Chapter Twenty-One
Now
I ran almost all the way back to Black Bass, even as my ankle throbbed. I held Winona’s cookbook tightly to my chest, like if I loosened my grip, it would disappear.
While I waited for the paint stripper to activate and for those terrible words to begin to dissolve, I sat on the front steps.
An uncomfortable heat burned at the base of my neck, as though I was being watched, but there was no way to prove it.
I’d even taken a few tentative steps behind the cabin, finding nothing.
The woods were less dense here, and I felt confident that if someone was still out here, I’d be able to see them.
I flipped through the cookbook again, but I couldn’t find anything else. Only that unlabeled envelope, the haunting photo.
The unused bus tickets.
The confirmation that Winona’s plan, whatever it was, hadn’t gone the way she’d intended. Because someone was supposed to go with her.
With a last look at Black Bass—nowhere near perfect, but at least no one was staying here—I shuffled quickly down the path toward my mother’s cabin.
Margo was on the couch when I got there, her laptop in front of her, aggressively cat-eyed glasses reflecting the blue glow of the screen. Her mouth opened like she was going to make a smart-ass comment, but her face changed immediately when she saw me. I must have looked haunted.
“Jesus, what is it? What happened?”
“I don’t think Steph’s mom left. I think someone killed her.” The words had been dancing in my head for the last hour. But this was the first time I’d said this new theory out loud. We might not be looking into a runaway mother at all—but a murder.
A murder at the hands of someone here. Someone I knew.
Margo’s face was unreadable. When I’d finished the story of this afternoon, of the reprised Phantom’s art project on Black Bass, and the artifacts I’d found in the Barn, she leaned her head back on the back of the couch and closed her eyes.
I dropped down next to her. For a long moment, we both just sat in the silence, breathing in rhythm beside each other.
“Do you think she—” My voice sounded small and pathetic. I was sure she could feel my desperation, radiating off me in waves. “Do you think Steph knew all along? That something bad happened to her mom?”
She closed her eyes, then exhaled a long, painful-sounding breath. “The night of the fire,” she began, and I fought not to gasp.
I hadn’t been expecting this. We’d never talked about the fire. All I knew was what she’d told the investigators the next morning, before she’d left for good: They’d been near the Barn when the fire started, and they’d gotten separated.
It had felt too deep in the trenches to dig out over the past few days. But now, I supposed, was the time to talk about it, if there ever had been. Even though it made me feel woozy.
She was rubbing her temples, like telling this story was already draining her.
“I saw her stumbling into the woods. All alone, at the edges of the party. I wanted to walk her back to the cabin and put her to bed. But when she saw me, she had this look on her face. I don’t know how to describe it—she seemed almost manic.
She told me she had to go to the Barn, right then.
I followed her, because I didn’t know what else to do. ” She shook her head, wincing.
“She said, ‘We’re so close. I finally figured it out.’ I didn’t know what she meant.
But when we got there, she had a meltdown.
She was inconsolable. I told her that enough was enough, that she was freaking me out.
I told her to come with me, to come back to the cabin so she could sleep it off.
But you know what she was like. So fucking stubborn.
” Her voice broke on the last word, and goose bumps prickled my arms.
I tried to remember my own conversation with Steph that night, but the memory was hazy at best. “You think it was about her mom?”
For the first time, Margo met my eye. “She wouldn’t tell me what she was so worked up about. But now—now, I don’t know. I think she must have found something. Something bad. God, I wish she’d told me. I could have helped her.”
Her last few words were filled with so much sadness that I had to turn away and collect myself. Not for the first time, I wondered how different things would have been if they’d never come here. If we hadn’t shared a cabin that summer.
If I hadn’t been willing to do anything to be Steph’s friend.
So many maybes, and so many questions I’d never know the answers to.
“I should have pushed her more. I could tell something was going on with her, especially those last few weeks. Something happened, and it’s like she wasn’t Steph anymore.
She was making…strange decisions.” She gave me a pointed look, and I tensed.
“Every time I asked her what was going on, she would tell me she was close. And I told her, ‘Let me help you. We can figure this out together, if you’ll just tell me what’s going on.
’ But she wouldn’t. She shut me out, because I wouldn’t let it go.
Steph liked having secrets. I was so scared, though.
I’d never been afraid of her before that night. ”
I thought back on my memories of that summer. I knew what she meant; those last few weeks, there had been something bothering her. She’d never told me what it was.
“But I wasn’t just afraid of her.” Her voice was low and broken, and I leaned forward to hear her. “I was afraid for her.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, and I knew she was trying to stop herself from crying.
“We were arguing when we saw it. The fire.” She was whispering now, quieter than I’d ever heard her.
“And then we—we split up. It was Steph’s idea.
She was supposed to go to your mom’s cabin.
To wake her up and call for help. And I ran back to the beach, to warn everyone.
To make sure you and Chelsea were okay.”
I tried to hide the shock, though I was sure it was naked on my face.
“I wanted to stick together. But I gave in, and I ran. I left her out there in the woods.” A shuddering, tortured breath. “I left her out there to die.”
The heaviness of Margo’s confession fell over us like a weighted blanket, thick and suffocating, and we were silent for a long stretch.
“I wish you’d told me,” I said at last, voice like gravel. “The path between the Barn and my mother’s cabin wasn’t touched by the fire.”
Her eyes widened.
“So if that’s true—if you guys split up and she was supposed to run directly to my mom’s from the Barn, then…” I didn’t finish the sentence. I let the words hang there, between us. Unspoken but heavy.
I could see she was reliving that night, the same way that I was.
The heat of the flames, licking at our backs as we ran.
The horror of not knowing who was alive and who was dead.
And the next morning. The terrible act of counting and not finding her.
Knowing that she was the only one of us who didn’t make it out.
Picturing her screaming, burning alive. Utterly alone.
But now, I was having even worse thoughts. Dangerous ones.
What if Steph hadn’t died in the fire at all? What if someone knew what she’d learned about her mother and killed her for it?
“You know what this means, right?” She was staring at me, eyes glassy but narrowed, almost in a challenge.
Of course I did. If someone had followed Steph, and killed her, it had to have been one of the staff.
One of us.
I nodded. “And,” I said. “Someone’s been…messing with me this weekend.”
Margo cocked her head, a silent urge to go on. “Not just the graffiti. Small things. That match I found in the kitchen. It felt like—a taunt. And then, my sliding glass door in my bedroom? Looks like someone threw a rock at it, tried to break it.”
“What the hell, Little G? Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” She looked genuinely rattled.
“It just all seemed so circumstantial. Why would I be afraid of a match, you know? But when I saw the glass door…”
Margo was frowning, a canyon forming between her eyebrows. “I knew it. I knew someone was in my room,” she said, more to herself than me.
“Wait, what?”
“I wasn’t sure, but now I am. It smelled off, like someone had lit a cigarette, and I was sure a few things weren’t where I’d left them. But nothing was missing. The weirdest thing was the note, shoved under the front door earlier.”
“Note? What note?”
Her mouth was a grim line. “ ‘LEAVE, BITCH.’ ”
A cold terror crawled up my back. “Oh my God, Margo.” Something was very, very wrong.
She gave an almost embarrassed shrug, like an apology for not mentioning it. “Didn’t think I needed to call in the authorities. Honestly, I figured it was Baby, trying to freak me out after my interview with her dad this morning.” She pushed down a few invisible flyaways, then took a deep breath.
“Okay, we need to figure out who the Phantom is,” she said. “That’s our next step. Because whoever it was that summer is back. They’re here, they know something, and they’re trying to fuck with us so we don’t figure out that—that they killed her.”
She choked out the final word, and that’s when I knew I had to tell her. I’d never wanted to; it felt like the final, final piece of Steph that I still had all to myself. It was selfish, in so many ways. For years, I’d told myself it was out of loyalty. Not cowardice.
But she was gone now. And if breaking my promise would help us find the truth—would help us solve the mystery she’d been desperately trying to solve, the mystery that she died for—then it might be worth it.
“Wait a second,” I said, bracing myself for the fallout that I knew was coming. Margo’s eyes were round and laser-focused, searching my face for clues.
“We don’t need to figure out who the Phantom was,” I said, the words burning my tongue. “I already know.”