Page 14 of The Last to Vanish
Thinking of the Shermans leaving their two behind. No other tallies on the page from Georgia. No one else talking about hiking this evening.
Just Trey, eyes to the barrel, asking about the start ofthe vanishing trail.
I thought of the dark. Of the stories. His questions about the trail.
Of Trey with a bottle of wine and a walking stick and some purpose most of us were just guessing at—and I felt a chill, a precursor, the same feeling I’d gotten when I stood in his brother’s empty room for the first time.
The thing about a disappearance here was that our history made it somehow more unlikely, harder to comprehend. Like you’ve been playing a role in a production for too long. Something tongue-in-cheek, not quite a joke, but not quite the absence of one, either. So at the first sign of a disappearance, you had to shake the smile, fight back the nervous laughter threatening to bubble up. It’s a slowly creeping horror. Something you have to check and double-check, a hypothetical monster under the bed. Where the only thing you can think is:No. Please, no.
I picked up the phone at the front desk to call Trey. But the line just clicked steadily with dead air.
Something was wrong.Of coursesomething was wrong. Something was very wrong here. I understood that. We all must’ve understood that, on some level, whether we wanted to face it.
There were a lot of rumors about us here, as a collective—about the things we knew, the secrets we kept. But they ignored the obvious.
Georgia with her always-on music, and me with my proof-of-life photos to Sloane. Cory, outgoing and charming, making it impossible to miss him for long, and Marina, always bringing in the latest news. Celeste, who hosts nightly happy hours, and the sheriff who makes his regular visits, keeps to his schedule. Even the notes Georgia and I leave for each other at the front desk, a reminder that we were just there.
Everyone here is afraid of disappearing. And that no one else would notice before it was too late.
The missing hiking stick. The bottles of wine. His questions about the trail. His frame of mind.
I could not leave him out there alone.
CHAPTER 5
IQUICKLY SECURED THE OFFICEbehind the registration desk before racing out into the evening, where the sun had begun to set, and hoped I wasn’t too late to catch him.
The path lights to the cabins switched on as I jogged past, triggered by the settling dark. I raced up the cabin stairs, my steps echoing on the wood, when I heard something moving inside the cabin. Something heavy.
I breathed a sigh of relief, realizing I wasn’t too late, and pounded on the door with the side of my closed fist. The moving stopped, but no one approached. No steps across the floor, or a muffled call ofJust a minute.
Silence.
I knocked again. “Mr. West? It’s Abby. Can I speak with you please?”
Footsteps this time, and the door swung partly open. Trey had a faint gleam of sweat covering his face, hair disheveled, with the room in total disarray behind him. I could smell the booze coming off him—wasn’t sure it was just the wine after all.
Instinctively, I took a step back. “What’s going on?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady, calm, and controlled.
This time, he flung the door wide open, like some grand gesture. “I don’t know, why don’t you tell me.”
I shook my head, still standing in the entrance, as I surveyed the room. The dresser drawers had each been removed, laying empty on the floor. The bed had been pushed out from the wall. The wooden desk chair had been relocated below a vent, the grating removed.
And the metal grate was now on the surface of the desk, tossed on top of the open guest book binder. There was a screwdriver beside it, along with one of the missing bottles of wine—now empty. The walking stick was resting on the floor beside the chair, like he’d been using it to prod the space behind the missing grate.
I swallowed, stood my ground. “If you don’t tell me what’s going on, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“Come on,” he said, taking a few unbalanced steps backward, steadying himself on a bedpost, “from the second I’ve been here, I’m being watched.”
“That’s ridiculous. No, you’re not.” On the contrary, the three of us here had done our best to keep our distance.
He let out one loud, sharp laugh. “Oh, the sheriff just happens to be there tonight? Pulls me aside to ask if he can help me with anything while I’m in town?” He smirked, like he thought he’d uncovered my game. “And the noises last night, my god. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think someone was trying to drive me out of here. So tell me, Abby, am I close?”
“No, that’s not… the sheriff showing up, it was a coincidence… What noises?” I asked.
He swung his arm out to the side, gesturing to the wood-paneled wall that divided his room from Cabin Three. “From next door. The scratching. The moving. All. Fucking. Night.”
“There’s no one there,” I said. “It’s the squirrels. They get in the eaves, and—”
