by TAYLOR ADAMS
Dedication
For my parents
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Part 1: Four Small Fires Chapter 1: Lena
Chapter 2: Cambry’s Story
Chapter 3: Lena
Chapter 4: Cambry’s Story
Chapter 5: Lena
Chapter 6: Cambry’s Story
Part 2: The Plastic Man Chapter 7
Chapter 8: Lena
Chapter 9: Cambry’s Story
Chapter 10: Lena
Chapter 11
Chapter 12: Cambry’s Story
Chapter 13: Lena
Chapter 14: Cambry’s Story
Chapter 15: Lena
Chapter 16: Cambry’s Story
Chapter 17: Lena
Chapter 18
Chapter 19: Cambry’s Story
Chapter 20: Lena
Chapter 21
Chapter 22: Cambry’s Story
Part 3: The Last Word Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Taylor Adams
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part 1
Four Small Fires
Chapter 1
Lena
“You look . . . exactly like her.”
Lena Nguyen had heard this, many times before. It never got any less upsetting, being someone else’s walking, talking ghost.
“And you were twins?”
She nodded.
“Identical, right?”
She nodded again.
Something changed behind the state trooper’s eyes, and he looked regretful. Like he’d already committed an offense by not starting with this: “I’m . . . I should say, I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Another greatest hit. Lena made polite eye contact.
“I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose a sibling.”
No one ever could.
“Just try to take it one day at a time.”
The oldies kept coming.
“You’ll never get over it. But someday you will get past it.”
That’s a new one, Lena thought. She’d add it to the list.
Corporal Raymond Raycevic had agreed to meet her here in a gravel parking lot shared by the Magma Springs Diner and a Shell station, sixty miles outside of Missoula. An exodus of wildfire evacuees fed a constant stream of passing traffic, and the highway hit a dangerous junction here under two blind corners and no stoplight.
Corporal Raycevic himself was a gorilla-like man stuffed into a tan-brown highway patrol uniform pulled taut to contain him. All shoulders and biceps and a gentle smile. He’d shaken Lena’s hand with earnest delicacy. He had bags under his eyes, the soft color of bruises.
“Thank you for doing this,” she said.
“Of course.”
“I really appreciate it . . . you know. With you being on the clock and all—”
He half smiled. “My shift is over.”
He studied her again for a long moment, still transfixed, and Lena felt a familiar impatience. Discussing her sister with strangers always felt like this; a choose-your-own-adventure book she’d memorized ages ago. She knew exactly what Raycevic was thinking before he said it, his words arriving right on schedule: “I’m sorry. I just . . . I can’t get over how much you look just like her.”
You should try it, she thought sourly. It’s awful, grieving for someone while seeing her face in the mirror every single morning.
“It must be awful, seeing her face in the mirror every morning. Every day, anything with a reflection, even a car mirror, can just . . . blindside you.”
She looked at him.
“You have my sympathy, Lena.”
Yeah? And maybe I underestimated you, Ray.
A squealing hiss startled her. She turned—an eighteen-wheeler had taken the turn too fast. For a stomach-fluttery moment, ten tons of rolling cargo skidded directly at them on locked tires. Then the truck swerved back into its lane, and Corporal Raycevic watched the tinted windows pass, as if expecting the driver to apologize.
He didn’t. The engine throttled up and the rig thundered on, a wash of displaced air tugging their clothes. Lena swept her bangs from her face and watched the trailer’s stenciled letters hurtle past like film in a projector: SIDEWINDER. In another moment, gone. Just a ring in her ears and the gritty taste of dust.
“Idiot,” the cop muttered.
I’m really here, she thought. I’m really here, doing this.
The dust in her teeth made it real. After months of waiting, twenty-four-year-old Lena was finally here in Montana. Miles from home. Moving forward. Making progress. Another voice, just a faint whisper in her mind: Don’t get comfortable. Don’t let your guard down.
Not even for a second.
She caught herself twirling a lock of her hair with her index finger and tugging—a tic she’d had since elementary school—and stopped herself. It made her look nervous.
Raycevic didn’t notice. He was squinting into the distance. “Hairpin Bridge isn’t far from here, but there’s zero shade once you’re up there. The sun becomes a spotlight. Saps your energy. Before we go, do you need anything from the diner? Water, maybe?”
“I’ll buy something.”
“All right.” He pointed. “I’ll start my vehicle. Follow me.”
She hurried back inside the air-conditioned Magma Springs Diner. She’d already waited there for hours today, sipping black coffee as groups of firefighters talked shop over plates of greasy eggs. She pretended to waver at the mini-fridge stocked with energy drinks and bottled water, and once she was certain Corporal Raycevic was occupied inside his cruiser and not watching her through the front windows, she returned to her booth.
There, she had a laptop on the table. She triple-checked the power cable, the Sony unit, and the connection to the restaurant’s router. All good.
“Thanks again,” she said to the lady at the long counter. “I’ll be back soon.”
“Is that a college project you’re downloading?”
“Something like that.”
* * *
She followed the cop car east on Highway 200, fifteen minutes of fresh asphalt under a horizon banded with smoke. Then Raycevic veered sharply right, crossing two lanes, as if the turnoff had surprised him. Lena had to stomp on her brakes, grinding rubber.
He waved out his window: Sorry.
This new road hadn’t been maintained for decades. Weeds sprouted through fissures in sun-bleached concrete. The lines were faded. Over a locked metal gate, an equally faded signboard read: PUBLIC USE PROHIBITED. Corporal Raycevic had the code memorized. After relocking it behind them, he drove on at seventy-five, fifteen over the speed limit. She wondered if he was testing her, trying to goad her into a ticket. That would be a dick move.
She matched his speed. She would test him, too.
She drove in silence. No music or podcasts since she’d left Seattle this morning because she didn’t have the correct dongle to connect to the speakers. She was afraid to touch the CD player or radio presets because the car wasn’t hers.
It was Cambry’s.
Had been Cambry’s.
Driving your dead twin’s car is a jarring experience. Their father had urged Lena through teary eyes to accept the vehicle, insisted that this lived-in 2007 Toyota Corolla was one of her sister’s few remaining possessions and it would be wrong to sell it. Maybe so. But today’s journey to the dry foothills of Howard County, Montana, was the longest Lena had ever driven it.
I’m not just driving her car, she’d realized with a hollow pang, somewhere between Spokane and Coeur d’Alene. I’m driving her house.
City girl that she was, Lena couldn’t help but marvel at her twin’s spartan lifestyle. The duct tape on the steering wheel. The exposed wires betraying the handmade repairs to the cigarette-lighter adapter. The scattered dryer sheets (to fight odors, Lena guessed). To change or discard anything here, in this intimate space where her sister had lived capably for over nine months, felt like a profound insult.
So it all remained.
Even the moldy food in the cooler. Even the fountain drink at her side, sweet-smelling in the sunlight. Cambry’s lips had touched it three months ago. Maybe her DNA was still on it.
You look exactly like her.
She was surprised Corporal Raycevic hadn’t recognized Cambry’s car. He’d found it the same night he found her body. Wouldn’t he remember it?
His patrol car was still forging ahead—approaching eighty now—so Lena pushed the gas and matched his speed as the road climbed into the foothills. Tires jostled over rough concrete. The land dropped away in places to an alarming vastness on her right, and for a moment Lena considered how close you are to death on most roads. The buffers are mostly imaginary. You’re only a swerve away from an oncoming lane or a ravine. She tried not to think about it.
The lodgepole pines grew taller up here—sixty, seventy feet. Frayed branches cooked brittle in the sun, standing over floors of brown needles and crunchy juniper. A million acres of tinder waiting for a spark. And beyond the changing terrain, rising in the distance . . .
She felt a knot tighten in her throat.
There it was. The structure was already taking shape over the sloping hills, jagged and unwelcome and thoroughly man-made. An ancient fossil emerging from the land.
Oh, Jesus, there it is.
She felt her chest tense up as the rust-brown form came into clarity, rivets and girders drawn toothpick-sharp in the sunlight. Becoming real before her eyes as the cracked road pulled her closer. She knew she was committed now, that her and Corporal Raycevic’s fates were entwined here. She couldn’t possibly turn back.
As it drew closer, momentarily obscured by another hump of dry pines, she tried to calm her nerves. No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, right?
Still . . .
It looks so much bigger than in the photos.
* * *
BEFORE I GO
Posted 9/20/19 by LNguyen
It starts with a bridge.
A precarious steel monster with a fierce turn on its south ramp, spanning six hundred feet across an obscure valley on the fringes of a bankrupt silver-mining town, all rendered perfectly obsolete by the interstate. Seventy miles from Missoula. As far as bridges go, it’s a total fuckup, and it knows it.
It’s also where my sister died.
Allegedly.
Sorry to be heavy, dear readers. I know this blog post isn’t my usual writing for Lights and Sounds, and that may upset some of you. And I appreciate the kind words and FB/Insta well-wishes over the past few months I’ve been AWOL (obvious reasons). Yes, I’m back in the blogging saddle, but not quite how you may expect. And I have a doozy of a post here, so buckle up.
But before you read further:
This is not my normal blog. This is not a book, movie, or video game review. This is not a political rant (God knows this has been a great year for that). Nor is this poetry, humor, photography, or the long-awaited part eleven of JustRetailThings. This—whatever THIS is—is something I need to post here, on Lights and Sounds, to my modest but engaged readership (that’s you) for reasons that will soon become clear. By the time you finish reading this, depending on your time zone, I might just be national news. So, sorry in advance if this ruins your whole day. Good? Good.
Here we go.
I’m spending my Saturday at Hairpin Bridge. Tomorrow morning at the ass-crack of dawn I’m driving Cambry’s car seven hours east to the town of Magma Springs, Montana, and meeting up with a local highway patrolman named Raymond R. Raycevic. Yes, that’s really his name (apparently R’s were on sale the day his parents named him). Via email he’s kindly agreed to show me, the grieving sister, the exact spot where he discovered Cambry’s body three months ago.
As for Hairpin Bridge . . . well, dear readers, did that name sound familiar? You might have heard of it. It’s a bit of an architectural anomaly, given its odd shape (the valley walls necessitate that the road take a funny corkscrew turn on the south ramp before looping back over itself, like driving over a giant metal hairpin). It has another name I won’t repeat, because honestly, I don’t like the associations it now has with Cambry, and I don’t like how her name has become forever linked with it on the search engines. So I won’t use it.
Hairpin Bridge is haunted.
Allegedly (get used to that word).
It’s a hot spot for paranormal activity. They say space and time are malleable around the hallowed bones of Hairpin Bridge, and as you cross it, past and present can intertwine a bit. The way light refracts through a dirty lens.
I know. I’m not seriously suggesting my sister was murdered by ghosts. But I had a phase in July when I considered it. For a time, I devoured all the user-submitted accounts of corrupted time and glimpsed apparitions. I listened to every EVP audio recording where people claimed to have captured disembodied whispers: Help me or Leave this place. I even read the self-published book written by the Rupley guy who spent the night camping under it (spoiler: he lived).
It’s ridiculous, but that’s the hole I fell into after my sister’s abrupt death. In the terror of free fall, you’re not yourself for a while. You grasp for explanations, no matter how far-fetched. They can be myths, criminal conspiracies, anything to assign sense to the senseless. Any answer is better than nothing.
And now I think I finally have one.
(No, it doesn’t involve ghosts.)
So that’s where I’m going, dear readers. That’s why this latte-sipping Seattleite is setting out tomorrow to a butt-ugly bridge in God’s Country. That’s why I’m writing this. And that’s why I won’t accept anything less than the truth from Corporal Raycevic.
I’ll pay any price for it.
I have to know.
What happened to you, Cambry?
* * *
He was waiting for her on the bridge. He’d parked his black cruiser on the right, alongside a low and blistered guardrail, but Lena knew it didn’t matter where they parked. Hairpin Bridge served a dead highway. There was no traffic to block.
At the south ramp, just past the bridge’s eponymous hairpin twist, a sun-bleached sign stated something illegible about the structure being unsound or uninspected. It had failed to discourage scores of amateur ghost hunters. More recently, someone had spray-painted in black: ALL OF YOUR ROADS LEAD HERE.
Strangely apt, to Lena.
She parked a few yards ahead of the cop car to allow herself a quick escape route. She left the Corolla’s engine idling for a moment, took a breath and held it. The drive from Magma Springs hadn’t taken nearly as long as she’d planned. Now she was here. She felt unprepared.
I’m here, Cambry.
She studied her sister’s bent eyeglasses on the dashboard. The hairline scratches on the lenses.
Oh, God, I’m really here.
In her side-view mirror, Corporal Raycevic
stood by his car, elbow on the door, pretending he was picking at a scab on his wrist and not waiting on her. Considerate of him. He’d surprised her with his sensitivity already. On one hand, it was his job—he’d certainly delivered his share of bad news to grieving families—but Lena suspected there was more to it. He had lost someone, too. He wore the mark like she did, another member of that terrible unspoken club. A wife? A young kid?
Her lungs ached. She realized she’d been holding her breath.
She cut the engine and immediately regretted it. She could have delayed longer, and wished she had. Raycevic wouldn’t have minded. Now he was staring toward her through his jet-black sunglasses, noticing—yes, this was Cambry’s blue Toyota Corolla that Lena had driven out here. The victim’s twin sister, driving the victim’s car. Arriving at the site where the victim perished, like a ghoulish doppelgänger.
If it disturbed him, he didn’t show it. He gave her a gentle nod—This is the place.
Obviously.
She climbed out. The sun blazed hotter up here. Mirages shimmered off the bridge’s cement roadway in watery ripples. The air was windless.
“You can see the fire from here.” Raycevic pointed north. “Four thousand acres at Black Lake, still growing, still uncontained—”
“Is it coming toward us?”
“Not unless the wind changes.”
Lena didn’t care, then. She had enough on her mind. But the mile-high thunderhead of smoke was commanding. The world seemed to end on the horizon, a slow-motion apocalypse.
“You know, I never understood why it’s called Hairpin Bridge,” he said thoughtfully. “I see the sharp turn over there, I guess, but it reminds me more of those Marbleworks toys kids play with. You know what I’m talking about?”
“Yeah.”
“The straight piece with the curved hook on the end.” He pointed. “Right? That’s what it looks like to me. Not a hairpin.”
Marbleworks Bridge. Somehow it just didn’t have the same mystique.
“You play with Marbleworks a lot?”
“Everyone needs a hobby.”