Beck starts with the living room.
“Wouldn’t a body smell?” Beck asks as she yanks every drawer open. Items clang in an overwhelming cacophony of sound. I tense, waiting for the corpse on the ground to somehow wake up and tell us to shut up.
I move to the bathroom. “Honestly, if we findanythingof hers, that would be enough. Considering his surroundings, he probably buried her.”
“But why buryherand not Opal and Harlow? Why leave their body parts somewhere else?”
The bathroom smells like mildew and cheap soap, a million times better than the scent could’ve been. I open the mirror medicine cabinet. There are prescription pills, but it’s for something I don’t recognize and can’t look up.
And there is a ton of hair in the trash can. Hair and bloody bandages. I take as many photos as I can.
He really was the one torturing us this whole weekend. When I breathe, I can finally breathe deeply and fully again.
I can’t wait to tell the federal cops.
There’s no phone in the bathroom. Judging by Beck’s silence, she hasn’t found one in the living room. My stomach starts to knot.
Even if this place doesn’t smell, there’s no relief to get rid of the queasiness still settled in me. “Maybe he…liked her more.”
Even after everything Paisley did to me, there is nothing that would’ve made her deserve to be this monster’s favorite.
“God, I wish I could kill that guy again,” Beck says. “Fucking monster. Do you think he just used the witch stuff for cover?”
“I’m sure. God, poor Vanessa,” I say. “Not to mention what he did to get us out here. It’s so messed up.”
I know Beck wanted to come out here just as much as I did, but guilt gnaws at my insides. I’m the one who got all these messages, because I was the one who was there that night, who left that stupid voice note. If I had been on the trip in the first place, Beck would be back in LA with her parents, mourning but safe.
We shouldn’t be the ones to find her sister’s body, whatever state it’s in.
But I don’t find anything else in the bathroom. When I return to the main room, Beck’s empty-handed too.
“Wanna try the garage?” Beck asks.
I nod but put Evan’s gun in my backpack. Anywhere with doors we can’t keep an eye on suddenly feels very reasonably dangerous.
The garage is more of a workspace than anything. Tons of tools, workbenches, more taxidermy on the walls. Something shines on the bench.
It may not be Paisley’s phone, but I grab Evan’s burner phone like it’s the prized jewel it is.
“Maybe he wrote down coordinates for where he buried her,” I say.
I do a search through the burner, my mind running a million miles an hour. He doesn’t have bars, either, which may be another reason why the baiting texts stopped. I find our text exchange. I find…photos of Vanessa’s body before the coyotes got to her.
It was a violent death.
Sickened, I move to the other photos. There’s one of Paisley’s phone, taken at the watchtower. I know how helpful it’d be to the investigators, but I’m grateful not to have found any physical trophies in this cabin yet. I don’t think either of us could handle finding a lock of Paisley’s hair or a piece of her clothing. Still, I search through these drawers, my stomach churning as the number of places to look dwindles.
“Yeah, shit,” Beck says, her voice a little far away. “And our luck’s turned around!”
I wheel around to see Beck holding a key to Evan’s car.
Despite everything, it does bring a light to me. We can drive out ofthis hellacious forest and take what we have to the federal cops. If we’re fast enough, they can find Paisley’s body and close this up before the townies realize what we’re doing. Sure, our parents will be pissed we lied about where we were going, but it’ll have been worth it.
“Amazing,” I say, actually meaning it.
But then I look down at the contents of a drawer: Polaroid photos of girls in cute hiking gear posing with Evan. Sometimes they’re smiling big, sometimes they’re smizing for the camera.
Women’s sunglasses. A pink bandana. Some lists written in feminine handwriting on the motel stationery. Someone’s bottle opener from Dollywood. The kind of things you’d take from the lost and found.
