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“So who are you?” I ask finally, breaking the stillness.
“My name is Alani,” she answers. “I was friends with Lucy. I came here with her.”
My heart rate has finally slowed since my flirtation with the edge of the cliff, but this news sends it ratcheting up again. Amid everything else, I’d forgotten about the second toothbrush I’d found in Lucy’s bathroom, but now I realize it must have belonged to Alani. Her accent suddenly makes sense. She must be from the same town as Lucy: Greymouth, New Zealand.
“Why have you been following me?”
“I thought I could trust you,” Alani says. “So did Lucy. I mean, you weren’t on the island when Jacinta died. And we watched you around them, the Permanents. We picked up on how you’d look at them when they weren’t looking. Lucy thought maybe you knew more than you were letting on, and I kind of agreed,” Alani explains.
A memory flashes from the other night. Lucy, waiting outside my room, confirming when I’d arrived on the island.
“But after Lucy, I couldn’t risk it,” Alani continues. “I needed to know for sure that you would help me. So I followed you, trying to figure out what side you were on. When I saw the post you published today, that’s when I knew I could trust you. I watched as you confronted that woman, Cass. But I didn’t interrupt. After she went inside, I came up here after you. I waited in the trees until I was sure you weren’t meeting anyone before I tried to get your attention.”
Her words make sense separately, but woven together, it’s as if she’s speaking a different language. I settle on the first of many questions.
“What do you mean, what side I was on? Side of what?”
She barely lets me finish. It’s as if after all these days of staying silent, she’s opened the floodgates.
“They killed her.”
I swallow, forcing myself to stay composed. “Okay, okay. Calm down and start from the beginning.”
Alani takes a deep breath.
“A few weeks ago, Lucy’s sister came here, to Koh Sang. She was amazing. Always kind to me and Lucy, always including us. Never acting like we were a burden or too young to hang out with her. Nothing like my older sisters.”
There’s a familiar grief on Alani’s face, the same kind I wear when I think of my mother.
“Anyway, she was traveling through Southeast Asia, working her way through Thailand. She called home every day to update us. Lucy and I loved it. Lucy would put the phone on speaker, and her sister would tell us everything about what she had been seeing and eating. And best of all, about the hot boys she was meeting. She was gorgeous, so obviously they were tripping over themselves to get to her. Honestly, hearing her stories was better than watchingLove Island.”
Alani wears a sad smile. I rest my hand on her elbow, and she looks up at me, returning to the present.
“The calls stopped two days after she got to Koh Sang.”
I nod, bracing myself for the rest of the story.
“She arrived late on a Wednesday. She called us early Thursday morning. She was excited because she was going to try scuba diving for the first time. She was staying in a free room at the dive hotel. She called us the next day too—Friday—to fill us in on dive school.She loved everything about it, the diving, the school, the island. She told us a little about the dive training from that day, but she mostly talked about this guy she had met. An expat who lived on the island. She was straight-up giddy.
“She said they were planning to go out again that night. That the guy had something special planned, but she didn’t know what.” Alani’s voice breaks. “And then, nothing. We didn’t hear from her again. Lucy called nonstop, but eventually her sister’s phone just went straight to voicemail. Turned off. A full week later, the Koh Sang police called her parents. Told them that Jacinta had died. That she’d taken an early-morning hike alone and had fallen off the side of the cliff.”
“Jacinta Taylor,” I say. I suspected it as soon as Alani started telling her story, but I willed it not to be true. Jacinta, the girl whose mangled body was found on the rocks below Khrum Yai, was Lucy’s sister.
“Yes,” Alani confirms, her voice catching. “She fell right there.” She raises her finger, pointing to the spot that I was standing at just moments ago, and I shiver from a coldness entirely unrelated to the rain.
“It didn’t make sense,” Alani continues. “Jacinta was a night owl. She would never have woken up early if she didn’t have to—especially for physical activity. And there was never any question about suicide. She loved life too much to even consider it. Lucy’s parents accepted the police’s story; they were too heartbroken not to. They couldn’t bear the thought of coming here, so they had her remains shipped to New Zealand. But Lucy and I, we just couldn’t let it go. It didn’t seem right.
“We spent days rereading her texts and listening to hervoicemails. We learned everything we could about the island. We tried to find the guy Jacinta had been dating on social media, but the only information she had given us was that he was an expat and ‘totally gorgeous.’” Alani stops, a sad smile playing at her lips, thinking of Jacinta’s words. “She usually took a few days to post pictures on Instagram, so we had no photographs of him. It didn’t really give us much to work with. We’d gotten as far as we could through our online investigation. So Lucy decided we needed to come here and figure it out ourselves.”
Alani shivers now, and I remember that despite everything she’s done, all the risks she’s taken, she’s only just a girl.
“Lucy and I had taken a year off between high school and college,” Alani continues, “and we’d been working for a few months, so we put together all the money we had saved and bought the cheapest flights we could find. We told our parents we were road-tripping through New Zealand’s North Island, y’know, a way to break through the grief…” Alani trails off, and when she looks up at me, tears well in her eyes.
“Once we got here, we decided to retrace Jacinta’s steps. We came prepared. We’d researched everyone at the dive shop.”
I think of all the printouts Cass and I found in Lucy’s room and how Lucy was following all the Permanents—and me—on Instagram.
“Lucy signed up for the dive class. She got a free room like Jacinta stayed in, and I snuck in. It was awful. I thought summer was bad in New Zealand, but a room without air conditioning in Thailand, with the two of us in that little bed…it was torture.” Alani laughs, a throaty noise that seems to surprise her. She sniffs it away.
