Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The next morning, Max knocked on my door, swearing up and down he’d found a student who could turn the entire investigation on its head.
I jumped up and grabbed my bag. “Then what are we waiting for?” We had little over a week left before graduation to figure all of this out, and I wasn’t eager to waste any more time.
When we arrived at his room, the guy was hitting a bong with his friend and surrounded by a cloud of smoke. He fistbumped us when we walked in. I looked dubiously at Max, who winced and clasped his hands together. Just a couple minutes, he mouthed.
“Honestly, if you’re looking into anyone,” Jack D was saying, after an exceptionally verbose explanation of his fish tank, the different species of fish inside, and what actors he thought they all looked like, “look into Grant Hafer.”
Grant? That was the big revelation? I sighed. “We already talked to Grant, but we can’t exactly question him without evidence.”
“Evidence? What more do you need? The little dude was on an incel revenge trip. He was obsessed, man. He hated that Maya was dating a girl after him. Said she was loaning herself out to anyone who wanted it.”
“Creepy and gross, but it’s not exactly cold, hard proof,” I said.
“Tell her what you told me about the party,” Max said.
“Grant told me once that he wanted to fuck Dani to get back at Maya, that he’d ‘fuck her straight.’ Maya said he used to leave these freaky notes on her car.”
I grimaced. “Still, I doubt Basile will let us talk to him without a lawyer.”
Jack shook his limbs out as if he’d gotten a chill. “That whole frat gives me the creeps, man.” His friend, who’d been sitting on a beanbag chair in the corner playing Super Smash Bros., nodded in agreement. “Creepy dudes, for real.”
“What do you mean?” Max asked.
His friend spoke up. “They do fucked-up shit in the canyon. Cult shit.”
“Cult shit?” Max repeated, voice lowering. “Like what?”
“You should talk to Emma.”
“Who’s Emma?” I asked.
Jack shook his head. “Emma Garcia. She lives in town, not a student, but hangs out sometimes. I told her not to hang around with them, bunch of fucking incels. Then, of course, what happened? They assaulted her at a party. She was so freaked out afterward that she stopped coming around. Wouldn’t say a word about it, just up and left.
Haven’t seen her much since. She’s supposed to be coming back soon; my buddy down the hall texted her, but she never answered. ”
Max clapped his hands. “You see?”
“See what, exactly?” I said.
“They’re creeps, Cel! He’s a creep.”
“Please, not this again.”
We’d been arguing about it for days. Max thought Basile was involved in what happened to Dani; I didn’t.
It just didn’t make sense to me that he would be involved.
Even on the off chance that the two of them had had some sort of spat (though no evidence suggested they were anything more than passing acquaintances), someone like him didn’t just go around hexing people.
He didn’t need to. With his allure, the way he could win people over, he was far more likely to recruit an enemy, to draw them over to his way of thinking, than to hex them.
And I didn’t entirely trust Max’s judgment toward him, either.
They came from different worlds, and I think Max was jealous of him, of his schooling, of the fact that he came from money.
I wasn’t sure quite what it was, but I wished he would stop.
Basile could be an asset to the investigation, I just knew it, if only Max would give him a chance.
“Well then, let’s settle this,” said Max. “Let’s figure out what happened to Emma Garcia.”
As I climbed into Max’s truck, I was hit with a wave of nostalgia.
Bits and pieces of memories I’d been trying to hold back came surging in like a tidal wave.
Strands of hair lifting and blowing out the open window, his hand wrapped over mine.
A million forehead kisses set to the tune of Debussy’s Rêverie or whatever other composer he was into at the time.
How for three weeks in July, the air-conditioning was broken, so we only went out at night, cranked down the windows, and let the breeze ripple across our salt- and sweat-streaked skin.
Kissing those same bits of salt and sweat off later, tumbling to the floor, sheets tangled around our ankles.
I squeezed my eyes shut, rolled the window back up, and cleared my throat loudly.
Driving through town hit me with another wave of it.
That feeling of familiarity, knowing a place so well you could navigate it with your eyes closed, just by the sound of a neighbor’s ranchera music or the smell of tires roasting in the sun at the old junkyard, the cheers and jostles coming from the rodeo arena that had seen better days even when you were a kid.
Smiling, long-haired Thom, who worked at the video store, selling drugs on the side and steadily building his copper jewelry empire, selling pieces to whatever woebegone tourists found themselves lost enough to end up here, of all places.
Now it seemed like time had aged this place a hundred years.
Los Huesos wasn’t a large town. A gas station greeted visitors with a big old-fashioned Coca-Cola sign as though the place was perpetually stuck in 1973.
Below that, a sign advertised GROCERIES - ICE - FEED - LAUNDRY against the backdrop of a mesa.
There was a post office, a couple of schools, and a tiny clinic run by a couple that didn’t speak English.
Max’s Chevy rolled past chicken coops, trailers, stout, pueblo-style houses with colorful doors, front yards of sagebrush and clumps of dead grass, and a little farm with a rooster weathervane at the front.
The whole place was a study in color, pale yellow grass and green sagebrush against rust-red dirt, the mesas a million different colors in the sun, blood-orange and bronze and streaked scarlet, russet earth and rocks tumbling down like fat drips of blood.
But even in town, it was like Emma Garcia was a ghost. No one we asked had heard anything of her. She’d worked at the gas station, but the owner said she’d stopped showing up for her shifts some months back.
“Not a big surprise,” the man said. “Kids like that don’t have much going on in their lives. They’re in and out of jail, and that’s if they’re lucky.”
“And if they’re not?” Max asked.
“Whatever happened to her is the same fate that happens to countless girls here. Drugs, prostitution, maybe a drunk driver hit her and tossed her body in the ravine. Besides, girls from the rez, no one comes around looking for them.”
My stomach turned at his words.
He called after us as we walked out. “You hear about someone who wants a part-time job, you tell ’em I’m looking.”
Our drive back to campus was silent. I felt so awful after speaking to the gas station owner. His words echoed and twisted in my stomach. No one comes around looking for them.
We pulled into the parking lot at school, keeping a safe distance from the metal railing that marked the edge of the cliff, and I leaned my head against the window. Rain fell on the bull skull at the front of the ranch, streaking across the dust like tears.
Max stared straight ahead. Neither of us wanted to admit it, the hopelessness seeping in. We both felt like we were spinning our gears, reaching for thread after thread, only for them to all get tangled in a vicious knot.
But Max Middlemore was not someone used to losing. And he wouldn’t let something like this investigation defeat him.
Suddenly, he turned toward me, eyes wide.
I sighed. “No. Whatever it is, no.”
“You don’t even know what I’m going to ask.”
“Don’t need to. I don’t like that look.”
“Let’s just be honest for a second. Basile likes you a hell of a lot more than he likes me. To be honest, I might be offended if you weren’t so pretty.”
I blushed scarlet.
“If you were to talk to him, alone, maybe we could settle our little disagreement once and for all.”
I balked. “Now you’re offering me up as bait?”
“Well, if you’re right, and he has nothing to do with this, then you’ll be perfectly fine. If you’re not, well, it’s been a pleasure knowing you …”
I punched him in the arm.
“Kidding, I’m kidding. It’s just one conversation, and I’ll stay close enough to smell.”
“God, I hope not.” I pinched my nose. “What am I supposed to say anyway? Someone accused your friends of assaulting someone. Do you have any comment? If he wants to sue over Grant, I’m sure this won’t be welcome.”
“Don’t make it about that,” he said, stroking his hand over the stubble on his chin.
He needed a shave; we were both looking a little worse for the wear.
“Pretend like you need his help with something else.” His mouth twisted, and for a second, he wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Trust me, I don’t like it either, but we need this. For Dani.”
“But what if—?” My mind started to go haywire, imagining every freak accident imaginable.
“It won’t.” He grabbed my hand. “It’ll be alright, I promise.”
I blew out my cheeks. “Fine, but you owe me, like, … ten thousand chocolate cookies. And the good ones, too.”
He flashed a boyish grin, all dimples. “When we crack this case, I’ll get you a cookie the size of a car.”
I pulled out my phone, still open to Basile’s TikTok page. There were hundreds of comments from Basile’s thousands of followers, and I felt myself shrinking down, a small voice in my head whispering, What would someone like him get from hearing a speech by someone like you?*
I’d never been the type of person to glamorize all that.
I’d always preferred gentleness and kindness to flashiness and charm, but now that I watched him, I couldn’t look away.
His charisma bled across the screen—the ease of his smile, the way everything he said made so much sense.
How his theory could unlock an entire new world to us.
And despite the whispers of caution at the back of my mind, I knew he was the only one who could help me learn more.
“It must take him forever to do this shit,” Max said, looking over. “What a waste of time.”
“Maybe he just wants people to like him.”
“Don’t tell me you fall for all that, the trousers and the shiny shoes and the hair? He’s such a try-hard.”
“Just because some people like to present themselves better than just having rolled in the barn …”
“You used to not mind rolling in the barn with me.” He grinned, and it was so devilish I had to smile.
His expression grew serious for a moment. “You know, for how much you used to hate all this stuff, you’re sure spending a lot of time on it. You’re getting sucked into this stuff again, just like with Jamie.”
The mention of Jamie caught me off guard. It had been a silent truce between us that we wouldn’t mention that final year before I left, our breakup, any of it. “This isn’t like that.”
“Isn’t it? I feel like I’m losing you all over again.” He reached out his hand and tucked a stray piece of hair behind my ear. His hand lingered against my cheek.
“You never lost me,” I murmured. I hadn’t meant for it to be such a weighted statement, and I flushed as soon as I said it.
It was quiet for a moment, his eyes intently focused on mine. “Good.”