Courtney
I lie awake all night staring up at the cracked plaster ceiling. A long rift, like a winding river, snakes across it and I
lie there all night, waiting for chunks of plaster to come raining down on us while we’re in bed.
There is a streetlight outside in the parking lot that shines in through the window. It makes a loud humming noise that makes
it impossible for me to fall asleep.
Daniel Clarke is no longer a suspect. Because by 6:00 p.m. on the night that Emily and Reese had that fight, the night that
Emily and Nolan were killed—as the four of us, Emily, Nolan, Elliott and me, sat around playing cards and drinking—he was
already in Stewartville, Minnesota, getting gas from a Kwik Trip before heading further west, which leaves only a handful
of suspects.
Daniel Clarke didn’t kill them. He didn’t take Reese.
Wyatt sleeps on the floor. I see him out of the corner of my eye, his lanky body spread out face down on the quilt we dragged
from Elliott and my bed so that Elliott and I sleep under only a thin sheet. We found an extra blanket in a drawer for Wyatt,
which is pulled to his waist. He lies shirtless and facing away from me so that I wonder if he’s asleep or if he’s lying on
the floor with his eyes open, staring at the blank wall. I listen to the sounds of his breath, trying to decide.
I’m going to kill you if I’m late for school.
Kill you.
It wasn’t so much what he said but the way he said it, the merciless look in his eye and his strength when he hit me.
Beside me, Elliott lies with his heavy arm around my waist, binding me to the bed. Earlier, he tried talking to me when I
came back in from speaking to Detective Evans. He pulled me aside and said, We need to talk about this.
I asked, Talk about what?
He said, About why you don’t trust me.
I do trust you, I said, but it’s not true. He’s keeping something from me. I think about the blood on his shoes, about the picture of Reese
on his iPad, and how Emily said she wanted to talk to him that night before we left. I find it too convenient that he doesn’t
remember her saying that, just as I find it too convenient that he doesn’t remember what he and Reese were talking about that
night in the kitchen.
I spend my night in a constant rotation of thinking about Wyatt’s cold eyes and the drops of blood on Elliott’s shoes, trying
to explain them to myself, to justify them. There have been cases of people driving in their sleep, of them strangling and
stabbing loved ones for no reason at all and not even knowing what they’d done. Stress (like the loss of loved ones, for example)
causes people to have more vivid dreams—an excess of vivid dreams. So maybe Wyatt went from dreaming about a lost lunch to
an intruder in a flash (though he only remembered one of these dreams), and maybe the blood did belong to the fish, and Emily
didn’t want to talk to Elliott about anything more than his alma mater because Reese will be applying to colleges this year.
Maybe neither of them did it.
Or maybe one of them did.
I tell myself not to sleep, not to blink. To stay vigilant.
Only one thing keeps me from losing my mind: the girls. Their safety. They’re the only ones I know for certain are innocent in all this.
The buzz of the streetlight hums all night. Trucks pass by on the street, the rumble of their engines loud. At some point,
Wyatt kicks the blanket off him all of a sudden. As I watch, frozen, not turning my head but looking out of the corner of
my eye, he pushes himself up from the floor. At first, he stands in the center of it, and then he takes a few steps before
reaching out to turn an imaginary knob, to open an imaginary door.
Wyatt is asleep.
He’s sleepwalking again.
He walks out of his nonexistent door. He goes to stand at the edge of Cass and Mae’s bed, on Cass’s side, and I start to grab
for Elliott, to shake him awake, wondering what Wyatt is going to do and if he’s going to hurt her.
But then, before I can react, Wyatt turns around, swiveling his head as if lost and looking for something. He crosses the
room, going to the far corner of it. I can’t see what he’s doing, but with his back to me, I hear the sudden, urgent spray
of urine against the wall. He’s mistaken it for the bathroom. It goes on a long time and under different circumstances I might
say something, I might try to stop him, to wake him up, to lead him to the bathroom instead. But I don’t dare because I’m
afraid.
When he’s finished, Wyatt takes himself back to the floor, lying the opposite way as before with his head toward the door.
A second later the smell of urine reaches me, and I know that I should get up and clean it, but I’m too scared to move.
In time, the sun rises. It slips through the flimsy, semi-sheer curtain panels and into the room with us, waking Elliott.
I’m already awake and so I see him come to, the slow process of regaining consciousness, of opening his eyes, observing his
surroundings, remembering where he is and that he’s in this shitty motel.
His words, when he speaks, are a whisper. “How’d you sleep?” he asks, his face so close I smell his dried-out morning breath.
“I didn’t,” I say softly.
“Not at all?”
“No.” I shake my head. “Not at all.”
“You must have slept at least a little bit.”
“I don’t think so.”
He reaches out, runs a hand the length of my hair, and I feel my whole body stiffen. “I don’t want to fight with you,” he
says. “We’re both under a lot of stress. Can we call a truce?” he asks, and I wish it was that simple, that easy. Still, I
nod, telling him what he wants to hear. In the other bed, one of the girls makes a sound and we hold still, holding one another’s
eye, waiting for her to go back to sleep again because it’s too early for anyone but us to be awake, to come face-to-face
with reality.
“You must be exhausted if you didn’t sleep,” Elliott says. He breathes in, noticing the scent of something pungent in the
air. “Do you smell that?” he asks, pulling a face because of it.
I nod, whispering, “It’s urine.”
“Urine?”
“Wyatt was sleepwalking again. He mistook the corner of the room for the bathroom.”
His forehead furrows, his eyebrows coming together. “What do you mean? That he peed in the room?”
I nod again, imagine the dry urine on the wall, seeping into the carpeting. Elliott sighs, dragging his hands through his
hair. “It’s too early for this. I’m going to take a quick shower and see if I can’t find us some coffee.”
I nod. The mattress sinks when he moves into a sitting position, gravity pulling me to its center.
He gets out of bed. He stretches and then moves quietly across the room, stepping over Wyatt.
I hear the bathroom door partially close, not latching because of the way the door doesn’t properly latch.
For a moment, it’s quiet as I imagine Elliott stepping out of his clothes before the water turns on, the sound of it changing as Elliott pulls that little pin that diverts the water from the bath to the showerhead.
I reach over to the nightstand for my phone, which is dead. I went to bed without charging it. I feel Elliott’s side of the
bed for his phone, though it isn’t here. He must have taken it into the bathroom with him. I run my eyes across the room,
seeing Elliott’s iPad poking out from a large pocket on the side of his bag, which lies just beside Wyatt’s feet.
It takes effort to push the sheet off myself, to stand. To get to the iPad, I’ll have to step over Wyatt, because the bag
lies just on the other side of him and there’s not enough space in the small motel room for me to go around.
I creep slowly forward, praying the floor doesn’t squeak and that he can’t feel my presence.
Standing beside his makeshift bed, I watch Wyatt. He lies on his back now with his eyes closed, and I wonder if he’s asleep
or if he’s just pretending to be. As I lift a foot up from the floor and go to step over him, all I can think about are Wyatt’s
eyes flying open, him reaching out and grabbing me by the ankle, pulling me onto the ground with him.
But Wyatt doesn’t move. He continues to sleep as I step over him, setting my foot down on the other side, and reaching for
the iPad, pulling it into my grasp.
I get back in bed, under the thin sheet. I start to search for people who kill, needing—desperate—to see some sort of studies or theories on why people kill and the types of people who do to reassure
myself that no one in this room would do such a thing, but as I start to type, p-e, a list of previous search results come up, including Pearl Lake depth, which gives me pause.
My shoulders tighten, my hands all of a sudden clammy.
Pearl Lake is the name of the lake that the resort sits on.
Why would Elliott ever need to know its depth?
I go to the page Elliott searched. I skim. Pearl Lake is over 1,500 square acres in size with a maximum depth of forty-three
feet, though the average is only nineteen. It goes on to say that there are steep drop-offs along the shore, making parts
of it unsafe to swim. The clarity of the water, according to this article, is low, which means you wouldn’t easily be able
to see things floating beneath the surface.
I throw a glance toward the bathroom door, which I can’t quite see from where I am.
I listen for the sound of the shower to go off.
I pull up the entirety of Elliott’s browsing history. It’s sorted by date and, at first glance, is not unusual, things like
his email inbox, YouTube videos, Facebook and frequent checks of the weather. I look closer, examining them one at a time,
seeing that just a couple days ago Elliott accessed a Help Find Kylie Matthews page on Facebook. He must have been curious. He must have wanted to know more about her and her case, other than what I told
him the other day. I become curious too, scrolling through the most recent posts.
Four posts from the top is a post from none other than Elliott Gray. My heart stops. Because not only has Elliott been going
onto the Help Find Kylie Matthews page, but he’s been posting on it. And not just any post, but a picture of Reese’s face.
My throat tightens. Time slows down. I feel dizzy, refusing to believe what I’m seeing.
His post reads: Is this her? It looks like the age progresed picture.
He’s spelled progressed wrong. But that’s not all. He’s suggesting that Reese is the missing Kylie Matthews. He’s also given
the address of where to find her, of where she is—of where she was—at the resort, in cottage number eight.
There are some similarities in their appearance, sure, but Reese is not Kylie Matthews, which Elliott knows.
It’s ridiculous to think. Until recently, Reese had never stepped foot in this part of Wisconsin.
Five years ago, when Kylie went missing, Reese was going into eighth grade.
Cass and Mae were five at the time—about to start kindergarten—and, because of Emily’s frequent work travel, the four of us spent a lot of time together while Wyatt was off at various baseball camps.
I remember it well. I teach preschool; I had the summer off.
I took the three girls to the zoo, to the aquarium, shopping.
Reese was sweeter then than she is now. She had a soft side, a way with Cass and Mae.
They looked up to her. I remember Mae riding on Reese’s back for what felt like hours at the zoo that summer until my own back hurt from watching.
She never complained. I have pictures of it.
Reese is not Kylie Matthews. It’s not even a question.
Why would Elliott suggest that she is?
The comments are practically decisive.
I definitely see the resemblance.
OMG.
That has to be her.
Elliott’s Facebook post is dated the night before Reese went missing. That was days before I met Sam and Joanna Matthews.
It was days before I told Elliott about their little girl, Kylie, who was missing, which means that he knew about her before
I did.
Yet he acted so surprised when I told him.
How did Elliott know about Kylie Matthews?
I think back. I rack my brain, trying to make sense of it, going back to the beginning, to why we’re even here.
Elliott was the one who suggested we come to this resort.
He’s been here before. He came years ago with a bunch of college friends; it was a couple weeks before a buddy of his was to be married, his last hurrah as a bachelor.
They were going to drink entirely too much and do guy things like fish, hunt and cook things they killed over a fire.
They stayed at the same resort when they came, which is why we chose that one, at Elliott’s suggestion, because he said it was nice enough, rustic, clean, and that it had some charm.
Is it possible Elliott was here that same summer Kylie disappeared?
Is it possible he did something to hurt her, if not on purpose then by accident?
I’m so lost in thought that I never hear the shower water turn off.