“I can’t…”
“You can’t what?” Logan asked.
Please, a voice groaned, carried along by the wind.
Logan’s eyes widened. “Holy shit. I heard that.”
This voice wasn’t Tristan’s. Logan’s face said she recognized it, too. The voice was intensely familiar, but distorted as though the speaker stood miles away. Ashley had heard this voice, soft and bashful from the back seat of her truck.
It was Nick Porter’s.
“Okay, okay…” Ashley breathed. She turned to Logan. “Can you help me dig?”
Logan stared at the dirt and her face drained of color. She shook her head, fist clutched to her chest. Even in the dark, Ashley recognized the fear in her eyes. Her pupils were shrunken, ragged breath fogging from her lips. She whispered, “I can’t.”
“Then call Paris.”
Ashley fell to her knees and pressed her quivering fingers to the dirt. Her heart hammered and hammered, but she swept at the dirt anyway. She tucked her phone under her chin so it could soak the ground in white light. The night smelled like fear and the metallic scent of impending rain. She dug until her fingers brushed against something solid. And then Ashley’s heart stopped. She pushed away a layer of dirt and there, beneath the earth, her fingers met skin as cold as stone. The skin was too human to have been buried long, and too close to the surface to have been buried right. She bit back a sob and kept brushing at the dirt until it gave way to the ridges of human knuckles. She stumbled back and collapsed in the dirt.
She’d wanted to find one of the missing kids alive.
Instead, she’d found a body.
19
The Body But Not The Soul
After the cemetery everything was a strange dream.
It was a dream with claws. A sweltering blur. A nightmare rippling over Snakebite in slow, aching waves. Windows were shut, blinds drawn, children ushered inside on hot afternoons when they would usually play in the lake. News about the body wasn’t like the usual gossip—it wasn’t discussed over coffee at the Moontide. This was the kind of thing that snatched the words from people’s tongues. There was a killer on the loose. Snakebite was blanketed in a coat of silence, because now it was all real.
Nick Porter was dead.
Not missing, dead.
For the last two weeks, Ashley had been silent, too. The Owyhee County police had dug up one body in Pioneer Cemetery; Ashley had expected them to find two. More than ever, Snakebite was sure the Ortiz-Woodleys had something to do with it. Ashley wasn’t sure. Tristan was still missing, which was as terrifying as it was hopeful. He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t home, either.
Ashley didn’t know how to feel. Mostly, she felt empty.
Nick was dead, Tristan was gone, and she still knew nothing.
It’d been two weeks since she’d spoken to Logan. Two weeks since their whole world had been turned inside out. She wasn’t avoiding Logan—at least, not any more than she was avoiding everyone else—but something about reaching out scared her. If they kept looking, it meant everything they’d already found was real. It meant Snakebite could never go back to the way it had been.
More than anyone else, though, she’d wanted to text. To call. She wanted to drive out with Logan and keep looking. Ashley wasn’t sure what to do with that.
The call came in while she lay on her bed, head hanging over the side, blond hair draped across the floor. Ashley stared at Logan’s name a moment too long, then picked up.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.” Logan’s voice was hoarse. After a moment, she cleared her throat. “How’re you doing after … yeah, how’re you doing?”