Page 73 of The Last to Vanish
CHAPTER 22
IT WAS LATE, ANDthe inn was quiet, and I was thinking of all the people with something to hide. It wasn’t just me, who had been so careful, because, as I had learned,Families made people nervous.The way they kept digging, beyond reason, even when there’s nothing left. Driven by something deeper.
I was thinking of Cory’s parents, lying for him, without even asking whether they needed to. And a young Patrick Stamer following Celeste into the woods, when she was covered in blood. And Celeste never asking her husband or the sheriff what they did next, after they sent her away.
No one here seemed to want the answers. Not then, not now. Notreally.As if they were scared of what they might uncover about one another, or themselves.
I was locking up the safe for the day, my phone balanced on the ledge of the back window, in case Georgia reached out, when there was a knock at the lobby door. Which was unusual. We didn’t lock it.
Just as I stepped out from the back office, the door pushed open, and a head poked in, peering around the lobby—curly brownhair, a beard that matched. Harris smiled when he saw me there. “I was worried it was too late,” he said, stepping inside.
“No, perfect timing. I was just about to close up for the night. You’re a lifesaver.”
He strode across the room, reached over the registration desk, and picked up the phone, listening to the dead air. “Hmm,” he said, brow furrowing. “Can I check out the basement again?”
“Of course. I just need to finish shutting things down at the front desk.” I led him down the hall slowly, aware that most of our guests were sleeping, the rooms locked and quiet for the night. I stopped just before the employee door. “Can I ask you something, in confidence?”
“Go for it,” he said.
“What do you think of the sheriff?”
His eyes drifted to the side, and he ran his tongue behind his teeth. “I think,” he began, with the tiniest smirk, “that he hires me sometimes. And that he’s the reason I’m hired by others.”
“Fair enough,” I said, pressing my employee badge to the lock.
He pushed the door open, then held it there, pausing. “What are you really asking me, Abby?”
He knew exactly what I was asking. And I remembered how Cory told me I needed to be careful about that. “I feel like I don’t really know what people are capable of,” I began, edging my way into it. “I feel like I missed so much, not being here for all the disappearances.”
“Well,” he said, “neither was I.” He took a step downstairs, turned around. As if the privacy of the stairwell kept him safe, allowed him to say it. “What I think about the sheriff is, there are people who are everything to him. And there are people who are nothing to him.”
I nodded once, in thanks and in understanding.
I finished securing the lobby, waiting for Harris to finish upso I could go downstairs, to my apartment, process everything Celeste had told me. Decide what I was going to do with it all.
Walking into the back office, I saw an alert on my cell phone. I had hoped it was Georgia, sending some sort of message. An explanation; an apology. Or Sloane, checking in, reminding us both that we were safe.
But the notification on the screen was for a new message that had just arrived fromAliceKellyWasHere.
I perched against the windowsill, feeling the cold of the night against the glass on my back. I navigated to the message:I don’t know their last names, sorry. But I remember them. They’re in that group shot. I know it’s hard to see, but here’s a closer picture: Lacy on the left. Caroline on the right. They were the ones on the hike.
She didn’t have to say which one. The hike where they left her, let her go off on her own. Where she disappeared, never to be seen again.
The photo started to load below, in painstaking fragments. And there she was again, Alice Kelly, at the center of the frame, a close-up of the front row standing behind the sign. Quinn must’ve taken a closer snapshot of the picture. Lacy with a hand on Alice’s shoulder, turned her way, Caroline smiling at the camera. They were all so young. I pictured them hiking together, packs that seemed to weigh as much as they did, and what Alice would’ve looked like, ten years later. Where all of their lives would have gone from here. Where the others’ had. If they thought of her. If they sometimes thought they caught sight of her in the aisle of a store, or while picking up their kids from school. If they were all still haunted by it.
A new message chimed. Quinn was onlineright now.
James was her ex-boyfriend. He didn’t hike as part of that group. I’m surprised he went at all. He really only joined the Outdoors Club for the pictures.
I read it again twice before responding:He was a photographer?There was something here. Something between Alice and Farrah.
A note that she was typing. And then:Yes, that’s how they met. A photography class outside of school taught by some nature photographer. Alice joined for the nature part. He was there for the photography.
Footsteps approached from slowly down the hall, and then Harris was standing in the door frame, watching me type out a response to Quinn:Was he ever questioned?
“Who are you talking to this late at night?” he said with a smirk.
“Alice Kelly’s sister, actually,” I said, raising my eyes to him. “I found her on Instagram.”
