The Retreat, page 30
She tried to figure out where she was, but the woods had swallowed her whole. She was running in circles. Katie was directionally challenged on her best days. She could get lost in a parking garage, never mind a forest at night.
Everything looked wrapped in cellophane. The air was thick and wobbly with inky rivulets running through it that she could almost touch. Blood pounded in her ears. Her skin was ice, and yet she was coated in a layer of sweat, soaked in dread. Shadows moved all around her.
The air seemed to bulge, and Katie questioned if any of it were real. Would her eyes flicker open again and she’d be safe and snug around the fire? That the tea, after its initial gush of well-being, had just been replaced by a very, very bad trip? Did she trust her own cracked psyche anymore? How could she when she could murder someone in her sleep?
The angry blasts, those had to be real because Katie had felt the ground shudder. She scrambled between trees, trying to find her way toward the road. To get help. She had to get help.
She wished she had her phone. That she hadn’t chosen tonight, the tea ceremony, as the moment to give herself over to this place. If she had known what Carmen was doing, she would have talked her out of it.
Katie staggered down another rocky dip that suddenly turned steep, and then she skidded down it until she dropped on her ass into a shallow pool of moldy-smelling water. A mostly barren creek. The water was only a few inches deep.
Her insides started to heave, and when she stood up, she had to steady herself against a tree. Her peripheral vision flooded with streaky lines, and then she felt the tree pulsing, the deep ridges in the bark fluttering like fish gills beneath her palm.
She snatched her hand back and moved forward, careful not to slip on the mud-slick rocks that made up the creek bed.
Her head was churning.
Lily’s body, the excruciating details of it, played out as clear as a hologram. She was seeing dead Lily everywhere she looked.
It wouldn’t leave her alone, wouldn’t let her think. Lily’s blue-white face bloated and fissured with blood vessels was seared into her eyes.
But there was something else. She’d seen something. It was pulsing right there in the middle of her brain, but the tea was like a fog machine, obscuring whatever it was she wanted to know. She couldn’t get to it. Something so obvious. It fluttered around her mind like a moth.
“Katie? Katie?” A disembodied voice plunged through the dark. Ellie was calling her name.
“I’m here. Here! Where are you?” Katie whirled around. It was too dark to see her. Ellie called out again. Katie answered.
They did this a few more times, a game of Marco Polo in the dark woods, using sound to close the distance between them until finally, Ellie found her.
“Oh my God, Katie, thank God.” The voice was closer. “I’m up here.” Ellie flicked on the flashlight. It seared into Katie’s night-adjusted eyes. She staggered toward it.
“I heard gunshots,” Katie hissed up at her. The flashlight landed on Katie like a spotlight that she couldn’t see beyond.
“There you are. I see you,” Ellie said with a slight peekaboo lilt in her voice.
“Where are Ariel and Carmen? Are they okay?” The flashlight that Ellie was aiming directly at her eyes was still blinding her.
“I don’t know. Simon started shooting after he saw you run off, and we all just scattered. I don’t know where Carmen or Ariel are, and Simon’s still out there. We have to get back to the car. I have the fob. We just have to get to the car, then drive to a phone and call the police.”
Why does Ellie have the fob? Katie was sure she’d put it back in her suitcase along with her phone. There was something else in Ellie’s voice nudging at her. Not just its sharpness but also its volume. Katie was whispering because there was a drug dealer after them, but Ellie—there was a lack of urgency in her voice.
Katie couldn’t think straight.
“Are you hurt? I’ll come down and help you.”
“No, I’m fine. I’m coming.” But the flashlight started to wobble toward her anyway.
Behind her was the rocky ledge she would have to climb up, and in front of her was, well, Ellie, which inexplicably flooded Katie with a sudden wave of dread. She heard the splotchy noise of Ellie hitting the ankle-deep water. Her flashlight—or really Simon’s flashlight—zigzagged and landed on her again. How did she get his flashlight if he’d just started shooting? Her dazed head churned.
And then it connected.
What she’d seen on Lily’s body.
There was a chain necklace that had bunched up around her neck. If Lily had been wearing it earlier, it was long enough to have remained hidden under her clothes. But there it was, a tiny glass bauble gathered in the hollow of her neck.
A dandelion seed necklace. The ones Ellie made and called her make-a-wish jewelry. “You can hold it up and blow whenever you need to make a wish,” she’d said. Nate had smiled, and Katie had thought, Wow, this manic pixie dream girl is doing a real number on my brother.
But how?
“Come on, Katie, we have to go. Simon is a total psychopath.” Ellie spun the light around. “Come this way. The road is this way; I just heard a car.”
An alarm bell went off inside her. She was feeling lured. Drawn out.
With the light pointed away and with a shifting of clouds, the moonlight burst through and cascaded down. Katie saw that Ellie was coated in blood. “What happened to you?”
“What do you mean? I think I look good.” Ellie swung the flashlight under her chin, fully illuminating her face, and gave a gruesome grin. A front tooth was missing. Her face was a beaten, pulpy mess and yet her eyes were alert and gleaming, like she didn’t feel any of it. Ellie let out a witch’s cackle. “Maybe I don’t. Your brother is going to be so mad—he loves my face.”
She’s crazy. She’s fucking crazy.
I knew it.
Katie started backing up until she bumped against the hard crest behind her. Her hands searched for something, anything to use against Ellie. A rock, a branch.
Ellie turned back around and swept her flashlight over Katie cowering tightly against the ridge. Let out a growly, fed-up sigh. “You’re such a cunt bitch. You can’t make anything easy, can you?”
Katie was startled by Ellie’s harsh, accentless voice, even thinking for a moment that a third person had shown up.
Ellie made a fast, sweeping gesture like her arm had been released from a spring.
And then Katie noticed the large rock in Ellie’s hand. All she managed to do before the rock came smashing into her skull was ask, “But why?”
Katie’s vision turned bloodred, her ears flooded with whooshing air, but she could still hear Ellie’s voice as it bubbled like it was coming from underwater. “Why? Because you ruined my fucking life. You killed my sister.”
ELLIE
Her sister had been dying for as long as Ellie could remember. Her tiny, emaciated bird-bone body was always emitting an odor of doom. It was like her slow, slow death replaced any memories of when Violet was healthy. It was just the sounds of the piano, followed by a cutaway to chemotherapy treatments, then dialysis, the long, long wait for a new kidney, and the constant drone of Shelby Spade on her portable DVD player that she took from waiting room to treatment room to hospital bed.
Katie was writhing on the ground, sputtering in the filthy water. She was trying to say something, but it was all gurgles. Ellie set the flashlight down on the rock shelf so she could watch. She was enjoying the sight of Katie like this. “What was that? Huh? Can’t hear you. Did you finally shut up?”
“Lily was your sister?” Katie managed to finally spew out. Her gashed scalp was running blood, and her hair had gone from its toned-down auburn color right back to the hyper red that it had been when she’d played Shelby Spade.
“No. Lily’s name is really Rachel, and she was a junkie. She was playing a role. I hired her because I wanted you to feel what you should have felt all those years ago. Guilt. Guilt for killing my sister.”
Nate told her one late night that Katie had cut her own face. That she’d suffered a psychotic break, and they’d decided to let the police think it was AJ, Katie’s old manager. “Why? Just for stealing money? Don’t you think that’s a tad excessive?”
Nate’s face had darkened. “He got what he deserved.”
Certainly there was more to the story, but Ellie didn’t care. All she knew right then was how susceptible Katie would be to suggestion. So why not frame her for murder? She was almost angry with herself for not thinking of it sooner. It was so much better than just killing her, which would give Katie an easy way out. Better she felt punished. Tarred and feathered. Any remaining fame would forever be eclipsed by “her” crime.
Never once did Ellie buy Katie’s poor me, I’m getting recognized by strangers act.
Ellie immediately started looking for a victim. Someone who would go along with anything for a little bit of money—who’d be willing to even play dead.
An addict who knew her way around a needle would be best, because Ellie would need a fair amount of blood.
A homeless shelter was an obvious place to start, so Ellie volunteered using a different name. It was a badly run, smelly room in a church basement.
And that’s where she’d met Rachel, aka Lily. Ellie did plan on calling her Violet, but she couldn’t. Rachel was too grubby. And saying Violet’s name out loud did something to her. Her eyes would well, and her sister’s name would get stuck in her throat. So another flower it was. A proxy. And Katie would “kill” her all over again, but this time she would be punished for it.
Ellie had planned to send Lily away right after the tea ceremony and plant the knife. No one was going to find her because she technically didn’t exist.She was staying at the Sanctuary on a stolen credit card. The money Ellie had used to pay her was all taken from Nate’s restaurant and completely untraceable to Ellie’s own bank account. Ellie was going to give a statement to the police, vague enough to make her sound reluctant to accuse her sister-in-law-to-be but with the right amount of hinting and worry to lead them to Katie.
Lily would be long gone, jacked up on meth in some rest stop bathroom. Ellie hoped she’d overdose in the next few months so she wouldn’t have to worry about her.
It might be more difficult but people were still convicted without bodies all the time.
And it wasn’t like she was going to just kill someone for no reason. She wasn’t a psychopath. But then she realized Rachel probably had a police record. Her DNA could be obtained from the blood that Ellie had been storing up (she kept it hidden in one of Nate’s freezers at the restaurant, tucked behind the baby back ribs) and so unfortunately Lily was really going to have to die. Plus, when she thought more about it, it was just all-around better if there was a body. Rachel was a terrible person anyway. A meth addict who, at the tender age of twenty-four, already had two—maybe it was three—children in foster care. No one would really miss her—this was before Ellie knew about the sponsor.
The minute they’d pulled up to the retreat, Ellie knew Lily was as high as a kite by the way she aimed that shaky-handed heart at them.
Friday was cringeworthy. Her panting and fawning over Katie was too over the top, too manic. She was going to scare Katie back to the city. Ellie was not going to be foiled again.
On Friday night, after Katie had fled the partnered breathing exercise, Ellie had whispered to Lily to meet her at the dock, later that night.
“You need to tone it down; you’re coming on too strong. If you keep that up, she’ll leave.”
“I thought that’s what you wanted. That it would help with her intervention.” This was the story Ellie had told Lily—that she was going to play a small role in some elaborate intervention to help Katie stop drinking. But give an addict some money and the addict wants more. “Look, I gotta run back to the city, like, quick. I can be back in a couple of hours.” Lily was jittering on her feet. She had already snorted or shot through whatever she’d brought with her and wanted to go back to the city for more. Ellie registered that Lily was wearing her bulging backpack. She must have already called her sponsor to courier her back to the city. The girl was so fucking desperate for another hit of meth.
“No. We had an agreement, Rachel, you need to stay until Sunday.” Ellie wasn’t going to get reckless now. She had planned to kill Lily on Sunday night, while everyone was under the influence of the hallucinogen. If something went wrong, well, there would be no credible witnesses. Who would believe that someone who’d just spent a night communing with dead relatives or turning into a dragon saw something that implicated Ellie?
Even Ellie would have been deemed unreliable, so if she fucked up her story at any point or it didn’t match up exactly to other statements, she would still be in the clear.
It was supposed to happen after the ceremony ended, when everyone was still hazy and bleary-eyed after traveling into their mired psyches. Ellie had promised Lily that she would pay her the rest of her money on Sunday, after the tea.
She would go to her room, and while Lily was teetering toward sleep, her body weak and wrung out, Ellie would stab her. It was always going to be a knife from the kitchen. It had to be in order for it to be plausible that Katie went on some crazed killing frenzy while sleepwalking.
Katie didn’t remember killing her sister, so now she wouldn’t remember killing someone else, but this time she would rot away in jail for it. It would drive her mental, trying to unlock a memory that simply didn’t exist. Maybe then she would finally remember Violet and even appreciate the poignancy that Ellie chose Memorial Day weekend for her downfall.
“What’s the big deal? I can be back before morning. I’m not tired. Could I get the keys to that Escalade? I’m not tired,” she repeated, her buggy eyes getting buggier. “I can drive right through. Like there and back.”
“We had a deal, Lily. I need you to stay.”
“No one’ll know I’m gone. I just need the keys.” Lily took a step toward her. Her sweaty sheen of desperation was picked up by the rope light snaking the dock. When Ellie didn’t immediately hand the keys over, Lily snapped, “Fine, fuck you! If you don’t give me the keys, you can do your own intervention. I don’t care; I’m out.” Lily turned to leave.
“Okay, fine, wait here. I’ll go get the keys.” Ellie marched back to the house. Crept into the kitchen and pulled a knife from the butcher’s block.
She hemmed and hawed about going back upstairs for the latex gloves and hairnet she’d brought along, but she didn’t want to risk waking Katie up prematurely or Lily, in her erratic state, suddenly taking off. Plus the lake was right there, surely that’d get rid of most of Ellie’s DNA, and whatever was remaining could easily be written off as transfer DNA. Ellie had spent a lot of time researching the beautiful ambiguity of transfer DNA.
When Ellie returned, Lily was waiting for her in the driveway, her hand out. Ellie made like she was handing her the keys but instead plunged the knife into her stomach, then pulled it out. Aimed the knife to stab her again, but Lily had just stood there blinking. She was too high to feel pain, and rather than crumple to the ground as Ellie had expected, she’d clamped her own hand over Ellie’s and twisted it around so the knife nicked Ellie’s hip.
For a second, Ellie thought she was going to be killed. Lily, all skin and bone and jacked on meth, was stronger than she looked. Ellie managed to elbow her in the nose and regain control of the knife. Lily had pivoted, bent slightly at the hips, and Ellie thrust the knife into her back, once, twice, and was about to stab her a third time when she took off toward the woods.
Fuck. Lily wasn’t dead.
Not yet.
Ellie started to go after her when the screen door creaked open, and she heard the shuffle of someone out on the porch. She crouched down behind the Escalade. It was Anthony, standing there in shorts and a T-shirt, stargazing for what seemed like hours but was probably twenty minutes. Enough to give Lily a good head start. After Anthony went back inside, Ellie scoured the woods, but it was too dark and she didn’t have a flashlight. She was tired too. Stabbing someone was physically taxing. It was something you just didn’t think about.
By the time she got back to the Sanctuary, the sky was lightening.
Ellie decided that if Lily hadn’t returned to the Sanctuary for help, she had to be bleeding out in the woods. There was no way someone could sustain that many stab wounds, in the woods, in the middle of nowhere. There was too much blood. And bravo to herself—she was right about that! Oh, poor Lily—she could picture her running around the woods, not realizing it would have been better to stop moving and let her wounds clot up because her meth-infused heart was spewing out all her blood.
Someone would find Lily’s body in the morning. They had to. And so Ellie adapted once again. Moved her plan up to Friday night. At least she wouldn’t have to spend the next two days with Katie and her dim-witted friends and all their screechy laughing.
So she’d stood over Katie, still asleep. Gently squeezed a small amount of Lily’s blood out of the plasma bag she bought online into her own hand and pressed a bloody handprint to Katie’s face. She then pinched the valve, made a flicking motion, and spritzed more blood down her tank top. Then she tucked the gory-looking knife right next to her. Drained the rest of the blood into the sink, cut up the plasma bag into tiny pieces and flushed it.
In the morning, she would have pushed Katie to go to the police right away, but she couldn’t. Not until she knew for sure that Lily was dead, because if she weren’t, she’d reveal everything. If, miraculously, Lily hadn’t bled out and really was huddled up in the woods someplace only half-dead, well, Ellie had to finish the job and pull that necklace off her with her Ellie-Rose brand logo, an oversight she wasn’t proud of. She’d given it to Lily when she was trying to befriend her. Every time you feel like using again, just take this out and make a wish for something better. Something like that. It was why she’d had to spend the last two damn days looking for a dead or dying meth-head.
