Chapter 48
KOENIG RANCH
The main gate was chained shut, just as it has been for months.
But there’s another entrance a quarter mile down the road that someone either forgot, or just didn’t bother, to lock.
Hayden exchanges a glance with Carter, then jumps out to open it wide.
We drive through, and she doesn’t stop to close it.
I have a sudden memory of Rocky, uncharacteristically serious, explaining that the number one rule of ranch life is to make sure the gates are always closed behind you.
Insane to be thinking of that right now, to be remembering my boyfriend, my cheating, apparently murderous boyfriend, backlit by the sun as he urged his horse across a field of karst. Insane that time, that precious commodity, could still be so elastic as to allow memories to blossom in between my terrified heartbeats.
We drive around the familiar pathways, the car’s lights angling ahead of us.
Past what used to be the office, where they received shipments of feed and hay.
Past a handful of outbuildings and storage sheds.
Through oak, mesquite, pecan. Wending left and right and dipping down.
And then off the paved path, down an overgrown dirt road, and I know where we’re going and I don’t want to, I don’t want to, but it doesn’t matter.
Here we are.
The cabin.
“Hayden, get out and open the door for our guest,” Carter says nastily.
For a half second, I think she’s going to argue, or at least try to. But then she gets silently out of the car and opens the door.
I don’t move.
“What are we doing here?” I ask. My voice wavers more than I’d like.
“I’m not asking again,” Carter says.
So I move. I get out of the car.
I try to catch Hayden’s eye for the two seconds we have together before Carter joins us. Her face is streaked wet and red, tears sliding down like she’s been crying forever and will never be able to stop. She stares miserably down at her feet.
“Hayden, please. Just tell me what’s going on.”
“I never wanted any of this,” she whispers.
And then Carter lunges up behind her, throwing one arm around her neck as if he’s nuzzling up to her at a dance, holding the gun in front of both of them with the other hand.
His movements remind me of a sick coyote I saw when I was a kid, jangling and unpredictable; it is not so much that he is enjoying this as that he is infected with it.
“She says she never wanted any of this, but that’s a lie.
She wanted something real bad, didn’t you, Hay?
” Hayden gives a strangled little whimper, but he just laughs.
“Come on, let’s go inside. Maybe there’ll still be blood!
We can take some pictures, put them on Sekrit too! ”
“That’s fucking sick,” I say. It’s out of my mouth before I can think to hold it in, but he grins at me.
“You first, Iris.”
I hesitate, then look up at the cabin’s squat dark form, its square windows pale glints in the scanty moonlight.
“Come on, girls, don’t get shy now. He had you bitches lining up outside the door when he was still alive.” Carter nips at Hayden’s neck and she closes her eyes, tears clinging to her lashes.
So I turn to the cabin and push on the simple metal door. It opens easily. It never did have a lock on it.
Inside I can’t move far. It’s pitch dark.
Carter and Hayden step in right behind me—I can smell her grapefruit body spray, sour and sweet.
Someone bumps against something. Carter swears.
After a moment a small circle of light appears, his phone’s flashlight scooting across the unfinished wooden walls.
“Aren’t there any lights out here?” Carter snaps.
“No electricity,” Hayden whispers, trying to catch her breath. “There’s a fireplace. And a couple candles.”
“How romantic,” Carter says sneeringly. “Rocky always knew how to set the scene. You have a lighter, right? See if you can get something lit.”
She turns away, her shoulders hunched. A minute later a small flame flares up and then separates into two. A candle. Then another, and another.
The cabin is so unchanged it sends a stab of pain through me, even still, even with months and countless betrayals and countless acts of violence between now and when I last saw it.
Unfinished walls and a rough-hewn fireplace.
The dusty shelves, filled with rusty old treasures.
The heart-shaped rock Rocky had given me is still there, lying flat and covered in dust. The brass bedframe is still here too.
There used to be a mattress on it, but it’s gone now.
My stomach gives a lurch and I turn my head, thinking I might be sick. Almost immediately Carter has the gun in my face. The small black hole at the end of the muzzle gapes at me, dark and eager. I hold up my hands a little higher.
“Carter, please, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know why you’re … Why are we here?”
He jerks his head toward Hayden. “Ask my whore girlfriend. Your so-called friend.” I glance at Hayden but she’s still bent over, lighting candles.
Carter goes on. “Man, Iris, you know how to pick them. Not one, but two different friends willing to hook up with your boyfriend behind your back? You are a bad judge of character, kiddo.”
I stare at him. The candlelight plays madly across his skin, sharp devilish darts of red and yellow.
“You want to tell her, or should I?” he asks, looking at Hayden.
She shakes her head. He gives another angry laugh.
“The night of your little cheer party, you got a text, didn’t you, Iris?” he asks. “From Rocky.” He says the name like it’s something filthy.
“How do you know that?” I ask. I hate how much my voice is shaking.
“I know because Hay here told me all about it,” he says.
“She saw your phone that night. She saw Rocky’s little fuck-up.
” But you didn’t do anything about it—just proceeded to get as fucked up as you possibly could so you didn’t have to make a decision.
Very Iris of you, by the way,” he says. “Anyway, Hayden wasn’t nearly as slow as you were.
Hayden knew Rocky was fucking around. You want to know how she knew? ”
No, I think. No no no. But he keeps talking.
“She knew,” he says, jabbing a finger toward Hayden, “because she’d been fucking around with him herself just a few weeks earlier.”
“Hayden and Rocky.” The words float out of my mouth almost against my will, the way they would in a nightmare.
“That’s right,” he says. “One of her many little indiscretions. And so she decided to wait for everyone else to fall asleep and to drive out to this little love nest herself. Can you even imagine? The fucking nerve. Being a side piece and going to bitch someone out about having another side piece.” He clucks softly and shakes his head.
“Your mom would be so disappointed, Hayden.”
She just looks down, her cheeks bright with humiliation.
“Anyway,” Carter says. “Anyway. I got an alert that she was driving…”
“An alert?” I frown.
Hadyen finally speaks up at that. He had a tracker on my car. Nice, right?”
“If you weren’t the biggest slut in Varda, I wouldn’t have to do shit like that,” he snaps.
“So Carter sees that my car is moving. And he goes to follow me,” she says.
We’re all quiet for a moment, the candlelight flickering and pooling and making patterns in the shadow.
“And then you get out here, and you find him with Lynette,” I say softly.
“With Lynette,” Hayden agrees softly. “I wouldn’t have ever in a million years guessed it was her.”
“I would’ve,” Carter says, sneering. “Your boy liked to slum it sometimes. Loved those white trash girls.” He clenches his fists at his sides.
“I didn’t care that he was fucking Lynette Zeiger.
But when I pulled up to the cabin, I heard Hayden in there.
” He pitches his voice high in a nasty impression of her voice.
“‘You’re such a dog, how could you do this to me, why am I not enough for you?’” He stops talking abruptly and looks directly at me.
“She didn’t give a shit about me. Or you either. All she wanted was him.”
I try to catch Hayden’s eye, but she won’t look at me. Telling the story kept Carter almost calm, at least for a moment, but then his lips curl up in a rictus grin.
“I just lost it. I fucking lost it. I got the gun out of his truck and I went inside, and the second they saw me everyone started freaking out. Like I was some kind of monster.”
“You were waving a gun around, Carter, of course everyone started freaking out,” Hayden mutters.
“I wasn’t even going to use it,” he says.
“I wanted to scare them. I just … I don’t know what happened.
I was pointing it and then … I don’t know.
I don’t know.” He looks down at the gun in his hand, almost wonderingly.
“I think … I think it was an accident? It’s so fucking easy to pull a trigger. I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
My throat is bone dry. I can picture the scene so clearly.
Hayden driven there by a possessive rage so white hot she couldn’t even register the irony of demanding answers from the guy she herself had been cheating with.
Rocky, affable fuckboy Rocky, trying to de-escalate, holding his hands up to placate.
Carter waving the gun, wild and inconsolable.
“I wasn’t going to shoot, I swear,” Carter says again. “But then she…”
She. Lynette.
“Lynette laughed at us,” Hayden says bluntly. She looks almost resigned as she says it. Like she’s been holding onto it all this time, and it’s almost a relief to set it down. “She laughed. Told us that we were all hypocrites and we all deserved each other.”
Oh, God, I can almost hear it. I can almost see it.
Lynette, a blanket wrapped around her nudity, watching the idiotic high school soap opera we were all trapped in.
Knowing as she did how delicate social connections could be and watching them squabble over the pieces.
She’d opened her mouth and let out that hot, taunting laugh.
And Carter punished her for it.
“That’s why you shot her,” I whisper. “And then you killed Rocky. Because he was a witness. But why have you been catfishing me? Just to, I don’t know, see how far you could go? How much you could hurt me?”
“No,” Hayden says. “I was just trying to figure out what you knew. I didn’t know how else to do it. I swear, I wasn’t trying to hurt you worse.”
Carter starts to laugh again. “I told you it was stupid. She thought for sure she could get something out of you pretending to be that guy in Houston. Such a goofy plan. She thought maybe you’d tell Jonah that you thought your good friend Hayden was a murderer.
” Hayden recoils, but for a moment she meets his eyes.
“You’re the one who’s a murderer,” she hisses.
His movement is quick but awkward. He lunges at her, tries to grapple at her with his left hand, the gun lowered but still clenched in his right. All he gets is a handful of her hair gripped tight in his hand. He tugs it so it’s taut, leaning to sneer in her face.
“You made me kill my best friend,” he snarls.
My body is very still and quiet. It feels like everything—heart and lungs, blood and muscle—shuts down so that my mind has enough energy to understand what’s happening. I am eyes and ears and brain and nothing else.
Hayden is still crying, still shaking, but her eyes flash with hatred. “I didn’t make you do anything, Carter. I didn’t even know Rocky had a gun in his truck. You were the one who knew about it. You were the one who decided to grab it.”
There’s a loud crack. My entire body shudders. I think for a second he’s pulled the trigger. Then my vision clears and I see he’s hit her across the face with the pistol.
“Shut up!” He stands just inches from her, breath heaving. “This is on you. What happened to Rocky and Lynette was on you, and this is too.”
This is too. That’s when I know for sure.
He is planning to kill me out here.
“Look,” I say quickly. “I’m not going to tell anyone. I’m not. All I wanted was for the rumors to stop. I won’t go to the cops.”
He wheels around to face me again. The gun flashes up toward me. Something wet and red clings to one side of it. Hayden’s blood, I realize.
“Too late,” he says. For a second he sounds genuinely regretful. “You already posted your suicide note.”