by TAYLOR ADAMS
A man walks between the fires.
Seeing another human gives Cambry a shivery jolt—fires or no fires, she’d been certain she was alone out here—and she adjusts her footing, disturbing loose rocks. At this distance, the stranger is just a pacing speck. He looks shirtless. He crouches by each fire, as if prodding with a stick or poker. When he reaches the end of the row, he turns and checks each fire again.
Slow, patient, methodical.
She wishes she hadn’t left her binoculars in her trunk. She doesn’t dare approach any closer. Even a quarter mile feels too close.
The obvious explanation is that he’s just burning brush, as many landowners do before the summer burn ban. But the fires are too small, and the stone pyramids appear too purposeful. Maybe he’s smoking or slow-cooking something. Venison? Salmon?
Her furies whisper: Human?
She wonders if she’s trespassing. Cambry has always taken care never to steal from private property, lest she catch a bullet. Best to make your lifts in public spaces, difficult as it may be. She can’t remember passing any sunken fences or signs, but she glances behind herself anyway to check. When she looks back ahead, she realizes the faraway man has stopped pacing. He’s standing still now, like a scarecrow, halfway between his two nearest fires.
He’s staring uphill. At her.
Cambry’s blood turns to ice water. A tug in her stomach. She doesn’t move, either, matching his stance. The distance between them is too far to shout. She could try to wave, maybe. But she doesn’t.
The man keeps staring.
The wind changes direction, a low growl that shifts the trees, and the four smoke trails push leftward, drifting into the man’s face. He doesn’t seem to react.
In this surreal standoff, Cambry squints harder. This isn’t her first time being stared at in the nine months she’s lived like a refugee. She’s been asked to leave more parking lots and campgrounds than she can count. She tries to discern more detail: The sleeveless outline of a wifebeater undershirt. Brown khaki pants. His hands move for something at his waist (Gun, gun, gun, her furies whisper, but it’s not the right shape). He raises it with both hands to his face.
Time to go.
He studies her through his cupped hands. A pinprick of glinted light confirms—yes, he’s viewing her through lenses.
Go, Cambry. Now.
But this surreal moment seems to stretch forever, the air clotting, and she strangely feels like she really should wave now. She almost does. She’s self-conscious, spotlighted, feeling his distant eyes crawl up and down her body.
Her heartbeat rises. A frenzied rattle against her ribs.
Go-go-go-right-now . . .
And she turns and calmly retreats from the rise of grassy land, keeping her movements slow and casual in the gaze of this faraway stranger’s binoculars.
The second she’s out of his view, she breaks into a sprint.
* * *
Once her parked car is within eyeshot, she stops running and looks back.
To her muted terror, he now stands exactly where she’d been just moments ago. He doesn’t see her yet. He’s pacing on the grassy slope with his hands at his hips, moving loose rocks with his foot, searching the chalky soil for her footprints.
She drops to her knees behind the nearest tree, catching her breath.
At this closer distance, she can see him better. He’s a towering guy. Bulging biceps. Buzz cut. Thirties or forties, with a distinct military look. He must have run, too, to catch up to her so quickly. He’s searching the surrounding forest now, shielding his eyes from the sunset.
With a chill, she realizes she’s being tracked.
She unslings her backpack and slinks lower, lower, until she’s flat against the packed soil. The thin lodgepole pine barely covers her. Viewed from his angle, she’s just an eye and a cheekbone peering from behind a trunk. His vision can’t possibly be that good, right?
His binoculars probably are.
He’s unarmed, at least. That makes Cambry feel better. She imagined he’d have a bolt-action slung over his back, or a hatchet in his hand. But he’s empty-handed, save for those binoculars, and under the sleeveless wifebeater his flesh is lobster red. A nasty sunburn. His pants are formal-looking slacks. Was he changing his clothes, too? What was he doing?
He’s still searching the trees for her. His scanning focus approaches Cambry’s hiding spot, sweeping left to right—her stomach balls into a tight knot—as his attention passes her tree, studies it briefly, and keeps searching. Thank God.
Remaining stone-still and sunken into the yellow grass, she slides her right hand into her back pocket and feels for the reassuring lump of her KA-BAR, a three-inch folding blade. She wishes Blake hadn’t stolen the pistol when he left. A gun—even that piddly little mouse gun—would be nice right now. She resents her backpack, too. It slows her down.
Only now, crouched behind a tree and catching her gulped breaths in the fading daylight, does Cambry grasp the severity of what just happened. This stranger ran a quarter mile uphill, into the trees, to reach her. Immediately. Without hesitation. He even left his four strange fires unattended. Now, more than ever, she wants to know what purpose they served.
She can feel it building. The electricity in her nerves. The whispers in her mind, urging her to pack it out and run, to tear off the page and restart. To be Cambry Nguyen, the cross-country demon with the six-minute mile, the girl who torched every bridge behind her, who barreled from friend to friend, city to city, lover to lover, the way a swarm of locusts devastates a crop and moves on. The woman who found flaws in every good thing and solved them by making them vanish in her rearview mirror, from the West Coast to the East and nearly back again.
Her mouth is dry. She hasn’t had a cigarette since January, but she needs one now.
It’s probably a misunderstanding, she tells herself. For once, she should try facing a problem instead of running. It’s no big deal—property lines are blurry out here. On her route back from the campground, she’d probably missed a rust-eaten sign somewhere and trespassed on some guy’s private property, which gave him no choice but to follow her and ask her what she’s—
The sunburned man’s head snaps back. He sees her.
He doesn’t wave. He doesn’t raise his binoculars. He just launches into a silent, mechanical sprint toward her, resuming the chase.
Cambry runs like hell.
* * *
When she reaches her Corolla on the road’s shoulder, her heart is slamming in her eardrums and her breaths are hoarse. She’s in good shape—she ran a half-marathon last year—but her backpack jostles heavily on her shoulders and the straps rub her skin raw. She’s not sure if the sunburned man is still following her through the trees, or how close he is.
As she throws the door open, she doesn’t even glance back to locate her pursuer—that would cost precious seconds. She dives inside, twists the key, stomps on the gas. The engine roars, the tires claw handfuls of grit, and she’s off and racing under a billow of dust.
She catches her breath for a second time as she drives. Questions now, rising faster than she can think. Who was he? What was he doing? What would he have done, had he caught up to her? And more pressing: Shouldn’t you call 911?
There’s no signal out here, she knows. It’s a dead zone.
When you get into town, though . . . shouldn’t you call?
A gunshot pierces the air. She flinches hard.
A pothole. Just a pothole, slamming underneath the chassis. She rubs her arms, shivery with goose bumps. Even when she does get a 911 dispatcher on the line, she wonders what exactly she’ll say: Hello, dispatcher? I just saw a man tending to four small campfires.
Weird, yes. But illegal?
It all depends on what’s in those fires, an unhelpful voice tells her.
It’s a hell of a leap. She’s miles into the sticks, and it could very well be his own property he chased her from. Another rut scrapes the Corolla’s undercarriage. She
lets off the gas a bit. The last thing she needs is another flat tire.
The sun is gone now. The magic hour, photographers call it, because the twilight is shadowless and dreamy, like a blue-tinged painting. And something else—Cambry always swore she could sense this, despite Lena’s skepticism—she can feel electricity gathering in the air. The growing divide between positive and negative. Lightning is coming.
She passes familiar billboards for the Magma Springs Diner, then a pot shop—its slogan is “It’s Surprisingly Easy Being Green”—and she feels better. She got away clean. As the road winds between raised humps of trees, she glimpses blinking red lights on the horizon. Radio towers. The refuge of civilization, not far away. Humans. Cars. Speed limits. Insurance. Rent. Dentists.
She exhales—she didn’t realize she was holding her breath. She’s coming up on Highway 200 now, tapping her brakes at the junction, when she hears the jarring bleat of a siren.
She checks her rearview mirror.
Oh, thank God.
A dust-caked police cruiser races up on her tail with a flashing light bar. She pulls over like an obedient citizen, and the cop parks smoothly behind her. Black and gold paint. Montana Highway Patrol. The siren cuts, but the lights stay up, strobing in her mirrors.
Cambry hates cops. And she hates how relieved she is to see one.
Even in the rush of the moment, she coolly prepares her story. She makes sure the hose and fuel can are zipped up and hidden in her backpack. It was a nature walk, she’ll explain. Just a boondocking girl with a car full of psychological baggage, communing with the guardians of the afterlife, courting a nervous breakdown. Nothing more.
The state trooper steps out of his car and leaves his door ajar. As he approaches her Corolla, framed against the cool blue dusk, details sharpen. His tan-brown uniform is half-buttoned, untucked. He’s sunburned underneath. Binoculars swinging from a lanyard around his neck. Still red-faced, because he’s sprinted all the way from their first encounter to wherever he’d parked his cruiser.
His uniform has a name stitched on the breast, visible now as he reaches her window.
CPL. RAYMOND R. RAYCEVIC.
Chapter 3
Lena
“You pulled her over.”
He blinked. Excuse me?
“You pulled her over,” she said again. “On the day she died. The day before you found her body. It was in the report.”
A surprised beat—and then he nodded. “Did I not mention that?”
“No.”
“I could’ve sworn I did—”
“You didn’t.”
“Oh.” He frowned, and then glanced at the Shoebox recorder, quietly listening. “You told me to start with the night I found her body. June seventh.”
“Why did you pull her over the day before?”
“Doesn’t it say in the report?”
“I’m asking you.”
“Speeding.” He studied the smoke in the distance. “It was dusk, around eight o’clock—”
It was 8:09 p.m., Lena knew.
“And I saw that blue Toyota, right there, just tear ass past me. Going eighty, ninety.”
She nodded, wondering if tear ass was part of the Montana law enforcement lexicon. But it fit. Cambry drove with a lead foot. Always running, like a tsunami was at her back.
“I stopped her.” He spoke slowly, regretfully. “And . . . I spoke to her.”
Despite herself, Lena leaned forward and hung on every word. A sour tug in her stomach. She was certain she already knew everything he was about to say, but it still felt momentous, like interviewing someone who’d witnessed Cambry’s ghost. Everyone from her sister’s life ended up on this pedestal. She’d even come to envy Cambry’s boyfriends—the long line of terrible guys she had seemed to collect like bugs in a jar. A cocaine dealer (Terrible Guy #11), a woefully inept credit-card thief (Terrible Guy #6), and at least one narcissist (Terrible Guy #14, who carried a katana and wouldn’t shut up about the novel he was writing). She’d been fascinated by awful people, it seemed, and used them for as long as they suited her.
And to Lena, it wasn’t fair, because every last one of them—like Corporal Raycevic standing before her—was privy to things about her sister she could never know. All these awful people. She gripped a knot of her own hair and twisted, an eye-watering tug to the roots.
Raycevic continued: “I could tell immediately that she’d been living in the vehicle for some time. Battery, clothes, sleeping bag, backpack. Dirt under her nails. She looked tired. But people do, in that lifestyle. I’ve seen how it hardens you, not knowing where your next meal is coming from.”
My sister knew how to take care of herself, Lena thought but didn’t say.
She was living off the grid. Not helpless.
“Her eyes were red. She’d been crying. I asked her if she knew how fast she was going. She said it was an accident. She was apologetic, maybe a bit distant, like something was weighing on her mind—”
“She was apologetic?”
“Yeah. Why?”
Cambry was a social chameleon; many things, to many people, somehow all at once—but deferential to authority figures wasn’t one of them. Back in seventh grade, she’d tied a dish sponge tightly with twine so it would dry as a compressed pellet, then removed the twine and flushed it down a school toilet. The building’s pipes had to be excavated. Summer break had started ten days early.
Lena bit her tongue. “What did she say, exactly?”
“She . . . she told me her dirtbag boyfriend had ditched her in the middle of a cross-country trip. Left her broke and alone with just a few dollars, finding her way home—”
“That happened months before. In Florida.”
“She lied to me. I believed it. I wish I’d known, Lena.”
She studied his face behind his jet-black Oakleys, searching for cracks in his guilt. It wasn’t professional, but it was authentic. He was every bit as wounded and sorely defensive as a real human being would and should be. He’d spoken to a desperately troubled young woman moments before her suicide, he’d had a chance to save her life, and what did he do?
“I gave her a warning.”
“No ticket?”
“She was just trying to get home.”
“That’s all you have to say? I wish I’d tried that.”
“No, you don’t,” Raycevic said. “You’ve never even been pulled over.”
She scoffed. But he was right. Lena wasn’t even sure she’d ever broken the law in her life, unless you count a few underage beers and more than a few overdue library books. How would Raycevic know that, though? Unless he researched me, too?
“And then,” he said quietly, “I let her go on her way.”
“The day before you found her body under this bridge.”
“Yes.”
“The day she killed herself.”
“Yes.”
“Minutes before her estimated time of—”
“It’s all in the report.”
“That’s all that happened?” For some reason, Lena relished asking this. Her mother used to pull this line on both twins alike, although far more frequently on Cambry: That’s all that happened, huh? Someone was just asking you to store it in your backpack?
Corporal Raycevic broke away abruptly, leaned back over the guardrail, and stared down at the ravine floor below, like time had slipped back three months and he was once again discovering Cambry’s crumpled body amid the granite boulders. The big man chewed his lower lip, as if he was about to divulge something major, before hurriedly changing his mind.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s all.”
* * *
The great thing about cops?
Everything has a paper trail.
After the medical examiner ruled the death a suicide, Howard County kindly provided me with a scan of the handwritten log that Corporal Raymond Raycevic had filled out, probably moments after he stopped Cambry for speeding on Highway 200. The PDF can be downloaded here, de
ar readers: HCEAS6919.pdf
Coincidence, right?
The same trooper who pulled my twin over for speeding would discover her body under a remote bridge serving a closed road, just twenty-four hours later. Life can be so strange.
I’m trying to wrap my head around it.
Have you heard the one about the Japanese businessman? It’s something of a party joke for awful people. In August of 1945, this guy was on a business trip to a factory in Hiroshima. When Little Boy dropped, he suffered thermal burns and temporary blindness. He was one of thousands treated for his wounds in the terrible aftermath, but he was one of the lucky ones, and just days later, he returned home to his grateful family, several hundred miles south.
In Nagasaki.
Just in time to catch the second one.
For some reason, that poor guy has been on my mind a lot lately. He’s a reminder, I guess, of how random life can be. We live in a heaving sea of causes and effects. Coincidences happen every second. They don’t necessarily mean anything.
Like Hairpin Bridge’s ghostly whispers embedded in ten-megabyte widgets of crunchy static—sometimes white noise is just white noise.
Funnily enough, it was Cambry who told me that atom bomb story. We were eleven or twelve, I think, sitting on her bed. I remember she’d blared Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” on repeat because she loved the part where Death tells the woman We’ll be able to fly. Like dying is a superpower or something. Her room smelled like pumpkin because we’d just carved jack-o’-lanterns. Odd, how sounds and smells linger in the memory.
I even miss the bad things. I miss the way she used to call me Ratface (I have no idea why—our faces were exactly the same, according to science). I miss her nicotine breath. I miss the way she waited restless at every family event, like she was sitting on razor blades, lashed by the doubts and worries that her therapist called her chorus of furies. Even her flaws were operatic, like something from Greek myth.
We were identical twins. But not copies, like people guess.
I’d describe us more like a mirror’s reflection—where her right is my left, and vice versa. I went to college. She went renegade. I can write a novel. She can clean a rabbit. I live in my mind. She lives in the moment.
