Chapter 20 Nicola
“WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?”
We’re all standing around Zach’s body. A wool blanket has been draped over him—out of respect, yes, but also so no one’s forced to see what happened to him.
“We need to call the police,” I say, then to Connor: “You can make phone calls from your tablet, right? The nearest town isn’t that far away.
If we call them now, they should be here in, what, a few hours?
A few of us should stay here, with him, and the others should head back to the lodge, to meet them when they—”
“We can’t.”
“Can’t what?”
“Call the police.”
I expect the others to look just as confused as I am, but instead, they fiddle with their jackets, scratch their sneakers across the dirt, refuse to meet my eyes. “What do you mean? He’s dead.”
“And calling the police won’t make him any less dead,” Ros says.
I wait for someone to disagree, to protest that this—what she’s suggesting—is an actual crime, but no one does. “No,” I insist. “No, the medical examiner needs to look at him. The police need to open an investigation—”
“They don’t, Nic,” Greer says. Greer Woods: a licensed attorney who should know that concealing a crime could get her disbarred right before her father’s hearing. Jesus, has everyone here lost their minds?
“He’s been murdered!”
“He hasn’t.” Connor peels down the blanket.
I force myself to watch, but Hannah, I notice, scrunches her eyes closed, and Ros peers over her shoulder toward the woods.
“I’m not an expert,” he continues, “but I think it’s fairly obvious what happened here.
” He roots around inside Zach’s jacket pockets.
The left one’s empty, but in the right is a plastic baggie full of pills.
He fishes one out, examines it. “OxyContin. He’s still wearing all his clothes; doesn’t look like he intended on taking a late-night swim.
” He angles Zach’s head slightly, enough for me to catch the large gash on his scalp.
“He was probably under the influence, stumbled off the dock, and knocked himself unconscious on the way down.”
“Are you serious?” I gesture to the bone-deep cuts across his face. “You’re trying to tell me those were accidents?”
“They’re probably from the rocks at the bottom of the lake,” Greer says. “I’ve worked cases where bodies were discovered in water. It’s not uncommon for them to be all sliced up. Water’s not as gentle as you’d think.”
“So, he wasn’t…”
She shakes her head. Could she be right?
It’s impossible not to catalogue the similarities between him and Claire; he looks just like the photos taken of her in the morgue.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean he was murdered.
If he mixed alcohol and opioids, then came out here alone, like they’re suggesting, he could’ve drowned.
Maybe. Possibly. But even if that’s what happened, it doesn’t change the fact that we need to notify law enforcement.
“We still need to call someone. His family will be wondering what happened to him.”
Kemy shakes her head, but Greer’s the one who answers: “He doesn’t have anyone left, and besides, we were his family.
We were the ones who understood him, who cared about him.
Even at his lowest, he still made the decision to come to this retreat.
Hell, maybe he…” She glances back at the lake, at the ripples ghosting across its surface.
“Maybe he knew what he was doing last night. Maybe he wanted to choose how he went out, and he knew there was nowhere better for it than right here.”
“And that’s why he should be buried on the property,” Ros adds. “We can do that for him. We don’t have to call anyone.”
Perhaps it’s Ros’s insistence, the frantic edge to her voice, that finally clicks everything into place.
These club members have managed to keep their identities secret, but the moment the press catches wind of what happened—DEATH AT SERIAL KILLER KIDS’ CLUB—there will be no stopping them.
Their names, their faces, will be uploaded to thousands of true crime websites.
I think about Ros’s youngest daughter, grumpy in her cotton-ball sheep costume.
About how giddily cruel my community was after discovering the truth about my father.
Would it be the same for her? Would she stop getting invited to slumber parties, be struck from the chorus of the school musical?
Sometimes there’s no right choice to be made.
If I stand firm on calling the police, I’ll be putting their futures, their families, in jeopardy.
If I back down, that means betraying Zach.
I try viewing my memories from that night through this new lens: Zach, sitting alone in the dark, all those empty bottles scattered across the table.
He could’ve been suicidal—or, at least, there’s enough evidence to make the case that he was.
Enough evidence for me to look the other way, without feeling too guilty.
“Do you really think he’d want to be buried here?” I ask Greer.
“It’s where he was happiest.”
I only knew him for one day. These were his best friends. If they think this is what he would’ve wanted, who am I to say otherwise? I nod my agreement, and a tension I wasn’t even aware was there slowly seeps out of the group.
WE HAVE A SMALL FUNERAL for Zach when we get back to the lodge.
Imogen brings out candles—all of them jarred and smelling like lilac and lemongrass—and as we light them, we share a few words about him.
Ros recalls when the two of them tried axe-throwing in the woods.
“We were crack shots!” she claims, until Kemy reminds her how the axe ricocheted off a tree trunk and sent them both screaming into the bushes.
Kemy explains how he got so frustrated whenever he lost a board game (like flip-the-table, scatter-the-pieces frustrated) that they all started letting him win.
Imogen describes the hours he spent trying to master bakasana, crow pose, only to end up with a pounding headache from falling on his forehead.
“What about you, Nicola?” she asks. “Do you want to share anything?”
“Oh.” I draw back from these people who knew him for years. “I mean, we’d never even met before yesterday—”
Ros brushes off my comment. “Please. It’s like Greer said, we’re family here. Doesn’t matter if you’ve been coming for a day or a decade.”
Family. “All right.” The candle warms my palms as I hold it closer.
“Zach swapped seats with another passenger so we could sit together on the flight here. I had no idea who he was—in fact, I was terrified that he was a reporter who wanted to badger me for a headline—but once I realized he was a member of the club… he started to feel like the brother I never had. My parents always wanted a big family, and I never understood why until now. Having people you can trust, who trust you, matters. Knowing you belong matters.”
Imogen rests a hand on my shoulder and, after a long, mournful silence, starts singing in a paper-thin soprano: “Closing Time.” One by one, we join in, our voices merging together.
Even Connor mumble-mouths some of the words in a clear attempt at solidarity.
When we reach the chorus, Ros suddenly throws her head back and starts screaming the lyrics into the sky, the same way Zach did around the bonfire, painfully off-key.
We all burst into laughter and join her—hollering so loud, a spray of birds erupts into the sky, branches rattling in their wake.
The only one who doesn’t sing, who hovers at the back of the group, eyes locked on the blanket-covered body, is Greer.
NO ONE KNOWS HOW LONG digging out the hole will take, so we split the work into shifts.
Connor and Greer take the first one, breaking ground, followed by Kemy and Imogen, then Ros and Hannah.
Greer volunteers to take a second shift alongside me.
All day long, we can hear the grunts from outside, the crunch of the shovels, the metallic slide of silt across their blades.
We try our best to ignore it. Imogen leads a yoga class in the second-floor loft while Connor and Greer punch through the topsoil.
We unroll the mats and flow through the poses: Forward fold.
Crunch. Plank. Crunch. Upward dog. Crunch.
Downward dog. Crunch crunch crunch. By the end, we all feel tenser than when we started.
Ros and Hannah come back from their shift at the end of dinner, sweat patches on their shirts, hands blackened with grime. “You’re up,” Ros says, clapping Greer on the shoulder. She leaves dirty streaks where her fingers touched, but Greer doesn’t seem to notice.
“You ready?” she asks. I nod, then the two of us put on our jackets and head outside.
It’s chilly tonight, but after a few minutes of hard labor, I’ll probably be sweating just as much as Ros and Hannah were. I pick up a shovel, its handle still warm. “So, what do we need to do?”
“This should be the last shift in terms of digging out the grave.” She jumps into the hole, about three feet deep, then stabs her blade into the dirt. “It gets tougher the farther you go. You’ll want to bring the pickaxe down here in case we need to break up any rocks.”
“The pickaxe?”
She nods toward the tool that has been tossed on the lawn. I grab it and join her down in the hole. “You know, most retreats opt for team-building scavenger hunts, maybe two truths and a lie.”
The joke feels forced, but I can’t take much more grief. I jab my shovel in as far as I can. She’s right: It’s harder than it looks.
“No one says we can’t do both. Let’s see, my favorite color’s yellow. My mom’s dead. My dad’s a serial killer.”
“Tough one.”
“You know me. Riddle wrapped in a mystery and all that shit.”
My elbows wobble as I try to heave the silt over the rim of the grave. Some accidentally scatters onto the blanket still covering Zach. The last conversation he and I shared replays in my mind. “Hey, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”