The next time I opened my eyes, I was in a moving ambulance. Wheeler sat across from me, his face blackened from smoke and his eyes red as two raw bullet holes. He looked like a coal miner who’d been trapped underground for a few days. But he was alive, and appeared to be unhurt.
I tried to sit up, but I was strapped to a gurney with an IV needle stuck in my wrist, connected to a bag of blood on a stand.
“Lie still,” Wheeler said, touching my forehead. “You’ve lost a lot of blood.”
“H-how?” I said, my voice a dry croak. “How did you…find me?”
“Blitz,” Wheeler said. “It was a good call bringing him. He found me at the cottage and barked his head off until the fire department and the cops arrived. Then he led everyone to the sanctuary and you.”
I nodded. “Told you not to…sell him short. Or you.” I touched his hand. “Wheeler, I need you—” I coughed. Paused to swallow, wet my sand trap of a throat. “I need you to…find my coat.”
“Your coat?”
I nodded. “Body camera. Gemma…she confessed.”
His eyes widened. He began to search around the back of the ambulance until one of the paramedics turned around and asked testily, “What do you need, sir?”
“Just looking for her coat.”
“It’s in a box under the bench.”
Wheeler fished around under the bench until he found it. He held it up. It was soaked in blood.
“The left pocket.” I lowered my voice so the paramedics wouldn’t overhear. “Give it to the sheriff, but not until you’ve downloaded the footage onto my laptop.”
* * *
Stone’s Throw was too small to have its own hospital, so I was taken to the nearest medical center thirty miles away. An emergency room surgeon dug the bullet out of my shoulder, and an intern with a semi-steady hand stitched up the lacerations on my face and leg. I would have scars.
Hydrocodone was my best friend the following day, when I woke in a dim room with curtains pulled over the window.
A foggy blur of a man sat in a chair in the corner of the room. I blinked at him a few times before my eyes cleared, and the blur became Sheriff Lot. Seeing my eyes open, he stood and came to the side of the bed. He offered me a sip of water from an insulated mug with a plastic straw protruding from the top. I attempted to sit up, but fell back at a roar of pain from my shoulder. I hissed through my teeth, but batted the sheriff’s hands away when he tried to help me.
“I can do it.” My lips were parched. I tried to moisten them, but my tongue was about as useful as a strip of Styrofoam. I used my good arm to take the mug from Lot and continued to sip at the water until I could speak without sounding like a throat cancer survivor.
“So,” I said, eyeing the sheriff, who waited with his arms crossed over his chest, never taking his eyes off me. “Did I earn my paycheck?”
“Yours and mine both,” the sheriff said drily.
“I accept PayPal.”
“Hilarious. Do you mind if I open the curtains?”
He didn’t wait for my answer before parting them. I squinted in the light, but I didn’t mind the sudden onslaught of brightness. I’d been in the dark long enough.
I remembered every word of what Gemma told me before I shot her with the tranquilizer dart. I thought her admission might jog my actual memories, but I still couldn’t remember anything. Not her phone call. Not her friends who’d set a trap for me. Not the crash. Nothing.
Nothing but green eyes without a face to go with them.
Miranda was dead. At least now I knew. I still had unanswered questions in regard to her death (Where was her body? What were the names of Gemma’s friends, the ones who’d done the actual killing? Where were they now, and how would I make them pay for what they’d done?), but the most important question had been resolved. And I’d been right about Gemma all along. That truth was less satisfying than I had expected it to be. Knowing my sister had conspired to destroy my career and had, in the process, gotten Miranda killed would take some processing.
Lot leaned against the wall by the window. His skin looked looser today, like it no longer fit him. The sag of his cheeks made his acne scars appear deeper, but he was still handsome in that Marlboro Man way that had never appealed to me. Maybe it was time to try something new, though. Be a new me. Not Olivia Hill and not Liv Hendricks. Someone else entirely. I could feel her taking shape inside me already.
“Did Wheeler give you the footage from my body camera?” I asked.
“He did indeed.”
I took in a huge breath that expanded my chest and hurt my wounded shoulder. But I could handle physical pain. It was the emotional variety I’d never been good with.
“Where’s Gemma?” I asked.
“Here in the hospital,” Lot said. “Recovering. The stump of her toe was badly infected. She had sepsis, and she lost the eye you shot her in. I don’t know if that’s what you were aiming for, but you hit the bull’s-eye. Literally. The tip went dead center into her pupil.”
This news should have brought vindication, but I only felt remorse. Not for Gemma’s eye. She deserved worse than the loss of her peripheral vision. What I regretted was that I had relinquished who I was and become her, the irresponsible, self-indulgent train wreck, and that gave her the freedom to become me. Maybe the universe demanded that kind of balance. Or maybe we were just a couple of fucked-up ladies raised inside a fucked-up system. When it came down to it, Gemma was a hollow girl just like me. A series of masks and facades and archetypes and clichés we had embodied more often than we had been ourselves, for so many years that there was no self anymore. Our identities had never belonged to us. I had never been who I thought I was, and neither had she.
We’d never truly been sisters. We’d only played them on TV.
“You okay?” Lot asked.
“Pretty far from it, if you want the truth.”
“That’s understandable.”
“Is my mom here?”
“She and her lawyer are keeping your sister company now.”
“What about Helene?”
The sheriff’s mouth compressed to a tight, straight dash. No doubt he was feeling a measure of embarrassment that I had done what he couldn’t, found someone who was at least tangentially involved in the Dark Road disappearances. But I’d also been left a trail of bread crumbs to lead me in the right direction. I’d had help from @AnnikaKron.
“Helene we arrested. We released Jonas Kron. He told me to tell you thank you, by the way. He’ll probably offer you a part in his next film to show you his gratitude.”
I said nothing. I’d lived a Jonas Kron film over the last three days. I felt like I was still living it. Unresolved plot threads remained…
“Did you arrest Gemma?” I asked.
“We will,” he said. “I’m not sure when or for what. We still don’t know exactly what she did, and she’s not talking. Right now her lawyer has her on lockdown. No one but her doctors and I have access to her. But I can tell you she’s not answering questions about anything, not just the stuff she said to you last night. She won’t talk about her abduction either.”
“Because it was fake. She was never abducted.”
“I know that, but she claims everything she confessed just before you shot her was caused by her fever, that she was delusional and doesn’t remember saying any of it.”
“She’s lying.”
“The Internet agrees with you.”
“What do you…” I trailed off, remembering vaguely what I’d asked Wheeler to do before he handed my body camera footage over to the police.
“Your friend Chris Wheeler had a busy night,” Lot said. “Your sister’s lawyer has demanded the video he posted be taken down, but it’s already viral. Even some national news channels have picked it up.”
“What about Niklas and Anders?” I asked. “How are they doing?”
“Considering they just found out Helene was renting out the wolf sanctuary for illegal activities, I would say they’re doing exactly as you’d expect.”
“Do you know yet what went on there? How much did she tell you? Did you find out who was paying her?”
He shook his head. “We don’t know much yet because, if she’s to be believed, she doesn’t actually know much. The donations were made through a shadow corporation. She says her only contact with the person who paid her was through Kronophile chat rooms, where he went by the screen name WolfKing18. But we don’t have the—”
“Did you say WolfKing18?”
He nodded. “Does that mean something to you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I shook my head. “I’ll let you know when I figure it out. What else have you got?”
He hesitated. “I shouldn’t tell you. It hasn’t been made public yet.”
“You owe me, Clarice. I handed you a really big quid.”
He sighed. “I’m swearing you to secrecy here. If you tell anyone or use this on your series—”
“I won’t. Trust me. The series is done.”
Something in my tone must have convinced him, because he took a breath, wiping his fingers over his eyes. “It’s starting to look like the previous sheriff had dealings with the Wolf King, too. One of the things Helene did tell us was that this Wolf King assured her she would have no problems with local law enforcement.”
“Jesus. You’re starting to look like a real saint. Did anyone ever try to buy you off?”
“Only you.”
“I did not.”
“You kind of did.”
“Whatever.” I waved a hand at him, a gesture that was not worth the pain it caused in my shoulder.
Lot glanced at the clock and began to edge toward the door. “Look, there’s still plenty we don’t know, but eventually we’ll sort this mess out. I’ll update you again when I can.”
“You don’t need to take my statement?” I asked.
“Your statement is all over the Internet,” he said. “Get some rest, Liv. I’ll go pick up whatever scraps you left for me.”
* * *
I turned on the TV mounted across the wall from my hospital bed and flipped through the news stations, watched as my footage was broadcast for the entire country to see. I muted the volume and used my room phone to call the Eden Tree. I asked for Chris Wheeler’s room, but the phone rang without answer. I hung up, figuring Wheeler was sleeping. He’d had a long night, too.
I turned off the TV and closed my eyes, fatigue settling on me like a fog. I didn’t mean to fall asleep, but it didn’t seem I had a choice. My body insisted.
I woke up when a nurse came to check my bandages and give me another dose of pain medication.
“You had a visitor while you were out,” she said. “Porter Morrison. I told him you needed to rest. He left this for you.” The nurse patted a white envelope lying on the nightstand. My name was written on the front.
I opened the envelope. Inside was a single ticket to a special-event film screening at the Stone’s Throw Film Festival. The title of the film was Girl on a Dark Road.