Nothing to see here, folks! Look, we have cute little girls in pigtails!
I hadn’t given her much thought since the funeral, and I wasn’t expecting to see her. What I was expecting, I didn’t rightly know. Just not her.
“I know who you are,” she said to me after I got out of the car and started walking to the house.
“That right?”
“Yeah. You’re the girl who left.”
“My name is Jessica.”
She cocked her head to the side. “I didn’t know that.”
“No?”
She popped her fingers into her mouth, sucking them. “Nah, they don’t use your name.”
I wanted to vomit. My parents didn’t use my name? They just referred to me as what? The Girl Who Left? What the fuck was this? Why the hell was I here?
I almost turned around and got back in my car, but I could see my mother peeking through the window, and I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of seeing me turn tail and leave.
“What’s your name?”
“Serene.”
“That right?”
“Yes.”
She had a slight lisp, which must have put her on Todd’s shit list. Any imperfection was the fault of the imperfect person. He nearly lost his mind once when he noticed that one of the boys had a large zit on his chin. Clean living, you see, should’ve kept the downsides of puberty away. God, he was an asshole.
“What’s your last name?” I asked her.
“Blakemore.”
I clenched my fist so hard my nails almost broke skin. “That’s not your last name.”
“Yes, it is. Mom says.”
Fuck, fuck, fuck. We were all Blakemores when we lived in the LOT. Todd’s last name was given to all of us—we were all his children, apparently, belonging to him. But he didn’t have any actual children, not that we knew of. There were rumors—an occasional woman who gave birth to a child who people whispered about and then watched for signs of particular favor from Todd. Liam’s nephew, Aaron, was one of those kids, but it’s also just as likely that the other kids were simply jealous and looking for a reason why he didn’t have to spend as much time as we did learning how to dig the perfect ditch and tricking out end-of-the-world shelters.
“She’s not your mom.”
“Jessica!”
My head snapped to the left. My mother stood there, wearing coveralls similar to Serene’s. Had they traded one uniform in for another? Why couldn’t these people be free of each other?
“Therese.”
She looked stern. “You don’t . . .” My mother’s hands fluttered at her side. She looked tired, and old.
“Don’t what?”
“You can call me Mom. Or Charlotte. I don’t go by Therese anymore.”
“Can I?”
I could feel Serene’s eyes on us. I didn’t want to have this conversation in front of this girl who looked too much like me, too much like memories. I didn’t want to be having this conversation at all.
“Of course you can, honey, I—”
“Is Tanya here?”
“She’s in the kitchen. Why?”
“Because she’s the person I came to see.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t have a phone,” I said. Serene’s swing squeaked. I turned to look at her. She was pumping her legs methodically, pushing the tire higher into the air. Was she going to jump? Should someone tell her to stop and consider the consequences? Todd didn’t believe in that. Let the children fall where they may, he used to say. They’ll find a way to get back up again if they’re meant to.
“What?” my mother said.
“You don’t have a phone,” I said again, turning back to her. “That’s why I had to come.”
“You didn’t come to see me and your father?”
“No.”
“Why are you here, then?”
My mother shrank into herself as she asked that question. And if I’m being honest, I took some pleasure in that. It made me feel bigger, powerful somehow, to know I could injure her without even lifting a hand. And I hadn’t even said the worst part yet.
Because the worst part was why I was there.
The worst part was, “Kiki’s dead.”
Chapter 32
The Consequence
My ankle protests at the renewed run through the woods, but JJ doesn’t seem to feel any strain. She yells after Jessie, “There’s nowhere for you to go!”
But she’s wrong about that. Jessie’s running back to the water, where there are paddleboards and potentially other people if she makes it out into the lake, and we have to stop her before she gets away.
“Don’t let her get to the water,” I yell to JJ, and she kicks herself into another gear as she dodges and weaves through the thick stand of trees.
My lungs are screaming at me to stop, but I can’t. I count out the seconds in my head. How long did we run last time? How long till she makes it to the shore? We haven’t seen anyone all day, but there’s no guarantee of that continuing.
I dig as deep as I’ve ever had to in my entire life, knowing how important it is to get to Jessie before she reaches the beach. At some point, Jessie’s flung off her life jacket, and I can see her shoulders flagging, her steps a bit more cautious. She seems to be limping slightly; maybe she hurt herself in the tussle with JJ. I lengthen my stride, getting closer with every step, and finally she’s right in front of me. I can see water up ahead through the trees, but we’re still two hundred yards from the beach. Jessie trips on a root, her arms flailing in front of her as she loses speed trying to keep her balance.
Now. I have to strike now.
I reach into my pocket and take out the rock I stashed there earlier, then take a few running steps like I’m doing the long jump and catch her around the middle, knocking her down.
We tumble together to the ground. She screams, and then there’s a loud crack, a horrible wet sound. Jessie goes limp beneath me and I skid past her, ending up back on the forest floor with knees that feel like the skin’s been ripped off them. I drop the rock still tight in my hand, bring myself to a standing position, then turn around and look down. She’s lying perfectly still, silent and gray. Her head is at a weird angle, like her neck’s been snapped, and there’s blood oozing from her forehead and mouth.
I heave once, but hold it in, bringing my hand to my mouth.
JJ slaps through the trees and stops next to me. I can smell the sweat coming off her; we’re both a mix of blood and exertion.
JJ looks down at Jessie, then rears back her leg and kicks Jessie in the shin.
“Get up!”
I drop my hand. “JJ!”
“What?”
“She’s not . . .”
I point to Jessie, motionless on the ground. The blood is more obvious now, a wet streak on her chin, and there’s a sharp rock with a terrible stain on it inches away from her head.
JJ understands in the same moment that it sinks in.
Jessie’s dead.
I’ve killed her.
I’m struggling for breath, and all I can think is, Don’t throw up, don’t throw up, don’t throw up.
I’ve killed someone.
Don’t throw up.
“Stupid bitch,” JJ says. “She got what she deserved.”
“We need to clean up,” I say a few minutes later after my heartbeat has returned to a more normal rhythm and the dry heaves have passed.
JJ agrees, and so we spend the next hour clearing the scene. I pull a tarp from my pack, and we put Jessie on it so her blood stops oozing into the ground. JJ takes the latrine shovel I also brought to dig up the earth around Jessie’s head and walks it into the lake to let it disappear. Then we repeat the scene at the clearing in the woods where Jessie fell the first time. It takes a while to locate the spots of blood, and we can’t be sure we’ve gotten all of them, but it’s the best we can do under the circumstances.
We don’t talk much. JJ dumps the dir
t in the water, letting it darken and then dissolve, and I toss the stone I was holding and the one that she struck her head on as far away as possible. Then we both take a swim, scrubbing the dirt and blood from our bodies and cleaning out the scrapes we’ve collected as best we can with a tube of biodegradable soap, using up every drop. My fingernails are caked with dirt, and maybe more, so I find some sand to use as a scrub and work them until they’re clean and my fingers start to prune. The water is cold, and by the time I’m satisfied that I’ve gotten myself as clean as possible, I’m shivering.
When I head back onto the beach, JJ’s got her shirt wrapped around her waist, and the rest of her clothes are drying on a log near the fire that she’s built up again. Her prosthetic arm is resting next to it. Her hair is spiked and her breasts are lying flat against her chest. I can see the ridgelines of her stomach muscles. She looks like an Amazon—not someone to be trifled with.
I guess we both look like that now.
I wrap the other towel around me and sit on the log. The fire is hot and starts to warm me quickly. JJ takes a seat next to me and I check my watch. It’s six thirty.
“We need to get going so we have enough time to get back while it’s still light out,” JJ says.
“How long did it take us to get here?” I look across the lake. Our beach seems far away and deserted.
“About an hour. But we were also racing. And I don’t know about you, but I’m worn out. I think we should leave at least an hour and a half to get back. Especially since we’re also going to have to tow the extra paddleboard.”
“We could leave the body here,” I say.
“I think that’s a bad idea. The animals might dig her up, and people come over here.”
I put my feet out in front of me. They’re full of scratches. My whole body is. “The lake it is, then.”
“Agreed.”
“Then tomorrow, we go to the local cops to tell them that Jessie ran away.”
“And say what, exactly?”
“We tell them the truth. Not all of it, of course, but enough of it that our story will check out. I lost my money, I went searching for the bad guy, met Jessie who presented as another victim, we teamed up, found you, and then came here because there’s another Jessica living here. Turns out, Jessie was the bad guy all along, which we figured out when we found her Molly ID and the other stuff in her bag. When we confronted her about it, she ran away.”
“You think it will work?”
“It’s taking a page out of her book, right? How she was hiding in plain sight the whole time. How hard are they going to look for her?”
“We could try telling them it was self-defense,” JJ says.
“Too risky,” I say. “If they don’t buy that, then I’m going away for a long time. You too.”
“You’re right. I want to get our money back, though. How are we going to do that?”
I face a grim thought. “We’re going to have to use her fingerprint to get back into her accounts and then change the password to give us time to figure it out.”
“We need to keep this as simple as possible,” JJ says. “A lot could go wrong.”
“Yes. And then we need to pray that no one ever finds the body.”
Chapter 33
Someone Always Has to Do the Dirty Work
We decide to wait till twilight to do the deed. There’ll be less chance of us being seen then, when we dump her body in the lake.
“We’ll have to weigh her down,” JJ says.
“À la Virginia Woolf?”
“Who?”
“An author who killed herself by filling her pockets with stones. She wasn’t found for almost a month. And then her husband buried her body under her favorite tree or something.”
“People believed that story?”
I shrug. “She suffered from depression.”
“Sounds like her husband killed her, then covered it up.”
“I guess that’s possible. Regardless, that was in a river. Think about how deep this lake is. Plus, there must be lots of fish in there.”
“Do fish eat humans?”
“Some must.”
“All right, let’s go find some rocks.”
The shore is full of them. I dump out the backpack and we fill it with rocks. JJ hauls it to where we’ve left Jessie, about two hundred yards from the beach in the woods where she can’t be seen from the water in case someone goes by, and dumps it out. Jessie’s board shorts have deep pockets, as does her sweatshirt. We fill them both with the heaviest rocks we can fit inside. Then we wrap the tarp around her and tie it off with the rope from the ankle leash from her paddleboard. We bring her board into the woods, then work together to lift her onto it so we can use it as a stretcher.
When we get her down to the lake, the light is murky as the sun sets, and there’s a kind of steam coming off the water as the colder air meets it. It’s the perfect cover for what we’re doing, thank God, even assuming there’s anyone around. But the lake is bare. The pattern I’ve noticed over the last week is the same: people pack up shop around five and then stay close to their campsites. In fact, the only thing I’ve seen more than a couple hundred feet from the tents after dark was a moose.
I felt sick the entire time we were working and was glad I’d only had a couple of sips of beer, but as soon as we’re back, JJ picks up the trail mix I’d offered Jessie earlier and eats it quickly, washing it down with one of the remaining beers.
“How can you eat?” I ask.
“You should too. We have a long paddle ahead.”
“Can’t.”
“Suit yourself.”
When she’s finished, we clean up the camp, returning everything we brought to my backpack and JJ’s. I add Jessie’s phone wrapped in a plastic bag along with her wallet and ID to mine. Unlocking her phone had been the worst task. Jessie’s hand felt cold, though that was probably my imagination. But we need that phone unlocked to change the password, and now it works with my fingerprint. Everything in it is mine.
We each do a last survey of the campsite. The fire has died way down, but JJ insists on dumping the remaining beer on it to put it out, and when that isn’t enough, we fill and dump our canteens time and again until it’s all runny ash.
“The last thing we need,” JJ says, “is to start a forest fire.”
“We’ve done enough damage today.”
We carry Jessie’s paddleboard to the water. JJ takes her own ankle leash and attaches it to Jessie’s board as a tow rope. I hold the board steady while she climbs on, then help her push off with Jessie trailing behind. She needs to paddle slow and steady, so Jessie doesn’t roll off her board too early, and the rocks help with that, keeping her firmly in place.
I get on my own board and paddle softly behind JJ. I wish I’d brought headlamps, but we’d have to keep them off, anyway. The moon’s not out yet, but it will be soon. We have maybe thirty minutes to get this done.
JJ keeps a steady rhythm, and the water’s still flat, easing our path, though I feel a trickle of a breeze on my neck. That’s all we need, for a storm to start up. The weather can change in an instant in these mountains. Just last week, eight people had been blasted off the Grand Teton by unexpected lightning. That mountain is behind us, looming large and sharp. I’ve marveled every morning at the view, but now it seems sinister.
“We should do it here,” JJ says.
We’re still closer to the beach we just left than the beach we’re going to, but already my arms are killing me. “You sure?”
“Yeah. Wouldn’t want to risk getting any closer.”
“All right.”
I paddle up to her so we can raft up. Jessie’s bobbing behind us, almost peaceful under the tarp. Until I notice the stain seeping through, dark red, almost black. Ugh. I thought these things were supposed to be waterproof.
“What do we do?” I ask.
“Push her off gently, I think. Let’s not make a splash.”
I pull on the ankle leash t
o bring the board in between ours. The moon is rising. We have to do this now. The board is between us. “I think we should tilt it.”
“Toward you or me?”
“You. Okay?”
She nods and leans her weight on her side of Jessie’s board, while I lift with all my might. It doesn’t budge at all at first, but then slowly, slowly, it rises, and she starts to slide off. I heave even harder to bring the board up as JJ pushes down, and then she’s off the board and into the water. The body floats there for a moment and I despair that we’ve fucked it up, but then the tarp takes on water, and I guess Jessie does, too, and she starts to sink slowly beneath the glacial water in a rush of bubbles.
“We return thee to the earth from whence all things came,” I find myself saying, an old incantation the kids used to chant in imitation of Todd when our pet mouse or cat would die, and we’d sneak away to bury it. “Find peace there, and know that ye will be remembered.”
The moon has risen like a flashlight on our sins by the time we get back to shore. I can barely paddle, and I’ve gotten down on my knees to make the strokes shorter because I’m so woozy from lack of food and everything else that’s happened today that I’m worried I might fall off.
I realize I was half-asleep when my board scrapes against rocks.
We’ve made it. We’re here.
JJ hops into the water, her prosthetic arm held high. “Come help me.”
I follow her command again. She motions what she wants me to do—clean off Jessie’s paddleboard. I reach down and scoop up handfuls of sand and rocks and sluice the board. There’s a small dark stain near where her head was resting that’s visible in the moonlight. Nausea overtakes me again, but we can’t stop now, so I renew my scrubbing until the stain is gone and the board looks like it did before any of this happened.
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