Page 28 of The Last to Vanish
“Then he’s reckless, Abby. Keep out of it. Keep away from him.”
How could I expect Cory to understand—the feeling that the answers could be found through Trey, somehow, danger or not. I raised a hand, cutting off the line of discussion. There was no point in arguing with Cory. Neither of us would give an inch. “When’s the last time you were down at the falls?”
He rubbed the side of his face. “Last week sometime. Why?”
“I didn’t remember cairns on the trail on the other side.”
He shook his head. “We use paint on the trail. Probably just kids. People on a picnic, building a pile of stones. You know how it gets in the summer. It’s a well-traveled trail, Abby.”
I nodded, noncommittally, and it was like he could see right through me. Every thought. Every worry.
He took a step closer, lowered his voice. “There’s nothing out there. I promise. I’ve lived here my whole life.” A smirk that brought me back ten years, to the both of us in almost this very same spot.
I smiled tightly. “I’ve gotta run. Georgia’s only giving me an extra hour.”
And with the mention of her name, any thread of nostalgia between us was severed.
I WAS USED TOseeing Cory everywhere. I wasn’t even surprised to see him here now, in a place that should’ve felt private and mine.
When I’d officially met Cory for the first time, I didn’t know anything about who he was. Just that he stood behind the bar at the tavern and poured me a drink without asking for ID, and when I slid some cash across the bar top, he said,Oh, I’m not working here tonight.He had the pronounced lightness of being a decade younger then, at least one fewer tattoo, a future that was still more promise than expectation. He slid onto the bar stool beside me,told me his name, and said if I was going to be staying awhile, he was a good person to know. That he knew everything about this place.
I asked him the species of trees that lined the streets, and he didn’t know. I asked him the annual rainfall, and he laughed.
Two visits later, and I told him, in the hesitant way that I presented all information then, that I was going to be working at the inn, and he said he knew that, with a small smile. And when I left that night, I told him I’d be staying there, too. He said he knew that, too, and this time I laughed.
And later that night, when I went downstairs to the otherwise unoccupied basement, he was standing near the back entrance, the private one hidden at the back of the inn, and I said,How did you get in here?
I told you, he’d said,I know everything about this place. And then his smile faltered, and he looked behind him, toward the door, and he said,I wasn’t sure if—
I knew what he meant before he finished. He wasn’t sure if it was an invitation. But it was.
The thing about Cory then was he was both cocky and unsure at the same time, a little overexposed, never paying much attention to the times his heart was on his sleeve or his foot in his mouth. And for a time, I’d fallen for both.
It was lonely down there, in a different way than I’d been lonely before, after my mother’s death, finding myself on my own, with no direction—like time had stopped. At the inn, time kept moving, but sometimes I wasn’t sure if this place was real. WhetherIwas. I felt so far from the person I’d once been, not sure what I was really doing here. Like someone new being forged in the bones of this place. I imagined myself rising out of the concrete floor, made of intricate locks and steel and unbreakable glass. For that first year,my world shrank to a bubble, and the things that I loved in it were: this place, that mountain, and him.
But then he started pulling away, and I realized he was a walled thing all of his own. That, if I asked him something, anything real about Cutter’s Pass—What was it like, when Alice Kelly went missing? What do you think happened to the Fraternity Four?—he would tell me nothing more than the lines I’d heard him give to paying customers. If he knew things, he wouldn’t tell me, saying only, when I pressed,You won’t find any secrets here, with a sly grin, like it was all in jest. And I realized that Cutter’s Pass would only exist for you in the parts you were here for, and the rest would remain an impenetrable history. I’d learned I’d find more camaraderie and friendship in those that were like me—not from here.
It took the last two disappearances to make me feel like one of them, and only because I was here when they happened. To understand that the truth was something you couldn’t just explain to someone else, but had to experience for yourself, come to terms with in your own way.
By then, I had let Cory go. Unsettled by the lightness with which he approached everything. The carefree surface, the exterior charm. He capitalized on the disappearances, accepted the mysteries as something not too serious. He made all stories seem trivial, even mine. He had a distinct lack of gravity, in a way that felt unsustainable.
But Cory was never something that could slip into the past. In a way, I felt like Cory was a part of this place, set deep in its foundation. Something that would always be a part of me, whether we were together or not.
And then last year, a week after Georgia’s arrival, I saw him in the basement again, standing near that back entrance, like hewas waiting for her to find him there. A rehearsed move in a play. And I’d recast our entire history, every memory. Whatever spell remained was then finally and permanently broken. I imagined the people who had come before me, the history that had once existed but remained beyond my reach. The secrets Cory knew, and kept.
AFTER I’D FINISHED MYshower and threw on my work clothes, I still heard him in that storage room. But I passed without saying goodbye as I exited. It didn’t matter whether I locked up behind me. In the end, you had to choose to trust Cory, to believe his intentions.
I found out later that Cory had worked here once. When he’d wanted out of his parents’ house, before he could afford his own place—he’d come here, to Celeste and Vincent. Had lived in the very same apartment that Celeste gave me later. Of course he knew how to get in.
I had thought of what Celeste had told me, about needing to discover what’s most important to people to know how to navigate them. I could never figure it out, with him. And it was then I understood the problem with Cory: The one thing he was most interested in was himself.
IF CORY LACKED Asense of gravity, then Trey West was the opposite, standing in the parking lot as I backed my car up the slope of the employee drive. He was a black hole, a pull I couldn’t resist and didn’t want to, for fear I might miss something. I was starting to believe that the answers to this place somehow lay within him. That, despite Celeste’s disapproval and Cory’s warning, this was the way to find them.
I lowered the window, called his name, watched as he tried to place me in context again. I was dressed for work now, hair pulled back tightly, in the hand-me-down car from Celeste.
My own car had only lasted my first winter here. By the time the next fall was approaching—the leaves changing colors, crisp and swirling in the wind, brittle under our steps—the battery was on its way out, and the tires needed replacing, and my car, the very last thing that had once belonged to my mother, was dying. I didn’t want to admit it. Of all the things I had lost, the car shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did. It was just a car, and it had gotten me here, but it wouldn’t change the past. It was the insult of it—justone more thing—and after the engine sputtered, I’d slammed a door, kicked a tire, felt my eyes burning with tears in frustration.
And then Celeste was there, outside the carriage house, watching closely.What’s the matter?she asked.
