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Chapter 1
LUCY
Day 1
This is where he jumped. Where he edged out past the wooden barrier, onto the lichen-covered rocks. Where he gripped the trunk of a twisted pine and gazed into the depths below.
I remember his face was ghostly white against the fog, his dark eyes wide. He looked between the police and the yawning canyon, and chose the canyon.
He leapt into the mist.
I spent half an hour with the Cloudkiss Killer, but the thing I think about most is the moment of his death.
The space against the sky where he was until he wasn’t.
I stare at it now, the lone white pine clinging to the side of the cliff. The green-brown mountains in the distance, barely visible through the fog.
He must be dead because no one could survive that fall. Not even a monster like Joseph Kincaid. But the police never found his body. They searched the canyon for days and days, and all they found was a shoe.
I glance around now to make sure no one is watching, and then I hop the barrier and edge out as far as I can. I go the last few feet on my hands and knees, gripping the rock. I slide on my belly until I can stare straight down to the bottom of the canyon. But there’s nothing to see except fog; thick as smoke, gray and heavy as a funeral dress.
Maybe Kincaid’s still down there.
Maybe the fog swallowed him whole.
Maybe he is the fog now. The thought sends a shiver down my spine.
“L’appel du vide,” someone murmurs from behind me.
I startle, coming at least an inch off the ground, which moves me closer to the edge of the cliff, so that half my body dangles into space. Panic surges through me, and I clutch hard at the rock, hard enough that my fingernails skitter on the stone and one of them splinters. All the breath has left my body, and I’m frozen, not breathing, not moving, staring down into the canyon, sure that it is eager to swallow me up too.
“Sorry,” the person says. It’s a girl’s voice. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Are you all right?” She does sound sorry, her voice soft with contrition.
My breath releases in a cloud of vapor that reminds me it’s cold, it’s autumn, and I am lying on bare stone 1,800 feet in the air. “Yeah, I’m fine,” I say roughly. I climb backward, away from the edge, until my body meets the post of the wooden railing. As I press my back against it, I realize I’m trembling.
“I’m Carolina,” the girl says. It’s a name that ought to sound like molasses, but in her voice it’s only melodic. I tip back my head and look up at her, where she sits on top of the barrier a few feet away.
I don’t think I’ve ever met someone while looking up at them from the ground before. Black leggings and old brown hiking boots, the heavy kind. A burgundy raincoat over a lavender sweater. Long red-brown hair under a white beanie. Peaches-and-cream skin, a round, dramatically pretty face. A pair of dark brown eyes, staring out at the canyon, a dreamy lost look in them.
“Lucy,” I finally say.
Carolina’s eyes flick down to me. “Your nametag says ‘Geraldine.’”
I touch the plastic name tag hanging from my neck. It was waiting for me at registration, along with the rest of my false identity. Geraldine is my grandmother’s name. I paid for the contest with her credit card and used all her information to register since I’m underage. She never looks at her credit card bills, so she probably won’t even notice before I can pay her back. If I’m lucky, my parents will never find out I came here either. They think I’m visiting my cousin at Sewanee.
“I go by my middle name . . . for obvious reasons,” I say.
Carolina smiles, but I can’t read the expression behind it. “I don’t know. I like Geraldine. It sounds vintage.”
“Are you here for the Human Beasties contest too?” I ask. The park is closed to regular visitors for the week, so she must be another contestant. But she’s not wearing a name tag and isn’t at all what I imagined a true crime nut would look like. She holds a lead pencil and a sketchbook, open to a drawing I can’t quite make out from my place on the ground.
She sees me looking at the sketchbook and closes it quickly. “Just sketching the landscape,” she explains. “And, yeah, I’m here for Killer Quest. You know, I’ve never been camping before. Have you?”
Not in two years. Not since the Cloudkiss Killer found me. Not since I watched him leap off this cliff. I’ve barely even been on a hike.
“Yeah, my family went camping all the time,” I say, trying to sound casual. “What did you say to me earlier? It sounded French.” I took one semester of French, but I was awful at it. I couldn’t get my stubborn Tennessee accent to swallow all those unpronounced letters.
“L’appel du vide,” Carolina says. “It means ‘the call of the void.’ It’s that urge you get to leap off high places for no reason. Haven’t you ever had it?”
“No,” I say.
“Hmm,” Carolina says before lapsing back into silence. I feel like I gave her the wrong answer and she thinks less of me for it, as silly as that sounds.
Not that it matters what one of these true crime buffs thinks of me. Even if she is painfully beautiful. I’m only here to find Joseph Kincaid’s bones and get rid of the hold he has on me. To lay what happened to me two years ago to rest and go back to who I was before.
That way, I won’t have to think about him while I lace my shoes, while I drive to school, while I walk alone down a hallway. That way, I can get on with my life.
Cloudkiss Canyon is oppressive and terrifying, and the thought of a whole week here with a bunch of true crime fans is deeply unnerving, but the thought of living with Kincaid in my head for the rest of my life is way scarier.
“Did you come by yourself?” Carolina asks.
I nod.
“Me too. Where are you from?”
I pretend to be checking my jacket pocket for something while I take a moment to think. Has she already figured out who I am? Or are these just innocent questions? The media never released my name and age, but of course those details leaked out, the way they always do. People love a survival story. A few reporters even managed to snap my photo. I was never remarkable-looking to begin with, and now that I’ve cut off most of my hair and grown several inches, there’s no reason for anyone to recognize me. At least that’s what I’m telling myself. But that doesn’t mean I have to say I’m from Nashville.
“I’m from the Outer Banks in North Carolina,” I finally say, remembering our last family vacation. Ocean and wild horses. “You?”
“Honey Valley, just a few towns over from Racksen,” she says.
Racksen is the nearest town to here. It’s a dismal place full of convenience stores and auto repair shops. “What’s Honey Valley like?” I ask, conjuring green fields humming with bees.
Carolina shrugs. “There’s nothing interesting about it. God and guns like every other little Georgia town.” But she doesn’t sound like a Georgia girl—her accent’s as neutral as a newscaster’s. I’d think she were lying if it weren’t for the bitterness in her voice.
“Did you join the contest group chat? There are people from all over,” Carolina says, as if eager to change the subject. “One guy’s even flying in from Alaska. Can you believe that? I wonder who all we’ll meet. Should be a lot of interesting people.”
I don’t reply. Meeting new people isn’t really my thing. Plus, I did look into the group chat, and it was exactly what I expected. A bunch of people with safe, boring lives getting vicarious thrills from true crime. There were fifty spots, but only forty-seven have been taken. Apparently, most true crime enthusiasts prefer their gore from the safety of their cars while they commute home to the suburbs. Few are willing to take a trip to north Georgia, to climb through rough terrain, to camp outdoors in all weather, to touch a corpse. The ones who are willing to come are the die-hard Beastie Babes, as fans of the Human Beasties podcast like to call themselves. I’m pretty sure I’ll hate every single one of them.
My silence must make Carolina uneasy because she glances over her shoulder. “Looks like more people are arriving. I’m going to go check them out. See you later, Geraldine. Oh, and watch out for the fog—there’s no telling what might come out of it.” I think she’s joking, but she doesn’t smile. She throws her legs over the barrier, sliding clumsily to the ground.
“Bye,” I say weakly, unsettled by her words. I go back to staring at the canyon, where over and over again I imagine Joseph Kincaid’s ghost-white face looking back at me, his eyes wide and dark behind his wire-rimmed glasses. The moment he leapt and disappeared.
What does a serial killer think about as he plummets to the earth?
Did he think of me, the girl he broke, the girl he ruined, without ever touching my skin?
I shake my head. I can’t sit around like this, thinking of Kincaid, or I’ll never make it through the week. I get up off the ground and brush the dirt from my hiking pants, stretch the cold stiffness from my limbs.
I turn my back resolutely to the canyon and wander into the woods instead, along a trail lined with pine needles. Once the trees close around me, blocking out the sky, I realize how alone I am. This is exactly the thing I’ve avoided for the last two years. I always surround myself with people—my family, my softball team, my classmates—even though a part of me longs to be alone.
Well, for the first time in two years, I am. Alone in the place that made me afraid to ever be alone again. My pulse rackets back up, and I feel once more like I’m hanging halfway into the canyon, annihilation only a hairbreadth away.
The trees lean toward me, and the fog rises up around me, alive in a way that doesn’t feel quite right. There should be birds flitting and chirping in the trees—tufted titmice and cardinals and blue jays—but there’s only the steady sound of the wind blowing through the branches. I’m alone in the fog of Cloudkiss Canyon.
A branch snaps behind me, and I spin, my heart in my throat.
There’s no one there. I let out a painful breath.
“Lucy,” a man says, somewhere to my right, his form hidden in the fog. I recognize that voice. But it can’t be him. He’s dead. Is it someone else—someone playing a trick on me?
“Who’s there?” I call, squeezing my fists so tight it feels like my fingers will break. I peer into the gloom, though I can’t make out so much as a silhouette. But I can feel someone there, just beyond my sight, waiting and watching. Chill bumps erupt across my arms.
My heart is lodged in my throat, blocking my voice, my air. The trees lean in closer, a wooden cage.
A heavy breeze blows through the trees, and the fog thins, revealing empty woods. No one’s here. I’m alone. It wasn’t a prank. It wasn’t anything at all.
It wasn’t real.
I lean against a towering longleaf pine and close my eyes, try to steady my breathing.
“I’m safe,” I gasp to the trees, to the fog, to my own heart still pulsing painfully in my throat. “That wasn’t real.” Kincaid is dead. He’s been dead a long time. It was only because of what Carolina said, about watching out for the fog. Only because I was alone and frightened and already thinking of Kincaid. My imagination got away from me.
I run through the grounding techniques the counselor from church taught me: feel the sticky sap against my palm, the tree’s rough bark, the firm ground beneath my feet, the cool air on my face. I open my eyes and stare again at the place the man’s voice came from, to assure myself no one is there.
He never was there. A hallucination, I remind myself. A product of my anxious mind.
As my heart rate slows, I listen to the beat of blood in my veins, a steady rhythm that says I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive.
I’m alive and Kincaid isn’t.
And now I’m going to find his bones and prove it.
