Allie lets out a breath, then tries again. “So, a few months back, somebody started sharing screenshots in my Reddit group. They were of posts by a user with the screen name OneSadRealm, who’d been posting in a different subreddit called ER_Forever. The ‘ER’ is short for Elliot Rodger, this huge piece of shit who murdered a bunch of people in Santa Barbara and wrote like, a hundred-page manifesto about it.” She makes a disgusted face. “Elliot Rodger is like, a huge hero for ‘incels.’”
“Incels?” Deborah asks.
“A bunch of ‘involuntarily celibate’ creeps,” she clarifies. “Assholes who think theydeservesex, but since they can’t get it, they hate women. So they gather online to share their violent fantasies.”
I’m about to prod Allie to get to the point when she says something that stops me cold.
“The reason the Redditor shared those screenshots of OneSadRealm’s posts in my Camas Creek Murders subreddit is because somebody realized that his username is almost a perfect anagram forLeo Marsden.”
I give her a sharp look. “Hold on. Leo Marsden, like the seventeen-year-old kid who survived Camas Creek?”
“Yeah, him,” confirms Allie. We pause to navigate around a thick tree branch forking the current before she continues. “People lost their shit in my subreddit. And not just because of the anagram, but because the screenshots were … seriously awful. They were all about Leo’s mom. These horrible, bloody AI images of her with stab wounds, drowning in her own blood at the bottom of an orange-and-blue raft. In some of them, her face was all carved up. OneSadRealm made these terrible captions for the images, too. Stuff about how she and the other ‘Chads’ and ‘Stacys’ at Camas Creek deserved to die horrible deaths.”
“Who are Chad and Stacy? I’m still lost,” Deborah mumbles. “What does OneSadRealm have to do with Bryan?”
Allie huffs and glances between me and Deborah. “I’m getting there. Stacys and Chads are incel code for men and women who are at the top of the social food chain,” she explains. “Chads and Stacys are the people incels hate the most, because they supposedly get all the money, sex, and power, while the incels have nothing. But that doesn’t really matter.
“What matters is that the entire Camas Creek subreddit was up in arms about the OneSadRealm screenshots, and me and the other moderators had a huge fight about it. Some people were defending Leo Marsden, saying that anyone who was dragging his name through the mud was a huge dick and should get kicked out.” She sighs. “I was team Leo, a thousand percent. I thought the whole thing was completely insane, especially after all the bullshit about Kellen Stroop still supposedly being alive. But some of the other mods still sent the screenshots to the police, just in case. Nothing ever came of it, and the controversy finally petered out. OneSadRealm stopped posting on the ER_Forever subreddit after the uproar—he deleted his account.”
“I still don’t get what the big ah-hah is,” Deborah blusters, too loudly. “Why would anybody think Leo Marsden is the one who posted that sick stuff about his mom? Anybody could’ve made that screen name—”
“Shh!” I hiss, even though I can’t put my finger on why it would matter if Bryan overheard us talking about this.
A terrified voice in the back of my mind answers the question as soon as I have the thought.Because he’d probably love it.
Allie draws in another shudder of a breath. “During the height of the OneSadRealm controversy, one of myRedditors posted this mega-thread on the Camas Creek Murders subreddit, breaking it all down. I’m talking, like, pages.It was an insane theory about how Kellen Stroop was actually avictimat Camas Creek—and Leo Marsden was the real killer.”
I stop rowing. I thought I was tracking where this story was headed, but I was wrong. And despite everything, I find myself both sickened and engrossed by Allie’s story. One glance at Pam and Imani tells me they feel the same.
“Hold on, how could Leo Marsden be the real killer? Didn’t he get stabbed?” I ask, my mind swimming as I try to connect the dots.
“Istilldon’t understand what this has to do with Bryan …” Deborah mutters in frustration.
I shake my head and keep rowing. All I know is that I need to know the end of this story before we come face-to-face with Bryan again.
Something with wings slices through the air overhead, darker than the night, crossing so close to our boat I can hear the soft swish of the wind through its feathers.
A hawk,is my first thought.Parker, please. I need you.
But as the creature crosses our raft, I can see from the thick wings and stout body that it’s an owl. It flies on without another sound, disappearing somewhere along the wall on the far side of the canyon.
“Yeah, Leo definitely got stabbed,” Allie says bitterly, locking me back into the story. “But if that Camas Creek Reddit thread was right—and I’m pretty sure it was—he did it to himself.”
24
Before I can fully process what Allie’s said, the meandering current abruptly picks up its pace. The canyon has narrowed while we’ve been deep in conversation, and the force of the river funneling through the slender gap makes for swifter flow.
It feels like a warning.
You’re not even close to safety yet. There’s more danger ahead. So you’d better pay attention.
Allie’s words, which seem to mimic the speed of the current, have the same effect.
You’re not safe yet. There’s more danger ahead. Pay attention.
“So recently,Datelinefiled a Freedom of Information request in preparation for a special about the Camas Creek murders,” she says. “It brought out all these details about Camas Creek—like, that none of Leo’s injuries were actually life-threatening. His stab wounds were pretty shallow, actually, compared to everybody else’s. He didn’t even lose that much blood. Other victims, like his mom, had such deep wounds that the knife hit bone in a few instances,” she says, shuddering. “So there’s that. His injuries technically could have been self-inflicted.”
“But why would Leo stab himself—and then kill his own mom?” Pam asks, aghast.
