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“Well, now that we know her real name and address, we should try to find her on social media,” she says, taking back control. She’s focused, her voice slightly different from usual. It’s flatter, as if a different inflection is poking through her West Coast accent. There’s something familiar about it that I can’t quite place. The rain has alsopooled mascara under her eyes, which she quickly swipes away with the towel, leaving her eyelashes bare. There’s a vulnerability there that I rarely see, and again, something nudges my memory. “Maybe get her phone number,” Brooke continues before I can analyze the thought further. “Figure out who we need to contact.”
I nod. Despite stating Lucy’s full name, address, and the fact that she is—orwas—an organ donor, her identification card didn’t give us any indication of how to reach her family. As much as I hate to admit it, social media probablyisour best option.
“Okay,” Brooke says, pulling a laptop and her cell from the canvas tote she’d left here earlier. She sits on the bench, the computer opened on the towel she’s draped across her lap. “I’ll start with Google, Twitter, and Instagram. Why don’t you take Facebook? That old computer has an internet connection, right?” She nods to the rusty PC on the desk, which is probably as old as the resort itself.
I nod. “It’s slow, but it’ll do the trick.”
I settle onto the stool and watch Brooke as the old computer slowly comes to life. Her fingers tap diligently on her keyboard, and she expertly alternates her focus between her laptop and phone.
I deleted all my social media accounts three years ago, when they were deluged with requests to be my “friend,” most of which were accompanied by messages that started with an expletive and only got nastier from there. Ironically, Frederic put me in charge of handling the dive shop’s Facebook and Instagram accounts. My guess is that he figured the one woman in the shop would be the best suited for it. Unfortunately for him, I don’t quite have Brooke’s skill set. I go on the accounts every now and then to upload photos taken with the dive shop’s underwater camera, all of which lackfilters and any attempts at witty captions and usually fail to garner more than a handful of likes. But sometimes when I’m on there, I’ll spend a few minutes searching names of people I no longer know. My college roommate, for one, who’s now married to the captain of our university’s swimming team, a muscled jock I’d had a hopeless crush on. I look at the photos they post—his arm wrapped around her waist, a baby cradled in her arms outside their home in Greenwich. A painful reminder of what I might have had if life had turned out differently.
I turn my attention back to the screen, which has finally booted up. A Facebook search for Lucy Taylor returns thirteen thousand results. Award-winning authors, famous actresses, professors, doctors, porn stars, you name it. Just about everyone butourLucy Taylor. I narrow the results to users from Greymouth, New Zealand, the name of the city on Lucy’s identification card. Nothing. I try again, filtering by the names of cities located close to Greymouth. Still nothing.
As if reading my thoughts, Brooke groans. “Nothing on Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok. I even checked LinkedIn, but no Lucy Taylor.”
“No luck on Facebook either,” I say.
“What kind of eighteen-year-old girl doesn’t leave an internet footprint?”
I feel my cheeks grow hot at Brooke’s question, thinking of my own noticeable lack of social media presence, but Brooke doesn’t seem to notice.
“Then again, what kind of girl checks into a scuba-diving resort using a fake name?” Brooke asks.
“Wait,” I say, her comment triggering a thought. “Maybe shedidn’t just use the Lucy Dupin name for check-in. Maybe it’s, like, her internet alias.”
“Hmm.” Brooke’s typing before I’ve even finished the thought.
I inputLucy Dupininto the Facebook search bar. Twenty-five results. Much more manageable. But I feel my hope drain as I scroll through them. None of the profile pictures resemble the fair, blue-eyed dive student.
“She’s on Instagram,” Brooke says, stopping me mid-scroll, her eyes not straying from her phone. “Her handle is @LucyDupin1. I think I…” She pauses in thought.
I grab my phone, log in to Instagram using the dive shop account, and quickly type her handle into the search bar. The search yields only one result.
Her profile is public but as bare bones as it gets. No information in the description under her handle and no pictures. Her profile picture is just the standard gray silhouette provided by the app. I click over to her connections. She has a grand total of five followers, all of whom appear to be bots, but she’s following seventeen people. I start at the top: the official Koh Sang tourist page, the Koh Sang Dive Resort page that I curate, Frangipani Bar, the Sunset Restaurant. Clearly, she was planning for this trip. I keep scrolling, bristling as I see more familiar names pop up. Logan, Greta, Doug.
I’m mid-scroll when Brooke’s voice interrupts me.
“I have to go.”
“What?” I say, not sure I fully understand. “But you see who she’s following, right?”
“Yeah, it looks like she had a reason to come here. Either that or she was just extremely overexcited for this trip.” Brooke’s face is pale, her jaw set as she talks. “But I just remembered I have ameeting with a company about promoting their product. It could be a big gig for me.”
I stare, open mouthed and more than a little disappointed, as Brooke quickly gathers up her things. She’s never flaky like this. In all the times we’ve ever made plans, she’s never canceled, never even showed up a minute later than the meeting time we agreed on. And while she’s always working—responding to Instagram comments or editing photos—she’s never used it as an excuse before. I always got the impression that her influencer responsibilities weren’t something she was overly excited about. Certainly not more important than getting to the bottom of a mystery swirling around a dead guest.
I think of the rain, desperate to make her stay, but I realize that as we worked, the storm must have diminished to a mere drizzle and then to nothing, leaving as fast as it came. Now, the only sound from the dive shop roof is the occasional beat of a stray raindrop from one of the palm trees overhead.
“I’ll check in with you in a few hours,” she calls over her shoulder, an afterthought as she pulls the shop door open.
This isn’t the first time Brooke has done something like this. I think of her dropping my hand as we sat here in the dive shop yesterday. Since we first met a few weeks ago, she’s showered me with attention, making me feel like I’m her best friend. But then there are times like this when, without warning, she’ll become distracted, distant. As if a switch flips and she’s reminded that she has much more pressing concerns.
I usually try to ignore it, but this time it stings. In the past few hours, I’ve come to see us as a team. I wasn’t fooled by her claim that she wanted to find a way to contact Lucy’s family. She clearlydidn’t believe Lucy’s death was an accident, and despite my best efforts, I can’t shake the image of those ghostly blue fingerprints on Lucy’s neck. The more I think about it, the more Iknowthey were real. And now that I know how Logan’s ring came to be by Lucy’s body, there’s no reason to protect him.
I don’t believe this was an accident either. As much as I want to deny it, I think somebody killed Lucy.
And this Instagram profile seems to finally be getting us somewhere, giving us some insight into what she was doing on Koh Sang in the first place. Lucy had clearly planned for something. First the dive shop printouts, and now the Instagram profile. Plus, she met me, Doug, and Neil throughout the dive course but never Greta or Logan. What possible reason would she have had to follow them?
Before I can dig into the thought any further, the bell over the shop door chimes.
