Chapter Forty-Three Piper

Chapter Forty-Three

Piper

Now: Sunday, 1:20 p.m.

"Dead?" I repeat in disbelief. "Camille's…"

"It was carbon monoxide poisoning," Delaney announces. When her gaze sweeps over to Willa, she yelps. "Your eyes!"

Willa touches her face, self-conscious.

"They're a little bloodshot," I reassure her. "It's fine."

It's really not. Willa looks like someone who almost died. And Camille did.

"Are you sure? How do you know it was carbon monoxide?" I probe for more information.

"Yeah, we are. Someone turned on a propane heater." Liam jumps in with an explanation. "All the windows and doors were closed to conserve heat."

I think about the large thud I heard when I was in the basement. Someone moving a heavy object upstairs?

"People die like that all the time in tents on mountains." Delaney takes on a hushed, morbid tone. "But in a house?"

On cue, we all peer into the emptiness of the ground floor. It's eerie. Full of ghosts.

"What did you mean when you said it's over?" I dare not let the hope I feel bloom inside me.

"She left a note." Delaney pulls something from her jeans pocket. "She must have felt guilty about what she did, so she offed herself. God, it's awful, but it means we're safe. "

Willa begins to loudly sob, relief a powerful, overwhelming thing. Liam doesn't dare move to comfort her, so I rub her back in hopefully soothing circles.

"It's clear that help isn't coming, and the storm has finally abated," Delaney says. "We made decent headway snowshoeing until we heard you shouting, Piper. The conditions aren't bad."

Liam frowns. "That could take hours at this point, and we're losing daylight. We risk exposure, freezing to death."

"Please don't leave me." Willa is pleading with Liam, and we all know it. Delaney ignores the implication. She's forgiven Liam, it's clear, and Willa won't have him again.

"Liam's right." Delaney squeezes his arm lovingly. "We should shelter in place, concentrate on staying warm until either they repair the phone lines or help arrives."

"Do you think they'll plow the roads?" I query for the group.

"This high up the mountain?" Delaney worries her lip. "It won't be a priority. Lots of folks'll be snowed in."

"What about the shuttle?"

"What do you mean?" Delaney asks tightly.

I clear my throat nervously. "I overheard Silva setting it up. That guy is supposed to come back tomorrow morning for us. She promised him a huge tip."

The way Delaney screws up her face, I know she's only just resisting tearing me a new one for not sharing this information before. But now I'm no longer her chief murder suspect, and this is good news. She smiles wide.

"That's incredible. He'll know we must be trapped and call someone to plow. All we have to do is wait!"

We all breathe, properly exhale, for what feels like the first time all weekend.

"So now what?" Willa asks the practical thing. She surveys the house that recently tried to kill her and then the vast, white snowy expanse, where frostbite and freezing to death await.

"Inside should be safe," Liam says. "We turned off the heater, and Delaney opened a bunch of windows. It's better than out here."

We're hesitant to go inside. We leave the front door open, just in case.

"I'll get the fire going again," Delaney says. It must have gotten snuffed out from lack of oxygen before. "We can sleep in here to conserve heat. So we'll need pillows, blankets. And can someone make coffee or something?" Her teeth knock together as she says it.

Death and coffee. The natural order of things. Willa's too weak to help; she shuffles over to the couch and collapses ontoit.

"Hey, you're soaking wet! Up, up." Delaney fusses at Willa until she struggles to her feet. Then Delaney calls to Liam. "Give me your hoodie, babe." He does, and Delaney launches into caretaker mode, helping Willa peel off her wet jeans and sweater. Willa's too exhausted and cold to protest. It's quite a sight to see, Delaney dressing Willa like she's a limp toddler. Liam's hoodie is long enough to skim the top of Willa's thighs.

"I'll take care of the coffee," Liam volunteers. I follow him into the kitchen.

"Hey, can you help reset my shoulder?"

Liam nods, but his eyes betray his nerves. Though maybe it's from discovering body number five. I can no longer tell an ordinary human response from whatever numbing trauma we're going through. Or maybe Liam has always had a touch of unsureness to him, and it simply took me this long to notice.

I don't know any of my classmates, really. Except Camille. I knew her very well.

Now she's dead.

I grimace and hiss air through my teeth as Liam grabs firm hold of my forearm and shoves upward. Pain shoots down my side, but at least my shoulder is in place. And twenty-four hours from now, hopefully, I'll be able to get to a hospital. And the killer…

I look up to the ceiling, trying to picture my former teammate in her final moments. Dragging a propane heater up the stairs, setting it up in the hallway, and turning it on before retreating to her bedroom. Why kill yourself that way? And if Willa hadn't stumbled her way downstairs, we'd be dead too.

Not to mention how did Camille even know where to find a propane heater?

It feels too pat. Too convenient.

The answer is charging in my pocket.

But I can't check the phone without tipping off my companions. The killer is either dead upstairs or sitting in the living room. I have to be careful. What I need is an excuse to slip away.

"I'll go get blankets," I announce.

"Hold up, I'll help." Liam slides an old-fashioned kettle onto the hissing flames of the gas burner. "This needs a few minutes, and you're injured."

Fuck. But I plaster on a smile and let Liam follow me up to the second floor, my hand in my pocket the whole way, fingers running over the bezel of Silva's phone. Liam hesitates on the landing.

"You second-guessing premed?"

Liam startles from his pensive stare up to the third floor. I'm playing my own little game, testing his response.

"What?"

"After seeing all these dead bodies, I mean. It's awful, right? You have to dissect a dead body in medical school, you know."

"Yeah, I do." Liam swallows hard, brow furrowed. "It's fine." He squares his shoulders and puffs out his chest before charging into the bunk room. We ignore Wyatt's form, still slumped in front of the fireplace. The smell of smoke persists, now mixed with the sour sweetness of decay.

Liam strips the beds of their puffy duvets, and I grab pillows.

"It'll be different when they're not my friends," he says, almost as an afterthought.

"Were they really your friends, though?"

Liam stares at me like I've grown a second head. Then both our gazes drift over to the fireplace.

"I guess Camille's not who I thought she was, no," he says after a moment. "Delaney's devastated."

Liam seems oddly detached. He didn't deny his lack of connection to the other victims.

"Do you think this is enough?"

Liam's holding a pile of blankets aloft. An idea pops into my brain. A good excuse to get away without raising suspicion.

"I'll grab some from Eden's room too."

I'm stuck calling it that, even though Eden is long dead, comparatively speaking. It's not until Liam pauses on the threshold of the room that it occurs to me. He was in here last night with Willa, literally steps away from Wyatt's door. Everyone takes for granted that Liam's a good guy, Eagle Scout and all, but has anyone questioned where he's been all weekend, and when?

"Actually, you grab the comforter. I have to use the bathroom." Why didn't I just say that in the first place? I shuffle into the en suite bathroom before Liam can question me.

I sit on the closed toilet seat and sneak Silva's phone out of my pocket. I chant under my breath as I press the power button, "Please turn on, please turn on."

It does, so now I have to put all my energy out into the universe that Silva was the kind of person who didn't bother with a passcode. All signs point to maybe. The phone is a nondescript black rectangle, one of the Androids—an older model, from the looks of the scuffed hard-sided case. Silva wasn't cutting-edge. I swipe up, promising my firstborn to the universe, and I have to clamp down on a cry of joy when the damn phone unlocks. God bless trusting elder millennials and old phones.

I tap right into the email client on the home screen. If I were emailing with a killer, I wouldn't use my work email. And even without a signal, Gmail has all the most recent messages downloaded to the phone.

Silva's inbox is an unholy unread hell. She has over a thousand boldface messages. How anyone can live without inbox zero, I don't know. At least it makes it easier to tell which threads she's active on.

I scan the first page of her inbox, unsure what I'm looking for exactly. A subject line that says Re: Our evil plan to trap a bunch of kids on a mountain ?

Instead what catches my eye is a plainly named thread halfway down. Silva uses a color-coded labeling system, and this one has a red box that says Warner Prep . The subject line reads Yale.

The thread goes backward, and I don't have much time, so I skim until I find the crux of the chain and read my way up, in order.

[email protected], December 21, 2023 (17 days ago)

My contact in admissions won't tell me who sent the video. I tried my best, but they won't budge. They said it came from an anonymous gmail though.

[email protected], December 21, 2023 (17 days ago)

It has to be someone who was at that party. We have to do something.

[email protected], December 21, 2023 (17 days ago)

Even if we figure out who did it, they're not going to change their mind about rescinding your admission. I'm sorry.

[email protected], December 22, 2023 (16 days ago)

I just want to know who did this. If it was one of my "friends"…

I have an idea. But I'll need your help. I'll call you.

There's a long gap in the messages. And then:

[email protected] December 28, 2023 (10 days ago)

It's done. I told Principal Khan that Camille Sutter's mother demanded that a digital detox retreat be added to the excursions, and everyone you requested has been assigned to the trip.

[email protected] December 28, 2023 (10 days ago)

Perfect. We'll get them.

Silva was colluding with someone rescinded from Yale with the email [email protected]. And I know only one aspiring doctor.

There's a knock at the door.

I startle hard, banging my shin against the bathtub, and then I'm biting down a curse. I grind out, "Just a minute," my voice warbling traitorously. I scramble to pocket the phone, school my features into a mask that'll help me survive. But in the cold, gray silver of the mirror, all I can see is knowing and fear in my liner-smudged eyes.

"Buck up, Piper. You are not going to die," I whisper to my reflection. The girl who stares back isn't so sure.