The Last to Vanish(3)
His entire body deflated, almost like he was making himself prostrate, his forehead down to the counter between us before he stood again, as if he were unveiling someone new.
“I’m sorry,” he said, face contorted into a grimace. It was the first time I believed him.
“No,” I said. “I get it. Really. I understand. I would do the same.”
He pulled a wallet out of his back pocket, took a deep breath in and out, started again. “Trey West,” he said, leaving a pause for me to fill. A question, an offering.
“Abby,” I said.
“Abby,” he repeated, turning over his license, a credit card. “I’m not good at pretending. It’s a relief.”
It was his brother, Landon, who was good at that. We didn’t know he was a journalist when he came to stay. We’d thought he was trying his hand at writing a book, that he was on a personal retreat, that he needed the peace and quiet, the lack of distractions, the ambiance—that’s what he’d told us. We’d thought he was here to get away from something. Not that he was here for something instead. But those things were hard to differentiate on the surface. It wasn’t until he disappeared that we knew the truth.
I didn’t know what Trey was looking for all these months later. Whether he thought there was still something worth finding, that the police and the searchers had all missed; whether he was here to pay his respects, hoping for some sort of closure.
Closure was a hard thing to come by here.
“It’s not what I expected,” Trey said as I charged the night to his card.
I wasn’t sure whether he meant the inn or the entire town. The road into town climbed up for a stretch of miles before swerving down again, narrowing as it dipped from the mountains into the valley, vegetation pushing closer and creeping over the guardrails. It was a drive you didn’t want to do at night, riding the brakes as the curves grew tighter, branches arcing over the pavement. But then the trees opened up, and Cutter’s Pass presented itself, a lost city. A found oasis.
“It never is,” I said. There was always a slight disorientation when you arrived, nothing quite as expected from the drive in. The inn appeared older than it was from the outside, with the weatherworn cabins set back from the main three-story structure, and the forest steadily encroaching over the cleared acreage, but that was just how fast nature worked. Inside, the fireplace was gas; the logs, just for show; the antique locks on all the guest room doors could be overridden with an electronic badge.
It was already clear that Trey was different from his brother, who was closed off and blended in, whom I didn’t even notice for the first four days of his stay, because Georgia checked him in and could only remember, when pressed, that he had asked for the Wi-Fi password, and she had told him the service didn’t reach the cabins, that it was slow and barely consistent in the main building as well, which was why we had to keep the credit card slide under the register, old-fashioned carbon copies that people thought quaint, so it worked in our favor.
Other things that worked in our favor but were neither authentic nor necessary: the wooden key rings with the room names etched in by hand; the poker beside the fireplace, angled just so.
Things here were designed to appear more fragile than they were, but reinforced, because they had to be. We lived in the mountains, on the edge of the woods, subject to the whims of weather and the forces of nature.
The large guest room windows were practically soundproof. Frosted skylights in the upper-floor halls echoed the fall of rain or sleet, but were fully resistant to a branch lost to a storm. There were tempered glass panels in the thick wooden doors at the entrance, which could hypothetically stop a bullet, but thankfully had never been tested.
I pulled one of the umbrellas from the barrel, each a uniform navy blue with a tastefully small logo: a single, bare tree, white branches unfurling against the evening sky.
“Come on,” I said, “I’ll show you the way.”
This was not part of my job, but I couldn’t help myself. I never could.
* * *
OUTSIDE, THE RAIN WAS unrelenting, puddles forming in the gravel lot, water seeping into my shoes. Trey West had to duck to fit under the shared umbrella, his arm brushing up against mine as we walked.
“The cabins are this way,” I explained, gesturing to the trail of marked lighting along the brick path on the other side of the parking lot.
We passed his car, that black Audi with the Maryland plates, on the far end of the lot, and he looked at me sheepishly.
“Is it always this dark?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered, because it wasn’t really that dark out front, all things considered, but he must’ve had an entirely different frame of reference. The lit pathway did a fair enough job, along with the lights of the main building, both kept on from dusk to dawn. From the edge of this lot, even, you could see the road slope down into the town center: a geometric grid of antique shops and breweries and cafés, stores that specialized in expert hiking apparel or kitschy tourist gear, all named for the thing that could’ve been our downfall, but seemed to put us on the map instead.
Down there, you could find the Last Stop Tavern; Trace of the Mountain Souvenirs; the Edge, which sold camping gear and rented out lockers but also featured a menu of coffee and hot chocolate and beer, depending on the time of day; and CJ’s Hideaway, a top restaurant of the western Carolinas, with its entrance tucked in a back alley, a commitment to the con, even though it boasted a growing waiting list on most nights during peak season. Each storefront a subtle nod to what the rumors implied: that there was something hidden under the surface here. Some secret only we knew, that we weren’t letting on.