By

E.T. Bermuda

February 24, 2022

Moscow, Idaho

She no longer blamed the mirror. Hannah Cleere looked herself up and down, taking in her pudgy cheeks, her flat chestnut hair. As she stood there, stirring in the silence of the soft colors of her dorm room, Hannah tried to hide the sides of her body with her arms. She longed for home, but even thoughts of returning to a better place weren’t enough to pull her from the mirror.

Hannah tried anyway.

“Heaven,” her mother had said.

The disaster that stood in for her mother’s new vintage clothing store was anything but. Shortly before she had left for college, Hannah’s mother had sacrificed her small life’s savings for the shop they all stood inside of. The mess of rolls and swatches of fabric promised to put her and her older brother Scott to work for at least a few days.

“Hell,” Hannah now said to the mirror.

Every night, after the University of Idaho’s imposed freshmen curfew, she was with her roommates. Life during this time was predictable. On the weekends Hannah fastidiously tidied up the place while everyone else was out doing God knows what. In contrast, the weekdays saw each of the girls meeting in the evening to commit to a chore. Abby Diaz

usually arrived in the dorm room last. Maria van den Berg typically showed up moments ahead of Abby. But almost always Maddie Mogen was first.

“Hey, bookworm,” the girls sometimes said to Hannah. Other times it was, “Get lost in your library?” Hannah usually answered with a smile. It was true. Hannah worked at the college library and spent way too much time there.

Maddie was the only other roommate who held a job. She had started work with one of her friends at the off-campus Mad Greek restaurant downtown the previous semester. Once, on a holiday when the Mad Greek was slow, Maddie had been allowed to go home early. The college library had been closed that same day. That was when Hannah found Maddie in the dorm room on her smartphone with someone.

“Xana, we don’t even know Ethan,” she caught Maddie saying to the phone.

Everyone at the University of Idaho had something planned for the holiday, and always the boys took the opportunity to invite Maddie Mogen along. Hannah noted, however, that this time Maddie seemed more excited than unsure. Maddie closed her hand over the smartphone at the sight of Hannah, as if protecting the phone from her. “Yeah, just get me outta here,” Maddie said in a low voice. “Or else I’ll be stuck with my weird-ass roommate all weekend.”

That was it.

Hannah Cleere had decided then to take her own life. Later, after slogging through the rest of her homework, she would do it with sleeping pills. Looking back at herself in the

mirror, Hannah played with her hair, growing to share her mother’s love of it for a time, happy more so that her own life would dissolve with the swiftness of a mid-morning breeze. Hannah lowered her eyes as they filled with tears so thick she could only see the blurred outline of the small amber bottle set on the shelf beneath the mirror that held her pills. In a trance, she moved to thoughts of life. No one bats a thousand. Life doesn’t even bat a thousand.

She had always prayed she could. She supposed all of her classmates came closer to batting a thousand. Hannah hadn’t anticipated that life for her would evolve into a migration. Along with the lives of each girl in her dorm room. Along with the rest of the students at the University of Idaho. Along with every student in every university that ever existed!

Thousands of kids destined for college soared out from a hole in the controlled structure of their childhood. They danced the chaotic ballet of migrating lives. Collisions, navigational errors. So perfect, as if they’d been rehearsing this flight for generations. With her eyes closed, Hannah could nearly feel the movement through the hairs of her own skin.

As her mother drove her from Provo, Utah to Moscow, Idaho, Hannah recalled that she’d shut her eyes then, too. She’d paid close attention to the vehicle’s movement, so as to imagine what the world was instead of what the world actually was. A slow pressure nudged her left; she must have been rounding a mountain pass. A lurch downward; descending a steep slope. Hannah pretended to know these features of her mind's world as she passed through, but of course, she had only been playing a type of a blind guessing game. She didn’t really know. Finally, the slowing sensation of the vehicle, the dying of the

engine – she believed she had reached her new life. Caught up with three other girls that would move her the rest of the way. To her end.

Was the weight of her presence that much to bear for Maddie, Abby, and Maria as they checked and then re-checked their outfits in the mirror that they would be wearing for the night? So it was that she had become the unwanted roommate drifting along with them on their shared voyage above the surface of the world.

She’d enjoyed a brief fling in the form of a handsome Army veteran nearly twenty years her senior who’d suffered from PTSD. A man from Pullman named Brent Lee Kopacka. He was good-looking and good in bed, too, but Hannah grew unnerved with how threatening he could get. She believed she could change him, but in the end, that turned into another of her great failures.

Hannah thought she heard a beating then. A deep, giant bell signaling the end of an hour. Beating in her mind. She could no longer see herself in the mirror, which was good because she no longer blamed the mirror. Death will take care of any leftover blame, she figured as the bell continued.

Hannah Cleere reached for the deadly bottle of pills, wolfed them down, her throat slowly clenching the swarm of bitter gray tablets sorting their way into her neck like pennies as payment for her life.

She fell to the floor, recalling the odd scent of oranges as the sound of her breathing came at her from across the room. Her bulging eyes stared up at the ceiling as sunlight traced the tears across her purple face, and the foam that slipped from her mouth.

February 28, 2022

Moscow, Idaho

Rebecca Scofield never told a soul the anxiety she carried regarding what was done to her as she was raped in college at a house party while others laughed and performed drunken party tricks in the living room. That same anxiety returned a little bit as she entered Short’s Funeral Chapel. Hannah Cleere had been the first and only of Rebecca’s students to commit suicide. Rebecca had offered to give a eulogy. After a few phone calls, several negotiations with her husband, and a plan to distract her children, she was on her way to unite with that old anxiety.

The evening had come.

Rebecca opened the door to the funeral home sniffing as if to stop a runny nose. The house, probably once owned by a large wealthy family, was heated in the way a family home would be. The open room was spacy to the point of emptiness, but still cozy, the feeling being that all of the other previous spaces in the large house – the living room, kitchen, hallways – had all been removed, but their ghosts still existed where they once had been.

“Are you speaking today?” asked a woman with the hand outstretched that wasn't clenching a clipboard. The woman had such perfectly sad eyes, Rebecca wouldn’t have been surprised if the look had been rehearsed.

“I am.”

“You’ll be over here.”

The woman introduced herself as Rebecca followed her. They stopped at a row of chairs set diagonally along the far wall. Colorful pictures of pleasant landscapes adorned the wall. Two men had taken up chairs already, working their smartphones, and Rebecca knew she’d soon join them. The other chairs in the room were set in rows facing a large photo of Hannah Cleere sitting within a well of warm lighting at the very front of the room. Next to Hannah stood a pulpit. Beyond the pulpit a table had been set. Some of Hannah’s favorite belongings had been laid out across the table. At first, Rebecca couldn’t tell what was at the end of the table. After some examination she figured it to be a small maroon booklet.

The woman spoke through the middle of a thought that ended with, “Oh, and who exactly are you?” She added nervous laughter.

“Rebecca Scofield.”

Something changed in the woman’s face, so Rebecca added, “I was Hannah’s history professor.”

“Right, of course,” the woman said, “she spoke so very fond of you all of the time”, following up with the evening’s scheduled itinerary of speakers. Rebecca would go last.

That she had never before “spoken up” for someone seemed to Rebecca an obvious shortcoming as a college history professor. Of course, thoughts of herself slid away as she rose to the pulpit to speak for her dead student Hannah Cleere.

Rebecca Scofield, like any responsible human being about to execute a task for the dead, had prepared a decent, she believed, speech. The thoughts she’d prepared lost their power the moment they became her voice and entered the room. She spoke at the pulpit,

pouring over her former student’s impressive schoolwork, her eyes occasionally lowering to the small maroon booklet at the edge of the table.

Later, in bed, her husband asleep beside her, Rebecca would think of all the things she should’ve said about Hannah Cleere, but did not, all of the things she’d needed to say, but could not. In the darkness of her bedroom, Rebecca’s thoughts drifted to the final history lesson she’d given Hannah.

Hannah had chosen a semester thesis based on the paradoxical efficacy of the dichotomy between Frederick the Great and his father William I and their combined efforts that ended in the successful expansion of the Kingdom of Prussia.

Hannah hadn’t hesitated in her transition from talking of the subjects of her paperwork to the ideas found within it. The way Hannah had gushed over the two men – one a man of war who never fought a battle, the other a homosexual who became a man of war – had made Rebecca feel a bit guilty about the way she watched Hannah’s lips.

“He never revealed his true self when navigating through the unseen forces that motivated his enemies and allies,” Hannah had said of Frederick the Great. Her large blue eyes twinkled within her eyeglasses.

“Could a person who loved Voltaire, banned torture, and erected the Sanssouci Palace truly be an autocrat?” Rebecca said back.

Rebecca saddled up next to Hannah as the girl laughed at the joke.

The way Hannah had laughed, that lithe flourish of her neck, the attractive chirp in her voice, had dressed Rebecca into a grave kind of freedom that moved quicker than the spread of a hemlock.

Hannah, just another girl, covered then uncovered, dripping with a suicide horizon, Rebecca couldn’t bear to think of the skin to skin-like valence the two of them had shared over a small particle of history. First a fingerprint of intention, then suddenly a full-fisted grip of perverse attraction. She hadn’t figured out what to call it. A luxury? The crown of a slave? Three thousand pounds of enchantment? Possibilities, spinning, as a drunk in the night?

Rebecca’s hand was on Hannah’s wrist. Hannah’s hand was on hers. Then the two split apart, never to touch each other again.

Lying in her bed staring at the ceiling, the events of the funeral came back to Rebecca. After she’d finished speaking everyone had gotten up and allowed themselves to absorb into the group of their choice. Rebecca spoke with some folks her age, but just past the table a group of college girls stood in a circle chatting. They were unhappy, scratching their arms, looking, Rebecca believed, for a way out. They interested Rebecca more than anyone else. Two blondes in the group were ironically mismatched. Both were blonde, but one was very skinny, the other very voluptuous. Rebecca felt she knew the voluptuous one. She felt tenderly toward the girl and so she left her group and introduced herself under the guise of a grieving professor.

“I’m Kaylee,” the girl told her.

“Maddie,” said the other.

Rebecca introduced herself, but the girls knew much about her already because of what she’d said during her eulogy.

Rebecca found Kaylee Goncalves to be forthcoming, a bit preoccupied yet charming. Kaylee revealed not knowing Hannah Cleere, but that her roommate Maddie Mogen had

shared a dorm room with Hannah for some time. Maddie held an air of pugnacity, sounding like a braggart when she said, “I noticed something was off”.

It came to Rebecca then: the booklet on the table. It had already grown late, an hour or so after sunset, judging from the darkness beyond the windows. She inched her way to the table, trying to appear as though she’d only wanted to get a closer look. Rebecca raised one eyebrow and concentrated on not holding her gaze on the booklet for too long.

“Don’t you worry, darling”, a strange man said.

Smiling ferociously, Rebecca swung around to the other side of the table, pretending to examine the other items that had once belonged to Hannah until the man went away. The title on the front of the booklet was all she needed to justify grabbing it and taking it home with her: MY DIARY.

Rebecca had glanced around the room. A few men chatted with the woman with the clipboard. Rebecca’s eyes darted to the college girls. Maddie was pulling Kaylee toward the doorway to leave, but neither of them watched Rebecca. In an instant Rebecca reached down, grabbed Hannah’s diary, and slid it into an inside pocket of her coat.

As her husband slept, Rebecca perused Hannah’s diary, mentally logging down every detail of the girl’s life. It angered Rebecca to read that, over and over again, Hannah’s roommates had harassed her. One girl in particular, the same girl she’d met at the funeral, Maddie Mogen, Hannah had revealed as her primary antagonist.

Rebecca Scofield decided then that she would avenge Hannah Cleere.

Rebecca did not want Maddie Mogen dead, per se. She just wanted the girl to suffer a little. Rebecca had no idea what she wanted to do, but she knew that she could not afford to get caught.

These girls were woven into a familiar pattern of youthful rapport gone awry. They were mean. One passage in Hannah’s diary spoke of Maddie Mogen pinching her titties while she shouted at Hannah to lose her potbelly. If that wasn’t enough, Maddie and the others had forced Hannah to dry hump an old donkey that had wandered onto the University of Idaho campus. Rebecca, as a teacher, was determined to break the survivors out of this abusive cycle. Maddie Mogen needed to take better care. She needed to be delivered and Rebecca was her deliverer. The only trick for Rebecca would be avoiding stiff legal consequences. But she already knew just how she’d do it. She’d met a guy.

Only a week prior she’d attended a luncheon at Washington State University, Pullman that was intended to introduce students of the WSU Criminology Department to local historians. The goal of the luncheon had been to discuss how criminology had evolved over the course of the past several decades, whether for better or worse.

One man in particular talked at length about his interaction with convicted criminals and how they feel they might have gotten away with their crimes if it hadn’t been for this, that, or the other. Even better this man was only a Teacher’s Aide which meant he’d have more time than most to help her, and involving herself with him wouldn’t attract as much attention as it would another tenured professor. It took her a moment to remember his name. Finally, she remembered.

Bryan Kohberger.

March 12, 2022

Pullman, Washington

“Absolutely not!” shouted Bryan Kohberger.

He’d heard enough of Rebecca Scofield’s plan. Who did she think she was? It had been bad enough that the Pullman Police Department had rejected his application. After that the visual snow had returned. Now a University of Idaho professor wanted him to do the opposite of working alongside law enforcement: become a deviant, a criminal. Bad.

“I won’t be the conformist to your deviant,” he added, glaring down his massive crooked once-broken nose at her. She’d even wanted him to read the diary.

He had her eager eyes, and every piece of life still left in them, so strongly set on his that he knew that she knew he wasn’t kidding.

Bryan wasn’t happy. He thought about the late nights he’d spent at Northampton Community College, his introduction to psychology and how he’d loved it but he’d wanted to expand beyond mere psychology, to something more specific, something more meaningful. From there, he’d fostered his interests, choosing criminology, then graduating from DeSales with a B.A., before moving on to an M.A. two years later. Finally, he’d moved to Pullman, Washington all the way from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania after being accepted to pursue a PhD in the same field. Rebecca Scofield was crazy if she thought he’d throw it all away just to teach some college girls a lesson.

“They practically murdered poor Hannah,” Rebecca pleaded. “An innocent girl that you would’ve liked.”

“I doubt that,” Bryan snapped.

“Isn’t criminology all about justice?” Rebecca said.

“No.” Bryan said. “It’s about so much more.”

That was, perhaps what he’d truly fallen in love with regarding criminology, the way it could be used as a transmutable framework for improving the future growth and development of virtually all other disciplines in some fashion or another. In class at DeSales, it was he who first posited that criminology in the US currently lacked a series of generally consistent treatment modalities. The endemically flawed nature of modern law enforcement had persisted due to a lack of accurate diagnostic instruments, no basic acknowledgement of cause and effect, no definitive body of knowledge – all of which harkened back to its own reckless history.

“This is why I need to speak with you,” he’d told Rebecca Scofield at the luncheon at the University of Idaho a couple weeks prior. Her pudgy but clean white face beamed at what she took for a compliment. “As important as the examination of crime and deviance may be, our society is not capable of divorcing them from contemporary social and political events.”

“And you think an historian like myself can help you to understand why?” she’d asked.

“I truly hope so,” Kohberger had replied. “My theory is that it all links back to our history.”

It now terrified him that he’d been wrong about Professor Scofield all along. What she said next, sitting there in his apartment, her head held high, as though she herself owned the place, terrified him even more.

“Crime is omnipresent. You said that yourself.”

Kohberger shook his head, not out of disagreement, but out of being pushed right onto the edge of interest. In almost any basic conversation, he could peer into the universe of a Petri dish of ideas and pull out one genome of thought and insert another, could fill the other person’s head with whatever came to mind and win the debate. With Rebecca, however, he was still working on it. A quote came to him then: “ 'Events are in the saddle and ride mankind ', Abraham Lincoln once said that.”

They sat in his quiet apartment in Pullman, Washington, which had grown too quiet for the both of them. He peered out the window at the barren snowy roads and enjoyed that view far more than his view of Scofield.

“Don’t mock me,” Rebecca said.

His prescription for solving the criminology dilemma in the US had been a call for the need to pause, assess where everything currently stood and where it was all going.

“It’s true,” Kohberger admitted, inhaling deeply. “We cannot eliminate crime anymore than a physician can eliminate death. But you want me to cross into that threshold? Take that forbidden step? That is something I simply cannot do.”

“You don’t have to do anything!” Rebecca argued. “Just give me some pointers on how I can throw red herrings to the police. Or what to look out for as far as advancements in surveillance technologies. Give me tips.”

“I’d be aiding and abetting,” Kohberger said. “The fact that I’m even talking to you now could rack up a conspiracy to commit charge.”

Rebecca lifted herself from Bryan’s sofa, walked over to him, placed each hand on each of his sides and turned him away from his window towards her. He towered over her, easily standing head and shoulders above her. “The diary,” he said.

Rebecca slipped Hannah’s diary into the hand before her. “You help me, and I’ll educate you on all the history you could ever need to score that PhD.”

“Knowledge is power,” Bryan Kohberger said, his predatory eyes holding Rebecca’s gaze as he tossed the diary onto a nearby coffee table.

“So is this,” she said back.

The two touched lips for the first time. The warmth of their tongues sliding together sending an immediate heat throughout both of their bodies. Bryan’s hands gripped Rebecca’s hands as their mouths danced with movement. Kohberger unfastened Scofield’s bra from underneath her shirt with his left hand, then he lifted her shirt. Rebecca’s breasts seemed to jump out at him as Bryan lifted her shirt over her head. He tossed the shirt away. He unfastened Rebecca’s belt, unbuttoned the front of her slacks, lowered them, then her panties until she was fully naked, minus her necklace and her wristwatch and her wedding ring.

The two of them remained entangled, movement, quiet sounds, each stepping backward and then forward until Bryan reached the sliding glass door that permitted access to his second floor outdoor balcony. With help from Rebecca, Bryan got all of his clothing off, revealing his lean, chiseled features.

Bryan pulled Rebecca out onto the balcony outside, then turned her around, pushed her to the edge of the parapet so that she was facing it and away from him. He bent her over and slowly inserted himself into her. He watched her blonde hair wisp in the cold wind

like the wicking beams of gilded sunlight as rushing stormclouds overtook the sky. He fervently pounded her from behind, her voice low and shrill as she gasped, “Fuck me, “ over and over. Bryan hoped that his friend and neighbor next door, Brent Lee Kopacka, could hear the two of them from his apartment, or would maybe pass by on the sidewalk down below. If so, Bryan would flex his bicep muscles at Brent, then later would fill him in on the details after Brent asked for them. The two always bragged about their women to each other.

Bryan Kohberger grimaced like an angry God at the world beyond Rebecca Scofield’s wildly blowing hair while he fucked her as hard as he could, finally admitting to himself just before cumming how good it felt to be bad.

March 16, 2022

Pullman, Washington

He waited. His mind paced. Sitting in his apartment alone, waiting for Bryan Kohberger, Brent Lee Kopacka couldn’t think about anything or anyone anymore without the war in Afghanistan greeting him. He tried to concentrate on Hannah Cleere. He let her memory draw him back. Brent concentrated on himself standing in the doorway of the Short’s Funeral Chapel. Hannah’s photo had stood opposite him, breast-high all alone. He was eager to know why she’d killed herself.

At the funeral chapel a woman had greeted him with shared stillness. She’d asked him to please take a seat, avoiding any direct questioning. He spotted a table next to Hannah’s photo with a book and other various items. He did not recognize the items. Except for the book.

Brent found that he was happy to sit, basking in the warm room as the eulogies went on, so different, he thought, from the nighttimes in Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul. Those nights had been a hundred-plus degrees. The sweat would pour from his skin, as if two boa constrictors squeezed his entrails, gathered all the fluid, and then slid off to drink it without him.

Hannah Cleere, the bay of his mind re-quenching with her memory once again.

They had begun dating sometime after he’d moved to Pullman, Washington. He’d gotten bored, much as he was now, so he left first to visit the Washington State University library, then the other library at the University of Idaho, hoping for some providential event.

He traced the start of his journey with Hannah back to that moment.

It was outside the U of I library that a group of students had gathered to protest for the release of a herd of alpaca on the Seven Stars Ranch just outside of Coeur d’Alene.

The crowd captivated him. It wasn’t the same as his military unit.

A girl he’d later learn named Harriet stuffed a pamphlet in his hand. Another student he’d later learn named Michael shouted in an overly careful manner at the crowd around him. Brent had to stifle the brief impulse to laugh after learning that their efforts were all about saving alpaca.

“They’ll end up on the chopping block!” Harriet shouted. “Now’s our chance to save them!”

“To do what?” Brent asked.

“Save them.” Michael interjected.

Incredibly, a short bus hand-painted black and yellow so that it appeared more like a distorted school bus rather than a U of I transport, pressed through the grassy field until it reached their location in the center of the quad.

“Get on! The time is now!” Harriet shouted.

Harriet gently grabbed Brent and one other person, towed them onto the bus, sat them next to each other in the same two-person seat. “We’re gonna rescue them all,” she said before leaving the bus to grab more students.

The bus smelled a little of engine fuel and sweat. The enthusiastic sensation grew in Brent that he’d found what he’d been longing for.

"I’m Hannah,” the person next to him said.

Brent looked over to see a girl several years younger than him. He guessed she must be a freshman at the college. She had large blue eyes that made her look even younger.

“Brent,” he said, giving her a weak smile.

They talked for perhaps fifteen minutes during which time other students were loaded onto the bus. The driver, a shaggy man in a t-shirt and jeans, finally fired up the engine, stood, turned toward them, shouted, “For Mother Nature!” He pumped his fist in the air, the armpits of his t-shirt blotched with sweat stains, as several people cheered him on, many of them with their smartphones out, filming.

The bus set off for Coeur d’Alene.

As they rode past endless acres of green pastures and random corn and potato fields, Brent and Hannah shared information about their lives. Brent explained that the ride stood in stark contrast to the military transports he’d grown used to in the service. They had always smelled of metal and ice. Hannah revealed that she’d recently moved into a new dorm room and that she attended the rally for the sole purpose of getting away from her new roommates.

“I’m leaving those bitches to their own devices,” Hannah had said.

A random student that they’d both later admit to not knowing filmed them with her smartphone. Hannah made a funny face at the phone camera.

Brent watched out the window, paying attention to the mild rural character of the landscape moving past, reading it like he did the mountains in Afghanistan, bare snow bewitched by dust storms. He couldn’t help feeling that the earth revolved beneath them

while the bus stood still, its wheels spinning, as it burrowed itself into his world, eventually having too much to do with his world as Afghanistan had.

The Seven Stars Ranch was shocked to see them.

The chanting protesters paraded around the 40 acre property. Soon the ranch hands came at them, then the police, breaking up the group and chasing students here and there, but Brent and Hannah stole away to the ranch’s abandoned Country Store, east of the main barn. The Country Store was a guest house that had been converted into a type of souvenir shop. Brent argued that they should sneak in through a window at the back of the house, but Hannah pulled him away at the sight of a fat, gray squirrel glaring down at them in total anger. They opened the store’s homely wooden door and entered, the shutting and the sudden silence that followed them into the Country Store against the outside cacophony of police and protesters seemed utterly strange to Brent as if he and Hannah had happened into a dream house.

The yellow walls of the house were cluttered with tell-tale prize boxes and undisturbed wilderness paintings. It did not escape the two of them that the aisles left virtually no room for maneuvering. The place smelled of wood and fur. A stack of small plush dolls on one side of the aisle barely shoulder-width from a separate rack that held handcrafted trinkets.

No one occupied the counter.

“Don’t take anything,” Hannah had said, laughing then straightening her face.

“What’s this?” Brent had asked, picking a small glass plate up from a nearby counter. A baked potato sat on the plate, but it was covered in chocolate and what may have been either sour cream or vanilla ice cream. “A chocolate covered potato?”

Hannah gasped. “No way!” she exclaimed in a manner that revealed she knew exactly what it was.

“It’s a baked potato,” Brent said.

“No it isn’t,” Hannah said. “Not a normal one. It’s an ice cream potato.”

Brent lifted it to his nose, touched it with his finger. The upshot was, it certainly was cold, and it smelled sweet, rather than like a real baked potato. “There’s ice cream inside.” He never knew if he’d meant it as a question.

Just then a bell jingled from the front door of the Country Store. Hannah and Brent both instinctively ducked. Something moved through the tall aisles of trinkets and plush dolls. A small tap, then another, then another. Hannah silently motioned for Brent to place the ice cream potato back onto the counter, he assumed, in case a cop or a ranch hand had entered the store.

It was too late.

Just before him, layered in a coat of pink wool, its curious face so still that, at first, Brent thought it could have been fake, or a near-hallucination, as still as a marvelous stone of marble, stood a young alpaca. Never had he seen such an unthreatening thing. It reminded him of some of the children, nested and aloof, in Afghanistan. What private torments must such a defenseless creature suffer as it wheels its way through the world at the bottom of nature’s food chain? How had its species managed to survive at all? Facing the alpaca, Brent Kopacka understood how the Afghani children survived the war zone, the same way he had, the same way an alpaca survives predators – they knew they were nothing on their own.

Not much happened then until the alpaca angled its face toward the plate holding the ice cream potato. It let out a sad frail moan.

Brent Kopacka looked at Hannah Cleere for approval. She looked back at him, the two of them still ducking.

He hovered between fear and hope as he held the ice cream potato out to the alpaca. It sniffed at the chocolate and whipped cream. Brent watched the creature’s curiosity turn to desire, desire to anticipation, anticipation to dreaminess. Slowly, carefully, the pink alpaca consumed the baked potato dessert in six bites, making piping noises as it licked the plate clean. Laterals and faults of chocolate and vanilla ice cream strata smothered its snout and slid out the sides of its jaw.

“Disgusting!” Hannah said.

Brent and Hannah couldn’t keep from hysterical laughter. The creature seemed ashamed of itself, maybe it was the alpaca’s broad, thick eyebrows that gave it the look of a scared old woman. Brent buried his hand into the tuft of the creature’s head. A trill like underwater bird-chirping emanated from the alpaca as it pressed away in embarrassment.

No one got arrested. The police allowed them to get back onto the bus and leave. Harriet invited them to a midnight showing of an indie slasher film that a fellow U of I film student was screening. As the transient electrons of automated movie sounds and lights floated from the giant silver screen, lighting up their excited faces in blue definition against the darkened movie theater, Hannah’s hand caressed Brent’s. He leaned over, demonstrating for her, in some palpable way, his deep appreciation for her by admitting without sass or reason, “I only thought of war the one time today.”

The two kissed and they fucked in Brent’s apartment for days until the night Brent invited Hannah to have a look at his other obsession. He thought he could impress her by showing her his weapons collection. A Sig Sauer P320 handgun. A Wilson Combat Protector Carbine rifle. A Kel-Tec KSG.

He saved the very best of his collection for last: His 125th Anniversary Dog’s Head Ka-Bar knife.

Hannah refused to touch it when he’d asked her to. Days later when she demanded that he get rid of the weapons a fight ensued. He calmed her down and figured mere shouts would finish her will to fight. But over time Hannah continued to ask, then demand, that he sell his weapons. Eventually it became either her or the weapons. She had grown predictable. They scaled down their engagements before finally having sex for the last time then agreeing to take a break. Not long after, he discovered her black and white face in the newspaper dead by suicide.

Now he sat in his apartment waiting for the knock on the door. In his hands he toyed with the very same Ka-Bar knife that had scared Hannah Cleere away. He loved the weight of the knife, the way it would arc over the bronze skin of his hand whenever he rotated it. Its angular blade, so stiff and svelte. Resplendently sturdy, more grace than weight. Playing with it had become ritual. He’d killed two Taliban in battle with it.

His breath, in one central motion drew from within, the breath of all men who’d seen war, like the swift buzz of an omnipotent bullet, then he shot out his breath from behind pursed lips, sending the faces of dozens of soldiers back into death and darkness.

Finally a knock. He sheathed the knife and carried it with him to the door. He opened the front door to his apartment to see Bryan Kohberger standing there holding out his large hand.

“The diary,” Brent said first, mimicking Bryan by holding out his own hand.

Brent Lee Kopacka had been fashioning this scheme for quite some time, allowing it to silt in the slow ocean of his mind’s reach. He was the only person who had spotted Rebecca Scofield at the Short’s Funeral Chapel snatching up Hannah’s diary and stuffing it into her coat pocket. He’d gotten to talking to Rebecca, learned she was a history professor at the nearby University of Idaho. Knowing Bryan Kohberger was also a part of the “university scene”, Brent took a chance that Kohberger knew Scofield to some capacity. Or he could at least get to know her. It turned out Kohberger barely knew of her, but after checking out Rebecca’s picture on the U of I History Department website Bryan Kohberger agreed to initiate contact with her, for a price. The rest of the plan fell into place once both men realized that Rebecca wanted Bryan’s help as well.

“First the Ka-Bar,” Kohberger said back, his hand still out.

“No,” Brent said. “My plan. The diary first.”

Then the exchange took place. Bryan Kohberger gave Brent Kopacka Hannah Cleere’s diary. Brent Kopacka gave Bryan Kohberger his prized Ka-Bar knife, sheath included.

April 2, 2022

Mt. Vernon, Washington

Even when he’d become someone’s boyfriend, everything Ethan Chapin had experienced with her so far – Veni, Vidi; the Vici, he believed, would finally happen after Xana Kernodle came to see his tulips.

Ethan grew up imagining that he could give life to barren dirt fields like the Swamp Thing. At Tulip Valley Farms, his powers were to bury his hands in the soil and grant life in the form of tulips and sunflowers and peonies, colors and shapes – singles and doubles, large, solid and variegated. Near bodies of water – even on the massive misty beaches of the Oregon Coast – Ethan imagined he could make the seaweeds loom voluminous if he’d really wanted to.

Of course, he wasn’t a Swamp Thing. In reality, growing plants took work. His mentor Andrew Miller had been the first to encourage him, saying, “A passionate gardener turns over cold desolate winters with a seed.”

“Or a bulb,” Ethan had added, smiling, his hand cupping a tulip bulb.

Andrew had walked him through the process. Loosening the clods of soil with a spade, or if the dirt was too cold, solid or stubborn, a larger shovel. For a while the clods glistened in the sun, their dark wetness evaporating until they paled to a medium brown. “This is our moment,” Andrew instructed.

Ethan knew exactly what came next.

Andrew held out his hand. This was the cue. Ethan ran to a nearby five gallon pail filled with tulip bulbs. He pulled one out, returned to Andrew, held the bulb out at him.

“Why don’t you do this one,” Andrew had told him.

Excited, Ethan knelt down peering into a nearby hole in the ground he’d dug up earlier. He placed the bulb into the hole, making sure that the pointy end faced upward, then buried it with nearby soil. The soil had dried to the point that its chalky odor of earth filled his nostrils.

All of this had happened early last December. Now Ethan stood among his field of emerging tulips, showered by the blue sky. Green shoots pushed upwards, the persistence of life obvious. Nothing like the downcast, static classrooms of wooden desks filled with bored or even frightened students, the ever present burden of final exams on their mind.

“You did this?” Xana Kernodle asked, entering the field from the parking lot next to the storage barn. She wore a pink feather print notched neck blouse with bishop sleeves and jeans, strongly contrasting with his white Bass Pro Shops t-shirt and khaki shorts. She wore large sunglasses; his eyes were bare. Her hair flowed freely. He had on a shabby ball cap, unsure in the moment which one he’d even put on.

“Not quite all of it, but mostly, yeah,” Ethan awkwardly told her.

A number of rushing sunlight beams shimmered over some wholly green stalks and stems, waving against their outer sheaths, too youthful to have yet bloomed in the sun’s radiance. “It’s beautiful. So beautiful it makes me hate my eyelids for interrupting,” Xana said.

Ethan smiled. Xana was always saying things he considered momentous, beyond his own ability to fabricate. It played a heavy part of why he’d grown attracted to her. Their second date had been a coffee date. A number of fresh faces sipped coffee, studying various topics from books their professors had assigned to them all around Ethan and Xana as the two eyed each other from the same table they shared in the Student Union lounge they frequented on the University of Idaho campus. Xana’s coffee, she’d complained, tasted too bland, so Ethan handed her an orange wedge from his small Ziploc lunch baggie. “Just chase it with this,” he had said.

“Hell, no. That’s going straight in,” Xana had responded, first snatching his orange wedge away, then squeezing its juice into her coffee before dropping the rest of the wedge in. “I’ve never tasted orange-coffee before. I bet the two go together like strangers at an orgy.”

Often, Ethan found himself laughing in a room all alone when he thought about Xana and her moments like that one.

Now, at the Tulip Farm, she held his hand for what he counted out had been the longest amount of time since they’d first met.

No.

No time at all.

Only if the dead themselves or a fossilized bone took a shot at convincing Xana Kernodle there was yet time.

She grabbed Ethan’s hand and pulled him with her into the field. This loosened him up so that the wind caused his eyes to shimmer with a watery coolness and see in every direction. Xana let go of him and lowered herself over a row of tulips until she was down on

her knees in front of them, meeting the pinks of their petals face-to-face. Ethan’s heart beat. He stared downward at his girlfriend there with his tulips as if he were staring downward onto the ghostly pink and green waves of the northern lights sailing over an inverted night’s sky. Her face lifted. A smirk, then a grin like a proudly worn lapel pin. “They smell so much better than the Pi Beta Phi house,” she told him.

“Don’t believe you,” Ethan said.

“These flowers have warped my sense of smell. Nevermind. My roommates’ dirty boyfriends will warp it back,” Xana said.

“I’ll have to smell it for myself,” Ethan said. “Sigma Chi’s just down the road from Pi Beta Phi. Walking distance.”

“Crawling distance,” Xana corrected.

Soon after they left the tulip farm for the Skagit Valley Festival in town.

The town of Mt. Vernon, Washington reared up from the black hills and crystal Skagit River like the surviving remains of a mountainside peeking out from an avalanche. Xana Kernodle was a fast driver. She drove into town like a girl who made Veni, Vidi, Vici her own. Ethan knew he’d met his match. He rolled down his window to smell the parade-goers and the blossoming greens of the outdoors. The smells came and went, odors and fragrances did battle. In the city center, streetlights, merchant shops and food stores glowed even in the daylight. The thump of a rock band playing somewhere in the distance floated out over the festivities toward them.

Unobserved by the gathering on the large grassy park field, Ethan and Xana made their way through the tourists and townsfolk. The whole place had the ecumenical bustle of an outdoor concert. Holding hands, Ethan pulled Xana along past a group of children

painting each other’s faces. Other families sat together on blankets they’d laid over the grass. Ethan navigated their way through the patches of festival goers until the field opened up so wide that they could see a band at the far end of the field playing on a large stage. To the east of the band, several large baskets had been laid sideways on a massive spread of open field. Stretched out before the baskets lay giant sheets of colorful polyester and nylon.

“Let’s go there,” Xana told Ethan.

The two made their way to the baskets. As they approached, it became clear to Ethan what the baskets and sheets of nylon were for. “They’re flying today!” he said.

“Are those hot-air balloons?” Xana asked.

“Absolutely.” Ethan smiled.

There were twenty or so baskets and sheets spread across their region of the park. In the distance, the rock band could be heard, but the sound was forcefully drowned away by the rise of the hot-air balloon burners. Men pulled on burner cords, laughing with family and friends who helped by holding up the balloon lines. Fire erupted from some of the burners’ giant gas cylinders so powerfully that long lingering low notes blasted upward, a legion of fire-breathing dragons, Ethan imagined, amassing before him. Curiously detached, the urge to guess what the design of the balloons might be before they were fully inflated took Ethan. “I think that one’s a rainbow,” he said.

“That one’s gotta be a French flag,” Xana claimed.

Suddenly a voice shouted at them. “Hey, you two!”

Ethan and Xana turned to see a man all by himself struggling to separate the ropes that attached his basket to the mouth and scoop of his hot-air balloon's envelope. “Can you help me with these ropes? I’ll give you a ride.”

Ethan and Xana looked at each other.

Standing next to the balloon’s tipped-over basket, the man leaned over and pressed the burner to ignite a huge hot stream of gas-lit fire into the skirt of the balloon. Ethan was fearful of the heat, but he held his rope away from the flame. There was no way he was dropping his line if Xana could hold her’s. Which she did.

Soon the balloon’s ever-expanding envelope began to swell, then lift, until it stood at full height, lifting the basket with it and setting the basket to an upright position. The balloon was some sort of blue-green swirl design, not meant to be anything specific. Never had Ethan witnessed hot air pour so effortless into such a fragile matter as that balloon envelope.

“You two get in first,” the man said. “I’ll detach the lines securing the basket to the ground.”

Ethan stepped into the basket. Xana gave him her arm so that he could help pull her all the way in. It wasn’t until they were securely inside that Ethan noticed other balloons lifting off. The man left the burners and let them cool for a moment before detaching the remaining lines and jumping into the basket with some help from Ethan and Xana.

Their balloon pushed upward, rising with several other balloons. Some floated beneath them, some above. Ethan peered down at the festival goers. They seemed to shrink away as many of them stared upward in awe. The sounds of the music began to diminish,

but the furnace blasts remained. A distant loudspeaker was announcing their very lift off. All eyes from below were on them. Ethan and Xana laughed, moving ever so quickly away from the people, burglars escaping the authorities, no hope of capture. Ethan and Xana had them.

Paradoxically, the world seemed to somehow grow in size as they lifted higher above it. The tops of the canopies set around the park seemed to dance the waltz with the crowds of people. They all became ants, replaced by the mountains, and then all of it replaced by the sky.

The man with them peered out into the openness. Ethan stood behind Xana and wrapped both of his arms around her. The Veni. The Vidi.

“It’s all so amazing,” Xana said to him, removing her sunglasses without turning to meet him.

“I know what will make it more amazing,” Ethan said.

“Yeah. What?” Xana asked, clenching his arms with her own hands ever slightly.

“Girl you gone and done it to me, hotter than a hoochie coochie…,” Ethan started singing, “Got me like that first time I heard Alan Jackson Chattahoochee…”

Xana sang along, “I was never the same again, I’m a lifelong fan…”

They both sang, “Yes I am!”

The stranger with them in the hot-air balloon joined in, “Baby, I love you like I love country music…”

The three of them bellowed out the chorus together, laughing, taking in the gathering delight of the sky as their audience, the dreamy waves of cumulus clouds seeming to sing along, too.

Conquest was an experience Ethan had never expected – from the time he was accepted into the University of Idaho, to the time he joined Sigma Chi, to the moment he fell in love with Xana Kernodle. Had she created desire in him so that he would loathe his loneliness? Or had she conquered his loneliness to hold all that wanting sown between them? The joy of encountering it after fearing he might not keep it meant something that was not necessarily irrelevant to his thoughts of conquest with his new girlfriend; both the worry and the joy had wormed their way into his everyday, as it were, pollinated his days, so that even the history of their budding attachment in Moscow, and now Pullman, had fully woven into a conquest that was itself about overcoming the gravity-driven earth they flew over. The Veni. The Vidi. The Vici.

Ethan removed his shabby ball cap so that his lengthy brown hair blew as he watched Xana’s dark hair blowing asynchronously with his own. He wanted to keep it this way, ever happy, the world forever beneath them. Suddenly, like the victory of a game, Ethan knew the meaning of Xana Kernodle and then felt himself accomplishing a kind of inward success, again and again, as though this success at understanding his feelings for Xana brought about the girl herself.

“Come over to my place!” Xana shouted above the rushing wind.

“You mean it?” Ethan asked her.

She pulled him toward her. Their lips met. The man who was with them took that as his cue to look upward and release the parachute valve, descending them back down to earth.

April 20, 2022

Moscow, Idaho

Bryan Kohberger preferred to watch the road turn silver as dusk set in on King Rd. rather than repeat himself to Rebecca Scofield. Certainly she had determined to sufficiently learn criminal forensics, glaring at Kohberger, then at the King Rd. house each time he fed her a detail of his plan. He alone wielded and distributed prescient knowledge. He alone had covered all the possible time-splitting variables she needed to know if she expected to punish Maddie Mogen for causing the suicide death of Hannah Cleere. He had never led Rebecca Scofield astray, nor would he. Bryan Kohberger couldn’t bear to witness his talents suffering from misuse or misunderstanding to the point of failure. Rebecca Scofield had proven an annoyingly insecure pupil. She constantly attempted to compensate for her fears by raising question after question, “You really think this knife will scare her?” Rebecca asked. Again.

“Yes, yes,” he snapped at her. If he didn’t think of something quick, something profound and comforting, she’d soon ask again how he expected them to infiltrate “Maddie’s circle”.

Tonight they watched the three-story house that Maddie Mogen lived in. Bryan sat in the driver’s seat of his white Hyundai Elantra. Rebecca Scofield sat beside him in the front passenger seat reminiscing as she toyed with the Ka-Bar knife, slipping it in and out of its sheath. Rebecca agreed they could better infiltrate, punish, and then disappear if they became a part of Maddie Mogen’s life first. Always remaining just on the fringe, preferably out of sight of Maddie herself, because if they could accomplish that then they could

accomplish remaining out of future investigators’ lines of sight. The logic, foresight, and tact had been all his. But the stakeout, and the eventual kidnapping and mutilation had all been Scofield’s tasks to manage. And manage them she did. With worry.

They had been watching the house for two hours.

“Tell me again,” Scofield began, “why do we need a DoorDash?”

They had already had this conversation, too. He’d told her that ordering a DoorDash before the kidnapping served multiple purposes – to find out who and how many people were actually inside the house; to place his or Rebecca’s DNA inside the house and provide them with a viable excuse for their DNA being at the crime scene should the authorities accuse them of committing the crime based on DNA alone; and lastly, for alibi purposes. A DoorDash delivery would allow them to have been at the crime scene that night, but not necessarily at the exact time of the attack. Bryan understood that failure hung on an infinite number of unexpected, unplanned mischances. Crime was a large room leading into smaller rooms. A secret ladder rising above the breadth of those who thought themselves just. Bryan Kohberger loved that he was capable of covering every possibility with his sheer foresight. He hated being questioned.

“Several reasons. You know why.”

Rebecca frowned. “I don’t like it.”

“You don’t understand the technology.”

Her frown worsened. “I understand it just fine. We call in the order anonymously, they get distracted, the plan’s set in motion. But how do you know whether or not DoorDash

doesn’t have some kind of recording system that can be traced back to your phone?”

“We’re using your phone,” Kohberger let out a smile. He knew the remark would consume Rebecca.

“Oh, hell no we’re not! I’m never contacting anyone on my phone, especially not you!”

“Calm down. We’ll use a burner phone.” He continued. Teaching Rebecca Scofield about crime victims’ Pattern of Life concepts had been something Bryan had been looking forward to. “Look at the house,” he told her.

All of the lights inside the residence of 1122 King Rd. were lit. Music hummed from inside. “You can tell which girl is home by which light is lit. But if any of the lights remain lit after 3am, that means the girl who dwells within said bedroom is passed out. Likely drunk.”

Bryan and Rebecca had surmised several days ago that Maddie Mogen lived with several other girls. Parties were constant. The house was no normal house, but a sorority house. Bryan had been naturally uplifted by this fact. There wouldn’t, or at least shouldn’t, be any young men there for him to face off with when the time came. However, the unanimously lit windows meant a party. A party meant young men, and god knows who else, were present. At least the lights were a dead giveaway not to move forward.

“Look,” Rebecca said, her eyes on the house.

A thick blonde girl in a tight seafoam bodycon tube dress exited the front door of the house. She headed for one of the vehicles on the front drive, opened the door, searched for

something inside the vehicle, gave a stifled outcry, stumbled back into the house.

“Is that her?” Kohberger asked.

“No,” Scofield answered. “Maddie’s thinner. That’s Kaylee, one of the roommates. She’s a good friend of Maddie. I met her with Maddie at Hannah Cleere’s funeral.”

“Gotta be careful of those friends,” Bryan said. “They don’t ever let each other out of their sight. We may have to kidnap her too.”

“We’re not kidnapping Kaylee!” Rebecca snapped.

“I guarantee you, this Kaylee will get in our way.”

“We’re not kidnapping her. And we’re not calling a DoorDash!”

Just then a vehicle approached. It came to a stop near the top of an embankment on the eastern side of the house. Bryan Kohberger couldn’t believe it, he recognized the silver Hyundai Elantra. “No way,” he said.

“What?” Rebecca asked. “What is it?”

“That vehicle,” Bryan said. “I know it.”

“What about it?”

“That’s my neighbor Brent Kopacka’s car,” Bryan said. “He must’ve read the diary. What the hell did that girl Hannah Cleere write anyway?”

“It was terrible.”

Bryan opened the door and stepped out onto the road. He paused for a moment as his vision went fuzzy. The visual snow returned. He nearly panicked, but he gathered himself just enough by rubbing his eye with his fist. Bryan Kohberger would’ve preferred death over

the return of the visual snow. The visual snow was the only thing that prevented him from being perfect.

“What are you doing?” Rebecca hissed.

Bryan fought to show no signs of impairment. “He read the diary. I don’t think he came here to party. We can’t let him attack Maddie. If he does so, the cops, her friends, her family – none of them are gonna leave her vulnerable again. I gotta stop him.”

“You can’t just waltz up –”

Bryan slammed the car door leaving Rebecca wide-eyed, the rest of what she said muffled away.

Brent had rounded the side of the house so that Bryan could no longer see him. Bryan, alone and feeling quite naked, quickly crossed the street. Any wrong move could tip someone off that he wasn’t supposed to be on King Rd. He moved around the eastern corner of the house. As he approached his friend and neighbor, he quietly said, “Go home.”

Brent Lee Kopacka turned. “Maddie’s mine, Kohberger. A life for a life. That’s what we were trained in the Army.”

“No one’s dying today,” Bryan Kohberger said.

They both stood directly beneath the rear patio at 1122 King Rd. Footsteps, music, laughter – all drowned out the sound of their discussion. A girl howled with laughter just above them. Country music played from within the house.

“Bryan,” Brent Kopacka said. “We’ve been good friends a while now. But I’m gonna kill Maddie Mogen.”

“The professor and I have a better plan.” As he stood warily opposite Brent, he felt his breathing increase.

“What? What professor? Scofield?”

“Come with me. I can explain.” Bryan held out his hand in a gesture of peace.

“I don’t need a plan.”

Brent Lee Kopacka crouched at the ready.

A twisted calm coursed through Bryan Kohberger as he raised his fists. He preferred to fight rather than be discovered by anyone inside the King Rd. residence. He preferred violence rather than risk having his brilliant plans ruined.

Brent charged Bryan, attempting to tackle him, but Bryan held his ground, pulling Brent toward him so that Brent stumbled by harmlessly. Brent returned and swung first with a strong right hook, harmlessly connecting with the muscular portion of Bryan’s left arm that he’d raised in defense. Bryan swung back slamming the right side of Brent’s jaw with his fist. It was Brent’s turn, but his blow only struck empty air. Kohberger’s motion was quickly timed, smoothly fluid, but slow enough that it gave Brent just enough margin of time to form another attack stance.

Bryan Kohberger withdrew, crouching, his breath waning. He watched the white wooden walls of 1122 King Rd. from within which playful music and laughter could be heard. The sound of a steady bass riff from some radio. Conversations between men and women. Bryan was aware of every syllable, every thump, listening intently for the opening of one of the backyard doors. “They’ll hear us,” he murmured.

Brent took a forceful step toward him. “I’ll kill them all then.”

This time Bryan attacked with a deceptive snap, the deep holes of his eye sockets as crystal black as freshly scorched sand. His blow came an instant too late.

Brent Kopacka finally struck Bryan Kohberger hard in the left temple. Bryan fell to the ground.

“Fuck off, Bryan. Leave this job for the real killer,” Brent Lee Kopacka said, standing over him.

Just then the Ka-Bar knife forced its way up against the front of Brent’s throat. Connected to the knife was a small hand. Connected to the hand was an arm wrapping its way around Brent’s shoulder. Connected to the arm was Rebecca Scofield.

Rebecca held the knife to Brent’s neck, appearing almost to piggy-back ride him as she was much shorter than him. She forced the knife a little deeper into the flesh of his neck.

“Settle down, now,” she snarled, keeping the sharp side of the blade taut and steady.

May 3, 2022

Moscow, Idaho

They admitted often between the two of them that there existed a streak of craziness within their friendship, of which they were quite proud and whether this was the gift of angels or of demons they never cared. Kaylee Goncalves and Maddie Mogen loved only the stories, the immoderate laughter they received and brought each other as they grew into this world together.

Kaylee had never tried to make the magic happen. The magic of sisterhood. It just did.

She and Maddie had grown together in steady increments. They became adults in slow gentle nudges, a prominent stride forward as one shoved the other, and then remaining at that level of maturity for however long, it varied, neither maintained the same amount of maturity for the same period of time, until maybe a year or two or ten later, it would happen once again.

Happen again it did near the end of the semester when they bought and put to good use the scarecrow.

Kaylee and Maddie held each other as they limped down Main St. before stumbling onto the wrong street. The plan had been to get food from Mad Greek, Maddie’s new job where she could get anything on the menu at 50% off, but they turned too early onto Second St. They redirected their path down an alleyway, ultimately ending up inside

The Old Vineyard antique shop. Adam Lauda, a bouncer at the Corner Club had suggested they walk after Kaylee had placed her tongue on his elbow. “I didn’t wanna eat, anyway,” she told Maddie as they pulled each other inside The Old Vineyard. “It’ll wash away the taste of Adam’s apple.”

“You mean Adam’s asshole,” Maddie said.

“No! Adam’s elbow!” Both girls snorted laughter, tugging at the colorful beaded necklaces they’d earned showing their tits at Mardi Gras the year prior, that they’d worn for Adam Lauda to see.

It was a cool evening in May. They had each finished finals early. This meant drunken fun. Unsexed, senseless adventure. Magic inside of a random antique shop.

The place smelled like an old attic with the bare trace of women’s perfume still lingering in the corners. An old woman stood behind the counter. She said nothing but watched both of them closely, approving of any sign of their shame but not of her own. Kaylee wondered if she and Maddie had stumbled into the place once before. She and Maddie were no more than twenty-one. Plenty had happened that Kaylee couldn’t clearly recall. She returned the old woman’s stare as the girl the old woman saw her to be – all lashes, blonde locks, titties and lips.

“This place is like Christmas, dude,” Maddie exclaimed. She picked up a bundle of some sort of tall rust-colored oak grass tied together with a large blue ribbon bow.

Kaylee laughed at her best friend. “Why are you holding Jack? Give him back to me.” She went for the bundle, but Maddie pulled it away.

Jack DuCoeur was always looking to Kaylee Goncalves for love. He would never find it. Kaylee thought all of the time about telling him this.

There was the time that slugs ravaged the garden she’d cultivated on the snippet of land behind 1122 King Rd. She’d woken up alone at an odd early morning hour to check her garden. She’d walked through the dark of the house in her pajamas feeling the walls for guidance until she reached the slugs squirming in the darkness outside. Her phone was a keepsake that she never did without. Texting Jack about things like slugs in the middle of the night was her phone’s greatest keepsake. Each tap of Kaylee Goncalves’s finger on her phone’s screen punctuated the unleavened unrehearsed loneliness that circled her life with Jack DuCoeur filling in the role of lover.

There was the time she and Jack had chased a mouse downstairs only to watch it escape into a small shoe. The confusion persisted. Kaylee had never seen the shoe before. A thick bright red, stubby clog type of thing that none of her roommates would’ve been caught dead wearing. Kaylee made a mental note to ask Bethany Funke about it, but she never got around to it. She raised hell pleading with Jack to somehow remove the shoe without scaring or harming the mouse inside of it. She felt that if Jack could pull off the stunt, then, maybe then, she would love him.

There was the time a flock of birds flew inside a fog from a waterfall near a cave entrance they were having sex in. Jack DuCoeur thrust himself into Kaylee, his scrawny body struggling to hug her massive tits with everything he had, but she didn’t notice. After finishing in the cave with Jack, Kaylee walked naked toward the small flock of whistling birds swirling in the mist at the entrance of the cave as if to touch the birds with her entire body, finally feeling some erotic potential from the mist spread out by the flapping of their wings as the mist wrapped itself around her like a cool ghost that lived inside of water.

Pretending the bundle of oak grass was Jack and then loving it was so much easier than loving the real Jack. Maddie yanked the bundle away from Kaylee. “Stop thinking about him,” Maddie said in a harsh whisper.

Maddie set the bundle of oak grass back where she found it. The two girls walked through a couple of aisles spotting needless things. The double barrel of an old shotgun that lacked the rest of the gun. A heavy egg painted pink that neither of them could tell was real or not. A used toilet seat.

“Oh, no,” Kaylee said. “I think I have to pee.”

“We close in five minutes,” the old woman behind the counter said.

Maddie grabbed Kaylee by the shoulder, “We’re getting the fuck out of here.”

The two girls turned left then stopped. Before them stood a disheveled scarecrow that reminded Kaylee of a gritty old drunkard that had just been eighty-sixed from a bar. It stood taller than them, wore shabby clothes and a tattered black ball cap with hay wires

sprouting outward. Homeless men looked more put together. Its face was a scribbled mishmash of black ink or paint onto a slender wilted burlap sack packed with hay. It seemed to stand with a crooked lean like someone very intoxicated, but its head remained angled down so that it appeared to be looking straight at them. Its arms were spread wide in a welcoming manner. Its hands and fingers only more bushels of hay. The scarecrow had the look of a demon and an angel. Kaylee Goncalves would never forget loving its hideous indistinguishable face.

“Jack!” Kaylee exclaimed as she stumbled forward to hug the thing, knocking it over and landing on top of it. She seemed to crumble into the scarecrow while pawing its clothing to regain her balance. She felt her thighs slipping out from her skirt while she wrestled with the scarecrow that had no muscles for her to grab onto. Kaylee’s knees burned as they hit the hardwood floor. A crescendo of noise followed as the two connected with a stack of other miscellaneous items behind them and those items crashed to the floor too.

“Kaylee!” Maddie shouted.

“You break it, you buy it!” the old woman shouted.

Out in the dusk, Kaylee Goncalves and Maddie Mogen again stumbled down Main St., this time carrying the scarecrow with them like they would a friend who was on the verge of passing out. Amazingly none of the other items that fell inside the antique shop had broken. They were only charged for the scarecrow.

“What if it has bugs in it,” Maddie said.

“There’s nothing inside for bugs to eat,” Kaylee assured her friend.

McCall, Idaho was far south of Rathdrum and Coeur D’Alene where she’d spent most of her childhood, all very safe places, but it was in McCall, some days ago, Kaylee had been approached by a man she now nicknamed Mr. Stalker. “It’ll protect us from Mr. Stalker,” she told Maddie.

“How so?”

“Just make it look like Jack.”

“It already looks like Jack.”

A car passed just off Main St., its headlights cutting through the darkness, making it impossible to see who was inside.

“No, no. It’s him!” Kaylee screeched.

She’d stepped out of G.I. Janie’s after buying some panties when two men she hadn’t noticed inside the store followed her out. Kaylee took a few small steps then checked behind her. The men were there moving in tandem with her. She increased her pace down the sidewalk, her sense of safety in the broad daylight still present but quickly diminishing with each step. She again checked behind her. Only one of the men remained.

Moving very quickly, Kaylee rounded the corner of the building and reached her car. She fumbled for a second, dropped her keys, looked up while still probing the pavement with her hand. Mr. Stalker was there. “You want me to help you with those keys?” he said.

“No,” she stated firmly.

He stepped closer. Smiling. “You sure about that?”

Finally her fingers felt the familiar divots of her car keys. “I’m fine.”

Mr. Stalker walked toward a vehicle parked near her own and got inside. The engine of a green Chevy Nova from the ‘70s roared to life. Kaylee quickly got into her car and texted one of her Alpha Phi friends about Mr. Stalker.

That same car, she was sure of it, rounded over the street to perform a U-turn, then creeped toward her and Maddie and the scarecrow. The whites of its headlights containing them within a large bubble of vulnerability.

“Quick, walk faster,” she told Maddie.

The two of them skirted along, but the car continued to follow, matching their pace without effort, until after about ten feet. Kaylee and Maddie gave up trying to make the scarecrow look like a real person and they gave up on trying to outpace the vehicle. They would have to stand their ground.

The car rolled to a stop next to them. Mr. Stalker got out without killing the engine or shutting off the headlights. Mr. Stalker was a young man, well built, probably a college student, and, Kaylee swore, wore the exact same wide-brimmed hat as the scarecrow. Or at least a close match.

“I don’t mean to trouble you girls,” Mr. Stalker said.

“Then go away,” Maddie told him.

“I will. It’s just that…” he started, removing his hat and rubbing his shaggy copper hair around his thinning hair line.

“Just what?” Kaylee asked.

“Well, you see,” the man said. “That scarecrow you got there. That scarecrow belongs to me.”

“It’s ours,” Maddie said. “We bought it fair and square.”

Kaylee was surprised by her friend’s sudden attachment to and indignation over the scarecrow. “We broke it, then we bought it,” Kaylee corrected, matching Maddie’s glance. She realized that she and Maddie had sobered up a great deal since departing the antique shop.

“Where in the world did you find it?” the man asked.

“That’s our business,” Maddie said. “If you want it back, you’ll have to buy it. From us.”

The man glanced away, smiled, then met their glares with another smile. “Okay, then. Fair enough. Just one problem,” he said.

“What?” Kaylee asked.

“I haven’t got any money.”

“Well then it sounds like you’re shit out of luck,” Kaylee said, moving forward with her half of the scarecrow, dragging Maddie along with her.

“Wait! Hold on,” the man said.

The girls stopped.

“I don’t have money, but I got plenty of something else.”

“Listen Mr.,” Maddie said. “We have our phones and we’re gonna call the cops.”

“No, no. No need to do that.”

“Then leave us alone.”

“I don’t have money,” the man repeated. “But hear me out.” He reached into his pocket and produced a small utility knife. The thing wasn’t big enough to threaten anyone with real injury but both girls lurched at the sight of it. The man motioned toward the scarecrow with his knife. “I need to cut it open to show you.”

“You’re kidding,” Kaylee said.

“No, that’s my clothes and my scarecrow. I made it and I know exactly what’s inside of it.”

“What the fuck’s inside of it?” Maddie asked. Her and Kaylee glanced at each other, both of them dropping the scarecrow at once.

“Careful!” the man shouted. “Some of them fireworks are practically explosives!”

“You smuggled fireworks inside of a scarecrow?” Kaylee couldn’t help but ask. “What a dork? Why would you smuggle fireworks at all?”

“These aren’t just any fireworks.” The man bent down with his knife and carefully allowed its blade to tear through the front of the t-shirt that kept the scarecrow’s burlap chest together. “These are illegal fireworks.”

“What are you gonna do with those?”

“Come and see.” He looked up. In his hand he held a bottle that was clearly not a firework.

“And what are those? Pills?”

“Fentanyl,” he said.

“That explains it,” Kaylee said. “We’re going.” She grabbed Maddie by the elbow and the two of them started away.

“It’s almost the end of the semester.” The guy said to them. “And it looks like you’re already partying. What’s a few more hours in the mountains?”

The girls turned toward Mr. Stalker.

It turned out Mr. Stalker’s name was Jake Schriger. Jake bought the girls some wine coolers to fend off the early onset of a hangover and because both girls had refused his Fentanyl. On the drive into the mountains, Jake told them he was a twenty three year-old third year student majoring in mechanical engineering at the U of I. After a brief period climbing some altitude in the Nova, they came to a stop in a clearing that showed signs of regular use by campers. Jake and the girls gathered some wood and used the scarecrow for tinder and before long they had a decent fire. The girls sat on a log bench on one side of the campfire, Jake sat on a similar log bench on the other side.

Jake downed a Fentanyl. “You girls seniors?” he asked.

“Yep,” Kaylee said.

“Almost,” Maddie said.

“What are your plans after graduation?”

“She graduates first,” Maddie said, indicating Kaylee.

Kaylee Goncalves watched crystal bells of water touching the sides of her wine cooler bottle before sliding downward and dropping from its glass base. The falling bells refracted the golden light of their campfire so that the light’s distortion left behind a second world that she questioned was really separate from hers at all. “After I graduate I’m going to help everyone,” she said to no one in particular.

Maddie and Jake laughed.

They carried on drinking and talking for some time. Eventually Jake made his way over to their bench. He grabbed Maddie Mogen by the small of her back and moved her close to him until their lips locked together. His hands worked their way underneath her t-shirt, into her bra, playing with the flesh underneath for some time, before removing all of her clothing from above the waist. Maddie laughed while he dropped a Fentanyl onto her

tongue. She looked over at Kaylee and Kaylee understood what that look meant.

Kaylee approached the two of them, the fire lighting her large eyes and thick lips. She removed her shirt and bra and allowed the saucer nipples of her tits to fall in front of the others as she knelt before Jake Schriger. She stuck out her tongue until a Fentanyl rested on it.

She nudged herself in small motions into the two of them. Maddie and Jake opened up to make room for her. Kaylee Goncalves could not seem to stop herself. Her tongue in her best friend’s mouth. Her tongue in a total stranger’s mouth. Their vague flavors difficult to distinguish in the yellowing smoking black of the night. There, the smoothed and moistened skin around wetted lips. Their lips, eager and expecting mouths from which their beloved life flowed. Kaylee could not give name to this – but would that they remained. Gatekeepers of the holy and unholy. Angels and demons. Known only to each other, remaining known, thus never alone.

Not friendly, like those wearing clothes and waving hello, but affectionate. Not foreign, like those on opposite ends of the world, but exotic. Not summer, like the torching beat of the sun, but late spring. Not divorce, like the splitting atom destroying all matter in its wake, but immortal.

Jake removed the rest of his clothes first. Maddie and Kaylee followed, laughing, holding each other up, helped also by several wine coolers and Fentanyl. Maddie mounted Jake first, not riding him for very long before allowing Kaylee time.

Kaylee knew Jake wouldn’t last. The queen, the male worker, coming up, going down. Distant daughter and distant son of the night, having left homes, having found their quiet

place in the woods. As she rode him, Kaylee Goncalves peered out at the flickering trees, subjects of the deep unfathomed night. Nightliness. Nemesis, original desolation of nature who regardless makes a nest of life. Of life, their consort, together becoming a triple-yolked egg. Bearers of forlorn yearning, bearers of the knowledge of bounds beyond which only lovers may reach. Bearers of fate. In her left hand, his right hand. In his right hand, her left. Her breath welling against his hair. The light, rutted, white-cries. Another, then another. One last cry from him. No more emerged. No more returned.

Kaylee lay on a blanket by the fire listening to Jake finishing off with Maddie a second time just as he’d done with her. Of this, Kaylee would have no more. Half-starts and half-stops made in drunken haste. Thoughts ran through her sleepless mind. Was she losing herself? This foolishness needed to stop at some point. The demands of the day as a student would return and that sacred self she had gone to college for in the first place. Had agreed to date Jack DuCoeur in the first place. Had desired Adam Lauda at the Corner Club in the first place. Tomorrow she would figure out her final semester. She would contact her academic advisor at the University of Idaho to help her plan it all out.

Back in town the next morning Kaylee bathed and clothed herself, Maddie asleep in the other room on the third floor of 1122 King Rd. Jake Schriger in bed beside Maddie. Kaylee called her advisor and set an appointment for one week out.

A week later, Kaylee headed up the familiar steps into the U of I Administration Building. There, in the front lobby, she waited for the secretary to call her name.

“Ms. Goncalves, your advisor will see you now.”

Kaylee headed down the hallway to Dr. Ross’s office. Dr. Ross had been Kaylee’s academic advisor since her very first semester at the U of I. This time however, Dr. Ross’s nameplate had been removed from the wall next to her office door. The new name on the new nameplate read REBECCA SCOFIELD, PhD.

Kaylee entered the doorway. “Hello,” she said to a blonde woman sitting behind a large buckled oak desk and typing something on a computer. A coffee cup and a miniature version of a cartoon character stood near the corner.

“Hello, Kaylee,” Rebecca Scofield said, smiling wide.

“Where’s Dr. Ross? I hope she’s well,” Kaylee said. She noticed Rebecca’s eyes fixing on her.

“She is not, unfortunately,” Rebecca Scofield said. “It seems she’s fallen ill. I’ve been chosen as her replacement. Tentatively, of course. We’re all praying she’ll get well soon.”

Kaylee stopped. “Oh, my. I wish I could send her something. Or at least wish her well, maybe by email.”

“Sure. I’ll give you her personal email once she’s been released from ICU. I’ll be your new advisor. Kaylee, I’ll make this final fall semester the best you could ever have, I promise you that. Please, have a seat,” Rebecca Scofield said, gesturing toward one of the comfortable chairs before Kaylee.

July 1, 2022

Moscow, Idaho

Her name was Xana. Pronounced with a Z sound, but spelled with an X. She had never cared about her last name until the idea struck that it may be taken from her and replaced.

“Xana Chapin,” she said.

Trying it on for the first time felt nice.

“Not already,” Maddie Mogen said. “You’ve only been with Ethan a few months.”

It could be any day of the week in any rank of the top tier of a busy rush hour and the smell of greek food sinus-deep at the Mad Greek restaurant in Moscow, ID and all seats filled and all orders cast. Maddie and Xana then, displaced in the jaws of chaos, a workshift still dubious, as when folks are browzing menus in seats, all filled, with new customers walking in and standing in line to order – if the girls were lucky, standing, sometimes customers would follow after Maddie or Xana so that one of them would take their order – that Xana would fire away at collecting orders and Maddie would juggle the list, making sure everyone was served by the end of the rush.

“But he’s the right guy,” Xana said to Maddie as she flew by a row of booths.

And halfway through the rush, perplexed, struggling to reorganize her thoughts, uprooted by happy and disgruntled customers alike, untimely alterations of orders from table after table, some coming from nowhere, Maddie served up just in the nick of time. “He’s your only guy,” Maddie made sure to respond as loud as possible.

Later, after the end of the rush, the air in the Mad Greek still thick with children’s shoes and baklava desserts, Maddie and Xana discussed their plans while dicking around with drinking straws they used for their beverages on break.

They began to argue about whether or not Xana Kernodle had become “Master of the Party”. After being with Ethan Chapin for a number of months, Xana had learned much about how boys did it and the differences between their ways of partying and her girlfriends’ ways of partying. One thing she learned was how carelessly Ethan and his homeboys met new men. All the girls she knew practically had to be dragged kicking and screaming into an introduction with a total male stranger. Surely, if Old Xana was in a room with a male stranger the world would end before she would offer up a hello. Ethan changed all of that. New Xana often invited strangers, or near total strangers over. Once, the unpleasant thought coiled in her head: what if someone said yes, but failed to show? That had happened, too. But it didn’t matter with Ethan. His friends would show when asked, she noticed. The visions of her future with him that she didn’t know she wanted, but would often get, worked as a kind of aloe for her hopelessly stuck itch of dependence. In the off-chance that he couldn’t make it, Ethan would explain to her why and then would make it up to her later. Xana knew in her heart that she may be mistaking connection for dependence.

At that moment two men walked into the Mad Greek. The first man was tall, chiseled, dark wavy hair, bushy eyebrows. The man with him was shorter, but more muscular, with dark hair, buzzed short. The two men sat in a booth across from each other.

“Is it your table, or mine?” Maddie Mogen asked Xana.

The two men sat down. Xana watched both men as they watched her right back. “This one’s mine,” Xana said.

The two men each grabbed a small menu tucked between the salt and pepper shaker. “What to drink?” Xana asked them, tucking her work-shirt into her black skirt.

After Xana got the men their drinks and they finished ordering, one of the men asked, “Do you know anything fun to do in this town?”

“Depends on your definition of fun?” Xana said. “Moscow’s a college town. There’s literally always a party happening somewhere.”

“We’re down to party,” the gruff, muscular one said.

“We can provide any accommodations,” the taller one said. He extended his hand, “I’m Bryan Kohberger.” He indicated the other guy. “This is my friend, Brent Kopacka.”

“Nice to meet you two,” Xana said.

“I’m a vegetarian,” Bryan Kohberger said.

Xana smiled. “Oh, how cool. So am I….unless I’m camping.”

“Cheater!” Bryan said with the obvious hint of a tease.

“I’m the same way,” Brent chimed in. “I’ll eat whatever’s around.”

“You’ll probably want to go with Keira’s Amazing Vegan pizza. And maybe split it between the two of you.”

“Sounds great,” Bryan Kohberger said. “How much glitter do you put on the pizza?”

“How much what?” Xana asked.

“Glitter,” Bryan repeated.

“What the fuck is glitter, Bryan?” Brent Kopacka growled.

Bryan Kohberger looked at the two of them as if he could see through them rather than their physical bodies. “Glitter,” he explained, “is typically a multi-variety seasoning consisting of herbs and spices, ground to a powder, and sprinkled along the surface of a pizza in a manner that enhances the overall flavor of the pizza.”

“Wow, look at this guy,” Brent said with a shucks grin, thumbing at Bryan. “Did you know he’s a PhD candidate in Criminology?” he asked Xana.

“Nope,” she said. “But it sounds like he’s a great candidate for a PhD in Pizzaology.”

“It’s pronounced Pizzology,” Bryan corrected her.

Brent and Xana laughed as Kohberger examined his menu. Xana jotted down the order wondering what exactly to write on her slip regarding the glitter. She couldn’t keep the question from crossing her mind of when the last time was that the two men had gotten laid. She instantly agreed with the two men: they were in need of a party.

“We don’t want any pizza glitter,” Brent snapped to no one in particular. “Or any other kind of glitter at all.”

“Hey, Xana!” Maddie’s voice shouted from the back. “You got a call!”

“I gotta go, you guys,” Xana said, smiling. “1122 King Rd. 9pm, tonight. Bring your own shit.” To Xana’s surprise, the invite flowed like milk through hot coffee.

Both men smiled. “Will do,” Bryan Kohberger said.

“Sure thing,” Brent Kopacka said.

Xana lived in the neighborhood near all of the University of Idaho fraternity houses. The frat houses had been so established that they formed a line along the front fields separating the neighborhood from the college. There was Alpha Gamma Rho - Beta Phi, Sigma Chi, Alpha Gamma Delta, Alpha Kappa Lambda, and the Farm House. Xana could extract, with the magic of social media, at nearly any given day at any given time, nearly anyone from any of these houses to come join a social event. Easily several dozen.

But not without permission.

Xana did not have long to think about her explanation to her roommates as she drove through the small town of Moscow, Idaho. Everything was never more than a few minutes drive away from everything else.

Xana entered through the back of the house. No one ever used the front door. It required a combination and none of the girls could remember it, so everyone just used the back door. You had to climb some rocks, slide open the glass door, walk through the kitchen, but it was still easier than remembering the lock combination on the front door.

Inside the King Rd. house was empty. Only Maddie, Kaylee, Bethany and Dylan were living with her at the moment, and they were likely out with their boyfriends. Bethany and Dylan were nearly brand new. That was the pattern: a couple girls would move out just after one semester ended; a couple other girls would move in just before another semester began. Xana sniffed the air of the house, checking to see if the “dirty dick” smell that Kaylee had complained about finally dissipated. Xana smiled, pleased by the freshened air. Everyone else had done their chores for the day.

The house was perpetually lit by string lights. A web of white lights hung over the massive black sectional sofa that the roommates shared. The colors clashed, but also added a rejuvenating effect to anytime – day or night. Xana flung her purse onto the sofa.

Another set of Christmas-colored string lights hung over a black sheet meant to enhance the various colors just beyond the stairs leading to the first floor and the front door. All sorts of wine and martini glasses lined the shelf extending out beyond the stairwell. Set in between them was the occasional glass tumbler.

It was a youthful but not too youthful looking place. Like all youthful places where people go to get away from responsibilities, there was that excitement, like the very lights laced along the walls reached out to grasp you and steal you away from the mundane. Xana stared for a moment at the main attraction: a blue glowing sign Kaylee had put up after she’d moved in that read GOOD VIBES. Kaylee said she’d bought the sign from a kombucha shop in Boise.

“There she is,” a voice said from a door adjacent to the kitchen. Dylan Mortensen’s head poked out. Her long dirty-blonde hair streamed down in a straight fold.

“Hey, Dylan,” Xana said.

“Where’s Ethan?” Dylan smiled her trademark mischievous smile.

“Good question. Just got home. Gonna wait for his text.”

“Got any weed?” Dylan asked. “I ran out this morning.”

“I’m all out too,” Xana said. “But I’ve invited some people over tonight.”

“Some people?”

“Yo,” Xana began, “is it okay if I have a party? Just three or four people at most.”

“Sure. Just so long as it doesn’t turn into another solar system,” Dylan said.

A regular house party was just that – a party with everyone at the one house. A solar system party was a party that extended to all the other houses on the same street. It wasn’t quite the same as a block party. A block party had rules and regulations; a solar system lacked any of those things. Solar systems always just happened to formulate on their own. In a normal town such parties weren’t possible, but in a small town consisting nearly entirely of college students, it took effort to keep a solar system from forming.

“We’ll keep it on the DL,” Xana promised.

At the base of the slope behind 1122 King Rd., where the back porch met the sliding glass door, there they were, the boys from the fraternities piled onto the outdoor couch, beers in hands, shirtless, some of them with sunglasses, some wearing trucker’s hats. There they were underneath the summer sun shining hard and loudly over the country music blasting from within the house. There they were, the bitches wearing clothing that could’ve been underwear were it not for the fact that they all matched, elbows locked and intertwined – it may have been that they were keeping each other safe; it may have been they were already too drunk to stand on their own. There they were, the neighbors from the Alpha Gamma Rho - Beta Phi house collecting on the rooftop next door, fold-out chairs, coolers and boomboxes off to the side, tossing a football to each other – all signs of the creation of a new solar system.

Chief among them, basking in her own fold-out chair, a queen above and beyond her subjects, rested Xana Kernodle wearing only sunglasses and a two-piece red bathing suit. Is it a sin to take the sun? On an afternoon like this? she wondered.

He never made an entrance, rather Ethan Chapin always seemed to just appear among the crowds of other young men his age. Standing lanky over most others, in his pink shades and in spite of his attempts at a new mustache, Ethan looked younger and a little wilder than the other party goers. He sang quips and jokes like a rock star. Literally, one of the things he loved to do at some inevitable point in the night would be to break out in a country music song. Xana could listen to him sing for hours, and she could watch him in general the whole night. Currently, Ethan flailed his hands out from his body, hollering something at the boys next to him, extending his joke to infinity just in case any one of them gave a damn. He spotted Xana in her chair and quit the others to advance her direction, a new lingering kind of smile on his face.

“Shit’s going down!” he said.

“Over here,” Xana told him. She indicated the fold out chair next to her own.

Ethan sat down on the folding chair, only to realize he’d done so without a drink. He spotted one of his bros across the way. Ethan signaled this individual the same way a baseball player might, with a hand swipe across his own chest, a touch to his forehead, a wipe down the length of one arm, followed by some wacky twisting of his hands near his face. The non-verbal performance meant nothing at all...to anyone else. But the frat boys of Sigma Chi knew the movements were code for, “Please get me a beer.”

Beer finally in hand, Ethan lounged back in his chair and looked at his girlfriend. She cleared her throat at him and held out her empty hands. Her non-verbal code for, “Please get me anything but a beer.”

The party continued on into the late evening. The country music played. More arrived. Xana and her roommates shared gossip over drinks. More arrived. Kegs were delivered and a few young men managed the taps. After long lines had formed on each of the other taps, Jake Schriger manned the final remaining tap. Some guys set up a beer pong table using a long board and a couple of trash cans. Still more arrived.

Around 9pm Bryan Kohberger and Brent Lee Kopacka showed up. Several women at the party looked their way. Bryan had some kind of moisturizer holding his hair, wore a white collared button-up shirt, navy blue shorts and sandals. Brent had on a camo ball cap, a pinkish muscle shirt, khaki shorts and flip flops.

From across the deck, Maddie Mogen eyed Bryan Kohberger. From across the other side of the deck Xana eyed the both of them, only half-believing the two would ever be compatible.

She watched Maddie maneuver around her friends so that Bryan would have to pass beside her in order to reach the crowded taps. Still, however, Maddie remained with her friends. Xana knew this was her cue, so she got up and joined them. Each girl shared at least one odd story that had occurred over their summer so far, piling on insults and hyperbole about the people who crossed them, or their girlfriends, using whatever means necessary to remain the temporary center-of-attention. Girls helped their girlfriends to remember some important details if they forgot, particularly those that involved boys.

Just as Bryan Kohberger passed by the group, Xana pretended to see him for the first time and lightly grabbed his shoulder. “Oh, hello. You made it,” she said.

“We found the place,” Bryan said, smiling for the first time since entering the back patio. Brent Kopacka continued on toward the beer taps as if he hadn’t even seen the girls.

“You’re –,” Xana began before the briefest stall.

“I’m Bryan,” Bryan said, more to the group of girls than to Xana specifically.

In a slightly delayed, bubbly unison Xana also said, “Bryan.”

The music blasting from within the house had switched from country to hip-hop.

“You recognize her?” Xana asked him. “This is Maddie.”

“Sure,” Bryan said. “You work at the Mad Greek with Xana, don’t you?”

“We play together more than work,” Maddie said.

“You’re playing now,” Bryan said.

“Have you met my boyfriend?” Maddie said. “He’s right over there.”

She pointed to Jake as though she were pointing to a man of great significance, but instead Jake looked more like a monstrously large child, guzzling beer straight from the tap, sending a cascade of foamy suds down the center of his chest before handing it over to Brent to do the same. Maddie blushed.

“He seems happy,” Bryan Kohberger said. “I feel like I’ve met him already.”

Just then Jake ducked down behind himself and produced a box. Xana’s eyes bounced back and forth until it became clear that a couple of boxes had been placed behind the kegs at some point in the evening unknown to her and were now emerging

from the hillside grass like large rocks in the shallows. Jake handed the box to Brent, then grabbed the second box. “Fireworks time!” Jake Schriger announced to everyone.

The crowd cheered, though, Xana suspected, few of them knew what they were actually cheering for. “Who in the fuck brought fireworks?” she asked, a gaping half-smile growing on her face.

Maddie Mogen sighed. “I kinda did.”

Xana and Bryan’s heads both turned to Maddie in the same slow manner as Maddie shrugged a tiny shrug.

Brent Kopacka was the first to light a firework. The night had grown dark enough so that only the lights hanging from the balcony provided any real visibility. Brent lifted a long, pencil-thin stick with a cylindrical tube about as thick as Xana’s arm attached to it. At the head of the cylindrical tube was a cone with the point sticking upward. The skyrocket tubing was bright yellow on white stars and a fuse as thick as a power cable extended outward from the bottom like a loose string. Its coned head was solid red, the property of its materials indeterminate. Xana thought they could’ve been metal or cardboard. Brent handled the skyrocket like a trained soldier handling explosives, though Xana did not know he’d ever actually been one.

Brent stabbed the skyrocket stick into the ground so that the cone pointed upward. He looked to Jake for approval. Jake nodded back at him. Brent lifted one arm into the air as if preventing anyone from coming closer. He pulled out a lighter. “Everyone stay back,” he said.

The whole patio and most of the area leading to the driveway grew silent. The scene grew eerie given that the music from inside the house blasted, but no one was talking or laughing or dancing. No one did anything.

Brent lit the fuse and a thousand tiny sparks shot out making crispy sounds. After a moment the skyrocket whistled into the sky, disappearing like a dark ghost.

The sky was absent of all light except the moon and the distance stars until suddenly a loud boom, followed by a massive ball of lights that fell to the earth in a circular curtain-like manner that resembled the twining leaves of a tropical hanging plant, falling like a willowy wig of long pink hair before dissolving from existence.

Some girls hooted and jeered, while the men howled with laughter. Then the whole place cheered and screamed for more.

Jake joined Brent and the two began working fastidiously on lighting off as many skyrockets as they could after sticking them into the ground. The music from within the house had returned to country.

The crowd began to turn a little nuts. Ethan grabbed Xana and lifted her off of her feet, holding her by her back and knees the way he would an unconscious person. She hooted and wrapped one arm around his neck. He handed her over to David Loach who lifted her over his head. David then passed Xana along to others. David and some other men then grabbed Ethan, lifted him up, all men laughing, then pushed Ethan along to others until Ethan was crowd-surfing with Xana.

Xana felt the warm hands of others pattering the backside of her half-naked body, hands separate from each other but still together like the links of a bouncing net, supporting her as she drifted along the side of 1122 King Rd., and downward toward the

driveway. A number of fireworks suddenly boomed from above and colored the sky with a chaotic splatter of brightly colored ionized paint on black canvas. Xana Kernodle’s extended body circled above the crowd like the watery gyre of a river eddy, rising and dipping in wave after wave that filled Xana with a dizzying sensation. Ethan floated past her, the two of them laughing and managing to touch hands before they drifted apart. She caught the crowd lifting Maddie Mogen over head, then Bryan Kohberger, both of them looking no different than two people relaxing on a mattress – Maddie laughing hysterically as she began to surf the crowd; Bryan smiling, but showing no other emotion.

Another massive salvos of fireworks lifted off and exploded high above Moscow, Idaho. A tangerine fish firework blew up next to several bright pink and yellow comets. An orange brocade crown flashed and banged followed by some magenta chrysanthemums. The vibrant fireworks seemed to vibrate in the night sky as if alive and excited.

Jake pulled Maddie down from the crowd and then asked a random fellow nearby (Brent was still operating the fireworks) to help hold her upside down. Jake grabbed the beer tap while holding one side of Maddie up and fed it to her upside down mouth. The crowd cheered for more.

Jake let Maddie back down and she stumbled off to the side. Bryan Kohberger landed in front of Jake, so he performed the same type of keg stand with Bryan. But something happened then. While Bryan was being held upside down, someone’s hand slipped on one of Bryan’s thighs causing him to crash head-first to the ground, missing the steel keg by mere centimeters. Jake laughed along with everyone else as Bryan Kohberger lay on the

ground seemingly unconscious. Maddie Mogen shouted and stumbled over to Bryan, crouching over him. The rest of the crowd continued to cheer, but it was then that Xana, still crowd-surfing, noticed the fireworks had ceased.

Appearing almost out of nowhere, Brent Kopacka dashed toward Jake Schriger and slugged him in the face. Jake stumbled backward, before being caught and held up by some other college men. Jake wiped his chin, hollered something, then charged at Brent Kopacka. The two got off a couple of swipes before David Loach, who was standing nearby, was accidentally hit by Jake. David hit Jake back, but couldn’t do more before another random fellow hit him.

The entire backyard erupted into a massive brawl. Even the girls fought.

Xana was lowered near the driveway. Her red two-piece bathing suit had stayed on through the whole ride.

After a moment Ethan was safely lowered next to her. Xana shouted for everyone to stop, but no one did. Ethan grabbed her in a kind of backwards bear hug to protect her from the growing chaos around them. Something made of glass crashed on the ground nearby. People shouted as they threw punches. Xana watched Dylan Mortensen and Bethany Funke running around the patio in circles. Maddie Mogen helped Bryan Kohberger and his pulverized face get back up. She carried him, ducking in between the crowd, off through the sliding glass door and into the house. It was then Xana realized everyone was there except for Kaylee Goncalves.

Xana turned away and looked up only at Ethan. He looked down only at her. The two of them kissed each other as a vortex of chaos and pandemonium whirled around them. They held each other, both of them very aware of how impossible it should’ve been for them

to be blind to the rest of the world at that moment. Ethan smiled. Xana smiled, then instinctively she fixed her smile, wondering if Ethan had caught her adjusting her sorrow. Xana was learning. What whole populations are to the committed is what light is to the eyeless. Love made her blind, so she touched him. For the blind, to touch is to see.

Ethan stole her away, and for the first time in a very long time Xana attempted to enter 1122 King Rd. through the front door. “Damnit. I can’t remember that fucking passcode!” she told Ethan.

“Come on,” he said, grabbing her by the hand.

The two went around to the other side of the house. Screams and crashing could be heard on the patio and all around the other side of the house, but the side that they were on was completely devoid of partygoers.

“I’ll lift you up. Try to sneak inside through the back,” Ethan told her.

“I’ll pull you up with me,” Xana told him. There was no way she was stepping back onto that patio without him.

The two made it up onto the patio. A moment later blinking blue and red lights splashed along the hillside and the house. The lights were definitely not fireworks.

“Cops!” someone shouted. Everyone began a mad dash in every direction, many of the students disappearing almost expertly. “Cops! Cops!” people shouted, disappearing into the night until only a few remained.

From outside Xana heard the doorbell to her own house ring followed by a loud knock. “Everyone,” she said. “Stay quiet.”

Dylan Mortensen crouched and hugged Bethany Funke underneath the beer pong table. Xana pointed to Dylan. “You, look around for anything illegal and fucking get rid of it.”

Dylan nodded and got up.

Xana Kernodle pointed to Bethany Funke. “You, help Ethan get the fireworks the fuck out of here.”

“Xana,” Ethan said, squeezing her hand.

Xana pulled her hand away from Ethan and then shoved him toward Bethany. “Go,” she told him as she headed inside to answer the front door, before adding, “I’ll handle the cops.”

July 6, 2022

Moscow, Idaho

Rebecca Scofield sat with the emotional tinge of a jasper red July day, pondering the wheres-and-whys of it alone in her office at the University of Idaho. Scrolling down Kaylee Goncalves’s social media feed, she didn’t get far before noticing the links with images sent to Kaylee of a party held just prior to the 4th of July. People mingled in the darkness, fireworks blasting in the sky, drinks held in tangled crowds of youth.

Shadows came into being over Rebecca Scofield’s flushed eyes.

In one photo Maddie Mogen hugged some girl Rebecca didn’t recognize. In the background other people conversed on the wide patio and the wider hillside beyond the house at 1122 King Rd. The camera’s image only barely neutered the sounds and smells that night must’ve bred. In another image, Maddie blew a kiss to the camera with other girls laughing beside her. But it was the photo that ensnared Bryan Kohberger, laughing with the others, holding his drink, doing a keg stand, then, next to him, Brent Lee Kopacka, lighting off fireworks seen and heard around the world that night, that gave Rebecca pause. “Those fucking idiots,” she hissed, smacking her computer screen.

It had been her idea to have Bryan Kohberger and Brent Lee Kopacka team up to find a way to get closer to the girls. After watching the girls’ home over several weeks, she and Kohberger discovered that Maddie and Xana both worked at the Mad Greek in Moscow, ID after following Maddie’s car one afternoon.

From there it was up to Bryan and Brent to make friends with them.

In the meanwhile, Rebecca would work on Kaylee Goncalves.

This was decided because Kaylee was the only University of Idaho senior living at 1122 King Rd., thus she was the only one Rebecca could step-in for as an academic advisor. And she felt she’d done a good job, injuring Dr. Ross so that she could briefly fill in as Academic Advisor for the Communications Department, earning Kaylee’s trust and confidence in her advising expertise. Rebecca had been a professor for long enough to advise students, even if they majored in a different field other than history. It wasn’t difficult for her to redirect Kaylee Goncalves’s appointment to her office to ensure they would meet weekly in person.

And now all the work Rebecca had poured herself into would crumble thanks to Bryan Kohberger and Brent Lee Kopacka having a night on the town with the residences at 1122 King Rd. In one post, someone had mentioned that the cops had been called. Some Criminologist! Rebecca would have Bryan’s head for this! She was too busy at the moment to handle him. But the clock was now ticking.

Just last week, on the Friday before the 4th of July weekend, she and Kaylee met in her office to discuss different 400-level communications classes available in the coming fall semester. As Rebecca Scofield brought up the itinerary on her computer screen, Kaylee stood up and stepped toward a large bookshelf filled with different historical items and trinkets that Rebecca had found and kept along the way during her adventures earning her PhD.

Kaylee turned toward Rebecca. “Does it work, Dr. Scofield?” she asked, indicating an old compass on one of the shelves near eye-level. The compass was encased in wood within a separate wooden lid to enclose it, but the lid was currently set open.

"It's just Rebecca." Rebecca looked up. “Yes, it’s real.” She got up and walked to the shelf, picking up the small compass and handing it over to Kaylee. “It was used by Lewis and Clark during their expedition.”

Kaylee took the tiny compass and carefully cradled it in her hands, pondering its glassy face. “It’s so cute!” she exclaimed.

Rebecca couldn’t help smiling. A gesture of leadership. It never got old watching a student show even the slightest interest in history – her chosen passion. Next to where the compass had been was another object. Rebecca picked it up. “Have you ever heard of an adze?”

“No.”

Rebecca smiled. “I thought not. Not many have.” In Rebecca’s hand was what looked like a small tomahawk.

“Is it an ax?” Kaylee asked.

“Similar,” Rebecca told her. “Adzes were used for stripping bark or other unwanted matter from wood. We have no need for them today due to modern milling, but back in Lewis and Clark’s time these tools were extremely useful.”

“How did you get a hold of them?”

“Found them. Though, most artifacts have already been either permanently lost or found.”

Kaylee showed herself curious, then a little sad. She set the compass back onto the shelf. “I wish I could go where they went and search for their belongings. I’d never forget it. I’d always have a piece of what I found to remember it by.”

A cluster of possibilities formed then. It was true enough that Rebecca was planning an expedition with some fellow historians – they did so every summer. But she’d never before invited a student that wasn’t within the history program. She would have to come up with a way to hide the fact from her colleagues. “In a week or so I’ll be heading down to Lewiston at the confluence of Potlatch Creek and the Clearwater River. I head there every year to search the grounds for more artifacts. We raft down the river, passing every area Lewis and Clark did. Then we explore the grounds, caverns, and caves. These are the best places to search for Lewis and Clark’s lost artifacts.” Rebecca fought to keep the insistence from sweeping out of her voice. “You’re welcome to come.”

“Sure.” Kaylee said. “We’ll be rafting?”

“Oh, yes.” Rebecca Scofield said. This was her chance! She could lure Kaylee Goncalves into a cave and then tie her up, maybe beat her and then take pictures, and then send the images to Maddie Mogen with a message that Kaylee would be held at ransom until Maddie agreed to do whatever she demanded. Or she could hold Kaylee captive and force Maddie to withdraw money from her own bank account then pay up. She’d have to split the money with Bryan and Brent, but revenge for Hannah Cleere was never about the money, at least not for Rebecca Scofield. If neither of these options seemed viable, she could have Bryan and Brent do something to the house while Maddie and Kaylee were both held captive somewhere outside of Lewiston, Idaho. She’d find a way to make those two idiots useful. “And we’ll be exploring caves,” she told Kaylee. “Any treasures there could be worth $100,000. And you keep what you find.”

Kaylee turned and smiled and Scofield’s whole office lit up with the suggestion of happiness.

As she drove her Toyota Land Cruiser south toward Lewiston, Rebecca discussed the pathway they’d enter Hell’s Gate State Park from with a geology professor named Matthew Nye. “The wind’s blowing sediments northward, so I’ll need to take Tammany Creek south,” he told her.

Riding in the back, directly behind Rebecca, sat Kaylee Goncalves. Kaylee discussed the best pen pal she’d ever written to with a young geology adjunct named Amy Margolis. “It was a Panamanian girl, who’s name I can’t remember,” Kaylee told Amy.

“I wrote to an Iraqi kid after the U.S. invaded,” Amy said.

“Do you know any Arabic?” Kaylee asked.

Rebecca checked on them from the rear-view mirror as she sped down the highway and Matthew examined the map. Both girls played on their smartphones as they spoke to each other. The smart devices were the final remaining survivors of the world outside of Rebecca’s Toyota Land Cruiser as they left everything else in their lives behind piece by piece.

“She would write shukran all the time. I can’t remember exactly what it meant.”

“Thanks,” Rebecca hollered at them. She was forced to compete with the strong winds blasting in from her open window.

“You’re welcome,” Kaylee said. Both girls in the back laughed.

“No,” Rebecca said, “that’s the meaning –,” she trailed off.

The plan was to take the geologists to the trails just east of Hell’s Gate, then Rebeccca and Kaylee would double back to rent a raft from the Riverquest Excursions dock. Rebecca had done this all before, but now with Kaylee along, this time already was beginning to feel very different from her past excursions.

To Rebecca, Kaylee was little more than a carbon-copy of all the other young blondes doing what they do in the sorority houses across campus. Expendable to academics, except when they paid money. Rebecca had no need for girls of this sort, except, of course, to teach them. To play the part, anyway, and take their money.

Rebecca Scofield needed this annual unshared experience into the wild that she’d stumbled upon many years ago. The plan with the other geologists, Matthew and Amy, was to drop them off in Lewiston. They would catch a different ride back up to Moscow. This would allow Rebecca to do with Kaylee what she wanted. Yet now, Rebecca was sacrificing her exploratory time, her alone time, a wholesome time, to potentially assault a girl who may very well have been the polar opposite of Hannah Cleere. Rebecca moved her head closer to her window as she sped down the highway. She allowed her hair to catch as much of the wind as possible for as long as possible thinking this must be the same feeling that an aged leaf feels as it falls from its tree to the ground below.

Here, searching for treasure on the Lewis and Clark trail, is where Rebecca could lose the intellectual and emotional equivalent of that falling leaf, her inability to shift from background to foreground despite growing dizzy, unable to keep herself from reeling as concerns everlasting and forgettable, professional and personal, immediate and long-term, rush around her in a tide of disconnectedness.

A treasure, yes, that is what history is to Rebecca Scofield.

Looking back at Kaylee, unable to see anything other than Kaylee’s eyes locked on to and softly lit blue by the beaming screen of her smartphone, Rebecca did not think tying up and torturing Kaylee Goncalves to be much of a tragedy at all. Her Toyota’s engine roared along with the real heat of the wilderness outside of Lewiston, Idaho as it forced its way through the Land Cruiser’s open windows. Rebecca Scofield’s free hand that wasn’t holding the wheel moved to Bryan Kohberger’s Ka-Bar knife that she still possessed and currently had attached to the left side of her belt.

Swallow’s Nest came into view. The large rock jutted out of the arid tundra like a stone giant’s thumb. Beneath it flowed the Snake River, a river that, from a distance, lived up to its name, slithering through the ridge lands southwest to northeast, curving here and there every few acres like the dark twisting strands of a massive mythical snake’s scales. Drying sage shivered in the wind. Rebecca doubted that anyone could ever explore the whole of Hell’s Gate in a single lifetime. The sun rolled over nearly every trace of the vast mottle of rocks and dirt that stood against the bald between Idaho and Washington.

“Is that it?” Kaylee asked.

“That’s where you’re headed,” Michael answered. “But we’re getting dropped off first to the southeast.” He pointed to the left in the same direction that the Snake River flowed.

The geologist fields shown like a pale tan line before the riverside. Rebecca couldn’t tell where the geologists had left their work last year or where they would return to this time around. She was confident that Michael knew where to go.

After dropping off Amy and Michael and saying their goodbyes, Kaylee joined Rebecca up front, taking the passenger seat. “We won’t be long,” Rebecca told her.

“The drive was shorter than I expected,” Kaylee said.

“I don’t imagine it’ll be long before we find something, but we’re gonna have to raft southwest down the river in order to reach the caves.”

They placed a couple of metal detectors, some food, GPS devices, and the rest of their belongings inside a decent two-person raft Rebecca Scofield rented from the Riverquest Excursions shop near the river dock. They each helped each other strap on a life vest. Kaylee searched the cliffs and the river. Her browning legs matched portions of the looming cliffs and barren foothills beyond, contrasting greatly with the light blue jean shorts and black top she wore. “It looks fun.”

“Not if we tip over,” Rebecca said, stumbling around in her thick waterproof sandals.

“That would be even more fun.” Kaylee said. “If it gets hot out.”

Rebecca looked around, too. Both women had on wide-brimmed hats, so the sun’s heat impact would have some limited potency on their exposed face and shoulders. It was mid-morning in mid-July, so the day was still cool, but Rebecca knew it would get real hot soon. “Yeah, maybe we should take a dip,” she said. “Just don’t talk about men. Pinky swear?”

“Pinky swear,” Kaylee said, winking and holding out her pinky.

Rebecca guided the raft from the front while Kaylee pushed it from behind. The water rose higher and higher up to her thighs as she trudged further away from the bank. The riverbed mud sucked each of her feet downward which gave her feet the sensation that

they’d suddenly gained several pounds of weight. Cool mud oozed between Rebecca’s toes along with the river’s cold water, in a give-and-take, like a silent conversation taking place between her skin and mud that she would never see. Rebecca instructed Kaylee to jump in before lifting herself into the raft. A flock of birds suddenly switched direction from above.

The glassy water shimmered, already its light becoming like ephemeral stretched out diamonds winking away over the silver in the late July morning. They paddled down the river, each guiding their oar through the waves on opposite sides of the raft. Rebecca sat in front while Kaylee handled the rear. The two of them talked about Kaylee’s communications classes and what she expected from the coming semester. Rebecca couldn’t help mentioning how different comm classes were from history. “The difference is simple,” Rebecca told Kaylee. “You communication majors are fun to be around, always making yourselves presentable; we history majors discuss what’s always been around, hoping it’s accurately presented.”

Then they got on the subject of religion. “I met a Mormon once who said, ‘God can only tell us as much as we can grasp’,” Kaylee said.

Rebecca responded. “I met an ex-Mormon who said, ‘All I have are my experiences, and my experiences, being finite, cannot reveal the infinite to me.’”

Their raft listed strongly to the left. Rebecca caught the waving shine of the river’s surface rapidly being overtaken by the spitting whitewater of rapids. These differences in the river were new to Rebecca. “I don’t recall these rapids,” she told Kaylee. “Just keep paddling like you are. You’re doing great.”

“Thanks!” Kaylee shouted back.

The raft seemed to groan as it again listed strongly in the other direction. Then, it seemed, the raft tossed violently to the left as though a giant hand had slapped it from underneath the surface. Rebecca fought hard. Her oar smacked the water, but the water smacked right back. Then the river spat a flurry into her face and hat. She was temporarily blinded. Behind her Kaylee’s voice cut through the river’s angry fuss. Rebecca couldn’t tell if Kaylee was speaking words or shouting or screaming.

“Padd – !” Scofield tried to shout, but a wall of whitewater consumed her.

The raft gave up, overturning in defeat. Both women were tossed directly into the river.

Shouts, metal, water – all seemed to scream in their own voice until the river muted everything out. Rebecca struggled to keep herself upright. The oar was ripped from her hands. Her entire body froze from the cold. It was as if the water was a giant icy tongue pulling her downward into a mouth. She closed her eyes, but the muffled sounds wouldn’t allow the water’s current to settle down.

All was black. Then she could hear again. A portion of her head was above the surface. She sucked in air, opened her eyes, but the world was a wet blur. “Kaylee!” she tried. No response before the current pulled her back down.

Then suddenly a hand had her wrist. It pulled. Rebecca flailed for a moment until another hand had her around the stomach. Slowly she was pulled upward until the wind blasted the side of her face. Of all the times she’d floated down the Snake, she’d never thought capsizing would be this disorienting. The arms continued to pull her in a direction. She inched along, mechanically, that mud stubbornly holding her feet. Her breathing refused to slow. Before long, the river was beneath her knees, then her feet, then her toes.

Kaylee Goncalves pulled her the rest of the way to safety to the dry surface of the bank. Never in her life had Rebecca Scofield been so happy to lay upon dried dirt. “Thank you,” she said to Kaylee who stood over her.

“No problem. I worked as a lifeguard one summer in Coeur D’Alene.” In spite of her drenched clothing and hair, now visible as both women had lost their hats, Kaylee seemed as bright a young thing as ever.

Scofield checked their position while sitting. She thought she knew where they were. “The rule is: Around here, always head north.”

They had nothing left from the raft, or the raft itself. All was lost, save for their clothing and the Ka-Bar knife.

After drying and catching their breath, the two headed north in silence.

Strange thoughts began to take Rebecca Scofield then as she moved through the high swooning grass in between the riverbank’s rutted old trees with Kaylee Goncalves. Rebecca took in the silence, a natural sign of consolation. Her life had just come so close to ending. It played out over a slow montage consisting of filmic stills, not more than a few frames. A twelve-year-old Rebecca falling from her bike and scraping her knee. / Getting raped in college. / Her husband proposing to her. / Her first child. / Earning her PhD. / Hannah Cleere dead. / Brian Kohberger fulfilling her in a crude way she couldn’t understand. / Kaylee Goncalves grasping her wrist.

The dull scent of corolla on the wind, Kaylee’s drying blonde hair matted in the tree shade – Rebecca felt this moment would stick with her. A squirrel laughed from one of the trees. Soon a different odor filled the air. An odor Rebecca instantly recognized. However, it would be Kaylee who brought it up.

“Is that weed?” Kaylee asked, turning toward her.

“I may be your academic advisor, Kaylee,” Rebecca said. “But you don’t need me to confirm that one.”

They pushed their way into an opening that at first glance seemed like a tall grassy fence. Lined as far as the eye could see in either direction were marijuana plants. Something about them instantly unsettled Rebecca. They were too orderly, too well kept.

Kaylee pulled a bud off one plant, sniffed it, then another. “My roommates will love me forever,” she told Rebecca.

“Something’s not right about this,” Rebecca said.

“You said we’d find treasure,” Kaylee said, packing the buds into her breast cleavage as her backpack was long gone. She produced a lighter and held it up to Rebecca with pride. “I’d say this counts!”

Rebecca pulled a bud off one of the plants. Examined it. Looked around. Her eyes stopped on a small hispanic man pointing an assault rifle directly at her. The man shouted in Spanish so loudly that Kaylee dropped the bud she was holding. She turned and saw the man.

Both women threw their hands up.

The man continued in Spanish. Rebecca Scofield spoke the language fluently. Unsure of whether or not Kaylee understood the man, Rebecca translated. “He wants us to get down. I guess lay down.”

Kaylee lowered herself to the ground. Other voices could be heard approaching. Rebecca watched the man before them. He took his eyes off of Rebecca in order to

watch Kaylee as she lowered herself to the ground, keeping his gun trained on Kaylee. Rebecca saw this as her chance. She pulled the Ka-Bar knife from its sheath on her belt and threw it at the man. The Ka-Bar went straight into his left eye. Later it would make sense to Rebecca that the tempered knife could easily pierce a human’s eyeball, but in the moment she was shocked by how easily it had gone through. The immediate presence of blood gushing down the man’s face also took her for a loop.

This time it was Rebecca’s turn to grab Kaylee. The Spanish speaking voices in the distance were getting closer. Rebecca quickly helped Kaylee to her feet and the two ran in the direction of the man. He was spinning around, screaming, holding his eye with one hand, grasping for his assault rifle with the other which dangled from a sling around his shoulder. He struggled to retrieve his own rifle. Rebecca pushed the man back while simultaneously yanking the Ka-Bar from his eye. “Go!” she yelled at Kaylee.

The two ran past the man for a long distance, the screams slowly diminishing in volume, the smell of marijuana disappearing entirely, though Kaylee still occasionally got a whiff from the stash in her shirt.

“What a helluva day,” Kaylee said. “Does this happen every time?”

“No,” Rebecca said.

Soon they came to a yawning stony mound. The cave was familiar to Rebecca. “Finally, something familiar. Shit, you leave for one year, it’s like you’re in a different country. I know this cave,” she told Kaylee. “We can hide here for a while until those cartel goons give up.”

“Hopefully they give up.”

“Hopefully,” Rebecca repeated.

With the Ka-Bar knife, Rebecca cut several tree branches free, and with Kaylee’s help, was able to cover up most of the cave’s entrance.

“That should hide us,” Rebecca said.

Inside, the cave had almost no light. Rebecca grabbed a stick, held her hand out to Kaylee, and beckoned with all four of her fingers. Kaylee silently complied by pulling some of the weed from her breasts and allowing it to be used as torch material.

“I thought we were dead back there.”

“Death is the exact ingredient you need,” Rebecca said, lighting the torch. “To make life interesting.”

Their torch lit, Rebecca and Kaylee headed deeper into the cave. After some time they reached a wide opening in the cave with a massive gash in the roof that allowed sunlight to pour in. The torch was no longer necessary, so the two of them smoked the remaining torch weed using a handmade pipe from a hollowed-out twig Rebecca had made using the Ka-Bar knife.

“I swore off getting drunk and high,” Kaylee told Rebecca. “But I guess it’s okay under these circumstances.”

“Your academic advisor approves,” Rebecca said, taking a drag.

The two sat underneath the sunlight. “Why do you care about history?” Kaylee asked Rebecca.

“I guess because it teaches me how to handle the present,” Rebecca said. “If it wasn’t for history, I wouldn’t know about this cave existing, for example.”

“Good point,” Kaylee said. “How many times have you been here anyway?”

“This makes three.”

“Why’d you come here the other two times?”

“Good question,” Rebecca said. “Legend has it, Lewis and Clark hid a box filled with Thomas Jefferson Peace Medals somewhere in this cave. It was too dangerous to leave the medals anywhere else, so they hid them in a cave. My colleagues used to think this was the cave, but we searched it twice and never found anything.”

“You mean nickels?” Kaylee laughed. “Really old nickels? I bet a nickel would’ve been like fifty bucks in Jefferson’s time.”

Rebecca had to laugh at that. “No. Jefferson gave Lewis and Clark peace medals about the size of coffee coasters to give to any Native Americans they came across. The hope was that the natives wouldn’t attack, and would maybe even ally or join Lewis and Clark if their expedition needed extra hands.”

Kaylee lit the pipe and took another long drag before handing it over to Rebecca. “Isn’t that one over there?”

Rebecca frowned. “Ha, ha,” she said, sarcastically. “You don’t have to make fun of me, Kaylee.”

“I’m not,” Kaylee said, frowning back. “That looks like what you just described.” Kaylee pointed at a dull metal disk tucked between a knee-high rock and the wall on the other side of the cave.

Rebecca followed the direction of Kaylee’s finger. Sure enough, it appeared to be a disk about 3” in diameter. “No way!” Rebecca said standing up and heading toward the disk. “No way! No way! What the fuck kind of weed is this?!”

She dislodged the disk from the wedge it was trapped in, brushed some dirt off of it, and was greeted by Thomas Jefferson’s profile. The thing looked like it had survived some

ancient shipwreck. “No way!” she shouted. She turned it over and read the words she was expecting – PEACE. AND. FRIENDSHIP.

Kaylee got up and headed toward her. “Is that really it?”

Rebecca answered by letting out a long, steady wail. She then began jumping around, shouting with joy. “This is it!” she shouted over and over. She ran over to Kaylee and hugged her. The two of them jumped as they embraced each other, both of them wailing, both of them high as a kite. Kaylee stopped Rebecca with force, “The cartel! They might hear us!”

Rebecca decided they might as well sleep through the night in the cave. Her and Kaylee snuggled up together in a corner of the cave room. Laying, they talked.

Rebecca talked about her husband and whether or not she loved him as she turned the dusty numismatic medal round and round before her. She spoke again of history, but this time of her own. How her movement in life seemed to carry her, more or less, into a world that continually articulated itself with each passing event. “Does anything else make sense?” she asked Kaylee Goncalves.

“A lot of things can, but sometimes things make sense to me long after the fact”, Kaylee said.

Rebecca Scofield continued unafraid about anything but her inability to tell everything. This problem didn’t seem to exist when she was in the presence of Kaylee Goncalves. Opening herself up now, was reminiscent of her brief time spent with Hannah Cleere. She took a drag from the pipe, filling her lungs with the burning pleasure of a fearless dreamer. She examined the Jefferson medal as if seeing it for the first time.

“Bite it,” Kaylee said.

Again, a laugh from Rebecca. “It’s not a gold medal. It’s silver.”

Rebecca asked Kaylee what to do about her husband. She felt their relationship had become impersonal. Like a workplace duo, a handyman and an apprentice. Could she no longer recognize her loved one’s worth, once it has, like her own worth, gone away like moisture dried up from lips locked together for too long in a lingering kiss? What’s left inside her heart? She wondered. Even blood, with its briefest span of life, surely knows the secrets of her mind and body, having ridden many times through the channels of her veins that connect her miasma together. Powering it with the force of a woman’s matter-of-factly might, feeling, smiling, worrying, crying, taking for granted – all those feelings she never counted on or, somehow, never fulfilled.

“Here,” Kaylee Goncalves said in a low voice. “Take my hand.”

The two held each other there in the darkening passage filled with second-hand marijuana smoke. Rebecca figured no other living souls had done this. Kaylee licked the inside of her own mouth to help moisten it, and felt the pulse beating from Rebecca’s wrist, wondering if her world would keep filling with moments and places like this one.

Kaylee told Rebecca about her longtime boyfriend Jack DuCoeur and how she thought breaking up with him was inevitable. When she once shopped at the antique store in Moscow she wondered what talent last played the used violin on the shelf. Had their way with it until it had gotten into the chipped and split condition that it was in. Did that mean it was loved or hated, only to be loved or hated again? Had it ever played as good as it could have? Was she and her friends destined for a similar fate? Did they play each other like violins, enjoying one another in some fabulous concert before breaking it off, abandoning

each other once the sun had set on their time? Would any of them walk away wondering if they had been as good as they could’ve been?

“I swore off sex and partying,” Kaylee admitted then. “I graduate next semester, man.”

“I’ll get you there,” Rebecca said.

She turned toward Kaylee in their cave, a place without men or friends or the comforts of home, Kaylee’s warmth giving her something to believe in. Their lips met and no sooner had her tongue touched Kaylee’s before Kaylee pushed her away.

“Not now,” Kaylee said. “Not like this.”

“Okay,” Rebecca said.

The two eventually fell asleep with each other.

The next day Rebecca led Kaylee back out of the cave and back to the Hell’s Gate National Park entrance. They stood beside the vehicle. Rebecca felt the Jefferson Peace Medal in her front pocket, excited by its potential value and her future fame. Kaylee Goncalves was looking upward to the sky for reasons unknown to Rebecca Scofield.

She watched Kaylee then, really seeing her, and Rebecca couldn’t help thinking how much Kaylee reminded her of her younger self. Not at college age, but younger even. When she was a girl, what had she first noticed as she looked upward to the sky? The rain, or the birds? Perhaps it was neither. Perhaps it was only the wind, perhaps the same wind resting now between her teeth. Having never left. Still waiting to be spoken into words, given to that other girl — Kaylee Goncalves. There existed no lies within the wind. The lies had always

existed within her, Rebecca Scofield – teacher, wife, mother. She only need speak the truth.

She unlatched her belt so that the Ka-Bar knife and sheath slid free from it. “I feel bad getting this medal, and leaving you with nothing,” Rebecca said.

“I still have some of the weed,” Kaylee told Rebecca, meeting the older woman’s gaze.

“No,” Scofield said, holding out the sheathed knife. She would finally embrace the truth with two simple words. “Take this.”

“A knife?”

“It’s all I have to give you that you can remember this wild trip by,” Rebecca Scofield said.

Kaylee seemed unsure. “You sure?”

“Absolutely,” Rebecca said. “I won’t be needing it anymore.”

Kaylee took both of Rebecca’s hands before taking the knife. “Keep in touch, okay?”

“For sure,” Rebecca said, handing the knife over to Kaylee.

Kaylee Goncalves took the Ka-Bar knife and sheath, strapping it onto the belt on her shorts. By the time she had finished, Michael and Amy could be seen approaching from far beneath the nearby bluff.

August 22, 2022

Pullman, Washington

Brent Lee Kopacka was unsure of what went on between Bryan Kohberger and the girls at 1122 King Rd. those first few weeks. Only at times did he catch Kohberger leaving his apartment. Then other times when a girl would arrive.

“Maddie fuckin’ Mogen,” Brent Kopacka said to no one as he took a shot with his Mossberg Patriot rifle. The blast from his rifle swallowed up the vast expanse of the practice range before a momentary silence returned. He hit his target down range square in the center of its blank face. A dust nebula formed around the target before vanishing.

The patient dance of aiming and firing a rifle always settled Brent Kopacka. He remained steady, tucking his head into his right shoulder. He aligned his right eye within the scope, drew in his breath slowly, carefully, taking his time with it as he always had. He was reminded then about what his sergeant, a man named Busch had said about firing a rifle, about how a scope will bend light but never its brightness. “That’s what soldiers do,” Sgt. Busch had said. “We kill in the light or the dark, but we can’t control the brightness.” When firing a rifle, drawing in his breath always helped Brent to judge the wind – which way it was blowing, how strongly, and if the possibility existed for any sudden directional changes. The action was so controlled, so peaceful, a lot could go wrong, but Brent felt a nearly meditative command over his world and all the light within it.

Firing a rifle was the opposite of being blown up.

Brent didn’t know what went on in those first few days after having been hit by an IED. He didn’t see the hospital corpsman racing to dig the shrapnel out of his body or patch up the cuts. He was twenty years old. In boot camp he drank water instead of coffee. After basic, coffee instead of alcohol. He’d worn the same pair of socks for weeks at a time and had the habit of volunteering for action though no one in his unit could be called a best friend. Yet they saved him. For a week after the explosion, almost all he did was sleep. He was so unsure of everything that had happened during that week. Brent had never been placed in a position in which so much was out of his control. Even the sleep was something he hadn’t controlled.

Now, Brent Lee Kopacka felt that same lack of control, that same type of explosive chaos. Maddie Mogen and Bryan Kohberger were to blame. Firing his rifle was the only remedy Brent could think of to get them out of his mind. Other shots rang out from adjacent booths in nearby firing lanes. Other targets in other lanes down range bounced and flinched as bullets struck them. Brent liked the way the targets seemed to stand their ground after taking shot after shot.

“Bryan fuckin’ Kohberger,” he said as he took another shot at his own target.

Guns in general had taken on an intense, premier status in Brent’s life since Afghanistan. One hot day during his deployment, Brent learned from Sgt. Busch of the many ways a gun, just a simple handgun, could be tactically worked into daily life in various manners no normal, non-military, person would think of.

The Afghani desert wind scratched at Busch’s helmet as it whistled with a calm, impassive song. “Always place a handgun by your bedside,” Sgt. Busch had told Brent.

“Everyone does that,” Brent said, unimpressed. The scent of smoke from a nearby outdoor bark fire floated by the bullet-pocked clay hut they’d made a shelter out of.

“True,” Sgt. Busch said, raising a finger at Brent. “But here’s the trick. Make sure it’s the first thing an intruder sees.”

Brent took a swig from his canteen. He peered out into the shadow world that was a shadowy desert wasteland beyond his sunglasses. The meager purple lights of the Afghanistan sky were diminishing in the early evening as if they too were exhausted.

Sgt. Busch’s uneven mouth smiled from beneath his sunglasses, his large nose holding his glasses steady. “But before you do, load your gun with the wrong caliber bullets,” Busch told him. A fly feebly circled him, its frail wings somehow strong enough to handle the late Afghani winds.

Brent Kopacka leaned back and crossed his arms. “What?!” he sneered. “Why would anyone do that?”

“Because,” Sgt. Busch told him, “if an intruder steps into your bedroom, first thing he’s gonna notice is that gun beside your bed. That’s the first thing he’s gonna want. He’ll notice that gun more than he’ll notice you."

“So what,” Brent said. “He could still steal my gun. Use it against me.”

Sgt. Busch laughed. “Yeah, that’s the point. But can he use it? Can he really?”

“He could….”, then it hit Brent. “But if he uses it, he’s losing a hand.”

“And half his face. This is all before the ensuing fist fight once you jump out of bed and take him out.” Sgt. Busch hopped and did a karate chop. He settled down and thought

a little deeper for a second. “Or you could have a second, legitimately loaded handgun underneath your bed. Then just use that on him.”

Most of what Brent Kopacka had learned in the military was stupid nonsense. But everything gun-related, especially if it came from Sgt. Busch, was brilliant calculus. Ever since that conversation, Brent had wanted his own apartment back home for the sole purpose of placing a badly loaded handgun by his bedside. Of course, once he was discharged that’s exactly what he did. Then the waiting game of telling someone why it was there began. Brent would never tell anyone that he’d come up with the idea himself, but he’d infer it. Time would fly without anyone ever going into his bedroom, until Hannah Cleere. She hated the logic of the gun being there, but it was the one thing that she never demanded he remove.

Brent left the shooting range feeling better. He felt like a soldier again. He knew the feeling would leave him the first moment he had contact with another person.

He drove back to his apartment deciding on changing out the maleficent ammunition and replacing it with refreshed mismatched ammo. The gun could probably use cleaning as well.

Back inside his apartment, Brent placed his Mossberg back onto its spot on the gun rack in his guest room. He went to his bedroom, grabbed the Smith and Wesson .38 Special revolver by his bedside and took up a place on the couch in his living room. He placed the handgun onto the coffee table before him so that he could put on some ambient music from his streaming app. His favorite music to listen to while cleaning out his guns was soft classical.

Brent unloaded the .38 by removing the .357 Magnum bullets he’d placed inside of it some time ago. I’m a soldier. That’s what he told himself. Neither Bryan Kohberger nor Maddie Mogen could tell themselves the same thing. Brent felt his heart beat against the rhythm of the soft classical ambient music. Why did this dissonance throw him? He’d seen the two of them sneaking in, hushing and giggling late at night. Or, on occasion, they’d wake him in the early morning hours as they clumsily left Bryan Kohberger’s apartment. Brent never truly knew if it was Maddie Mogen. He supposed it could have been Rebecca Scofield.

Brent once traveled the full ten-mile drive to eat lunch at the Mad Greek restaurant in Moscow, Idaho by himself because he assumed that would be the last place he’d run into Maddie Mogen and Bryan Kohberger. No one dated where they worked. Although Maddie and Bryan had often found clever ways of turning themselves both visible and invisible, a perpetually inside-out exaggeration of a chameleon, they would just as soon as possible burst back onto center stage, under the guise of fun-loving neighbors, as a “love it or leave it chameleon” changing from the color of brightly lit lovers to the anti-color of stale water, or as a kind of joyful, half-conjoined-human pair, half-double-headed hydra chameleon that would regrow two heads for every head Brent Lee Kopacka imagined himself chopping off. There they were that day dining at the Mad Greek when he had arrived. Bryan Kohberger and Maddie Mogen sharing food from the same plate!

Brent Kopacka checked the gun for lint and dust or dirt inside the frame areas. He removed any signs of fouling within the gun by swiping at it harshly with a cloth. Brent was convinced that Maddie Mogen had become afflicted with Florence Nightingale Syndrome.

As far as he could remember, she hadn’t paid Kohberger any attention that very first day they had gone to the Mad Greek. It was only after Bryan had been attacked at Xana Kernodle’s house party that Maddie then turned her affections toward him. This meant Maddie and Bryan’s relationship was partially Brent’s own fault.

Brent placed some bore cleaner on a cleaning patch, then placed the cleaning patch on a small rod that he jammed through the barrel of his .38 Special. The soft classical music overhead had changed beats. A new song came on, and with it his emotions lightened up a little bit. As he swabbed the revolver’s barrel, Brent wondered if he’d ever be able to find someone himself, post Hannah Cleere.

After he’d finished lubricating the gun’s moving parts and reloading the .38 Special with .357 Magnum rounds a knock came at the door.

Leaving the revolver on the coffee table, Brent got up and answered.

“You’re finally back,” Bryan Kohberger said as the door swung open.

“Been here a while,” Brent said, allowing Kohberger inside before shutting the door.

“You’re here too often,” Bryan said as he found a place on the couch. Brent couldn’t tell if Bryan was being sarcastic. Bryan whistled a long, accusatory whistle when he noticed the .38 Special on the coffee table. He picked it up. “You crazy fuck. This gun’s fully loaded.”

“It’s my bedside gun,” Brent said.

“In Criminology we learned it’s best to forget about keeping a gun beside you for night protection. Instead you should store a can of mace nearby. Under your pillow, or somewhere like that.”

“Not that gun,” Brent told him. “That gun’s special.”

Kohberger held it out, tilted it. He was so concentrated as he examined the .38 Special that Brent thought Bryan seemed to be communicating with it telepathically. “It is, isn’t it?” was all Bryan Kohberger said.

For a brief, wild second, Brent Kopacka thought that Bryan Kohberger might know it was loaded with the wrong bullets. Impossible.

“Where’s Maddie?” Brent asked.

“On her way,” Bryan said.

“You brought her here?!”

“No. I gave her directions.”

“Why’s she coming over? You know I want to bash her face in,” Brent said.

“It’s time you got over that,” Bryan told him. “It’s time you got to know her.”

“Where’s my Ka-Bar knife? I want it back if you’re never gonna use it.”

“I don’t have it anymore.”

“Who does?” Brent Lee Kopacka couldn’t believe how little Bryan Kohberger cared about his once prized possession.

“Dr. Scofield, I think.”

“You let that crazy bitch keep it? It’s a wonder we’re not all ripped to shreds already,” Brent said.

Bryan Kohberger let out a sudden, hungry laugh. “Forget about all of that,” Bryan said. “We’re gonna have fun. Today you and I are gonna get high with some people.”

“Wh–” Brent started, but then another knock came at the door.

Maddie Mogen stood in the doorway. She had on pink-rimmed sunglasses with matching pink lenses even though she was indoors. Her blonde hair remained untied in

any way. She spread her arms open at the sight of Brent. “Ha, ha! There he is, Captain Fireworks!” She moved to hug Brent.

He allowed her to hug him. Once she began tousling his buzzed, almost non-existent hair with mock ferocity, Brent pulled away. “Bryan’s this way,” he said.

“I almost couldn’t find the place,” Maddie said as she followed Brent into the main room. She stopped. “But then I remembered, it’s like right next to Bryan’s place.”

“Well, you found us,” Brent said. “I had faith.”

Maddie hooted at the sight of Bryan on the couch with the gun. “What are you doing with that?” she asked Bryan. “Is it real?”

Bryan set the gun down on the coffee table as he stood to meet her. “Yes. Brent was just cleaning out his bedside gun.”

“I hate guns. They’re so loud,” Maddie said.

“They saved my life a few times,” Brent said. He picked up the gun and made for his bedroom. He picked up his smartphone too. He turned off the soft classical ambience.

“Won’t be needing it where we’re going,” Maddie hollered as he walked away.

“Oh, yeah.” Brent could no longer see them. He placed the revolver on a stand next to his bed. He hollered back, “And where might that be?”

Cara Kernodle slammed her hand down on the table. Her long wispy black-dyed hair hung over her circled leathery face. The baggies of heroin danced from the impact, being the only things that moved in that moment. “You’re shortin’ me twenty,” she told Kohberger.

“No,” he said. “$200 is correct for a gram of that quality.”

Maddie had told Bryan and Brent on the drive over that she wasn’t sure if Xana’s mother had anything to sell. She wasn’t even sure if Cara was in town. “It’s worth a try though,” Maddie had said. “I haven’t gotten high in for-ev-ah!”

“If she’s not there, we’ll get weed from Dylan,” Bryan had said to Maddie. His white Hyundai Elantra sped for some distance.

It turned out Cara Kernodle was at her usual place a quarter mile away from 1122 King Rd. They didn’t need a street address because Maddie remembered the name of the road, and that Cara’s house stood out from all the other houses on that street. Outside sunlight baked withered grass overgrowing in the front yard. The filthy paint chipping from the rotting boarded grooves of wood that made up the outer walls was like the tips of badly hashed fingernails flecked with dirt. The other houses on the same road were much better kept up and were, more importantly, a mercifully lengthy distance away. Inside was jammed up with furniture, and everywhere seemed to be filled with smoke. It wouldn’t have surprised Brent if something inside the house had actually been on fire. Cara Kernodle had classic rock playing on a small old radio somewhere.

Cara took a long drag from her cigarette. She held Bryan Kohberger’s gaze for a long while. “$200 it is then,” she said. Her voice was heavy and full of gravel. She pushed the drugs toward him. A smile appeared, revealing a couple of her missing front teeth. “How’s my girl?”

Brent and Bryan looked at Maddie. It was her job to answer that question. It took Maddie Mogen a second to realize this. “Oh,” she started, “Xana’s working with me at the Mad Greek.”

“She still with that kid?”

“You mean Ethan Chapin?” Maddie asked.

“Yeah,” Cara said. She chuckled. “Kid gave me a flower.” She hackled some more while stuffing her cigarette into an ashtray. She looked around the room as if searching for missing car keys. “It’s around here somewhere.”

“Look,” Bryan Kohberger interrupted. “How about you get high with us? I’ve had a long week. I’m teacher’s aide to some dickhead named Snyder in Pullman. Says I’m too hard on his female students.”

Cara ignored him and eyed Maddie who was sitting between both men on a couch across the table from Cara’s recliner. “He treatin’ her well?”

“Xana’s very happy with Ethan,” Maddie confirmed underneath the pink glasses she still had on. “They threw a party a couple months back that’s still considered legend.”

Everyone in the house laughed this time except for Cara. Brent finished laughing with an uncertain smile.

Cara opened the baggie and placed heroin onto a spoon to cook. “Strap up,” she told them.

Bryan and Maddie pulled up their sleeves and tied off their arms to raise a vein. Cara placed the drugs onto a large spoon, cooked it, then placed a ball of cotton down to filter it from the needle.

Brent Lee Kopacka drifted off. The heroin was almost more than he could handle. His whole life played like a eulogy owed to both dying and coming back. What he hated most about his guns was that they could never be like those fireworks that blasted life into the light of his friends’ eyes, the same eyes that he’d die and come back to life for every time he’d looked into them. Eyes as soft as a civilian’s intent, as eager as a soldier’s drive. It was hard for Brent Lee Kopacka then to decide what he felt like, a civilian or a soldier. Brent sunk down into the couch, placing his arm around Maddie Mogen. She wouldn’t mind. Neither would Bryan Kohberger. They had images of each other in the others’ smartphone photo galleries from the night of Xana’s house party. Each of them now seemed like a picture of one another. Not a moving picture, the still kind. The kind that never captured a person’s breathing, eliminating all movement so that it could capture life in a way that promised never to give it back.

Cara Kernodle watched him. Brent couldn’t be certain of her colors. She had haunting dark brown eyes, a more frightening version of Xana’s youthful eyes. Cara’s black hair, almost uncomfortably silken, could’ve been the same hair belonging to the corpse of one recently deceased. “Superstitious?” she asked him.

“Not any more than anyone else,” Brent said.

“How superstitious is everyone else?”

“Probably more than they’d admit,” Brent said. “Why you ask?”

“I got a genie in that pipe,” Cara Kernodle said, smiling down at a crack pipe on the coffee table in front of the couch.

Brent laughed. It was the only time in his life he’d ever laughed at a crack pipe. He’d usually stare at one with nervous awe whenever he saw one.

“It granted me three wishes today already,” Cara said.

“Yeah,” Brent responded, now truly amused by her and engaged in what she had to say. “What’s that?”

“The first wish I had was to hear about how my daughter’s been. The second wish was for those two to shut the fuck up.” She pointed at Bryan Kohberger and Maddie Mogen who were staring at the ceiling, their eyes widely dilated. Maddie’s eyes appeared pink and a long way off underneath her glasses.

“What’s the third wish?” Brent Kopacka asked.

He knew what his third wish would be. Watching Sgt. Busch blasted open into bits and pieces that sprayed the world with his wet bloody essence could’ve only left Brent with a permanent two-dimensional trace of whatever was. Brent’s third wish would be to forget all about Sgt. Busch so that he, Brent Kopacka, could rid himself of his abject devotion to the past. A past that was very real, a past that tempted him daily to return to it, grab one of his guns, any of them except for the wrongly-loaded .38 Special by his bedside, his final lingering memento of Sgt. Busch, to engage in a shootout with anyone, willing or unwilling.

To feel like a civilian again.

Brent wanted his existence to be quaint, connected, living – things that seemed to exist, pouring out from the presence of the happy civilians around him that paradoxically made him so unhappy. He wondered if Cara Kernodle could bring him back. It was then he realized what her third wish was.

Cara Kernodle mounted him there on the couch with Bryan and Maddie slumped over next to them. Brent didn’t move to stop her. He was okay in that moment. He wanted

to feel some kind of movement, some kind of real life. He became a soldier again, picking Cara up to take her to a back room inside the house. He allowed Cara Kernodle to place her tongue inside his mouth. He peered over at Bryan and Maddie. They stared at the ceiling, neither one moving. Still as a picture.

He thrust himself into Cara, making her moan with a human voice that echoed through every small thought Brent loved and every immense thought he wished would obscure and fall away. Most of all that of Sgt. Busch in that final moment they’d spent together. Inside a shelter that was the storm. “Kill ‘em all!” Sgt. Busch had screamed, guarding his face from the fire just as the IED blew him away. Sgt. Busch had made it only halfway, Brent believed, to where he was now. Sgt. Busch had taken lives, but that was all he’d managed before Death itself rose to life to claim what God would not.

September 23, 2022

Pullman, Washington

In the beginning Bryan Kohberger was bullied by the opposite sex. Then came the visual snow, iridescent flakes that rained down from a separate world, his shame and embarrassment opening themselves up into the empty silence that echoed from somewhere within that seen and unseen storm.

He searched for something inspirational. Movies, TV shows, books, etc. -- whatever promised him it was possible, even for a chubby boy like himself, that failed to keep the skies of his mind clear of the visual snow, to gain strength through adversity.

He worked on himself throughout the summer, just before his junior year at Pleasant Valley High. Bryan discovered that hard work made him strong, and thin. Every time he dropped a pound or two, the urge to cower or to quit diminished. Bryan dieted properly. He measured every aspect of his food – counted the grams of protein, considered the carbohydrates, rejected the sugar, if possible. Bryan exercised properly. At first just a walk around the block. Then a few blocks. Then a few blocks more.

Each advancement was difficult at the start. The distractions came from one direction and then from another, but Bryan Kohberger did not falter. He had the mind of a hard cock thrusting itself into a vagina or even an anus. Bryan Kohberger’s newfound doctrine was leading him to some magnificent destination, one without the visual snow, of that he was certain.

That junior year he seemed to fly past the girls of Pleasant Valley High as they avoided him in the hallways uncertain of what they had just witnessed. He toughened

up his fellow classmates in the law enforcement vocational program he attended, his plastic policeman’s badge teetering between gold and bronze depending on the shadows in which he stood. He’d scream in a classmate’s face whenever that person wavered, especially if it was a girl. He shoved someone whenever they wouldn’t move fast enough. He threatened to fight them if they so much as gave up.

After getting kicked out of the school’s law enforcement program, and the threat of the return of the visual snow, Bryan Kohberger decided none of the heretics of the Pleasant Valley School District were as competent as he was at educating himself, so he finished his degree online. His way.

He met new friends now that he was no longer confined to the walls of Pleasant Valley. It was as though he lifted high above them, high above Pennsylvania altogether, as if all that weight he’d once carried had been shed, so high that he’d risen above the very clouds that provided the air with the visual snow, so high that he could finally look down on everyone below with relief.

Alone through it all, he finally met a girl in his new circle who grew close to him, asking about his life at home and what he did for fun. The visual snow nearly returned then, so Bryan grabbed the nearest high as a means to escape – heroin. His new friends had offered up, and Bryan Kohberger enjoyed it willingly, knowing he possessed the power to turn it down whenever the time came.

He attended Monroe Career and Technical Institute in Bartonsville, but the whole while Bryan slammed heroin to hide from the visual snow. He fucked his sort-of girlfriend to hide from it. He went wild on her. He told her, “Without the wild, nothing grows.” He thought

himself so clever, so grown up for saying that after losing his virginity.

The heroin distracted him from the girl, and the girl from the heroin at times, but both also distracted him from everything else. The addiction to both came on hard, so hard that he could see everything, hear everything, smell everything but it was all very sharp. Too sharp. Too dark. Too harsh. Bryan Kohberger dropped out a year later. Adversity had gotten the better of him, and he knew it. He considered the girl, considered the drug. He knew that, at least for the time being, he’d have to drop both and possibly face the visual snow. Bryan Kohberger strapped on his boots and attended Northampton Community College in Bethlehem by 2018, earning an associate degree in psychology.

After graduating from Northampton, he worked as a security guard at the Pleasant Valley School District. He attended DeSales University and studied Criminal Justice, earning a B.A. in 2020 and an M.A in 2022. That same year, he’d been accepted into the Washington State University, Pullman PhD program.

He’d done it. He’d reached the promised land.

“That’s ridiculous,” Mona Goodwin said. “Leaving behind an instrument of murder always increases the risk of the murderer getting caught.”

“All murderers leave something behind, whether it’s their image on CCTV footage, browsing the victim’s social media account, or cell phone pings. Might as well see what happens when they leave a portion of the weapon behind. How quickly could authorities track them down? Is it possible that the discarded portion of the murder weapon would

throw investigators off? You can’t know unless you carry the action out yourself,” Bryan Kohberger repeated.

In Dr. John Snyder’s class, the students discussed everything criminology, as quickly as the 12-week semester would allow. They discussed Strain Theory, Deviants, Labeling, etc., but on this particular day Experimental Criminology was the topic.

Dr. Snyder had taken on Bryan Kohberger as his Teacher’s Aide for the Fall 2022 semester, and often allowed Kohberger to lead class discussions. Bryan loved to lead the students in discussion. There was every need for him to speak his mind. He was their pastor, they were his disciples. When he preached the classroom was his congregation, his notebook filled with jotted down ideas and his stature as he stood in front of the others sharing his knowledge were his pulpit. The students were supposed to listen and absorb what he said as if it were true gospel. They were his mission, he was their savior. And it was good. Though he had spoken many lines to them, his job was never over – there was criminology training to give, he was sure that he was the one chosen to do it.

“Are you suggesting committing an actual murder for the purpose of preventing future murders?” Dr. Snyder asked Bryan.

Bryan Kohberger whipped around, snapped and pointed at Dr. Snyder as if he’d just won a game show prize. “Yes! A murder with every possible known element in it. Multiple victims. A private residence. Heavily surveilled. Victims that are never alone. A murder weapon that’s known to kill slowly, one person at a time, except there are multiple deaths.” Kohberger stiffened with each breath, his eyes red and watery. “When we tested our atomic bombs back in the 40s and 50s, we didn’t drop those bombs on real neighborhoods, we

used test sites. We learned a lot, but no one truly learned the damage a nuke could set upon an actual functional city until Chernobyl.”

“That’s so idiotic, Bryan,” Mona said, rolling her eyes. “Society would never allow even one test like that.”

“They don’t know what they want, or what they need,” Bryan Kohberger told her.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mona asked him.

The rest of the class had gone quiet as the discussion between Mona and Bryan heated up.

“What color is the sky?” Bryan asked her.

“Blue –,” Mona started.

“No!” Bryan shouted, cutting her off. “It’s black. Half the time. Other times it’s gray if the day is overcast and then other times it’s red or orange!”

“Let’s bring it down,” Dr. Snyder warned.

“Too often law enforcement guesses at vague answers based on other vague crimes committed because they think they’ve seen it all day after day! I’m not suggesting we actually do it, I’m just positing that it would more quickly help solve a crime if some ‘ultimate crime’ were purposely carried out in advance and then studied!”

“That’s insane!” Mona shouted.

“That’s experimental criminology done right.” Bryan said, nodding with a grin. “Einstein once quipped that quantum insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. There’s a second part to that. Quantum brilliance is doing something different over and over again while expecting the unexpected!”

“Enough!” Dr. Snyder shouted.

The conversation ended then. The subject was changed and Dr. Snyder continued his lecture on Experimental Criminology. Whenever Mona wasn’t watching Dr. Snyder she stared at her textbook. She glanced out of the second story window. Bryan Kohberger noted that she looked everywhere but at him. This wouldn’t do. She needed to be further taught.

Mona quickly packed her belongings and headed to the parking lot. Bryan packed his belongings up more quickly so that he wouldn’t fall behind and lose her. He was quick enough, finishing in time to brush past Dr. Snyder and the other students. He kept several feet behind Mona Goodwin, so that she wouldn’t notice him following her. He was sure she hadn’t spotted him.

She headed outside, the sun casting a perfect light over the vast parking lot beyond. It wasn’t until she reached her vehicle that she caught Bryan Kohberger standing beside her. “What are you doing here?” she asked him, her voice shaky.

“You need to understand,” he said. He liked the look of her, like a sheep straying wayward from the flock.

“What?” she said, her mouth gaping open. “What are you talking about?” She began to fumble through her purse for her car keys. Getting inside of her vehicle had become her top priority.

“Experimental Criminology,” Bryan Kohberger said. In order for her to understand he’d have to guide her physically back to where she belonged, just as a shepherd would. “I’m the best for a reason. I’m only trying to help you see.”

“I see fine.” She had them. She lifted the keys from her purse and they glinted sunlight with a sweet jingle jangle.

“No, you don’t,” Bryan said. He grabbed her arm.

She began with a little gasp. “Get your hands off of me!”

At that Bryan Kohberger backed away. He looked at her as though she was the one acting strange. “You’ll see,” Bryan Kohberger said, stepping away from her, the depth of his dark eyes narrowing. “I’ll show you. I’ll show everyone what I mean.”

Mona slammed the door of her vehicle shut. Bryan moved away as she sped out of her parking space. A month later he received an email summons from Dr. Snyder. A week after that he was sitting in front of a board of criminology professors.

“An ‘improvement plan’!?” Kohberger said, his jaw out, his neck muscles tight.

Dr. Snyder and the other high-ranking faculty of the WSU Pullman Criminology Department sat in a half-circle around Bryan.

“We’ve received a number of disturbing complaints,” Dr. Frankowski said.

“You hired me as your Teacher’s Aide, didn’t you?”

The room was quiet. Everything seemed to soften, the relaxed tans and beige of the walls shifted to gray and white. Kohberger continued. “I’m only doing my job. I can’t help it that I’m the best and that they cannot see it.”

“Mona Goodwin said you followed her out to her car,” Dr. Robinson said.

“She left class so quickly,” Kohberger said.

“Then you made physical contact with her,” Dr. Robinson continued. “You grabbed her by the arm.”

“Some people may consider that a physical assault,” Dr. Frankowski said.

“And over what?” Dr. Robinson asked.

“He and the other student Mona Goodwin were discussing Experimental Criminology,” Dr. Snyder said. “Bryan says it’s best to commit a crime in order to better understand it. Mona disputed that, saying that committing a crime defeats the purpose of investigating in the first place.”

“What really did you mean, Bryan?” Dr. Frankowski said.

“It was only an outside-the-box theory,” Bryan began. “Crimes can be better recognized, better categorized, if they’re intentionally carried out by authorities.”

“So,” Dr. Robinson said. “You’re suggesting…organized murder.”

Except for Dr. Snyder, the rest of the faculty in the room laughed.

“We have criminals on death row –”, Kohberger began.

“My god, I’ve had enough,” Dr. Frankowski cut in.

“Society can use them, or maybe just their corpse in an orchestrated murder.”

Murmurs and mumblings broke out in the room until they were replaced by the silence of breathing.

“We’ve always suffered the burden of how to execute them.”

“It’ll never happen, Bryan. Plus, you can’t get an accurate assessment of a future crime from one committed in the past.”

“That’s because there’s never been a murder, successfully carried out, that includes all known possible factors involved in a crime.”

“Such a murder isn’t possible,” another professor who’d remained quiet thus far named Dr. Dewitt said. He relaxed in his seat. “You can’t place real life actions onto

paper and call it a useful cheat sheet. Not one that the field of criminology could ever use.”

“Paper is silence. Until words are written on it.” Kohberger said. “If only I could show you that it can be done.”

“You can’t,” Dr. Frankowski said.

“We’ll adjourn now. Bryan, the main issue is your confrontation with Mona Goodwin outside of class.” Dr. Snyder wrung his hands together as if feeling them for the first time. He slowed down and the whole room seemed to slow down with him. “That cannot happen again. The outbursts in class also don’t help. We want to offer you a plan to course-correct so that you can better interact and develop your own theories along with those of my students and your fellow classmates.”

Bryan Kohberger’s face was still while Dr. Snyder finished his spiel. He heard but remembered very little of what the board had to say. The session ended with Kohberger quietly walking to his vehicle, thinking of the visual snow and how far away it had remained the whole time he’d discussed his plan for the “ultimate murder”.

Just like his very first lay, Maddie Mogen remained an enigma to Bryan Kohberger. Everyday with the girl started out a riddle. Some might consider that a compliment. Bryan never woke up with Maddie having any kind of plan in mind set with her for that day. Was she his girlfriend? His sort-of girlfriend? A friend with benefits? Bryan Kohberger still didn’t know. He didn’t want to ask, and he didn’t know why that was the case either. Even now, as he awoke in bed with her at 1122 King Rd. she struck him with the riddle: Would Maddie Mogen make the perfect murder victim, the perfect murder experiment?

Her DNA was now forever with him and his DNA with her. Any trace the authorities might find could be explained away. He would have to break up with her now. It was the only way.

Bryan Kohberger was amazed by how much Maddie liked him. How hard it was to make her want to break it off. First he’d tried alcohol. He drank everyday until his grades started to suffer and all Maddie Mogen would do about it was drop an Alka-Seltzer in a cup of water and leave it by his bedside each morning. Bryan had tried making a pass at her best friend Kaylee Goncalves right in front of her, but both girls laughed it off, mistaking it for a moment of satirical confidence. Bryan tried missing dates, he tried stealing her food, he tried crashing her car, he even tried faking his own death. But it wasn’t until he quit gelling his hair that Maddie Mogen finally had “the talk” with him.

“Why aren’t you doing your hair anymore?” Maddie asked, in a manner like asking someone who’d just fallen down if they needed an ambulance.

Bryan resisted the urge to fist-pump in the air. He was always aware of the destination any given conversation with Maddie was headed. He’d allow questioning, so long as it was just the two of them. Any more than that and he’d shut off. He found he felt uncomfortable asking questions back if others were around. He’d either seem too intrusive, or he’d reveal too much to too many. The truth was, he’d simply run out of hair gel for that day and forgot to buy some more. But there was no going back. This was his chance to break up with Maddie and begin planning the ultimate murder experiment. “My hair’s fine,” he said.

Dylan Mortensen and Bethany Funke were in their separate bedrooms, so Maddie and Bryan had taken up a place on the couch in the living room.

For the next several hours Bryan and Maddie talked. Back and forth they went, she would question him about his true purpose, he would lie to make himself look good. Their conversation was cut short when Ethan and Xana entered, waved, and then disappeared into Xana’s bedroom. They resumed their conversation but with lowered voices. With every pull she gave to save the relationship, he pushed. With every tear she shed, he smirked. She tried to remember a word that meant happiness. He told her that forgiveness was that word and that she ought to forgive him by letting him go. She ought to forget him too because happiness flows deepest in the sea of forgetting.

Bryan Kohberger stroked Maddie Mogen’s blonde hair, stared into her bright blue eyes, and assured her that she had brought him to his knees with the realization that she had made him feel reborn, as though he'd had one brief minute of life remaining before she lifted him up as one would lift a tall glass for intoxicating cheers. In that span of time Maddie had held her hand out to him while it was filled with what he could only define as sunlight that eclipsed his visual snow and made him feel as though she had replaced both so that he swore that he saw her as he saw love.

Then he imagined that strange moment when he’d connected to her and she’d transferred his matter into hers and shaped his mind into seeing the two of them together more like hers did. To transfer matter was surgery. To shape that same matter, art.

Then he imagined her finally gone. A little creature of a person standing there, then the film going blank. He figured by trying to lose someone he’d assimilated himself into

wanting her more, more so than he ever did back when he’d tried. He told her he’d do better with the “slip ups” and the drinking. He’d quit hitting on her friends and he would drive his own car. “But let’s party,” he said to her, “one last time. Then I’ll kick. All of it.”

Maddie laughed at that, tears forming from her eyes. Bryan knew she knew exactly what he meant, and that it had worked on her. “Ethan and Xana are throwing another party, right? Mid-November?” he asked Maddie.

“Not really,” she said. “It’s just a Sigma Chi fraternity get-together on the 12th. We could stop by though.”

Their conversation was cut short when two women entered through the front door and headed up the stairs and into the living room. Kaylee Goncalves. With her, arm-in-arm, was none other than Dr. Rebecca Scofield. The two women laughed about something as they set their bags down on the floor next to the couch. Their faces straightened at the sight of Bryan Kohberger on the couch wrapped in Maddie Mogen’s arms as he wiped the tears from his girlfriend’s face.

October 31, 2022

Moscow, Idaho

Jack DuCeour pressed down onto a random portion of the message he’d written into Kaylee Goncalves’s Instagram DM, hit the spacebar on his smartphone’s screen over and over again as he watched the words he’d punched separate farther and farther away from each other. As they did so, he thought about pressing SEND.

He had it in mind that she was his to dwell upon, but that she wasn’t his to leave alone. Their relationship was not quite hers, but it was not quite his either. It belonged to both of them. So Jack DuCeour did the smart thing, he bought a dog.

Next he’d have to decide on how to tell her. He deleted the DM and placed the goldendoodle into the passenger seat of his vehicle and spirited the dog off to 1122 King Rd.

In a songful whirlwind of desire, Jack drove through the streets of Moscow, Idaho whistling a lively tune whose origin he couldn’t care to remember. He fixed his ballcap onto his head in a backward position. It was Halloween. October had brought snow, the gray dirty kind of snow that made the slender roads of Moscow appear as though covered in old rags and that gave the houses and buildings a dull and oily appearance and that gave the branches of leafless trees that crooked fingers look. The town was not the perfection he preferred, but that’s what Kaylee Goncalves was for.

Jack entered through the sliding glass doors at the back of the house, as everyone usually did who didn’t typically reside there. He motioned for the small dog with thick curly

golden fur to enter, shutting the door behind it as it wagged its tail with interest.

“What kind of dog is that?” Ethan asked him before chugging from a carton of orange juice. He returned the carton to the refrigerator.

“It’s for Kaylee,” Jack told him. “Is she here?”

“Don’t know,” Ethan said. “Xana was testing out some eyeliner for her costume tonight. I was busy with that.”

The dog silently followed Jack towards Ethan who stood between the refrigerator and the dining table in the center of the kitchen, opposite the sliding glass doors.

“Is it a poodle?”

“A goldendoodle. He doesn’t have a name yet.” Jack said.

Jack repeated this line to Kaylee Goncalves upstairs in her bedroom after she’d asked him the same question. He leaned in her doorway with self-satisfied pride.

“He’s adorable!” she exclaimed, bending to pet the dog. “He’s really for me?”

“He’s ours,” Jack said. “I was thinking we could name him Louis. After your favorite character in RoboCop.” Jack and Kaylee had recently seen the movie, and Kaylee admitted that her favorite character in the film had been Officer Lewis. Kaylee had told Jack that Lewis reminded her of her academic advisor.

“No,” Kaylee said. “He’s a big tough dude. We should name him Murphy, after RoboCop himself.”

Kaylee kneaded the fur of Murphy’s back a little harder. “Jack,” she said before pursing her lips. “You know I’m leaving for Texas.”

“I know,” Jack said. “I think he’ll get used to traveling.”

“It’s like,” she tried, but could only recall roughly the distance from Idaho to Texas. “A couple thousand miles.”

Jack searched the room for something else to talk about. Anything. “What is that? Is that a hunting knife?”

Kaylee followed his gaze to a nightstand next to her bed. On the nightstand sat the Ka-Bar knife that Rebecca Scofield had given to her. Rebecca had been over the day before and had asked her if she’d enjoyed the knife. Kaylee had told Rebecca that she had. She’d used it once to pop open some imported wine coolers for her roommates.

“That’s nothing,” she said, closing her eyes, then waiting for an appropriate moment before opening them back up on him.

“That’s not nothing,” Jack DuCeour said, moving toward it. Crestfallen investigator that he had become, Jack naturally caught her movement and took her denial to mean something else. Murphy started to follow him, but instead heeled and watched the two of them. “It’s not my knife.”

Jack picked up the Ka-Bar knife in its tan leather sheath. He left it sheathed. “Are you seeing someone?”

“I’m leaving, Jack. You’re not coming with me. So…”, she let the idea sink in, wishing for some opportunity to grab Murphy and run off with the dog before Jack could respond.

“Who is he?” Jack asked.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does. We go to class with these people. It’ll be on my mind, Kaylee.”

“It’s not someone from school,” Kaylee Goncalves said. It wasn’t entirely a lie. More of a half-truth that she could live with.

They finished the conversation with Jack leaving Murphy with Kaylee. As he left, he again crossed paths with Ethan, this time lounging on the couch with Xana Kernodle in the living room. Hoping Ethan wouldn’t think too much of it, Jack asked him if he’d seen another guy with Kaylee on any of the prior days. Ethan said that he’d only seen Bryan Kohberger with Maddie Mogen on the couch the day prior, but that someone did come over with Kaylee.

“It was someone Bryan Kohberger knows,” Ethan told Jack.

Xana nudged Ethan as if to tell him to shut up.

“Where can I find this…Bryan Kohberger?”

“He and Maddie will be at the Sigma Chi party Friday the 12th,” Ethan said as he suffered another nudge from Xana, this time one that made him burp.

Jack DuCeour would not get drunk on Halloween with everyone else. He would not risk being too hungover to get to the truth of the matter. His plan clenched and coaxed him as dawn rose beyond the horizon, yet Kaylee Goncalves still had him under lock and key, a torched prism from which he still could not escape. He would not wait until November 12th to confront Bryan Kohberger about who Kaylee had been seeing. There could be no dragging of the feet for this mission.

A simple Google search had revealed nothing when he’d entered “Brian Kohberger”, so he tried again, this time entering “Bryan Kohberger”, and up popped Bryan Kohberger’s

Teacher’s Aide photo from the WSU, Pullman Criminology Department webpage.

He jumped in his truck and embarked on the ten-mile journey to WSU, Pullman. He’d left Murphy with Kaylee, so there was no concern about leaving his car parked on a neighborhood street for the whole day if necessary. After finding the Criminology building, he roved through the hallways, sometimes peering into classrooms through glass windows on the doors to spot anyone that resembled the online photo of Bryan Kohberger.

As the day drew toward lunch time, he’d still had no luck, and so he finally gave up. As he exited the door he spotted a very tall man, with a large nose, gelled dark hair, and a chiseled face that bared an unmistakable resemblance to the man he was looking for. The man had a couple books and a notebook tucked away with one arm. He wore a tie but no jacket.

“Bryan Kohberger,” Jack said to the man.

The man stopped. Looked at Jack as if taken off guard by his own name, then smiled and winced. “Kaylee’s boyfriend,” he said to Jack, pointing at Jack. “I’ve seen you at Maddie’s place before, but we’ve never met.” Bryan held out his hand.

Jack didn’t shake it. He stood his ground, ready to fight although he could feel that Bryan Kohberger had already significantly disarmed him. “I’m here to talk about Kaylee.”

“Kaylee?” Bryan said with confusion. “Maddie’s roommate?”

“My girlfriend,” Jack corrected.

“Kaylee Goncalves? What about her?”

Jack held both hands up as if surrendering. The gesture surprised him. “Hey, look,” he said, stepping back. “I only want to know if the two of you have something going on.”

“Wha–”

“I only want to know, so that I can walk away from her. I don’t want to get in the middle of anything. I just want to get out of the way. But I need to know first.”

“Me?”

“If there’s something going on between you, I won’t stop it. I’m just–”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Bryan said.

Every part of Jack’s body seemed to stop altogether at once.

“I’m with Maddie,” Bryan said. Now it was Bryan holding his hands up in surrender. “And things are going very well with us. You’ve got the wrong guy.”

“You…,” Jack felt too foolish to say anything for a moment. This was not the way he’d pictured this conversation going. “You haven’t been with her?”

“What?” Bryan exclaimed. Then he chuckled. “Me? No way.”

Jack released a breath. “Oh man, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Bryan assured him, waving away the issue.

Jack DuCeour finally stepped closer to Bryan Kohberger. Holding out his hand. “I’m so sorry.”

Bryan let out a small chuckle. The two men shook hands. “It’s fine.”

“I keep feeling like she’s seeing someone behind my back,” Jack explained.

“She is,” Bryan said.

Jack stopped, stunned, as if Bryan had just farted in his face. He stared into the dark eyes of the other man. “What?” he said.

“She’s fucking someone else behind your back,” Bryan said, striking him with a schadenfreude grin. Bryan’s firmly set deep dark eyes, and chiseled face made him appear like a mad scientist ready to hit the switch.

Jack DuCeour’s lips parted so much he could tell they were drooping, but he didn’t have any idea how to fix them. He pulled his hand back. “What?”

“Yeah, man. She’s been fucking someone behind your back for weeks.” Bryan said, with a continuous chuckle. It was a laugh Jack DuCeour would never forget.

“What? Who?”

“I’m not telling,” Bryan Kohberger said. Laughing even harder. This went on for almost a full minute – him laughing while Jack DuCeour just stood there. Suddenly Bryan stopped laughing and became very serious. His dark eyes peered directly into Jack’s bright blue eyes. Bryan then said, “Unless you agree to do something for me.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“What the fuck, man!”

Bryan Kohberger laughed with glee at that.

“Stop laughing!”

Bryan Kohberger laughed some more, but soon said, “Okay, okay. I’m sorry, man. We don’t have to do this.” He began to walk away.

“Wait,” Jack said, too desperate to stop himself.

Bryan Kohberger stopped and turned toward Jack.

“Wait,” Jack said. “What do you want from me?”

All of the following words poured out of Bryan Kohberger as though he’d recited them a thousand times over. “Kaylee Goncalves is in possession of a certain item that belongs to a friend of mine named Brent Lee Kopacka. You don’t know Brent Lee Kopacka, but you likely know of Brent’s Ka-Bar knife. A massive, sharp, frightening weapon to behold. I want that knife. I want you to steal that knife from Kaylee Goncalves. I want you to hand that knife over to me. And then I never want to see you again.” Bryan held the palm of his hand up to Jack in a way that suggested he expected Jack to drop the very knife in his hand at that moment.

Jack looked away from Bryan, but after a moment he nodded his head. “I saw a knife in her bedroom. I think I know what you’re talking about.”

Bryan Kohberger nodded along with Jack DuCeour. “Then you’ll get it for me?”

“You’ll tell me who Kaylee’s been seeing behind my back?”

“I promise I’ll tell you. And I’ll also tell you, when, where and how to find this person.” Bryan held his hand out, this time for Jack to shake it.

The two men again shook hands.

Back at 1122 King Rd., Jack DuCeour stood at the front door of the house feeling like a loser. He’d tried to enter the house from the sliding rear doors as usual, but this time they had been locked. He knew Kaylee was home because he knew her schedule and he saw her car sitting in the steep driveway. He’d texted Kaylee, announcing his arrival, but he’d received no answer. Her place was on the way from WSU, Pullman to his next class in Moscow, ID,

so he swung by her place first. He scratched his nose before knocking on the front door.

The girls only ever locked the rear sliding glass doors when a break-up was underway. He knocked.

After two more times knocking he turned away toward his vehicle. He heard Kaylee Goncalves’s voice behind him. “What is it, Jack?”

He turned to her. “Can I come in?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

He’d been with Kaylee long enough to know there was no way he was getting in that house and that his best bet was to leave immediately and hope she would ask him to come over at a later date, which was practically guaranteed to happen if he played his cards right. “I was just coming over to check on Murphy,” he lied. He knew she knew he was lying.

To his surprise Kaylee smiled. “You can see Murphy,” she said. “Hold on.”

She shut the door and returned a moment later with Murphy. Jack, Kaylee and Murphy hung out on the front lawn at 1122 King Rd. until Jack had to leave for class. As expected, Kaylee never allowed him into the house which meant they were definitely on “separated” status. Jack pounded the steering wheel with both of his hands as he drove away. Sometimes he couldn’t stand it, being in the in between. All of the years of pouring his heart out and receiving her kind affections in return now worked against his core being as a lover with no love. His very heart pumped with a substance that toggled back and forth between sweet blood to salty brine.

He would have to find a way to win back Kaylee Goncalves, or he would have to find a way to sneak into 1122 King Rd., a nearly impossible task given that four young college girls lived there. He settled back into the driver’s seat of his vehicle and a smile spread over his face as the thought of a specific party. Sigma Chi, November 12th. He knew it would be there where he’d run into the one man who could access the house and who would be willing to get him anything he asked for. Ethan Chapin was always up for grabs.

November 11, 2022

Moscow, Idaho

Rebecca Scofield only had two brief history classes to teach on Fridays for the fall semester at the University of Idaho. She’d set aside the majority of her day helping Kaylee Goncalves pack some of her belongings into her new Range Rover. Though Kaylee would never admit it, not to Rebecca or anyone else, Rebecca saw that moving had been emotionally taxing on the soon-to-be college graduate. Kaylee had intentionally packed her belongings piecemeal so that she could return to Moscow several times before finally remaining in Austin, Texas.

Rebecca Scofield searched for a way to keep Kaylee Goncalves from leaving Moscow, Idaho at all costs. What was the cost of hope? Her husband? Rebecca knew that should her affections for the girl be discovered and a divorce ensue, no one would be able to keep her from her children. So at least there was no losing them. The community would do nothing more than point a finger at her and call her a Godless sinner. Rebecca knew better. It was not sin. To strip herself of God, of meaningless belongings like beliefs and clothing, in favor of feeling the tanned skin of beauty reading the whole palm of her hand, bronze and slick, revealing to her fresh flesh underneath.

She remembered the time when she’d first kissed Kaylee and Kaylee had allowed it to happen. The two of them stood amid two columns of plain-colored books of every shape and size stacked like sentries on the second floor of the University of Idaho library as if stationed there to hide them from the campus-front windows where the light may touch them. Kaylee Goncalves’s unassuming facade cobbled together out of equal parts innocence and dignity would not stop Rebecca Scofield from having her way as Hannah Cleere had done before. Rebecca did more than just place her lips on Kaylee then, she used her hands and her tongue. Who wouldn’t want their desires to roam freely and play along with another’s in such an establishment built for the sole purpose of cultivating one’s

imagination? Who doesn’t dream of making their tongue so useful in a place where silence is expected?

By the time she was through with Kaylee in the library, the two of them were on their way to Kaylee’s bedroom at 1122 King Rd. Then Kaylee would be texting her daily for another meet up. That juggernaut of a connection, barely held above rock bottom, Rebecca supposed, was the thing she desired, a way out of her profession’s infertile culture from which she had grown sweet like a rose that arose from the nurturing earth, a woman’s need to arouse another woman, willing her to rise from what was undesirable about her life in Moscow, Idaho without her ever having to leave.

Rebecca grabbed Kaylee now and pulled her to her and kissed her as she had done that very first day. Kaylee pulled away. “I was serious,” Kaylee said. “I’m leaving, so we can’t.”

Rebecca grunted, unable to verbalize what she was thinking.

Kaylee looked at her. “Would your husband allow it?”

“Not fair,” Rebecca growled. “No one allows it. I've spent too much time not allowing it.” She added, “So this is what it would’ve felt like.”

“What do you mean?”

“I once nearly got involved with Hannah Cleere, the girl who committed suicide.”

“I never actually met her.”

“I know,” Rebecca said. “I often wondered what a break-up with her would’ve felt like. Now I know.”

Kaylee turned to Rebecca. “Bet you never thought it’d be like this. It’s the last time, Dr. Scofield.” She then grabbed Rebecca, a smaller but heavier woman, and threw her on the

bed. Kaylee giggled and lightly pressed her lips onto Rebecca’s, more of a tap than a press. Rebecca returned with more lasting contact. Both women ran their fingers across the other one’s sides. Rebecca slid her tongue into Kaylee’s mouth. Back and forth they went like this until they began removing each other's sweaters. They expertly unstrapped each other's bras. Murphy jumped up on the bed and playfully pounced both women. They laughed hysterically at the dog before continuing. Kaylee tousled Rebecca’s bright blonde hair. Rebecca buried her face into Kaylee’s massive breasts, pretending to season the skin of Kaylee’s breasts with the flavor of her lips and tongue before Kaylee buried her face into Rebecca’s to do the same. The two removed the rest of their clothes and finished having sex.

The last time. Both were so satisfied that they silently lay together settling into the resplendent splendor of the eyes of their me-not-me. Rebecca told Kaylee, “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For the time you gave me.”

After a while Kaylee got up. Rebecca knew this was her cue to get dressed and leave.

“Help me with the dog’s toys?” Kaylee asked her. She had been picking some of them up to find a place for them in her new Range Rover.

“Sure,” Rebecca said. “I’ll be down in a minute.” She pretended to struggle with her bra. Once Kaylee left the room Rebecca glanced around. Everything she saw looked like it belonged to a college girl who was about to place it all up for sale on Craigslist before

buying all of the things that an older business woman needed. “Out with the old, in with the new,” Rebecca said to the empty bedroom.

Rebecca took in the remaining items around her. The pink picture frames, neon lighting, frumpy curtains, teddy bears – all of it still belonged, except for Rebecca Scofield. Only for this one final moment. All of it belonged, except for Rebecca and except for the Ka-Bar knife on the nightstand next to the bed. Kaylee wouldn’t miss it, Rebecca believed. She probably wouldn’t even realize it was gone. Then the thought sunk in, couldn’t the same be said about me? Rebecca let out a little laugh.

Rebecca stepped toward the knife.

It had been hers to begin with. She wasn’t sure exactly what she’d do with it. It had no place in her home either, but there was nothing else in the bedroom that tied her to Kaylee Goncalves more than that ominous weapon. It’s just a tool, she assured herself. It could go next to her husband’s fishing gear. He would think it had been there the whole time. Kidnapping Kaylee wasn’t possible. She’d get caught. She would never be able to keep a person all to herself, but that knife.

Kaylee’s footfalls could be heard coming up the steps. Rebecca placed her hand on the Ka-Bar knife.

It would fit snugly between her skin and the belt of her pants. Perhaps she didn’t need to place it into the garage next to her husband’s fishing gear. She could set it in the very back of the glove box in her vehicle. If anyone ever found it, she could tell them that she herself had found it, lying on the edge of a soggy riverbank, having found a new treasure where she'd intended to find an ancient treasure. Or maybe she could say she’d won it, at a Teacher’s summit. Maybe every once in a while she could hold it then lock it back up, like she wanted to do with Kaylee, then let it back out if only there was some kind of promise that she'd never lose it. Maybe she could get away with capturing and containing the soon-to-be college graduate, her true love. Maybe with the help of Bryan Kohberger. And, of course, the knife.

Kaylee was nearly at the door. Rebecca picked up the sheathed Ka-Bar knife. She lifted her sweater and shoved the weapon down into her panties.

She lowered her sweater over the hilt.

“The toys,” Kaylee said, indicating the floor.

“Yes,” Rebecca said. Bending down, ignoring the uncomfortable resistance of the knife underneath her pants against her abdomen and right thigh. “We can’t have Murphy getting bored on his future road trips,” she said.

“So, the prodigal sidekick returns,” Bryan Kohberger said, smiling hugely at Rebecca Scofield, almost laughing at her.

“I’m not your damn sidekick,” Rebecca said.

“Lemme guess,” Bryan Kohberger said, his usually dark eyes gracing Rebecca with a happier shade than usual. “You wanna nuke the campus down at the University of Idaho? Kill all the kids? Or maybe it’s all of Moscow this time?”

“It’s Kaylee Goncalves this time,” she stated. “And I don’t want anyone dead!”

The two of them had agreed to meet at Bryan’s girlfriend’s workplace, the Mad Greek Restaurant in downtown Moscow. Plenty of people dined at the nearby tables. Bryan and Rebecca knew no one present would ever guess at what it was they discussed, but they both made an effort to lower their voices. Neither of them were worried about Maddie Mogen, who would occasionally check on their drinks. It had only been mildly unusual that Bryan and Rebecca knew each other. Moscow, Idaho, like most of the towns in Idaho, was small enough for everyone to run into everyone now and again.

“You two sure you’re not hungry?” Maddie asked them, standing next to their table with a pen and a small notepad.

“Just drinks,” Rebecca said with a smile, the smile of someone who wasn’t thirsty.

After Maddie was a safe distance away, Bryan spoke up. “Afraid I can’t help you.”

Rebecca frowned. “Why not?”

Bryan lifted his hands and opened both of them up. “No Ka-Bar.” He placed his hands around his glass of green tea. “Told you, the only crime we can ever get away with committing and not risk getting caught requires Brent’s Ka-Bar knife. But….” he took a quick sip from his glass of tea, “you saw to the end of that, didn’t you? But don’t worry, I’ve got a plan in motion to get the knife back. Brent’s been bugging me about it.”

This time a true smile beamed from Rebecca Scofield. She didn’t take the knife out of her purse. Instead she tilted the top of her purse toward Bryan Kohberger while simultaneously pulling the edges of the bag wide apart so that he could see the Ka-Bar knife inside of it.

“How?” he asked.

“Worked my usual magic,” Rebecca said.

“Can your usual magic help me kidnap Jack DuCeour?” He emphasized the words ‘usual’ and ‘magic’ as though he were verbally shoving them into her chest.

A look of confusion took Rebecca. “What do you want with Jack?”

“He’s a loose end. Can you keep the knife this time without giving it away to one of your student lovers?” The sarcasm was palpable.

Rebecca Scofield nearly pulled out the knife and shoved it into his neck. Anger flashed over her. “I oughta kill you right now.”

“Then who’s gonna play cupid for ya?”

“You son of a bitch.”

“Here’s the deal,” Kohberger said. “You keep the knife. It’s game night. U of I vs. UC Davis, so everyone at Sigma Chi will be drinking. Ethan and Xana will be at the party tonight at the Sigma Chi place. You know where that is?”

“Everyone knows where that shithole is.”

“Good. They’ve invited Jack to show up along with Maddie and Yours Truly. We’ll kidnap Jack from there, you and I. Then we’ll kidnap Kaylee afterward. Probably in the morning while she’s hungover. Then we’ll….” he rolled his hand, gesturing for her to finish the sentence.

“I don’t know, Kohberger. Quit with the cute game-show bullshit and just tell me.”

“Then we’ll….” still rolling his hand and smiling.

“Bryan!”

He lowered his voice. “Then we’ll frame Jack for the kidnapping. The authorities always, and I mean, always!, suspect the husband or boyfriend when a lady goes missing.”

“Brilliant,” Rebecca said, smiling and returning her purse to the spot on the seat next to her. “Except I don’t want to kidnap Kaylee.”

“Really? What’s your plan with her then?”

“I want to steal the keys to her Range Rover. It has to be tonight.”

“Why? GTA isn’t your MO.”

“I’m not stealing her car, just the keys. Kaylee’s leaving for Texas sometime tomorrow. I want to lock myself inside her car, then once she’s a few hundred miles away, reveal

myself. We’ll be too far away for her to turn back. I need you to return her keys to her after I’m inside the back of her car. Either way, we still need to get her boyfriend Jack out of the way, just for the night.”

Kohberger laughed. “I should call you Dr. Desperate. So you’re leaving everything behind for this girl? That’s bold, I’ll give you that.”

“It’s worth a shot.” Rebecca said. “How do you know Kaylee will be hungover Saturday morning?”

“You kidding me? Has there ever been a post-game-night Saturday morning without the entire town of Moscow, Idaho being hungover?”

“Good point. Her being hungover could throw a wrench in my plans.” Rebecca said. “What about the dog?”

“What dog?”

“The dog! Kaylee’s fucking dog. I guess it’s Jack’s dog too.”

“Why’d they get a dog?” Bryan asked.

“I think to save their relationship.”

Bryan Kohberger nearly spat his green tea all over Rebecca, but he managed to stifle his laughter in time. Rebecca did not wince with surprise. “What kind of dog is it?” he asked, wiping his chin.

“How the fuck am I supposed to know? Some fucking dog!” Her voice turned brisk, dismissive.

“You’ve seen it, haven’t you?” Bryan asked. He cast his dark eyes down on Rebecca.

“Yeah, but I don’t know what kind of dog it is.”

“Some professor you are.”

Rebecca started for the knife in her purse.

“Okay,” Bryan said, holding his hands up to calm her down. “Calm down. The dog knows you, right?”

“Yeah. It’s seen me before. Probably knows my scent, I guess.”

“Okay. We should be fine.”

“You don’t think the dog will bark?”

“If it does, we’ll just give it a hug and rub it all over.”

“Brilliant,” Rebecca said again, this time with sarcasm.

Bryan Kohberger sat back in his seat like a man who expected to hear that word associated with his name for the remainder of his life. He cradled the back of his head within both of his hands in a relaxed sitting position and blew his girlfriend a kiss from across the restaurant.

November 12, 2022

Moscow, Idaho

Youth, impatient and spurious, as the first score of a ball game, was a treasure Xana Kernodle didn’t know she possessed. Xana couldn’t wait to get through her morning visit with her mother to lunchtime when she’d meet up with Ethan Chapin to go to the U of I vs. UC Davis football game later that night, then onward to the Sigma Chi party afterward. Xana was more youthful than she knew, but always felt that youthful spirit slip and fade like water whenever she visited her mother. Xana loved her mother, but she hated her mother’s place.

Place was the only name Xana could bring herself to call it. People hide from other people in a place. People fuck and fight away from other people in a place. People do illegal drugs recreationally in a place. People overdose and die in a place.

Xana hadn’t seen her mother since the start of the fall 2022 semester, so she had to go to let her mother know that she still cared and that things were going well with school and with Ethan. Xana had Ethan, no one was worried about anything happening to her. It was her mother Cara that required some checking up on from time to time.

While her friends and roommates were texting and meeting up to plan their pre-game and post-game escapades in drink and seduction, while they were formulating their plans to avoid the cops and intimidate visiting UC Davis fans, continuous acts of youthful immortality that had become routine on game nights, win or lose, Xana Kernodle was fending off mortality for her struggling mother.

She had left her boyfriend Ethan to his schoolwork on campus, but she promised to meet up with him at the Kibbie Dome sometime around kickoff.

For this task he would stay away. His last visit to her mother’s had been abysmally embarrassing. Her mother had mentioned his mustache and how it made him look ridiculous. Xana was fuming at the comment. Ethan’s mustache was one of his most adorable features. Xana had sworn off another visit with her mother, but Ethan convinced her to go only after she convinced him that she would go alone.

“You’re late,” Cara said, opening the door.

“We’ll make this quick then,” Xana responded.

She followed her mother into the living room which still looked unloved and loose with smoky stains like it had not been cleaned in ages. She sat on the edge of the same couch with stained upholstery that Bryan and Maddie had gotten high on months prior. Xana couldn’t keep her petite frame from being absently drawn, as if she were a plush doll set between bed pillows on a child’s mattress. She had picked up the habit sometime in her own childhood and was never the same way around anyone else. Her mother sat across from her pulling a pack of cigarettes from her hoodie pocket. “Talk to your father recently?”

“You know I have. And no, I’m not telling you how he’s doing other than that he’s fine.”

“I didn’t ask. Was only wondering if you’d talked to him.”

“How have you been doing?” Xana said to change the subject. Her dark hair hung flat over her shoulders, but she was thankful that her hair didn't wander in thin hushed membranes over her head like her mother's.

“You know, surviving. You and your sister’s all that give me hope.”

Xana noticed how dry Cara’s face had grown that fall. How cracked and bronze. Xana could see, sometimes, the face she may have as an older woman. “You’re not alone.”

Cara Kernodle smiled. “Well, I had a few people over. Couple months back.” She let the idea settle in for a moment before she added, “Friends of yours.”

“Who?” Xana asked. She didn’t think she cared so long as it wasn’t Ethan.

“Hmm, let me think,” Cara said, turning her eyes upward in deep, concentrated thought. “Maddie….”

“What was she doing here?”

“She was with two guys,” Cara answered. “One of them was a handsome young soldier.”

Xana frowned.

Cara chuckled. She lit a cigarette, her ashy fingertips working expertly on the match. “Don’t worry, it wasn’t Ethan. How’s your man been, by the way?”

“We’re going to a game tonight.”

“Here?” Cara took a drag and threw her match in a nearby ashtray as it extinguished.

“Yeah, the Kibbie Dome.”

“Then what?”

“Ethan’s got a Sigma Chi party. We’re going there, but I don’t want to.”

Cara straightened. “Oh, yeah. Why’s that?”

Xana angled towards her mother and spoke in a direct manner. “There’s this ‘roided-out prick named David Loach. Picks fights with everyone.”

“Why don’t you kick him out?” Cara asked.

“I can’t,” Xana explained. “I’m not a part of the fraternity. But Ethan and some of the others are gonna confront him and suggest that he get some help and stay away from Sigma Chi until he can lay off the steroids.”

“Ha, ha,” Cara laughed. “Don’t send him my way. You know I’m into those reckless man-baby types.”

Xana rolled her eyes before laughing with her mother. She could no longer resist. In her own worn out, tough, world-weary way, Cara Kernodle could be nothing if not darkly charming. In addition to providing familiar hospitality, her mother also strove to bring the mood in the room wherever Xana needed the mood to be.

Besides their puttering reputation and closely guarded social interactions, Xana’s roommates presented other challenges. Their personal lives had the tidiness of a porn star’s film set. While her roommates drank with different young men each week, sometimes each night, Xana stuck by closely only with a small handful of friends. She did not consider herself the reason for the bathroom congestion that commonly occurred inside of 1122 King Rd. on game day. The bathrooms on the first, second and third floor were shared. Xana most often saw Dylan as they lived on the same floor.

“We should get a picture,” Dylan told Xana without turning to look at her as she fixed her hair and examined it in the bathroom mirror.

“Let’s wait,” Xana told Dylan. “Ethan will be over soon. He should be in the pics with us.”

The roommates knew that Kaylee Goncalves was coming up from Texas to visit briefly before returning. She had just purchased a new Range Rover and wanted to show it off to everyone, and she joked that maybe the Vandals would finally win a game if she came back to Moscow one last time to show support for the team. For her part, Xana had put on her best Vandals sweater and a pair of dark blue jeans. She opted to watch the game with her hair in braided pigtails.

“He should!” Dylan said. “That would be great.”

Friendship – the stuff of happiness, the stuff of belonging – was in overabundance. Xana rarely ate lunch alone. Bethany Funke poked at her toast in the kitchen on the second floor. All of the girls ate toast for each meal of the day. “We got this,” Bethany said, referring to the game.

Ethan appeared at the sliding glass door. Xana jumped up from her seat and slid the door open for him. “Howdy,” Ethan said to her. He was perpetually locked in a country phase. Xana wouldn’t have minded at all if he’d started singing country music for her right then and there.

“Kaylee’s coming over,” Xana told him as she embraced him. Her arms around his waist. He wrapped his arms around her back.

“We should get a picture,” he said.

“That’s exactly what I told Dylan,” Xana said. She added a vulgar line that she knew would amuse Ethan. "She's muff-diving a piece of toast at the moment."

Ethan pretended to ignore the line, but a smile managed to appear on his face.

A hoot sounded off from upstairs. The thunder of footfalls dashing down the stairs ended with Maddie Mogen appearing at the base of the stairs near the living room. “Kaylee’s here!” she shouted.

Xana, Ethan and the other three occupants of 1122 King Rd. headed out the back sliding door. The history of fun spilled over each of them with every friendly gathering. As they rounded the corner, they spotted a brand new Range Rover in the driveway. The sweet bitterness of Moscow’s cold November air passed through Xana Kernodle’s dark hair like a cold nothing. Maddie hooted again as Kaylee exited from the driver’s side door. Jack DuCoeur exited with Murphy from the passenger side door. Maddie dashed toward Kaylee. The rest of them walked slowly behind Maddie, but only Xana and Ethan were holding each other, arms wrapped around each other’s waist. Kaylee hooted back at Maddie and the two hollered as they hugged and jumped up and down in a brief semi-circle. Xana needed this. The greater immortality of collective youth that occurred whenever she contemplated the stars of her life.

Each roommate took turns, even Ethan, taking a moment to give Kaylee Goncalves a hug. “Let’s get some candles burning and some records turning all the lights down low, take it nice and slow,” Ethan sang.

The girls laughed. “Let’s get inside,” Kaylee started. “And get some photos!”

They took a few photos indoors before heading out onto the balcony to take a few more. Jack DuCeour assumed the role of cameraman, snapping a photo of the six others in a kind of sideways group-hug. “That’s worth a million words,” Jack exclaimed as he examined the photo on his smartphone.

“Send it to me,” Kaylee ordered.

They raised their arms with everyone else packing the stands of the Kibbie Dome as the Vandals put another touchdown on the scoreboard. The people packing the stands – old

folks, alumni, kids, face-painters, shirtless body-painters. Students. A pattern had developed between Xana and Ethan and the cheering crowds. Everyone screamed. The steep baying of the crowds ebbing and contorting under the lights yet glued together expanded and fractured like the wandering currents of a misty ocean hued in daylight. Xana Kernodle screamed with everyone with a fervor that disguised her deep canyon of need for Ethan. Ethan displayed a kind of enthusiastic naivete that worked wonders at disguising any emotion he may have felt except for relative indifference. Whenever a touchdown happened he’d make sure Xana knew this wasn’t the case by swooping down to kiss her on the cheek as the rest of the folks in the stands went wild. Xana looked ahead at the field, pretending to miss the subtle force of air that followed Ethan’s face, the tiny bit of wind that came before his lips touched her cheek. Only then would the entirety of the Kibbie Dome light up like a thousand screaming candles in Xana Kernodle’s eyes.

They tailgated for a while until finally catching an Uber to the Sigma Chi party. For the party, Xana kept her pigtails and wore her special flashy sunglasses. Ethan had on a t-shirt and collared jacket with blue jeans. With Ethan, Xana had no compunctions when surrounded by folks from another fraternity or sorority. Together she and Ethan owned the place. Everywhere, in every corner of the house, out in the front and back yards, the youths of Sigma Chi were a bright promise, their conversations cheerful and brisk. Many of them had been at the game. Young men and women huddled in seperate circles, smartphones and Dixie cups in hand, papery men, bouncy women, all at least a little tipsy. All except for one guy.

“David,” Xana said at the sight of him. She studied David Loach’s face, letting his unsettling features settle over her like ash from a volcanic downpour.

She half hid behind Ethan. She could feel the palm of Ethan’s hand cupping her hip and she knew then that he hadn’t yet spotted David.

Xana pulled Ethan away from David’s direction, imagining – a hidden trove of steroid syringes in David’s closet, him shouting fierce vocals, the aggressive standoff. On the far side of the house, someone had started music. Xana felt a rush of panic, a reaching for the other end of the house.

“Ethan!”

It was too late. A zap of anger flew through Xana at the recognition of David Loach’s voice. “No,” she told Ethan, grabbing his arm toward her with a physical desire to keep him away from David Loach.

Ethan turned. David Loach stormed toward him. The last time the two men met a fight broke out over David accusing Ethan of stealing his car. It was later discovered that no one had stolen David’s car, it had been towed away because he’d parked it illegally in a handicapped spot.

Ethan held out his hand to David. “Not now, David,” Ethan said in a low voice. Whether because he couldn’t hear from the loud music, or he’d really wanted a fight and so ignored Ethan’s warning, David approached Ethan and grabbed for the collar of his jacket. It was then Xana caught that David wore a white University of Idaho muscle T-shirt with the sleeves cut off so that it showed off his thick arms. This was despite the freezing conditions outside. Steroids, she thought. Xana figured it unlikely that David Loach would’ve taken any steroids after the football game, but rather he would’ve done so before the game which

would’ve been over two hours ago. She wondered if steroids had a lingering effect on a person’s body that made David more dangerous now than he normally would’ve been. Ethan stood much taller and was equally as muscular and Ethan showed no fear. But if the steroids were still producing their desired effect, David may have held the advantage. Xana simply didn’t know. She would never admit it, but it turned her on in that moment to see her boyfriend so unaffectedly standing his ground against a possibly super-powered opponent.

The room was full of people. The only noise was the loud music pushing its way through from the other room in the back of the house. No one moved. Barely anyone sipped their drink. Xana stole a glance at some of the young men standing behind the couch, hoping they’d catch on to her cue to intervene. No one did.

“You think you can just take my money?” David snapped. He still held Ethan by the collar of his jacket.

“I won, fair and square,” Ethan told him, parting David’s hands with his own hands so that David was forced to release them from Ethan’s collar.

“You bet against U of I!” David barked. “What kind of Vandal are you?”

“Wait, what?” Xana asked.

“Yeah,” David turned to her, smirking, nodding his head. “This piece of shit,” he thumbed at Ethan, “bet against our team.”

“They didn’t stand a chance against UC Davis,” Ethan said. “It was the logical bet.”

This seemed to infuriate David. He reeled his arm back. Xana’s stomach tensed. It seemed he was throwing a punch, but he kept his arm back, in a locked-and-loaded

manner. If he was trying to intimidate Ethan, Xana couldn’t tell if it was working. “You call yourself a Vandal!” David Loach finally threw a punch.

Ethan blocked it, and only shoved David back, not throwing a punch of his own. The shove was more than enough. David stumbled back, far enough away that three young men behind him caught him, preventing him from falling all the way back.

“Cut it out, you guys,” Jack Showalter said, stepping in between the two.

“Jack!” Xana said. She took a short breath and steadied herself. A fight would not ensue with Jack Showalter involved.

Ethan swelled to his full height, his shaggy hair hanging over his eyes in wild pleats, but underneath it he brooded like a bear.

“You guys get him out of here,” Jack said to the dudes holding David Loach. Jack’s eyes darted between David and the three men holding him up. “You’re not allowed back here ever again, David.”

David shoved the others away. He shoved so hard, Xana thought the other boys might attack David, but they didn’t. David wiped the sleeves of his arms as though clearing them of invisible dust. He pointed at Ethan. “I better not catch you walking the streets, man.”

“Fuck you,” Ethan said.

This pleased Xana. She never felt vulnerable with Ethan by her side. “Don’t come back here, David. You’re not welcome.” It was an unnecessary statement. Xana knew she lacked any kind of authority to ban someone from the Sigma Chi house. She hoped David might still have something to lose – a good reputation, a decent academic standing – so she tried to remind him of that. He was still allowed on campus and he probably was near

graduation. A fight would certainly cost him that if word spread to the dean.

In that moment David hesitated, Xana no longer thought him a threat. If he intended to pursue a fist fight, he’d have done so already. David glanced at the others in the room, his eyes finishing on Ethan. David looked as though he might change his mind.

Xana swallowed hard. She grabbed Ethan and pulled him toward her. She nearly fainted at the warm sensation Ethan’s arm made as he slid it around her back. She held no uncertainties that she would join in and fight alongside Ethan should an actual fist-fight break out.

David’s voice was loud and firm, loud enough to be heard by everyone present over the blaring music, but he was no longer shouting. He again pointed at Ethan. “I’ll be seeing you around,” he said as he stormed out of the room.

Everyone loosened up. Xana took a well deserved breath. Jack Showalter stepped toward them. “He won’t be allowed back here,” Jack said. “I’ll see to it.”

“Thanks,” Xana said to Jack, smiling.

“Thanks,” Ethan said to Jack, taking his hand in a kind of clutching hand shake.

The party continued on without incident. Those remaining collected themselves. Conversations resumed. Someone brought a portable stripper’s pole and set it up in the center of the living room. Xana took turns with some other girls at the party dancing and riding on the stripper’s pole. Ethan and Jack relaxed and grabbed drinks before taking their seats on the couch, appearing very much like the night’s victors that they were.

Though she appeared to have fun, Xana couldn’t shake the thought of David Loach and whether or not he would act on his threats of violence against her and her man.

November 12, 2022

Moscow, Idaho

At the Sigma Chi party, Jack DuCeour was greeted by several young men and a few women. Tonight was a home game night. University of Idaho vs. UC Davis on the football field. It was practically ritual for the boys of Sigma Chi to get trashed before the game. Loud techno dance music blasted from a bedroom somewhere at the back of the house. He strolled slowly in, slapping hands with Calvin Hulme. David Lambright patted him on the back just before Kelsey Anderson greeted him with a hug. His lively, boisterous classmates partied in opposition to the lingering revenant of a cold overcast Moscow, Idaho evening.

As Jack DuCeour entered the Sigma Chi living room, a group of boys led David Loach outside onto the front lawn, all of the boys grasping David's wrists and clenching parts of his muscle shirt. Jack watched them go before turning to spot Ethan Chapin on a couch along the wall of the living room. Ethan lifted his glass, a signal meaning hello. Someone had set up a portable stripper’s pole in the center of the living room. Xana Kernodle, fully dressed in Vandal gear with her hair in pigtails and wearing a pair of flashy sunglasses, pole-danced, sliding upside-down from the top of the pole down to the bottom with her legs spread wide while sticking her tongue out at the crowd of young men and women as they cheered her on. Jack DuCeour laughed and cheered with the others.

Bryan and Maddie sat on a separate couch, but they hadn’t yet seen Jack because they were locked in a make-out session.

Jack went to the kitchen and took some shots with some total strangers about his age. Xana Kernodle grabbed him and pulled him with her to the center of the living room

which had become a dance floor along with a stripper’s stage. Some other girl had taken over the pole. Someone handed Jack a Dixie cup filled with beer.

“Where’s Kaylee?” Xana asked him. She started dancing with him in the living room, so he danced with her even though he felt stupid doing it.

“Her and I aren’t together right now.” He had to shout in order to be heard above the music.

“Aww,” Xana said. “Go talk to Ethan, he’s been waiting for you.”

Jack DuCeour nodded and headed toward the couch. Ethan got up and gave him a hug. “You made it!” Ethan said.

“You know I always do,” Jack said.

Ethan grabbed Jack an extra bottle of beer and the two headed to the back yard. “Don’t worry,” Ethan said, grinning at Jack. “Kaylee will move on. You’ll move on. It’s what happens.”

“Ever been through a break-up?” Jack asked.

“Me?” Ethan stopped to think. “I had a couple moments in high school where I thought I was in a relationship, but none of that feels real now. Not after Xana.” He laughed as he thought a little deeper. He took a sip from his Dixie cup and shook his head. “Not when I realized that I had to return home to my parents each night.”

“True,” Jack said.

“What are your plans?” Ethan asked, holding his beer at chest level and peering out into the backyard.

“I plan to finish school, maybe get a job in Texas. If Kaylee will allow it, maybe we could get back together again. I just wish I knew how to make her happy.”

“No, man,” Ethan said, frowning. “I mean, what are your plans for tonight?”

“Oh.” Jack said. He took a sip from his cup. “I don’t have one. Maybe hang out with Bryan Kohberger.”

“I got some intel from his girlfriend,” Ethan said with a smile.

“You mean Maddie?”

“Yessir.”

“What is it? Is she meeting up with Kaylee tonight?”

Ethan paused for suspense before finally answering. “Yessir.”

“Where? When?”

“The Corner Club,” Ethan said. “Maddie told me earlier that she and Kaylee are gonna get drunk with Adam Lauda.” Ethan stuttered for a moment. “I mean Adam’s not drinking because he’s bouncing at Corner Club, but they’re supposed to give him some company.”

“I knew it,” Jack said.

“Knew what?” Bryan Kohberger said, standing in the sliding glass door’s opening.

“Kaylee’s back in town,” Jack told him.

“Oh yeah, I know,” Bryan said. “Her and Maddie are hanging out together all night.”

“You knew?”

“Easy, easy,” Bryan said, placing his arm around Jack. “Maddie’s leaving me with you and then we’ll meet up with the two of them at the end of the night.”

“So I’ll be seeing the both of you at the King Road house later?” Ethan asked them.

“You know it,” Bryan said to Ethan.

Jack grabbed Bryan Kohberger and the two of them went around the side of the house to the front lawn where they could talk alone. “I got some bad news,” Jack said.

“What’s that?” Bryan asked him.

“I couldn’t get the knife for you.” Jack held concern in his eyes and his cheeks.

“No problem.”

“What does that mean?”

“Means no problem.”

Jack lifted an eyebrow. “So, you’ll still tell me who Kaylee’s been seeing?”

“Nope.” Bryan said.

“I figured.” Jack wouldn’t meet the taller man’s gaze.

“I’ll show you,” Bryan said with a grin.

“What?”

“I’ll show you. Come with me.”

It was no coincidence that the two men walked openly down the darkening streets of Moscow and that nightfall had settled in by the time they reached a white Hyundai Elantra parked on the side of the road. Rebecca Scofield stepped out of the vehicle, Ka-Bar knife in hand.

“That’s the lady,” Bryan told Jack. He turned to Jack with a serious, careful look.

“What lady?” Jack asked him.

“The lady Kaylee’s been seeing. Dr. Rebecca Scofield.”

“Why don’t you get into the car, Jack DuCeour.” a short, soft, blonde woman with a clear complexion and a piddling voice Jack had never seen before said. Rebecca Scofield opened the back seat of the vehicle and motioned for him to get inside.

Rebecca urged Jack not to worry as she tied a blindfold over his eyes and ordered him to place his hands behind his back before she zip-tied them together. He sat directly behind Bryan Kohberger who was in the driver’s seat. Rebecca scooted into the back of the car in the seat next to Jack on the passenger’s side of the vehicle. “What’s happening?” Jack asked. He searched around blindly, with the sudden unexpected thought of Stevie Wonder and this must be how the musical legend feels. Jack would be having no such fun and games at his expense. Sure, like the dudes at Sigma Chi, he could get crazy, a touch wild, drunk, etc., etc., but he was, absolutely under no circumstance, the sort to do things like bind-and-torture a friend to teach him to leave a girl alone, or better still, hire a professional to temporarily scare the fratboy of all fratboy qualities so that the fratboy would be utterly unfratboylike when it came time to engage once again with the woman he loved.

“We’re taking you somewhere safe,” Bryan finally answered as he fired up the engine.

“It’s not you we want,” Rebecca added.

Jack felt the car moving forward. He thought of what to say, going with his gut, going with guesswork. “I can’t believe this. What’s going on? Did Maddie and Kaylee put you up to this?”

“Maddie and Kaylee don’t know anything!” Rebecca Scofield shouted.

“We need you to remain quiet,” Bryan said. He turned left.

Jack obediently kept silent as the vehicle sped to wherever their destination was. Jack still believed it was some kind of prank. No, he was not the kind of wimp to stay silent

in the face of a tasteless prank and besides, he wasn’t even resisting when he thought he could have if he’d wanted to. “Listen,” he said. “Just let me go and I’ll leave Kaylee alone. I promise.”

“Shut up!” Rebecca Scofield snapped.

She sounded serious enough for Jack to remain silent. Several minutes later Bryan Kohberger stopped the car and he and Rebecca Scofield exited the vehicle. For several more minutes that seemed like an eternity the two left Jack in his seat, looking nowhere at nothing before finally someone opened the door and pulled Jack out of the car. “Walk with me,” Bryan said.

“Are you guys surprising me with something? Let me tell Kaylee and Maddie that this isn’t funny,” Jack told Bryan.

“You’ll see Kaylee soon,” Bryan offered.

Bryan and Rebecca guided Jack through a doorway. Rebecca’s small hands grabbed him by the shoulders and sat him down onto a comfortable chair. “We need you to stay here,” she said. “There’a a comfortable bed right next to you if you need to rest.”

“Uh, okay,” Jack said, his voice tiny, precise, half expecting a trick. They could call him whipped, they could call him stupid, privileged or whatever they will, but that was not what Jack DuCeour believed himself to be. What he knew he knew, a lot about a little and a little about a lot, and he had his reasons for doing what he did, and neither Bryan nor Rebecca could blame him for a lack of attempting his Kaylee gambit. He needed time to find some common ground.

Then, suddenly the commotion of a struggle was happening. Flesh, cloth and breath merged and parted like bits and pieces of song and static through a broken antenna in a heavy wind. Someone gagged, then a shrill hum, a woman’s voice, then silence. A smack that sounded like bone, a skull, Jack thought, being hit, and then the thick thud of a body heaping to the floor. He stood from his chair, his unintelligible scrambled pulse rising with him. “Oh, god,” he started. “What was that?” His own shaky voice nearly drove him nuts. Jack DeCeour remained poised where he stood. “Hello?”

A door slammed. Then another door. Then a car engine. Then the car sped away. “Hello?” he asked the room. Silence was the only thing the room provided him. For Jack DuCeour, this was proof that the world, on common occasions, failed to work as it should.

Though his blindfold, and the room in general, kept him locked into a dark silence, and his hands were tied, he could still use them to feel around for the body on the floor. Eventually his hands connected with someone’s soft flesh. Jack nudged the body, but he could not tell who he was nudging.

November 12, 2022

Moscow, Idaho

Maddie Mogen browsed TikTok like a madwoman who couldn't keep from laughing at her own spirit. She sat on her bedside pecking through TikTok loops with her forefinger. One of Shrek changing colors while a male and female pair of singers sang a folksy-sounding song in acapella. Another of a cute red cartoon character with great big eyes acting funny while horrifying music played. Another of a pleasant Asian man in a suit and tie wearing prescription glasses saying hello to the camera with no music playing at all.

Maddie flung the door to her dressing closet open. Today was gameday, therefore today’s attire would be simple. A small black t-shirt, and a yellow University of Idaho sweater. Jeans, black shoes.

Maddie placed the clothes onto the edge of her bed before heading out into the hallway on the third floor of 1122 King Rd. and into the bathroom to shower. After showering she put on clothes and went downstairs to eat. It was after this that the most important, most exciting part of her day began. She was seeing Kaylee Goncalves for the last night for the foreseeable future, she was going to the Kibbie Dome to watch the football game, finally she and Kaylee would finish off the night at the Corner Club in downtown Moscow. This meant that her entire morning would be spent trying out new make-up applications then choosing the very best one.

No Jack DuCeour. No Bryan Kohberger.

“Maddie! I'm almost home,” she heard Kaylee calling from speakerphone.

“Make-up!” Maddie shouted back, which meant go. Which meant Maddie was not to be bothered for a good couple minutes. Kaylee had permission to go do anything else for that time.

Xana, Dylan and Bethany all made general commotion from the floor below. A TV with the news or morning show. A conversation on the phone. A shower. Food cooking. Probably at least one of the other roommates would be applying make-up all morning like Maddie was if not all of them. Morning noises at 1122 King Rd. were basically limited to these duties, so Maddie put her smartphone on her music streaming app after hanging up with Kaylee.

Country was her favorite music to listen to while she applied make-up. While she fixed herself up for the moment. Recent photos of her father, her mother, her roommates, and one of her and Bryan decorated her make-up bench. All served as reminders of past moments.

Today was her last time with Kaylee until either Kaylee once again returned to Moscow, or Maddie found her way to Texas. Two places that couldn’t be farther away from each other. She did the math and it would be the farthest her and Kaylee had ever been from each other. It felt like a permanent moment.

You can live in the desert, Maddie thought to herself. Her father took her camping in the mountains outside of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. She couldn’t have been more than seven years old. There Maddie embraced her training in masculinity, hunting for small game with a stick, chewing tall grass to test its safety and flavor, stalking disheveled tweakers

struggling to keep well off-the-grid, covering her blonde hair in mud to make herself harder to see, then covering the rest of her body in more mud and nothing else before she searched the forest for her new best friend, and possible sister, Kaylee Goncalves. Her father had scolded her and Kaylee for their mud suits, but Maddie’s ability to become the quietest little beast had revealed two things: there was Maddie Mogen’s fist and Mother Nature’s face.

She applied her cleanser and toner the same way in order to remove any dead skin cells. She drew in her brows first with her brow pencil, filling in and carving her brows, in order to structure her face before adding the rest of her make-up. It was easier that way. She applied her primer then her hydrating mist then her foundation. The cream color of her foundation took her back to those days on Lacrosse Ave. around the time she initially met Kaylee. One of the first things she showed Kaylee were the french vanilla chrysanthemums that grew alongside her father’s house. Segmented white, sprigs of yellow. She pushed Kaylee into the bed of chrysanthemums, laughing mischievously as the larger girl fell over. Maddie laughed even harder once Kaylee started laughing with her, the flowers no doubt crushed beneath her body.

Maddie dabbed on concealer to remove any under eyes before dabbing it away. She had always been a little jealous and a little proud of her dreamy new friend Kaylee Goncalves who had crushed her father’s chrysanthemums, then lamented the act and tried to stand them up and replace them back together, resuscitating their aloe-colored stems and slender cream petals with the work of her tender fingers until they were safe from civilization and Maddie once again wanted them for her own. Kaylee was practically surrounded by an army of siblings in her own family circle.

Finally, Maddie applied dimension, blush and bronzer to the rest of her face before finishing her eyes with mascara. Her phone rang.

“Get down here, girl!” shouted Kaylee. Spot-on timing. They were tied together like a knot no one dared unravel.

Maddie hooted as she descended the stairs, gathered the rest of the roommates, including Ethan, and led them onto the driveway to meet with Kaylee, Jack and Murphy. They all decided on taking a photo on the third floor balcony. Jack DuCeour agreed to play cameraman.

“Finally!” Bethany Funke said.

“Group photo,” Dylan added.

All of them wore Vandals gear except Kaylee as if emphasizing that she had already permanently departed for Texas.

“Where’s your Vandal sweater, traitor!” Dylan said to Kaylee.

“Packed away. This is the most comfortable driving gear,” Kaylee stated. "Hop on," she said to Maddie. Maddie knew this was her cue to piggyback on her best friend, and possible sister.

Out on the patio that morning, they took their very last photo together.

They shouted from the stands, cursed UC Davis when the line of scrimmage was near, cheered for every Vandal touchdown. The air inside of the dome smelled of clean plastic and of sausages cooking from somewhere. The game was nothing special. The Vandals lost badly, so they assured themselves that there was always next week. Afterward, they laughed and spoke with other classmates inside the Kibbie Dome for a little while until it was time to go. They left the Kibbie Dome the same way that they had arrived – a trusted Uber.

Kaylee and Maddie know the Corner Club. There are many more men there than women. The girls were free to do with these men whatever they wanted, which was usually

nothing. The girls could sight down the exact dimensions of every man’s body, their age, how long they appeared to have been drinking, how they would likely finish out the night -- all of these things despite the noisy distractions of the overhead music, the laughter, the other women who’d been there longer.

The older men were cool. They cradled their drinks as if making it known to everyone else that they took care of everything they touched. The young men were promising, almost a trial run of a masculine life lived for the purpose of pleasuring or teasing or even possibly fighting those they came into contact with while they themselves remained, for the moment, untouched.

One of these younger men stood taller than the rest near the rear exit. He had been a basketball star, but was now a full-time student who burned the midnight oil as a bouncer at the Corner Club. Kaylee ran toward this young man, leaving Maddie to receive their drinks from the bartender. “Adam!” Kaylee shouted as she ran towards him, her arms out for a hug. Her voice was bright but tiny. From across the bar Maddie could see that something had switched on inside of Kaylee, enlivened her. She had suddenly wanted to rejoice in the University of Idaho’s epic loss, so long as Adam Lauda and Kaylee Goncalves were near.

Adam Lauda laughed as Kaylee wrapped him in a hug. “You’ve gotten strong, Kaylee.”

“We lost,” she said.

“Not again!” Adam joked.

Adam was a pristine young man. Tall with fresh blue eyes that would make one think he’d only ever seen health and happiness. The whitest teeth, a fully dimpled smile and dark wavy hair. Maddie joined Kaylee and Adam, handing Kaylee a Long Island Iced Tea.

Maddie noted that Adam’s hair had been washed recently as the smell of men’s shampoo freshened his area at the back of the smokeless bar. Maddie sipped from her Long Island, and as the buzz set in she wanted to lock Kaylee and Adam together away with her in that moment, a happy moment that she yearned to own, whose distance and time she could recreate, wherein they talked and flirted and talked and flirted, over and over. Maddie believed that friendship is happiness because both come and go. A person’s duty in life was to receive and give up both. But the Corner Club went on around them. Maddie knew that Kaylee would soon leave her with Adam in favor of joining the other men in the bar, to flirt and dance with, being too much in love with Adam Lauda to say much more than their respective hellos and how-are-yous.

Kaylee did exactly that.

Adam smiled at Maddie. Maddie started with a cheer.

“To Kaylee going off to Texas,” she said, downing her drink alone since being a bouncer, Adam couldn’t drink with her.

Adam knew Kaylee was leaving, like everyone else in their circle. Adam shrugged, “To Kaylee.”

Maddie returned his cheer. Since she knew that Adam couldn’t drink, and since she knew that she could, Maddie Mogen started out the night telling Adam something.

She started by telling him what loneliness used to mean to her. Worry mixed with haste, sometimes struck by disappointment that she defined as an absence. Being an only child since birth, everyday thereafter having her wonder, what was a brother? A sister? She never realized she'd gone without these people until she'd danced with her father at someone else's wedding sometime after he'd divorced her mother. Absent-minded movement with the opposite sex. Since the divorce happened she would never truly have a sibling who shared her blood. She kept thinking as they spun a slow merengue, the stars of the night fraying and bursting millions of light years away, yet somehow coinciding with her father's slipping dance steps, wasn’t she supposed to share a bedroom with something sweet and rare like a sister, then whisper in her sister's ear a joke about their brother?

The look in her father's eyes that night assured that she would never enjoy that sweet and rare kind of love. Maddie told Adam that a love like that wasn't for anyone at all, and that she didn't need it any longer, she only needed this moment. This moment that had grown into a lie.

Adam crossed his arms to preserve his steady warmth even though it wasn’t cold inside of the Corner Club. “You never fell in love?” he asked.

Maddie told Adam that she probably hadn’t. She told him that she’d been watching Kaylee’s every move and that she didn’t think Kaylee had either. Maddie burst with laughter. Her voice deep for such a slender young woman. “Except”, she thought, “when it didn’t feel fun enough.”

“Except,” she continued, making a game of his question, “when the fun grew too close, too quick so that I didn’t realize it until after we’d parted ways.”

“Except,” she finished, looking at Kaylee Goncalves from across the bar. “When we didn’t.”

Maddie told Adam not to laugh at her deep voice. She continued by telling him what she thought of his own deep amused baritone. If it matched up to Bryan Kohberger’s. Her eyes scrunched up and her lips pushed with puzzlement. It didn’t. “My boyfriend’s only amused when he’s right,” Maddie said.

Adam asked, “Has Bryan Kohberger ever been wrong?”

“Yes,” Maddie admitted. “But it’s not what you think.”

Adam stepped forward. “When?”

“Bryan was wrong about not believing in Bigfoot.”

“Bigfoot?” Adam said with an absurd grin.

Maddie told Adam about the time Kaylee had taught her to tie wild knots where the pine roots thrived at a small forest creek east of Lake Coeur d’Alene. She admitted being seven, her face and body smudged all over with mud, and finishing her first Double Fisherman's Bend knot made from the desiccated fibers of a fallen tree. Maddie and Kaylee laughed and re-applied more mud to their naked bodies after their knot-tying session.

Birds chirped to their success and Maddie felt a dreamy five or six inches taller as she stood and held up her newest achievement – her first fully finished Double Fisherman's Bend knot.

Her stance faltered as the singing waters from the nearby creek were interrupted by a loud splash. Maddie was naked except for the mud, but only then did she feel naked. “What’s over there?” Kaylee had whispered, her wild muddy blonde hair and smeared face still. The pine-studded mountains stood at a great height beyond Kaylee Goncalves. A smell took over that was like a wet dog mixed with rotting garbage.

“What’s that smell?” Maddie had returned the question, covering her nose.

This time, like the last, a noise.

Like a grunt, then the rustling of a nearby bush. Leaves scratching leaves with snickering hatred. Maddie saw a thick red finger, then got nauseous and stiff. The furr was bright red follicles that flowed into thicker follicles at the beast’s hand. The creature moved the bush aside with little effort. Its hands connected to thick muscled forearms running with the same evenly uniform long red hairlike fur. The definitions of the creature’s muscle patterns could be seen through the fur. Maddie’s eyes went blank.

The creature tilted its head as if to ask why.

Kaylee moved toward Maddie, grabbed her hand. Kaylee spoke. “Uh, uh,” was all the girl could produce. Both stood with their heads craned back to look up at the massive ape-like humanoid. It stood twice the size of Maddie’s father whom she considered tall. Its incredibly thick torso blotted out most of the striking sunlight behind it from where the girls stood.

“Uh! Uh!” the creature mimicked.

It had massive shoulders that hefted as it ‘spoke’. Massive bulbous breasts hung from its chest, their tips streaked with red whorls of hair, and Maddie vaguely understood that the thing was female. Its eyes were very hard to see since they were sunken so far back beneath the creature’s thick, mean furry brows. Maddie’s first thought was that it had black eyes, but she really couldn’t tell. The creature. Two naked mud-sisters. It righted its head at them.

“Uh! Uh!” it repeated with a dumb manly voice. It pointed at Maddie.

Maddie’s soft pulse scattered through the meat of her body. Her mouth went dry. She still held the knotted wood-rope in one shaky hand. The cold ground beneath her seemed to grasp her and hold her feet into place. The thing purred as it breathed, the barest traces of a roar that filled the world with a sound all too familiar to Maddie. A sound like hunger. A sound that reminded her of her stomach growling late at night. Footfalls of individuals rushing to escape. Wind beating within the shadows that fell between freshly washed and flapping sheets that bled with moisture as they fought to free themselves from their tightly set clotheslines.

The creature stepped toward Maddie Mogen. At almost the exact same moment Kaylee Goncalves stepped in front of Maddie Mogen placing herself between Maddie and the creature. To both girls’ astonishment the creature retreated from Kaylee’s action. It tried to hide behind the bush, but hiding was comically impossible for the massive bright red thing.

“Come on, let’s go,” Kaylee said to Maddie as she grabbed the smaller girl’s wrist.

Maddie swatted Kaylee away. “No, wait,” Maddie said.

Maddie stepped slowly toward what she would later come to call Bigfoot.

Bigfoot's enormous breasts toggled as it shot steady warm breaths into the air. Its nostrils plumed wide with surprise. It held out its hand as Maddie approached.

Maddie dropped the Double Fisherman's Bend knot made of root fibers into the palm of Bigfoot’s hand which was about half the size of Maddie’s entire body.

“You saw Bigfoot,” Adam said, suspicious. He glanced at Maddie’s drink, which held more air than booze, giving away what he really suspected.

Maddie told Adam that she had. She told Adam that she thought of Bigfoot as some biological anomaly, the same as the rogue kind of love that existed between her and her mother. Maddie explained how her love for her mother was something like the way a squirrel in early spring tests the growth and temperament of two branches before jumping between them. One holds, the other catches, then it’s back and forth. Then it’s Maddie catching her mother stubbing her toe while carrying groceries, then her mother’s turn, her deft rapid-fire eyes skimming ever so quickly back to make sure in her agony that her only daughter hadn’t somehow gotten hurt along with her. “The pattern of a heart pulling and pushing blood through a living thing,” Maddie said. “Is that the circumstance of life? Or of love?”

Adam Lauda laughed at that. “Both,” he offered.

The word ‘both’ had Maddie searching the bar for Kaylee. She spotted Kaylee leaning back on a stool into another friend of theirs named Jack Showalter.

Kaylee, as if contacted via telepathy, looked directly at Maddie with a semi-blank stare that Maddie liked to think of as a smile before gesturing toward three shot glasses filled with hard liquor. “These are for us,” Kaylee said when Maddie approached. The three of them each downed a shot.

“You two ready to go?” Jack Showalter asked after several minutes of conversation. He often walked the girls to their driver, a young PhD who worked at the University of Idaho named Eric Gower. Eric agreed to meet them just beyond the Grub Trucks several blocks away.

Maddie and Kaylee could’ve, if they’d wanted to, gotten picked up by Eric right outside of the Corner Club doors. But the girls loved to walk the downtown sidewalks of Moscow while drunk and when accompanied by a male lookout. Maddie noticed Jack Showalter’s legs were longer than hers and Kaylee’s so that he covered more ground than either of them with each of his steps. He adjusted his pace so that he wouldn’t leave them behind, and Maddie Mogen knew this must be some type of mercy, good charm, resulting from the closeness of friends.

She wondered then if she and Kaylee were friends with Bigfoot.

She guessed it had always been up to the monster to decide. The monster she and Kaylee had met had been just as friendly as Jack Showalter. It was not a mistake to think of a monster as a thing that she could walk and talk with underneath the bright lights of Moscow, Idaho at night, needing to know no better as the alcohol and the voices of her friends lifted her and warmed her from the inside, first her belly and then the rest. Bigfoot had peacefully collected from them a hand-made knot all those years ago. Maddie wasn’t sure if Bigfoot had been born good or if they, girls like her and Kaylee, had made the monster that way.

Maddie told Adam, earlier in the bar, that if that were true, the opposite could never be true.

As the three of them – herself, Jack, and Kaylee – made their way down the mostly empty Main Street of Moscow toward the Grub Trucks, then later to Eric Gower’s vehicle, then later to 1122 King Rd., Kaylee Goncalves asked Maddie Mogen in a loud drunken voice, “Maddie! What did you say to Adam?!”

Maddie Mogen smiled, watched the three sets of their feet shuffling over the red bricks of Moscow as she searched the ground for what answer to give, then figured she’d tell Kaylee the truth. “Like,” Maddie said. “I told Adam everything.”

November 13, 2022

Moscow, Idaho

The sliding glass door at the rear of 1122 King Rd. was never locked. The Killer knew this, and so he slid the door aside with ease. The Killer entered.

For a moment The Killer stopped, considered the dark empty kitchen. The Killer had on a black ski mask that covered his entire head except for his eyes. The Killer had gotten lucky, having found the ski mask at the thrift store in town rather than a store with a more typical purchasing system. Breathing through the mask was warm, but was not otherwise obstructed. The inside of the house didn’t smell like anything. The Killer figured if he removed his ski mask, the kitchen would still smell neutral. The Killer had patiently sat inside of a white Hyundai Elantra, engine and defrost running, on an obscured slope behind the house. Putting on the mask was both unusual and comforting on a cold November night. Unusual because it was out of place, but comforting because he was warmed by his own breath reflecting back onto his face from within his mask.

The Killer had watched the lights of the house, one by one, go out until the entire inside of the house was black, except for the portions near ambiant lighting. He spotted a Jack-in-the-Box bag with Xana Kernodle’s first name on it on the table in the center of the kitchen. The Killer was lucky. He had discovered over the past few weeks that Xana regularly ordered DoorDash on the weekend, so he would have to wait until that happened to kill Maddie and he would then have to kill Xana as she would likely still be awake. He had to wait awhile for the DoorDash driver to leave before he could set out for the house. He was careful not to wait too long. He tip-toed through the kitchen in his reliably quiet Vans

sneakers, having once before done so and noted that the floor creaked in a certain spot adjacent to the sink. The Killer made sure to avoid that spot.

He soon peered into the darkened living room. Some of the neon and holiday lights set up as decorations allowed for good visibility, not just in the living room but throughout the entire second floor. The Killer stepped toward the living room but did not enter it. He stopped in the square hallway connecting the two parts of the house that also served as access to Dylan Mortensen’s room. The Killer did not care for Dylan, having only met her once or twice. Nonetheless he stared at her door for a moment and listened. He waited to hear footsteps, a voice, or even breathing. The Killer heard none of these things, so he continued up the stairway to the third floor being very careful not to make the steps creak. None of the flooring was carpeted, so it would be easy for one to make the stairs creak if they weren’t careful.

On the third floor The Killer was faced with two options: Kaylee’s former room, or Maddie’s current room. The Killer knew which room belonged to which girl. During his time earlier outside in his white Hyundai Elantra, The Killer noted that the lights to Kaylee’s room had never turned on or off. She was therefore unlikely to be there. But the dog was likely to be there and may bark, so The Killer knew he should avoid that room.

The Killer turned toward Maddie Mogen’s room. The Killer had Brent Lee Kopacka’s old 125th Anniversary Dog’s Head Ka-Bar knife sheathed and attached to his belt. The Killer pulled the knife and sheath from his belt. The weapon looked as though it belonged inside of the nearly pitch black of the third-floor hallway, but the knife had never before felt as

strange in his hands as it did now. The Killer couldn’t picture in his mind using it with either his right hand or his left hand. The Killer unsheathed the knife. He decided he’d use both hands by holding the sheath in one, the knife in the other.

The Killer’s heart began to race the moment he placed his left hand, the one holding the sheath, over the globed shape of the doorknob. Since his right hand held the knife, that hand would no longer be used for any other purpose. He turned the doorknob. The doorknob made no sound.

Immediately the smell of feminine youth penetrated his mask. The Killer pressed the door all the way open. To the left of the door slept two girls on Maddie Mogen’s queen-sized bed. The foot of the bed was closest; their heads faced the opposite wall. Both girls were well-lit by the white decorative lights Maddie had hanging around the door to her closet which was located at the far wall away from the front door. Next to the closet was her bedroom window which was black from the night. Sitting between the window and The Killer at the doorway was a small desk which she used to apply her make-up and for studying.

The Killer had to walk across the room in order to position himself in the best possible spot. He watched his shadow, created by the decoration lights, swim over both girls. The two girls cuddled with each other the same way a post-coitus couple might, but they were both clothed. The Killer recognized the other girl as Kaylee Goncalves. He had only intended to kill Maddie, but now he would have to kill them both.

The Killer took a deep breath, feeling light-headed, knowing this would be the last time he’d ever see the two of these girls at peace. It was very much possible that they’d survive the knife attack, but they would never again be the same as they were in that

moment that he watched them. He leaned over Maddie Mogen and he readied the knife. There was no metallic shimmy sound effect like in the movies. The knife merely remained in his hand, its blade still, facing downward as though it wanted to strike.

The Killer took another deep breath. He looked at the door as he slowly lowered the knife back down to his side.

He could not do it.

He knew Xana Kernodle was awake downstairs and would likely hear everything. If he made any noise, any kind of noise at all, he would have to finish off both girls, race downstairs, and hope like hell Xana was not on the phone with the police.

But there was the DoorDash to consider. Xana was eating right now. No one under the age of thirty eats anything in the middle of the night without watching YouTube or TikTok on their phone. The Killer had no choice but to hope this was the case.

He raised the sturdy knife a little over a foot above Maddie Mogen’s chest. She breathed in her bed. He breathed with her. She turned slightly. He lowered the knife a little then raised it the same way he would do a practice swing with a heavy mallet. Maddie turned back to a fully supine sleeping position.

The Killer slammed the Ka-Bar knife into Maddie Mogen’s chest. Her eyes flashed open wide through the dimly lit shadows of her bedroom. Her mouth burst open in much the same manner. She barely had time to do these things before The Killer yanked the knife out of her chest. Blood burst from her chest and splattered across the wall and across the face of Kaylee still sleeping soundly.

Maddie started to cough, her deep husky voice recognizable within the coughing. The Killer brought the knife back down, aiming for Maddie’s neck to prevent any further sound

from coming out, but he missed and stabbed her through the eye. This time the girl howled one of the strangest sounds The Killer had ever heard. It sounded something like a bag of pulpy fruit being mashed around with a person’s hands while that same person sang soprano. She spat up blood while more blood burst from her eye.

The Killer stabbed her a couple more times before Kaylee began to stir. The Killer barely noticed Kaylee.

Maddie fought hard. She pushed, she struggled, she squirmed, trying to kick her weakening legs upward underneath the bed cover, her legs making the bed cover rise and fall like a child playing ‘ghost’ from underneath it. Maddie was an innocent girl, and The Killer knew this but didn’t care until he saw her fighting for her life. For the first time in his life The Killer felt like a monster. He relished the feeling.

The Killer gashed both of Maddie’s arms as he repeatedly brought the knife down into her vital organs. She sounded angrier and her flesh felt more tender all at once as she tried to utter noise, but instead only blood spewed from her mouth. Maddie sounded otherworldly like an alien thing from another world hacking up its final noises. The sound was so surreal that it briefly took The Killer’s mind off of what he was doing.

Kaylee Goncalves began to murmur and then speak coherently in a slow sleepy questioning trill. The Killer had no choice but to leave Maddie Mogen alone to begin stabbing Kaylee.

Unlike Maddie, Kaylee had already been somewhat awakened by the time that she took her first mutilation. Her response was much more vocal. She sounded amazingly cute as the knife went into her somewhere between her neck and her right breast. She sounded as though she were calling out to her dog Murphy. A high pitched lilt, then a steady drone

until The Killer jammed the knife into her neck. After this, Kaylee began to hack and sound similar to Maddie, that disgusting otherworldly gargle. Though she gave the weight of some resistance, The Killer found it much easier to kill Kaylee because of the experience he had gained from killing Maddie.

Blood sprayed everywhere, but The Killer never got any in his eyes. He clearly saw the degradation he’d created out of the two once beautiful girls. Even through his ski mask the room reeked of blood, sweat, stale alcohol, and perfume. The knife felt like it was no longer in his hand as he brought it up and down, again and again.

Finally, it was over.

He was breathing so hard that he tried to stop himself after realizing he was the only one in the room still making any kind of sound. He was amazed that his hands were not shaking with the rest of his heaving upper body. The pungent stench of unprocessed bodily alcohol nearly made him lose his balance.

He didn’t have long.

The girls had made some noise which meant Xana Kernodle could likely be on the phone with the police at this very moment. Still, The Killer took in the room around him.

The girls lay together, fully clothed, in a mess of bedsheets and blood. Their blood was everywhere it could possibly get.

In the fairly lit room, The Killer spotted the knife sheath next to Maddie Mogen’s corpse. He'd dropped it at some point along the way. He thought about picking it up, but instead he only stared at it. He did not want it back. It was a part of his plan to leave it with them, to find out, once and for all, just how good police forensics had gotten.

The Killer locked the bedroom door from the inside to keep the cops from discovering what he’d done for as long as possible. He moved quickly down the stairs. Time was running out if Xana was on the phone with the police.

The living room was darker than Maddie Mogen’s bedroom, but his adrenaline had him dashing through the house with impressive dexterity. Only as he approached the doorway to Xana Kernodle’s room did The Killer begin to slow down.

A dim light illuminated the wall of the room from beyond the ajar doorway. The Killer maintained his pace. After rounding the corner and entering Xana’s bedroom, The Killer saw what he feared most. Xana Kernodle was in fact awake and she was on her smartphone!

“It’s okay. I’m going to help you,” he instinctively told her.

It was all he could think to say, assuming that she was on the phone with the police. Only later would he remember that she hadn’t actually been talking into the phone. She was merely watching something on it.

Xana Kernodle’s bed was situated in the center of her bedroom to the left of the doorway. This meant The Killer could approach her from either side of the bed. Xana sat on the left side, her left, of the bed with her back up against the wall so that she could more easily watch her smartphone. A man slept in a prone position beside her to her right. The Killer grimaced underneath his mask. Again, he had only intended to kill Xana, and again, he would have to kill Xana and whoever was in bed with her.

The Killer only barely registered Ethan Chapin, instead remaining more concerned with the smartphone and the fact that Xana was currently using it. The Killer rushed towards Xana. She had looked up when he’d spoken to her, but he could tell by the misdirection of her darting eyes that the light from the screen of her smartphone made it difficult for her to see out into her own dark bedroom. Her disorientation made her strangely approachable. She knew someone was there, but didn’t know much more than that.

The Killer swung his knife into a downward arch piercing her stomach, which was bare as, unlike Kaylee and Maddie, Xana wore only a bra and panties. To The Killer’s surprise, Xana swung a fist directly into his left eye. The Killer toppled backwards, taking the Ka-Bar knife with him.

Xana bellowed out very loudly, throwing her phone across the room. The Killer blocked the phone from hitting him in the face. He spotted Ethan Chapin turning over, waking up. The Killer had no more time.

He rushed at Xana Kernodle whose eyes must’ve finally adjusted to the miniscule amount of light in the bedroom. Without the smartphone the room had grown as dark as the night had grown long. Xana scratched and clawed at him, but she was only scratching and clawing at the cloth of his ski mask. He brought the knife down into her, but she grabbed his arm and pushed his arm outwardly so that he was forced to pull the Ka-Bar knife out of her or risk losing the knife.

He stepped back. Ethan Chapin was waking up, but was still unaware of what was happening. “Xana?” Ethan asked.

“Someone’s here!” Xana shouted to Ethan. The clear tone of agony could be heard from within the octaves of her shaky voice. The Killer bet it was the stab to her gut that had her in agony.

To The Killer's amazement, Xana shuffled out of her bed and charged The Killer. Unfortunately for Xana, this made her easier to kill as all The Killer had to do was use her own momentum to pull her forward and stab her in the back. The Killer flung her toward her spot on the bed and she fell to the floor, stretching her stomach wider as she landed.

The Killer knew he stood no chance against Ethan Chapin if the athletic young man ever got out of the bed. The Killer jumped onto the bed where Xana’s old spot had been, and with both hands brought the Ka-Bar knife down into Ethan. Ethan screamed, but The Killer kept bringing the knife up and dropping it back down into Ethan's bare chest with both hands using all of his might.

Ethan wouldn’t die. Instead, he managed to grab both of the Killer’s arms at the wrists and he pulled The Killer over with him, causing the two of them to teeter and then tumble over Ethan Chapin’s side of the bed. This caused a cacophony of percussive noises. The two of them briefly sounded like a drummer wildly thumping his bass drum and tom toms as they toppled downward.

Ethan Chapin got a hold of the Ka-Bar knife and had landed on top of The Killer so that he straddled The Killer, his eyes peering down into The Killer’s. The Ka-Bar knife’s stout, razor-sharp, salient rutted blade now faced The Killer and hung about four inches above The Killer’s face. A warm drop of blood slid and fell from the tempered blade onto The Killer’s ski mask as if the blade itself were injured and bleeding. Ethan pushed. Three inches. Ethan pushed some more, breathing hard, hot and heavy, as though he were attempting to give his own heat to The Killer. Two inches. Ethan pushed more, his voice trying. One inch.

One inch and The Killer would be dead.

Ethan’s breathing rate began to decrease and his downward force lessened. He was bleeding all over The Killer. The Ka-Bar knife lifted, now two inches away from The Killer’s face. Then it was three.

Ethan’s breathing stopped and he fell aside, landing in a limp fetal position and breathing so slightly that The Killer thought he wasn’t breathing at all. Later, after The Killer had long gone, after The Killer had locked Xana's bedroom door from the inside, the same as he'd done to Maddie's bedroom door, Ethan would manage to unlock the door and crawl out of the bedroom only to finally pass away in the living room. His final act in death would be alerting the other roommates to call the police, but by then it would be far too late.

The Killer got up and stood, knife in hand. He felt far from victorious. Adding to the weight of the battle, The Killer felt as though he were standing in the world’s longest-ever commercial break. He had no idea if anyone had called the police or not. Departure was all that he concerned himself with. He tried to manipulate his breathing and heart rate to slow them down, but it was no use. His heart continued to race so fast that he thought he might collapse back onto Ethan. He was wasting time. The Killer’s head darted around the room, first in Ethan’s direction, then Xana’s. The Killer stepped over to Xana’s side of the bed to see her status. She lay on the floor sprayed with blood, eyes open, unmoving.

The Killer stood listening for anything. The only sound coming from the room was the barely audible audio from the speaker of Xana’s smartphone. Whatever she had been watching was still playing. Everything had happened that quickly.

At a fast pace The Killer locked the bedroom door from the inside, left the room before shutting the door all of the way. He spotted Dylan Mortensen closing the door to her bedroom as he passed, but he did not bother with attempting to force it open and have his way with her.

Why had he killed the others?

For Maddie it was that she was the key to The Killer's heart, the same kind of heart that could do no more than beat, just like all of the hearts of all of those who would ever care about the blood that they pumped, the lives that they fed, in the first place. Kaylee, Xana, Ethan, Maddie – all of them would now forever be. And they would remain so through the ages. Fulfilling a unique purpose. For Kaylee and Ethan, they were merely in the wrong

place at the wrong time. For Xana, it was, of course, because The Killer assumed she was calling the police. All of them would now be forever a warped weft like strings spun together into a pulsing core, similar to the pulsing core that was The Killer’s ever-maddening mind and body, all the wefts eternally feeding truth back into the body from which they had sprung. Murder is a mystery, even once solved.

The Killer knew all of this. The Killer knew there would never be an end to it. He knew committing murder would never bring him closer to understanding it, but it was better than doing nothing. Shoving a knife through someone’s flesh was more acceptable, more comfortable, than looking the other way. Dylan Mortensen was free to call the police now if she wanted. The Killer knew how loud he’d been with Ethan and Xana and he knew that the police were likely already on their way.

The Killer stepped briskly over to the sliding glass door on the other side of the kitchen. He stepped outside and a growing winter breeze cooled the sweat all over his body and for a moment it stunned him that he hadn’t noticed his own sweat up to that point. A dog's barking filtered through the leafless branches of trees some distance away. He half-ran to where his white Hyundai Elantra waited for him in the slender road on the slope beyond the house’s back porch.

November 13, 2022

Pullman, Washington

“Get up, you little shit.”

Jack DuCeour tried to sit up as he awoke. His hands were still tied as they’d been for what he sensed must’ve been hours. Hours that had been put into place by the knock to his head and the booze he'd drank just prior. He recognized the voice as that of Rebecca Scofield. She ordered him up, but all he could do was attempt to sit. If she wanted him to get up she’d have to help him.

“What’s happening?”

He felt an arm tuck underneath his armpit and lift him. Finally the blindfolds were removed to reveal the battered face of Rebecca Scofield. She held an ice pack to her forehead. “We’re getting outta here, that’s what.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“That fucker double-crossed me. This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Rebecca said.

“Bryan Kohberger?”

“Yeah, him. C’mon, my car’s parked outside.”

“Where are we?”

“Kohberger’s apartment. We’re in Pullman. We need to get to Moscow now. I think he may have done something to the girls.” Rebecca cut the zip ties that held Jack’s hands together.

He moved his arms freely and couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt such a pleasant sensation. “What girls?” he asked.

“What girls do you think?” Rebecca snapped. “Kaylee and Maddie.”

The two exited Bryan Kohberger’s apartment. They went down the stairs and headed to Rebecca Scofield’s vehicle. The sun was out, but the air was cold enough that Jack knew it must’ve still been morning. “What time is it?”

“Around 9 in the morning,” Rebecca said. “Why would Kohberger just leave us?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “I don’t know what’s going on with you two.”

They got into Rebecca’s sedan and headed back to Moscow. Jack watched the shrunken acorns, small brown globes shaped like arrows having fallen onto the snow from the trees between Moscow and Pullman. How many more were left to fall? Why had he once raved of them being so beautiful and interesting to Kaylee Goncalves, but now felt them to be so waning and adrift?

He and Rebecca arrived around ten in the morning. Jack asked if he could be dropped off at the Sigma Chi house. It was where he’d left his smartphone and his car. The Sigma Chi house was not much more than one hundred feet from 1122 King Rd. so he told her he’d meet her there in a few minutes.

Inside his vehicle, Jack found his smartphone and checked his messages. Relief swept over him once he saw that both Kaylee and Maddie had messaged him several times only a few hours earlier. He could tell by the content of the texts that they had both had a lot to drink the previous night. He left his vehicle and walked over to 1122 King Rd.

Nothing profound was out of place regarding the three-story structure except that Rebecca Scofield stood by it, waiting for him. He guessed that she must not have felt comfortable entering the house without him. He couldn’t have guessed why this was the

case; he held the same status that she did when it came to how Kaylee Goncalves managed her boundaries with the both of them.

“Are they home?” he asked Rebecca as he approached.

“I don’t know. I’ve been waiting for you,” she said. “Let’s go in.”

They entered from the front door. Jack had memorized the pass code.

The house was quiet. Jack DuCeour thought, too quiet. He didn’t smell the rust until they reached the second floor. They had both intended to go straight to the third floor, but Ethan Chapin’s corpse stopped them in their tracks. A lengthy smear of dried blood trailed behind him along the carpet indicating the path he’d crawled some time ago. “Who the fuck is that?” Rebecca asked.

“Ethan?” Jack said, recognizing the ruffled brown hair and correctly guessing that only Ethan would’ve crawled from the direction of Xana Kernodle’s bedroom. He raced to the body, kneeled over it, knew instinctively not to touch anything.

“Oh, my God,” Rebecca said, putting both hands to her mouth. “Is he…?”

Jack looked at her as if she’d just asked him the most outrageous question imaginable. Jack did not answer.

“Oh, my God,” Rebecca said again. “Kaylee!”

Her and Jack both double-timed it up the stairs to Kaylee’s room. Jack found Murphy inside, but no Kaylee. In fact, all of Kaylee’s belongings had been moved out days ago, so there was literally just the dog. Murphy got up and raised his head to Jack. Jack petted Murphy, sensing that the quiet dog was happy to see him. “I don’t know where she could be,” he told Rebecca.

“Maybe Maddie knows,” Rebecca said.

They left Murphy inside of Kaylee’s room for the time being. They walked over to Maddie’s door. Jack knocked. No sound. Jack knocked again. No response. Nothing.

“Maddie,” Jack offered.

“Try it,” Rebecca whispered.

Jack turned the door handle. Locked. He kept trying, but the door would not budge. “Maddie!” he tried again. He turned to Rebecca. “Should I try kicking it?”

“And wake the whole neighborhood? No! There’s a dead fucking body downstairs!” Her voice was urgent, but came out as a panicked whisper.

“Yeah, I know that,” Jack snapped back, also in a whisper. He continued to turn the handle even though entering the room was futile.

“Fuck it, I’m outta here. If they’re not here, obviously they don’t want to talk to us or else they’d be texting or calling. I’m not trying to have that person’s death downstairs pinned on me.”

Jack felt too tired to stop her. Nonetheless he said, “You may want to stay. We need to call the cops.”

“The hell we do,” Rebecca told him. “I’m not sticking around here to have that kid’s death blamed on me. ”

“I’ll call them then.” Jack reached for his phone.

“Wait,” Rebecca said. She raised a hand to Jack. “We should wait.”

“What? Why?”

“Listen Jack. Neither of us should be here right now. Guess who’s gonna be the prime suspect in whatever happened downstairs? Not me. I don’t even know who that person is. You know him though. And you and Kaylee just went through a break-up.”

“A sort-of break-up,” he corrected.

“Cut the bullshit, Jack!” she said. “You guys ended it, and that’s that!”

“We didn't,” he resisted. “We...just didn't finish...but, yeah, I shouldn’t be here.”

“It’s possible Kaylee, Maddie, or Bryan did something really really bad. We need to get our asses as far away from this place as possible.”

He looked at her trembling, but she was serious. “Get away?” he asked.

“The only thing you and I know for certain right now is that whatever happened last night, we had nothing to do with it. So why involve ourselves now?”

“I’ll try calling Kaylee.”

“No. We need to go. Don’t call anyone. We’ll wait for them to reach out to us. Damnit. I’m stuck with my husband forever, aren’t I?”

Jack shrugged without saying anything. He’d never met Rebecca’s husband. “He can’t be that bad.”

Rebecca glanced up and down the hallway as if she were a prospective homebuyer doing a walkthrough. “Yeah,” she agreed. “My marriage is nowhere near as bad as this place.”

With that Jack DuCeour and Rebecca Scofield left the house. Jack DuCoeur gave Ethan’s corpse a passing glance as he walked beside it. Ethan and the whole room around him almost could have been a painting, it was all so still. He wanted to pick the larger young man up, to place an arm around him, to hold his body close as they walked away from 1122 King Rd., holding each other together, hand over shoulder. Jack remembered a rainy afternoon in Moscow that was so bad it had turned the whole town dark, weeks ago in the early fall when he and Kaylee had to walk from Sigma Chi toward 1122 King Rd. The rain, as it fell, washed the town in a muddy gray, so that the town had appeared as images on a

malfunctioning old black-and-white television screen, apparitions of a world without color, without a steady flow, except for the falling water. No color splashed in the darkened puddles, no sounds could defeat the rain’s endless white hiss. Ethan Chapin’s still wet corpse seemed much like the shooting cascades of that wet afternoon, that was so wet, too wet to wash away its own incessant solitary storm. All he wanted to do was walk away from this place with Ethan Chapin. He'd have to settle for Rebecca Scofield.

Not long after he and Rebecca departed, the police would contact him informing him of what happened to the Idaho 4. He assumed the police had done the same with Rebecca Scofield, but if they had, Jack had never found out. After he and Rebecca left 1122 King Rd. that day and drove away in their separate vehicles, neither one of them ever spoke to each other again about the crime.

December 15, 2022

Pullman, Washington

Bryan Kohberger stood over Brent Lee Kopacka. Brent slept soundly in his bed, but that was about to change.

Bryan Kohberger held Brent’s own .38 Special six-shooter, ready to fire on the unsuspecting veteran. Bryan had remembered to put his gloves back on. “Wakey, wakey,” he said.

Brent Kopacka didn’t wake up. He didn’t even stir. “Brent!” Bryan shouted. It was after ten in the morning and in order for Bryan Kohberger’s plans to work Brent needed to wake up. Bryan thought about firing the revolver now, but it wasn’t quite time.

“Wh–,” Brent Kopacka said as he stirred in his bed. “Bryan. What are you doing here?”

Bryan Kohberger had figured out lockpicking early on in his criminology studies. Accessing Brent Kopacka’s apartment had been no problem for the PhD candidate. “I’m here to help you end it,” Bryan said.

“What?” Brent sat up in his bed. “What the fuck, man? What are you doing here?”

“Just told you. I’m gonna reunite you with Hannah Cleere. Your long lost love.”

Brent Kopacka frowned. He saw his familiar .38 Special in Bryan Kohberger’s hand. The gun was loaded with .357 Magnum rounds and would explode once discharged. Still, he couldn’t help checking his bedside tabletop to make sure that his gun was in fact the one Kohberger held. Sure enough, his .38 Special was missing from its spot. “My 38,” he said, rubbing his head.

“It’s mine now,” Kohberger told him, his eyes wide.

“What are you doing here, Bryan?”

“Someone’s gotta take the fall.”

“Fall? What fall?” Brent asked. He didn’t move to get out of bed. He was shirtless.

Bryan Kohberger paced left a couple steps then right, always keeping the business end of the heavy revolver trained on Brent. “Maddie, Kaylee,” Bryan said. “Xana. Ethan. The Idaho 4. That’s what the press is calling them now.”

Brent’s face straightened. It had been over a month since the murders. The case was still under investigation and no one had yet been named as the suspect. The truth fell on him then like an avalanche. “No way,” Brent said in awe. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

“No, Brent,” Bryan said smiling. “It was you.”

Brent frowned. He spoke lightly as if in conversation with a ghost beside him on his own bed. “You did it.”

“Only for the sake of science,” Kohberger said. “If the authorities manage to solve this case, no other case will ever go unsolved again. I changed the world, Brent. Along with The Four. We will be legend.”

“You murdered those kids,” Brent said in a stunned manner as if shaking off a jab. “Your own girlfriend.”

“Girlfriends come and go,” Bryan said. “So do classes. We had our discussions, our arguments, too. We talked about crime and victims and laws and criminals and who had murdered whom and who is more just or cunning and when will they learn. They’ll learn now. Now! From me. We all migrate, Brent. Just like birds. We go where we're supposed to go, or we fall by the wayside and die unremembered. We can never sit still, Brent, at least, not someone like me. Doesn't matter either way because it's not the bird or the person 'migrating' that matters. It's the wind that carries them. That’s what it is to live with the visual snow. No. The wind that carries others is what a person must be to overcome the visual snow.”

“What are you talking about? Visual snow? You’ll be seen as a monster, Bryan.”

“You’re wrong!” Bryan shouted. He shook the gun as he spoke. He wanted so badly for the whole world to know what he’d done. What he'd overcome. What he had to share. He could carry all, and open up their youthful eyes. The exact opposite of the visual snow. Bryan Kohberger wanted everyone involved. In what had happened and in what was happening right now. “You’ll be seen as the monster. I’ll be the one to ‘solve’ the crime someday once I have my PhD.”

“You’d frame me for the murders?” Brent sat back. The linen drapes of his apartment windows were pulled all the way back to allow for a great amount of the morning sun’s light to flood his bedroom. “Rebecca will rat you out. She may have already done so. You don’t know what she’s been saying to the cops. She may have already told them all we’d done together. Or she might wait a few years. Either way the truth will come out in the end.”

Bryan shook his head. The sunlight from the window of Brent’s apartment bedroom pulsed like a living thing and Bryan moved to stand inside of it so that the spotlight that it created separated him from the room’s shadow that Brent sat in. “That’s the beauty of my thesis. Rebecca isn’t saying anything to anyone. She’s got too much to lose. Besides, she had nothing to do with the actual murders, so…” he let his words settle in and wagged the gun, “she wouldn’t be lying by telling the cops she knows nothing. I had her and Jack DuCoeur knocked out in my apartment on the kill night. They got nothing to say. Not anything that matters anyway.”

“You can’t pin it on me. You’re just going to oust yourself as the killer if you shoot me.”

“I’m not here to shoot you. I’m here only to fire your special little gun.” Bryan shook Brent’s gun and then tousled it slowly the way one would ask another person for money.

Brent couldn’t help but scoff at that. Good old Sgt. Busch’s infinite wisdom would prevail. Relief took over. All he had to do was simply allow Bryan Kohberger to fire his gun, then he could pounce the injured man and it’d all be over. Brent straightened up in his bed, readied himself to pounce on Kohberger once he fired the shot. “Do it then,” Brent said.

“I will,” Bryan said with forced confidence.

“I’m curious,” Brent started. “What if the cops don’t come?”

Bryan pulled an old-style flip-phone from his pocket. “Burner phone. I’ll leave it here with you.”

“Fire the gun. Quit being a pussy.”

Brent Lee Kopacka had seen a lot of carnage in Afghanistan, but he’d never seen a man’s hand blown off by his own handgun. This would be a first. He had never particularly liked or hated Bryan Kohberger, but now Brent couldn’t think of anyone else’s hand he’d rather see get blown away. The flip-phone was useful. Brent already had it in his mind to use it to call the police, but not on himself -- on an injured Bryan Kohberger. “Fire the gun,” he said again, slowly, clearly.

Bryan Kohberger lifted his arm, pointed the revolver at the ceiling. They were at the top floor of Brent’s apartment building, so firing the gun wouldn’t have harmed anyone above them. Both men listened quietly and eyed each other. When the moment of listening reached its end, Bryan Kohberger’s forefinger curled around the trigger. The intimacy fell

on the expert criminologist like an enchanted wish. He smiled and pressed his lips together.

A blast.

A bullet hole appeared in the ceiling. The gun went off just as it was supposed to. Now it was Bryan Kohberger who beamed with satisfaction. “Did you think I couldn’t tell?” Bryan Kohberger said. “Check your bed next to you.”

“What?!” As the ringing in his ears dissipated, reality immediately set in for Brent Lee Kopacka. Five .357 Magnum rounds sat next to his left leg on his bedspread. Bryan Kohberger had changed the rounds prior to waking him up. “How in the hell could you have known?!”

Bryan Kohberger fired a second round, laughing with evil glee. “Ha, ha, ha, ha!” He laughed, firing a third round into the roof. “I’m the greatest criminologist alive!” Bryan Kohberger shouted. “You think I can’t tell when a .38 Special has been loaded with .357 rounds?!” He fired a fourth shot into the roof laughing like a madman as he did so, and waking up anyone in the apartment complex still sleeping. A plume of white dust spewed down from the ceiling.

“No! No!” Brent Lee Kopacka shouted. He finally stepped out of bed. He wore only boxer briefs.

Bryan Kohberger lowered the gun back onto Brent Kopacka, flipped open the burner phone and dialed 911. “Yes,” he said to the dispatch operator. “I’m going to murder my neighbors!” Then Bryan fired a fifth round into the ceiling, intentionally allowing the operator to hear it. “My name’s Brent Lee Kopacka,” Bryan said. “I’m at the Latah Apartments. 1248 Southeast Latah Street. Get here! Or else!” Bryan Kohberger hung up the phone and tossed it to Brent Lee Kopacka. Brent failed to catch the phone.

“You fucking asshole!” Brent shouted, stepping toward Bryan.

Bryan Kohberger lifted his gloved left hand, fingers spread, pressing down onto nothing so as to calm Brent Lee Kopacka. “Okay, okay. Don’t worry,” Bryan Kohberger said to Brent. He pointed the gun away from Brent. “You didn’t think I planned to walk out of here alive, did you?”

Brent hesitated.

Bryan Kohberger lightly tossed the gun to Brent. It was no problem. He reminded himself about remembering to wear his gloves. This time Brent caught what was tossed his way. Bryan spoke up. “There’s one more round. Shoot me, kill me. Tell them it was self-defense.”

Brent lifted the gun. Bryan Kohberger could see that even under the circumstances Brent hadn’t lost an ounce of his nerve. He was indeed experienced with weaponry and a standoff. “C’mon,” Bryan teased. “It’s not like you haven’t already killed a million innocent kids in Afghanistan.”

Brent scowled and without speaking fired the gun. Brent Lee Kopacka’s hand exploded so unexpectedly that he didn’t react for a full two seconds. The gun was gone. His hand was gone. All that was left was the protruding bone of his wrist and shredded meat slathered with blood that had once been his right hand. Brent began to scream in agony.

Bryan Kohberger burst out laughing at Brent Lee Kopacka’s misfortune. “I never said I replaced ALL of the .357 rounds. Ha, ha, ha, ha! I left one last round in the chamber just for you!”

Brent's wrist spurted blood everywhere, so much so that it caused Bryan Kohberger to back away towards the door. “Better get your guns!” Bryan Kohberger mocked. “The cops are on their way.”

Kohberger exited the apartment hearing two things: Brent Lee Kopacka’s screams and police sirens approaching from some distance.

“Was that gunshots I heard?” Bryan Kohberger's father asked as he placed the gas pump back into its terminal. Bryan approached and then entered his own white Hyundai Elantra. He had told his father that he’d left a photo of his girlfriend in his apartment and that he needed to quickly go and fetch it. This was after they'd packed all of his most important belongings into the trunk of his Elantra before leaving the rest of his belongings to permanently remain in his apartment, though Bryan's father had no idea that was the case. His father said he’d wait for him. Bryan had returned the couple blocks distance in very little time back to the Shell station where his father had fueled the vehicle and shopped for road trip snacks. On the walk over, Bryan had removed his gloves and tossed them into a nearby sewer drain.

“Sounded like it,” Bryan said after catching his breath. The day wasn’t real. Weeks ago, after he and Maddie Mogen had decided to remain together, Bryan took Maddie on a trip to Lake Coeur d’Alene. It was windy so that a flock of white caps burst all over across the lake. A flock of seagulls rising above it all. Maddie had told him a few dirty jokes the minute he started up about criminology, and he hugged her to make her stop. After a moment she asked him, “Bryan, do you love me?”

In a way he did.

Maddie Mogen was his key. His key to achieving more than he could ever hope. Greatness. The greatness of self-discovery. As the seagulls flew and screeched, Bryan thought of the reasons some birds migrate from one part of the world to another. Any part of the world that they wished to go. Bryan had asked Maddie Mogen that day on the lake, “Maddie, did you ever wonder, as a kid, what it would feel like to fly? Not just like in an airplane, but like a bird, with the wind, and a destination in sight?"

"Of course," Maddie Mogen said.

Bryan understood that he was different, having never brought himself to consider the professions of a doctor or a fighter pilot or a movie star. The typical professions a fool would choose. "Why doesn't anyone ever think to tell someone else, 'I wanna be the wind that controls the birds.'?”

“I don’t know. Growing up I always wanted to be a sister,” Maddie said.

“You mean like a nun?”

Maddie Mogen laughed. Her silky, untamed blonde hair whipped in the lake’s direction. “Of course not.” She stared out at the lake, her blue eyes as unforgettable as the lake’s water. “I suppose it was Kaylee Goncalves who first made me think it. I knew the moment that I saw her, when I first met her, that I just wanted to be someone's sister. Hers.”

Bryan Kohberger let loose a rare true smile. He caught himself hugging Maddie Mogen even harder.

"I got fired from my Teacher's Aide position," he admitted.

"What?!" Maddie said. "Don't they know what they're doing in Pullman? You really should've chosen University of Idaho. I could move out of 1122 King Rd., and you and I could get our own place. With my help, Bryan, the whole world will see what they've been missing without you. Why'd they fire you?"

He loosened his arm from her. “They wanted just another teacher, but I'm not that, Maddie. I'm much more. If they failed to see it then, they'll see it soon. I'm no teacher. I'm a force. A force just like the wind. Like the wind that carries those who fly.”

“What are you talking about, Bryan?”

“Why would anyone want to be anything other than that? We'll be great together, Maddie. Great. Great for the whole of existence.”

Bryan’s father was a small, unassuming, middle-aged man with prescription glasses and a mustache and goatee. He entered the vehicle and took his place in the driver’s seat before starting the car. The sun strangled Bryan's father with light. A glint reflected off of the man's eyeglasses. Bryan settled himself, curled his toes within his Vans sneakers, unable to shake his true glee.

Bryan sat by his passenger-side window and looked outside as his father pulled the vehicle away from the gas station. Pullman’s police force rushed toward his and Brent Lee Kopacka’s apartment complex in the rear-view mirror just outside of his car window. He watched the reflected backwards world in the mirror wherein everything moved in the opposite direction, a backward direction that Bryan Kohberger had forced the world to move in.

Bryan knew they would shoot Brent Lee Kopacka dead.

Bryan knew Brent would be unable to keep from screaming like a maniac from the loss of his hand. He would be unable to keep from grabbing some nearby weapon and using it on whoever stepped through the front door of his apartment. Such was PTSD.

Every criminologist knew of it. The police would tell Brent to calm down, but he would be unable to. Then they’d open fire. Then the public would assume his guilt. For what happened to the Idaho 4. They'd cathartically embrace his guilt, and take pleasure in blaming him, convincing themselves that it was all finally over. The culprit was caught. Order was restored.

“Sorry I got to drag you all the way back to Pennsylvania,” Bryan Kohberger’s father joked. A genuine smile appeared on his father’s face from the lame quip.

Bryan and his father moved in the opposite direction of everything happening in Bryan’s passenger-side rear-view mirror. It was as though they migrated, Bryan thought. Finally, he thought deeper. Only those who migrate can avoid the visual snow.

Bryan hoped that he and his father would continue to fly together, forward on and on, all of the way eastward, to Pennsylvania, to the other end of the country. Then, after they said goodbye, he'd continue alone, on to another university where he would plot out another murder if he felt so inclined. If he met some happy folks, especially women, that he thought great enough to make the kind of impact on himself, and on the world, that they always did, only then he'd feel himself capable. In waves he will remember the four of them – fueled by their passing glances at his strange face and their careless laughter as they turned away from him – he will reach for them in his dreams and press his erection into nothing but empty space because to remain untamed satisfies a monster more than life itself.

“I’m happy,” Bryan Kohberger told his father. “Happy to go back to Pennsylvania. Finally. So long as I may go anywhere that I please,” he continued, pretending to smile a genuine smile.

THE END