Page 14

Claire

Now

I don’t sleep much that night, my sweaty limbs and disturbing memories twisting themselves up in Kyan’s soft sheets for hours. I give up at any attempt as my room begins to lighten, the day just about to break through the cracks in the blinds.

I throw on a sweatshirt and head towards the kitchen, pausing slightly at the doorway to my bedroom, breathing only once I’ve confirmed the absence of the early morning whispers from yesterday.

I wait at the coffeemaker until it finally froths out enough hot liquid for the six of us, and I grab a mug and take it out with me to the balcony.

It’s been years since I’ve seen a sunrise like this one, a decade in fact.

Pink crawls upwards in the sky, transforming the darkness into something beautiful.

Despite the early hour and the chill in the air, the die-hard surfers are already out, black icons against a sea of color.

But the beach itself is empty aside from an unmanned lifeguard stand.

I think how much my mother would have loved this. She was always exclaiming over a sunrise or a sunset, insisting we catch every one.

Tomorrow’s never certain, she’d say. How could you live with yourself if you missed your last-ever sunset?

The memory of her words pulses in my chest, a painful heartbeat. While she was dying, I was wasting countless sunsets over here.

I found out that first day I got back from Australia, when she met me at O’Hare Airport.

I searched for her at the arrival gate, scanning the crowd, looking for her dark, curly hair hovering several inches above everyone else’s with her five-foot-nine stature.

But she wasn’t there. I almost dropped to my knees at that point.

The distress of having had it all for such a fleeting time—a best friend, a boyfriend, a family—only to have it all go up in smoke was too much.

I wanted my mother. Only she would understand. Only she would make it better.

But when I did spot her, it wasn’t the woman I knew. It wasn’t my mother. It was a shell. A skinny frame confined to a wheelchair, red fabric wrapped around her head, dark circles beneath her eyes accentuating the hollows of her cheeks.

Pancreatic cancer, stage four. It was inoperable when the doctors found it, and she’d pushed for me to go abroad so I could avoid the worst of it. So I wouldn’t be left with memories of the hardest weeks.

I wanted to collapse into her, but she looked so frail I realized I might break her if I did. I knew then that I would never tell her the truth. I could never tell her what I did, who I really was.

So I swallowed it for the few weeks she had left.

I swallowed it as I tried to figure out what life looks like for a solitary twenty-year-old without friends, without a family.

As I dropped out of college, swapping classes for a minimum wage job to support myself, selling the family home, and moving into a cramped downtown studio apartment.

As I moved forward with a life I never wanted, one streaked with guilt and regret.

It formed a boulder in my throat, something I could never recover from. Until now.

“Hey.”

The word yanks me from my thoughts, and I swipe the tear from my eye before Josh can see it. As I do, I realize how far the sun has risen in the sky, the pinkish light replaced by a golden glaze drizzled over the beach.

“Good morning,” I respond as he sits down next to me. “Did you sleep well?”

I take in his mussed sandy hair and his sleepy eyes, and something throbs in my chest. There’s a familiarity with Josh, an easiness. It’s why I’ve never been able to stay away.

“Damn, that bed’s amazing,” he says, and I laugh.

We sit there for a moment, occasionally raising our respective mugs of coffee to our lips.

“I thought you weren’t coming,” I say eventually. I try to keep it light, but the accusation slips through in my tone.

“I know. I should have texted you. But to be honest, you were part of the reason I decided to come back.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I know how much you went through the last time. How close you were to Phoebe. I figured if you were strong enough to relive all that, the least I could do was to be here too.”

The back of my eyes burn, and I force the tears away.

“Listen,” I say. “The others, they can’t know. They wouldn’t understand.”

He nods, but he won’t meet my eyes.

“I won’t tell them,” he says eventually, resigned. “Don’t worry.”

I think of how similar the conversation is to the whispers I overheard yesterday morning, and I cringe. So many secrets, so many things we don’t know about each other. Was it always like this?

“Hey.” He turns to me, pulling a hand away from his mug and placing it on my arm. There’s concern in his cornflower blue eyes. “This can’t be easy for you, being back here. Are you okay?”

A lump instantly forms in my throat. Despite all the questions I’ve been forced to answer the last few days, no one has asked about me. How I’m holding up, if I’m alright.

The short answer is: I’m not. It’s not just the guilt, the paranoia of what the police will find. It’s the memories of all of it, of Phoebe, of what happened after. The stories that live in this place, that have come alive as I keep thinking about the last time we were all here.

My body crumples, and suddenly Josh is there to support me, kneeling beside me, his arms wrapped around me. And it’s exactly what I need. A friend.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he murmurs as he rubs my back, my tears dripping onto his T-shirt, leaving crescent-sized stains in the fabric. “You’re okay. I’m here.”

I don’t know how long we stay there, but eventually we’re interrupted by the unlatching of the door lock behind us.

“Oh.” Declan’s surprise drifts across the balcony, and I snatch my head up, away from Josh’s shoulder.

When Declan next speaks, it’s with barely concealed bitterness. “I didn’t realize I was interrupting.”

I want to stop him, to explain. To tell him how I’ve thought about him every day over the last ten years.

The times we spent hand in hand walking on the beach in the Whitsundays, his arms around me as the others looked on, jealousy hard in Phoebe’s eyes at our tangled limbs.

I want to tell him that I almost reached out, that I wrote out a novel-length email at least five times, one I was never able to send.

But then I think of how I tried to talk to him in Sydney after everything happened, how I sent him messages when I returned home. How those efforts went rebuffed, the messages unanswered. How he let me down when I needed him most.

I let him go back inside without stopping him.

***

The plane we take to Everly Airport seats sixteen and is easily susceptible to turbulence.

While the flight itself is only about ninety minutes, the last half is dominated by views from our small windows of a barren red landscape, dotted occasionally with shrubbery and gum trees.

Every second of it brings my mind back to my time in Jagged Rock. To what happened there, to what I did.

The wheels hit the tarmac, and minutes later, we grab our bags from the sole carousel in baggage claim and secure the two rental cars ordered for us in advance by Kyan, who was quick as always to flash his cash.

We pile in, Adrien, Kyan, and Josh in one car, Declan, Ellery, and I in the other, and head towards the address for Nick’s ranch, which Adrien found online.

The airport feels as if it was dropped in the middle of nowhere.

It’s surrounded only by dirt and a small parking lot, its asphalt glistening in the midday sun.

There’s nothing else around, no shops, no businesses, no roads other than a small two-lane street that turns into dirt after about half a mile.

As we drive, my memories travel back to Nick.

That very first day at orientation, he and Phoebe got off on the wrong foot, and it got progressively worse from there.

Phoebe doing things—showing up late, intentionally trailing behind on our cultural tours—to piss him off, his face always growing a concerning shade of red in response.

For the thousandth time since yesterday, the thought seeps into my brain. Did Nick really kill her?

“I think this is it,” Ellery says as Kyan’s car stops in front us. I look out the window to the right and there lies a massive gate blocking a dirt road, Gould Farms wrought in steel above a logo of a sheep.

As soon as I open the car door, I notice the air is dryer, the temperature at least ten degrees hotter out here than back in Sydney.

I can already taste the dust that littered my lungs the last time we were here.

I think of the handwritten sign I saw in the baggage claim. Limit Water Use—We are in a Drought!!!

“I don’t see any speaker.” Kyan walks up and sticks his head through the gap in the gate. “And there’s a chain on here that needs a key to unlock.”

“We could climb it,” Ellery says.

“Climb it?” Kyan says, clearly eyeing the height of the gate.

“Oh, come on. Where’s the adventurous Kyan from ten years ago? What if I dared you?” Ellery jokes, nudging him in the side before grabbing on to the gate, pulling her right leg up.

And then I see him.

“Ellery, stop!” I yell, pointing to the hulking man walking towards us from over a hill beyond the gate. He must have heard our cars pull up.

Ellery’s still climbing back down when he gets close enough for me to hear it. A sound I’ve only heard in movies. A soft, stomach-clenching click. The safety gauge of a gun coming unclasped.

“Get down from there.” The words are a familiar growl. Nick Gould looks the same as he did years ago: bulky, intimidating, with fiery red hair. Only this time, he’s carrying a rifle.

“Nick, we’re just here to talk,” Josh says, taking on the tone of a hostage negotiator, hands raised.

Nick’s eyes narrow as he comes closer. After a moment, recognition blooms in his eyes.

“The hell are yous doing here?”

He doesn’t bother to hide his shock. Thankfully, the surprise seems to have made him forget the rifle, which he now holds limply by his side.

“We came to ask you some questions,” I pipe up, fumbling.

“Can we come in?” Ellery adds.

“We can do whatever talking yous want right here.”

“Sure,” Kyan says, too agreeably. “We know you and Hari were still in touch—”

“What about it?” Nick says gruffly, before Kyan can finish. I note that he doesn’t deny it.

“Well, she’s dead.”

The news seems to wash over Nick in waves. Shock, then grief, then total and utter devastation. A look I’ve never seen on his—or any grown man’s—face. For a startling moment, I think he may weep or crumple to the ground. Or both.

“No,” he says instead, clearing his throat and regaining some control. “She can’t be.”

“It was an overdose,” Adrien says.

“You’re wrong.” Nick’s voice is stronger now, and I notice white peeking out from his knuckles as he wraps his fingers tighter around the rifle. “She was clean.”

It’s the same thing Kyan had said.

“We think it may have been—”

But Adrien doesn’t let Declan finish. “When was the last time you saw her?” she asks Nick.

“Er…a couple months ago, I think.”

“So, you didn’t see her earlier this week?”

His bushy eyebrows form a sharp V as he stares at her. “No.”

“You were here, at the ranch, all week?” she continues, her voice cool, as if she’s in a courtroom.

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business.” I notice a flash of something unidentifiable in Nick’s eyes, before the grief in his expression begins to harden. “Wait a minute. What are you playing at?”

“What about the night Phoebe went missing in Jagged Rock?” Adrien deftly changes the topic. “What exactly were you doing after the dinner that night?”

Nick freezes for a moment and then his eyes widen. “Are you tryin’ ta ask if I’m responsible? If I killed her?”

No one rushes to respond, and Nick doesn’t wait. Instead, I watch in horror as he reaches again for the gun at his side.

“Hey, hey,” Josh says gently.

“You come onto my property and accuse me of things you have no idea about. It’s about time yous all leave,” Nick growls.

Declan steps forward. “I think if we could just—”

But Nick doesn’t listen to Declan’s proposal. “Leave,” he grunts. “Now.”

So we do, rushing back to our respective cars, before Declan and Kyan step on the gas.

As we drive away, I turn back around, watching Nick, the rifle still in his hand, his face like carved concrete.

“Well, that certainly wasn’t successful,” Ellery says with a laugh that comes out too high.

But I disagree. Because I noticed Nick’s caginess in answering Adrien’s questions. His refusal to admit where he’d been this past week or what he’d been doing the night of Phoebe’s murder. The flash of something in his eye that I’m only just now recognizing.

Panic.

Nick Gould knows something he’s not telling us.

And I’m going to find out what.