Page 68 of The Last to Vanish
“I was looking for this.” I picked up the framed blueprint and held it out to Celeste, because the truth was the safest answer.
She frowned. “Yes, I can see that. You could’ve asked me, you know.”
I couldn’t get a deep breath, couldn’t slow my heart, but I wasn’t afraid. Maybe I should’ve been, but I still couldn’t make it fit. Celeste, who had been my place of safety. I couldn’t surrender that, not after all we had been through.
I needed to ask. And it felt like she was finally giving me permission to do so. “Celeste,” I began, “what did you do?”
She stared at me, as if trying to read what I was really asking. She pressed her lips together. “Come out here, Abigail,” she said. “Come out where we can talk.”
I followed her into the main living area of the carriage home. She pulled out a chair at the dining room table, wooden legs scratching against the floor. “Come sit. I need to sit. I’m very tired,” she said.
I slowly pulled out the chair across from her, placed the framed blueprint at my feet. It did not escape my notice that the pile of papers sat between us. A physical promise:Look. Look what I am trying to do for you—
And yet.
And yet.
“You took that picture, Celeste.” There were no good answers, because I could feel my eyes tearing even as I said it. This person who had taken me in, made me a part of this world, become my family—all the good things about this place, because of her. “At the tavern. The logo from this inn, you can see it in the reflection. It had to be you.”
And still, I wanted her to deny it. I was waiting for it:What picture? What logo? No, that’s not possible, dear.
Instead, she let out a long sigh, her head dropping onto her hands, and she looked so old, so frail, suddenly. So incapable of any of this. “I always knew this day was coming. I wondered,” she said, “how long it would be. Who it would be.”
“Celeste,” I said, and I was begging now, begging for it to be a misunderstanding. Wanted her to say that I was wrong, that it was not her in the photo, that there were others who had worked at the inn and Rochelle waswrong.That she had not been the fifth member of their trek. But she did no such thing.
And so I repeated the only question that mattered: “What did youdo?”
“You have tounderstand,” she said, and I could feel that she was pleading with me, too. To believe her, or to understand, or just to listen. But she stopped whatever thought she’d begun, shook her head, took a deep breath. “Everything happened so fast. It felt like forever, but it was so fast.”
“What?” I asked. “Whatwas fast?” My voice was too high, too tight, and I felt my hands balling into fists under the table.
“Okay,” she said, as if coming to terms with something for herself. “The beginning was an accident,” she said, and my ears started ringing.
“An accident,” I repeated, imagining a way to make it okay. A slip into the ravine, like Rochelle had said. Someone tripping, and a hand, reaching out for another—a terrible, horrific accident.
Her hand was shaking as she reached for me, but my arms stayed in my lap, under the table.
She took a deep breath, started again. “That’s not the beginning, really. The beginning, well. It started in town, where I met them. There was something off from the start. With their entire dynamic. It was like they didn’t really want to be here.”
In all the versions and rumors I heard, there was never mention of anyone else. Never any mention of who they’d interacted with before setting out.
“It was just luck, that I was there.” And I thought of how much all of our lives came down to luck. “I was heading down to the tavern after work, for a drink.” Her eyes drifted to the side, and I wondered if she was meeting up with Sheriff Stamer, a young deputy then, while her husband was out of town. I wondered how much of Rochelle’s implication was true.
“And there was this group of boys out front, they were justboys, and they asked me to take a picture.” Her eyes drifted shut. “Yes,I took that picture for them. They set their packs on the bench, and I took the shot, and then they were arguing, and somehow the camera must’ve gotten left there, on that bench, when they picked up their packs again.”
“They were arguing?” Had people from the tavern seen them, out the window? Or were they too far down the road, out of sight?
“Yes, about whether they should start. They said they were heading toward the Appalachian, and I told them,You won’t make it, it’s too late.Apparently,everyonetold them that. But Brian, the one with that hat, he was adamant. He was the athletic one. Said he didn’t come all this way to waste a day in some shitty little town. Like I wasn’t even there.” I had heard that everyone told them not to do it, down at the tavern. The thing I had never heard was Celeste.
“The others were right. It was obvious to anyone who looked at them. Their gear, they wereamateurs. They’d had a round of drinks, maybe more. They had no business setting out into the dark. They reached some sort of compromise as they were arguing, that they’d go if they could find a guide. They asked me if I knew anyone. And for some reason I just said,I can do it.” A pause. “I think about that often.”
“Why? Why would you say that?” I brought my arms up on top of the table, leaning forward.
“I was worried. Look, they weren’t going to make it all the way. We all knew this. But I thought, I could get them somewhere good, safe, convince them to set up camp. I thought I could keep them from getting hurt. You have to understand, Abigail. I thought I could help.”
I could imagine it so clearly, a young Celeste, unable not to help, as she had once done for me.
“It wasn’t long after we started that I realized this wasn’t just a camping trip.”
