I sat between Pearl and Shay in another rocking chair with my legs curled beneath me, trying to let the night air clear my head.It wasn’t working.
Not really.
My brain had been moving too fast since the second I saw Erin’s face on that second poster.Actually, it had been moving too fast since I stepped onto Skull Island, but now it felt like all the pieces were spinning around without landing anywhere useful.
“Yeah,” Shay said from my other side.“Until you tell her there’s a murderer on the island.”
Pearl sighed.“Yeah.That kind of puts a damper on things.”
“A tiny one,” Shay added.
Pearl lifted her hand, pinching her fingers close together.“Barely noticeable.”
I snorted softly and let my head fall back against the chair.
They kept talking after that, but I only caught pieces of it.
Something about the first haunted house Pearl had ever gone to as a teenager.Shay saying she hated chainsaws in haunted attractions because they were lazy scares.Pearl arguing that lazy scares were still effective if you were the one being chased.Shay insisting she would simply trip and die because cardio was not part of her personal brand.
I should’ve laughed more.
I probably did once or twice, but mostly, I stared out into the dark, watching the glow of the haunted house lights pulse through the trees.
This guy was playing a game with us.That was the part I couldn’t get around.
The club had already been in his game.Anchor, Pearl, Shay, Prime, Bob, Bernice, all of them had been pulled into it long before I showed up.But Erin’s picture changed things.
The wanted poster at the ghost town and the photo stuck to the clubhouse front door.
Phase Two.A date seventeen days in the future.
The man in the hoodie is showing up just enough to be seen.
None of it felt random.It felt staged and planned.
People always thought lies were just words, but lies were often scenes.Props.Angles.Timing.The right face at the right moment.The right information left in the right place.
That was what this felt like.
A scene.Something he wanted us to see and something he wanted me to think.
I closed my eyes.Erin’s first photo formed immediately in my mind.
The wanted poster from the ghost town.Her face altered to look old-timey, grainy, and black-and-white, fitting the theme of the attraction.
Then the second one.
Erin lying down with her eyes closed and her head turned slightly.
Sleeping.Maybe?
God, I hated that maybe.
I tried to breathe through the tightness in my chest and focused harder.
Her face wasn’t what mattered.Not right now.
That was hard because every instinct in me wanted to stare at her face and search for pain, fear, bruises, life, death, anything.But the investigator part of me knew the face was the trap.
