Twenty-Seven
I return to the world as if surfacing from a swim in the ocean.
Ears ringing, lightheaded, gravity feeling a little too heavy on my muscles and bones.
A spot of warmth hits my back and I realize Beck’s touching me.
I managed to stay calm as I processed the bloody pliers and the nails, but I’ve hit my wall.
It’s only once I have that thought that I start quaking.
Beck’s touch on my back turns to two grips, one on each of my shoulders.
“I know,” she says. “C’mon, we don’t have to look at it.”
And Beck leads me away from the piles of wood and the fire circle. Flies land anew in the circle. The image alone makes my stomach lurch again, but there’s nothing left to come up.
Beck waits until my body stops convulsing to keep walking me away. We make it to a house several structures away, out of the sight of the circle. She settles my shaking legs down until we’re both sitting on a porch.
“That was…” Beck blows air out into her cheeks. A choking laugh escapes her lips. “Oh, that was real. That was…” She scratches at her neck so hard I fear she’ll draw blood. “They were killed for something.”
“A ritual.” My throat’s parched, but I know better than to put anything in my body right now.
“Do you still not believe in witches?”
I let my breath out slowly, pressing my palms into the warming wood of the porch.
A splintering bit of wood cuts at my skin, not enough to get stuck but enough to wake my senses a bit.
I pull my hands up and inspect the flesh for splinters anyway.
“It doesn’t matter if they exist. But whoever did kill them clearly believes in something.
Summoning the witch themself, thinking they’re possessed by the witch, and trying to get the devil. Who cares.”
My mouth still tastes like vomit. I swallow again and again, like it’ll do anything to banish what just happened.
“So people are being ritualistically cut up in the town that believes a witch needs to be ‘satisfied’ to prevent another fire,” Beck says.
“Some traveler disappears the same night Paisley, Harlow, and Opal died. And supposedly there was a bloody woman running from the woods into town. All this shit would certainly get someone covered in blood.”
Whoever killed Paisley, Harlow, and Opal not only planted a witch story in their minds, but also planted the idea of going out to the ghost town.
At some point, they were all killed for this horrible ritualistic belief.
At some other point, they had hair, teeth, nails, and an ear removed.
Once they were dead, the killer threw their bodies over a cliff.
And if the texter is right, the whole town knew this ritual took place.
This town is hiding three murders.
Or everyone in the town but the texter, anyway.
Why would someone be so careless leaving Paisley’s nails and Harlow’s ear around a campsite that anyone has access to but remember to take Paisley’s phone? And if the killer is local, did they just go home after killing my friends, or did they have some kind of secret hideaway in the forest?
I know the forest destroys so much evidence, but there has to be something of this killer out here somewhere, right? The pliers are an amazing start to dust for DNA or prints, but this killing was so barbaric. I turn the pliers around in my hands, thumbing off dirt.
My heart jolts, my brain finally able to move on from the taste in my mouth.
There’s a label on the pliers.
KINGSTON WATCHTOWER.
I pull out the paper map Natalie gave us.
My blood goes cold.
We’re right by the lookout tower, which is labeled as defunct. If Natalie knows exactly who came in and out of the national park that night, then we have a very limited suspect pool. It appears that the killer is a woman with long hair. They were able to grab pliers from the lookout tower.
The killer is only human. They must’ve left some trace at this lookout tower.
“We’re going to a lookout tower,” I tell Beck. “I think maybe the killer went there before killing Paisley, Harlow, and Opal.”
Beck stands and brushes the dirt off her pants. “Let’s go.” She snaps some more pictures. “Do you think it’s kinda weird that we’ve found trace evidence of what happened to Pais, Opal, and Harlow, but not that missing woman?”
“I don’t know.”
I dig out my toothbrush, toothpaste, and water bottle and wash out my mouth a few times.
Beck stares at the spot where I spit in the dirt. “We’re leaving a lot of DNA around here, aren’t we?”
I shrug as I wipe my mouth. “Everyone leaves DNA everywhere. It only matters if we’re doing something wrong, right?”
Beck raises her brows. “Fair enough.”
Once I feel clean again, Beck’s words about the missing woman race through my mind.
Natalie knows exactly who was here in the national park. You’re not allowed here at night if you’re not camping. The only women registered to a campsite were Paisley, Harlow, Opal, Ivy, and Vanessa. Ivy didn’t do it, and three of the girls are dead.
We’d assumed all this time that Vanessa was dead, but all Ivy knew was that she was missing. But a woman was spotted that night by two people. A little girl saw a bloody woman run into town and I saw a woman, no longer bloodied, in the parking lot.
It hits me like a wrecking ball.
Of course.
Paisley said in her video that a lady told them about the witch. What if that lady was Vanessa?
What if Vanessa’s disappeared because she doesn’t want to be found?
I swallow the fear digging into my throat and grab my pepper spray as we start walking again.
Maybe we’ll find out just what happened to her when we reach the watchtower.
* * *
Exhaustion creeps in as a surprise. The walk to the watchtower is half a mile, a nothing hike that wouldn’t even be enough for Beck to walk her dogs and get them tired out.
But after the poor night’s sleep, the hike out here, and losing what little caloric energy I had to the summoning circle, I can barely keep my eyes open as my feet drag through the dirt.
I’ve managed to keep water and half a granola bar down, but I know I need more energy, and that I can’t take in any more for a while.
Beck is equally sluggish after her panic attack.
The fact is, we need to rest. This terrain could easily cause us to twist ankles. Every wise decision my dad would be expecting me to make isn’t being made all in the name of my newest hunch about the watchtower.
But we keep walking, pushing through stray tree branches that grow harder and harder to avoid as the minutes go by. I find myself drifting off, listening to bushes rustle and imagining what easy prey we’d be if any predator animals wanted to take down two big meals.
“You know,” Beck says, reigniting the conversation for the first time in about an hour, “I have this delusion that I could beat a coyote in a fight. Like, I could drop kick one off its feet if he ever got near my dogs when I’m out walking in Sherman Oaks.
Now, damn, I’m not so sure. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a coyote up close.
Maybe they’re a lot bigger than I think they are. ”
“I think they’re pretty small. Bears around here aren’t that big either.”
“Are there mountain lions?”
“Not sure.” I press my hand to my forehead, mopping up the sweat. “Don’t think so.”
But when I hear a twig cracking somewhere behind us, we both jump.
“What was that?” Beck asks.
I don’t have an answer.
But we have reached the watchtower.
In another life, I might’ve called the watchtower cute.
Somewhere Owen and I would’ve been exhilarated to discover as kids on our camping trips.
It’s about the size of a large treehouse, lined with a wraparound porch and standing proudly at the top of three wooden platforms accessible by a rope ladder that could be pulled up each time you go up.
It reminds me of an old children’s book, although I can’t remember which one.
I’m not usually huge on heights, but as Beck and I climb and pull the ladder up level by level, the tightness in my chest loosens the higher we go.
No one can get us up here. Literally, no animal or human.
The inside of the tower is almost rustically dorm-like.
The floor is brown tile, the walls painted forest green.
There’s a twin-sized cot shoved into the corner, a tiny kitchen with a sink and counter space to the other side.
A coffeepot sits collecting dust along with a stack of ceramic plates.
There’s one tiny table in the middle with an even smaller wooden stool nearby.
The windows wrap around the whole room, with storage shelves above them.
The room is stuffy as hell, dust getting in my throat immediately. As I cough, Beck leaves the door open.
“I think we’ll need some air for a second.”
Beck jumps up on the countertop to reach the storage cabinets. I scan everything at eye level while she does.
“This place is the ideal spot to wait out the zombie apocalypse,” Beck says. “They’ve got bottled water, sodas, every dried and canned food you can imagine.”
“Are the items expired? This thing must’ve been rebuilt after that terrible fire, right? Why decommission it?”
Beck inspects a can of SpaghettiOs. “I guess it isn’t technically fire season. Maybe Natalie’s partner’s lazy.”
I look through the drawers under the countertop. There are more kitchen and handy tools marked with the lookout tower label like the pliers. My heartbeat picks up, and I wish I knew exactly where to go from here.
Regret swirls in my gut as I think about how we handled Ivy.
Yes, it’s great we found Harlow’s phone, but we don’t really know anything about Vanessa.
How would I even know if something were hers?
The only other obvious thing to look for is smears of old blood if she stopped by here while bloody.
But even that isn’t necessarily true; we just know she grabbed this tool to rip off Paisley’s fingernails at some point.
It could’ve happened before or after their deaths.
My foot brushes against something. It hits the bottom of the window with a thud.
“What was that?” Beck asks, removing her head from the inside of a cabinet.
“Not sure.”
I bend down to pick it up.
But one look at it and I nearly collapse onto the floor with it.
It’s a phone, wrapped in the neon pink case Paisley bought a year ago. The same case that has a HASTINGS SCHOOL NARWHALS sticker on it.
“Holy shit,” I say.
This is Paisley’s phone.
We finally found Paisley’s phone.
The one with my damning voice note on it.