Again, rattling slightly against the receiver.
With a tinnyclick, the answering machine picked up.
Silence.
Marlowe barely breathed.
Quiet rustling filtered through the receiver like someone was deciding to leave a message.
Then a voice, fragile and metallic.
“Hey, sorry, it’s Heather.”
Marlowe’s headache dug a blinding spike into her skull.
“Your truck was gone from the lake…I guess you made it out, even if you’re not picking up. You always used to pick up for me.”
Heather’s voice grated open a fresh wound in raw, deliberate strokes.
“I called Fish and Wildlife—they’ll be stopping by soon. Whatever we saw that night…”Heather sighed on the other end of the line,“…it doesn’t matter, Marlowe. If you get this, call me. I found a new place for us to…talk. Thanks.”
The answering machine whirred to a stop.
Smoke stains morphed into Heather’s blood spattered across Marlowe’s ceiling.
Affairs In Order
Heather was going to die. Heatherhadto die, and Marlowe had to be the one to do it.
Fuck.
Marlowe was in a trap, with a gnawed-off leg or a bottomless river being the only way out.
She could still find another person. A hitchhiker, maybe—there were always a few along the main highway—or the man at the gas pumps who smiled at her with too many teeth. Heather didn’t have to be the one.
But Heather had to be the one sacrificed to Pike, because if she wasn’t, Marlowe would still have to flee the state to avoid murder charges, and Heather would be free, andalive, and Marlowe would rather eat her gnawed-off leg instead of accept failure.
Calling Fish and Wildlife had been the right, upstanding thing to do and Marlowe shouldn’t have expected anything less from Miss Perfect—the camp would reopen once the floodwaters fully receded and canoes and boats and gangly, sunburned limbs would fill the lake now haunted by a monster.
The kids didn’t deserve to die a horrible death.
Most of them, like Marlowe had been, were church kids sent by their parents. They felt a sense of unease at daily chapel, but sat in the back anyways, friendship bracelets taped to their Bibles, sweaty shoulders bumping with whispered jokes, waiting until the final prayer finished so they could rush out the chapel doors like wild animals and go back to Camp Atonement being just a summer vacation instead of a place rotten with judgment and abused power.
Pike had to go.
And so did Heather.
Marlowe scraped her teeth against the mark in her palm. Heather had been on the phone a minute ago, so she had to be away from her cabin in the rec room or offices. But it was Wednesday, and Camp Atonement was so bent over by tradition that even with the camp in shamblesthe counselors would be hosting their weekly sing-along around the fire, shitty guitars and all.
She could wait for Heather in her cabin. Take her to the lake. Pike was hungry—they wouldn’t leave any evidence. Marlowe would be across the border by the time Fish and Wildlife caught Pike. Done with this town, over Heather, free from Pike.
Marlowe sat up, head pounding in time with her heartbeat.
Pike wouldn’t know anything was coming until it was too late. Marlowe didn’t care, but her stomach felt queasy again. They’d served back-of-fridge hotdish tonight. Must be why rocks settled in her gut. Hospital food was always shit.
She paced the length of her galley kitchen, shaking out a cigarette and lighting it with her spare lighter. She sucked it to ashes in half the time and lit another one, smoking away the thought of Pike’s Lake being dredged and searched.
If she had more time to plan, she’d do this quietly with a syringe or two smuggled from work. Heather wouldn’t struggle. But she had to figure out another way—something discrete in case she was interrupted before she reached cabin 9.
