Chapter Twenty-Seven Piper

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Piper

Now: Saturday, 8:03 p.m.

"This must be how someone got downstairs to Eden without any of us noticing."

Delaney puts it together as quickly as I do. A secret passage down to the basement. And an icicle missing from the eaves. It's like something out of a detective novel.

"Maybe Silva was hiding in here the whole time," Delaney goes on. Then she snatches back the flashlight and frantically searches the room for signs of life. Empty water bottles, discarded food. But the place is surprisingly clean for a garage. This whole chalet is the kind of minimalist luxury clean that only rich people's houses ever are.

Then I catch movement from the corner of my eye. There's something, someone, crouched in the corner next to the workbench. My heart seizes in my chest. I wince as my voice comes out in a whispery shake. "O-over there."

Delaney whips the light around. A pair of eyes glint back.

Willa yelps, but Delaney is nonplussed. My heart, for its part, starts back up.

"It's the cat," she says. Then she sweeps the flashlight back over the door to the house and the cat-sized flap at its base.

"It's weird this house has a cat," I repeat, almost to myself, as Delaney draws her own conclusion.

"If Silva was here, she's gone now."

We waffle between doors. One to the freezing outdoors and a long, arduous, wet trek to the shed, and the other leading to the relative warmth of the living room, with its crackling fire. But we promised the group we'd check both places.

Willa's the one to articulate it, finally. "So we need to go back out to the shed, then…."

She trails off in a question. No one moves. We stare past the garage to where the blanket of white vanishes into a wall of black. A bitter wind slices into our cheeks. I take the first snow-heavy step forward.

It takes so long to plow through the snowdrifts around the side of the house, I'm surprised we don't find Liam, Camille, and Wyatt already waiting by the back patio once we arrive. How far up the hill are they trekking to check for other houses?

But for now it's just us and wan moonlight fighting through the whiteout during the storm's break. And then we see it. The small shed is half obscured by snowdrifts, maybe twenty feet off from the ski-room doors.

As we're digging out the entrance, a shouted greeting catches on the wind.

"It's Liam!" Willa exclaims. "Maybe they found something?"

Delaney takes off across the snow without a word, splitting the difference as Liam, Camille, and Wyatt trudge around the side of the house. Willa sprints after her.

I turn back to the shed, scooping the last of the snow away with my arm. The handle bites cold into my palm, even through my glove. It may be foolhardy, but—impatient—I wrench the door open. I don't think our chaperone is in here, so might as well rip off the bandage.

The shed is narrow but deep, and pitch dark. Delaney took the flashlight with her. But soon all three beams bounce outside as the group draws up, giving the inside a strobe-like club effect. There's nobody here.

"It's empty," I announce, but I'm butting into a conversation in progress, and Delaney doesn't miss a beat.

"The garage was empty, but we did find a door down to the basement," Delaney shares. And now it's Liam and company's turn.

"We hiked as far out as we could but didn't find anything."

Camille pointedly clears her throat.

"Camille thinks she saw a light in the distance. For a second," Liam amends.

"He insists I hallucinated it," Camille snaps.

"No one else saw it," parries Liam. Wyatt throws up his hands, refusing to take a side.

"I'm not sure how you could see anything in these conditions. It's a total whiteout," Delaney says.

While they squabble, I'm drawn into the shed. I scan the space. I see a dusty coil of hose, a weed trimmer for summer, cleaning supplies for the hot tub, and a cache of snowshoes.

I spot a large object, shaped like a riding lawn mower, under a gray cover. I pull back part of the thick tarp, and hope leaps in my chest.

Then it immediately falls.

"Guys?" I call to the group standing outside. Remarkably, they listen for once. "Didn't Silva say she was taking the snowmobile down the mountain?"

"Yeah, why?" Delaney appears in the doorway: a hulking, shadowy shape.

I tug the cover the rest of the way off the vehicle, sucking in a breath as it appears inch by inch.

"Is that…" Delaney's voice falls off to a hush. Then: "Oh god." She stumbles out of the doorway as Wyatt and Cam rush in. Delaney points the beam across the silver-and-black Yamaha.

"I knew it!" Camille shrieks. "That bitch never left. She's here !" The light dances across the shed, but it's only me turning my head from the brightness.

Camille's disappointment is brief. "I call shotgun!"

"You can't call shotgun on a snowmobile." Delaney rolls her eyes.

"I don't care!" Camille gestures so hard with the flashlight that the battery rattles against the hard plastic sides. "I'm not staying on this mountain."

"Neither am I," Wyatt jumps in. "Cam and I will go. I know how to drive one, and she's lightest. It's an ideal combo."

"Excuse me?" Delaney's fast as a whipcrack.

Willa's a beat behind her. "Are you saying I'm too fat to ride?"

"These—these things do have weight limits," Wyatt replies after an awkward beat. "But also the powder is really light, and we want to move fast and easy over the snow…." Willa's eyes go wide at the revelation, then dim with acceptance. Delaney remains pointedly pissed off that they'd leave her behind.

"Are we seriously having this argument right now?" Liam bellows. He gestures up at the steadily swirling snow above our heads. An errant flake stings my cheek; then another catches in my eyelashes. Soon more land in my hair, dissolving onto my scalp and making me regret not wearing a hat. The storm is starting up again.

"No one can navigate a mountain in the middle of the night during a snowstorm," he continues. "You remember those winding roads from the way up. They're impossible, and there's zero visibility right now. You could go careening off the mountain, or into the side of it. It's too dangerous."

"But it's dangerous here, too!" Camille whines.

"We'll wait until the storm dies down. The forecast said there'd be twenty-four to forty-eight hours of serious snowfall, right? We'll see how it is in the morning. If it's safe, we leave. Okay?"

Liam is the grounded voice of reason we all need.

And then Delaney speaks.

"What about Silva? The snowmobile proves she never left. What do we do?"

"Stick together," Liam answers. "And we search the house again. As a group. There's nowhere else to hide out here, so the house is the only option."

Plan decided, we retrace our tracks in a silent single file. A bitter wind cuts against my neck as I take up the sweeper position.

Search the house. It sounds so simple. But this time we won't be looking for cell phones, but an unpredictable killer. A chill runs through me that has nothing to do with the driving snow.

Back at the house, we crowd into the foyer, silent and dripping. The once-welcoming cabin now looms before us like a haunted house. We listen for signs of our guidance counselor lurking in the darkness. Triplet beams crisscross the ground floor. Camille lets out a yelp when her light lands on a bear sculpture in the corner. It casts a long shadow, its outstretched claws like Freddy Krueger daggers.

"We should get changed before we search," Delaney near whispers. Then she gains some confidence when no killer leaps from the shadows. "Let's go up together," she orders.

We're too cold and exhausted to argue. The eerie silence continues up the stairs.

"We meet back here in five minutes, no more," Liam instructs as we file upstairs. "You don't leave your buddy for any reason. And you don't go to another floor. Understood?"

We nod, then watch as the boys jerk open each door like cops on a crime show. For once I decide not to fight their patriarchal chivalry. Satisfied that Silva isn't waiting under our beds, we file off into our respective rooms to change.

"Hold on," Willa says once we've shut the door and placed a chair under the handle just in case. She veers back over to the desk under the window and fetches something from a sliding drawer. The welcome box. "They gave us candles." Willa holds two aloft. "And I found a lighter earlier when I searched the ground floor."

I step closer and shine the beam over the labels: Romantic Escape and Accidental Chemistry . What odd names for candles, particularly the second one. Once lit, the wicks provide a steady orange light. Too bad they don't cast any significant heat. It's cold as balls up here.

The smells don't exactly mesh—Romantic Escape has notes of pine, strawberries, and cardamom, while Accidental Chemistry smells of butter, salt, and smoke. We place them on opposite corners of the room to diffuse the scents as much as possible.

"They could have been accidents, right?" Willa's voice is small, like a child's. It takes a second for me to realize she means the deaths. "And maybe Silva took the skis after all…." She's trying to convince herself, I think.

I am past delusion. I find myself praying we find our guidance counselor holed up in the attic. It's preferable to the alternative. The MurderGals have done a few episodes on psycho teens. It's some truly dark shit when a peer snaps.

Willa and I peel off our heavy, wet clothes, shivering in the candlelight as our skin hits frigid air. We hurry into warm, dry alternatives in silence. The candles crack and pop, slowly spreading their discordant smells and meager light as we crouch over our suitcases on opposite sides of the room.

I shimmy a fresh pair of jeans over my hips one-handed, and carefully wrangle myself into a dry, long-sleeved Henley. My hoodie remains damp from the snowfall, and I ignore a pulse of disgust putting it back on. It's the only thing that can conceal my secret. My contraband phone weighs down the front pocket like a brick. To think, twenty-four hours ago my biggest concern was our chaperone discovering I'd snuck in a cache of murder podcasts to listen to on a disconnected iPhone. Now it's getting murdered, whether by the killer stalking us, or by my classmates if they discover I've been holding out on them.

And recording them.

What started as a strange instinct during our party games last night is now a vital living record of our unfolding horror. If I die, maybe the MurderGals will make an episode about me. And if I survive…well, the police will be interested in this when it's all over.

Meanwhile Willa, either from nerves or from the cold, is going at warp speed. She tears through her suitcase, pulling out socks and sweaters until they scatter around our room. Finally she seems to locate what she was looking for. She tugs on the errant pant leg until it dislodges something violently, sending a small palm-sized packet soaring. It smacks me in the arm, and when I bend to pick up the offending article, a whistle catches in my throat.

"Oh, sorry!" Willa apologizes quickly, before we both look down at the item now clearly displayed on the floor.

My fingers brush against the sharp and crinkly packaging of the condom.

"Piper, I—"

"Who are you—" and then it comes together. Clearer than any case the MurderGals have ever cracked. "Liam."

Willa's pleading eyes make clear that I am right.

"You can't say anything, " she begs.

I watch her a moment longer before flinging the silvery packet back her way.

"Delaney is going to kill you."