Page 74 of The Girl from Widow Hills
CHAPTER 21
Wednesday, 4 a.m.
THE RINGING PHONE JARREDme from sleep, and my heart was racing in a panic—like I might find myself outside again, hearing a phone, standing over a body in the grass. I sat upright as it rang once more, the shadows of my bedroom furniture orienting me. The stuffy room; the door closed with a lock up high; the window latched shut. It was still so dark, no sign of morning.
A third ring, and I reached for it on my bedside table, my vision too blurry to read the name.
“Hello?” I answered.
“Liv, sorry to wake you like this.”
“Bennett?” It was his voice, but it sounded quiet and clipped.
“I knew you’d want to hear it from me,” he continued.
“What? Hear what?” I was trying to ground myself, while Bennett talked in circles, like I had missed half the conversation.
He drew in a slow breath, mouth pressed close to the phone. “It’s Elyse.”
I didn’t respond, too confused to know where to start. Elysewhat—
“They found her yesterday. At the campgrounds.” A pause as I tried to process what he was getting at. “She overdosed.”
My breath escaped in a rush, like someone had knocked me back.
The sirens I’d heard last night with Nathan, the ambulance rushing by the hotel. Had it been for her? How many hours earlier had this happened?
How long had people known, the truth circulating through their group texts, until Bennett was eventually contacted? He was the only one who would call me directly.
“Is she okay?” I asked, even though I knew the answer. Heard it in his voice as soon as he spoke. A call in the middle of the night, the clipped words—he was trying to break the news to me softly, but it was only delaying the inevitable.
“No, she’s not.” His voice broke, and he cleared his throat, continued on. “She was crashing in one of the cabins. Hadn’t paid or anything. They found her yesterday evening when a new couple was checking in. It had been too long, Liv. I’m sorry.”
But I was caught in the details. She was staying at the campgrounds? I didn’t understand. She’d quit; she’d moved out—“Why? Why was she there?” As if this were the detail that mattered, that could unravel all the other things he’d said, changing the outcome. As if, after the illogic had been pointed out, the rest would fall apart.
“I don’t know. Her car was nearby, full of her things.” And then, “Are you okay?”
“What? I don’t know.” I was stuck in this persisting shock. Like maybe this wasn’t real. Like I was talking, dreaming, while half-awake. I stood from my bed and tried the door, but it was still latched with the hook-and-eye lock. I felt trapped, couldn’t breathe.
“I have to go,” I said, dragging the ladder out of the closet. I knew it was real, from the metal legs scratching against the wood floor. The cold of the steps on my bare feet. The latch, just barely in reach. A noise in my throat like my windpipe would seize up if I didn’t get to the open air soon.
Panic. I knew it was panic, but I couldn’t stop it.
Finally, I threw open the bedroom door and stumbled out into the dark hallway. My hands traced the wall as I followed the hall into the living room, out the front door, until I was standing on the porch with my hands on top of my head, taking big gulps of the night air, thinking,Panic, this is panic,slow down and breathe—until I realized I was just crying.
IT WAS WHEN Iwent back inside, moments later, that I thought I heard something—a rattle of silverware in the kitchen, something that happened whenever I closed the back door. I flipped on each light as I went, thinking,Elyse, playing some shitty joke.But when I made it there, the lock was secure.
I flashed back to the handle in my office, faintly turning.
Maybe someone had been trying to get in, shaking the door-frame. I turned on the outside porch light, but it had burned out. Bennett had fixed the front light, but now the back was gone, too.
I wasn’t keeping on top of things, instead patching mistakes as they came up. I’d been too late for everything. Too comfortable in this new place, in my new life. Not looking for the danger coming. Ignoring it, even, when it started to emerge, hoping it would fade back into the woodwork.
I’d stopped looking for Elyse after calling her previous employer. I’d trusted Bennett instead of my gut. He had talked me down from panicking, but he was wrong. I shouldn’t have listened to him, shouldn’t have called him first. I knew something was wrong, the same way I could sense it in my mother, and I’d done nothing.
I should’ve called her again. I should’ve texted. I should’ve driven around and asked all her friends—someone had mentioned an Erin, and I’d never followed up. And now she was dead. Had died all alone in a cabin. Four walls closing in, the cold and dark night, believing there was no other way out.
I KEPT SEEING THEshadow of her in my house: beside my bed, watching out the window; at the kitchen counter, cooking eggs. I closed my eyes and heard the echo of her voice:This is scary, Liv.I kept searching for more—the last words she’d spoken to me, standing beside my bed. But everything had slipped from me, the medicine turning my head hazy, so that our last moment together became just one more memory forever lost to me.
