Chapter 9
When Apricot returned to the villa, Cassidy invited Edie and Rose over to try and figure out what the hell was going on.
Edie told her in further messages that Rose thought the whole thing was just a publicity stunt on LeHane’s part.
Cassidy knew James saw Ryan fall the night before, and although she wished to never see him again if she could avoid it, she invited him over as well.
The four women sat at the round white table in the living room area, while James leaned against the counter of the breakfast nook.
Rose looked a little irritated to be there, flipping through her phone with quick, sharp flicks of her fingers.
Apricot sat next to her, also looking like she didn’t want to be at the table.
Rose wrapped her curls in a bright scarf that matched her bodycon dress, and Apricot wore the high-rise short shorts and sheer tank top she planned to attend the show in.
Both of them gave the impression that they had better things they wanted to do right now.
Edie, though, looked how Cassidy felt. Edie’s braids hung loose around her shoulders, which rose up in a tension that matched James’.
He’d been on edge since he’d reached the villa and looked like he was ready to burst out of his own skin.
Apricot tried texting Daisy again and even commented on her video when she went live earlier, but Daisy either ignored or didn’t see the messages.
“So, tell me what you think is happening here, and be quick because I want to see tonight’s opener,” Rose said.
“Edie, I know you think you saw that guy fall off the cliff, and I know it really messed with you to see that, but he’s clearly okay.
He’s been posting all day, and he doesn’t even look hurt. ”
“We all saw him fall,” Cassidy said, indicating herself, Edie, and James in quick circles with her hand. “And I didn’t just see it. I heard it. There’s no way that was fake. His neck …”
The crunching of Ryan LeHane’s neck breaking as the weight of his body cranked it into a right angle would haunt Cassidy for the rest of her life. She felt at a loss to describe how she knew on a gut level that Ryan and his friends couldn’t have faked that; she just knew.
“His whole thing is fucked up pranks, though. I think this was just a next level prank,” Rose said.
James shook his head. “No. I stayed with the body. I saw the blood. It was no fucking prank.”
“Can’t give CPR to a test dummy,” Rose said under her breath.
James opened his mouth to speak but Edie interrupted him.
“What if it’s a cover up?” she asked. “We think he’s still posting, but we don’t know that all of that is from today.
There’s nothing in any of his videos or pictures to for sure say when they were filmed.
He could have gotten all the footie yesterday and now someone is posting it from his account to avoid this whole festival going tits up. ”
“Yes!” James shouted, pointing at Edie like she’d just won a prize. “It has to be a coverup. I went back to the waterfall today—”
“Why?” Cassidy gasped in horror.
“And security told me I couldn’t make a statement, and then they disappeared. So then I went back to the waterfall, and there was nothing there.”
“What do you mean there was nothing there?” Apricot asked.
“There was no blood, there was no body, there was nothing,” he said.
Cassidy watched Edie’s eyes widen in a mirror of her own horror.
“So, it was definitely a prank, then! I don’t know what you’re all going on about when you’re just proving that there’s nothing to be worried about here except some tasteless, juvenile tricks,” Rose said.
“You’re not going to tell me what I saw. I know what I saw. And why would security be guarding nothing? And then,” he added, raising his voice, “they told me to give any statement I wanted to give to island officials, but they don’t have a tent. There’s no one to go to.”
“What about that guy who greeted all of us when we got off the plane?” Cassidy asked.
James shook his head. “I have no idea who you’re talking about.
There’s no central person I could find to report anything to.
Security deferred me to ‘the island,’ but there’s no representative here to make a complaint to,” then he added, with so much conviction in his voice and suppressed anger that it came out just louder than a whisper, “someone went to a lot of effort to clean up that mess, and now they’re posting on Ryan’s accounts to keep his death under wraps. ”
“Who would be posting?” Apricot asked, matching James’ volume.
“Maybe it’s someone from behind the scenes here,” James said, leaning back against the counter and taking on a conversational volume again. “No one has been talking about Ryan and all the videos and hashtags relating to his death or disappearance have been deleted.”
“No, that’s not true,” Cassidy said. “The guy who started that fight last night posted some videos and I watched them this morning. He was talking all about how weird this place is and then talked about Ryan falling.”
“Is that video you were watching still up now?” James asked. “You should check and see because I bet it’s not.”
Cassidy retrieved her laptop from her bedroom and did a search for UrbEx Mike. She found his profile, but the three videos on the Island Xperience were gone.
“He had three videos,” she said, clicking around and refreshing the screen to try and summon the videos again. “The first two had nothing to do with Ryan’s death; he was just saying how weird everything sounded with the invites.”
“No, that makes sense. It seems like anyone who has said anything negative about the island is getting their posts deleted. They’re doing a complete scrub,” James said.
“Yeah, I saw a video shit-talking the restaurants earlier and thought it was hilarious,” Rose said, unlocking the phone in her hand and tapping around on the screen After a moment of scrolling up and down, her jaw set. “I thought I put it in my collection, but maybe I didn’t. I can’t find it now.”
James raised his fists and shook them in frustration.
“That’s what I’m saying! I’m sure people are talking shit about this place and not just because they want to find things wrong with it.
People had some legitimate complaints that I saw yesterday.
Like, all of you in the tents have to share a communal bathroom, and there aren’t any Bahamians anywhere so there’s no money from this whole thing going into their economy, and the dorms are, frankly, pretty shoddy for how much a bunch of us paid to stay in them, and that can’t just be fixed overnight.
There’s no way people aren’t still complaining about those things, but there’s no proof.
It’s like all of the negative coverage is getting scrubbed. ”
“Can they do that?” Cassidy asked. “Can they, like, delete our posts and not tell us?”
“Of course they can,” James insisted. “They do it all the time.”
“All the time? Really?” Rose raised her eyebrows.
Cassidy noticed that Edie’s head moved from left to right as the conversation moved from Rose to James, like she was watching a tennis match. Cassidy felt self-conscious just watching her and made sure to only move her eyes from speaker to speaker.
“Okay, they usually give you a notification that they deleted your shit,” James admitted.
“But it’s not like they can’t do it without telling you.
Besides, for all we know this festival is being bankrolled by the guys who own Instagram or something.
If we post on their platform, then they have the ability to take posts off if they violate guidelines.
We probably agreed to some bullshit when we bought our tickets here to say that we wouldn’t slander it if things got all Fyre Fest.”
“Oh my god!” Apricot exclaimed, her eyes wide as she stared across the table at the others.
“Do you think they’re spying on us? Like, not just on our phones, but like actually in person spying on us?
” She turned to the left and grabbed Cassidy’s arm in a panic.
“Do you think that’s who we saw in that video we posted yesterday?
Do you think that kid was paid to spy on us? ”
Apricot stood and ran over to the sliding glass door.
She placed her fingers on the handle but didn’t open it.
Instead, she pressed her forehead close to the glass and looked one way down the length of the porch, then other.
Even with the different lighting from the incident the day before, it struck Cassidy how similar Apricot’s silhouette looked compared to the shadow they’d seen, and a shiver ran up her spine.
“What kid?” Rose asked, her voice inflecting high in shock.
“There was a kid on the patio yesterday, maybe,” Cassidy said.
“In that video you showed us in the hot tub?” Edie asked. She seemed to recall a fuzzy memory of seeing one of Apricot’s video posts but failed to recall any children in it.
“Yeah. I mean, we didn’t see him at first, but he was definitely in that video the first time we saw it, but he was gone. I don’t know. It definitely looked like a kid. It wasn’t a glitch or anything.”
“It’s fucking scary is what it was,” Apricot shouted, sliding the blinds shut and twisting them closed as they waved and tapped against one another like plastic windchimes.
“And,” Cassidy added slowly, “I think I saw something similar up there with Ryan when he fell.” She couldn’t look at anyone as she made this admission, and instead, stared down at the table. “I think it pushed him.”
The room fell into a cool darkness and Apricot seated herself back at the table.
“Maybe you all saw what you wanted to see,” Rose said.
“No, I bet they did see something,” Edie said. “I’ve been seeing some weird stuff on this island, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a bunch of little kids running around.”
Rose turned to Edie and gave the full force of her disbelief in the strength of her side-eye. “How would the video have changed?”