Page 17 of The Last to Vanish
Date missing:January 16, 2019
Last seen:Cutter’s Pass, North Carolina
Shallow Falls Trailhead
CHAPTER 6
“OPEN THAT FOLDER,” TREYsaid. Too much time had passed as I stared at the contents of the flash drive, my inaction veering too close to being interpreted as a choice.
I could feel his breath at my shoulder and the proximity of his body hovering over mine, could see both our faces reflected in the glow of the computer screen, as I clicked the folder markedFARRAH.
A grid of thumbnails loaded across the page, and a wave of nausea rolled through me, as Trey cursed under his breath. These were photos. Photos in a folder marked with her name.
Farrah Jordan had disappeared three winters earlier. She had arrived in town one morning in January and was last seen at the wooden sign that marked the Shallow Falls Trailhead, with a camera hanging around her neck.
Everyone said it had been bad luck. Bad luck, that she had stopped in Cutter’s Pass on a frozen Wednesday, drawn by the beauty of the landscape, lured in to take a closer look. Bad luck, that her car had been found abandoned between the Edge and Trace of the Mountain Souvenirs, covered in a heavy snowfall, three days after she’d presumably gone missing.
I clicked the first photo, preparing myself for her image, her stare, something that dragged her across the past, brought her abruptly into focus. Something sharper than the image we’d all been shown later that week, driver’s license quality, reducing her to the haunting eyes, the set of her mouth.
But this was a photograph of nothing. A white blur, a camera in motion. I clicked the next picture, and it was more of the same, but slightly more in focus. In this image, I could make out the vague definition of the tread of a snow boot on white earth. Like she’d snapped these pictures inadvertently, camera pointing at the ground, while she was doing something else.
Maybe outside the Edge, where she’d stopped for a coffee and asked for the way to the Shallow Falls Trailhead.Beautiful morning, Jack had said. He’d stepped out front and pointed down the snow-lined road, past the Last Stop Tavern, a straight shot from Main Street to the rise of Mountain Pass, leading the way.
Can I walk it from here?The last words on record of Farrah Jordan.
Sure, most people do.His reply still haunted him, three years later.
Now I could feel the tension building in Trey’s breathing beside me. These images were useless, nothing worth hiding on a flash drive in a hollow bedpost.
One more click, and suddenly the room chilled, the world expanded. We were staring at a crisp photograph of bare branches against a pale gray sky.
Trey released a sharp exhale. “Is that here?” he asked.
“I can’t tell,” I said. I couldn’t even tell if the photo was in color—all the warmth had been leached out of the winter landscape. I moved on to the next: more bare trees, narrow trunks and crooked branches overlapping, fading into the distance, giving the illusion of something disappearing. Next: a circle of bare branches against the winter sky, as if someone had taken this while lying on the cold earth. As if the thing disappearing in the previous photo all along was you.
I shivered as Trey leaned across me, impatient, and I moved to the side as he began scrolling faster—searching for her, forFarrah, or maybe something else—and gripped the edge of the reception desk.
But the only images, passing one by one across my screen, were of trees, of sky, of snowy ground and a cold, barren landscape. They feltwrongsomehow, disconnected from the name on the folder.
I knew before he’d reached the end: We wouldn’t find her in these pictures. There would be no haunting gaze staring back at us, or glimpse of her in town. There wasn’t even a strand of dark hair that had fallen across the frame, or her unsettling reflection against the frozen landscape.
“She was a nature photographer,” I told Trey as he hit the arrow key again. “Lived in South Carolina, but taught courses all across the Southeast. She’d been on her way to Asheville, to teach a course for the spring semester. Stayed in Springwood the night before she disappeared, about thirty minutes from here.” We had learned, during the search, that she’d told her family she would be taking her time on the way up, would be in and out of cell phone range. They didn’t worry at first—she was independent, thirty-six, and often off the grid for work.
For the investigators, Jack’s statement indicated that this was probably an unfortunate accident; that she may not have even realized she was in a town notorious for the disappeared when she set out. And the state of her car: back seat piled high with a duffel bag of luggage, a camera bag with several attachments and a battery charger, sneakers tossed on the floor—like she’d just been passing through and got caught up in the beauty of the moment, went angling for a closer shot.
Looking at these images now—trees, snow, sky—I couldn’t even say that these had been taken here, on our trail. In the woods,in the winter, everything had a tendency to look the same. Just bare crooked branches, and barren ground, as far as you could see.
“These could be from anywhere,” I said. It was even possible that this arrived in Landon West’s possession from some other time, some other work trip. That these were not the last images that Farrah Jordan had ever taken.
Trey paused scrolling only for a second before shaking his head and continuing. “Then why the hell did my brother have them?”
My back teeth clenched together, because that was the question. That was the big question. Because, in all the searching, in the list of things that were never seen, that camera—and any presumed contents—had disappeared along with her.
“We don’t even know these were hers,” I said. They didn’t look like art, didn’t look like shots taken by a professional photographer, documenting the beauty of a place.
He turned his head toward me, disbelief radiating off him, in a way that made me lean back. He moved the cursor up to the file properties, and a list of details filled the screen to the right. “What day did she disappear?” he asked.
He had highlighted the date in the photo properties, and my stomach sank. “January sixteenth,” I said; I knew the date by heart. The same date currently on display in the properties.
