Page 4 of Bird on a Blade

That’s the thing about the infamous fat camp killings. They didn’t technically happen at a fat camp.

It’s a piece of trivia that pedants love, the sort of thing they’ll trot out when they need a trick question at a trivia content.Name the camp where the Fat Camp Killings took placeand someone who read the Wikipedia entry two years ago after listening to a podcast will shout, “Head Start Fitness Camp!” and then the emcee will shake their head ruefully and say, “I’m sorry, buttechnicallyHead Start Fitness Camp was closed for the season.”

And that is true. The camp was closed for the year, but five of us were still on the campgrounds because my mother paid the camp owner $10,000 for the cruelest counselors to work with me, one-on-one, for an entire week after the camp closed. A last-ditch effort to make me thin before I went off to Stanford and embarrassed her for being fat.

That’s why Lindsay Kirtle wasn’t there the night of the killings, or Maggie, the swimming instructor who snuck us joints after hours. Or Vic, the Yoga guy who told us how beautiful we allwere after his sessions. My mother didn’t want anyone who’d tell me I was beautiful. She wanted me to be humiliated. She probably thought she might finally kickstart me into an eating disorder—which, admittedly, did happen, in a roundabout way.

Four deep breaths.

I need to get groceries.

The thought of getting back in my car makes me vaguely queasy after the long drive from the last hotel, and Altarida, the nearest town, is only about a thirty-minute walk on the little hiking trail that winds away from camp. I won’t be able to bring much back with me, but I can fill up my backpack to get me covered for tonight.

I have to resist the voice, quieter now but still there, that tells me not to go at all, to just skip dinner and breakfast, it’s no big deal, just intermittent fasting, right?

I grab my backpack and stalk outside. My phone dings.

Charlotte

Thank God. Scott still hasn’t reached out to me at all. I think you’re in the clear.

I doubt that very much, but it’s still a nice thought.

The sunlight is warm and dappled with streaks of green from the fluttering trees. I find the hiking trail easily, even though the sign’s been knocked over and tall grass creeps around it. The trail itself isn’t terrible. I wonder if someone’s maintained it. The camp’s owner, maybe.

The forest settles around me. It’s too late in the year for the cicadas, and it feels quiet without them, even though there are other familiar sounds, like the faint hum of grasshoppers and twittering bird song. When I was at Head Start—the actual camp, not my mom’s $10,000 torture session—we used to walk to town every Sunday and spend the day buzzing between the little shops on Main Street. There was a comic book store for a while and a candy shop we’d sneak into when the counselors weren’t payingattention. One of those touristy five and dimes. It’s surprisingly easy to let those happier memories wash over me.

But then I hear a snap in the woods, a broken branch, and my heart jitters up in my chest.Just a squirrel,I tell myself. Still, I glance at the densely woven trees, half-expecting to see a flash of pale mask.

He’s dead.He is dead. I saw him die. He was holding me when he died. I saw his body afterward, the mask shattered and half his head gone, a red spongy cavity where his brain should have been. I’d thrown up, retching and choking while Deputy Crosier, the one who’d been on patrol outside the camp and gotten there so quickly, just stared at the body, hands shaking.

Sawyer Caldwell is dead.

But two officers had still come to visit me the day after the murders. I was back home in Arlington by then. They sat down in the formal living room and looked at me and told me they were posting an officer outside the house for the time being, because Sawyer Caldwell’s body had disappeared.

I push on down the trail. I know Sawyer Caldwell isn’t in the woods. It’s just a squirrel I heard. Just some animal stepping on a decayed branch.

And what threat is Sawyer Caldwell to me now, anyway?

It’s Scott I have to worry about. My husband, still. Technically.

But he won’t find me here, either. I’m alone. I’m safe. I’m registered under the name Hayley Lace.

I’ve got two months to figure out what I’m going to do next.

So I keep walking through the woods, fingers curled around the straps of my backpack. I got this far. I won’t be undone by noises in the forest.

CHAPTER TWO

SAWYER

Fifteen years in the dirt.

It’s been nearly a week and I’m still reeling from it, truth be told. Fifteen goddamn years. I knew the first few times would take longer; Mama and Ambrose had both warned me about that. They said that the first few times take a while, and then each time after that it gets a little shorter and it’s easy going for a while and you don’t mind dying. Then, eventually, it gets longer again, not months or years but decades. Centuries. But I won’t have to be worry about that for a long, long time.

Still. Fifteen years.

Everything’s changed. My house is gone, nothing but the foundation and the fireplace, which means they took all my stuff, too. The various knives I’d accumulated. My machete. My bones! I’d collected so many, severing them from their bodies and burying them in the backyard with a little plastic flag so the worms could do all the hard work of cleaning off the meat and all I had to do was polish them up.

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