Chapter 6
I closed my eyes, but sleep didn’t come. Even though Chloe cranked up the AC as high as it would go, it was stuffy in the room, and the walls were so thin I could hear people tramping around in the suite overhead or down the hall, their suitcases rattling behind them.
Sometime in the middle of the night, I headed to the bathroom and saw that the light was on. I raised my hand to knock on the door but stopped short when I heard two voices on the other side.
“You do realize she’s going to fuck us all over,” I heard someone say. Riley, maybe. “This is how it begins. Shiloh goes rogue, and the whole thing unravels. We should’ve just kept driving like we were supposed to.”
“You’re being dramatic,” said Chloe. I knew it was her from that gravelly Southern drawl. “If she doesn’t shape up, she’s out, and the rest of us will carry on. It’s that simple.”
“Nothing is ever that simple,” said Riley. I was certain it was her now. It was the delivery that gave her away—that jadedness and anger that set her apart from the rest of the girls in the group. “He’s going to make one of us do it when the time comes.”
He? The group was only girls. What boy or man could they possibly be referring to? Someone’s dad, maybe? A guardian of some kind?
“If it comes to that.” Chloe’s voice was so soft I could barely hear her.
“It will. Even Adeline couldn’t hack it. There’s no way she’ll make it through.”
My breath hitched at the mention of my sister’s name.
“That’s harsh.”
“But true.”
There was a long beat before Chloe spoke again. “How long do you think she’s going to last?”
Another pause, as Riley considered the question. “If she’s even allowed to stay, I give her about a month, max.”
A month? I’d told my mom I was going to go on a week-long camping trip, and mentally, I hadn’t prepared to be gone for anything more than three weeks, max.
The length of a longish road trip. But Chloe and Riley were talking like this was something more permanent.
As if I was going to be like them, on the road indefinitely.
It made me want to burst into the bathroom, let them know that I had a home and family to return to.
I wasn’t just going to leave everything behind.
I bit my tongue to keep from speaking.
“She’s been lucky so far,” said Riley. “Shiloh’s gone easy on her, given everything that happened to her sister.
And Skye likes her, which counts for a lot, unfortunately.
They’ll make sure she gets the clean dispatches.
But it won’t stay that way forever, and I don’t think she has the stomach for the gnarly stuff. ”
I wondered what they meant by dispatches; some kind of job, maybe?
How else could a handful of girls fund their road trips?
Gas was expensive, and food wasn’t cheap either.
The money had to be coming from somewhere.
But what made a job clean versus gnarly?
I couldn’t imagine the girls scrubbing floors or being suited to any hard labor.
With the exception of Riley and Shiloh, who seemed to favor men’s jeans and button-downs, the girls certainly didn’t dress for it.
“I think you might be underestimating her. She’s already been through a lot.”
“Please,” said Riley, and I could practically see her rolling her eyes. “Her sister was a force, and even she folded in the end. Roslyn seems…softer. And that’s me being generous.”
“Don’t be generous. Say what you mean. It’s just you and me. The others are asleep.”
“She’s average at best, weak at worst,” said Riley. “If it wasn’t for her sister, you and I both know she wouldn’t even be here. She’s lucky Shiloh likes a pretty face.”
I flushed at the implication, my cheeks burning. Was Riley right? I’d assumed that my…reaction to Shiloh was one-sided. But was it possible that Shiloh had taken notice of me in the same way? I couldn’t imagine it, a girl like that finding anything to notice about someone like me.
“There are a lot of pretty faces around here,” said Chloe, and she sounded a little dejected. Jealous, even, though there was no real fire behind it.
“None quite like hers, though. And you know Shiloh. She always knows what she wants, and she has a way of getting it.”
Riley sounded so convinced, and she seemed to know Shiloh well, as well as anyone could know someone as withdrawn as Shiloh, anyway.
Maybe there was truth to it, to the beginnings of whatever this was that I was feeling.
Something between us, something different and perhaps more dangerous than what Shiloh shared with the other girls in the group.
I liked the idea of that, for reasons I wasn’t brave enough to confront.
“It wasn’t just Shiloh. Adeline wanted her here too.”
I froze, my heart trilling a fast rhythm against my sternum. Adeline had wanted me here? But why? I strained toward the door, wanting to make sure I caught every word that came next.
“For whatever that’s worth. Adeline couldn’t make it herself.”
“Yeah,” said Chloe. “But we both know what that was about.”
It was all I could do not to burst into the bathroom and demand that she elaborate and, in doing so, reveal I’d been eavesdropping. I couldn’t imagine that going over well, especially with Riley, who clearly had some sort of grudge against me for reasons I didn’t yet understand.
“Adeline always had to win,” said Riley. “Must’ve been hard for her to lose for once. She couldn’t have been expecting it.”
A pit formed in my stomach. Who did Adeline lose to? And while playing what game?
I heard the faucet running, and I lunged away from the door, back to bed.
I managed to slide under the covers and squeeze my eyes shut just as the bathroom door opened and Chloe stepped out into the suite, returning to the cot.
I lay there frozen for some time before I worked up the courage to get up and go back to the bathroom, the pressure in my bladder making it impossible to sleep.
I didn’t knock before entering, on principle mostly. It wasn’t fair that Riley got dibs on the bathroom when there was a pullout couch and an RV she could be sleeping in.
When I opened the door, I saw her sound asleep in the tub. She had her boots on, crusted with mud and braced above the rusty faucet. I wondered how she could sleep comfortably, folded nearly in half, with all the blood rushing down from her legs.
I edged up to the toilet, drew the shower curtain closed for privacy, and attempted to pee as quietly as I could. But I’d barely started when Riley spoke.
“You know you can still go home,” she said, as if we’d already been talking. She drew the curtain back to look at me, her eyes narrow and cloudy with sleep. “You don’t have to stay with us.”
I flinched, a little hurt. It was obvious Riley didn’t want me here, but her opinion clearly wasn’t the one that mattered. So why did I feel so much pressure to win her over, to prove that I was worthy of being here just like everyone else?
“Naomi and Iona were lying earlier.” Riley shifted her weight with a slight wince.
That was the first time I noticed the scar on her knee, surgically straight, thick, and silvered over the way scars do with enough time.
I wondered how she’d gotten it. “It doesn’t get any easier with time,” she said, eyeing me from the tub.
“It just gets hard in a different way. That’s what your sister used to say. ”
With that, Riley shifted in the tub, turning her back to me, and promptly fell back asleep.
I didn’t have the guts to wake her up, to ask more questions about Adeline and what she did with the girls that summer. I hated myself for that. I was here to find out what happened to my sister, but I couldn’t even work up the courage to demand the truth.
On my way back to bed, I looked out the window. There, standing on the other side of the fence, right at the edge of the quarry, was a figure.
Shiloh. Awake and alone outside despite the fact that it was past midnight.
I went to her, stealing out of the suite and traversing the long walkways of the motel, without really knowing why except that I was too wired to sleep—my mind reeling with theories about Adeline and these strange girls that she’d traveled with.
I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts and questions, especially when there was someone awake who could answer them.
Outside, it was unseasonably cold and quiet. There was a hole in the fence that encircled the parking lot, and I ducked through it. A few of my curls tangled painfully in the cut chain links, and I had to untangle them before starting toward Shiloh, who stood right on the cliff’s edge.
“Can’t sleep?” Even though I spoke softly, the words carried over the gash of the quarry in a series of long echoes.
Shiloh didn’t answer or even pull her gaze from the quarry. I had the eerie suspicion that she’d known it was me from the moment I’d left the motel. Maybe even before that.
I noticed, as I came to stand alongside her, just how close she was to the cliff.
She gazed over its edge, tense and expectant, and I wondered who or what she could’ve been waiting for at that hour, alone in the dark.
“You should know that I don’t have what you’re looking for.
All that stuff that happened with Adeline, that storm she was caught up in.
We were only privy to it for a while, and in the end, I—we—couldn’t save her from it. Believe me, we tried.”
It was a nonanswer. A diversion. But I didn’t call her on it then. “I just want to know what happened to her. She changed that summer when she was with you. She must have, because she came back so…” I trailed off, grasping for the right word.
“Different?”
“So wrong,” I corrected her firmly. I had tolerated my parents and therapists poking holes in my theories with their Socratic questioning and gentle appeals. But I wouldn’t, couldn’t, take it from her. “I know something happened.”
“And you’ve come here to find out exactly what that is?”
I didn’t deny it. No point being coy when she clearly knew what I was after.
“What happened to her when she was traveling with you? And why was she even with you in the first place? What do you guys even do? You never really answered that question when I asked yesterday, and I know there’s more that you’re not telling me.
I heard Riley and Chloe talking earlier. ”
“What did they say?” she asked, without the barest hint of curiosity. Like she was just trying to humor me, to say the right thing at the right time.
Just then, a cold wind dragged across the quarry. I shivered, folding my arms tight over my chest, and Shiloh turned to look at me for the first time. “What the hell, Roslyn? It’s freezing out here.”
She shrugged off her coat—a denim trucker jacket with patches at both elbows. I tried to wave her away, but she set it down over my shoulders anyway. It was heavy and warm, and it smelled like her—clean and earthen, like a forest after it rains. “You should go inside. Warm up.”
But I didn’t move. I thought about what Riley said earlier, about Shiloh liking a pretty face, and I hated myself for that.
I was here for Adeline. I refused to become one of the countless people who allowed themselves to move on and forget her.
“You never answered my question about Adeline. What happened when she was with you?”
“I can’t answer that,” said Shiloh, and then she nodded across the quarry. “But he can.”
A man appeared then, as if summoned forth from the mist. A figure across the quarry, on the other side of the barbed wire fence, coming toward us.
He walked in a way that was strange and erratic, no rhythm to his steps, a wrenching of his shoulders, a convulsion that bent his arm sharply backward at the joint of the elbow.
Even at a distance, he looked like a thing that was not yet used to wearing human skin.
Seeing him, my mouth went dry, and my hands began to shake.
The ground felt like it was melting beneath my feet.
The only time I’d felt a terror like that was the moment the police showed up on our front porch to tell us they’d found Adeline’s corpse in the playhouse.
Even before the officer said a word, I knew what he was going to say, could tell from the expression on his face that the mystery of Adeline’s disappearance had ended in death.
Now, watching this man approach, I felt that same dread.
It all happened so fast after that. Shiloh took a half step in front of me, angling her body between me and the approaching figure even though he was still a long way off, coming around the bend of the quarry, walking tight against the fence.
“Go wake the girls,” she said, in a way that made me want to run. In a way that told me I should. “Let them know our guest is here.”