Nine
Seeing Paisley’s face again feels like I’ve sunk into a waking dream.
Paisley mostly keeps the camera off herself, switching between selfie mode and turning the camera on Harlow and Opal as Paisley talks about a witch offscreen.
She talks about a human-goat creature, something that gets my heart pinching in fear.
It’s too detailed to be anything Paisley could come up with on her own.
And the fear in Opal’s voice—it’s unlike anything I’ve ever heard before.
Opal’s certainly one to scream and whimper and yell watching horror movies, but there’s always an air of lightness.
Not like this. In this video, you feel her fear growing.
But the video itself is over quickly. A scream sounds through the woods; the phone drops.
The video ends.
Beck grips my shoulder, shooting my heart to my throat. “Let me watch the video again,” she says. I hand Beck the phone. She scrolls back a few frames before the ending. “What were they seeing?”
I take my own look. I’ve watched enough horror movies and ghost shows to know what we’re looking for. Silhouettes, human figures. Human-like figures. But there’s no disruption in the tree line.
When I look back at Beck, though, her eyes say what I’m thinking: They didn’t just scare themselves.
“We need to figure out who sent this and how they got it. Wanna get out of here?” she asks. “Go somewhere where funeral processions won’t interrupt us?”
“But what about the burial?” I ask.
“I’m done with funerals.”
The potential consequences of digging into this video make my skin crawl, but I feel a little more invincible with someone like Beck at my side. I throw my mom a text about how I’m not feeling well and heading home as Beck leads me to her car.
Eventually, I’ll have to tell my mom and dad about the text. And if that leads to talking about the tire—it won’t. I can stop it there.
* * *
We settle into the first coffee shop we come across on our way out of the cemetery, a mom-and-pop place called Priscilla’s.
We blend into the afternoon coffee crowds with ease, barely grabbing one of their iron tables and chairs dotted along the sidewalk.
With its dozens of unique coffee flavors and its location only a block or two from Warner Brothers Studios, it’s a hotspot for industry gossip, networking coffees, and aspiring screenwriters hunched over laptops.
The kind of place where talking about a few dead teenage girls and a creepy video about a witch will be dismissed as a creative working session between two high school filmmakers who’re a little too into Halloween.
Beck rips the paper off a straw for something called a Café Borgia, which I’m too embarrassed to ask the contents of and see if it somehow relates to the real Borgia pope’s family that I learned about in AP Euro last year. “So what’s your instinct on that message?”
I unwrap the straw in my iced maple drink, throwing my crumpled paper in a ball next to hers. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you live and breathe horror. Is this text person serious? And what are they trying to tell us with this video?” Beck looks down at her hands, still covered in rings I imagine her parents didn’t want her wearing during a funeral.
“Paisley’s talking about a witch, isn’t she?”
“No! Fuck the witch thing.” She puts a hand up. “I mean, no offense. I know you love all the haunted lore and stuff.”
I raise my eyebrows. “I don’t think witches are real.”
“But this texter is trying to get us to see something the authorities didn’t. What else could that mean but someone doing this to them? What if there are more videos that show what happened?”
The authorities made this out to be such a clear-cut case, but what if it wasn’t just them accidentally stepping off a cliff? All they have is the bodies. Raw material can tell a story, but it can only go so far. It doesn’t give emotion or motivation or an exact sequence of events.
But now there’s this video. These texts.
Should we believe this anonymous person genuinely wants to help?
We know all three of them were alive between 9:45 p.m. and 9:50 p.m. We know Paisley had caught on to some legend about a witch that wasn’t publicized much online, given I never saw anything about it in my own research rabbit hole.
We know Opal was scared. Opal was scared in a way I’ve never seen before.
A lump sticks in my throat.
“Who could’ve sent this?” Beck asks.
I google the phone number, but nothing comes up.
“It must be someone who lives in that town,” I say, reaching for a logical explanation. “How would they have gotten that video? Did anyone ever find her phone?”
“No, no one found her phone,” Beck says. “The last time it pinged a location was somewhere in town along the main street. She was probably grabbing some supply or shopping, but I don’t know what happened to it after that. I guess the cops had no reason to check its location recently.”
The phone still has to be in Kingston, all but confirming that the texter is someone from around there who knows how to crack a teenage girl’s passcode.
But why is this person being so cryptic?
If they do have good intentions, what kind of help do they really want to give us?
And why wouldn’t they have turned over Paisley’s phone to the cops?
At the same time, though, something about it feels true.
My heart hammers. “Paisley sent me a text the night before everything…went down.” I can’t even say died.
“I confronted her, asking why she didn’t bring me, and she said she was doing me a favor and that they were all going to die out there.
At the time, I thought she was just being dramatic, but if this person thinks Paisley and co.
found something they shouldn’t have, maybe Paisley was serious. ”
Beck eyes my phone, her breath coming drawn out. “Can we make a deal?”
“What kind of deal?” I almost whisper it.
“If the forest cops don’t help us, we have to go back, like the message said. We have to find out what really happened.”
My chest tightens at the thought, but the idea of never knowing is even more suffocating.
What would our investigation even look like?
If Beck’s right, then their killer is still in Kingston somewhere.
And if this town is as messed up as the texter is saying, would they even talk to us? Would they try to kill us too?
Beyond that, how would I even get my parents to agree to let me go?
It would be such a stupid, reckless thing to do. But the more I sink into the idea of knowing what really happened to them, to really know what I would’ve died from had my friends actually liked me, the more I need to know the answers like I need the oxygen in the air.
I exhale and fidget with the straw wrapper on the table. Going there is a last resort. It would only happen if the proper authorities won’t do it for us. But they will. Paisley’s a rich white girl, their favorite demographic to investigate.
“Deal,” I say. “I’ll send the video to the cops once I get home.”
For the first time since I saw Beck that night at the Mystic Museum, she smiles at me.
“Then let’s get you home.”
We grab our drinks and head toward the exit.
A couple immediately takes our seats, chatting about the latest round of layoffs at one of the studios.
Our surroundings swallow up any proof that we were there, leaving smooth ground for someone else.
Just like the woods did to Paisley, Harlow, and Opal.
Come hell or high water, we’ll find the truth.