Only She Came Back

by Margot Harrison

Genres: YA Mysteries & Thrillers

Synopsis

A chilling thriller about an unlikely friendship between a true-crime fan and a former high school classmate suspected of murdering her influencer boyfriend, perfect for fans of Holly Jackson and Courtney Summers.

On July 28 at 6:30 p.m., Kiri Dunsmore walks out of the desert wearing her boyfriend’s sweatshirt, covered in his blood. Dazed and on the verge of unconsciousness, she tells a cashier that he’s still out there and most likely dead. The disappearance of Callum Massey, a “survival guru” with hundreds of thousands of YouTube followers, rocks the nation. And Kiri is a prime suspect.
 
Back in Kiri's hometown, true-crime fanatic Sam is completely hooked on the case—especially now that she recognizes the suspect as shy Katie from high school. Although they didn’t know each other well, that doesn’t stop Sam from reaching out to befriend her old classmate.
 
But when Kiri starts to confide in her, Sam realizes there’s more to the story than she had imagined. Can she keep Kiri’s secrets even though revealing them could put her where she's always longed to be—at the center of the story?

Release date: November 14, 2023

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 256

Sample

AUGUST 4, MIDNIGHT

The first time the video popped up in my feed, I recognized her straightaway.

But not the name, because I’d known her only as Katie, never as Kiri. And all the posts in my feed were screaming “Kiri’s Eerie Cave Video” and “Does Kiri’s Story Hold Up?” and “What Was Really Happening with Kiri and Callum?”

I recognized that face, though, and that voice, low-pitched and wispy, from more than a year earlier when Katie Dunsmore sat behind me in junior English.

Katie was a girl who took up space, maybe six feet tall with long legs and broad shoulders—a girl who looked like a Valkyrie even in those days, when her hair was mousy brown, but who seemed to try to minimize her Valkyrie-ness by hunching over and crumpling into herself. She ran track and sat alone in the cafeteria or with some teammate friends. No boyfriend or girlfriend that I knew of.

We paired up for the final project in that class because there was nobody else for us to pair up with. Katie focused on the work, which was fine with me, and I don’t remember a single in-class conversation about anything else. No nudging, no private jokes, no texts that weren’t about meetings and deadlines. She made a label for our joint portfolio—strange, fey hand lettering wrapped in intricate flowers and vines—and when I complimented it, she said, “I used to want to be an artist, but I can’t do perspective.”

On the last day of school, Katie gave me a ride home. Pulling up at my place, she said, “We aren’t that far apart.”

For a second I thought she meant we were both shy, or both antisocial, but then I realized she was talking about where we lived. Geographically, it was true. But when she told me her address—“The very last house on Dumont Street in Queen City Park”—I felt the gulf between us. My mom and I live up by the highway in a rental duplex with mangy vinyl siding and a view of Kinney Drugs and the neighborhood sports bar where people get rowdy on weekend nights.

If Katie’s saying we were close was a shy way of asking me to hang out, I didn’t take the bait. Back then, I spent all my free time taping and editing my podcast about serial killer Drea Flint, thinking I could be the next true-crime sensation. By the time I realized I had nothing new to say and no subscribers except my friends and my mom, it was summer. I ditched the podcast and started working at the multiplex and met Regina Chen—Reggie. She made my life more exciting, so I basically blew off fall semester. I barely cared that I was tanking my grades until later, after the January night when everything went to pieces.

I didn’t graduate with honors the way Katie probably did. I spotted her after the ceremony on the UVM campus green, one arm around a man who was probably her dad and the other around a hot guy with black hair tumbling in his eyes. I noticed Katie’s new hair color and threw her a wave. If she saw me, she gave no sign.

The hot guy was Callum Massey—you can see the graduation pics online—but I didn’t know that. I’d never heard of him until he went missing.

It’s a strange thing to go looking for random distraction, lying in the dark with your phone because it’s too hot to sleep, and to find videos describing your English project partner as an “ice queen” and a “murderous femme fatale” and a “stone-cold killer.”

I watched video after video, starting with Kiri/Katie’s videos from the park. They were hard to watch, because she didn’t make a lot of sense and moved the phone so the angles made me seasick, but it was her. It was Katie. And everybody was talking.

Murderer. Victim. Killer. Survivor.

After that, I went down the rabbit hole: the local and national news reports, the top influencers’ takes, Callum’s videos, especially the ones with Kiri in them. There were a bunch from their road trip and Lost Village National Monument, some a whole half hour long.

I watched the road trip videos over and over: Katie driving on heat-hazed highways toward glowing pink horizons, her skin burnished gold. And this is going to sound weird, but I was jealous.

I’d spent the summer pedaling the four blocks between home and my job through molasses-thick air, helping my friends pack to leave town for fancy colleges and knowing that all I had to look forward to were shitty blockbusters and smoke breaks outside a half-abandoned movie theater. Every night I scrolled through videos in the dark, here in my mom’s apartment where the moments were sticky and endless and even the crickets sounded like they’d given up on the possibility of change.

Meanwhile, Katie was frolicking in the spray on the Jersey Shore. She was climbing the Washington Monument; running her fingers through the tassels of midwestern cornstalks; munching on authentic tamales at roadside stands; watching sunsets with her head on her boyfriend’s shoulder. It made me itch a little, imagining myself so close to someone. Imagining her head on my shoulder, her long hair tickling my cheek.

But even though Kiri was usually the one on-screen, the story still belonged to Callum. It was his channel. He was the one behind the camera, making everything look good.

Then Kiri walked into that gas station. And the story became hers.

When I was twelve, the whole town was plastered with posters of a college girl named Kelsey Detwiler who’d gone missing after a night out. Weeks later, they found her strangled body in the woods, and after a month, they caught the killer—a guy who’d lent her his phone, then followed her back to campus. He was a family man with a loving wife and two daughters, and everyone who knew him said he was kind and generous—he attended church every single Sunday, so he must be, right? But my dad became a churchgoer, too, after spending years as a raging, ass-kicking drunk and walking out on us when I was nine. These days, he acts like he invented human goodness.

I hate hypocrites. If you’re going to be a waste of space in this world, own it.

After what happened to Kelsey, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the evil out there—the fine, upstanding family men I passed on the street who might secretly be rapist-murderers. I craved more stories about killers, so I ate up library books and went down Wiki rabbit holes. When Mom and I took the long drive to see my dad, we listened to murder podcasts, and that made it easier to tolerate my stepmom’s sanctimonious eyebrows and knowing that I could never be as sweet and picture-perfect as my half siblings.

Stories about serial killers get depressing, though, because most of them are insecure creeps who try to make themselves feel bigger by hurting women (or whoever else they can get away with hurting). Even the cleverest killers, the ones who lead elaborate double lives, basically just do variations on that same ugly MO.

Every now and then, though, I found a story about a woman who tried to even the score, and those were my favorites.

What makes a woman want to kill? I don’t think it should even be a question—don’t we have plenty of reasons?—but because it’s more rare, everyone wonders.

Sometimes being spurned by a man pushes a woman over the line. Sometimes it’s money. Sometimes despair. And sometimes she just wants payback for all the crap she’s had to put up with. My favorite example was Drea Flint, a twenty-one-year-old who started out by killing her stepfather, then joined up with an older boyfriend and cut a bloody swath across the Southwest, robbing a bunch of guys and leaving five truckers and a gas station attendant dead.

“Cut a bloody swath” is sensationalist language, my friend Lore would say. Lore was happy to watch Hannibal and Natural Born Killers with me, but look at crime scene photos? No way. And in junior year, when I told Lore about my podcast idea, they got all uptight about my “obsession.” Was I a murder hound? A police groupie? Did I know that murders of pretty white girls get disproportionate attention?

I knew all that, of course. I also knew that most murders aren’t mysteries at all, and the ones that do go cold rarely get solved. My podcast was not about being an armchair detective. I just hated how people talked online about Drea Flint, treating her as if she were sicker and more disgusting than her boyfriend, though he was just as abusive as the other men in her life. Nobody seemed to care that her stepfather used to beat her, or that her teachers remembered her as a talented poet, or that she couldn’t seem to shake her addiction to sleazebag guys who told her what to do. I wanted to tell all of her sad story.

In the end, I just didn’t have enough to tell. Or maybe the problem was how I told it, with my wobbly voice and crappy home recording setup. I was another clueless kid desperate to be part of the conversation, and when I realized the whole thing was embarrassing, I stopped. Soon after that, I met Reggie, so I didn’t mind being just a true-crime consumer. We’d swap our most horrendous murder stories at the Grand Nine, trying to gross or freak each other out and usually failing.

It gets boring just collecting stories, though. Deep down, I still wanted to be the one to tell a story no one else could.

By the time I’d watched all the essential videos in the Callum/Kiri saga, it was nearly 2:00 AM. But it was tough to sleep when everybody online was buzzing.

Was Kiri involved in Callum’s death? She had to be, right? (Have you seen those vids?)

Why’d the cops even let her fly back to Vermont? Shouldn’t they have held her in New Mexico for more questioning? What if she made a break for the Canadian border?

My fingertips itched, I wanted so badly to write my own comment. I know this girl! We went to high school together! After all my years of true-crime obsession, finally I knew a person of interest.

But what did I know, exactly? That Kiri/Katie was shy? That she used to have brown hair? I cringed at the thought of posting that.

So I just lay there between the sweaty sheets, scrolling and scrolling, listening to the happy laughter and zydeco beats that wafted across the parking lot from Molly B’s Bar & Grill. I switched from feed to feed, finding the influencers who had the most active comment sections, waiting for one of Katie’s friends or teammates to post real insider info. My shift the next day didn’t start until noon.

The more I read, the smaller and grubbier I felt. Between junior year and now, Katie Dunsmore had grown larger than life.

Maybe she’d gotten some earlier attention on the YouTube channel, but it was nothing compared with this. Whatever happened in the desert had made her every action and motive worthy of dissection—the tilt of her head, the way she wore her hair when she boarded the plane back to Vermont, the tone of voice she used to say, I think he’s dead.

It was partly because she was pretty—but not in a good way, people kept saying. Her eyes are so dead, several insisted.

So many people were already trying to spin the story the way they read it.

Her eyes? What about his?!

Callum’s an inspiration. If you don’t see that, you need to wake up.

Callum’s a perv. If Kiri didn’t ice him, she should’ve.

But if Katie really was a killer—I couldn’t assume that, of course—how had she become one from the person I had known? What was her story, and would she ever be able to tell it on her own terms?

People kept reposting the same still of Kiri and Callum standing arm in arm in the late desert sunlight. With matching dark sunglasses, gleaming teeth, and brilliant smiles, they were a movie poster. They felt immortal.

Aliza Deene of Murder Most F**ked Up, my favorite true-crime source, posted a video encouraging people to stop jumping to conclusions and wait for more evidence. That was typical Aliza: Instead of going for the most sensational angle, she tried to understand what made criminals tick. But it did no good: Everybody already had a take, had their assumptions.

She’s obvs mentally unstable.

He’s six years older. Classic grooming.

That doesn’t make it okay to kill him.

We don’t even know he’s dead!

She’s a sociopath. I can always tell.

Last call came and went at Molly B’s. At nearly three, I couldn’t take all the voices buzzing in my head anymore (look at her hair, look at her smile, look at her bitch face), so I got up quietly and locked the apartment and wheeled my bike down the steps to the pavement.

Aside from the groan of the four-lane highway just up the road, my neighborhood was dead quiet. Classic Burlington. There aren’t many houses around here, just warehouses and city utilities sitting in big patches of concrete and pools of orange light. I took the left turn away from Burton Snowboards and along the park, then into the woods, until I came out in a tiny neighborhood that curves around the lakeshore.

Katie’s house was as nice as I expected. It wasn’t right on the water, but it stood up away from the street with a good view: two stories, clean and modern, surrounded by placid globes of light. There was a window under the second-floor gable, facing the lake. Maybe that was hers.

I stood there in the middle of the street, holding my bike, thinking about how alone Katie—Kiri—must have felt in the desert and how alone I was now. Just me and the keening katydids and the dull clang, clang of a boat’s mast as the waves sloshed it back and forth. The winking lights on the far side of the lake cast a hazy glow that showed me the outlines of the Adirondacks.

Had I been envying Katie because she was famous for possibly committing a murder? Out here in the fresh air, closer to where she was hiding out, I didn’t feel good about that.

But it wasn’t like I had anything better to do. Should I be getting my beauty sleep so I could scoop popcorn for kiddies tomorrow? Reading community college catalogs? These days, “waste of space” kind of described me.

A mass of trees rose behind Katie’s house; the yard must back onto the park. I’d probably seen this house a million times from the other side, walking the trails, and never realized it was hers. Never had a reason to care.

I snapped a photo, careful not to use the flash. If I were an even bigger waste of space, I might have posted it: Hey, guess what, y’all? I’m outside Kiri Dunsmore’s house right now!

Instead, I kept it for myself. A wild plan was already forming in my head, and that plan required me to be more subtle. More cunning.

I hadn’t been able to tell Drea’s untold story because I didn’t know her. She’d died by suicide in prison, and all my sources were second- and third-hand accounts. But Katie’s story—I was close to it already, and maybe I could get closer.

Two days later, on my day off, I dug out some old running gear, biked to the park, locked up the bike, and “jogged” the trail behind Katie’s house. I’m no runner, so the best I could actually do was fast-walk most of the way.

When I reached the stretch of woods that I suspected adjoined her backyard, I did start running (slowly). It was a good thing, because up ahead stood a young guy wearing city clothes—nice jeans and a leather jacket—and talking into a headset. He leaned against one of the boulders on the other side of the trail. I ran past him and around the curve, forcing myself not to glance in the direction of her house.

Probably media, doing exactly what I was—monitoring the area for sightings. He was still there the second time I came around the loop, but not the third. I left the trail and did hamstring stretches while I chanced some glimpses through the screen of trees: a garden bright with zinnias and tiny tomatoes. A deck draped with colorful beach towels. A big slider window.

I did several more loops, dripping with sweat despite doing more walking than actual running. By then, it was nearly dinnertime, and the park was emptying out. I lingered opposite the house for twenty minutes, long enough to see flashes of TV inside and a skinny bald guy (Katie’s dad?) pacing the lawn, having an inaudible phone conversation.

But no Kiri—Katie. I kept having to remind myself to use the name I’d known her by, because Kiri wasn’t someone I knew yet, even if I wanted to think I did. Katie was my English classmate; Kiri lived on screens and might be a murderer.

Come out, Katie. Come out.

Should I text her? She was still in my contacts, but her inbox would be full of media people and old friends suddenly wanting to reconnect. I needed a reason, something plausible that had nothing to do with the case. I racked my brain.

Lore texted to ask if I wanted to hang at the waterfront. I texted back that I had community college enrollment paperwork to do.

You’re stalking her. You’re better than this. I could just see Lore saying that, shaking their head sadly. On the other hand, Brenna, my stepmom, wouldn’t be sad at all. To her, everything I’d done today would be proof of my unfitness for salvation in her high-class heaven, right in line with my punk T-shirts and my mom’s tattoos and the fact that I’d been watching R-rated movies since I was ten.

Sometimes I wonder if Brenna knows that Dad used to hit Mom while I cowered under the covers. Sometimes I wonder if she thinks it was Mom’s fault for not being the amazing wife that Brenna thinks she is.

Screw her. Screw everyone. I wasn’t hurting anyone by scoping out a backyard.

On my way out of the park, I detoured to the mouth of Katie’s street and saw two news vans, one local and one national, with their antennae stretching up into the sky. The reporters in those vans wanted candid pics and sound bites that they could twist into a juicy narrative about an unhinged little rich girl. I already saw it happening when I scanned the headlines.

What I wanted was so much harder to grasp. Her story. In her own words.

The next morning before work, I ran the loop in the park again. This time, I found only one van on the street and no headset guy lurking in the woods. The curtains were drawn across the slider window of Kiri’s house. No one came into the yard in the ten minutes I dared to stay.

The frenzy was dying down. The #kiridunsmore hashtag wasn’t trending anymore, knocked out by some meme about a tortoise. Maybe it was time for me to let it go, too.

But that night, the feeds exploded with new intel.

The blood on the sweatshirt was the same type as Callum’s; DNA results were pending. The medical examiner said Callum could have bled that much and survived, but it was unlikely without prompt medical attention.

As for the footprints of a stranger that Kiri claimed to have seen around the campsite in one of her videos, investigators found no trace of them—or any useful prints at all. In the days between Callum’s disappearance and Kiri’s arrival at the gas station, there’d been a rainstorm in the desert. The amateur detectives online were busy comparing Kiri’s video to earlier footage of the campsite, trying to establish whether the footprints she pointed out in the sandy soil had already been there before Callum disappeared.

Just like that, #kiridunsmore was trending again.

That girl is a dirty lying h-bag.

Callum was big and jacked, tho. No way she killed him.

Maybe she got him by surprise.

I tried to care about Callum Massey being dead. By this time I knew every angle of his face, every plane of his ripped chest. I knew how his voice sounded when he was schooling his loyal viewers on building a chicken coop or making your own venison jerky or finding a safe way to eat a cactus. Patient, but with an edge.

It was the edge I didn’t like. It made me think he was holding things back. And you heard it most often when he was addressing Kiri, as if he didn’t quite trust her to get things right.

The next day, instead of dawdling over breakfast with my phone, I put my runner disguise back on and grabbed the bike. I was halfway to the park before I even considered what I was doing (stalker stalker stalker), but by then it didn’t seem worth turning back.

This time, I wouldn’t pause by her house any longer than it took to stretch my hamstrings. Just a quick check.

I ran faster this time, legs pumping and lungs straining. Knowing it was Callum’s blood on the sweatshirt made everything seem a little more dangerously real. But with no weapon and no body, would they have a case against her?

What if I just texted her and told her I was producing a podcast? I know you’re not what people say you are. Let me tell your story.

Good luck with that. My breath came short as I reached the curve where the boulders loomed opposite her backyard. At this point, any reporter in the country would leap at the chance to interview Kiri. But she hadn’t given any interviews, probably on the advice of her high-priced lawyer.

I was so busy scolding myself that I barely noticed branches thrashing to my left. But I stopped short when a figure burst through the trees from Kiri’s backyard and dashed past me onto the trail.

Her feet were bare. Her cheeks were red, her hair knotted up and falling messily around her face, strikingly blond in the morning sunlight.

I stood stock-still, not breathing. I expected her to keep right on running, and I don’t think I would have had the guts to try to stop her. But when she reached the boulders, she paused to look around, her eyes wild, and her gaze caught on me.

I gulped. What if she thought I was one of them, like the guy with the headset?

But no, she wouldn’t think that. She knew me. “Katie?” I asked tentatively.

She frowned. For an instant, I thought she couldn’t place me—or maybe she wasn’t used to hearing her old name. Then—“Sam?”

“Been a while.” I tried to smile. Everything Lore had ever said or might say about me—murder tourist, voyeu. . .