Only she came back, p.6
Only She Came Back, page 6
I couldn’t just blurt out what I’d heard like a desperate clout chaser. First I had to know it was true.
My mind raced, assembling the clues. New footprints in the campsite. Scary bikers. West, with his shady history, trying to scare Kiri away from Callum by telling her things she refused to repeat to me. Maybe West had some kind of beef with Callum, wanting to ruin his relationship. Or maybe some of the “bad things” West had said about Callum were true.
Kiri might be guilty for all I knew, but after tonight, I couldn’t see her as cold-blooded or manipulative. Her nervousness, her desperate eagerness to talk, her admitting that she couldn’t just snap out of the survivalist mindset—all of that felt too real. Maybe I’d never been quite that irrational, but I knew how it felt to let someone else define your reality.
From behind me came the steady purr of a car in low gear.
I was just past Burton Snowboards, back out of the woods in the open. A glance over my shoulder showed me a burly black SUV. I hugged the shoulder and motioned for the driver to pass, but they crept on, keeping only a car length behind me.
Hunched over the handlebars, I pedaled faster, feeling the burn in my hamstrings. I suck at telling one make of car from another, but I knew that Tierney Brenner had a black Range Rover. Why would he be dogging me when he’d steered clear of me since January?
The car still wasn’t passing, the engine rumbling softly.
Ice flooded my chest as I passed the mouth of Pine Street and the dead-end freeway. There were no houses for another few blocks, only the giant, fenced-off tanks of the Champlain Water District to my right. If this person chose to run me off the road, no one was there to stop them.
No side streets to peel off onto, either, except for Kindness Court, the humane society’s driveway, which was up a steep hill with no outlet. I could only keep going.
It had to be Tierney the Dickwad. But what did he want with me?
I risked another glance backward, though it slowed my momentum uphill and made the bike wobble dangerously. All I saw were lights smeared across a windshield and a lump of darkness that might have been a man.
Kelsey Detwiler, the girl who was killed downtown, popped into my head, followed by a fractured collage of all the stories I’d consumed over the years. Did any of them start with a girl on her bike out so late that no one would hear her scream? The stub of freeway, with its tangled sumac and concrete barriers, was the perfect place to dump a body.
Maybe I deserved this. Maybe by fantasizing about telling Kiri’s story, I’d called the black SUV to me, summoning the universe to make the story about me instead. One I would know all of but wouldn’t be able to tell—not if it ended here.
Eyes straight ahead. Pedal, pedal, pedal.
Past Kindness Court, close enough to Molly B’s to hear the thump of a classic cover band practicing after hours, I cursed the incline. Faster.
Still the motor purred evenly behind me. Not a single rev. Imagine the self-control it would take to keep your foot so steady on the gas.
Here, inland, the wind was gone and the treetops were still. The air shivered around me—air that had been lazy and lake-smelling and ordinary, now taut and vibrating with danger.
He didn’t have to creep behind me. He could just run me down. Or block my way, cut the engine, jump out of the car, pull me off my bike. Cover my mouth. Drag me into the back seat. Lock all the doors and peel out.
For all victims, there must be a moment when the world changes. A sick, sudden wobble of the earth on its axis, when the guy who lent you his phone is no longer a helpful stranger. The guy who showed up at your campsite is no longer a friend.
The rumble of the engine rose to a roar, drowning out the classic rock from the bar. Light blinded my left eye; he was pulling abreast of me. Passing—or making his move to cut me off?
My bike took a sickening lurch onto the shoulder. The blaze of headlights cast long grass and milkweed into relief. One glimpse of a green-and-white license plate, and then I was veering toward the ditch, out of control—and I bit down hard on my lip and put my whole weight on the pedal, wresting the front wheel back into line.
When I looked up again, the SUV’s taillights were shrinking to twin glints in the distance. They seemed to twinkle, but that was just my shaking.
I touched the ground long enough to draw a deep breath and pull myself together. The smell of fried food from Molly B’s meant that our apartment complex was just a bit farther. I’d made it.
I rode the last quarter mile with my heart drumming madly and my shirt soaked with cold sweat. Maybe it was just a stray reporter who’d seen me sneaking into Kiri’s and followed me. But if they didn’t want to get out and talk, why would they make their presence so obvious to me?
When I reached home, I leapt off the bike and marched it to the rack, willing it to stay straight this once. Though I couldn’t see it from here, I could feel the vast, empty Kmart parking lot stretching out behind our building.
If I were following a girl on a bike, trying to find out where she lived, that’s where I’d wait for her—in a spot with a view of the intersection.
I had no reason to think the SUV driver was anything but a random creep. But I stopped fumbling with the chain, tossed the backpack over my shoulder, and hustled the bike up the front steps by the handlebars, the front wheel swinging madly. The door locked behind me with a reassuring click. Mom would be pissed to see the bike in the hallway when she got home from her night shift in the NICU, but I didn’t care. It felt safer not to linger outside.
Upstairs, I tiptoed across Mom’s empty bedroom to peer out the back window. There were a few cars in the Kmart parking lot, but none I could be sure was the SUV.
Its plate had been green and white, but more white than green—not a Vermont plate. Not Tierney, or anyone local. Someone who liked making girls on bikes feel vulnerable. As I curled up in bed, I tried to shake the sensation of being prey.
5
AUGUST 9, 11:30 AM
I woke up to a notification for a new video of Callum and Kiri on the road trip.
It was taken in the parking lot of a Waffle House near Tulsa on July 4 at dusk. Somebody raised their phone to film fireworks in the distance, and suddenly, in between faint booms and sprays of colored light, they heard a couple arguing.
Her voice is high-pitched, shrieky. “Let’s just go, okay! I’m ready! You win!”
His voice is much lower—the words almost inaudible, but clearly meant to calm her. “You just need to wash your face. You just need to—” and then something else.
The phone swings jerkily across the parking lot to frame them—a tall guy and a tall girl in front of a van, his white T-shirt and her blond hair glowing under the light.
“No, I don’t need to sit still!” Kiri’s hair spills tangled over her shoulders, which are strong and tan and mostly exposed by her tank top. Tears glint on her face.
“Shh,” Callum says, and then they both turn toward whoever’s holding the phone as it bobs closer to them.
A fuzzy male voice: “Are you okay, miss? This guy giving you a hard time?”
Kiri’s face is splotched red, but she wipes away the tears. Her mouth forms a jagged smile. “No, I’m fine, sir. He’s my boyfriend. We were just having a disagreement about…”
“Our route,” Callum says. Quick as a flash, he reaches into the van’s cab and produces a map. “We’re driving cross-country. She likes to use the GPS. I like to do it the old-fashioned way.”
He unfolds the map and moves forward, out of frame, as if to discuss it with one of the strangers. The phone stays on Kiri. A female voice asks, “Are you sure you’re okay, hon? You seem pretty upset.”
Kiri grabs her hair, pulls it back into a ponytail, and catches it in a band—brisk, angry motions. “Really, I’m fine,” she says, smiling even as her voice wobbles. “He just makes me feel stupid sometimes. But it’s because he’s so smart.”
“Oh, hon,” the voice says. The video ends.
“What on earth is that?”
I straightened to find Mom peering over my shoulder and pulled the phone against my chest, as if I could protect Kiri from the world’s prying eyes. What I’d seen felt so raw and private. “Nothing. A news clip.”
Sunlight spilled through the window over our sink. In daylight, I could see that none of the cars in the Kmart parking lot that I remembered from last night were black SUVs. The events of 3:00 AM had the same murky quality as the video I’d just watched; I could barely be sure any of it had happened, much less what it meant.
What I did know was that I would see Kiri again tonight. The thought made my cheeks hot and tight, my pulse pounding so hard my body seemed ready to fly apart—like those fireworks over the Waffle House parking lot, like a rocket streaking across the sky.
“That girl sounded really upset.” Bathrobe-clad, my mom padded over to the sink and ran water into the coffee carafe. “Is she okay? She’s not dead now, is she?”
“No.” Mom doesn’t share Lore’s feelings about true crime—she appreciates a good mystery—but if I let her know I had anything but a casual interest in the case, she would start worrying. “It’s the guy who’s missing, actually. A YouTube influencer. They found his bloody sweatshirt.”
“Oh, Lord.” Mom measured grounds into the coffeemaker, hair tumbling in her eyes—red-brown and wavy like mine, but touched with gray. “His poor parents must be going through hell.”
“You’re such a mom,” I said, spooning up cornflakes. Somehow it had never occurred to me what Callum’s parents might be feeling right now, but I’d better start caring. I would need to tell all sides.
“Right?” Mom flipped the coffeemaker’s switch, then sat down and propped her elbows on the bare wooden table. As always after one of her long shifts, she moved with the slow determination of a sleepwalker, smoky shadows under her eyes. “I did a reading for Mrs. Linderholm on Tuesday,” she said. “You know, the one who lost her son to an overdose last year?”
My mom’s side hustle is giving readings in a ranch house just off the highway with a neon sign that says PSYCHIC out front. It’s as tidy and impersonal as a therapist’s office, but with crystal balls. When things got bad with Dad, she told me once, connecting with the universal energies helped her center herself. I wished the universal energies could have told her to kick him out the first time he ever laid a hand on her—or the second or third time—but I didn’t say so.
She used to say he only hurt her because he loved her too much. If that’s true, love is a hell of a thing.
“There are so many sons and grandsons with overdoses,” I said. “I can’t keep them straight.”
Mom shook her head at me. “If you ever have kids, Sam, you’ll stop being so flip about it. Mrs. Linderholm’s son was missing for two weeks before he was found in a ravine. Waiting for news, wondering… the news was almost a relief. She asked me to ask him—”
“His spirit,” I said.
“Right. She asked me to ask his spirit if he was lonely out there. If he was still tied to his body, if he understood that he was dead.”
I don’t believe in life after death, but a shiver feathered its way down the bare backs of my arms. On my phone screen, Callum had been calm and in control. Now he might be a bloody shell buried in the sand or hidden under scrub brush.
Or maybe he was alive, riding through an unknown landscape in a car driven by a man with a scorpion tattoo on his neck. If West really was involved, who was to say he’d killed Callum?
Kiri had been so upset in the Waffle House parking lot. Such a mess. Maybe Callum had had enough of her and faked his death, using his old friend as the ticket to a new life. It was an ugly thought, but sometimes men do just cut and run—hello, Dad.
As the coffee perked, I scrolled through the comments on the video—hundreds already. This was a bombshell, the first hard evidence that something was wrong between Callum and Kiri. Predictably, at least a third of the comments said Kiri looked “like a psycho.” Another third said she was obviously the victim of Callum’s abuse.
“What did the guy’s spirit say?” I asked as Mom got up to pour her coffee. “Was he lonely?”
“You know my clients’ readings are confidential, Sammy. But, as a rule, spirits aren’t lonely or confused unless they have unfinished business with the living.” She bent to look over my shoulder again, the rich coffee scent wafting from the cup in her hand and making my stomach grumble. “What are you reading? Is this about the missing influencer? Why are people so obsessed with him?”
“People like to solve mysteries.” I scrolled faster as the comments started to repeat themselves: That bitch needs to be arrested. Someone should’ve called the cops on Callum. She was unstable. He was controlling. A tragedy. An outrage.
Mom straightened, the smell retreating. “But once you solve the mystery,” she said, “what’s left? Usually just somebody like Mrs. Linderholm, caught in that spiral of grief while everybody else moves on.”
Aliza Deene was doing a live reaction to the Waffle House video, rubbing plummy blush on her cheekbones while she explained her take:
“I know some of y’all want to believe that Callum Massey was a saint. But if you analyze how he’s trying to calm Kiri down in this clip, how he’s trying to minimize her pain, you see all the classic signs of a controlling personality. And notice how, when bystanders step in, he continues to try to control the narrative. You heard how hysterical Kiri was. You really think they were fighting about whether to use the GPS? Not a chance. This was a serious, potentially relationship-ending argument. So yeah, Callum isn’t being honest. But there’s more to the story. If we look at this shot right here, right before Kiri says that Callum makes her feel stupid—”
“Hey.” Owen’s hand was waving in my face. “Earth to Sam. Is Maren around?”
I batted him away and set my phone on the ticket counter, plucking out an earbud. It was another dead afternoon at the Grand Nine, all the four o’clock shows playing to a handful of customers. “She’s on her half.”
“Well, when she gets back, tell her we got a problem with our copy of Stations in the Night. Every ten minutes or so the whole image turns red like somebody dropped a bucket of blood on it.”
“Um, nice visual. I thought you were the kind of enlightened cinephile who appreciates the expressive use of color.”
“Expressive, my ass. That movie’s a piece of shit.” Owen leaned over the counter. “Popcorn?”
I snagged a prefilled bag from under the heating lamp, trying to keep my attention on what Aliza was saying in my left ear:
“Now, I know some of you don’t agree with my diagnosis of Kiri as having histrionic personality disorder—”
“That’s bullshit,” I said aloud.
“What is?” Owen eyeballed my phone. “Oh, that again. These people need to get lives.”
“Are you talking about me?” I handed over the bag. “You know you’re basically filling your stomach with salt-covered cardboard, right?”
“Nice visual, and no, I didn’t mean you.” He watched Aliza tracing a perfect arc of black eyeliner. “So, what’s this expert’s theory? Does she think Katie Dunsmore’s a killer?”
“What would she know about it?” Too late, I realized how annoyed I’d sounded. Aliza kept running the same clip in slow motion: Kiri raising her wet eyes to look earnestly into the face of the person holding the camera, or into the camera itself.
Yes, she was looking into the camera. But what was that supposed to prove? If someone’s filming you, isn’t that a natural place to look?
Now Aliza was off on a weird tangent about Kiri’s voice, comparing a bunch of different audio clips. No wonder she was overanalyzing things when she knew so little—nothing about the cougars, or the appearing and disappearing phone, or the disarranged campsite. Nothing about West.
“Oh,” I called as Owen turned to go, a kernel already caught in his beard, “I meant to ask—have you seen Spawn around lately?” Spawn of Brenner is one of our many names for Tierney.
Owen shook his head, shoveling another handful of popcorn down his gullet. “Nah, unless you count the time I saw him downtown, coming out of Nectar’s—that was back in the spring. Think Dickwad’s lost interest in us.”
He may call him “Dickwad” now, but Owen used to be a Spawn fanboy—gushing over Tierney’s tricked-out truck, watching with googly eyes as Tierney flirted with Reggie. Sometimes I wonder if he was thinking, What would Tierney do? the whole time he was hooking up with me.
Of course, I’d been just as bad with Reggie, making her into my role model. I remembered Kiri’s surprise when I told her I didn’t have those feelings for Reggie anymore. When someone comes along and turns you into a better person… how can it just be over?
Was that how she felt about Callum, even now? That he’d inspired her to be her best self? Watching the video clips and hearing her words echo in my head, I felt as if something cold were slipping down my spine.
Owen trudged back into the entrails of the multiplex, and I sank onto the stool and rested my head on my folded arms, trying to pay attention to the voice in my earbuds. Trying not to think about seeing Kiri again tonight.
What would Aliza Deene do for two exclusive interviews? Sell her soul, probably. But Aliza hadn’t heard the desolation in Kiri’s voice as she confessed that, in her mind, she was still lost in the desert and never coming home.
No, Aliza knew nothing about Kiri. Her monologue cut through my thoughts, her voice sharp as a blade:
“So, we have a young woman here who’s extremely skilled at performing on camera. Who weaponizes her big eyes and ‘poor little me’ voice to get sympathy from everyone around her. Don’t get me wrong—Callum Massey reads like a narcissist, and I fully believe this relationship was abusive on both sides. But when Kiri drops that innocent little comment about Callum making her feel stupid, in the Fourth of July video? Yeah, I’m calling this, folks—she’s self-consciously playing the part of a victim. She’s preparing a defense. I think that’s when she knew she would kill him.”
