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Then the sound went quiet, replaced by frantic thrashing.
I carried on screaming for both of us, the night air swirling with dark electricity that had nowhere to go.
I screamed until suddenly I heard her voice again, screaming with me.
He was standing up, from where he’d been kneeling over her on the black, scrubby ground.
When I saw her stand up and run, I almost cheered.
I know. You’d think I would have understood.
I called her name again, not expecting her to turn around—until she did. She heard me. I could see it in the twist of her body as she heard her own name but kept running anyway, toward the inky treeline.
He brushed past me on his way to the car. When I looked down at the spot where he had been kneeling, I could see the dark shape of Meghan’s body, her scarf still tight around her neck, her eyes half-closed and bloodshot.
I nearly went after her into the woods.
I wanted to. I wanted to tell her I was sorry. That she wasn’t alone. That she wasn’t invisible—not to me, anyway. I didn’t want to haunt him anymore. What was the point if I couldn’t stop this from happening. Maybe there was no rhyme or reason to why I was still here in limbo, following him around like a puppy.
A darker thought crept in: Maybe I just hadn’t figured out how to stop him in time. I had failed her.
I called Meghan’s name again as I heard the car’s engine start behind me.
The fact was that I couldn’t help her. Not anymore. That much I knew for certain. She was dead. Like me.
I had nothing to offer her.
And I couldn’t face her.
The only thing I could do was follow him back to the car before he disappeared again.
21. SKYE
Kuna, Idaho
Now
It was my useless phone that led them to the foothills off Blacks Creek Road. Three days after I was supposed to be driving to ISU.
Once the officer ordered the phone records, things moved quickly. And once the police started searching in the right area, I wasn’t exceptionally hard to find.
My phone had pinged off cell towers in Kuna, South Boise, Robie Creek, and then Prairie, Idaho, where the signal pinged until it disappeared. Together, along with a GPS signal that had briefly connected along Blacks Creek Road, the little dots created something like a Bermuda triangle, where I’d been swallowed up.
My parents didn’t see the constellation of cell phone pings or the GPS data. I drove with them to the police station. But then I followed Officer Willis while a different officer took my parents’ detailed statement in separate rooms.
I couldn’t be with my parents and their hope. Not when it was about to be shattered.
While my parents were being questioned, Officer Willis requested cell phone records from Verizon. Before he called the customer service number and pressed 8 for law enforcement requests, he printed and faxed a signed affidavit on letterhead stating that the Kuna Police required the records as soon as possible as part of an endangered missing persons investigation.
I waited with him until the cell phone records were emailed half an hour later. When the cell data report came, I studied the map of tower pings and the long GPS timestamp along Blacks Creek Road over his shoulder. His brow furrowed as he traced a finger along the list of final pings coming from Prairie, Idaho. There was nothing but foothills and canyons anywhere near the area.
The license plate number on the Kia Sorento wasn’t immediately useful. It was a Utah plate with a Utah address, registered to James and April Carson. There was no record of either April or James in Idaho yet.
The fact that he was married surprised me less than the fact that he had a living, breathing wife. I tried to imagine her. What did she look like? Beautiful, probably. Did she have any idea who she had married? I wasn’t sure whether I should be terrified of her or for her.
Officer Willis barked at someone to create an ALPR report, which I gathered was some kind of license plate monitoring database. Then he pulled up a map of Blacks Creek canyon and left the station in his patrol car.
* * *
