Kiss Her Goodbye: Thriller/Romance with a shocking twist

by Kirsten Mitchell

  Just a few more days of these ridiculous fools and she could get home to share her findings with the department. A smile tugged at her lips just imagining how damn good that would feel.

  She finished the chocolate bar and crumpled up the wrapper in her palm when she heard a snap in the woods behind her. She cocked her head to listen. It snapped again. Penelope spun to face the source.

  But just empty dark woods stood before her. Besides frogs croaking in the lake and the faraway sounds of animals, only silence emitted at her.

  She eased around to look back at the lake again.

  Another snap cracked in the woods. This time louder.

  And closer.

  Could Nate’s ridiculous paranoia actually be correct? Could there be a grizzly bear out there? That was just something she’d said to terrify and control him. But maybe there was one. She scolded herself for not bringing her gun on this trip. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  “Hello?” Barter shouted. “Who’s there? Show yourself. Now”

  The snapping came closer and louder. Barter strained to see into the gloomy trees.

  The shadows parted and a person emerged and stood before her.

  “Oh,” Barter relaxed. “It’s only you. Did you get lonely without me at camp? I was just thinking-”

  Before she could even finish her sentence, they ran at her. Hands thrust up to her shoulders and shoved her backward toward the cliff.

  “Hey!” Penelope screamed. “What the hell are you doing? Have you lost your damn mind?” Her chocolate bar wrapper knocked loose from her fingers and fluttered and twirled down the cliff like a dying butterfly.

  Hands punched and slapped her face. Barter tried to punch back, but a metal weapon caught her wrist. She recoiled in sizzling agony that tore into the bone, and bent to protect herself from further damage. She felt the hood of her sweatshirt being grabbed. She swung up to right-hook her assailant to make them release her, but they only punched back twice as hard. With each beat on her head, her scalp stung with the impact. Hot blood swirled through her hair, around her cheeks and down from the tip of her nose and plopped onto her toenails in her sandals in watery tulip patterns.

  “I am a goddamn cop, you moron!” she boomed, still bending to protect herself. “Do you understand what kind of trouble you’ll get in for doing this to me?”

  Hands shoved her shoulders back, back, back toward the cliff. Toward certain death. Barter thrust her hands up to fight the hands off her in one last ditch effort and thrust her torso hard against the impelling force. Her sandals were losing their grip on the stony, slippery ground. Behind her calves, she could see the lake below the cliff inching closer and closer to her. She was losing her fight.

  “Why are you doing this?” she yelled.

  With one final shove, her sandals flew free from the stony cliff and her feet jetted off the side of the cliff.

  In one moment, all time stopped.

  The air in her collapsed out with one defeated sigh.

  She fell back. Cold mountain air dug ballooned up her over-sized shirt. She could feel herself free-falling to certain death, but she had her back toward it and couldn’t see it coming. All she could see was her assailant’s satisfied smiling face getting smaller and smaller as Penelope dropped away from them.

  She twisted and whirled toward the black water that rushed up to slam and shatter her.

  If she was going to die this way, like a helpless victim whose life had been snatched against her choosing, and not as the hero she’d always thought she was, then at least Constable Penelope Barter wanted to face it for what it was

  And own it like a bad bitch.

  *******

  Saturday, September 16: 9:12 p.m.

  “Yeah, that’s right. Die bitch!” Auxiliary Allan Michaels yelled at his TV screen. He pounded out another successful round of video games. The female avatar fell to the pavement, her red and beige clumpy brains splaying over Michael’s avatar’s feet in quivering misery. Allan let out a victorious whoop.

  He threw the black video game controller atop a stack of sci-fi novels he always kept near his bed and cracked open another root beer.

  “Damn.” He grinned and congratulated himself on another successful day off of doing absolutely nothing. The best part of days off wasn’t the endless video games, but the fact that his training partner, Constable Penelope Barter, wasn’t around to harass him. Although that hadn’t stopped her from sending him a nagging text message every hour on the hour since she’d left on her hiking trip with Leo Lawson and Mia Floyd to Blueflower.

  He glanced at his cell again, a little perplexed that he hadn’t heard from Barter in a while. Even though she was out in the mountains, she would have cell signal boost on her police cell phone and would never hesitate to send him badgering texts. But it had been at least four hours since he’d received anything.

  The weirdest niggling feeling tingled deep in his belly.

  He wondered if he should call the station and report his concern. See what the Chief thought.

  Allan drained the rest of his root beer and crumpled up the can before he arching it over the stack of sci-fis to the pile of hundreds of soda cans in the corner.

  Nah, she was probably fine.

  One thing he knew about Barter was that she was a tough lady who could handle anything. She was probably just busy karate-chopping moose and ripping trees out of the ground for firewood with her bare hands.

  His buddies, Brad and Mulaka, logged online and Allan was ready to play again.

  If anything, Allan welcomed the bliss of not hearing from her for a while as he enjoyed his day off. He shoved the creepy, worried feeling away and picked up his controller to start up a new game.

  *******

  CHAPTER TEN

  The sun cast purple on the lake horizon between the trees. The air pulsed with a chilly fog that curled down the mountainside. Mia plunked down on a log in front of the campfire that Leo had built. She snuggled a fluffy gray blanket around her shoulders and Glenda’s and closed her eyes, marveling at the happy throbs of heat that kissed her cheeks.

  “I don’t know how you did it.” She smiled gratefully at him and held her palms towards the flame to warm them.

  “Yeah, that fire pit was as wet as an outhouse pit,” Glenda laughed. “Speaking of which, I hope there is one here.” She looked back at Nate, who was separated from the group, sitting on the ground. “Nate, dude, bring out the marshmallows. We gotta celebrate making it up that hill and finally getting to camp.”

  Nate hunched at the side of the campsite in the shadows of the trees, away from the others. He hugged his knees to his chest and rocked back and forth, vacantly staring ahead at nothing. Softly, he murmured to himself.

  “Where the hell is Barter? She sure is taking a long time at the lake; it’s getting dark now.” Glenda got up to fetch Nate’s black bag by the tent. She zipped it open to take out marshmallows and then paused. Instead of taking out the delicious treats, her hands slowly pulled out a long dagger in a gold leather sheath, she pulled it out and rolled it in her hands, examining it. Pinching the mother of pearl handle of the blade as though it was infected with something, she pulled it from the sheath and showed it to Mia, arching her eyebrow ever so slightly. “What the actual hell is this?”

  Mia shrugged. “Probably just some hunting knife?”

  Leo looked up from the fire he was working on and rubbed his nose with a frustration that Mia could not ignore. He strode over to Glenda with his hand out, “Give me that. I’ll keep it with me.”

  “Why?” Glenda scrunched up her nose, confused. “Is Nate not to be trusted playing with knives or something?”

  “Nah, I just might need it later,” he said. But Mia recognized the same nervous tendencies he had as a kid. Something about seeing the knife made him uncomfortable, and he was hiding it from them. Leo shoved the blade back in the sheath and put it down the front of his pants.

  Mia caught a glimpse of his manscaping and luscious
ly carved lower abs and she forced her gaze away back to the fire. She dipped her head down into her blanket to hide her smile that refused to go away.

  “Yeah, I was wondering too why Barter’s not back,” Leo looked over to the lake. His face clenched with worry.

  “Should we go look for her?” Mia asked.

  “No,” Nate’s voice burst from across the camp. It was the first word he spoke, since arriving back to camp one hour ago and rocking himself in a corner. “Don’t go look for her. She’ll be back.”

  “Why not, buddy?” Leo laughed.

  “There are bears out there, it’s not safe,” Nate murmured and returned to his rocking back and forth.

  “Bears?” Mia clutched her blanket tighter around herself.

  “All the more reason to go find her and help her get back,” Leo said. “If a group of us go, there’s less chance of being approached by an animal.”

  “Um, well…she actually told me she was bored and she was going home,” Nate said. “She said she was sick of us idiots. I told her not to use the word idiots and she got mad at me.”

  “She wanted to head back at seven o’clock in the evening?” Leo said. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Nate’s rocking picked up in speed. “It’s what she said. Okay?”

  Mia watched Nate. There was something incredibly strange about him. Even stranger than before. Ever since they’d made camp, he had descended into more awkward behavior.

  “Well, I’m just going to take a look around.” Leo got up and threw on his jacket.

  “So, now you’re saying I am a liar.” Nate looked helplessly at him.

  “No,” Leo said. “I just want to make sure she hasn’t gotten hurt or lost out there.” He strolled out toward the lake.

  Mia and Glenda got up from the fire and headed toward the ladies’ tent. As they entered, Mia looked at an empty red bag placed directly in the center of the tent. It was Barter’s. If she left to go back to town, how come she didn’t take her sleeping bag with her? How come she only told Nate and nobody else?

  Glenda shoved the red bag away and set up Mia’s and hers to one side, and Barter’s to the other with a large, almost insulting gap between them. They turned on a lantern and settled in on their bags to start up a game of cards.

  Hours later, she heard Leo make his way back to camp and enter the guys’ tent. Barter did not come into the ladies’ tent. By then, Glenda was already fast asleep and Mia gripped her sleeping bag up to her chin, unable to ignore the horrible feeling swirling her stomach. Did she really leave? It just didn’t seem right.

  “Good night, Mia,” Glenda stirred awake and hummed to her before her eyes dragged closed again. “Sleep tight, don’t let the grizzly bears bite.”

  “Mmm…You too,” Mia’s eyes fluttered closed as she fell, anxiously, to sleep.

  Hours later, she thrust awake and sat up in her sleeping bag, disturbed. She crawled on her knees across the tent to where the red sleeping bag would be and grappled blindly in the dark air, feeling around the tent for Barter, but still she was not there. She crawled back to her bed and inched her legs in when the slightest, softest sound of crinkling distracted her. Her hands patted around in the darkness at the sleeping bag and with each pat, the crinkling continued. Finally, her fingers found the source of the noise and she gripped it.

  It was a piece of paper.

  Was it a receipt? A tag from the sleeping bag? A bubblegum wrapper? Surely, it was just something harmless. Surely…

  She clipped on the lamp and winced as Glenda murmured her distress about the bright amber light barging into her dreams.

  Mia looked at the paper in her hand. It was folded-up notepaper, a different type that had been used before. This paper had pink lines, as the notes she received in the past usually were blank. She hoped to hell it was a shopping list she had written years ago that had somehow gotten trapped in her sleeping bag.

  Her fingers trembled as they unfolded the note. She opened it with the precision of someone disabling a bomb. She stared down in horror at the words.

  It can’t be.

  She read it one more time, and then let out a muffled cry. Glenda stirred in her sleep again, this time in response to the noise, and then rolled over and let out a snore.

  Mia slipped out of her sleeping bag and exited the tent. She padded barefoot across the campsite and unzipped the tent door to the men’s tent. One bag was empty, one was filled with the lump of a body. She made a silent, aggressive prayer that the lump was Leo and not Nate.

  “Leo!” she whispered harshly into the darkness.

  “Mm,” Leo mumbled from the depths of his slumber. “Woman, what is it?”

  She blasted an exhale of relief.

  “I need you to wake up,” she pleaded. “I need to show you something.”

  “What the…?” he ground his fists into his eyes, then yanked the shiny blue sleeping bag over his head, shutting her off. He murmured from under the sleeping bag, “Can’t you see that I’m sleeping?”

  Under his pillow, she saw the glint of Nate’s knife that Leo was keeping safe. It was now out of the sheath.

  “Where is Nate?”

  “You wake me up in the middle of the night to just randomly ask me that?” he said. “Who knows where he is? Probably went scouring the earth for rare forest spices that can only be harvested at the witching hour.”

  Mia crossed the tent to snap on the lantern, filling the tent with a flickering orange glow. She placed the note on the sleeping bag under his chin. “Look at this.”

  Leo lowered the sleeping bag from over his head and squinted at the note in front of his nose. He reached for his bedside bag and pulled out a pair of black-framed reading glasses and slid them up his nose. Mia silently scolded herself for noticing how adorable they made him look.

  “What is this?” he said after reading it. “Who wrote this? What does it mean?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “You’re next,” Leo read the note aloud. “Next for what? Next to win a lottery jackpot? Next in line at the DMV?”

  “Stop making fun, this is really serious,” Mia said. “I didn’t write this note. I have no pen in my tent.”

  “Oh, come on, Mia,” he laughed. “It was probably Barter who left this. Just trying to get ruffle your feathers.”

  “Barter? Barter is a cop,” Mia said. “You mean to tell me that the cop who is investigating the disappearance of my own son suddenly got the idea to write me death threats just for giggles?”

  “Stranger things have happened.” He shrugged.

  “No,” Mia said. “She would not do that.” As rough around the edges as she was, Mia had to admit that Barter seemed to be the epitome of a professional police investigator. She was not the type who would ever lower herself to harassing a civilian with some petty prank.

  Leo sat up in his sleeping bag. He wrapped his arms comfortingly around Mia, who was squatting before him. Mia’s body melted to his touch and she tensed herself to remain strong against his warmth. It was futile. The longer he held her, the weaker she grew. She fell to her bottom and sat before him.

  “So you’re saying the writer of these death threats has followed you here to the forest?” He caressed her face with his strong palm, evaporating her fear with each stroke. His eyes glimmered in the darkness. She wanted to collapse into him and escape all this madness.

  “Yes,” she murmured. “Actually, I think it was Nate who wrote this. I think he’s been following me and Glenda. I can feel it in the way he looks at us. I think he’s obsessed with her and wants to get to me. Surely, you’ve noticed it too.”

  Leo winced, as though he was thinking something he wasn’t saying. “Can you honestly say,” Leo said as he smiled again and continued caressing her face and then kissed her forehead, “that the handwriting in this note is exactly the same as the handwriting as your own?”

  She took the note back from him and studied it. It was possible it was the same
handwriting, it looked very similar. But she could not say for absolute certain.

  “I don’t know…” Her eyes followed the curves of each letter more closely. The loops, the dots, the slashes. It was almost exactly her own writing. Not quite, but almost. “As I said, I don’t have a pen. So, I just don’t know…” But how could Nate possibly emulate her writing so well? Her shoulders slumped as she realized how silly she was being, jumping to conclusions. She was being unfair, judging him so harshly just because he was socially inept.

  “You see?” Leo said as though sensing her change in thought. He lifted her chin to meet his gaze. He took the note from her, folded it sternly, and then tucked it inside of one of his shoes. “You’ve been through so much in four years. But don’t worry, we will get through this. Together. And if it turns out that it’s Barter who’s doing this as a prank, we will deal with her.”

  But the lump in her heart made it terrifying to be strong right now. A string of tears threatened to collect like pearls in her eyes.

  “I like your grit.” He grinned. “And if you want, I can give you some hints on how to get even with her. Maybe ruin her life? I’ve got a lot of juicy shit on her that would really screw her over if anyone knew.”

  “Really?” Mia stared at him stunned.

  “No, of course not,” he laughed. “God, did you think I was serious? I don’t play dirty. But what I can do is give you the best kiss of your life right now.”

  Mia pulled back from him. Was he drunk? “We can’t do that, Leo. You know that we can’t.” Although she very much wanted to. One false move from him and she would jump all over him. Even the suggestion of a kiss, imagining how it felt to be kissed by him, years ago, sent indescribable flutters through her and wound her so tightly she thought she would burst.

  “I know.” He smiled.