Chapter 49
THE DRIVE TO BURT KIESWETTER’S cabin will take two hours, maybe an hour and forty if Cameron Wallace drives fast.
Barb isn’t sure that it’s the wisest idea for Cameron to come along.
But when they explained to him who Marty Kieswetter might be—possibly the “Nathan Shelley” who found Ingrid Larsen’s dog, possibly the “tall dude” Sydney mentioned in her voicemail to her friend Jasmine, and possibly someone who saw Kylie Kahl in Seattle before she disappeared—he insisted on driving them to the cabin.
It does makes sense to have a police detective with them; they really don’t know what they’ll be walking into.
The problem is, Cameron doesn’t know that Marty Kieswetter isn’t just a potential person of interest in the disappearances of three women.
Cam has no idea that Marty was at the drive-in the night Lorelei died, and that he might have the answers to what really happened to his stepsister twenty-five years ago.
Barb sort of skipped over that part, because he’d have questions.
Hell, they had questions.
“But aren’t you off duty now?” Barb asks, exchanging a look with Nicolette as they follow Cameron out to the parking lot. He clicks the fob for the green Nissan Pathfinder parked a few rows over from her car. It’s his personal vehicle.
“Yep, and that’s why I won’t be there in any official police capacity,” he says. “But his credit card does place him at a hotel near Kylie Kahl’s on the last day she was seen, and he’s tall, and you have a hunch. I know what it’s like to have a hunch, so I’m going as your friend.”
Friend capacity or not, he’s holstered and badged.
The two women climb into the SUV, Barb automatically taking the front passenger seat, Nicolette sliding into the back. There was a time when Nicolette would have called shotgun and they’d have bickered over who got to sit where. But things are different now.
Nicolette is different now, as much as Barb hates to admit it.
On the way up to Bear Lake, she and Cameron continue to trade theories about the missing women, with Nicolette occasionally adding context. Apparently she and Sydney Carlisle had crossed paths a handful of times over the years, most recently in Las Vegas during Sydney’s last season on Showgirls.
“She was really sweet,” Nicolette says from the backseat. “She loved performing, but she hated being a reality star. She struggled with the things people said about her online. I wasn’t surprised she didn’t do a third season. It’s not for everybody.”
Cameron nods, focused on the road. “That’s how I’d feel.”
“Kylie, on other hand, loved the attention,” Nicolette says.
“She was already popular because of her TikTok, but she blossomed on the show. And she never gave two shits what people said about her.” A pause.
“She always said that every cruel thing had already been said to her back home in Wisconsin.”
“What about Freddie?” Barb asks. “What was their relationship really like?”
“They were adorable,” Nicolette says. “What you saw on the show was the same as how they were when the cameras weren’t around.
Whatever happened to her, I can’t imagine Freddie was involved.
I don’t know that it was true love in the traditional sense.
But they really, really liked each other.
They were best friends. Yeah, they annoyed each other and they argued.
But they also talked all the time and made each other laugh.
In my opinion, theirs was the healthiest marriage of all. ”
“And you?” Cameron asks, glancing at her through the rearview mirror. “Do you like being on TV?”
“I used to,” Nicolette says. “But now I’m having a hard time remembering why I ever wanted to do it in the first place.”
“You always wanted to be famous,” Barb says, but there’s no malice behind it. It’s a fact, and they both know it.
In the backseat, she hears Nicolette sigh. “It’s true what they say. Be careful what you wish for.”
* * *
Ninety minutes later, Bear Lake Road shows up on Google Maps, but the trees are so dense that the lake itself isn’t even visible from the road.
Neither are most of the cabins and cottages.
Occasionally they pass a mailbox at the end of a cleared path, indicating a home somewhere deeper in the woods.
But only occasionally. Otherwise it feels like they’re driving to nowhere.
“Maybe we should have waited until the morning to do this,” Nicolette says, and she sounds as freaked out as Barb feels. “It’s getting dark and there are no lights out here. Also, I’m assuming there are bears if they named an entire lake after them?”
“It’s fine,” Cameron says, but he seems tenser than usual. “I’ll put a call into the station, let everywhere know where we are.”
“But there’s no signal out here.” Barb points to his phone, which is stuck to the dashboard with a magnetic holder. The LTE indicator is showing zero bars, and her phone is doing the same. “Google Maps is working offine.”
He glances over at her. “You want to go back?”
She hesitates. She does and she doesn’t.
“Let’s play it by ear,” she finally says. “If we find Marty’s cabin, and it looks creepy as hell, we’ll turn around.”
“If it’s creepy as hell, I’m not getting out of the car,” Nicolette declares from the backseat. “I don’t need to get redrum’d today.”
“You don’t need to get what?” Cam glances at her in the rearview mirror, confused.
“Redrum’d,” Barb says to him with a nervous chuckle. “Redrum is the word murder backward. Guess you’ve never seen The Shining?”
“Um, should we really be talking about horror movies right now?” he asks.
“He’s right,” Nicolette says. “My bad. Let’s not manifest anything we don’t want to actually happen.”
Barb checks the map on Cameron’s phone, then looks up at the small white mailbox on the side of the road they’re approaching. She squints. The black lettering on the side spells kieswetter.
“That’s it,” she says. “Turn right at that mailbox.”
Cameron turns the car onto the dirt path, but wherever the cabin is, it’s not yet visible.
Off the main road, it seems even darker, the tree coverage blocking what’s left of the late-afternoon sunlight.
The thing bothering Barb the most about being out here, so far away from any sort of civilization, is the silence.
For a person who enjoys writing in busy diners and coffee shops, and who almost always has the TV on in the background while she’s working at home, noise is comforting.
It’s necessary. The quiet is the most disturbing part of this whole drive.
But then, suddenly, through the trees, there’s light. It’s emanating from the cabin that’s appeared just up ahead, catching them all off guard.
“That’s quite pretty,” Nicolette says. She’s leaning forward, looking out the windshield between Barb and Cameron. “I thought it would look rundown, but it doesn’t, at all.”
Picturesque is actually the word that comes to mind for Barb.
The cabin is small, but it’s well maintained, with a wraparound porch.
Behind it, Bear Lake shimmers, the sunset casting a wide golden path across the calm waters.
There’s a second, smaller cabin to the far left, set almost all the way back into the trees, and a black SUV is parked to the right, halfway into the bushes.
It’s covered in rust and dirt, and doesn’t appear to have been driven in a while.
Barb checks the notes she made in her phone after she spoke to the private investigator.
The black Ford Edge here is the same car that Marty drives; the license plates are a match.
From both cabins, puffs of smoke are drifting out of their chimneys. When Barb opens her car door, she hears music playing. Pearl Jam’s “Yellow Ledbetter.”
Somebody’s home.
The three of them exit Cam’s car, and wordlessly, Barb takes the lead.
Nicolette follows a few steps behind, but Cameron goes a different direction, flashlight in hand as he heads toward the rusty Ford.
As Barb steps up onto the porch of the larger cabin, she finds herself glad that he insisted on coming.
There’s no way to know what—or who—they’ll find behind that door.
Unlike Lorelei and Nicolette, Barb had never hated Marty back in the day. She wouldn’t go so far as to say that his social awkwardness was endearing, but she could relate to it. She was just better at hiding being a misfit than he was.
She knocks on the door. A few seconds later, it opens. Expecting to look up at a person significantly taller than she is, she instead comes face-to-face with a woman who appears just as shocked to see Barb as she is to see her.
“Barb,” Alice Chu says. “What are you doing here?”