Page 49 of The Last to Vanish
I pulled up Farrah’s profile, scanning the images she was tagged in. Then went to theAliceKellyWasHereInstagram account one more time, looking not only at her bag, but ather. The account was public, and so was the one I was viewing from—a well-followed and long-running account in the inn’s name. On impulse, I sent a private message.
Hi, I stumbled upon your beautiful tribute to your sister. We are helping the town collect some photos as the ten-year anniversary approaches, and wondered if you might be willing to share some more recent photos?
The front door of the inn opened, and I went out front to greet our guest, to try and lose myself in the rhythm of the inn, the daily routines that I had come to love. I helped this place run, knew if I left, my absence would be felt strongly. In the same way Vincent’s was when I first arrived.
I tried not to think of the others: Farrah, who no one noticed until her car was found abandoned; Landon, and his empty room.
Check-in after checkout, question after request, I counted the hours until I could retreat into my room, into the closet, into that bag. Marina came for happy hour, and I tried to act like the version of myself she knew best, helping her set out the food, nodding in all the right places.
But I couldn’t meet her eye, not when I was imagining all the things Cory might be capable of.
Then I helped Marina clean up, escorting the rest of the guests out, checking the clock again. Almost time. Almost done. The sun had set, and I was finally alone, had just placed the sign at the phone to tell anyone how to reach me for any issues.
The front door opened again, and I took a deep breath, dropped my shoulders, preparing for one last guest.
But the only person in the lobby, waiting for me, was Trey West.
CHAPTER 15
“IS NOW A GOODtime?” Trey asked, looking around the empty lobby. I wondered what he was doing in town earlier—who he was talking to. I must’ve nodded, because he continued. “I was hoping we could talk somewhere in private.”
“Sure,” I said as his eyes drifted to the back office. But I didn’t like the idea of feeling trapped with this man I had misjudged. I had lost the upper hand; didn’t know whether he’d been snooping around—following me, noticing when I was gone, taking that binder. Maybe when I thought I was watching him, he was really the one watching me. Should I really have been surprised? He’d played a false hand at his arrival; when I’d caught him in it, he just needed to shift his act.
“We can sit out back,” I said, leading him down the hall, flipping the floodlights on before stepping out onto the wooden deck. A place where I could be seen. Where I could get out. His brother’s journal was in the basement of this inn, and I needed to keep him far away from it.
Trey sat in a metal chair across from mine, a circular wrought iron table between us. Gnats swarmed in the glare of the light beside the door, a moth gently tapping against the bulb. He worefaded jeans and a partially fitted black T-shirt, and his ankles were visible over the top of his sneakers, and he did not fit in here at all.
He rested his forehead in his hand, then straightened, pushing his hair back, like Georgia might do.
“My brother stopped at my parents’ place on the way down here,” he said. The hollows under his eyes appeared darker in the shadows, his scar brighter, in contrast. “Spent a night in the same room he grew up in.” A twitch at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. “Landon was always the good son. The one who kept up with them. I was the wanderer.”
“That must be tough,” I said, because I didn’t know what was needed from me in the moment. I didn’t know why he was telling me this.
He lifted one shoulder slightly, like that was beside the point. “They wanted me to go through the room. Pack it away.” He swallowed, like he was steeling himself for something. “They waited for me to come home, and asked me to help them with it. I figured it was the one thing I could do for them.”
“I know what that’s like,” I said. I’d had to do the same, after my mom passed. Packing away her things, the entire apartment, because there was no one else to do it for me. Mostly I’d sold what I could, donated the clothes, took only what fit comfortably in the back of the car.
Trey took a deep breath. “So I’m there in his room with a bottle of beer, looking through my brother’s high school yearbooks and concert stubs from fifteen years ago. Just throwing out as much as I could, boxing up the rest, and I find this in the top drawer of his desk.” He slammed a lined sheet of paper on the table between us, like it was a trump card. The edges fluttered in the night breeze.
I didn’t know when it had gotten into his hand. Whether he’d had this all along. Everything about Trey felt like a magic trick.
I sat up straighter. The paper had been folded up, and I could picture it in the pocket of his pants, all this time. There were several numbers written on the page, but only one sequence stood out.
“Something familiar?”
“Yes,” I said. It was a phone number. The area code was local. My throat felt parched. “It’s the inn.”
“It’s the inn,” he repeated.
Then he placed his pointer finger on the numbers above it. But I could only focus on his fingernail, down to the quick. There was a roughness to his hands that didn’t exist earlier in the week.
“What do you think this is?” he asked.
I shook my head. The other number was in hyphen form: 8-1. “I don’t know.”
He jabbed his finger at the page, and I tried again. “A date?”
He sank back into his chair, like I’d given the right answer. “That’s what I thought, too. Imagine, I’m sitting there at my brother’s desk, and I see this date. August first? And the inn’s number?” His eyes widened. “I came down, almost straightaway, to make it. Like he was leading me somewhere. It felt like a sign.”
