Page 36 of The Last to Vanish
This was the bag I’d dug out of the lost and found bin almost ten years earlier, just months after she’d gone missing. Alice’s bag. Here, at the inn.
I leaned against the wall, wanted anything else to be true. But there was no avoiding it: For the past ten years, I’d been wearing the pack that had once, a decade earlier, belonged to Alice Kelly. Alice Kelly, who had walked out of these woods,into the townof Cutter’s Pass, and disappeared. Never to be seen again.
PART 3
Alice Kelly
Date missing:September 2, 2012
Last seen:Cutter’s Pass, North Carolina
The Last Stop Tavern
CHAPTER 11
IKNEW THE STORY OFAlice Kelly well. I had arrived in its aftermath—after the search, after the investigation, after the cloud of suspicion over the town had dissipated. The case may have been behind them when I’d arrived that winter, but I could feel it in every aspect of Cutter’s Pass.
It was the first disappearance since the Fraternity Four, fifteen years earlier. And that made it all the more notable:Young Woman Disappears in Same Town as Unsolved Case of the Fraternity Four. Their story was excavated and rehashed, becoming something bigger, a part of the present. Comparisons were drawn. People who had lived in town for both were given a closer look. It didn’t matter that the cases differed in every aspect except for the location. When I drove in, Cutter’s Pass was a town on edge; borders pulled tighter, residents grew quieter, everything turned inward.
The story had spread up and down the Appalachian, eventually spilling over to the other side. I’d been living on the outskirts of Nashville at the time, in a third-level two-bedroom apartment with no elevator, because I understood the severity of my mother’s illness—that she needed my help, and also thatthere was a clock, and it was running out. Time bent differently for us, every day moving in a slow monotony while also slipping away too fast.
I’d first seen Alice Kelly’s smiling face, high cheekbones and a spatter of freckles, on a local news program my mom kept on all day in our dimly lit living room. My mom then followed the case with a vigilance I didn’t understand—there were missing people everywhere, tragedies behind us and tragedies awaiting us—but she held my hand as I sat beside her on that brown couch, eyes trained to the television, as if we knew her. And then, as we continued to watch, eventually we felt that we did.
Alice Kelly, just starting her senior year of college, who had been hiking with a large group from the Outdoors Club over the long Labor Day weekend—a trek that was supposed to end the next day. But her group of three had splintered off, fallen behind, and decided to camp near the intersection of the trails. Alice didn’t want to. As her hiking partners explained in interviews, tear faced and noticeably shaken, Alice said she had a test the day after next, couldn’t risk missing it. She saw the town in the distance—the dome of the inn and the steeple pushing up through the trees—and decided she could make it by sunset. She was the most experienced hiker among them. She had a plan.
I’d watched those interviews sitting beside my mother, listened as she said,There’s something not right about that place.
I’d imagined Alice often since then, standing on the ridge in the distance and seeing Cutter’s Pass—a town, a safe harbor, anoption—as she packed up her things while telling her friends she’d befine.
And at first, she was. She’d made it out of the woods and followed the road into town, where the streets and restaurants were packed for the Labor Day weekend. She made her way to the Last Stop Tavern, and her cell phone must’ve been dead when she’dtried to turn it on, finally back in range. Because, according to witnesses, she’d used the phone behind the bar to place a single call before leaving.
And that was the last time she was ever seen.
It took until the next day to realize she’d gone missing, when the other hikers made it back in cell phone range and tried to reach her. That’s when they discovered that something was wrong. That Alice had slipped from her known life. She hadn’t returned to school. Her family hadn’t heard from her. Her friends hadn’t heard from her. No one had heard from her.
All of the calls from the tavern that night were local numbers. None of them had lasted very long. But every call made from that line was traced, and none of the recipients remembered hearing from a young woman, for any reason. Two of the calls had gone to a cab company, but neither driver picked up a girl matching her description. Still: Every cab driver was interviewed, every patron of that bar, every person who had cause to be in the downtown of Cutter’s Pass that evening. No one could remember seeing her after she left the tavern.
The story had slipped from the news as the months stretched on, but whenever Cutter’s Pass was mentioned, I heard my mother’s warning:There’s something not right about that place.Ironic that I’d come here and found some solace here after her death.
This was the context, the history, I had arrived in. This place that was still reeling from Alice Kelly’s disappearance. A reckoning that had never quite happened. A brief destabilization. There had been no answers. No tangible connections made between the cases. No sign of her. No sign of any of them.
Not until this backpack, which I had carried for years, unaware. This backpack, which had somehow made it to the basement where I slept, where I lived. So that now I saw her here in my half dream, auburn hair in a ponytail, dirt across her freckledcheek, eyes wide, and hands gripping the straps of that bag as she stood at the end of the hall of this basement—
A ringing phone brought me back to the surface—at least, I thought it was a ringing phone. By the time I was fully awake, the ringing had stopped. It could’ve been part of the dream about Alice.
I pushed myself up off the floor, a crick in my neck from how I’d fallen asleep, my head resting on the pack, as if I’d conjured her in the dream, breathing in the scent of earth and the forest. My mouth tasted like stale wine and I still wore my uniform from the day before, stiff and uncomfortable.
The sun was streaming through the gap in the blinds of my living room—I couldn’t tell what time it was, only that I’d slept later than usual. I felt disoriented, confused, my entire frame of existence splintered beneath my feet.
I walked through the bedroom into the bathroom, where I stripped off yesterday’s clothes and stood in water set too hot, letting the steam fill my lungs. There was a tremor in my hands—like when I’d last had a fever, and Celeste kept coming down to check on me, bringing me soup, resting the back of her hand against my forehead. She’d even called in a doctor, who declared it the flu, said all we could do was wait for the fever to break. It was the one time I’d seen Celeste look truly afraid. She’d stayed on the couch so she could keep a close watch. Something I thought I’d never experience again, after losing my mother.
For a long time, I wasn’t afraid of what had happened to Alice Kelly. Because in my mind, I imagined her as someone like me, with nothing holding her in one place any longer. Because, as people soon discovered: She did not have a test the next day, as she’d told her friends; she did not have cause to rush back to school—these were lies.
I believed, strongly, what I had told Trey during our hike. That some people didn’t want to be found. And I’d believed Alice hadrun. Why else concoct the story she had told the other hikers on the ridge that day. I believed that she had taken stock of her life and decided to change course. I believed if there was a secret kept in Cutter’s Pass, it was this. I had wondered, back then, if maybe they had all left.
But that story wasn’t true. Her bag had been in the basement of this inn, all along.
And suddenly, everything circled back to this place. I could see the ghosts of all of them: Landon, Farrah, and now—Alice.
