His nostrils flair before he says, “Telling the police was always your job, anyway.”
Somehow, the vice grip from the emotion swirling around my neck grows tighter.
What does he meanourjob? We met this guy less than twenty minutes ago. We’ve only been dealing with Natalie. Hell, I only learned his name yesterday when we were planning to go on the hike.
When did we talk to him before now?
My stomach goes cold.
I know.
Evan’s one of the few prominent outsiders in town besides Natalie. Evan felt like he couldn’t come forward with information. Evan seems like the kind of coward who’d start two girls down this investigative rabbit hole and disappear right when someone in town told him to stop.
He’s the texter.
This should be a moment of triumph and calm. We finally found the only person in this town who believes my friends deserve justice. He wants to expose this town for their evil just like Beck and I do.
But all I feel is a wave of queasiness.
“You’re the one who brought us out here, aren’t you?” I ask. “You’re the one who sent the video Paisley made and told me to talk to you.”
Evan’s shoulders shrug as he breathes. “I am.”
It’s only now, stuck in this cabin in the middle of nowhere, when only one of us has a gun, I ask the most important question.
I swallow the lump in my throat. “How did you even get that video?” I ask.
“I had her phone.” Evan settles his gaze solidly on his hands. “Ifound it in the watchtower but didn’t want it on my person. If someone in town found me with it, they could—”
My veins start to buzz.
I was right about the texter all along.
Beck leaps out of her seat. “So why the fuck didn’t you turn it in to the FBI? That’s my dead sister’s fucking phone. Are you reallythatscared of this hick town?”
Evan grabs the gun from off the table.
My stomach drops to my shoes.
“No,” he says, raising his gaze to meet us. “I couldn’t get involved with the feds like that. But I still needed you.” He looks right at me, his eyes ice cold. “I brought you here because you saw the other one.”
He’s pointing a gun at us.
You saw the other one.
He’s pointing a fucking gun at us, and I need to be anywhere but here, but my brain goes to one place: the parking lot that night back in October.
I flash to the woman with the long hair. The one who stared at me like a blank animal.
The same woman who burst through the woods and onto the road.
She wasn’t the killer.
“You were going to kill her,” I say, still acutely aware of the gun pointed directly at me. “That’s why she was running.”
Beck looks between the two of us, eyes wild in confusion. “What’re you talking about?”
“I thought all this time that maybe she was the killer running away after hurting Paisley, Harlow, and Opal,” I say. My voice feels far away, like I’m narrating from above. I wish I were. “But she was running from you. She escaped.”
