We reached the trunk and I almost cried out with relief. Another countdown and we lifted the bundle toward the back of the car—but Kristen raised her side too quickly, those toned arms like a lever, and for a wild second I thought we’d catapult him inside. My heartbeat scattered as we jostled the curtain, almost overcorrecting, but then we evened out and lowered him into the trunk. I dashed back inside and loaded my arms with his other clothes, whipping my head around to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. A migraine surged behind my eyes as I hustled back into the cool air and dropped Paolo’s clothes on top of him.
The trunk squealed as we pushed it shut, and we glanced around the small parking lot. No movement on the street or in the blackened windows of a nearby guest room. Of course, if someone was watching us from inside, we wouldn’t be able to see them. We were staking so much on luck, on the gamble that I’d understood the hotel receptionist correctly, that most of the property was vacant.
“Shovels,” I prompted, moving toward the stone steps. This was another reason we couldn’t just pack up and leave: We couldn’t dig with our hands, and borrowing and returning shovels from the hotel before dawn was another microstep in our gambit to remain forgettable, under the radar. A process that already felt painstaking and nearly impossible, like building a ship in a bottle.
Kristen followed me upstairs and to the end of the pool. The air up here had that cold, steely-clean smell, and it was oddly bright, as if the water weren’t just reflecting the night sky but actually amplifying it. A shudder ran through me, guilt like a sprinkler: Paolo on the bar patio earlier that night, a flesh-and-blood being with secrets and dreams and loved ones and—
No. He was a bad man.
He attacked Kristen.
She was fighting for her life.
She reached the shed and ran her palms over the door’s particleboard surface, then found the lock: a smooth padlock that hung from two strips of metal screwed into the door and the frame.
“Shoot.” She gave it a tug. “It’s locked.”
My brain recentered, an auto-refresh. I nudged her out of the way and lifted the lighter I’d brought from the suite. My problem-solving instinct clanged on, the same knack that makes me so good at escape rooms and brainteasers and my job as a project manager. Maybe focusing hard on this simple problem—door is locked; we need what’s behind it—would distract me from the larger and more horrifying issue on our hands. The stained backpack heaped in the trunk, and the pile of bones and organs and pooling blood inside. “Here, hold this.”
As Kristen clutched the lighter, I dug in my pockets, then selected the tiniest coin—an octagonal one-peso piece. I eased its side into a screw that held the lock against the door, then turned.
She gasped. “It’s working.” She held her fist to her mouth as I rotated the coin.
My mind scuttled ahead. “We have to leave everything exactly as we found it,” I whispered. “We should even mess up our footprints here.” Everything would need to look locked, secure, untouched—nothing to raise suspicion. Hopefully ever, but at least long enough for the signs of our presence to grind down to nothingness, for the hotel suite and walking paths to move back toward their median condition. Like we’d never set foot here.
I plucked out the screw with a surgeon’s care, then pulled on the still-locked padlock. The door swung toward me, and the hardware with it.
Kristen pushed in front of me. “You’re a genius. Let’s find those shovels.”
I almost couldn’t believe they were there: leaning against the back wall, caked in dirt and jumbled with rakes and hoes. Each tool looked like a deadly weapon, something meant only for pummeling human flesh. For a wild second, I pictured it: Kristen in Cambodia with the metal lamp held aloft, sa-wing batter batter batter. Her eyes as electric as a storm. The image flipped: Kristen in the same stance, but here, with a bottle of wine. I felt a brief swoop of fear and pushed it aside.
I grabbed a shovel from Kristen, and she ducked back into the shed, rifling around.
“Yes,” she hissed, then held out two flashlights. “Let’s go.” She plunged back toward the stone steps, the spade slung against her shoulder. Like she was one of the Seven Dwarfs. Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to bury a body we go.
CHAPTER 8
Kristen squinted out the windshield, her shoulders buckled in concentration as we rolled out of the driveway and down the mountain road.
“Can you see?” I whispered. Her night vision was better than mine, as we’d discovered on a stargazing tour a few nights ago, when she had to guide me by the hand to the massive telescope the guide had set up. My astigmatism made the darkness staticky and dull. Astigmatism and asthma—small defects mostly sidestepped in the modern world. It was the big things that got you: bottles of wine, the metal legs of a bed frame. A lengthy plummet from the lip of a cliff.
“I can see enough,” she replied. “I’ll turn on the headlights as soon as we get around the corner.”
“The last thing we need is to go over the side.” A laugh rose through me, neon and hysterical. I turned it into a cough and Kristen glanced at me sharply. “I’m fine.”
The engine seemed impossibly loud, a tank trundling through the silence. Of course, it had to work harder with a 180-pound man in the trunk. Another 40 with his backpack and belongings over and around him. We were lucky he had his bag with him, that he hadn’t checked in anywhere yet. If he’d left all his stuff in a hostel, surely—
Kristen ignited the headlights, then slammed on the brakes. A creature sat in the road, about a foot long, with rippling gray fur and enormous eyes. A rabbit—no, a chinchilla. It fixed us with an accusing stare, then sauntered over to the shoulder. Kristen exhaled and took her foot off the brake. I watched it through the window until its outline melted into the charcoal night.
I kept feeling its obsidian eyes on me, judging, seeing. The incident in Cambodia had felt improbable, out-of-body, the kind of thing that happened in movies and true-crime podcasts but not to me. And yet here I was, blackened by a lightning bolt a second time.
In Phnom Penh I’d been useless, shaking and crying and chattering at the jaw so violently that Kristen had cloistered us in the bathroom with the shower running, the steam turning my cheeks pink and drawing blood back into my hands and feet as if hypothermia were the real problem. She’d pulled it together, because she needed to. Remembered the rushing water of Tonle Kak, the spooky stories of women filling their pockets with rocks before flinging themselves off a cliff, hoping for a riptide. A disappearance if we were lucky, a probable suicide if the body turned up. The plan was harried and haphazard, but it had to work. It had worked.
Now Kristen clung to the wheel, her chin strained forward, the same posture she adopted when she drove through a blizzard. The reel of horror stories looped in my head again, unlucky Americans locked up abroad, and a new thought sent terror up my arms: If someone connected this to Sebastian, we’d be doubly, irreparably screwed. We couldn’t bring Paolo back to life, and just like in Cambodia, our priority must be making it home without leaving breadcrumbs behind.
Kristen hit the brakes in the middle of the street. I glanced around for a stop sign I’d missed. When I turned to her again, she was slumped against the steering wheel.