The Last Time I Lied_A Novel

by Riley Sager

  “Don’t let me spoil your night. Keep playing.”

  They do. Because they’re nervous. Because they’re scared. Because they don’t know what else to do but to keep playing, appeasing me, waiting until I pass out, which likely will be any second now.

  “One more round,” Miranda says, her decisiveness not quite masking her fear. “I’ll go.”

  I close my eyes before crawling into bed. Rather, they close on their own, no matter how much I try to keep them open. I’m too tired. Too drunk. Too emotionally flattened by my confession. Temporarily blinded, I feel my way into bed, reaching for the mattress, my pillow, the wall. I curl into a ball, my knees to my chest, back turned to the girls. My standard humiliation position.

  “One: I once got sick after riding the Cyclone at Coney Island.” Miranda’s voice slows, cautious, pausing to hear if I’m asleep yet. “Two: I read about a hundred books a year.”

  Sleep overwhelms me immediately. It’s like a trapdoor, opening up beneath me. I willingly fall, plummeting into unconsciousness. As I tumble, I can still hear Miranda, her voice faint and fading fast.

  “Three: I’m worried about Emma.”

  This is how it continues.

  You scream again.

  And again.

  You do it even though you don’t know why. Yet you also sort of do. Because no matter how much you try, you can’t rid your mind of those too-terrible-to-think thoughts. Deep down, you know that one of them is true.

  So you scream one more time, waking the rest of the camp. Even standing in the lake, ten feet from shore, you can sense a wave of energy pulsing toward you. It’s a sudden jolt. A collective surprise. A heron on the shore senses it and spreads its long, elegant wings. It takes flight, rising high, riding the sound of your screams.

  The first person you see is Franny. She bursts onto the back deck of the Lodge. The screams have already tipped her off that something is wrong. One quick glance at you in the water confirms it. She flies down the wooden steps, the hem of her white nightgown fluttering.

  Chet is next, all sleepy eyes and bedhead. He stays on the deck, unnerved, his hands gripping the railing. After that comes Theo, not even pausing, racing down the steps. You see that he’s clad only in a pair of boxer shorts, the sight of all that exposed skin obscene under the circumstances. You look away, queasy.

  Others have gathered along the shore, campers and counselors alike, standing motionless in the mist. All of them scared and startled and curious. That above everything else. Their curiosity comes at you like a frigid wind. You hate them just then. You hate their eagerness to learn something you already know, no matter how terrible it may be.

  Becca Schoenfeld stands among them. You hate her most of all because she actually has the gall to chronicle what’s happening. She elbows her way to the front of the crowd, her camera raised. When she clicks off a few shots, the noise of the shutter skips across the lake like a flat stone.

  But it’s only Franny who comes forward. She stands at the edge of the lake, her bare toes this close from the water.

  “Emma?” she says. “What are you doing out here? Are you hurt?”

  You don’t answer. You’re unsure how.

  “Em?” It’s Theo, whom you still can’t bear to look at. “Come out of the water.”

  “Go back to the Lodge,” Franny snaps at him. “I can handle this.”

  She enters the lake. Not wading like you did. She marches. Knees lifting. Arms pumping. Nightgown darkening at the hem as it sucks up water. She stops a few feet from you, her head cocked in concern. Her voice is low, strained but calm.

  “Emma, what’s the matter?”

  “They’re gone,” you say.

  “Who’s gone?”

  “The other girls in the cabin.”

  Franny swallows, sending a ripple down the graceful curve of her throat. “All of them?”

  When you nod, the light in her green eyes dims.

  That’s when you realize it’s serious.

  Things move quickly after that. Everyone spreads out across the camp, going to places you’ve already looked. The fire pit. The latrine. The cabin, where Theo opens each hickory trunk cautiously, as if the girls could be inside them, waiting to spring out like a jack-in-the-box.

  The hunt turns up nothing, which is no surprise to you. You know what’s going on. You knew it the moment you woke up in that empty and silent cabin.

  A search party is organized. Just a small one—an attempt by all to pretend the situation isn’t as dire as everyone fears it truly is. You insist on tagging along, even though you’re in no condition to be roaming the woods, calling out the names of girls who may or may not be missing. You march behind Theo, trying hard to keep up, ignoring how the chill of the lake water lingers on your skin. It makes you shiver, despite the fact that the temperature has inched past ninety degrees and that your skin is coated with a thin sheen of sweat. You search the woods that flank the camp. First one side, then the other. While marching through the forest, you picture Buchanan Harris doing the very same thing a hundred years earlier. Blazing a trail, armed with just a machete and willful optimism. It’s a strange thought. Silly, too. Yet it takes your mind off your tired feet and sore limbs and the fact that a trio of dead girls might be waiting for you just around the next bend.

  No girls appear, alive or dead. There’s no trace of them. It’s as if they had never existed at all. Like they were a figment of the camp’s imagination. A mass hallucination.

  You return to Camp Nightingale during lunch, with all the remaining campers in the mess hall, picking at plates of sad, soggy pizza slices. Everyone looks up as you hobble inside. Various emotions swirl in their eyes. Hope. Fear. Blame. It’s that last one you feel the most as you make your way to Franny’s table. It heats the back of your neck like a sunburn.

  “Anything?” Franny asks.

  Theo shakes his head. A few of the campers begin to weep, their sobs breaking out all around you, disrupting the otherwise quiet of the mess hall. It makes you hate them all over again. Most of these crying girls barely knew the missing. You’re the one who should be crying. But you look to Franny for guidance. She’s not weeping. She’s calm in the face of this unfathomable storm.

  “I think it’s time I call the police,” she says.

  A half hour later, you’re still in the mess hall. It’s been cleared of crying campers and their equally moist-eyed counselors. The kitchen staff has been shuffled outside. The whole place is empty except for you and a state police detective whose name you’ve already forgotten.

  “Now then,” he says, “how many girls seem to be missing?”

  You notice his choice of words. Seem to be missing. Like you’re making the whole thing up. Like he doesn’t believe you.

  “I thought Franny already told you everything.”

  “I’d like to hear it from you.” He leans back in his chair, crosses his arms. “If you don’t mind.”

  “Three,” you say.

  “All staying in the same cabin?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re sure you’ve looked everywhere for them?”

  “Not the whole property,” you say. “But the entire camp’s been searched.”

  The detective sighs, reaches into his suit coat, and removes a pen and a notebook. “Let’s start by telling me their names.”

  You hesitate, because to identify them is to make it real. Once you say their names, they’ll be known to the world as missing persons. And you don’t think you’re ready for that. You bite the inside of your cheek, stalling. But the detective stares you down, getting peeved, his face pinkening ever so slightly.

  “Miss Davis?”

  “Right,” you say. “Their names.”

  You take a deep breath. Your heart does several sad, little flips in your chest.

  “Their names are Sa
sha, Krystal, and Miranda.”

  PART TWO

  AND A LIE

  27

  The detective writes their names in his notebook, thus making the situation official. My heart completes another sorrowful flip-flop in my chest.

  “Let’s go back to the beginning,” he says. “Back to the moment you realized the girls were missing from the cabin.”

  An awkward moment passes in which I’m not sure who he’s talking about. Which ones? I almost say.

  I can’t help but feel like that thirteen-year-old cowering in the presence of a different detective asking me about a different set of missing girls. Everything is so similar. The empty mess hall and the slightly impatient lawman and my simmering panic. Other than my age and the new cast of missing persons, the only major difference is the mug of coffee sitting on the table in front of me. The first time around it was orange juice.

  This isn’t happening.

  That’s what I tell myself as I sit rigid in my plastic cafeteria chair, waiting for the mess hall walls and floor to melt away. Like a dream. A painting splashed with turpentine. And when it all slides away, I’ll be somewhere else. Back in my loft, maybe. Awakening in front of an empty canvas.

  But the walls and floor remain. As does the detective, whose name suddenly comes to me. Flynn. Detective Nathan Flynn.

  This isn’t happening. Not again.

  Three girls go missing from the very same cabin at the very same camp where three other girls disappeared fifteen years earlier? The odds of that happening are astronomical. I’m sure Sasha, that tiny well of knowledge, would have a percentage at the ready.

  Still, I can’t believe it. Even as the floor and walls stubbornly refuse to evaporate and Detective Flynn keeps sitting there and I examine my hands to make sure they’re the hands of a woman and not a thirteen-year-old girl.

  This isn’t happening.

  I’m not going crazy.

  “Miss Davis, I need you to focus, okay?” Flynn’s voice slices through my thoughts. “I understand your shock. I really do. But every minute you spend not answering these questions means another minute goes by that those girls are still out there.”

  It’s enough to shake off my lingering disbelief. At least for the moment. I look at him, fighting back tears, and say, “What was the question again?”

  “When did you realize the girls were missing?”

  “When I woke up.”

  “What time was this?”

  I think back to the moment I awoke in the cabin. It was only hours ago yet feels like a lifetime.

  “A little past five.”

  “You always such an early riser?”

  “Not usually,” I say. “But I am here.”

  Flynn makes a note of this. I’m not sure why.

  “So you woke up and saw they were gone,” he says. “Then what?”

  “I went to look for them.”

  “Where?”

  “All over the camp.” I take a sip of the coffee. It’s lukewarm, slightly bitter. “Latrine. Mess hall. Arts and crafts building. Even other cabins.”

  “And there was no sign of them?”

  “No,” I say, my voice cracking. “Nothing.”

  Flynn flips to a new page in his notebook even though what I’ve told him amounts to only a few measly sentences.

  “Why did you go to the lake?”

  Confusion rolls over me again. Does he mean now? Fifteen years ago?

  “I don’t understand the question,” I say.

  “Mrs. Harris-White told me they found you standing in the lake this morning. After you realized the girls in your cabin were missing. Did you think they’d be there?”

  I barely remember that moment. I recall seeing the sun rise over the lake. That first blush of daylight. It drew me to it.

  Flynn persists. “Did you have some reason to think the girls had gone swimming?”

  “They can’t swim. At least, I don’t think they can.”

  I remember one of them telling me that. Krystal? Or was it Sasha? Now that I think about it, I don’t recall seeing any of them actually go into the water.

  “I just thought they might be there,” I say. “Standing in the lake.”

  “The way you were standing in the lake?”

  “I don’t know why I did that.”

  The sound of my voice makes me cringe. I sound so weak, so confused. Pain nudges my temples, making it hard to think.

  “Mrs. Harris-White also said you were screaming.”

  That I remember. In fact, I can still hear my cries streaking across the water. I can still see that heron startled into flight.

  “I was.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was scared,” I say.

  “Scared?”

  “Wouldn’t you be? If you woke up and everyone else in your cabin was gone?”

  “I’d be worried,” Flynn says. “I don’t think I’d scream.”

  “Well, I did.”

  Because I knew what was going on. I was stupid enough to come back here, and now it’s happening again.

  Detective Flynn flips to a fresh page. “Is there a chance you screamed for another reason?”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe out of guilt.”

  I shift in my seat, discomfited by Flynn’s tone. I detect slight mistrust, a sliver of suspicion.

  “Guilt?” I say.

  “You know, for losing them when they were under your care.”

  “I didn’t lose them.”

  “But they were under your care, right? You were their camp counselor.”

  “Instructor,” I say. “I told them when I first arrived that I was here to be a friend and not some authority figure.”

  “And were you?” Flynn says. “Friends, I mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you liked them?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you had no issues with them? No disagreements or fights?”

  “No,” I say, stressing the word. “I told you, I liked them.”

  Impatience nudges my ribs and shimmies down my legs. Why is he wasting all this time asking me questions when the girls are still out there, maybe hurt, definitely lost? Why doesn’t anyone seem to be searching? I glance out the mess hall window and see a couple of police cruisers and a smattering of state troopers milling about outside.

  “Is someone looking for them?” I ask. “There’s going to be a search party, right?”

  “There will be. We just need some more information from you.”

  “How much more?”

  “Well, for starters, is there anything about the girls you think I should know? Something about them that might aid in the search?”

  “Um, Krystal is spelled with a K,” I say. “In case that helps.”

  “It certainly will.”

  Flynn doesn’t elaborate, leaving me to picture each of them on the sides of milk cartons, a noble public service that’s actually horrible when you think about it. Who wants to open their fridge and see the face of a missing child staring back at them?

  “Anything else?” Flynn asks.

  I close my eyes, rub my temples. My head is killing me.

  “Let me think,” I say. “Sasha. She’s so smart. The downside is she knows so much it makes her a little scared. She’s afraid of bears. And snakes.”

  It occurs to me that Sasha might be afraid right now, wherever she is. The others, too. It breaks my heart to think of them lost in the woods, terrified of their surroundings. I hope they’re all together, so they can comfort one another. Please, God, let them be together.

  I keep talking, overcome with the urge to tell the detective everything I know about the girls. “Miranda’s the oldest. And the bravest. Her uncle is a cop, I think. Or maybe it was h
er dad. Although she lives with her grandmother. She never mentioned parents, come to think of it.”

  A realization pops into my head, coming at me like a thunderclap.

  “She took her phone.”

  “Who did?”

  “Miranda. I mean, I’m not certain she took it with her, but it wasn’t among her things. Could that be used to find her?”

  Flynn, who had been sagging in his chair while I prattled on, suddenly perks up. “Yes, it definitely could. All cell phones come with a GPS. Do you know the carrier?”

  “I don’t.”

  “I’ll have someone contact her grandmother and ask,” Flynn says. “Now let’s talk about why you think the girls are gone.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There has to be a reason, don’t you think? Like maybe they left because they were mad at you about something?”

  “Nothing I can think of.”

  That’s a lie. The latest in a long line of them. Because there is something that would make them want to leave Dogwood.

  Me.

  The way I acted.

  Drunk and crying and still touching my bare wrist, which now has a red streak on its side where my thumb kept rubbing the skin. I wasn’t in my right mind last night, and it scared them. I saw it in their eyes.

  “You think they ran away?” I ask.

  “I’m saying that’s the most logical reason. On average, more than two million youth run away each year. The vast majority are quickly located and returned home.”

  It sounds like another one of those statistics Sasha would have at the ready. But I don’t believe for a second the three of them ran away. They gave no indication of unhappiness in their home lives.

  “What if they didn’t?” I say. “What would be another reason?”

  “Foul play.”

  Flynn says it so quickly it makes me gasp. “Like kidnapping?”

  “Is it a possibility? Yes. Is it likely? No. Less than one percent of all missing children are abducted by strangers.”

  “What if the kidnapper isn’t a stranger?”

  Flynn quickly flips to another page of his notebook, pen poised over paper. “Do you know of such a person?”