by Hester Young
“Was Jocelyn lying about all the things she did for you?” I ask. “Getting you through school, covering for you with your parents? Was she just blowing smoke up my ass, or what?”
Lise jams her hands into the pockets of her sweatshirt. She wanted me to be weak, and so I was. She wanted to be the good one, and so I let her. Jocelyn was always telling me what a screwup I was, that I self-sabotage. So fine. She shrugs. I decided to be the person she said I was.
“How did she find out about you guys?”
Lise crosses the room and stops on a bloodstained patch of tile, her back to me. I told her.
“You told her?”
I told her we needed to talk, somewhere away from Mom and Dad. She showed up here at the restaurant, asked me, “What did you do this time?” And so I told her. I thought she should know. I’d ended stuff with Kai a couple weeks before, but I felt bad. She thought she had this amazing, loyal boyfriend, but she didn’t. She had a right to know the truth.
I remember my ex-husband confessing his affair years ago, trying to pretend it was for my benefit and not some selfish cry for attention. For a second, I actually feel sorry for Jocelyn, getting ambushed like that. At least I didn’t know my husband’s mistress. Jocelyn’s betrayal was double.
“So you told her and then what?”
Lise turns to face me, and now I can see the gash in her head, the blood running from her scalp. Again, she lends me her eyes. Images of Jocelyn flutter through the space, silent and slow, as if underwater. Jocelyn clutching her temples, struggling to process. Jocelyn flushed, her mouth pinched and venomous as it all sinks in. Jocelyn unloading on her sister, screaming, her pretty features twisted by rage.
It seemed so stupid, how worked up she was getting. Lise runs her fingers over the edge of the counter. She didn’t even like Kai, not really. She was always trying to change him. I told her, maybe you’re into the idea of him more than the actual guy. Maybe I did you a favor, showing you who he really is.
“Did she hit you with something?”
She shoved me.
Suddenly the restaurant goes spinning. I’m knocked off balance, lurching backward, falling. A splitting impact to my skull, and then darkness. Cold.
My head hit the counter, Lise says from the void. And that was it. No chance to fix things. Over so fast.
This was not a premeditated killing, then, but an argument gone very wrong. Enough to exonerate Jocelyn, perhaps, had she not handled the aftermath with such careful precision.
“She took your sweatshirt. Pretended to be you.”
Yeah.
I have to grudgingly admire Jocelyn’s quick thinking. She was too smart to let herself be seen in the wrong place at the wrong time, to ruin her alibi with Kai. Did Jocelyn realize she was setting up Elijah as the perfect suspect when she pretended to dump him on their walk home? Was she really willing to sacrifice him for her own gain? She and Elijah were in the same boat, after all. Lise betrayed him, too.
“Elijah loved you,” I say, and now I’m back in the freezer again, the lightbulb flickering overhead. “He’s been wandering around the woods at night for weeks, signaling to you.”
I know. Lise is just a voice again, an echo in my brain. The woods are the only place he can see me.
“What do you mean?”
He left a bunch of lanterns out there. I turn them on sometimes at night, do our special signal. So he knows that I’m still with him. Always, like I promised.
“Jesus Christ. That was you.” Of all the explanations I had for those lights, ghostly love note never made the list. The image is as pathetic as it is romantic. Is this what I’ll be reduced to, the only way left for me to tell Noah and my girls I love them? Silly electrical tricks that could just as easily be dismissed as faulty wiring? My daughters need a mother, not a poltergeist. If only I’d stayed away from Ono Place tonight. If only I hadn’t followed Jocelyn inside.
“Why did she come back tonight?” I mutter, to myself as much as Lise. “Why did Jocelyn come here?”
Lise doesn’t respond, but her sister’s appearance at the restaurant doesn’t sit well with me. Those garbage bags in her knapsack—did Jocelyn intend to move Lise’s body? To where? Without a car, Jocelyn couldn’t get far, and there’s not a lot of options in the square except . . .
That Dumpster.
“Ugh.” The thought leaves me queasy. The girl would do anything to hide a mistake.
It occurs to me that any sudden doubts Jocelyn had about the crime scene were likely my fault. I changed the game yesterday, told her that her alibi was ruined, that Kai had admitted he was doing ’shrooms with Brayden instead of studying math with her on campus. That left her wide open to questions. Where she was that night. Why she lied. Jocelyn must have weighed her options and decided that the body in the freezer was too easily tied to her.
This wasn’t supposed to be about you, Lise says, and I feel her presence fading. The lightbulb begins to dim. I didn’t mean to put you in danger.
“Danger?” I choke back the tears that my eyes are too cold to cry. “Lise, I’m going to die here.”
No. You won’t.
The freezer light erupts suddenly into sparks and then winks out. A shower of burning embers falls like fairy dust. I reach out my hands to catch them, their light, their warmth, but they die in midair. I’m back to where I started. Alone in the dark.
The freezer door rattles.
I stare into the black, edging toward the noise. Has Jocelyn returned to finish this? Will I get my chance to fight?
The door cracks open, and a wedge of light pours in. I tense up, ready to attack with everything I have. But it’s not Jocelyn peering into the freezer with an expression of pure shock.
It’s Rae.
thirty
What in hell?” Rae gapes as I burst from the freezer. “Charlie!? What happened?”
My skin burns as it hits the warm air. I lean over the stainless steel counter, shaking, trying to compose myself.
Rae holds up a screwdriver with her right hand. “This was stuck in the door. Did someone lock you in there?”
At the sight of the screwdriver, I can only shake my head. “That little bitch.” I wince as the blood rushes painfully back to my digits. “What are you doing here? How’d you know where I was?”
“Find My iPhone. I used your Apple ID and password. I saw you type them in before.” She looks a bit guilty at this admission, as if I might honestly be mad at her for tracking me down.
I’m so grateful to see her, so happy to be alive, I almost cry. “So you came out here looking for me? Just like that? Maybe I’m not the only one with a sixth sense.”
“I was mostly pissed off you were prowling around without me,” Rae confesses. “I mean, you sent me this cryptic text about how you were looking into something—I was ticked. It’s our last night. We should be doing this together! So I looked up your location and had Thom bring me over. I saw our rental car, and then . . . someone walked out of the restaurant.” She peels off her cardigan and drapes it around my shoulders. “Was that Jocelyn?”
“Yeah, that was Jocelyn. Did you see where she went?”
“Kai picked her up about ten minutes ago. They drove off in a red Corolla. I came over here as soon as they left to see what was up. I don’t think they saw me.” She takes me by the wrist. “What’s going on? Did Jocelyn put you in the freezer?”
“Not just me,” I tell her. “Lise’s in there, too.”
Her jaw drops so hard it nearly detaches. “Lise?” Her startled gaze shifts to the freezer door. “Are you telling me—”
“She’s dead, Rae,” I say. “Jocelyn killed her. It was an accident, but the cover-up sure wasn’t.”
Rae looks ill at this revelation. “Oh my God. Victor and Sue . . . they’ll be devastated.”
I can’t let myself imagine their pain, no
t now. Something else is gnawing at me. “Did you say Jocelyn’s with Kai?”
“Yeah. You don’t think—was he in on this?”
“No. But Kai’s not safe with her.” I cross through the kitchen, my misgivings multiplying with each step. “We’ve got to find out where they went.”
Rae scrambles to keep up with me. “I don’t get it. Why would Jocelyn hurt Kai? He’s the one person on her side.”
“He can blow apart her alibi,” I say, “and she knows it.”
She knows because I told her. I told her that he’d already begun to crack, to spill her secrets. I told her Kai wouldn’t keep lying for her, that he’d go to the police, tell them what he knew. Unaware of who I was dealing with, I cemented Kai as a liability in her mind—and given his relationship with Lise, he is indeed a liability. He has the power to reveal both Jocelyn’s opportunity and her motive for murder. If law enforcement ever got wind of his fling with Lise, suspicion would immediately shift to Jocelyn.
“Kai is a loose end,” I tell Rae. “Just like I was.” I sprint toward the restaurant door. “She’s come this far. She’s not turning back.”
We jog across the square to where our vehicle is parked. This is it, I realize. The reason for the visions I’ve been having, why I’ve been seeing with Kai’s eyes. That moment in the woods was where it all began. Where he and Lise sealed their fate.
I couldn’t help her, but I can still save him. I hope.
“You think Jocelyn’s going to off him?” Rae asks. “Just like that?”
“Probably.” I hit the unlock button on my car key, and the car chirps back in response. “With Kai dead, she’d completely control the narrative. She could pin everything on him.” I slide behind the wheel and close my eyes. “We’ve got to think. Figure out where she’d take him, how she’d do it.”
“Kai’s a lot bigger and stronger than Jocelyn,” Rae points out. “It would have to be something sneaky. Poison, maybe? She could slip him some bug killer or something. Although it would be hard to make that look like an accident . . .”
“People are going to find Lise in that freezer. As far as Jocelyn knows, they’ll find me there, too. There’s no way to make that look like an accident.”
“A suicide, then,” Rae guesses. “She could spin Kai’s death as a suicide. Kai killed you and Lise, but he couldn’t live with the guilt, something along those lines.”
I nod. “It’s that or self-defense. She could say he attacked her.”
Rae scratches her head. “So she kills him how? Beats him in the head with a tire iron? Pushes him off a tall cliff?”
I turn toward her slowly, palms beginning to tingle. A push. A tall cliff. Of course.
The sensations I had by the caldera come rushing back. Darkness. The pressure of two hands on my back. Fingertips pressing, pushing, urging me toward the edge of a four-hundred-foot drop. I dismissed the experience as noise, an unrelated fragment of the past or future. Now I see how wrong I was.
My impressions on this island haven’t been random. They’ve been connecting me to Kai all along. I’ve seen with his eyes, felt with his body. Unwillingly shared moments of both his past and future. If Rae and I can’t get to Jocelyn, that push is where his future ends.
I used to take my daughters here, Victor said as he stood on the summit of Kīlauea, legendary home of the goddess Pele. This was our special spot.
Special, indeed. I insert the key into the ignition, toss Rae the GPS.
“What?” she says. “Where are we going?”
“To a place with a tall cliff.” I pull sharply away from the curb. The car squeals onto Kanoa Drive, already ten miles above the speed limit. “Volcanoes National Park.”
* * *
• • •
ALTHOUGH THE PARK is open twenty-four hours a day, costs have evidently affected its staffing abilities. The guard shacks at the entry stand empty, and we pass through unobserved. I was hoping for a ranger, someone who could confirm that Kai’s old Corolla has been by, but no such luck. We’re left operating on blind faith.
The ride over—nearly an hour in the pitch dark—was a tense one, but at least I’ve brought Rae up to speed. She called the Hawaiʻi County Police Department, alerted them to the body in the freezer at Ono Place, told them sixteen-year-old Jocelyn Nakagawa attempted to kill a visiting journalist who was looking into the story. Eventually, fed up with the dispatcher’s many questions, Rae demanded they send someone to Crater Rim Drive at Volcanoes National Park and hung up. Now she sits clutching the door, uncharacteristically quiet, as she prepares herself for what might lie ahead.
For the first time since we began digging into the disappearance of Lise Nakagawa, this is no longer a game to Rae. Someone could die tonight. I very nearly did.
We see no other cars as we pass the visitor center, although I’m sure there are people out there somewhere, hikers hoping to catch a better view of the lava flows at night. At least the wind is on our side. The caldera itself is a bit hazy, but the clouds haven’t yet drifted to the street.
I proceed down Crater Rim Drive, trying to remember the little nook by the rim that Victor showed us, exactly where it was situated. His favorite spot in the park, he said, and if I’m right, the place made an impression on Jocelyn. It certainly made an impression on me. I know what I felt standing at the edge. The end could come so quickly.
“What are we going to do?” Rae asks. “How do we find them?”
I think it over. Although the road follows the caldera rim all the way to the observatory, we’re too far from the edge to see anyone while driving by.
“We’ll park over by the steam vents,” I say. “And from there . . . follow the path west, I guess.”
“We’ll be wandering around a mile or more in the dark,” Rae warns me. “And you don’t have a flashlight.”
She’s right. In the absence of a car charger, my phone remains dead. We’ve got nothing but the light on Rae’s cell to guide us.
And what if I’m wrong?
That sensation I had on the edge of the caldera bore no time stamp. It could be weeks in the future, or months. If Jocelyn waits even a single night to dispose of Kai, Rae and I won’t be here to stop her. I can point my finger and scream bloody murder—literally—but Jocelyn won’t be easily defeated. As soon as she learns that I’m alive, she’ll adjust her story, craft explanations, find ways to acquit herself.
Don’t get ahead of yourself. I focus on the headlights, the winding road.
Fortunately, the steam vents are marked by signs. I turn into the parking lot, trying not to think about the story of the ranger who fell inside one, the pain and terror of that end. One thing is apparent: if Jocelyn intends to kill Kai, she has plenty of options out here.
“Charlie.” Rae grabs my arm, interrupting my morbid train of thought. “Look.”
In the corner of the parking lot, a single car. I drive closer, flashing my headlights over it. A red Corolla. No sign of the occupants, but the Free Thought bumper sticker leaves no room for doubt.
“They’re here,” Rae breathes.
I park horizontally across the Corolla’s rear, blocking them in. Rae slides out of the passenger seat with her phone light on and shines it quickly into the backseat. She shakes her head. Empty.
I join Rae on the curb. A nearby steam vent catches the breeze, engulfing us in its telltale mineral odor. “What do we do? Just walk along the path yelling for Kai and hope we interrupt whatever Jocelyn has planned?”
“No,” Rae says. “No way. For all we know, that kid is already dead and Jocelyn’s lurking in the bushes somewhere. We don’t want to give her a heads-up that we’re coming. Not after what she did to you tonight.”
“She’ll see our light,” I point out. “There’s no surprising her.”
“If she sees our light, she’ll think we’re just hikers and she’ll try to wait
us out. Remember, she still thinks you’re trapped in that freezer. We have the upper hand as long as she’s not expecting us.”
I’m not sure if anyone ever really has the upper hand with Jocelyn, but I have no better plan. Rae charges ahead, locating a paved pathway that eventually runs parallel to the rim. My gut in knots, I follow the bouncing light of her phone.
It’s chilly in the park tonight, and if I hadn’t just experienced subfreezing temperatures with a dead body, I might be uncomfortable. As things are, I count my blessings. Even the dark is manageable compared to the total blackness of that freezer. The moon is more than half-full, awash in a sky of rolling cloud cover, and I can make out plenty of shapes: grass, shrubs, the crooked silhouettes of scrappy native trees. In the distance, an indistinct pink glow hints at the molten layer just beneath the surface of the Halemaʻumaʻu crater.
Minutes later, however, the visibility deteriorates. Rae’s light grows murky ahead of me, her figure dissolving into a cloud. The wind has shifted course. Now the vog drifts in, stealthy as a cat.
As we continue down the trail, it takes over, engulfs the rim area. Rae stops walking and looks back, searching for me in the soupy dark. I jog to catch up with her and trip on a bump in the hard-packed ground. Somehow I avoid a face plant, but the fall does not build confidence. How will we find anything in this mess? I don’t know how far we are from Jocelyn’s special overlook, and Rae’s light only makes it worse, illuminating the floating vapor around us while blinding my eyes to everything else. For a helpless, hopeless minute, I think that all is lost, that under cover of night and vog, Jocelyn will surely get away with this.
But I can’t let her win. The vog is my cover, too. I can use it just like she can.
“Turn your light off,” I tell Rae.
“What?”
