by Riley Sager
Sam’s story, meanwhile, made the same rounds as Lisa’s and, eventually, mine. Evening news. Front pages. Magazine covers. Oh, how the reporters came running. Probably the very ones who would later camp on my parents’ front lawn. Sam granted a handful of print interviews, plus an exclusive one to that TV bitch with the Chanel-scented paper, likely for more or less the same price given to me.
Her only condition was that her face couldn’t be shown on camera, nor could any new photographs be taken of her. All anyone saw was that single yearbook photo—the permanent face of her particular ordeal. That’s why it was a big deal when she agreed to join Lisa and me in a chat with Oprah, on camera, for all the world to see. Which made it a bigger deal when I backed out. Because of me, no one got to glimpse another view of Samantha Boyd.
A year after that, she vanished.
It wasn’t a sudden thing, her disappearance. Instead, it was a slow fading, like morning fog sapping away in the sun. Reporters writing about the tenth anniversary of the Nightlight Inn Murders suddenly had a hard time tracking her down. Her mother eventually came forward to admit she’d lost touch. Federal authorities, who like to keep tabs on victims of violent crimes, couldn’t find her.
She was gone. Off the grid, as Coop puts it.
No one knows for sure what happened, but that didn’t keep theories from sprouting and spreading like mold spores. One article I read surmised that she had changed her name and moved to South America. Another suggested that she was living in isolation somewhere out west. The murder-porn sites took a darker view, naturally, tossing out conspiracy theories involving suicide, kidnapping, government cover-ups.
But now she’s here, right in front of me. Her appearance is so unexpected that I’m at a loss for words. All I can muster is, “What are you doing here?”
Sam rolls her eyes. “You really suck at this hello thing.”
“Sorry,” I say. “Hello.”
“Good job.”
“Thanks. But it still doesn’t tell me why you’re here.”
“Isn’t it obvious? I’m here to see you.” Sam’s voice brings to mind a speakeasy—smoky and booze-scented. It contains the dark lilt of something forbidden. “I thought we should finally meet.”
We stare at each other a moment, each of us assessing the damage to the other. I get the feeling Sam has also read up on me, because she eyes my stomach first, then my shoulder. I, meanwhile, sneak a glance at her leg, trying to remember if there was a noticeable limp when she crossed the street.
Thoughts of Lisa slide into my head. We’re a rare breed, she once told me. We need to stick together.
Now that she’s gone, no one else can understand what we’ve been through. Sam and I are the only ones. And while I still don’t fully comprehend why she’s come out of hiding simply to see me, I find myself giving a reluctant nod.
“And so we have,” I say, my voice still dulled by surprise. “Would you like to come up?”
• • •
We sit in the living room, not drinking the coffee I’ve set out in front of us. I’ve since changed out of my running clothes into blue jeans, red flats, and a turquoise blouse. A splash of color to counteract all of Sam’s black.
I perch on a straight-backed chair upholstered in purple velvet. Stiff and punishing, it’s more for show than for sitting. Sam is on the antique sofa, looking equally as uncomfortable. She sits with her knees together, arms tight at her sides, trying to make small talk, which clearly isn’t her forte. The words come out in short, intense bursts. Each one is like a cherry bomb that’s been quickly tossed.
“Nice place.”
“Thanks.”
“Looks big.”
“It’s not bad. We only have the two bedrooms.”
I cringe as I say it. Only. As if I’m somehow deprived. Judging from the bulging knapsack Sam brought with her, I’m not sure she has a room.
“Nice.”
Sam shifts on the sofa. I get the sense she’s trying hard to resist kicking off her boots and spreading herself across it. She looks as uncomfortable as I feel.
“Not that this place is small,” I say, the words spilling out in a desperate attempt not to sound like I’m spoiled. “I understand how lucky I am. And the spare room is nice to have when Jeff’s family comes to visit. Jeff. That’s my boyfriend. His parents are in Delaware and his brother, sister-in-law, and two nephews live in Maryland. They like to visit a lot. It’s fun having kids around sometimes.”
I love Jeff’s family, all of them as catalogue-perfect as Jeff himself. They all know about Pine Cottage. Jeff told them as soon as it was clear things between us were getting serious. Those solid, middle-class Protestants didn’t bat an eye. His mother even sent me a fruit basket with a handwritten note saying she hoped it would brighten my day.
“What about your family?” Sam says.
“What about them?”
“Do they visit a lot?”
I think about my mother’s one and only visit. She invited herself, using the excuse that she was going through a rough patch with Fred and just wanted to get away for a weekend. Jeff saw it as a good sign. Naïvely, I did too. I thought my mother would be impressed with the new life I had created. Instead, she spent the entire weekend criticizing everything from the clothes I wore to how much wine I drank at dinner. By the time she left, we were barely speaking.
“No,” I tell Sam. “They don’t. What about yours?”
“Same.”
I once saw Mrs. Boyd in an interview on 20/20 shortly after the world realized Sam was missing. She was a scrubby thing, with red blotches on her skin and two inches of dark roots seeping into her bleached hair. During the interview, she came across as jarringly unsentimental about her daughter. The hard set of her jaw made her voice mealy and unkind. She looked tired and rubbed raw. Even though Sam has that same weary air about her, I can see why she wanted to escape such a woman. Mrs. Boyd resembled a house roughed up by too many storms.
My mother is the opposite. Sheila Carpenter refuses to let anyone see the wear and tear. When I was in the hospital after Pine Cottage, she showed up each morning in full makeup, not a hair out of place. Sure, her only child had barely escaped a madman who slaughtered all her friends, but that was no excuse to appear unkempt. If Sam’s mother is a fixer-upper, mine is a suburban McMansion rotting on the inside.
“Last I heard, you sort of vanished,” I say.
“Kind of,” Sam says.
“Where were you all those years?”
“Here and there. You know, just laying low.”
I find myself sitting with my arms locked across my chest, hands buried in my armpits. I pry them out and fold them primly on my lap. Within seconds, though, my arms have assumed their original position. My whole body thirsts for a Xanax.
Sam doesn’t notice. She’s too busy tucking her hair behind her ears to give the apartment another vaguely critical once-over. I’ve decorated the place with an emphasis on shabby chic. Everything is mismatched, from the blue walls to the flea-market lamps to the white shag carpeting I purchased ironically but ended up loving. It is, I realize, the apartment of someone trying to disguise how much money they really have, and I can’t tell if Sam is impressed or annoyed by that.
“Do you work?” she asks.
“Yes. I’m, uh—”
I’m stalling, which I always do before telling someone my flighty, fanciful job. Especially someone like Sam, who carries an aura of lifelong poverty. It’s evident in the runs in her fishnets, her duct-taped boots, her hard eyes. Desperation hums off her like radio waves, shivery and intense.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she says. “I mean, you don’t even know me.”
“I’m a blogger?” It comes out sounding like a question. Like I have no clue what I am. “I have a website. It’s called Quincy’s Sweets.”
Sam offers
a polite half smile. “Cute name. Is it, like, kittens and shit?”
“Baked goods. Cakes, cookies, muffins. I post pictures and decorating tips. Recipes. Tons of recipes. It’s been featured on the Food Network.”
Jesus. Bragging about the Food Network? Even I want to smack myself. But Sam greets it all with a laid-back nod.
“Cool,” she says.
“It can be fun,” I say, finally wrangling my voice to a lower register.
“Why cakes? Why not world hunger or politics or—”
“Kittens and shit?”
This time, Sam’s smile is full and genuine. “Yeah. That.”
“I’ve always liked to bake. It’s one of the few things I’m good at. It relaxes me. Makes me happy. After—” I hesitate again, for a very different reason. “After what happened to me—”
“You mean the Pine Cottage Murders?” Sam says.
At first, I’m surprised she knows the name. Then I realize it’s natural that she would. Just like how I know about the Nightlight Inn.
“Yes,” I say. “After that, when I was living at home, I spent a lot of time baking things for friends and neighbors. Thank-you presents, really. People were so generous. A new casserole every night, for weeks.”
“All that food.” Sam lifts her fingers to her teeth, gnawing at the cuticles. The sleeve of her leather jacket slips, revealing dark ink at her wrist. A tattoo, hidden just out of sight. “It must have been a nice neighborhood.”
“It was.”
Sam catches a hangnail in her teeth, tugs it off, spits it out. “Mine wasn’t.”
Silence follows as questions flicker in my mind. Personal ones Sam might not want to answer. How long did the barbed wire keep you against that tree? How did you get loose? What did it feel like plunging that drill bit into Calvin Whitmer’s heart?
Instead, I say, “Should we talk about what happened to Lisa?”
“You make it sound like we’ve got a choice.”
“We don’t have to.”
“She killed herself,” Sam says. “Of course we do.”
“Why do you think she did it?”
“Maybe she couldn’t take it anymore.”
I know what she means. It is the guilt, the nightmares, the lingering grief. Most of all, it is the gnawing, unshakable sense that maybe my survival wasn’t meant to be. That I’m nothing more than a desperate, wriggling insect destiny forgot to squash.
“Is Lisa’s suicide why you came out of hiding after all this time?”
Sam levels her gaze at me. “What do you think?”
“Yes. Because it rattled you as much as it did me.”
Sam stays silent.
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
“Maybe,” she says.
“And you wanted to finally see me in person. Because you were curious about what I was like.”
“Oh, I already know everything about you,” Sam says.
She leans back onto the sofa, finally allowing herself to get more comfortable. She crosses her legs, the left boot thrown casually over her right knee. Her arms unlock from her sides, spreading like wings across the cushions. I perform a similar unfolding. My arms fall from around my chest as I lean forward in my chair.
“You’d be surprised.”
Sam arches one of her brows. Both have been drawn on with black eyeliner, and the movement exposes a few downy hairs beneath the dark smudge.
“An unexpected challenge from Miss Quincy Carpenter.”
“It’s not a challenge,” I say. “Just a fact. I’ve got secrets.”
“We all have secrets,” Sam replies. “But are you more than the young Martha Stewart you pretend to be on your blog? That’s the real question.”
“How do you know I’m pretending?”
“Because you’re a Final Girl. It’s different for us.”
“I’m not a Final Girl,” I say. “I really never have been. I’m just me. Now, I’m not going to lie and say I don’t think about what happened. I do. But not a lot. I’ve moved past that.”
Sam looks like she doesn’t believe me. Both fake brows are now raised. “So you’re telling me you’ve been cured by the therapeutic value of baking?”
“It helps,” I say.
“Then prove it.”
“Prove it?”
“Yeah,” Sam says. “Bake something.”
“Right now?”
“Sure.” Sam stands, stretches, hauls me out of my chair. “Show me the real you.”
7.
Baking is a science, as rigorous as chemistry or physics. There are rules that must be followed. Too much of one thing and not enough of another can lead to ruin. I find comfort in this. Outside, the world is an unruly place where men prowl with sharpened knives. In baking, there is only order.
That’s why Quincy’s Sweets exists. When I graduated college with a marketing degree and moved to New York, I still thought of myself as a victim. So did everyone else. Baking seemed the only way to change that. I wanted to pour my runny, sloshing existence into a human-shaped mold and crank up the heat, emerging soft, springy, and new.
So far, it’s working.
In the kitchen, I spread twin lines of bowls across the counter, sized according to what they contain. The biggest ones hold the base—powdery mounds of flour and sugar heaped like snowdrifts. Medium bowls are for the glue. Water. Eggs. Butter. In the smallest bowls are the flavors, the tiniest amounts packing the largest punch. Pumpkin puree and orange zest, cinnamon and cranberry.
Sam stares at the array of ingredients, uncertain. “What are you going to bake?”
“We are going to bake orange pumpkin loaf.”
I want Sam to witness firsthand the formula behind baking and to experience its safety; I want her to see how it’s helped me become more than just a girl screaming through the woods away from Pine Cottage.
If she believes it, then maybe it’s actually true.
Sam remains still, looking first at me and then at our surroundings. I think the kitchen is cozy, done up in soothing greens and blues. There’s a vase of daisies on the windowsill and kitschy potholders hanging from the walls. The appliances are state-of-the-art but with a retro design. Sam eyes it all with barely concealed terror. She has the look of a feral child dragged suddenly into civilization.
“Do you know how to bake?” I ask.
“No,” Sam says. “I microwave.”
Then she laughs. A raucous, throaty one that fills the kitchen. I like the sound. When it’s just me in the kitchen, all is silent.
“It’s easy,” I tell her. “Trust me.”
I position Sam before one row of bowls and take my place before the other. I then show her, step-by-step, how to fold the butter and sugar together; combine them with the flour, water, and eggs; layer in the flavors one at a time. Sam forms the batter the same way she talks—in short, haphazard bursts. Tufts of flour and blots of pumpkin rise from her bowl.
“Um, am I doing this right?”
“Almost,” I say. “You need to be more gentle.”
“You sound like all my ex-boyfriends,” Sam jokes, even though she’s starting to follow my advice and mix the ingredients with slightly less force. The results are immediate. “Hey, it’s working!”
“Slow and steady wins the race. That’s the Tenth Commandment on my blog.”
“You should write a cookbook,” Sam says. “Baking for Idiots.”
“I’ve thought about it. Just a regular cookbook, though.”
“What about a book about Pine Cottage?”
I stiffen at the sound of those two words pushed together. Individually, they have no power over me. Pine. Cottage. Nothing but harmless words. But when combined they obtain the sharpness of the knife He shoved into my shoulder and stomach. If I blink, I know I’ll see Janelle emerging from the t
rees, still technically alive but already dead. So I keep my eyes open, staring at the batter thickening in the bowl in front of me.
“It would be an awfully short book,” I say.
“Oh, yeah.” There’s a false ring to Sam’s voice, as if she’s trying to make it sound like she’s only just now considering my memory loss. “Right.”
She’s staring too, although at me and not at her bowl. I feel her gaze on my cheek, as warm as the afternoon sun coming through the kitchen window. I get the uneasy sense she’s testing me somehow. That I’ll fail if I turn to meet her stare. I continue to look at the bread batter, thick and glistening in the bottom of my bowl.
“Did you read Lisa’s book?” I ask.
“Nah,” Sam says. “You?”
“No.”
I don’t know why I lie. Which is itself a lie. I do know. It’s to keep Sam slightly off balance. I bet she assumes I’ve read Lisa’s book cover to cover, which I have. There’s nothing as boring as being predictable.
“And the two of you never met?” I say.
“Lisa never got the pleasure,” Sam says. “You?”
“We talked on the phone. About how to deal with trauma. What people expect of us. It wasn’t quite like meeting in person.”
“And sure as hell not like baking together.”
Sam nudges my hip with hers and gives another laugh. Whatever test she was giving me, I think I’ve passed.
“It’s time to put these in the oven,” I announce.
I slide my batter into a loaf pan using a spatula. Sam simply tips her bowl over the pan, but her aim is off, and batter spills onto the counter.
“Shit,” she says. “Where can I get one of those flat things?”
“You mean a spatula? In there.”
I point to one of the counter drawers behind her. She tugs the handle of the one beneath it. The locked drawer. My drawer. Inside, something rattles.
“What’s in here?”
“Don’t touch that!”
I sound more panicked than I intend to, my voice lightly dusted with anger. My hand flutters to my neck, feeling for the key, as if it had somehow magically found its way into the drawer’s lock. It’s still there, of course, flat against my chest.
