Chapter 9
Later that day, at a pizza buffet on the border between Wisconsin and Minnesota, Shiloh informed me that my next kill would take place at a music festival in the salt flats of Nevada.
She wouldn’t give me a name when I asked, or tell me how the person would die, just that it was coming.
Another chance to prove that I could keep up my end of the bargain and find out what had really happened to my sister the night she died.
The buffet was a little seedy. The pizza was stale and dry under the red glare of the heat lamps, and the lettuce in the salad bar was brown and wilting. The girls claimed a booth, all of us sliding into the benches on either side of the table.
I looked to Shiloh. “How many people do I have to kill, anyway?”
“There is no set number,” said Shiloh, and she caught Iona’s eye across the table, then nodded to a lone woman sitting at the bar. She was a box-blonde in a tailored suit, looked to be in her forties. She sat hunched over several empty shot glasses. “It’s about how you kill, not how many.”
Iona slid out of the booth, crossing the restaurant in a few long strides.
She perched herself on an unclaimed stool beside the woman, gave her a wide and dazzling smile and said something, a joke, maybe, or a compliment; I couldn’t hear them from so far away.
But whatever it was brought a smile to the woman’s face.
It was only then that I realized Iona was going to kill her.
Shiloh kept her gaze trained on Iona. “Watch her work. You see how she stays present? That’s crucial. You need to live their last moments with them. Ease them through it.”
I watched with a pit in my stomach as Iona slid a hand across the sticky bar top. She touched the woman’s fingers, and that was all it took. The woman slumped forward out of her stool and hit the ground.
Riley tossed a crumpled napkin on a half-eaten slice of pizza and slid out of the booth. “Welp. Guess that’s our cue.”
The other girls followed suit, trailing her out of the restaurant, Iona close at their heels. But I stayed, alone in the booth, staring at the woman lying dead on the ground until Shiloh caught me by the arm and dragged me away.
Outside the buffet, as ambulance sirens wailed in the distance, Shiloh spread a paper map across the hood of her truck and developed a plan.
From eastern Minnesota to the Nevada salt flats where the music festival would take place was nearly a twenty-three-hour drive.
She estimated it would take us about three days of driving, and only if we didn’t make too many pit stops.
To stay on time, we agreed to stop every two or three hours for pee breaks at gas stations, rest stops, or, in particularly rural areas, on the shoulder of the road, hidden by the high grass.
We’d drive during the daylight hours and spend our nights in campsites or desolate stretches owned by the Bureau of Land Management, where anyone could stay as long as they wanted to.
An ambulance pulled into the parking lot, help for a woman who was already dead. The lights flashed and the sirens howled. Iona watched on, expressionless, as paramedics rushed into the restaurant.
Shiloh, for her part, didn’t even register them.
She was already focused on the next dispatch, tracing a finger along the map, following the path of a highway.
“If we stay on target, we should make it to Nevada on Friday, give or take. Just as the festival begins.” Her gaze flickered up to me, eyes sharp in the flashing lights of the ambulance.
“That’ll give you plenty of time to find your mark. ”
I swallowed what felt like a stone. I hadn’t let myself think of Stewart much in the wake of his death.
Every time I thought of him—alone in that cabin, dead—I just…
shut down. But now, faced with the impending reality of my second kill, all the memories came flooding back.
The feel of him under my hand, the visions of his life, the life I’d taken.
I wasn’t sure I had it in me to do it again.
If not for Adeline, I don’t even think I would’ve had the strength to try.
The paramedics burst from the restaurant with the woman, the corpse, strapped to the gurney. They ushered her into the ambulance and pulled out onto the street. No sirens this time, just the lights flashing silently.
—
That first day on the open road, driving through the grassy plains of South Dakota, was like the dream of a dream.
The empty highways were licked with heat waves.
The prairies were flat and featureless, stretching endlessly toward the distant horizon.
Sometimes we went what felt like hours without seeing a single other car on the road and it was safe enough for Skye and Naomi to ride in the bed of Shiloh’s truck, the wind whipping their hair wild and weightless, Skye with her arms raised Titanic-style and Naomi bracing her to keep her from falling.
That night, we camped on BLM land. The whole scene was fast and frantic.
It reminded me of an overstuffed closet bursting open and spilling out onto the empty plains.
Chloe, one of the taller girls in the group, strung Christmas lights across the fold-down awning over the RV’s door.
Iona unfurled a large and dusty Persian rug and pried open a series of rusting lounge chairs, padding the seats with tasseled pillows in a variety of sizes and colors.
Naomi turned on music, and the rasping vocals of Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks crackled from an old speaker that Skye had set up in the bed of Shiloh’s truck.
As darkness fell, Iona strung a sheet up on the side of the RV, a makeshift screen.
Riley made popcorn in a pan over the open fire while Naomi and Iona fussed with a tangled knot of extension cords until—wheezing and overheated—a projector finally spit grainy black-and-white footage at the sheet.
Skye, Iona, and Chloe piled into the trunk of the station wagon, and the rest of us dragged up folding chairs and pillows, clutching bowls of warm popcorn to our chests as the opening credits reeled.
I was surprised when Shiloh bypassed the other girls and sat down on a pillow beside me, so close our knees very nearly touched.
When the wind blew just so, I could feel her hair skim across my cheek.
And I wondered what it meant that I wanted her closer still.
—
The next day, we got up before dawn, packed up camp in the blue dark, and hit the highway hoping to make it across the better part of Wyoming and into Utah before nightfall.
We were a good four hours into our drive and, as far as I could tell, roughly in the middle of nowhere when Chloe convinced Shiloh to pull over at Flower Children, a vintage shop that had been announcing itself in a series of sun-faded billboards posted at intervals along the side of the road.
“We have nothing to wear to the music festival.” Chloe leaned forward from the back seat of the truck to make sure that Shiloh heard her.
“You always say we need to keep a low profile; how are we going to do that if we don’t even look the part?
” She then gestured to me with a jab of her thumb, and I was grateful that Shiloh didn’t take her eyes off the road to look at me.
“I mean, Roslyn’s wardrobe is almost entirely comprised of gym shorts and hand-me-down Catholic camp T-shirts. No offense.”
“None taken,” I said, though in truth, I was a little embarrassed, because I knew my wardrobe was sorely lacking.
When Adeline was alive, I’d dressed better, because she coaxed me into borrowing her clothes—thrifted cotton maxi skirts and tiny crop tops stolen from our local strip mall and bleach-dyed in our parents’ deep Jacuzzi tub.
Adeline was always adventurous with what she wore, and I had always followed suit. But after she died, I lost the heart to wear her clothes. They still smelled like her, and I worried that the scent would fade with wear. So I left her clothes in her closet untouched.
My personal wardrobe was mostly comprised of stuff that Adeline wouldn’t even wear to bed: sweat-wicking shorts, baggy T-shirts, and neon sports bras that Adeline had once called garish and tasteless.
“If I don’t stretch my legs a bit, I’m going to get a blood clot,” Skye whined, backing Chloe up. “Please can we just have a look?”
Shiloh didn’t answer her, but when the antique shop appeared on the roadside—it was a warehouse painted red to look like a barn—she steered her truck into the parking lot with an exasperated sigh. “You have thirty minutes.”
Flower Children was as big as a department store, and it was packed to capacity with so many antiques that, upon entering, my brain briefly overloaded. There were two floors. The bottom was reserved mostly for furniture and other antiques. The second floor was all vintage clothes.
The girls immediately raced upstairs and began to sort through the selections, the hangers screeching along the racks as they clawed their way through a bevy of wedding gowns gone yellow with age, fur-trimmed coats, and long silken nightgowns, among other finds.
Chloe, perhaps feeling guilty for her choice comments about my wardrobe, designated herself as my personal stylist. “I’m not trying to change your wardrobe, per se, just expand it so that it’s more…you.”
I gestured to my outfit: dirty Converse, athletic shorts, an old T-shirt from a Catholic summer camp I’d been forced to attend years ago. The only redeemable element of the outfit was Shiloh’s coat, which…I’d been wearing a lot for no reason I was willing to admit out loud. “What if this is me?”
Chloe glanced at me up and down. The neon-pink running shorts, the ratty T-shirt, Shiloh’s coat over it. She wrinkled her nose. “I find that highly unlikely. The goal is to pick pieces that call to you, not just whatever is around. Everything has to go…except that coat. It’s Shiloh’s, right?”
I flushed hot. “She let me borrow it.”