Like it never was a thri.., p.1
Like It Never Was: A thriller, page 1
LIKE IT NEVER WAS
A THRILLER
FAITH GARDNER
Copyright © 2024 by Faith Gardner
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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For my mom—
who, sadly, vetoed my idea
of dedicating this book to Bigfoot.
CONTENTS
1. Then
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
4. Now
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
18. Then
19. Now
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
23. Then
24. Now
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
28. Then
29. Now
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
42. Then
43. Now
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
53. Then
54. Now
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
One more thing …
Read the first chapter of They Are the Hunters
A note from the author
Acknowledgments
Also by Faith Gardner
About the Author
ONE
THEN
It was mid-June, twilight, the sky a bruised blue above the oak-covered hills. Crickets chirped. Bats blew through the treetops with tiny screams. The highway connecting the beach to the mountains was sleepy enough that there were minute-long lulls between speeding cars.
A short straightaway unraveled into turn after turn as you started up the pass.
That’s where I, Jolene Vero, waited.
Crouched behind a felled tree covered in moss and vines.
In a gorilla suit.
It was a sauna in the heavy costume, one that reeked of other people’s sweat. Every so often, I pulled off the mask for a breath of fresh air. But not for too long. I needed to be ready when I heard it.
Elizabeth Smith’s car, a Karmann Ghia, was a classic with shiny tangerine paint, and just like her, something was off about it. At first glance: impressive, cute, vintage. Want. But it leaked oil everywhere it went, emitted foul black clouds of smoke when it started up, and could be heard from half a mile away. It was the energy vampire of cars.
As I sat there behind the log waiting for the sound of Elizabeth’s clunker, I had time to think about everything. About Elizabeth. About the misdemeanors that racked up in the past year. Her uptalky singsong voice cornering me into conversations. The random silent treatments for no reason at all. Her obsession with conspiracy theories. The clothes, the hair, the boy. And of course, the possible poisoning. Even her stupid car was something she knew I wanted and then stole for herself. And worst of all: the innocent denials she begged whenever I called her out on any of it.
The memories made me mean.
It was like a drug kicking in, my anger. I took it and I took it and I took it and then the last week of school, I heard her bragging that she saw a Sasquatch while driving home. Of course she didn’t see a Sasquatch while driving home. She was unbelievably full of shit. I heard everyone laughing at her and that, right there, was the moment I hatched this plan.
I’d never pulled a prank like this on anyone before, but once I spotted the gorilla costume in our theater building recently, it was just too tempting. Elizabeth wanted to tell a tall tale about Bigfoot? Well, I’d give her Bigfoot. I was going to scare the daylights out of her and it would be hilarious. We had just graduated. I was about to leave town and start a new life and this prank on my nemesis was some version of closure.
I thought I was a good person.
But like love, goodness is never really unconditional.
Push, push, push … at some point, somebody’s going to push back.
As the cricket symphony swelled, a new sound split through it—her engine chugging closer. The tone crept higher and higher as it neared. I fluttered with a thrill, envisioning the fear on her face. She would tell everyone she saw Bigfoot—literally! She’d swear! On her life! She’d post about it with too many exclamation points on social media. People would laugh at her stupidity and I would laugh the hardest.
When the sound of Elizabeth’s engine rose to a sputtering roar, I hit my cue. I popped out like a jump-scare from behind the felled tree and waved my gorilla arms at the tangerine car speeding toward me. The mask was humid from my giggling breath. Lumbering toward the shoulder of the road, I wanted to be sure she saw me.
And she did, all right.
Her lips opened wide into a silent scream. I could see the terror shining in her eyes and the way she mouthed Oh my God and then swerved her car in an unexpected left turn straight off the pass with a screech of burning rubber.
It happened in a blink—one moment she was barreling toward me, the next I was listening to the crunch of her car rolling down an embankment.
And then the person saying Oh my God was me.
The highway was deadly quiet after the sound of twisting metal and breaking glass faded. Time seemed to halt. My mind scrambled to make sense of what just occurred.
I didn’t think she’d swerve across the other lane and make a left turn off the hill. I … I didn’t know what to do now. Should I run across the highway after her? Scream for help and hope someone could hear me out in this wilderness? Wait for a car to flag down?
I froze, choked by shock.
I was in a gorilla suit. I wasn’t sure how to explain that to anyone who saw me. And the other side of the road was a steep embankment, there was no way to scale it in this outfit without possibly tumbling down it myself.
My stunt—my stupid, careless, idiotic, dangerous stunt—caused an accident.
My chest tightened and my feet were made of bricks.
Do something! I screamed silently to myself.
But my body didn’t move.
How could I help her? What could I even do? I was eighteen years old, not a paramedic. The sound of approaching cars released a new wave of adrenaline. Help! I’d get help. I turned and ran into the trees in my gorilla suit, terrified for Elizabeth’s fate and terrified someone would spot me and associate me with the accident.
It would be better for everyone if I left and called for help. There was nothing else I could do. I shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
TWO
By the time I got back to my car, which was parked up a crossroad about a five-minute sprint away, I was shaking so badly that I had to take the suit off and strip down to my camisole and short shorts in the car.
My phone was dead in my purse.
Of course it was. And service was spotty here anyway.
I hyperventilated.
Should I go try to rescue Elizabeth myself? How would I, even? What a coward I turned out to be when the literal rubber hit the literal road.
But then I spotted a woman walking her German Shepherd about thirty feet away. I got out of the car and waved her down.
“Hey!” I yelled, jogging toward her. “Oh thank God. Can you call 911? There was an accident on the pass just there at the end of the street. A car drove off the side. Please, my phone is dead!”
“You’re kidding me,” the woman said, covering her mouth. “Yes, of course. Right down at the end of this street, you mean?”
I nodded.
“I live about three houses up.” She gestured behind her. “Didn’t bring my phone with me, but I’ll go back. My goodness, that highway is so dang dangerous if you drive too fast.”
A little sob escaped me. “Thank you. Thank you for calling it in. It was an orange Karmann Ghia.”
“Gotcha.” The woman turned and sprinted, her dog chasing after her.
Shivering from shock under the shade of the oak trees, I debated whether I was supposed to follow the woman. But back in my car, there was the gorilla suit, the evidence that this was all my fault.
Fuck was too weak a word.
I put my hand over
My fault. Mine. I did that to a person.
The self-hatred was paralyzing.
But I pulled my hand away from my mouth and walked toward my car. Looked back over my shoulder, where the woman had disappeared.
Inhale, exhale.
The woman had it under control. She was calling someone. Help was coming. This could be fixed. The paramedics would be here soon. Elizabeth would be rescued by the people who knew what they were doing.
I got back to my car, climbed in, and turned on the ignition. I cast one more worried glance up in the direction the woman had run. The road was all shadows, the houses set far back from the roads and shrouded with trees. I made a U-turn and then a right onto the highway, the spot where Elizabeth’s car had just veered off fading in my rearview.
Eerily calm.
Looking nothing like the scene of a ghastly accident.
Trying to flush it all out of my head, I turned on the stereo and cranked up the 13th Floor Elevators, “You’re Gonna Miss Me.”
I shook like a human earthquake. Should I even drive in this condition? Steady, breath. Steady now.
Guilt hit me worse than the flu.
My mind fired off a paralyzing parade of possibilities: I might have just killed someone; I definitely hurt someone; her family would be devastated; my life was over.
I saw a melancholy funeral scene.
I saw the gray concrete interior of a prison cell glaring back at me.
I began to cry as I continued the drive up the hill. In my rearview, I thought I saw a plume of smoke rising above the tangled oaks—but told myself no, no, it was just a cloud.
Help was on the way.
At home, I shoved the gorilla suit in a plastic bag and stuffed it in the garbage bin. My high school theater wouldn’t be getting it back now. First thing, I started checking police and highway patrol sites for any update on the crash. Nothing yet. Please make Elizabeth okay. Please make it so she wasn’t hurt. I might have hated her a little, but I didn’t want to injure her, and I certainly didn’t want her dead. Oh man, I couldn’t even fathom that thought.
I had to call my dad.
THREE
Dad was—as usual—still at the office. He was a high-profile criminal defense attorney. He was also my favorite person in the world.
“Daddy,” I said shakily.
“What’s wrong?” His voice seemed to crawl closer, as if he could detect my horror.
I took a deep breath and chose my words carefully, the way he taught me. “Hypothetically speaking, if someone were to … say … cause a car accident and that car accident resulted in injury and/or—” I swallowed a lump the size of a boulder. “—death—but no one saw it happen—could that person go to prison?”
He was silent. I could hear the sound of movement, a door shutting. Finally, he murmured, “Bunny. You okay?”
Bunny has been his nickname for me since I was little, because of the way I wrinkle my nose when I smile.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Hypothetical question.”
He blew out a long breath. “How would this hypothetical person have caused a hypothetical accident?”
“By jump-scaring them from the shoulder and startling a driver so badly they veered off the road.”
In the silence, I could almost hear him biting his tongue to stop himself from an outburst to chastise me. Hypothetically, of course.
“A pedestrian did this.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Worst case? The pedestrian could be charged with manslaughter. They could certainly be sued to high heavens for negligence.”
“I thought pedestrians always had the right of way.”
“Don’t believe everything you Google, kid.”
The blood seemed to drain from my body and I got dizzy, imagining Elizabeth dead. The weight of the guilt hit me like a rockslide. Her poor family, sobbing at their loss. Elizabeth robbed of a future, of her life. And then my future—my boundless future, sparkling with college and friends I hadn’t met yet and starring roles in plays—all disappearing with a miserable poof.
“Did the driver see this pedestrian?” he asked.
I swallowed and worked hard to control the shake in my voice. “Well, yes but—not in a way they could be recognized.”
“Elaborate.”
“The pedestrian was … in a gorilla suit.”
The silence was so long and dreadful I was drowning in it. I closed my eyes and pushed my fingers into my forehead, hard, wondering if I could perform a lobotomy on myself. Just carve a morsel out of my brain and make this all go away.
“In a gorilla suit, for fuck’s sake,” he muttered to himself. “Why the—you know what, never mind.” The sigh he blew out was piercing. “Okay. Hypothetically if no one saw anything, then, well, who’s to say? Tree falls in the woods, et cetera.”
My mind spun this thought around and around again. I let go of my fingertips, released a little pressure from my forehead.
“Tree falls in the woods,” I repeated faintly. Closing my eyes, I saw a tree falling and then vanishing into thin air.
“I mean, if no one saw it, did it really happen?”
Now it was morphing into a philosophical question. I chewed the thought, savoring it. Relaxing as the actual seemed to blur into the abstract.
I sat on the edge of my bed and eyed my wall, the reprint of Picasso’s Girl before a Mirror, which my dad bought me at the MoMA gift shop last time we visited my grandparents in New York.
“You’ve been home all night tonight, right?” he asked. “You haven’t gone anywhere.”
The implication took its time sinking in, but then I began to feel freer. The invisible weights on my shoulders grew wings and flew away. I’ve always been a girl with a wild imagination, and I imagined what he was saying vividly, in color, replaying it like a movie, a memory. Yes, I was here. Right here. Look at the piles of clothes and the half-packed suitcase on my bed. Tomorrow, I was off to summer camp in the mountains of Santa Ynez Valley, to be a camp counselor for the third year in a row.
“I’ve been packing,” I said.
“You’ve been packing,” he agreed. “All right, let’s end the hypotheticals and let you get back to it, shall we?”
“Love you, Daddy.”
“Back atcha.”
Beep said the phone in my ear as the call dropped. I turned to my packing and worked hard to imagine I was here for the past hour. Of course I was here, I hadn’t left the house. But I couldn’t help the truth from peeking in. Every few minutes, I checked the local news for updates about automobile accidents. Refresh, refresh, refresh until my index finger cramped.
When I didn’t see the news anywhere, I almost started to believe it hadn’t happened.
By bedtime, I stopped checking. If there had been a fatality there would have been an update by now. I started making up a story in my head that if it happened at all—which it hadn’t—it had been a minor accident and Elizabeth had gone home with bumps and bruises and dents in her Karmann Ghia. Close call. Could have been so much worse.
Little did I know that Elizabeth was screaming in a burn unit thirty miles away and her left leg would be amputated at dawn.
I had no idea. I slept long and hard.
Sleep, that sweet forgetting.
FOUR
NOW
It’s been ten years, and still—sometimes I wake up and the first thing I think of is what I did to Elizabeth.
At first it happened every morning, then less and less as the years wore on, until finally, now, it’s just once in a blue moon. But sometimes she pops to mind and crushes me out of nowhere. I get a nightmare stomach-churn. And then I tell myself I was never there. It’s a shame and a tragedy, but not my business. Elizabeth survived. She’s okay and living a fine life out there somewhere.
But when my mind trips up, when the guilt glitches and hangs on like a ghost, when I do really let myself think of her?
I swear she tried to poison me back in high school. Just imagine what she’d do to me now if she knew it was me who ran her off the road that day.
