Her breaths come slower too.
“Good,” I say. “You’re doing a great job.”
The sobs become sniffles and finally she speaks, “I’m sorry.”
I run my thumbs along her knuckles like my mom did to me. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” She looks up at me, her eyes puffy and bloodshot, cheeks splotchy. Like she looked at the burial. “Do you want to take a break? I can see if the nails lead to any more clues. You don’t have to. We have all day here.” I look out over the forest from our height. “We can even go back to the campsite. We can wait for the car and leave once it’s ready. It should be done tonight.”
“Give me a few hours,” she says. “I can just sit in the sun.”
“Okay,” I say. “Do you feel steady?”
Beck lets me go, slowly rising back to her feet. “Yeah. I’m good.” She heads to the window, halfway in to return to the ground. She turns around. “Thank you, Emma.”
A bolt of pride flies through me. “You’re welcome.”
When Mom had given me the choice about returning to camp or not, I’d said no. I wanted to go home. While Owen had spent three weeks at camp, I had accompanied Liam to every kids’ movie andarcade and fenced-in playground that summer while Dad wrote in the closest seating area.
Now, I don’t want to wait to re-face my fear. Once I see Beck walk through the grass and find a place to lie down and shut her eyes, I approach.
“How ya doing?” I ask.
“Okay.” She looks off into the distance. “She died, Em. Some sick fuck ripped off her fingernails, killed her, and left her for coyotes to eat. She’s gone and she must’ve been so fucking terrified and—” She exhales, catching herself. “We need to find this freak. I need to know why someone would rip apart teenage girls they don’t even know. This is so awful.”
I agree. We have to keep going. “Yeah. I was going to look at the nails again.”
Beck swallows hard. “I’m gonna stay here a bit longer. I still feel a little lightheaded from the panic attack.”
“Okay.” I squeeze her hand before I return to that roof.
I bend down close enough to the nest to take in the smell of plant decay and bird pheromone and photograph every angle. I try to figure out the story. Surely a bird wouldn’t travel that far to find materials for a nest, so Paisley’s body must’ve been around here somewhere. It lends even more to the theory that they all died here and their bodies were moved.
I take the nail Beck had grabbed and examine that as much as I can. There’s dried blood stuck to the nail bed, but it’s miraculously intact. The pliers explain it, but it’s still such a miracle. No blood at the top of the nail, just at the bottom where it was presumably removed. So, she didn’t fight back when she was killed? I would think hair or dirt would’ve stayed caked in if that were the case.
Ivy mentioned drugs. Maybe they were all drugged or took more drugs out here? It would explain how a woman killed them, if one did.
We only know that all of them had some body part removed and moved somewhere else.
If I can find some kind of ritual site, maybe that’ll lead to the killer. Or at least be enough to get the authorities out here investigating. They can do the terrifying parts for us.
I make my way back to the road, scanning the ghost town for my next move. I have to think opposite of how a search team would. Where would theynotthink to look? Four of Paisley’s nails were in the bird’s nest, so where are the other ones?
I start my walk along the road, ready to check the houses with a new fervor. Even if the thought of what those pliers did makes my stomach turn. Paisley might’ve been responsible for so much pain in Beck’s and my lives, but I can’t imagine what she went through with those things. Someone ripped them off her hands. I had one incident as a kid when a can of tomatoes fell on my foot at the grocery store and the pain of that is still so visceral. I can’t imagine having to peel it—
I gag, stopping in my path as the spasm hits. I cannot think about that. I have to keep looking.
Ten little buildings, two collapsed. I remember a photograph of the collapsed ones from my research. There’s something extra sad about them, like an event caused them to fall when the other ones built the same didn’t. Termites, a fire? I can’t remember if one of them that collapsed had anything to do with the schoolteacher, if that was directly involved in the ritual she did.
Either way, it’s just a pile of rubble. Maybe the other one had termites.
But something about it feels…wrong to me. Repeating thatinformation feels like tasting a rotten bit of food. I pull out my map and read the description of the ghost town.
I gasp.
The official guide only states that the schoolhouse burned down in the 1900s. Nothing else should be broken.
Maybe the guide’s old. Maybe it’s all innocent, natural, just something that hasn’t been updated.
But I run to the dinky pile of wood, the one that was presumably once someone’s shack of a home. One look down at the logs and I can see scorch marks like scars. I toss aside the smallest pieces of wood with ease, even get through a few smaller logs by sheer force of will. But as I get to the larger logs, even rolling them away has me sweating and the muscles in my back and arms aching like I’ve never felt before. I’m moving the remains of a home, a task that shouldn’t be possible for me. But here we are, and I won’t stop until it’s done.
