by Tess Oliver
"King, do you remember that time we went sledding on Cooper's Hill?"
"I remember it, do you?" I asked sarcastically.
She tapped my chest and rested her cheek against me again. "Yes, that was me. You guys were standing on the sleds and taking those crazy jumps off the snow banks. Especially you. I held my breath every time you flew through the air."
"Crashed a few times too. I remember my ass being pretty sore after that. But mostly, I remember when you decided to try it."
Her quiet laugh drifted into the shadowy room. "I flew up off the board and right into a massive pile of snow." She lifted her head and smiled at me. Even in the darkness, her green eyes looked like emeralds. "And you dug me out. You looked so scared."
"Fuck, I was scared. I was calling you and you didn't answer. Thought you were suffocating or something. I was plowing through that snow like a mad dog, and there you were on the other side of the snow, having a good laugh."
"It was so cute. You were the only person to come running through the snow to find me." She gazed up at me again. "All those guys who liked to profess their love when they thought it would impress me, but when it came to digging me out of a snow drift, only one of my many knights came running. Lucky for me, it was the knight I was hoping for."
Kenzie rested her head against my chest again. "King?"
"Yeah?"
"I'm sorry if I hurt you. In fact, I'm sorry I was such a stupid, little brat back then. And I'm sorry I didn't let you know that I was Kenzie. I'm sorry about a lot of things, it seems." A soft yawn flowed from her throat.
I tightened my arm around her. "I'm sorry you had it so fucking rough, Kenzie. I wish I could have done something to help you back then."
She wriggled against me. "You had your own stuff going on. None of us had it too great in that town. Even Jack had it bad when he was little." She laughed. "But man, he sure made it out of that hellhole, didn't he?"
"He sure did."
"Good night, Kingston."
"Good night . . . Kenzie."
28
"Housekeeping," the strange voice and persistent knock kicked me out of a weird dream where Mr. Campbell, my fifth grade teacher, and I were building a hot air balloon to take to New York and we were using live bats to keep the thing afloat, instead of the usual helium. No fucking idea where any of it came from, but I was blaming it on the last twenty-four hours.
"Housekeeping." The persistent knock was joined by the persistent voice telling me to get the fuck up.
"Kenzie," I called toward the closed bathroom door, "I think we slept past checkout." I'd slept in my jeans. I climbed out of bed and plodded barefoot, a risk considering the state of the carpet below my feet, and cracked open the door. The woman, maybe nineteen, with a blonde ponytail and a tattoo of a rose climbing up her neck, stared angrily at me.
"I need to clean this room."
"Yep, can you give me fifteen? Maybe go to another room and come back?"
She chewed the wad of gum that had apparently been tucked in her cheek. "Guess so but fifteen. I've got a schedule, and my boss is an asshole."
"Understood. Fifteen." I shut the door and walked over to the bathroom. I knocked. "We need to vacate the room in fifteen." There was no response. Every scary possibility struck me as I urgently pushed open the door. The one scenario I wasn't expecting was an empty bathroom. She'd even taken the tiny shampoo bottles and complimentary coffee cup.
Kenzie had fallen asleep in my arms. As tired as I felt, I'd stayed awake for a good hour just listening to her soft breathing, feeling her warm body against me and wondering what the hell I was going to do next. It seemed Kenzie had made that decision for me.
My limbs felt like lead as I headed over to the chair for my shirt and shoes. A piece of motel stationary was sticking out from under the ice bucket. I sat down and pulled the note free.
King, my dreamy knight in shining armor, I decided to take off and give you some time. My life is heading in the right direction, but it's still a chaotic mess. You don't deserve that. You've got your act together. I can't step in 'from the grave' and mess that up. There's one thing I need you to know for certain. You might have thought you were competing with all the other Westridge boys, but you weren't. It was you. It was always you. I just couldn't act on my feelings because I knew you'd leave someday, that you'd hightail it out of that crummy town the second you got your wings. My life was already one massive heartbreak. I couldn't endure more. So along with my many secrets, I kept that one, the one that assured me I was in love with Kingston Bristow, locked up in my heart. I will text you an address . . . if I ever get one. But I will leave everything up to you. If you decide, like I sense you might, that you're better off never seeing me again, then at least I can be happy with memories of the last few days. They were everything I expected, and they only made me love you more.
Love always and forever, Kenzie.
P.S. I took the shampoo bottles. Hope you don't mind.
My phone rang. I grabbed and answered it. "Kenzie?"
"Did you just say Kenzie?" Bronx asked. "Where the hell are you?"
"Bronx, oh hey, yeah, uh, I'm in that motel, the one just outside Westridge."
There was a long pause. "What the fuck is going on, and why did you call me Kenzie?"
I rubbed my face to snap out of the semi-coma the letter had left me in. "Because she's Kenzie. Sutton was the one they pulled from the river."
"I knew it. I fucking knew it. I saw her and you know, there was just always something about Kenzie, something in the way she carried herself, in the way she talked. Wait, so Sutton was the one who jumped off the bridge?"
"Not exactly. She was killed and thrown off the bridge to cover it all up."
Another long pause. "Bro—"
"Yep. And the story gets more fucking crazy from there, but I've got to get out of here because I've got housekeeping riding my ass to vacate the premises."
"Does this have something to do with the text my mom sent this morning? Her friend, Gertrude, remember Gertrude, the attendance lady at the school? She called my mom to tell her that Sheriff Jensen had been arrested."
"Yep, saw him get handcuffed and everything." The persistent knock returned to the door. "Can't tell you all this over the phone. I'm coming down the hill in a few. Meet me at my place at noon, and I'll fill you in on all the gritty details."
"All right. Is Kenzie there now? Put her on. I want to tell her I was on to her little act all along."
I glanced around the empty room. Outside the woman was yelling housekeeping again. "No, Kenzie's gone. She left."
"Wait, she's gone? You let the love of your life go? I've tried that before, buddy, and it doesn't work out so well."
"Yeah, well, this whole thing is a little more complicated than that." The housekeeper's patience had grown thin. She used her pass key and pushed her rattling cart right into the room.
"Got to go. I'll see you at my place later. Then you can hear the whole fucking thing. I sort of need to hear it too because I'm still having a hard time believing it."
"All right, see you in a few hours."
29
Bronx relaxed back on the patio chair. "Still can't believe it. Bad enough that he killed his wife but to find out he set the infamous barn fire, the one that killed three girls. The guy was a psycho, and they gave him a badge and a gun. Guess it helped that his dad was there to cover up the first crime. Always hated Jensen. Why didn't you ever tell me you saw him up at the park that night and with shovels, no less?"
I pulled my chair farther into the sun. The clouds had broken apart, and the light coming through felt good. "I was a teenager, going through some shit of my own. Mom was heading back into one of her dark moods. I never thought about it again until Kenzie told me what she knew about her mom's disappearance. Everyone in town was told she left."
Bronx lowered his sunglasses over his eyes to blot out the bright sun that was now showering the back deck. "That's wild about the twins s
witching places all the time. I still don't get why Kenzie kept up the farce that she was Sutton."
I blew out air. "I'm with you there. She said after everyone just assumed that they'd pulled Kenzie out of the river, she'd grown comfortable being Sutton. She liked it enough that she sort of just kept going. But she should have told me. She knew how I felt about her."
"Sensing a little anger there or hurt pride maybe?" Bronx asked.
"Fuck you, with your therapy. Wouldn't your pride be hurt? We're making out, and the whole time I'm thinking I'm with Sutton. Then, it turns out I'm with Kenzie, the girl I've been obsessed with since I rode a fucking two wheeled bike. She had every opportunity to tell me, but she kept it from me until she had no choice except to confess. Something tells me she might just have gone on with the lie if things hadn't gotten so crazy at the end."
Noises out front made me sit up. "Sounds like someone is at the door."
"Oh yeah, while you were talking, Angus and Kaos texted to find out where we were hanging out."
"Shit, not sure if I'm up for visitors."
Bronx got up from the chair. "It's not visitors. It's Angus and Kaos. And they said they'd bring food."
"Oh, food, you should have led with that." I followed him inside.
Angus and Kaos entered like only they could, like two massive grizzly bears having a wrestling match. I managed to snatch the food bags from Angus's hand before Kaos could finish shoving him.
"What the hell are you two doing?" I asked.
Kaos flashed his thumb Angus's direction. "This idiot forgot the hot sauce. I specifically told him to make sure he told the cashier extra hot sauce and he forgot. So we're eating burritos without hot sauce, which is even worse than French fries without ketchup."
Kaos looked at me with a solidly serious, pleading look. "Please fucking tell me you have hot sauce."
"I've got every damn heat level you could want and even one called Volcano that I haven't had the courage to open yet."
Angus pushed past me toward the kitchen. "I've had that stuff and it's awesome. But do you have milk and a fire extinguisher for back up?"
"Yeah, yeah, volcano away," I said.
Kaos grabbed plates from the cupboard. "Hey, Bronx said you solved some hundred-year-old triple murder."
Bronx was pulling a soda from the fridge. "I never said a hundred."
Kaos held out his hands in question. "You said old. You said he solved an old murder."
"And that automatically means a hundred?" Bronx asked.
Kaos shrugged his massive shoulders. "I don't know. Just decided it must have been a hundred years. He said three girls died in a barn fire."
I looked at Bronx. "When the hell did you have time to text all this to these guys?"
"Don't know. I guess when you went to the bathroom. I'm fast. Quick on the draw, as they say."
"At least that's what Layla says," Angus quipped, then proudly beamed about his joke. He reached into the pantry cupboard. "Ah ha, here it is. Volcano." He pulled out the bright red bottle of hot sauce that contained ghost peppers and came with a large warning label, something about seizures and temporary blindness.
"You know what?" I said. "Let's eat outside. That way, when Angus pukes his fucking guts out, and we have to throw milk down his throat, the mess will be outside."
We carried food and drinks out to my deck. I had no actual table, but we were all pretty practiced at balancing food on our knees. We dragged the chairs together and the three of us waited for Angus to take his first bite of volcanic burrito. He poured out the smallest amount possible. The second the food entered his mouth, sweat beaded on his forehead and his face turned red.
I handed him the carton of milk before he had a chance to ask for it. He tossed it back and drank most of the milk. He wiped his mouth off with the back of his hand. It seemed the idiot was going to try another bite.
"Uh, your first aid"—Kaos pointed to the milk—"is almost gone. Should we ready the garden hose?"
Angus put the bottle down on the deck. "Nah, think I'll just eat the rest like you mortals."
"Put the lid on that bottle," I suggested. "If it spills, it'll eat a hole through the decking."
"So, where's that cutie pie with the green eyes you brought to the soccer game?" Kaos asked. As usual, he was finished with his first burrito and starting on the second. There were probably two more in the bag.
I would have preferred continuing the hot sauce conversation. I wasn't ready to talk about anything else yet. Before I could give a pat answer that she didn't actually live in my house, Angus tossed out another question. Apparently, my best friend had been really flapping his gums lately.
"Bronx said she's the sister of the girl you had a big thing for growing up. Let me see—" he pointed at me. "The Johnson twins, right? You always talk about them."
Bronx was hiding behind his burrito avoiding eye contact. It turned out I didn't need to say a fucking word because the grizzly bear twins went right on with the conversation, on a topic they knew nothing about.
"It's not the Johnson twins, fuckface." Kaos had taken a quick breather from inhaling burrito number two. "It was the Jackson twins and they're both dead. So you're just pulling shit out of your ass right now."
I stared at Bronx until he had no choice except to make eye contact.
"Do you see what you've done?" I asked.
He cleared his throat letting me know he was going to take care of it. Kaos and Angus were still debating the name. Bronx whistled to get their attention. "They were the Jensen twins, Sutton and Kenzie Jensen. Sutton was murdered by the town hermit, and Kenzie is the one you met at the soccer game. Turns out she wasn't dead. Her father, an evil killer, made up a story about her dying. Only we thought Kenzie had fallen in the river, and Sutton had left town. It turns out the girls were always switching identities. On the day that Kenzie was killed, it was actually Sutton." He sat back with a satisfied smile as if everything was just clear as day now. That would not be my guess as I looked at the dumbfounded expressions sitting across from us.
Kaos finally spoke. "Don't know what any of that meant, but it's a good thing you didn't go into teaching. Isn't Kenzie the girl you had a crush on in Westridge?"
Bronx laughed. "A crush? That's the understatement of the year."
I sat back and munched on my burrito. The idiots didn't seem the least bit interested in my input, so I let them cluck on like frantic chickens in a coop.
"Wait—" Angus still had his mouth filled with food. He swallowed with a lot of drama. "You're telling me that the girl that we've all heard about on those late nights when we were in camp or waiting for the truck or plane to pick us up, the girl he'd drone on about, even though she was supposed to be dead, that that girl was the girl at the soccer game. That was Kenzie." He looked at me with a confused brow. "It is Kenzie right?"
I just kept chewing and didn't respond. I was far too fucking amused by the whole damn thing.
"Yes, it's Kenzie, the girl we've all heard about for years, and she's gone," Bronx added in, unnecessarily.
Kaos took a quick break from his fourth burrito. It seemed there might have even been a fifth in the bag. "She's gone? Where did she go?"
Bronx looked pointedly at me. "Yeah, King, where did she go?" He was being facetious since I'd already told him about the note. He had been bugging me to go after her, but I wasn't so sure it was the right thing to do.
"Not sure but she'll be local for awhile. At least until her dad's murder trial is over," I said.
Angus's eyes rounded. "Her dad is a murderer? I thought you used to talk about the prick, the sheriff asshole you guys hated as being dad to the twins."
"Yup," Bronx hopped in. "Turns out he was a dirty cop, as dirty as they come. And he's going to jail because King uncovered the whole fucking thing."
"Seriously?" Kaos asked. "Dude, fucking proud to be sitting on your deck."
Angus had finished his food. He relaxed back. "But I don't get why Kenzie is gon
e. You've been pining for her your whole life, and you let her just leave?" He shook his head. "I don't get it."
"It's a little more complicated than that, Angus," I started.
"Is it?" Bronx asked. "Let's see. On the one hand, it turns out Kenzie Jensen, your lifelong crush, the girl you told me you'd love forever, is alive, and even more miraculous, she's landed back in your life. You guys hooked up, solved a handful of murders, including the one that would take the menacing shadow of her father out of her life forever. Then she writes you a note that clearly sounded like a love letter and not a Dear John. And then she left and you, big fucking blockhead that you are, didn't go after her." Bronx made a big production out of wiping his hands. "There, that pretty much covers it."
"You guys don't understand," I started but was interrupted when my phone beeped. Just seeing that it was a text from Kenzie sent my pulse racing. It was just like in high school when she'd walk down the hallway or float out from the lunchroom. My pulse would race, my heart would slap against my ribs, and everything else would disappear. It would just be Kenzie with her long legs and those sparkling green eyes walking toward me.
"Just wanted you to know that I'm at the Motel 6 on Winchester Road. Hope you're doing well. XO"
"That's her, isn't it?" Bronx asked. "I can tell by that flustered blush you're wearing."
"Fuck off with the flustered blush. And yes, it's her. She's just letting me know where she's staying."
The three of them stared at me, not saying a word.
"What?" I asked.
"Why the fuck are you still sitting here?" Kaos asked.
"It's Kenzie. Kenzie Jensen," Bronx added.
