Page 22 of The Last to Vanish
The danger wasn’t the trail; the danger was in stepping off and not being able to find your way back. I’d heard about hikers’ bodies found years later, on other sections of the Appalachian, mere yardsfrom the trail—never knowing how close they were. Perishing, tragically, so close to safety.
“Come on,” I said, and listened as his steps continued behind my own. I appreciated the silence of the early morning, but I was on edge, waiting for the questions to begin. It didn’t take long.
“I read up on the disappearances,” Trey said. “Before I came.” A thought he’d obviously considered sharing for some time. This was also not a surprise.
I tried to keep my pace steady. “Most people do,” I said. It was easier to discuss this with him behind me. I imagined Celeste’s voice in my ear.We should be careful, Abigail.
“All of the cases, they have a tie to the trail now, right? Not just the town of Cutter’s Pass. But this.Here.” Like this ground we were walking was hallowed, dangerous. Either. Both.
“Depends what you mean by tie,” I said. “There’s not a lot of hard evidence that any of them came this way. The cases aren’t similar. They’re not related.” There wasn’t even proof, in a few of the cases, that some had even set foot in these woods, though that was certainly what most of us believed.
“The Fraternity Four, on a camping trip,” he began, as if he were suddenly the expert, two days in to his first visit to Cutter’s Pass. “Alice Kelly, leaving her group on the Appalachian, to hike out by herself. My brother, with his boots missing. And now Farrah Jordan. The pictures put her here.”
It was easy to see the woods as the tie, if you wanted. It was just as easy not to. “The Fraternity Foursaidthey were heading for the trail, but no one saw them out here,” I explained. They had set out in the evening, which they had been warned not to do. It was too late, the sun setting too fast; they wouldn’t make it to a campsite on time. But they had flashlights and charisma and strong will and good humor, and they were up for an adventure, they said.
“And Alice Kelly made itout,” I continued. “All the way intotown, to the tavern, where she made a phone call. Andthenshe disappeared.” The woods were not the last place she was seen. The woods were not the last placeanyof them were seen. Farrah Jordan, at the trailhead. Landon West, at the inn.
We continued on, the uncertainty hanging between us, when I realized we were the only two people who knew about the flash drive. And then for a moment, we felt like the only two people in the world. Nothing but our heavy breathing, our steady steps, a chill at my back at the sound of his hiking stick striking dirt between each step.
And then, something else. Up ahead. The soft sound of footsteps, coming closer, but out of sight, around the next bend. I thought of that car tucked around the corner, by the trailhead.
I stopped walking so suddenly that Trey nearly collided with my back. I moved the walking stick to my left hand, as my right went instinctively to my pocket—with the knife.
But the person rounding the corner was only Celeste, with her trademark walking stick, on her trademark walk.
“Well, good morning, you two,” she said as she approached. Her hair was in a braid that hung down her back, and her strides were deceptively long for a woman just over five feet tall, who had recently celebrated her fifty-eighth birthday. With her graying hair, and skin that had seen three decades of working outdoors on the mountain, she often appeared older than her age. Until you saw her on the move.
“Good morning, Celeste.” I stepped to the side to let her pass but gave her a look as our eyes locked. We’d had words, before, about her coming out here alone. Especially since Landon West’s disappearance. This was her home, as she’d told me more than once. But that was the illusion of safety that people here clung to: It was always visitors. Everyone who grew up here seemed to feel a sense of immunity, justified or not. And Celeste’s roots ran deep:Both of her parents had grown up here, and when they died soon after she finished college, instead of her tie to this place being severed, it only seemed to pull tighter, calling her back.
She paused as she approached Trey, raised her sharp green-eyed gaze, and then the corners of her mouth. “I’m glad you’re getting the full service from this one,” she said, one hand reaching out for my upper arm, giving it a firm squeeze. “She knows these woods like the back of her hand.” Which was generous and not entirely true.
“She’s a pretty good guide,” he said, which was also generous and even less true.
“We wanted to get an early start,” I said, taking the moment to drop my pack to the ground and hand a metal water bottle to Trey. “Thought we’d be the first ones on the trail. Everything okay out there?” I asked, my words heavy with meaning.
She smiled tightly. “I wasn’t even the first. Passed a hiker coming out as I was on my way in. This is practically midmorning on the mountain.” She pressed her walking stick into the dirt, twisted it back and forth before stepping to the next rock protruding from the trail. “Be safe, Abigail.” Her words carrying their own warning.
Trey took a deep drink as Celeste continued on, alone. We both watched as she disappeared behind the next switchback, swallowed up by the rhododendron. The sound of her footsteps quickly faded to nothing under the breeze rustling through the leaves.
He handed me the bottle. “She’s not worried? Being out here alone?” he asked.
“No,” I said, my back teeth clenched together. Celeste was stubborn in a way that did nothing to ease my concern. “She thinks the fact that she comes out here every day means that nothing can touch her. That just because nothing has happened before, nothing ever will.” I took a deep breath. Although we always warned our guests to go with a partner, Celeste rarely did. “After her husbanddied, she scattered his ashes on the mountain. She says she likes to start her day talking to him each morning, just like she always did. I guess she thinks it’s worth the risk.”
In truth, I sometimes felt Vincent’s presence out here, too, in the same way I felt him at the inn. I’d asked about him a lot when I first arrived, when the loss of him was still heavy, and recent, and I wanted to get to know him however I could. Celeste revisited the same stories, the same moments, until I could feel her memories as if they were my own: the first time they met, at a work event, when she had just started at the same design company, where he was an architect; the first time he saw this place, when they were still just dating; the fact that they couldn’t even remember whose idea it was to buy the land and build the inn, as if the thought had always existed, like magic. Listening to Celeste, I could picture him carrying a guest’s luggage effortlessly up the steps, could hear his deep laugh echoing through the lobby. But I found that over time, I got to know Vincent from his absence best of all.
When I arrived, I could still see his shadow in everything. His loss was tangible in the things that suddenly fell to disrepair. Vincent came into focus in these gaps, and I imagined him organizing the receipts, and sweeping the entrance, and straightening the picture frames that had fallen off kilter. All these tasks I picked up in his absence. I grew into the places that Vincent had left vacant.
“Well,” Trey said, “she’s a little intimidating, despite her size.”
I nodded, listening closer to the woods, trying in vain to track her back to the exit. “I think you’d have to be, to build this place from scratch and run it pretty much by yourself for thirty years.”
His eyes were narrowed, still watching the corner, as if she might be waiting there all along. “You know her well?” he asked.
I started walking again, felt Trey falling into stride. “She’s family,” I said. I always felt protective of her, admired her for what she’d created and everything she’d done for this place, and thepeople within it. Everything good about this place was because of her, and I wanted Trey to know it. She’d given me a home when I had no place else to go; her car when mine had died; a job when I’d needed one most. I knew, from the way people talked in town, that she’d done the same for others over the years. People thought highly of the inn primarily because they thought highly of Celeste herself.
We walked for a few more moments in silence before he continued. “What was it like, growing up here, with a town with this sort of history?”
“I didn’t.” When Celeste introduced me to the others in town, all she’d ever had to say was,This is Abby, Vincent’s niece, and nothing else needed to be said. “Her husband was my uncle,” I explained. “But he was older than her, and I didn’t know him growing up, either. They built this place together. I came to visit after he died. And then… I never left.”
