23
Allie lowers her voice, even though it’s basically impossible for Bryan to hear us over the mutter of the smooth, dark river at this distance.
“I told you that I’m a moderator for that subreddit, right? The one about the Camas Creek murders?”
I nod as she shoots a glance over her shoulder and scans the void of the canyon, where Bryan is lurking. Gone is the conspiratorial tone I heard in her voice every time she mentioned Camas Creek before.
“We remember,” Imani prods through chattering teeth. “Keep talking.”
I shiver, forcing my aching arms to keep moving, preserving the pocket of space between our raft and Bryan’s. On the other side of the raft, Pam mirrors my movements. Allie and Deborah huddle on either side of Imani with their arms around her, still trying to warm her up.
Allie goes on. “There’s always some pretty active true-crime junkies on my subreddit, talking about the case.
And conspiracy theories are super common for the notorious true-crime cases.
Just look at JonBenét Ramsey. Some people swear she’s still alive, and not just alive, but freaking living it up as Katy Perry. ”
I roll my eyes. “Yikes.”
Allie wrinkles her nose but keeps going.
“A few years back, when that dumb movie came out, there were all kinds of Redditors insisting that Kellen Stroop was still alive. The media got involved, and there was so much public uproar that the investigators actually exhumed Kellen’s body to prove he was dead.
Even then, some people refused to believe it.
Like I said yesterday, I got sucked into that fucking rabbit hole for a while—”
“So you think that Bryan is somehow Kellen Stroop?” Pam interrupts impatiently, her voice high. “I thought you said he couldn’t be—”
“No,” Allie replies, shaking her head firmly, “although I definitely thought about that possibility a lot yesterday, when the satellite phone went missing. There’s a scene from the Lifemark movie where Kellen is staring down this poor rafter in the dark, with blood dripping down his arm, and it’s terrifying—”
I shoot her a look, unsure where this is headed. “Okay …”
Allie makes a frustrated noise. “Sorry, sorry. Hang with me, okay? I’m just trying to explain why I didn’t pay much attention to every conspiracy theory.
” She meets my confused look, and I’m surprised to see genuine anguish in her eyes.
“I still just feel like … like all of this is a little bit my fault.” Her voice wobbles, and she hurries to add, “I’m not trying to get sympathy.
It’s just … everything is starting to make sense to me now. ”
I try not to let my frustration show. None of this makes sense to me. Not a single thing. It’s only a matter of time before we’re facing the next rapids, and I want to know what we’re dealing with before then—so I know what our chances are.
“Just tell us what you know, hon,” Pam says gently. The fleece of her soggy purple sweatshirt is matted and smeared with Imani’s blood. “We won’t be mad at you. We’re all on the same team here … We just want to get off this river somehow.”
Allie lets out a breath, then tries again.
“So, a few months back, somebody started sharing screenshots in my Reddit group. They were of posts by a user with the screen name OneSadRealm, who’d been posting in a different subreddit called ER_Forever.
The ‘ER’ is short for Elliot Rodger, this huge piece of shit who murdered a bunch of people in Santa Barbara and wrote like, a hundred-page manifesto about it.
” She makes a disgusted face. “Elliot Rodger is like, a huge hero for ‘incels.’”
“Incels?” Deborah asks.
“A bunch of ‘involuntarily celibate’ creeps,” she clarifies. “Assholes who think they deserve sex, but since they can’t get it, they hate women. So they gather online to share their violent fantasies.”
I’m about to prod Allie to get to the point when she says something that stops me cold.
“The reason the Redditor shared those screenshots of OneSadRealm’s posts in my Camas Creek Murders subreddit is because somebody realized that his username is almost a perfect anagram for Leo Marsden.”
I give her a sharp look. “Hold on. Leo Marsden, like the seventeen-year-old kid who survived Camas Creek?”
“Yeah, him,” confirms Allie. We pause to navigate around a thick tree branch forking the current before she continues.
“People lost their shit in my subreddit. And not just because of the anagram, but because the screenshots were … seriously awful. They were all about Leo’s mom.
These horrible, bloody AI images of her with stab wounds, drowning in her own blood at the bottom of an orange-and-blue raft.
In some of them, her face was all carved up.
OneSadRealm made these terrible captions for the images, too.
Stuff about how she and the other ‘Chads’ and ‘Stacys’ at Camas Creek deserved to die horrible deaths. ”
“Who are Chad and Stacy? I’m still lost,” Deborah mumbles. “What does OneSadRealm have to do with Bryan?”
Allie huffs and glances between me and Deborah.
“I’m getting there. Stacys and Chads are incel code for men and women who are at the top of the social food chain,” she explains.
“Chads and Stacys are the people incels hate the most, because they supposedly get all the money, sex, and power, while the incels have nothing. But that doesn’t really matter.
“What matters is that the entire Camas Creek subreddit was up in arms about the OneSadRealm screenshots, and me and the other moderators had a huge fight about it. Some people were defending Leo Marsden, saying that anyone who was dragging his name through the mud was a huge dick and should get kicked out.” She sighs.
“I was team Leo, a thousand percent. I thought the whole thing was completely insane, especially after all the bullshit about Kellen Stroop still supposedly being alive. But some of the other mods still sent the screenshots to the police, just in case. Nothing ever came of it, and the controversy finally petered out. OneSadRealm stopped posting on the ER_Forever subreddit after the uproar—he deleted his account.”
“I still don’t get what the big ah-hah is,” Deborah blusters, too loudly. “Why would anybody think Leo Marsden is the one who posted that sick stuff about his mom? Anybody could’ve made that screen name—”
“Shh!” I hiss, even though I can’t put my finger on why it would matter if Bryan overheard us talking about this.
A terrified voice in the back of my mind answers the question as soon as I have the thought. Because he’d probably love it.
Allie draws in another shudder of a breath.
“During the height of the OneSadRealm controversy, one of my Redditors posted this mega-thread on the Camas Creek Murders subreddit, breaking it all down. I’m talking, like, pages.
It was an insane theory about how Kellen Stroop was actually a victim at Camas Creek—and Leo Marsden was the real killer. ”
I stop rowing. I thought I was tracking where this story was headed, but I was wrong. And despite everything, I find myself both sickened and engrossed by Allie’s story. One glance at Pam and Imani tells me they feel the same.
“Hold on, how could Leo Marsden be the real killer? Didn’t he get stabbed?” I ask, my mind swimming as I try to connect the dots.
“I still don’t understand what this has to do with Bryan …” Deborah mutters in frustration.
I shake my head and keep rowing. All I know is that I need to know the end of this story before we come face-to-face with Bryan again.
Something with wings slices through the air overhead, darker than the night, crossing so close to our boat I can hear the soft swish of the wind through its feathers.
A hawk, is my first thought. Parker, please. I need you.
But as the creature crosses our raft, I can see from the thick wings and stout body that it’s an owl. It flies on without another sound, disappearing somewhere along the wall on the far side of the canyon.
“Yeah, Leo definitely got stabbed,” Allie says bitterly, locking me back into the story. “But if that Camas Creek Reddit thread was right—and I’m pretty sure it was—he did it to himself.”