Chapter 23
“What?” Edie’s hand rushed to her head, where she should have found her braids, but instead her fingers found a thin layer of curls, cropped close to her scalp. She felt violated and couldn’t help from patting her hands around in search of any single plait. “What the hell?”
A tingling cold crept into her raised arms and brought goosebumps to the surface of her skin. “I didn’t even fall asleep,” she whispered in disbelief.
“Do you believe me now about my tattoo?”
Edie let her arms drop. She nodded slowly. “I already believed you. I’m sorry.” She stepped away from Cassidy and glanced at her then quickly away. “That’s why we have to search the woods.”
Cassidy sat up in the loveseat. “Why?”
Edie looked at her dead on and took a seat on the coffee table in front of her. The light from between the blinds to the back porch fell in a bright line between Cassidy’s eyes.
“What separates us from everyone else?”
“Perfect teeth and rich parents?” Cassidy suggested, deadpan.
“I’m being serious. What makes you and James and me different from everyone else? What can you think of?”
Cassidy chewed her lip and thought, then shrugged. “We had people that disappeared on us.”
“I mean, yeah, but James didn’t know Apricot and Rose before he got here, so he didn’t lose anyone close to him. If he had forgotten he’d met either of them the day after he did, that would almost make sense.”
“What do you think it is, then?” Cassidy asked.
As she moved, the beam of light hit her eyes.
She stood and walked to the blinds to open them, then stopped.
“Everything was going fine until that kid faked his death or whatever,” she sighed.
As she said it, Edie could tell something dawned on her.
She slowly turned to verify that Edie was thinking the same thing.
“You saw Ryan LeHane fall, didn’t you?” Cassidy asked.
Edie nodded. “And so did you.”
“But Apricot didn’t see it, and Daisy wasn’t there.”
“Rose didn’t see it happen, either. But James did.”
Edie felt an electricity in knowing that Cassidy stumbled upon the same train of thought but couldn’t tell if the shocks in her body stemmed from fear or excitement. “That’s why we have to go back.”
“What do you expect to find, exactly?” Cassidy asked as they trudged through the sand together.
“I don’t know,” Edie replied. “Maybe that’s where Rose is, and Apricot and Daisy. I mean, maybe there’s a chance that they’re still here somewhere. People don’t just disappear.”
Yet, the expanded distance between the villas and the tents they passed compared to the day before suggested otherwise.
Normally, she felt at home walking through warm, sugar-soft beaches like this one, but now she felt like every step took a greater effort than the last. All around them, people laughed and shouted and filmed every second of their experience for viewers around the world to show off their vacation in the sun.
It all felt wrong to Edie. The sun didn’t deserve to glisten so beautifully off the blue water, and people didn’t deserve to be so happy when everything around them was totally different than just days before.
It should have been cloudy and desolate.
There should have been a tropical storm coming to put them all out of their blissfully ignorant existence.
Instead, the skies remained clear, and the only dark clouds hung over Edie and Cassidy.
“Tattoos and hair also don’t just disappear,” Cassidy said as they neared the place on the island where the two coves came together. Another stand-up paddle board yoga class floated on the calm water.
“Okay,” Edie conceded in a low voice. “But whatever is at work here lives in there and it has our friends.”
The breeze ran through the dark, lush woods and got trapped there. Even though she only stood a few yards away, Edie couldn’t hear the sound of the shaking leaves. The warm early morning sunshine also failed to penetrate the dense canopy. Edie shivered as she peered inside.
“And what are you going to do if we don’t find them?” Cassidy asked, also staring ahead into the woods.
“I guess it depends on what we do find.”
Edie couldn’t locate the path they took that first night.
It was dark then, and she just followed the line of people ahead of her through the trees.
Edie spent her childhood outside and grew up knowing to look for landmarks, and so, even though she was high as the stars on that first trek, she picked her way through the overgrown vegetation until they found the stream and the rocky impression of a path that led to the waterfall.
The temperature continued to drop as they grew nearer to the falls, and Edie felt a deeper chill under her skin when she thought about what she last saw deep in these trees and what she was perhaps about to see.
Her heart pounded at the thought of finding Ryan’s body broken and rotting on the rocks, even though James told her that he’d been back and there’d been no body.
With everything going on lately, she wasn’t sure what she would find.
She couldn’t get the image of Ryan’s body out of her mind and got herself so worked up that when something ran past her in the woods, she let out a yelp.
“What?” Cassidy asked.
Edie shook her head. “Just an animal or something.”
A really big, really fast animal.
They kept walking deeper into the trees, and Edie heard Cassidy shiver behind her. Every time something shook in the leaves near the trail, Edie jumped. She couldn’t tell how far they were from the waterfall and was ready to bolt when she heard Cassidy gasp behind her.
“What? What is it?” Edie asked, sounding angrier than scared.
“It’s nothing, it’s just …” Cassidy trailed off and her eyes darted around. Both women stood still, waiting to hear the signs of something hiding in the flora that followed them this entire time, but instead the woods fell eerily silent.
“I think I’ve seen it, too,” Edie whispered. “I think we’re being watched.”
“We should turn around,” Cassidy said, looking like a deer ready to flee.
“No, no.” Edie put her hands out, nearly grabbing Cassidy. Instead, she put her palms toward the woman in the same way she would soothe a scared animal. “I think it’s close. We can’t turn back yet.”
Although Edie bluffed in guessing where they were in proximity to the waterfall, she was correct.
Soon they were upon it, and Edie thought the cliff looked shorter than before.
That first night on the island, it reached up into the endless sky above the trees and Ryan LeHane’s last performance appeared like it was stories above them.
The water still slid down the rock and poured its three braids steadily onto the granite platform below, with nothing stopping the flow.
“Well, it looks exactly like it did last time, except there’s no body. Just like James said there wasn’t,” Cassidy said.
Not only was there no body, but there were no signs that any violence ever occurred there. No blood, no loose rocks or trampled moss beds. She sat down on the log she thought she’d sat on that first night and a realization crept over her as though being poured over her skin by the waterfall itself.
This wasn’t a game, or a coverup. No crime, or accident, ever occurred at this waterfall. Ryan LeHane never fell, because Ryan LeHane never existed. Things had always looked just this way, just as they remembered it, but somehow this was the first time they were seeing them.
“Well, now what?” Cassidy asked, sitting down next to Edie.
Edie shook her head, unsure of how to proceed.
She looked from the falls to Cassidy as though in a daze.
None of it seemed real, but the humidity in the air, the cold droplets on her skin, the smell of wet and fertile soil giving foothold to the trees surrounding the rocky falls, all of it was too vivid to be denied.
“Didn’t … didn’t James say he saw some buildings on this side of the island? Where the workers are staying?” she asked.
“I thought we weren’t trusting things James said.”
“James has figured something out. Let’s play by his rules and see what happens.”
Cassidy shrugged and shook her head in concession. “Sure, yeah, why not.” She stood and started to go through the trees around the falls, continuing the path they’d taken.
“I’m sure they don’t go through the forest when they clock out. Let’s go back to the beach and find a path,” Edie said.
This time, when she saw shadows in the corners of her eyes, she didn’t look.
Edie kept her focus on the ground behind Cassidy’s feet, only looking up to ensure they followed landmarks she recognized until the sounds of the ocean broke through the foliage, followed shortly by the sun shining onto her skin.
There were no markers to suggest that one way or another led to a path, so Edie walked north up the beach and Cassidy followed.
Despite a lack of signage saying that this side of the island was in any way off limits, once they got more than a couple hundred yards away from the cove, they were alone on the beach.
The ocean lapped placidly at the shore, and the two women walked in silence.
Edie kept an eye out for any signs of a pathway breaking through the trees but saw none.
They walked until they reached the northmost part of the island and still didn’t see anything.
Only after turning left and walking east again did Edie finally spot something in the trees: a cabin-like structure, smaller than she thought a dormitory would be to house all the workers on the island.
As they walked closer, the vegetation cleared and the land in front of the cabin was open and covered only with grass, allowing them to safely approach and see that the cabin did not look inhabited by anyone.
There were curtains over the cracked windows and the inside was completely dark.