“You!” I yell, taking the person in. And I’ve never been happier to see someone in my life. I run straight towards them, wrapping my arms around them tightly. Because I know I’m safe.
“Come with me,” they say. “I’ll help you.”
So I do. And it’s not long before I realize I’ve made the worst mistake of my life.
26
Claire
Now
The next hour is chaos. Everything seems to happen too fast, too out of control to be real. The ambulance arrives first, a model that looks like it would be better suited for the 1980s. A skinny paramedic who barely looks old enough to have graduated high school loads the stretcher holding Kyan’s unconscious body into the ambulance before closing the doors against Adrien and her demands to accompany him to the hospital.
“No one unrelated to the victim can ride with us. You will have to meet him there,” the paramedic keeps repeating with all the empathy of a robocaller.
That word,victim,sticks in my throat, dusty and thick like the air hanging heavy around us. It’s the same word they used to describe Phoebe. And Hari.
Which one of us is next?
The question plays in my head, but I refuse to ask it aloud.
I don’t know how much time has passed when the police finally arrive, an ancient sedan gliding leisurely up to the Inn’s parking lot in a cloud of dust.
Out of the driver’s side steps a heavyset man who looks to be in his sixties. I recognize him instantly. It’s the detective—or the closest thing to in Jagged Rock—who had run the “investigation” into Phoebe’s disappearance. He’s aged, just like everything in this town. Gray hairs stick out among the brown in his half-grown beard, which is riddled with holes. He’s wearing dark sunglasses and carrying a solid twenty pounds around his waist that weren’t present a decade ago, and he’s clothed in a pair of threadbare jeans and a khaki shirt with a neckline already rimmed with sweat. I figured his name would come back to me immediately, but it’s as though my brain has blacked it out.
“Detective Allen,” Declan says coldly. I look over at him, his white T-shirt smeared with Kyan’s blood, faint traces of it on his cheek. He looks like he’s gone through battle. The others’ faces are tear streaked, their eyes blank and heavy. Randy is nowhere to be seen, having scampered inside as soon as Adrien called the ambulance.
Allen, of course, I think as the detective approaches, trailed by another tall gawky officer wearing a variation on the same outfit.
“We met a long time ago,” Declan explains. “We were part of the cohort of students Hamilton College sent back in 2015.”
“Yeah, I’d heard yous’d come back,” Allen drawls. “Figured it was a joke. What good reason could you possibly have to visit us again?”
I stand frozen before him, the memories from the morningafter Phoebe went missing gluing me to the spot. Allen arrived at the Inn around two in the afternoon, hours after I reported to Nick Gould that Phoebe hadn’t been in her bed when I’d woken up.
“Sounds like a classic runaway to me,” Allen said then, stroking his thin facial hair, pulling an absurdly long one around his dark-rimmed fingernail.
“It’s not like her,” I said. “She wouldn’t just leave.”
Allen leaned towards me at that point, close enough that I could smell the coffee on his breath, stale and acidic.
“Why are you so worried?” he asked. “You do something to her?”
That shut me up.
“What exactly happened here?” he asks now, his voice just as apathetic as it was all those years ago.
Josh steps forward. “Our friend, Kyan Quek, he was stabbed. We had—”
“That the oriental one?” Allen interrupts.
I’m disgusted—but not surprised—by the casual racism. I remember the harsh glances our group would conjure as we walked down the main street of Jagged Rock. The whispers, aimed just loudly enough for Ellery to hear, about the “unnatural” color of her mixed-race skin, or the “go back where you came from” comments muttered as we’d sit in the town’s café.
“Uh, he’s Singaporean,” Josh says, clearly also taken aback.
“Right,” Allen says.
“The four of us—Kyan, Ellery, Adrien, and me,” Josh continues, “we’d been hanging out around back. Ellery, Adrien, and I headedinside, but Kyan stayed out, said he was going to take a call. A few minutes after we went in, we heard Kyan scream.”
