Ryan was feeling her neck for a pulse. He reached over, grabbed my shoulder. “Stop, Toni. She’s dead. We’ve gotta get help.”
Dead. The word stole the breath from my lungs. I focused in on his face, my teeth chattering, gasping for air.
He said, “You have to calm down.” But his face was white and terrified, his voice also high and strangled.
“She can’t be dead.” I said it as a plea, begging.
He stood up. “Let’s go.” He grabbed my arm, tried to pull me up.
I leaned over my sister, pressed my face to her cold chest as I sobbed, “No, no. Oh, God, I’m so sorry.” I clutched one of her hands, noticed that a fingernail was torn off. “Nicole, wake up, please wake up.” I pulled at her hand uselessly, trying to tug her back into this world.
Ryan knelt beside me. He was also crying. His voice cracking as he said, “We’ve got to go, Toni.”
“I can’t leave her. I can’t.”
“We don’t know who hurt her—they could still be out here.”
I shook my head. “I’m not going.”
He lifted me up under my arms while I fought, biting and kicking. He dragged me to the truck, threw me inside. He backed out in a spray of gravel, shooting down the road. I barely registered that the other partiers were gone, the broad expanse of dark highway, the yellow line, the smell of stale pot and booze and lake water and fear rolling off of us. Ryan turned on the heat but I couldn’t stop shaking, couldn’t stop crying.
Then we were at the police station. The harsh neon lights blinding. An officer was walking to his patrol car. Ryan and I got out. I collapsed onto the pavement, screaming that my sister needed help. Ryan was trying to explain what happened, but the cop was staring at his truck. I looked back and saw the bloody hand print smeared down the side. Like someone had been trying to get back in.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CAMPBELL RIVER
MAY 2013
I woke late, unsure of what to do with my day off. I’d told Mike I’d work an extra shift if he needed me—it was starting to get busy now that it was the middle of May and the tourists were coming—but he gave me hell, told me I needed a life. We both knew that since I left the halfway house, the restaurant was my life. I’d be forever grateful to him for giving me my job back. Sure, I had to work in the kitchen now, not up front where the diners could whisper and speculate about the woman who had killed her sister. But I preferred the noise of the kitchen anyway. Besides, a job was a job and when you have a record like mine, work was pretty hard to come by.
Captain, my gray-brindle pit bull, was still in my bed. The lazy-ass would sleep all morning if I let him, but I didn’t care. He was the best thing that had happened to me in a long time. Since I moved back I’d been helping at the shelter, walking the dogs. The shelter staff was glad for the assistance—they didn’t give a crap about my past. The manager, Stephanie, was a tough broad, somewhere in her late forties, lots of tattoos and piercings. We hit it off right away. She didn’t ask any questions; we just talked about the dogs. One day this sad-looking pit bull came in. He’d been beaten up and dragged behind a truck. They weren’t sure what to do with him, figured he’d have a hard time getting adopted because of his scars and mangled ears from a home cropping job—if I ever found out who did it, I’d return the favor. I took him home that day. He loves living on the boat. It’s just an old sailboat, not seaworthy anymore, but it was the first time I had a place of my own and I’d slowly been buying things for it, new curtains, covers for the cushions, a small microwave.
I took Captain off the boat and up the wharf for his morning constitutional. On the way we greeted a few people who were down on the docks, preparing for the day. They were used to me by now, but I was sure they had their suspicions and probably talked about me when I wasn’t around. After Captain was finished, I brewed some coffee and cleaned the boat, which didn’t take long. I sat on my upper deck for a bit, enjoying the sway of the boat, watching the gulls circle overhead, Captain sprawled out on the warm surface. I still couldn’t get used to how incredible the salt air smelled. It had been the first thing I noticed when the bus, which I’d taken up from Victoria, pulled into town. I wanted to run from window to window and suck it all in.