garage and onto the street.
We’d agreed that I’d return tomorrow after work—through the park rather than via the street this time, in case any news vans decided to stick around into the evening. I didn’t love the thought of hiking through the park this late, but I wanted her to think I was tough, not a “scared little girl.”
My brain was humming so hard that I was barely aware of what I was doing. I pedaled back through the dark woods on autopilot, from one pool of streetlight to the next, and all I saw were Kiri’s dark eyes fixed on me, willing me to trust her. All I felt were her fingertips on my skin.
She could have been lying to me about the things she hadn’t told the police—West, the rest stop, the phone. But she had no reason to think I would tell anyone. She didn’t know about my failed podcast, how badly I wanted to know every bit of her story, all the parts that the internet didn’t know.
