Kiss Her Goodbye: Thriller/Romance with a shocking twist

by Kirsten Mitchell

  “No need to be scared,” Barter said. “I’m not here as a cop. I’m here as a customer, just like anyone else. But a very special, well-trained customer. Just think of my as your co-pilot.”

  “But I don’t want you to be my co-pilot.” Nate said.

  Barter changed the subject, “We’d better hurry up and catch up to Mia and Glenda. They’re just about all the way up the mountain by now.”

  “Actually. It’s not scientifically possible for them to finish hiking the mountain by now,” Nate corrected her. “This is a four-day hike. They’ve only been walking for five minutes.”

  “Only four days, huh?” Penelope said. “Then I guess I better work fast.”

  “Work fast at wh-wh-what?” Nate stammered.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know.” She smirked at him and strode off in the direction of the women.

  *******

  Mia’s thighs scorched and her lungs prickled with each step up what felt like a forty-five-degree angled trail. Her feet felt like they would billow smoke out the tops of her socks any minute now.

  “This is brutal,” Mia said to Glenda, who was on her phone playing video games and hardly affected by the exertion.

  “Mm,” Glenda barely listened, her thumbs punching at the phone screen.

  What the hell had Mia been thinking to agree to this level of physical exertion when she’d barely peeled herself off her cluttered couch for the past four years?

  And the fact that Leo had shown up made it that much more difficult. She recalled the way he’d looked at her the day before, as if he wasn’t quite sure she if she was sane or not and whether he should come along for the trip.

  And then when Nate had tried to make her leave behind her bags, the condescending way Leo had protected her and forced Nate to let her take them. It just made Mia want to cringe and die. Like she was some fragile patient who needed to be given everything she demanded, lest she crumble into oblivion in front of everybody’s eyes.

  She stomped forward in her brand new hiking boots. Brand new only because she’d never worn them before, but she’d actually bought them four years ago. It had been a week before Brendan disappeared and she had planned to take him camping to one of her favorite towns, a quaint little place called Revelstoke. But after he’d gone missing, she’d forgotten all about the boots tucked away in her closet. Through the years, more clutter piled atop them, sweeping them further and further away from memory. It had only been last night when she’d been sleeping, that she thrust awake, patting her own chest, expecting to find a note, relieved to find none, that she remembered the boots in the closet.

  They now made their debut hike by promptly catching on to a gnarled tree root, not five minutes into her walk, sending Mia pummeling forward to the earth. She barely caught herself and paused before walking again. She gasped, barely having any more breath in her lungs to grab on to. Her legs pleaded her to give them a break and let them sit down, but it had only been five minutes that they’d started walking and she didn’t want to seem pathetic in front of Glenda.

  The worst part of Leo coming on this trip was that she didn’t know how she would handle her mind-numbing attraction to him. It was getting awkward to keep a straight face around him. He hadn’t even kissed her, although they’d come pretty close in Brendan’s bedroom. But that was something she could never let happen. Not after how they parted years ago and the secrets that now separated then and made them strangers.

  Back when she was seventeen, he’d been the first man she’d ever slept with, and every man since then had fallen far short of the bar he’d set. Although over the years, she’d had some decent sex, nothing was as intensely delicious as what she had experienced with Leo all those years ago. Maybe it had just been just teenage hormones that made the sex that much more exciting.

  Or maybe it had been something else?

  Mia’s boot caught another root and this time she flailed forward, unable to catch herself. She landed face first on the damp earth. Her knapsack rolled up and punched her in the back of her skull, driving her face against the earth. The remaining bags flung forward and erupted open, scattering Brendan’s colorful toys across the trail. With her face now stamped against the ground, the scents of a million pine trees drenched in wet moss with a flicker of spicy cougar pee flitted at her throat.

  Mia lifted her head and stared at the black mud before her face, her mouth full of the oddly sweet and nutty flavor. She spat it out, but chunks of bark still clung to her front teeth. With dirty fists, she wiped it from her eyes and scowled at the agony of grinding mud upon mud into her eyeballs.

  “Careful there!” Glenda came running back over with her bags bouncing heavily on her arms. As she squatted down to cup her hands under Mia's biceps, they were startled by the sounds of shouting voices at the base of the trail.

  A woman’s faraway voice rolled through the trees up the path at them. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  “Who is that?” Glenda abandoned Mia, dropping her and her knapsack back to the ground, and jogged back to take a peek at what was going on. “Another hiker joining us? Oh, man alive, I hope she's into vlogging too.”

  “I just hope she’s nice,” Mia said.

  The murmur of men’s voices answered the new hiker’s request.

  “Yeah?” the woman hollered back, “well, screw you, too!”

  “Sure,” Glenda said, “she sounds like a real sweetie.” She strained to take a better look. “Hey…no way.”

  “What is it?” Mia wrestled out of her knapsack, writhing on the ground.

  “Isn’t that the butch cop who barged in last night and wiped out on Brendan’s toys?”

  Mia gawked at up Glenda from the ground and blinked at her.

  Constable Barter?

  Oh, please, please, please say it wasn’t so. How much worse could this trip get?

  Mia strained to pluck herself from the mud. She threw her bag down with a dirty splash before joining Glenda to look. A tall, thin, freckled woman with a perpetually angry purple face and a blast of yellow hair bobbing with each syllable of her speech stood there pointing an instructive finger way too close in Leo and Nate’s faces.

  Yep.

  It was her, alright.

  But why?

  “She sure has a bitchy ’tude, huh?” Glenda shrugged. “Wonder what’s gotten her all fired up.”

  Mia was beginning to wonder the same thing. She was in enough trouble with Constable Barter; she didn’t want to ask and provoke the woman further.

  Constable Barter looked up the hill at Glenda and Mia and let out a long sarcastic wave at them. Glenda reluctantly waved back.

  Mia did not.

  Penelope dismissed the men and sprinted up the hill to meet the women with what seemed like no more than ten steps and the most obnoxious confidence Mia had ever witnessed.

  “When you get killed on this trip, please give me a call.” Barter reached them, not even breathless. Her purple freckled face free from even a flicker of sweat and her eyes and pursed mouth visibly judged the sweaty mud that caked and streamed Mia’s face and she continued, “Lovely day for a hike today, isn’t it?”

  “It was lovely until now,” Glenda said. “And, tell me, how the hell are we supposed to call you if we get killed?”

  “I dunno. You look smart, kid. Well, kind of,” Barter said. “You’ll figure out a way.”

  Leo and Nate appeared up the hill behind Constable Barter. Nate’s face twisted in rage and nervousness. Leo’s drenched in worry and regret.

  “She is not my co-pilot,” Nate announced to them, still not holding eye contact with anyone. “We discussed it just now. I am the pilot and Leo is my co-pilot.”

  “Let’s just get started on this hike already,” Leo said. “Enough with this co-pilot bullshit.”

  “By the way, my co-pilot is not allowed to use curse words. Nobody is. It’s one of the regulations I’ve detailed clearly on my website. No swearing on this trip,” Nate passed out the copies of re
gulations and maps he’d printed. From his backpack, he pulled out a shiny and twisted black wooden hiking stick that looked he had polished it obsessively before the trip. He thrust it out in front of him, pointing up the mountain. “Onward and upward, crew!”

  In one hand Glenda held her vlogging camera above her head looking down on her. In the other hand, she grabbed her own hiking stick, a fir branch still swathed in thick green. She waved it ahead of her. Mia gasped. It was the exact way Brendan used to do, pretending he was a magician. He used to have fantasies of being a great wizard to escape the misery of being bullied. Mia’s throat tightened and her heart felt like it stopped, seeing the bizarre resemblance. When Glenda turned back to smile at her, for a fleeting second, it seemed as though Brendan’s smiling cherub face superimposed over hers.

  It was everything Mia could do to stop herself from falling to her knees.

  She turned to Leo, who was watching her.

  “You okay?” he asked warily.

  God damn you Leo for caring so much about me like this. Don’t you understand how much trouble you can get us in?

  “Walk with me,” she murmured to him. “I need to talk to you about something.”

  *******

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Saturday, September 16: 11:00 a.m.

  “That’s her blue car.” Jessica Walkers pulled into Guiding Pass parking lot. “It’s the same one I followed yesterday.” The back of the van rumbled and the vehicle rocked from side to side. “Shut up back there, Walter!” the old lady shouted to the rear, then turned to Mark, face twisted in accusation. “Did you even feed him today?”

  “Yeah, man, I fed him,” Mark rolled his eyes at his grandmother as he slouched over in the passenger seat, flipping the pages of his comic book. Ever since he was a child he refused to call her ‘grandmother’, and now that he was in his thirties and had seen what he had seen over the years, he could barely even address her by her own name. “Pretty sure we’d all be mauled to death by now if I didn’t feed him. So just, like, take a chill pill and everything.”

  “I hope you didn’t feed him cherries again. You know they always give him diarrhea. Did you feed him cherries? For crying out loud, Mark, say you didn’t feed him cherries. I just had the van cleaned.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Jessica, I didn’t feed him any goddamn cherries. I’m not an idiot, okay?”

  Walter roared in the back and rocked the van harder.

  Mark moaned at his grandmother. “Your nagging is waking him up and annoying me.”

  “Good. I need to be annoying today,” Jessica said. “Because everything needs to be perfect this time. Not like last time.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Mark’s eyes rolled even higher into his head. “Here we go again with your dramatics.”

  Jessica took an elastic band from her and swept her gray hair up into a bun. She scowled with determination. “We’re going up that mountain after them.”

  “What? You can’t do that. You’re fuckin’ eighty years old,” Mark said. “You won’t even last five minutes climbing that thing.”

  “Quit your damn whining. Our girl needs our help,” Jessica said. “Let Walter and the kid out of their cages and let’s get going.”

  “Your girl,” Mark snickered. “She doesn’t even know you’re coming after her. Like she would even care if she did.”

  “She will care soon enough.”

  “Hey.” Mark looked over to the parking lot. “Isn’t that Constable Penelope Barter’s truck there?”

  Jessica scanned her gaze over to the rundown gray Dodge truck parked under the shade of pine trees.

  “We can’t do this if there’s a cop there.” Mark said, “We’re gonna get busted for sure. We might as well just go home so I can catch up on Netflix.”

  “You’ve got no determination, you lazy ass bastard. I didn’t raise you to be no sissy-boy,” Jessica said. “Just bring guns. We’ll shoot the bitch in the face if we have to.”

  “Jeez, man,” Mark dropped his comic book on his lap and gaped at her. “You’re a real psycho. You know that, Grandma?” he said, unintentionally addressing her as ‘grandma’ for the first time in a long time.

  “Whatever. Just bring the guns,” she barked.

  *******

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “What’s up?” Leo strode beside her and she felt the crash of familiarity hit her harder than she had been expecting. She looked over at his face, but his jaw clenched and he kept his eyes on the path ahead of them. He’d gotten older and stronger-looking, but hadn’t changed a bit since she’d last seen him. He still had that air of breezy confidence and cheekiness that both drove her mad and exhilarated her.

  “I just wanted to know why you felt it was necessary to come along on this trip?”

  He turned to her. Smiled. “What? You didn’t feel like catching up?”

  She cringed. How could he even joke about that, after how she’d left him years ago, without explanation?

  “It’s just that when you recommended this trip with your client, Nate, I didn’t realize you would actually be joining us.”

  “Nate asked me to come,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’m not here for you.”

  He spoke with a smile, but his words were cold. Cutting. She wasn’t even sure how to respond to that.

  Truthfully, he had every right to be angry at her. Downright pissed for how she’d just left him. But what he didn’t understand was why she left. And the reason she’d left was something she could never discuss with him. It was a part of her past that she’d long forgotten, since she moved on and eventually married Brendan’s father, Jason. After Jason had left in a bitter divorce and she was alone with a baby who was her entire life, she never once thought about the past she’d had with Leo. Not until now that baby was yanked away from her and Leo was back in front of her, forcing her to look at what a nasty person she’d been to him. Maybe she had deserved losing her son for how she had behaved. Guilt and sadness smashed through her, and she looked away from him.

  “Plus, you’re going to need some help getting to Blueflower,” he continued. Oblivious to her pain. Or at least he seemed oblivious. Maybe he had a damned good poker face. “Legend says it’s not an easy place to get to.”

  “Thank you.” She didn’t know what else to say. “I know it’s a silly dream. You probably think I am crazy.”

  “I do not,” he said, his eyes shifting into darkness. He rubbed at his chin.

  “I keep having dreams about my son. Crazy weird dreams. Like he is calling me and luring me to some place. But I don’t know where. The only thing I can think of my grandfather’s cabin at Blueflower.”

  “Why there?”

  “He always loved camping and fishing there, especially when he was little.” Mia smiled at the memory, feeling a flicker of nostalgic joy she hadn’t felt in a while. “He always told me when he grew up he wanted to live there at that cabin. I told him it was impossible; he would need to work and have a job just like everyone else, but he insisted he would live off the land. You know how kids dream like that.”

  Leo stared at her, not smiling. Not reacting. She’d wondered if she’d said too much.

  “Why now, Mia?” he finally said. “Why do you need to get to the cabin after four years of him missing?”

  She felt her joy funnel out of her, drop by drop. “The notes.” She bent to pick up pinecones, rolled them around in her hands to examine them, and then stuffed them into her knapsack. “The notes have been getting really bad lately. I wake up and find them on my chest most days now. They didn’t start coming until a few years ago, and the last few months or so, I’ve been getting them almost every day.”

  “What do the notes say?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t say.” Just remembering the words made her sick. “I don’t know if I can talk about it.”

  He nodded.

  “All I know is that the anniversary of my son’s disappearance is this weekend. I need to get to the cabin to see if he’s
there.”

  “Do you think he will be there?”

  She looked at him. What an impossibly cruel question. Her heart thundered and her hands shook before she even had a chance to respond to him. “No,” she whispered. “I would need to be crazy to believe something like that, wouldn’t I?”

  “You’re not crazy,” he said. For the first time they’d arrived, he smiled at her. The lusciousness in his eyes sparkled funny feelings in her tummy. She couldn’t help but smile back and wrestle with a weird giddy feeling that woke up inside of her.

  “Have you ever told anyone else about these dreams? Have you told the police?”

  “No way,” Mia said. “They already think I’m crazy enough. The only person I’ve told is Glenda…and now you.”

  He nodded, as though assessing everything, then said with the sexiest compassion she’d ever seen in a guy, “Let’s just say I know where you’re coming from a lot better than you realize.”

  “Because you’re a therapist,” she said, more as a statement than a question.

  But he didn’t answer her right away. He simply looked at her, like a thousand questions of his own pummeled through his mind. “Yeah…sure,” he said, unconvincingly. “Because I’m a therapist.”

  She winced, not sure if he was intending to sound sarcastic or not. Finding another cluster of pinecones by an array of ferns, she scooped them up in her hands and shoved those into her bag too.

  Their boots marched forward in an odd, almost musical unison. She wanted to change the subject and get away from the awkwardness that bloomed inside of her.

  “Is there something wrong with Nate?”

  Leo stopped walking and looked at her.

  So much for getting rid of awkward moments.

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  “I mean, I didn’t mean it like…” she said. “I mean, are we safe with him?”