Page 51 of The Last to Vanish
Should I send someone to check out your phone in the morning?I asked.
Why don’t I just try to reset it first. Sorry to trouble you.
No trouble, I said.
Good night, then, Abby, he’d said, and it unsettled me, that he remembered my name.
Good night, Mr. West, I’d said.
By the next afternoon, he would be gone.
“But you weren’t interviewed,” Trey said.
I brushed him off, pushed back from the table, too close and falling under his spell. “I talked to the investigators, of course,” I said. “I just hadn’t had much contact with him. I wasn’t on shift when he checked in, and I wasn’t the one to discover he was missing.”
“What did you do, exactly, when you found out?”
I breathed in the night air, looking out to the woods. Anyonecould be out there, watching back. I chose my words very carefully. I remembered the feeling, standing in front of that empty cabin. That eerie, haunting feeling, something bubbling up to the surface—?“The three of us searched everywhere on the property. His car was still here. We called around, first. And then we called the sheriff.”
“Who did you call around to, first. Where did you think he might be?”
“The Last Stop Tavern,” I said. “It’s the closest place to walk. Our guests often head down there for food.”
“Did they know who he was, when you called?”
“Excuse me?”
“You said, you called the tavern to ask about my brother. Did they know who he was.”
Cory and Marina and Ray, he meant. That day, it was Marina who had picked up. I remembered it well, the way her voice changed, had dropped and become guarded. The way she’d chosen her own words so carefully, too.
“I don’t know. I said we were looking for a guest, a man named Landon West. They took a few minutes to check, and say,No, there’s no one here by that name.”
“You guys keep track of the guests coming in and out,” he said with the vague tinge of an accusation. And it was then I knew it was him who had been in the back office when I’d forgotten to lock it. Who’d taken our binder. Who was watching all of us closely. He was digging, and he wasn’t going to stop.
“You snuck in and stole that binder from me?” I stood up, ready to move.
He didn’t even flinch, as if we were beyond pretending. “You’re not answering any questions, and I have to get them somehow.”
“We started doing that,” I countered, “after your brother disappeared.”
“I think you know something,” he said, fingers pressed into the table, “and I’m asking you.Please.”
He shook his head, stood up as well. I remembered that the switch could flip so suddenly, and I was glad for the exit: the field, the woods—an escape. “Please, Abby,” he repeated. God, he wanted it so desperately. I could feel it coming off him. His entire body practically coiled with it—the need for answers.
“If I knew something, I promise, I would say it. I would’ve said it long ago.”
But now I was thinking of the journal belonging to his brother in the closet of my apartment, the secrets I was also keeping.
“You’re heading back tomorrow, right?” I asked. A plea, a reminder. Family members—Celeste had warned me about them.
“Monday,” he said. “Unless all the cabins are suddenly going to be occupied tomorrow?”
I shook my head, not trusting my own voice.
“Well, good night, then,” he said, but I knew whatever allegiance we’d begun with had firmly cracked. That any trust I’d garnered, with my call to the sheriff, with my answers to his questions, had long worn out. That we stood on opposite sides of a divide now.
AS SOON AS HEwas gone, I closed up the lobby and went down to the basement. I couldn’t decide where to head first: to see Georgia or to examine the bag in the closet of my apartment.
