Ain’t Gonna Drown (Now)
I THOUGHT IT’D BE quiet out here.
The quiet’s only a background that ends up amplifying everything else, all the chirps and rustles and howls.
It’s the perfect place to go missing because all the things that makes noise, that cover up what happened, can’t say a goddamn thing about what they saw. A million eyes, and not one voice; surrounded by so much life, yet still all alone.
I go through Cora’s closet first.
Hunter goes back to working outside without so much as a fuck you as soon as we get back to the house. She, too, seemed to have revealed too much on our little trip into town.
“Can’t catch what you’ve already got.”
I exhale, pulling Cora’s closet open wide. Summer clothes are hanging, her heavier winter coats and boots stored down below in big gray bins on the floor. Flannels and jeans, probably a nearly identical set to what Hunter’s got hanging up in hers. Most of the hangers are full, so she didn’t pack a bag, at least not one for a long trip.
Everything looks fine in the bathroom: a bar of soap, a razor, bottles of shampoo and conditioner. There’s some moisturizer on the counter, though when I spin open the lid, it’s nearly full.
The room itself is immaculate. The bed is made. The desk is tidy. No boots thrown near the bed, no towels slung over the door. Nothing to suggest she left in a hurry, but nothing to suggest she was forced out either.
The surface is telling me nothing. So it’s time to go deeper.
I pull out all the drawers from the dresser, drop their contents all over the floor. Nothing of interest falls out among the underwear, the bras, and the socks; and the drawers in her desk and the one in her nightstand are similarly of no help.
There are no compartments in the floor, no lines in the ceiling to signal any paneling. Her closet holds nothing but clothes and shoes. I rip the blankets and the sheets from the bed, to no avail.
The room is spinning when I’m done, my chest heaving from exertion and frustration.
There’s … nothing. It feels sterile, like you couldn’t even tell who was living here. No secrets hidden among the cobwebs and the dead moths. Nothing.
I scrub my hands down my face. Another waste of time, like so much of my time spent here has been, and I’m no closer to finding Cora than I was the morning Hunter called. Even though I’ve been here less than twenty-four hours, I’m already behind the eight ball. I need to find something—anything—that’ll send me in the right direction.
I’m standing, moving toward the door, ready to declare this another dead end, when I see it. Perched on the corner of her desk in a tiny black frame: a photo of Cora and me from the last time I was here.
My legs close the distance between the desk and me. I pick up the frame, ignoring the way my hands are shaking just a touch.
Eight years ago, but it seems so much longer. My arms wrapped around her neck, the big smile on her face.
Lies. All of it. Because she ruined it.
I flip it over. On the back, taped to the right-hand corner, is a key.
“You know what this goes to?”
Hunter wipes sweat from her brow, picking up the long barrel of wire next to her. The sun’s starting to slip away into the night, the wind brushing by us. It was hot this morning, but the temperature has cooled considerably. “What?” she demands.
I thrust the key in her direction. “This. Do you know what it goes to?”
Her eyes narrow as she stands, studying the key. “Where’d you find that?”
“In Cora’s room, taped to the back of a photo of the two of us.”
She takes it, and I try to ignore the rough feeling of her gloves against my bare skin. She turns it over, passing it between her hands. “No,” she says, giving it back. “I ain’t never seen anything like that.”
The key is so small it nearly disappears into my hand. It’s gold, with a tiny C carved into the top of it. Cora, maybe, or Cole. It’d be so easy to lose, to slip through your fingers and be lost out here in the grass and the dirt.
Hunter scratches the back of her neck. “That all you wanted?”
My eyes move to what she’s working on. Fixing the barbed-wire fence on the east side of the property, it looks like. The tension between us hasn’t dissipated any either. I wonder if she’s waiting for me to bring up this afternoon, to acknowledge what she said. At this point, I don’t even know the truth about who I am, so how could I possibly try to explain it to Hunter?
“That’s all,” I tell her as I tuck the key into the back pocket of my jeans.
“Alright,” she replies, kneeling back down. “I’m gonna get back to work, if that’s alright with you.”
“Do you need help?”
We both freeze in disbelief. Why in the hell would I ask that? Why would I offer this woman, of all people, help? I should start looking into what this key could open, not volunteer to help with manual labor. Fixing fences certainly isn’t on my list of investigative chores.
Hunter Lemming should mean nothing to me. But she knows my aunt better than I do; she’s the one who’s gotten all the pieces of Cora that I’ve missed out on. The pieces I used to get. The pieces I’ll never get again if I don’t find her.
Hunter is rude and smart and honest. She looks at me like I’m on the top, middle, and bottom of her shit list. She’s told me I’m a terrible person, and it only makes me want to ask in earnest, How do you know?
Finally, Hunter drops her head toward her lap, letting out a short laugh. “Do you have any sorta idea how to do this?”
Heat rises to my cheeks. I have some memory of this chore, but eight years have damped down the finer points. “Obviously not,” I snap. “I’m just a stuck-up city girl, remember?”
She looks up at me from her knees, and a shiver goes down my spine. “Go back inside,” she says, her mind obviously not in the same place as mine.
“You give me shit for not knowing how to do any country-folk things, and now when I’m trying to help you out, you want to send me away? Seems a bit hypocritical of you.”
She rises, takes off her worn gloves, then hands them over. “Have at it.”
The gloves are still warm from her hands as I slip them on, then take a spot in front of the fence. I stare at the hole, then the bundle of wire next to my right knee.
“Alright,” she says. When I look over, Hunter’s kneeling, one arm extended as she points toward the fence. “I already took the barbs off for you, and the first sleeve’s on there right.” She reaches back and around me to grab for something else. Her now-bare hand brushes against my side, and I pretend I don’t notice the contact. “Can’t catch what you’ve already got.”
“Clamp this down around the sleeve,” she says, handing me a large, jawed tool that looks a bit like a pair of pliers. “This is the crimper.”
I do as she says, clamping the tool over the small, bead-like fixture on the line of wire. I press the handles together, and the sleeve wraps tighter around the wire. A memory comes into focus, of Cora’s hands wrapped around mine when I was too small and weak to do this by myself. Every time we’d finish a section, she’d stand, wipe the sweat from her brow, and smile at me, her stamp of approval.
Now, I can do this and everything else by myself. And the days of wanting approval are long gone—just, it seems, like the woman whose approval I used to crave the most.
“Harder than that,” Hunter instructs, dragging me out of my head.
Please. I blow out a breath, then bring the handles together once again.
“Good,” she says. “Now you’re gonna separate the wires there and wrap ’em around the sleeve.”
Pulling the wires apart is easy, but it’s slower going trying to get them all wrapped back together. While I’m trying to finish, Hunter clears her throat. “You gonna tell me why you’ve taken a sudden interest in ranch chores?”
Shaking my head, I focus on wrapping the wire. “It’s a good idea for me to get into Cora’s headspace, do the things she would do, put myself in her shoes. Plus it’s a good distraction.”
“What do you need a distraction from?”
My missing aunt. What you said in the truck. The way I want to trail my mouth after the drops of sweat that are rolling down your neck. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s not like anything traumatizing has happened within the past couple of days.”
She presses her lips together. “Harder” is all she says.
I exhale. “Alright. If you were Cora, where would you have disappeared to?”
“Nowhere,” she replies almost before I’ve even gotten the entirety of the question out. “I already told you that Cora wouldn’t have left without tellin’ anyone. She doesn’t own any other property, doesn’t have any family that she visits. She’s here every single day of the year.”
“So you’re assuming she was taken, then?”
“Yes.”
“She drive a car?”
“A truck, yeah.”
“Where is it?”
“… Not here.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Okay, strike against the kidnapping theory.”
“I knew her,” she growls. “I know her better than anyone else. When I say she didn’t run away, I mean it.”
A beat. Then I add, “Better than I did.”
Her eyebrows pull down. “What?”
“What you meant to say is you know her better than I did.”
She blinks, then opens her mouth to say something, but I don’t let her. “Who in her life would’ve wanted to hurt her?”
Hunter hesitates, then tries to make it seem like she didn’t. The action is small, but I’ve been trained in this language. The way people hide and dip and shirk away when you ask the wrong question or, rather, the right one. “No one,” she says.
“Lie.”
“No one,” she repeats, shifting away from me.
“Do you want to find her or not?”
“Stop askin’ me that.”
“Then stop giving me reasons to.”
“God, you think …” She trails off, shakes her head.
“Say it, Cowgirl.”
“You think you know everything!” she exclaims. “You think everything is so small and simple here—that you’re gonna snap your fingers and find Cora hidin’ in some corner. I already answered these questions from the police two weeks ago, and they’ve come up with nothin’. What makes you think—”
“The police are idiots.”
“Oh, here we go—”
“And in a town this size, severely ill-equipped to deal with a missing persons case. Me, on the other hand? I’ve been assisting a private investigator for the past six years in one of the biggest cities in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve seen all kinds of crimes and people and motives and have far more experience at twenty-two with this type of case than whatever idiot is running the police force in town. I hate to break it to you, but our best bet of bringing my aunt home is me. It’s only gonna work if you start being honest with me and tell me what I need to know.
“That’s not me knowing everything,” I continue before she can accuse me of being overconfident or arrogant. “That’s me being incredibly capable and good at what I’ve been taught to do.”
The silence stretches between us as I finish my task, my hands cramping and aching, but I don’t complain. After a few moments, Hunter hands over a small pair of shears. “Clip the ends. Then we’ll move on to the next one.”
“What happened to the fence?” I ask.
“Storm probably knocked it down; happens. Gotta fix it quick or else the cows’ll get out.”
“Cows?”
“You do know this is a cattle ranch, right?”
“Of course,” I reply, not completely truthful.
She looks at me with clear distain. “We’ve got twenty-seven of ’em right now. Right before Cora went missing, some gal named Lindsay, from the bank, came down and counted ’em all up for us.”
“She counted your cows? Is that a Wyoming-style euphemism?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
I rub at my forehead with the back of my gloved hand. “Of course not.”
We keep moving down the fence line, patching holes, me doing the work, Hunter only speaking to offer instructions or advice. Sweat starts to drip down the back of my neck as I work, the time ticking by as the sun starts to fade entirely.
“Alright,” Hunter says eventually, my mind too lost in the monotony of fence fixing to register how many hours have gone by. “That’ll be enough for today. Time for dinner.”
We gather all the tools and supplies. I follow her back toward the main house, to the tool shed that’s set off to the side.
There’s some strange, tentative part of me that likes this: working outside, seeing the instant results of my energy, the dust clinging to my palms and under my nails. That part of me isn’t new; it’s just been lying dormant for the past eight years. I loved coming out here and seeing Cora, but I also loved helping her with chores, working alongside the sun as it gave way to the moon. It was in those moments that I understood my aunt the most: why she gave up something she was so passionate about to run a ranch that was barely earning enough money to break even.
“If there were people who wanted to hurt her—and I’m not sayin’ there were—she had it under control,” Hunter suddenly offers as we step into the shed. It’s small but crammed full, yet still somehow remarkably organized: tools hang on metal shelves above a small workbench, which is covered in neat stacks of paper on one side, and larger power tools on the other.
I hand my items to her, one at a time, watching as Hunter meticulously puts them away. The line of her body is strong and hard, but smooth. She’s a well-oiled machine moving cohesively, every twitch of every muscle purposeful.
“And what if she didn’t?” I ask carefully, even as alarm bells are going off in my head.
“She did,” Hunter replies. “I know that for a fact. This isn’t even worth talkin’ about.”
I hand her the last of the tools. “Why don’t you tell me and then let me decide if it’s important or not?”
Something incredibly odd happens after that: Hunter smiles. It’s so unexpected I nearly lose my balance. But what a sight it is: white teeth against tan skin streaked with dirt and dust and sweat.
For a moment, I consider closing the distance between us, backing her up until she has no choice but to perch her ass on the workbench. That wouldn’t work, though—she wouldn’t give up ground so easily. Or maybe she would if she knew what I’d do to her in exchange for her giving me an inch to run with.
Hunter clears her throat, her eyes dropping to the floor as she rocks back on her heels. I wonder if, in the safety and privacy of this tiny shed on this sprawling ranch, similar thoughts had found their way into her head too. “Good work today, Princess.”
“Good enough to get me one of those little hats for my own?”
As if on instinct, she reaches up to touch her hat, then stops halfway. “No,” she replies, not even considering it. “You gotta earn one of these.”
I take a step closer. “What’d you do to get yours, then?”
There’s warning in her gaze when she looks up at me. This too must be personal—something connected to Cora or her family. “I earned it” is all she says, voice gruff.
With one more step, I’m standing nearly on her toes, sharing the same air. I was right: she gives no ground, makes no concessions. I raise my hand, aiming to skim the brim of her hat with the tips of my fingers, but she moves so fast it makes me dizzy. My hand is snared in her grip, hovering near her cheek, the heat from our palms searing into my knuckles.
“You don’t touch another woman’s hat,” she all but growls.
Her grip doesn’t loosen any, and I don’t mind. “What can I touch, then?” I ask.
A muscle in her jaw jumps. “You can keep your hands to yourself is what you can do.”
“That doesn’t sound fun at all.”
“You’re not here for fun,” she snaps. “You’re here to find Cora.”
“Did it occur to you I could do both?”
She finally lets go of my hand. “I ain’t an idiot,” she says brusquely, her cheeks starting to redden. “I know what you’re suggestin’. And I ain’t interested.”
My eyes widen in mock surprise. “I was thinking that we could go get ice cream and paint our nails. But please, do tell: What are you so uninterested in?”
She says nothing, but her body betrays her. Hunter’s cheeks have turned a shade of red I didn’t even know existed. I wonder if it has a name or if I will forever remember it as Hunter Lemming Arousal.
I turn, walking back the way I came, letting the question sit with her. “Dinnertime.”
I am drunk. Resoundingly so.
The vodka bottle next to me is half empty—half full, the few brain cells still hanging in there urge. I found it stowed beneath the sink when I went looking for alcohol again, Hunter retiring to the guesthouse instead of eating with me. Again. Music is blasting through my phone, my attempt to drown out the thoughts that the vodka isn’t adequately silencing.
Even though everything around me has changed so much, it’s mind-bending how much hasn’t. It’s driving me up the fucking walls, wondering how both can be true—wondering if it’s true of Cora too. If her hair is longer or if she ever thinks about me; what kind of person she’s become.
I stagger to my feet, the room spinning slightly around the edges, not bothering with shoes or a coat or even a glance at the time before I’m out the door. My feet eat up the ground quickly, the crickets chirping incessantly, the world humming with life I can’t see, and then I’m at Hunter’s door.
I knock three times. “You up?” I yell … to no answer.
I scrub my hands over my face. The light from the porch is plenty to illuminate the space around me, so when I hear a rustle, I spin and can clearly see the giant wolf staring back.
I jump right back into the door. Wait, no—it’s not a wolf. Just a huge, feral white cat.
I’ve seen feral cats scurrying around the more rural parts of Spokane before, but they were always much smaller, and there was always a three-thousand-ton vehicle in between the two of us.
The cat stares, as if transfixed, its fur a bright white, its eyes solid black orbs. It seems to be alone, but God knows what else is out here. I remember Cora’s warnings, from so long ago, about the animals that roamed freely around here, especially at night: wild turkeys, raccoons, deer, bears, cougars. Though she probably wasn’t speaking about pudgy feral cats when she issued those warnings.
The cat keeps staring but doesn’t advance. I tip my head to the side, studying it as it studies me. I’m the one out of place here, I realize—the intruder. The one who doesn’t belong.
Not for the first time and I’m sure not for the last.
Suddenly I’m falling backward, the air leaving my lungs as I land flat on my back. And then I’m staring up at the wide-eyed, bed-headed Hunter Lemming, whom I have very clearly woken up from sleep.
“What is wrong with you?” she exclaims. “It’s three in the morning, and you’re out here stargazing again?”
“There was a cat.”
She rips her angered gaze upward, and mine follows the same path. “Nothing there, Princess,” she says as we stare at the empty space.
“I swear to God, there was this huge fuck—”
“Have you been drinking?”
My brows pull together. “What, you don’t drink?”
“No,” she says sharply. “I don’t drink.”
The line of her jaw is locked down hard and—oh. She is not wearing any pants. Only a red flannel that hangs below her ass, the buttons done up except for the top one, baring the hollow of her throat.
“Why are you out here in the first place?” she asks, ripping me from my less than godly thoughts.
I exhale slowly. “I needed to talk to you.”
“It couldn’t wait until the sun was up?”
“No. I wanna know who she is.”
“Who who is?”
“Cora,” I snap. “I want to know who Cora is. And you’re probably the only person left on Earth who knows the answer, so here I am, drunk and lying on my ass and screaming at a cat on your doorstep.”
She says nothing for a moment, as if she’s trying to process everything I’ve told her. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you want to know who she is? You haven’t even spoken to her in eight years. You didn’t even know she was missing until I called.”
Because I need answers. Because I need to know what makes me so unlovable. Because I want to finally be able to leave this place in the past.
“That’s why,” I reply, so quietly I don’t even know if she hears me.
I’m expecting her to shove me out the doorway and slam the door in my face. But all she does is sigh, long and loud, and say, “Alright.”
The guesthouse is a sight.
It looks like a ranch-inspired Pinterest board, somehow even more beautiful than the main house. The walls are a bright and brilliant brown, as are the floors. There’s a large, intricate woolen rug in the middle of it all. The room is completely open except for the bathroom, which is enclosed and set off toward the right side. Kitchen to the left, a small table and two chairs next to it, desk in the corner, Hunter’s bed pushed under the window across the room. Everything is neat and tidy but the bed, which is empty and unmade. I try not to let my gaze linger on that particular piece of furniture.
I unceremoniously flop down onto one of the chairs. Hunter rolls her eyes but brings me a glass of water and a blanket. I make a big show of not staring at her bare legs as she moves around, then ends up in the chair across from me.
“You do this a lot?” she asks.
“Get drunk? Yes.”
She watches me, gaze edged in caution. I down half the water without pausing for breath, then slam the glass down harder than I meant to. “Tell me what she’d gotten herself into,” I say, eager to change the subject.
“Ranching,” she replies without missing a beat. “Fixing fences. Book club with her friends in town once a month.”
“And …?”
“And nothing else pertinent.”
“Let me get this straight,” I say, leaning back in my chair. “She’d gotten herself into something that ended up causing people to want to hurt her, and now she’s missing, and you don’t want to tell me anything about said activities?”
“Cora … she rubbed some people the wrong way. Nothing more sinister than that.”
“How so?”
She presses her lips together, says nothing for a moment. Just when I think I’ve lost her, the woman across the table asks, “Have you ever heard of the Parker Mountain case?”
Of course I’ve heard of the Parker Mountain case. It’s only the most notorious coldish case in the state of Wyoming. Forty years ago, the body of a seventeen-year-old girl, Jessica Coldwater, was found at the base of Parker Mountain, forty-five minutes outside of Wonderland. Jessica was the daughter of Wonderland’s mayor and was found brutally murdered. A couple of days into the investigation, they discovered that Jessica’s best friend, Holly Prine, was also missing. Police quickly concluded that Holly killed Jessica and fled the scene, but the case was never officially closed. Hence, coldish.
I’ve never bought that it was Holly. When Cora used to talk about it, she’d said that the motive was practically nonexistent—something about the girls fighting over a boy, hardly something to kill your best friend over. And they never had any leads on where Holly disappeared to after the murder either. I didn’t do any sort of real investigating because I was a thousand miles away, and anything associated with Wonderland—or Wyoming in general—I’ve attempted to steer clear of.
“Of course,” I reply. “That was the case that first got me interested in being a PI.” Which isn’t quite the truth, but it’s not a whole lie either.
“Cora’s become obsessed with the case over the past couple of years,” Hunter explains. “She was trying to solve it. A lot of the folks in town didn’t take too kindly to that.”
“Why not?”
“Most people are convinced that Holly did it,” she continues. “Cora gave up on it a few months back. Which is why,” she says, her voice growing sharper, “I told you it wasn’t worth mentioning.”
“What if she didn’t?”
“What?”
“What if she didn’t stop investigating?”
“Of course she did,” Hunter insists.
I pick up my water, throw back the rest of it. “Maybe she stopped investigating,” I reply. “Or maybe that’s just what she told you.”
Hunter has no response to that. It probably never occurred to her that Cora would lie; that Cora would betray her trust; that Cora would, one day, suddenly become an entirely different person.
“Exactly,” I say, leaning back, trying to stop the ceiling from circling so violently. “Such a good thing that you called me down here. Truly.”
She tips her head to the side, studying me. “What’d you leave behind?”
The abrupt change in topic only makes the room spin more. “What?”
“In Spokane,” she continues. “Family, friends? Who’s missing you right now?”
“Who’s missing you right now?” What a question to ask. “Well, certainly the women whose beds I would’ve been warming for the past few evenings.”
It’s another half-truth—or maybe the whole truth and I don’t want to accept it. I don’t know if Carson is missing me or not. As their assistant, almost certainly. I’m good at my job, an asset to their operation, and we both know it. But as a person? As Quinn Cuthridge? Not the private investigator in training, but the twenty-two-year-old who’s looking for something to keep her holding on just a little bit longer? I could not answer that question, and maybe that in and of itself is the answer.
Two dots of red appear on Hunter’s cheeks, which makes me think about earlier, in the shed. “What about your family?” she asks.
That goddamn question again. “Only family I have is currently missing right now.”
“Your parents?”
“I already told you not to ask about my family,” I snarl.
“I told you the same thing,” she replies. “Yet, I told you about mine. Only seems fair you return the favor.”
Oh, there are all kinds of favors I’d like to do for you. “I have no idea who my father is,” comes tumbling out of my mouth.
She holds my gaze. I know what question she’s going to ask before she even poses it. I could stop her, shove the question back between her lips before it ever has a chance of escaping. I’ve given her what she asked for. I’ve already warned her. Still, I let her ask: “Your mom?”
I grin so wide I’m sure it looks like I need to be institutionalized. “I do not speak about my mother.”
Elain. Elain Cuthridge, who would change her last name at the drop of a hat just so we wouldn’t have the same one, so there’d be nothing but the blood in our veins tying us to each other. Elain, who never attended an open house in elementary school or chaperoned a field trip or came to my high school graduation. Elain, who every Christmas would give me twenty dollars and disappear for a night or two or ten, and I’d watch the snowflakes fall through our tiny, fingerprint-smudged window, boiling with a jealousy so intense I’m surprised it didn’t burn down our entire shitty apartment complex. Jealous of snowflakes because there were so many of them. Snowflakes never fell by themselves; they fell in groups, in packs and bunches. Snowflakes were never alone. Even when they melted, they slipped away in solidarity.
“I do not speak of her,” I say again, wondering who I’m trying to convince of that.
Hunter nods once. Slow and methodical, as if she somehow understands this too. As if she can see a flicker of the truth and knows the rest of it belongs only to me.
I stand, nearly toppling back over. “Thanks for the water.”
“Quinn, I’m—”
“Oh, don’t pity me,” I snap, wheeling around. “Don’t feel sad for me because of something you think you know, something you think you’ve figured out. Don’t look at the alcohol and assume it’s any more than me liking the burn down my throat. Don’t feel bad for me, because there’s nothing to feel bad about.”
“What I said earlier, on the side of the road,” Hunter continues, as if she hadn’t even heard me. “I didn’t mean it. I shouldn’t have said it. I’m sorry.”
The words, the apology, shake something loose in me. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I’ve got no idea. “Don’t apologize,” I tell her. “You were probably right anyway.”
“That really how you think about yourself?”
I give her no answer, just hold on to her gaze from across the table.
Hunter is something else. Impossible to get a handle on—prickly on the outside, soft on the inside. And that’s just the beginning. As much as I fight it, I want to find out the middle and the ending too.