Wilderness

by B.E. Jones

Genres: Domestic Thrillers; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

*Soon to be a major TV series on Amazon Prime, starring Jenna Coleman*

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LOVE CAN HURT. BETRAYAL CAN KILL.

Shattered by the discovery of her husband's affair, Liv knows they need to leave the chaos of New York to save their marriage. Maybe the road trip they'd always planned, exploring America's national parks - just the two of them - would help heal the wounds.

But what Liv hasn't told her husband is that she has set him three challenges on their trip - three opportunities to prove he's really sorry.

If he fails? Well, it's dangerous out there in the wilderness; accidents happen all the time.

And if it's easy to die, then it's also easy to kill.
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What readers are saying about Wilderness . . .

'Fast paced and totally twisted. THIS IS A MUST READ'

'A dark, addictive thriller everyone should read this summer'

'Absolutely gripping'

'Superb . . . tension that oozes off the pages as you read'

'A MUST READ!!!'

'I absolutely devoured it! Lots of twists to keep you on your toes!'

'Addictive'

'If you enjoyed Gone Girl, you'll love this'

'A terrific page-turner'

'I loved every little surprise, twist and reveal'

'Edge of the seat'

'A brilliant page-turner! Loved it'

'One of the best and most surprising endings I've read in quite a long time'

'I loved this book'

'A dark story of obsession, revenge and forgiveness!'

Release date: June 8, 2021

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 85000

Sample

No one died until six months after I saw the home video. The timing was complicated and there were important decisions to be made first, such as should I stay or should I go? Fall or fight? Mend or destroy? Curl up in a ball and die or . . .

Either way, there was no choosing on a whim, with a snap of my fingers, the toss of a coin, because what I saw in my future, if I made the wrong decision, was me all alone, scrabbling through the rubble among heaps of charred bones and the stench of death – in other words, divorced.

All right, perhaps it wouldn’t have been like that, like the actual end of the world, if I’d just left him, but that’s how it felt. So what if I wasn’t the first woman cheated on by her husband? So what if I wouldn’t be the last? It doesn’t matter that it’s a cliché, that it’s commonplace, that it’s glaringly mediocre. It still means the whole world and its end when it’s happening to you.

That’s why I’m trying to explain the last twelve months, the destruction that followed the discovery that my husband was sleeping with a skinny, skank-whore years younger than me. Because it’s not always the noisiest things that do the most harm, not the havoc reported on the nightly news with footage of smoking craters and swooping aid choppers. There’s the carnage that takes place in silence, in the confines of a two-bedroom condo among the steel and stone canyons of New York City.

Wars are waged inside these ordinary spaces every day, unfolding quietly within four walls, within our own heads, and there’s no escape from them, no matter how many miles we travel. But we try, don’t we? We try to flee. We attempt to run. That’s how it all came down to one single second on our postcard-perfect ‘holiday of a lifetime’, our shining ‘dream road trip’, our enviable summer vacation – even though I knew about the affair, about Will’s A-cup accomplice in infidelity. Because I’d forgiven him, except . . .

Except for that heavy-breathing doubt in the back of my head that refused to shut up and slink away, the one pawing the ground and baring its teeth all winter on the streets of New York, snarling – the little voice whispering, Does he deserve to be forgiven? Can he ever be trusted now? Can you?

I thought the road trip would give me some perspective, to test Will’s commitment to fixing things, without more words, endless, deceitful words, so slick and slippery. I needed to know he was really sorry. And if I didn’t have clear evidence of that by the end of the trip, well, I had options under consideration.

I don’t mean I’d actually plotted to kill him then. Plot, plan, premeditate are such precise words, pickily implying logic and structure when all I really had were a few ‘contingencies’ at hand. Because it’s dangerous out there in the wilderness, inside the resting jaws of the great unknown, always waiting to snap. Civilisation is flimsy at best and, believe me, you don’t have to go far beyond our well-groomed towns and smartly dressed cities to watch the veneer crack, see the mask slip, the old, dark shape of the beast emerge. You don’t even have to leave your own home, or what’s left of it, to open a rarely used zip pocket, click on an unexpected text, then feel the hairs on your neck rise, your claws slide out, feel yourself changing . . .

Still, when Will and I set out on the first leg of our holiday it was only my usual research that had highlighted how easily people die all the time in North America’s national parks, those vast areas where there are great heights to fall from, things that want to bite and eat you, and places to lose yourself in for ever. All it takes is one misstep; a slip, a trip, a flash of fangs and each can mean disaster when you’re miles from help, out of sight of CCTV with no signal bars on your phone.

That’s what makes it easy to die out there. Makes it easy to kill, too. Believe me, I should know.

Because by then, by the time I lost myself under the vast skies, in the empty spaces, it wasn’t just about Will’s survival, it was about mine and, if you’re honest, that’s usually the most important thing. We’ll fight for that until we’re bloody and breathless, or someone else is, lying open-eyed and broken in the undergrowth or splayed on a hot slab of city paving stone, until the bodies pile up alongside the excuses and you have to admit what you are – no more hiding.

Nothing makes you more honest with yourself than admitting you’re thinking about ways to kill your husband, except perhaps doing it. But as I said, on a flawless June morning, with 1500 miles and four states ahead of us, it wasn’t a plan, it was a possibility.

When we set out from Phoenix, just a sunscreen lick after breakfast, the day was already as hot as a stoked furnace and blinding with poured sunlight. Will was driving, me next to him with a lapful of maps, crisscrossed with the coloured lines and orange blocks of the great state of Arizona. It was his job to remember to stay in the right-hand lane and mine to navigate (alongside the intermittent satnav) through the mountains and deserts materialising through the windscreen after decades in the dreaming, years in the imagining, months in the planning.

If, at that moment, I’d taken a lifestyle photo for one of my magazine features on the ‘Great American Road Trip’, it would have looked perfect, both of us smiling, sunglasses on, the white glare of Will’s Abercrombie shirt flaring in the lens, the gloss of my hair as it streamed behind me, chasing an unspooling ribbon of road.

Imagine the ease and eagerness of our lives, it would have said. Look at Mr and Mrs Taylor, married and loving it. Loving each other, an advert for adventure and lasting partnership. Here we go, laughing, smiling.

And it was almost like that, with the tank full of petrol, steak sandwiches and sparkling water in the icebox, well equipped like all first-world refugees fleeing our inner crisis in comfort. In our backpacks were Nalgene water bottles and vacuum-packed trail mix, wick-away micro fleeces and high-factor sun lotion, mega-strength DEET and antihistamines – charms, talismans for every eventually; as if those things could protect us from what was out there on the backwoods paths or inside the car with us, sharing every mile, licking its lips.

As we snaked northwards through the slow, sandy canyons, it seemed so much more than twenty-four hours since we’d caught a cab from Manhattan to JFK airport then jumped into the bottom left-hand corner of the country to Phoenix. The internal flight had handily chewed up 2144 miles, eight states and thirty-seven hours of drive time so we’d be in no hurry as we gazed down from the rim of the Grand Canyon into the Earth’s biggest hole in the ground, dawdled through the amber dust of the Wild West captured in the red rock spires of every Hollywood cowboy movie and the grit of John Wayne’s clenched jaw.

Later we’d make the long climb into the pine-clad passes of the high Sierras, tipping our hats at El Capitan in Yosemite Valley, before sliding down to Death Valley and home again. It was quite an adventure for two pasty Brits in a hired Japanese car under a Yankee sun, two people from a grey and dreary isle who until a year ago were living under the gloom-banishing electric lights of London and the constant threat of unwrapping an umbrella.

It’s hard to appreciate the size of that land until you’ve driven across it, especially if you’re from a small island that once had an empire and still puffs out its chest like it’s one of the big kids. But when you realise you could fit all of the UK into, say, Arizona’s jacket pocket, and South Wales, where I was born, is just a scrap of handkerchief in that pocket, it makes you appreciate the possibilities that exist, good and bad, the things that can happen if you don’t keep a close grip on yourself. On the road that morning, I suppose Will and I both had our own ideas of what that meant.

As far as he was concerned it was a chance to digitally detox from the stress of New York City and his job, and for us to reconnect, recapture the romance, heal, grow, move on after the affair; you know, all that psychobabble and self-help bullshit people tell each other to give themselves the illusion of control.

I had something else in mind, something more structured – a little road-trip challenge I’d set for him, taking shape as the scenery changed and the safety and structures of everyday reality started to fall away. You could say I was offering him three chances to save his own life, our life together, once and for all. What could be simpler for a man who insisted, so earnestly, that he wanted to make amends than to complete three straightforward tasks:

1. Surprise me with a thoughtful romantic gesture.

2. Be spontaneous and seize a sense of occasion.

3. Stay calm if things go wrong and look after me.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Barely a challenge at all, in fact? Hardly a fatal matter, though I can assure you everything depends on the context. Then everything seems reasonable, like the fact I hadn’t actually told Will he was going to be tested and I hadn’t explained the rules or penalties.

Because it’s not as if we hadn’t had the conversation before, or ones like it, back in our edge-of-Kensington, shoebox flat, rented for half market rate from a minted friend of Will’s mum, the same refrain cropping up every few months across the years of our marriage, usually ending with me in tears of frustration, thinking, Why do you always take me for granted?

We’d had ‘the talk’ again, on those knife-edged winter nights after I’d taken him back, me explaining what he would need to do to make me trust him again. But eventually it’s the unspoken things that matter in a marriage, surely? The instinct. The understanding. The offering.

That can, of course, leave you open to disappointment, and, as we sailed past the fields of tequila-bottle cartoonish cactus, upturned arms saluting our passing, the pressure of a test fail weighed almost as heavily on me as the importance of making the holiday count probably did on him. Because what would it really mean, when the final whistle blew, in Las Vegas, ten days down the road, if the judge’s decision was final, no do-overs or extra time allowed? If it was game over for us? For him?

Honestly, I just didn’t allow myself to think that far ahead, reminding myself I could still call an end to it all, the journey, the challenge, our eight-year marriage at any minute if I wanted to. It didn’t have to mean anything that, statistically, the most common cause of death in US national parks is drowning, closely followed by fatal motor vehicle crashes, then falls and slips.

So what if my online preparations (for the tourist travel tips box in the feature I’d planned) revealed that around 160 people end up with these banal explanations on their death certificates every year, these almost no-one-at-fault, no-one-to-blame explanations in the box for accidental deaths, alongside a few extra for dehydration, exposure and wildlife attacks? It didn’t have to mean anything. It wasn’t a sign, a nod from the universe, a suggestion of any sort.

My own contingency plan was vague at that stage, merely something that had bubbled into being during the hazy, heart-sick hours I’d spent that winter, watching black and white films, slumped on the sofa, chugging bourbon from the bottle, crying myself to sleep. Until the very last second, in the rain, in the storm, it was only a fantasy to occupy my thoughts on those long, furtive night-walks I’d started taking through a frost-twinkled New York City, my face concealed, watching from street corners, peering in through lit windows, imagining, wondering, longing . . .

. . . imagining the sound a fist makes against bone . . .

. . . wishing I knew how to obtain a gun in the nation that loves its right to bear arms . . .

. . . longing for certainty so clean and decisive there’d be no more hoping for the best while fearing the worst – in other words no going back.

I suppose the idea, which later shaped itself into the ultimate ultimatum, was simply a way to gain some control again, because I’d had none while Will had chosen to wreck our lives, strafe through memories, explode promises, sniper-shoot my trust straight in the forehead. Will and his dick – his early midlife-crisis dick, nothing more original than that.

For a while, the rage that triggered had staggered me like nothing I’d ever felt before, that red-black, bloody taste of something primal bubbling up in my mouth, ears ringing with blood – except for maybe that one time, long ago, when I’d had the first taste of it, when James Scott had laughed at me and Natalie Lewis had been alone for once, crying . . . and I . . .

Either way, that feeling hadn’t been at home in a school uniform on a warm June afternoon, nor, much later, in a silk blouse and spike heels in a smart New York hotel. But, honestly, it was under control as Will and I whizzed past the freeway signs for Camp Verde and Sedona, towards the desert rail hub of Flagstaff, turning north-west towards our new start.

Racing along the blacktop, the cares and sorrows of the months finally starting to recede before the elemental size of the land’s memory, Will seemed to catch some of my thoughts. Reaching over, placing his hand on the back of my neck, he smiled tightly, swallowing before saying, ‘I’m really glad we’re doing this, Liv. I’m so glad you’re giving me the chance to make everything right. This is a new start for us. I can never make up for what I’ve done but I’m going to try. I promise you that. I love you.’

‘Me too,’ I smiled back, taking his hand and squeezing it, refusing to give in to the familiar shock of friction, the treacherous spark that did not mean I knew him. That I never had. He didn’t know me either, what I’d done in the city that winter. What I would do very soon – standing over that ravine, wind whipping my hair, clenching my jaw and my fists, feeling my feet moving forward of their own accord, one, two, one, two . . . one two three . . .

But no one could’ve known that, as I pointed out the turnoff sliding us north-east towards Utah, Will indicating right and grinning, ‘Next stop Monument Valley. Cowboy country here we come. The Taylor wagon train is coming into town.’

Though, when we found ourselves still wheeling through the emptiness two hours later, with only the occasional green bubble of grass and stream in the expanse of dry, baked world, I gained a new respect for those first Americans who wet their toes at Plymouth Rock, pulled on their boots and pointed their wagons west.

Because we’re all pioneers, aren’t we? When we start out, when we say I do on our wedding day, when we break new ground. We set up a homestead, build fences, try to keep close to the fire where it’s safe. Except, watching the buzzards circling idly over the tombstone-like landscape, the bleached skull of a horse at the edge of the blacktop, I knew it wasn’t safe. Nothing ever is.

When we finally pulled up in Monument Valley just before 6 p.m., tired and hungry, there was indeed danger to life and limb but for a far more prosaic reason than I’d expected. After five and a half hours on the road, I was looking forward to some quiet time with Will, admiring those famous buttes and ‘Mittens’ that greeted us from the hotel terrace, immortalised by John Ford in widescreen.

With their red-rock fingers pressed into the sky, thumbs tucked at their sides, the scene was achingly Instagrammable, and, to me, instantly recognisable from an issue in my collection of much-thumbed National Geographics (page 39, Navajo man in profile, facing Mittens, sunset filter). But why hadn’t it occurred to me that, at a hotel with the ringside seat to one of the most photographed vistas in the world, everyone else would have the same idea?

Overdressed, overloud, over-enthusiastic members of every race on earth swarmed the terrace and spacious gift gallery, wielding backpack battering rams, extremities weighted like pack horses with cameras, video recorders and newly purchased Navajo string ties, turquoise silver earrings and windcatcher trinkets.

Every corner seemed crammed with canoodling honeymooners, grinning anniversary markers and boisterous big-birthday celebrators, jostling each other for the perfect Facebook update or bucket list fist-bump, elbows flying everywhere.

When Will and I headed outside for the nightly sunset, after sampling some Navajo fry-bread and other specialities in the crammed restaurant, in the name of research, there was even less privacy, the atmosphere resembling a rock concert with everyone popping their earbuds in and out, tapping their glimmering phone screens, sighing at the poor signal, then clicking and snapping with camera apps.

‘Come on. Let’s find somewhere quieter,’ said Will patiently, no doubt seeing a homicidal look in my eye as I was almost blinded by yet another poking selfie stick. Leading me away from the throng he settled us into an armchair nook of red rock a few minutes’ scramble away.

‘This is much better,’ he sighed, once I was safely ringed in his arms, head resting back against his chest. ‘It reminds me of that night up on Pen y Fan? The night we stayed up to watch the Perseid meteor shower? Remember? How we watched all night.’ As if I could forget that magical evening on the Brecon Beacons, snug as a bug inside one of his expensive coats, staring at the lightshow of the Milky Way as the sky dripped stars just for us.

I’d always been able to breathe up there, really breathe, never so happy as on the days the mist came down like a bedsheet, visibility vanishing save for my boots on the path until the whiteness parted to reveal a valley of tarn and field, of dazzling blue and white light. To my disgust, when we’d first met, Will, a border child from Monmouth, where much of the accent and affluence is English, had never visited our breath-taking national park, but he’d happily embraced the knee-breaking, lung-busting climbs I’d shown him after we began dating.

He was always happy for me to lead the way, map in hand, until it was time for his favourite part, making tea for us with his little backpack boiler and breaking out the chocolate biscuits.

I knew why he’d mentioned the meteor shower that night, halfway across the world under those unfamiliar Utah stars. That was the night he’d proposed, on a spur of the moment urge – no ring, that came later – and I knew he was trying to use the memory as a bandage, to close the hole he’d slashed open inside me with his infidelity. I suppose it could have counted as his first ‘pass’ of the road-trip test, as he kissed my neck, qualifying as a sort of romantic gesture, but it was too soon, too slight to count, the words ringing hollow like exposed bones, even as we were wound in each other’s arms, the very image of a happy couple.

Because we weren’t a couple by then, or at least, not the same couple we had been, not even as Will said, ‘I love you even more now than I did then, and I never thought that would be possible, Liv,’ because I was a stranger in his arms and a stranger was placing his lips on my cheek, warm against the chill that pulsed under my skin. Because, for a long time, I hadn’t felt like his wife, the older version of that Geography student who’d twisted her ankle hauling a hired kayak out of the lazy River Wye more than a decade before, grateful for the help of a tousle-haired instructor with a mellow, posh voice and strong hands.

As the fluttering bands of pink and coral competed over the monumental buttes I tried not to think about how grateful I’d been that day, mesmerised as Will’s capable fingers worked the joint under my sock, applying an efficient crepe wrap, as he said, ‘Hope to see you again,’ helping me hobble back to the university minibus, eager to explain, ‘This isn’t my day job. I’m actually a Business student in Bristol but I’m here every Saturday. Ask for William.’

Then, seven days later, I’d limped back, knowing that, though we were clearly a world apart, from very different backgrounds, it was irrelevant because Will didn’t know what that meant or why it mattered. How could it? When Will had never known the girl who’d existed in Cardiff before that day, the one who’d never shown him her childhood home before they’d pulled it down, just as he didn’t know the woman in his arms, shivering at the inky chill of the darkening desert.

On that first proper night of our road trip, he couldn’t know I’d already sat inches away from the redheaded whore he’d betrayed me with. That for months, unseen, unspeaking, I’d assessed every stitch of her designer suits and expensive shoes, listened to her greeting clients, arranging dinners, always conscious of how I looked and sounded by comparison, how short I fell in ways that shouldn’t have mattered. Had never mattered until then.

That’s one of the reasons I hated her so much, I think, when I first found out who she was, with her sharp bob and young, fat-free figure. A size 4 nightmare made even worse by the fact she was the not-quite-me I’d wanted to be, could have been . . . almost . . . if only . . .

There’s a green-eyed monster in us all, isn’t there? Other monsters too, patient and lean, and inside me was one that had already visualised scratching out the eyes of the bitch-slut who’d stolen my husband, living in the city of my dreams with the lifestyle of my fantasies, every day rubbing my face in the fact that, because I didn’t have a wealthy daddy like Will to introduce me to ‘some business friends with a new venture’, I couldn’t get interviews for staff-writer posts ahead of the rest, couldn’t move on up with a nod and a wink. That, while freelancing for travel magazines, I’d still had to work three days a week in a travel agents for a decade to bump up my salary, still chasing those glossy, high-end commissions.

Since arriving in the USA I hadn’t been able to work at all, as Will’s spouse, under the terms of his visa, so officially I was taking a ‘career break’, writing the travel book I’d wanted to for years, a guide for Millennials who want to get off the package circuit but think Airbnb is a terrifying prospect. But it was slow going, making new contacts, sending out introductions, earning no money of my own for the first time since I was sixteen.

Then there she was, that bimbo whore, ‘Senior PR Executive’ at twenty-six years old, for fuck’s sake, in her kitten heels, with her Louis Vuitton bag and Chanel slip dress, dashing from elegant hotel lobby to uptown meeting while I laboured at my laptop in $15 leggings. That’s why I’d watched her night after night since Christmas, inhaling her bubbly, flirty ease and unmistakable smell of privilege, of being ‘the right sort’ who has doors opened for them with a nod of the head, before visualising that head exploding from a shotgun blast, imagining how the click would feel when I pulled the trigger.

Despite the romantic, star-strewn setting of our Utah sunset, it was her I was thinking about when the sun dipped in the west, wondering if she was following her usual Monday-night routine at Ashtanga Yoga; wondering if she knew what she’d done to us, to the people me and Will had once been, to the life she’d slaughtered simply by removing her lacy pink panties.

Did she realise she was always there with us? Perched inside my chest, claws in soft tissue, even as I sat curled under Will’s arm in the rocky niche, the Mittens blending red then black into the inky dark? Did she know Will and I would never really be alone again no matter where we lived, how far we drove, how many vacations we took?

As the sun finally disappeared the thought made me long for a quick, hot slug of Jack Daniel’s to at least blur her from the front of my mind. Because by then I’d come to want my bourbon tranquilliser far too often, certainly more than was good for me. I needed it to help smooth the edges of the afternoons, grinding like broken glass across the approach of each evening, to help me bear the fact I was torn and bloody inside, a monster stitched back together with fraying promises, regretting the fact that the Navajo reservation is legally as dry as the monumental valley inside it.

As the three of us climbed into bed that night, in our ‘stargazer’ room on the top floor, it felt crowded in the silence, under the sudden weight of the desert chill. She took up a lot of space for someone so skinny. She filled the bed and the inches between my body and Will’s; I felt her warm breath on my neck. At least, at that moment, I was pretty sure it was her breath – I knew something was there in the room with us. But it was something older, something darker, something waiting. We were officially at the end of day one and it didn’t have long to wait.

How different it had been for me a year before, so hopeful, so guileless that I don’t remember swallowing a single qualm on the day we checked into Heathrow’s Terminal 5 for international departures. Will had been promoted to ‘events and client manager’ at last, our bags were packed and the London flat emptied. The next stop was the Big Apple and I’d never been so ready and eager to take a greedy bite.

Approaching the shimmering city that first day, in the chauffeur-driven car, the Statue of Liberty, Empire State and Chrysler buildings reared up like the opening credits of our own movie, filled with the cinematic promise of the New World. We’d been offered the use of a company apartment by Will’s new employer, Piper-Dewey, for twelve months, so we could actually live in Manhattan while bypassing its sky-high real estate rates, and, u. . .