No one can get us up here. Literally, no animal or human.
The inside of the tower is almost rustically dorm-like. The floor is brown tile, the walls painted forest green. There’s a twin-sized cot shoved into the corner, a tiny kitchen with a sink and counter space to the other side. A coffeepot sits collecting dust along with a stack of ceramic plates. There’s one tiny table in the middle with an even smaller wooden stool nearby. The windows wrap around the whole room, with storage shelves above them.
The room is stuffy as hell, dust getting in my throat immediately. As I cough, Beck leaves the door open.
“I think we’ll need some air for a second.”
Beck jumps up on the countertop to reach the storage cabinets. I scan everything at eye level while she does.
“This place is the ideal spot to wait out the zombie apocalypse,” Beck says. “They’ve got bottled water, sodas, every dried and canned food you can imagine.”
“Are the items expired? This thing must’ve been rebuilt after that terrible fire, right? Why decommission it?”
Beck inspects a can of SpaghettiOs. “I guess it isn’ttechnicallyfire season. Maybe Natalie’s partner’s lazy.”
I look through the drawers under the countertop. There are more kitchen and handy tools marked with the lookout tower label like the pliers. My heartbeat picks up, and I wish I knew exactly where to go from here.
Regret swirls in my gut as I think about how we handled Ivy. Yes, it’s great we found Harlow’s phone, but we don’t really know anything about Vanessa. How would I even know if something were hers? The only other obvious thing to look for is smears of old blood if she stopped by here while bloody. But even that isn’t necessarily true; we just know she grabbed this tool to rip off Paisley’s fingernails at some point. It could’ve happened before or after their deaths.
My foot brushes against something. It hits the bottom of the window with a thud.
“What was that?” Beck asks, removing her head from the inside of a cabinet.
“Not sure.”
I bend down to pick it up.
But one look at it and I nearly collapse onto the floor with it.
It’s a phone, wrapped in the neon pink case Paisley bought a year ago. The same case that has a HASTINGS SCHOOL NARWHALS sticker on it.
“Holy shit,” I say.
This is Paisley’s phone.
We finally found Paisley’s phone.
The one with my damning voice note on it.
Twenty-Eight
There it is. The whole reason I came here. The moment I can take this from a personal nightmare to a selfless quest to help Beck find closure for her dead sister. I have no idea how the phone got all the way out here, but here it is. My heart slams against my throat as I place the phone on the table in the middle of the room.
“Jesus,” Beck says, more a gasp than anything. “Is that Pais’s phone?”
I swallow, not sure of where to go from here. Is there any chance Beck would just let it be so I could delete the message alone? I know that voice note is in there somewhere. It’d be such an easy in-and-out job.
Beck runs her fingers along the dust encrusted on the screen. “Her killer was definitely here.”
My heart only beats faster as I look at it. We’re truly standing somewhere a monster once stood. History echoes in here like it echoed in the ghost town.
“We have to charge it,” Beck says. “We have to find out what’s on it.”
Heat rises up my neck. I feel like a child getting caught in mischiefwith Owen with no way out. I rifle through my backpack, sweat pooling under my sweatshirt as I retrieve my portable charger.
I have one chance.
“Let me get it juiced up,” I say. “Then I can start looking.”
