Page 15 of The Last to Vanish
He started laughing again. Head tipped back, unhinged. I thought about calling someone. Backing down the steps, locking myself in the lobby, safe behind tempered glass and solid wood and locks made of steel.
“Squirrels. Coincidence. Answer me this, then. Where is my brother’s phone? He always recorded his interviews with it.”
My eyes went wide. “If you have questions about the investigation, you should talk to the sheriff.All of uslooked for him. Here, and outthere.” He flinched, but I continued. “My guess? His phone was on him.” I looked around the chaos again, an understanding slowly setting in. “Is that what you’re looking for? You think there’s a missing phone in here?”
He rounded the room, to the far side of the bed. “No,” he said as he pushed the bed farther away from the wall, leveraging his weight behind the headboard. And then he shook his head. “I don’tknow.”
I saw him differently then. Not at all how the sheriff implied—as some kid worthy of our sympathy—but something more: illogical, panicked, something on the cusp of dangerous. I squeezed my eyes shut, desperate for control of the situation. “Stop,” I said. “Just, stop.” I gripped the closest bedpost, like that could stop him. “Please just calm down.”
The desk light caught on the scar below his jaw, and this time, I imagined a fight. A hotheaded punch, a returning jab, a knockout blow, and his chin colliding with the surface of a bar.
I ran through the possibilities of who to call. The sheriff; Celeste; Ray at the tavern, who might get someone here faster than the police; Cory, even, who was probably somewhere out there, right now.
But suddenly, Trey stilled. His hands were still gripping the headboard, but he was looking at me closely now, like he was reclassifying me, just as I was doing to him. “Was it you, Abby, who noticed he was missing?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t notice,” I said. “None of us did. Not until he missed checkout. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t, either,” he said. He deflated, looking around the room, like he could see himself finally as I did.
Okay, everything was okay. He was coming down from the episode. His reaction tonight was just the setting, his guilt, the lack of information. All of us, bombarding him at once.
“We weren’t close,” he said, in a confessional tone that belied our relationship. “I was away on business.” An excuse that sounded like an alibi he’d had to give to the police. “It was the start of a new consulting assignment, and when my mom called, I didn’t see what difference it would make if I were here or there. He was a grown man, we both were, he had his own life, his own way of doing things. We weren’t cut from the same cloth, him and me. Do you have siblings?”
I shook my head. Had imagined it sometimes, how different my life would’ve been if the makeup of my family had been just a little different, a little larger. The small shifts that changed the entire trajectory of a life.
“Well,” he said, like I couldn’t possibly understand the dynamics of such things—of people forced to occupy the same space, with little in common. Of growing apart. “I thought maybe he was trying to emulate the experience at first, you know? The disappearances. He wasn’t… He got his stories in… nontraditional ways.”
I guessed thatnontraditionalwas a generous way of saying that Landon West did not find himself beholden to the same ethics as others. The papers had reported that he had a reputation of keeping his stories and his progress under tight wraps until they were ready. Whatever he’d been working on, it was never printed. No details had emerged. His editors at the magazine he often freelanced for didn’t know much about it, other than he had said hehad a fresh lead into the mysteries of Cutter’s Pass. His friends knew less, just that he was planning to be off grid for a time.
Whatever that lead was, it didn’t exist in any email correspondences with colleagues. It hadn’t been shared with anybody who came forward, looking for him, or looking for the reward offered by his family. It hadn’t been stored on his laptop, either, which was left behind in his room on the surface of that desk
“My parents went through all his things, I know. ButIdidn’t.”
“You think they missed something? That you’re going to find it now?”
“I think if there’s something worth finding, it’ll be me, yeah.”
Everyone who arrived here came with that same feeling—that they would be the one to crack it, somehow. It was almost a compulsion, but it never played out.
Trey sighed. “It’s not just the phone. He also kept a notebook on him, one of those small leather ones. Always had it. I thought it was so fucking pretentious.” He laughed to himself before dropping onto the edge of the bed.
“You think you’re going to find a notebook?”
I looked at the surface of the desk again. Trey had packed a screwdriver, had come here with the intention of taking this place apart. But there weren’t many hiding places.
He raised his arms in some exaggerated, exhausted shrug. “When we were teenagers, he hid things from our parents in a vent like that…” His eyes drifted to the open grate, and he shook his head. “It was stupid to think. But there has to besomething. There’s nothing on his computer? He was here for almost a week. What the hell was he doing here, then?”
“I’m sorry, I wish I had answers for you. But there’s nothing in this room. Everyone has already been through it.” I swallowed. “We all searched for him. Went out every morning. For weeks, Trey.”
He looked over at me, mouth slightly parted, before his eyes drifted shut. “Yeah,” he said, still sitting on the edge of the bed, running his hand through his hair. “I’m sorry about…” He waved his hand around the cabin. “He’s not an experienced hiker. Do you think…”
I didn’t like to think about it, didn’t want to talk about all the ways something could go wrong out there. The rumors of people who tried to take shelter in some hidden place in bad weather, becoming trapped. The stories of hikers stepping off trail, getting disoriented and unable to find their way back.
“Here,” I said, “just, let’s move this back. Help me with the bed.”
He returned to the headboard, and I braced my hands on the nearest post, but when I put my weight behind it, the oval top of the wooden post popped off in my hand, the sound reverberating.
I had maybe two seconds to decide what to do, and by then, it was too late. Trey’s eyes locked on mine.
