Mariana scrambled to her feet and rammed into him, tackling him from behind. He fell face-first, but when he hit the ground, he rolled and popped back onto his feet.
Claire immediately rushed to Reyva. “Are you okay?”
Reyva cried, “Watch out!”
He grabbed Claire’s hair, twisted her around, and shoved her toward the mound. “Any one of you will do. It doesn’t matter which.” He propelled her up the rocks, toward the mouth of the cave. She didn’t know how such a malnourished man could be so strong. But his grip was like a vise, and pushing against him felt like pushing against a brick wall. She lost ground.
She felt her foot slip over empty air. Panicking, she threw her weight against the wild man, but he pushed back, forcing her toward the hole.
“Claire!” Mariana cried.
Like some kind of action hero, Reyva charged up the rock and, cradling her broken arm against her, leaned back and kicked, hard. Her flat foot hit Arthur’s stomach. Air whooshed out of him. As he stumbled, Claire spun around—trying to wrench herself free. He spun with her, and his feet hit the hole.
Shocked, he released her and tried to grab on to the rock. In a split second, she saw the fear in his face, and then he was gone, falling into the earth as if the cave were swallowing him. She heard him scream, heard a thud, and then silence.
The birds were silent too.
Twenty-Two
“Did we just...,” Claire began.
Kill someone, her brain finished. She couldn’t say the words out loud. Backing away from the mouth of the cave, she shook her head as if that would erase what just happened.
“He might not be dead,” Mariana said. “He could just be hurt.”
It was so quiet. So very quiet. He wasn’t screaming anymore. The wind wasn’t blowing. The birds weren’t chirping to one another. Just silence, closing in on them.
She silently repeated Mariana’s words:He might not be dead.Maybe they hadn’t killed him. Maybe they weren’t murderers. Claire gulped in air. There wasn’t enough oxygen. It had fled, sucked away with the wind. The silence was roaring in her ears.
“It was an accident,” Reyva said firmly. Cradling her arm, she winced. “What he did... or tried to do... that wasn’t. Hechoseto attack us. We just defended ourselves.”
“Are you all right?” Claire said.
“Fine.” And then she amended that. “Actually, in tremendous pain.” She crumpled to her knees.
“Mariana, the phone?” If they called for help, they would be saved, Reyva would get help, Jack would get help, and the wild man... It had been self-defense. He’d attacked them. And he’d set the fire.
He hadn’t known what he was doing, she thought.
That didn’t make it okay that he’d killed all those people. He may not have known what he was doing, but they were still dead.
At what point had he lost his grip on reality?
“Do you think any of that was true?” Claire asked. Her voice was shrill in her ears. She inhaled, swallowed hard.Breathe, she ordered herself, and then managed in a steadier voice, “Do you think he really knew our parents?” He’d said her mother’s name and knew her nickname. But how could it be true? She knew her parents. Maybe they didn’t always understand her, but they were definitively and objectivelynice. They wouldn’t have abandoned a friend in the woods. They wouldn’t have left him there to havethishappen to him.
“You can’t believe anything he said,” Reyva said. “You’re the one who called him Arthur. He could have latched onto that story of a missing kid—it’s an urban legend around here.”
“Rural legend,” Mariana corrected as she struggled to roll Jack off his bag.
Reyva was right. Claire had brought up the name Arthur. He hadn’t volunteered it; he’d just latched onto it. He might not have actually been the missing boy from all those years ago. He might not have had any idea who he was.
Except he knew “Sweet Julie,”she thought.
And he knew he’d burned down the Lake House.
They’d stumbled onto two separate crimes: the burning of the Lake House by the wild man and the shooting of the program director by Jack’s father.Truly horrific luck, she thought.
But it was almost over. Her heart rate was starting to slow, and the forest wasn’t spinning around her. Mariana at last succeeded in extracting the phone from Jack’s squashed pack and held it up as a trophy. “Got it!”
