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Puerto Aventuras, Mexico

E mily ought to feel relaxed by the azure water and the hot sun, but instead she’s wired. She’s glued to her phone.

She wonders how the heck anyone knows she’s out of the country.

Then she realizes.

It must be someone who saw her Snapchat.

The night they got to Mexico, it was Hunter’s birthday.

They’d gone out for tall, strong margaritas.

Emily had taken a selfie of the two of them, exhausted, hugging, their green drinks visible on the table.

Without any context, it might have looked like a regular vacation pic.

She’d posted it to Snapchat because she wanted Hunter to feel appreciated.

It backfired.

Immediately Emily makes her social media accounts private, something she never imagined she’d want to do. She’d never understood why people even bothered to have private accounts.

But now the dark corners of the internet are full of fingers pointed at the small group of friends who sat on the curb outside 1122 King Road on that Sunday. Commentators are guessing which of them committed the murders.

There’s speculation about Emily and Hunter, Dylan, Bethany, Jack DuCoeur, and Jake Schriger, Maddie’s boyfriend.

And after the release of the Grub Truck video, there’s speculation about the young man in the hooded sweatshirt who appeared to follow Maddie and Kaylee to their rideshare.

Hoodie Guy is Jack Showalter. Emily learns that he’s a Delt whom the older Pi Phis know.

Even Emily finds herself sucked into the grim guessing game about which of them might be the murderer.

She goes through the list:

Jake? Emily finds that super-hard to believe because he’d been texting them frantically, sounding panicked, when the friends were sitting outside the King Road house. She feels horrible that none of them responded.

Jack DuCoeur? No way. When he arrived at the King Road house, he was clearly as shocked as they were.

Hoodie Guy, Jack Showalter? Emily is hesitant to write him off because she doesn’t really know him and some of the older Pi Phis have said that occasionally, when drunk, he can seem belligerent. And at least for now, there’s no other strong potential suspect.

It’s not Dylan or Bethany. So who?

Emily considers herself thick-skinned. She’s never been the type of person to care what others say about her. But here in Mexico, thirty-seven hundred miles from Moscow, she’s scared.

Truly terrified. Maybe the killer followed them here to her parents’ house?

At night, in the dark, she clings to Hunter Johnson and keeps the bedroom light on. Neither of them walks anywhere alone after sundown.

“The one night of my college life that I wasn’t with Xana, someone murdered her,” she said.

Was that person trying to hurt her ?

Is that person now stalking her ?

Emily’s mom, Karen, feels helpless watching the two young adults walk around like zombies, shells of the people they were just a week ago.

She can see that Hunter, mute for much of the trip, is still in the early stages of intense shock, while Emily is trying to mother Hunter, Dylan, Josie, Bethany, and Linden. That’s her way of coping.

Karen regularly speaks to Jessica, Hunter’s mom, wondering what they can do to put an end to the online bombardment. The advice they receive from Bill Thompson’s office is simply not to engage.

But as every day passes, the speculation gets more lurid.

There are posts everywhere of old footage of Hunter wearing zip ties answering the door at 1122 King Road to police who’d been called about a noise complaint. This raises questions online as to whether he was into bondage.

Emily rolls her eyes at this. The truth is so prosaic if one isn’t looking for anything salacious. Hunter answered the door to the cops at 1122 King Road because they were in the middle of a game of champagne shackles, and Hunter and Kaylee were the only members of the group of legal drinking age.

Another internet sleuth, Jonathan Lee Riches, makes a YouTube video suggesting that Xana’s dad had put a lock on the King Road house’s front door the week before the murders because he was worried that Emily threw wild parties there.

Emily, it’s suggested, is someone the police are looking at as the possible murderer.

In fact, Xana’s dad never put a lock on the door of the King Road house.

At her wit’s end, Hunter’s mom, Jessica, phones Chief Fry.

“Please,” she says, “can you do something to stop this? Can you say publicly they aren’t suspects?”

The next day, Fry gives a press conference. He states that the surviving roommates, all the others at the house that morning, the rideshare driver, and the man in the hooded sweatshirt seen outside the food truck are not being treated as suspects.

For twenty-four hours, there is a reprieve online.

But then it explodes again, even worse than before.

Emily and Karen think this is partly because the Goncalves family sat for a TV interview in which Kristi said that the police might have cleared people too quickly, and Steve appeared to agree.

Karen and Emily understand that Steve and Kristi want to find the murderer, but they wish that hadn’t been articulated.

It’s the first time that the families affected most by the murders disagree as to what the right plan of action is to bring whoever did this to justice.

But it won’t be the last.