The Last to Vanish(5)

But Georgia always seemed on high alert, just by nature of the shape of her face—narrow and fine boned, with large brown eyes and her blonde hair in a pixie cut. You could almost imagine her as some mystical creature, something you might catch a glimpse of hiding between the trees, if not for the fact that she was nearly six feet tall, sharp angles and long limbs and very hard to miss.

“Was that a hiker you just checked in?” she asked.

I shook my head, straightening the paperwork into the binder behind the desk, just to have something to do with my hands. “Actually, it was Landon West’s brother,” I said without making eye contact. I could imagine her expression well enough.

She stood perfectly still, waiting for me to look up. When I finally did, I lifted one shoulder, as in, I know.

“Are you going to tell Celeste?” she asked.

“Wasn’t planning on it.” After nearly a decade of working with her, Celeste now paid me to keep the details from reaching her, content to spend her time in a semiretirement. And I wasn’t sure whether this was a problem just yet.

I started closing up for the evening, shutting down the computer, gathering anything of value to store in the office behind us, which would remain locked until the morning.

“How much longer until this rain breaks?” Georgia asked, pulling out her cell and taking it into the back office, which was the best place to get any signal here—the closest to the town center you could get, the better. “I can’t get any bars,” she added, her voice going tight. She’d been on edge to some degree since Landon West’s disappearance in April, and it didn’t take much to push her over now.

“Soon, I think,” I said, for no other reason than wanting to ease her nervous energy, which had only succeeded in making me anxious as well. The weather; the phone lines; Trey West’s arrival—like there was something beginning. Something gathering force. I shook it off as I tucked the locked case of receipts and cash under my arm; this was why Georgia rarely worked the late shift.

“Abby,” Georgia called from the back office, her voice even higher, tighter.

I stepped around the corner, where she faced the dark windows over the table we used both as a desk and for meals. I’d often stood in that very spot to send a text, or upload a photo to the inn’s social media accounts. The rain sounded like it was indeed letting up, though the weather app visible on her cell phone screen was still blank and searching. She pressed a single pointer finger against the glass, turning to face me. “Cory’s on his way up with a group.”

Rain or Shine, that was his motto. Pretty much the only rule of his tours, that I could tell. “I thought he only went to the woods on day trips,” I said. It was too dark, too pointless, to take visitors out there in the night. Never mind the current state of things.

But I felt Georgia’s eyes on me as I slid the money drawer into a secondary safe in the closet. “He added Landon West to the circuit a couple weeks back.”

“You can’t be serious,” I said, joining her at the window, face pressed close to the cold glass. The case was barely four months old—dormant, but definitely not closed. I could just barely see the dancing beams of the flashlights heading up the steep incline in the dark.

“Someone should tell him,” Georgia said.

I stared at the side of her face, the plea already forming. I’d warned her about Cory, but some people have to figure things out for themselves.

At the tail end of last summer, when I was still showing Georgia around Cutter’s Pass, I brought her along on a night out, introduced her to the seasonal workers who were then in their last weeks, half of whom, despite their promises and drunken assurances, we would never see again. I felt Georgia picking up on it, sliding into it, the wild energy that pulled at everyone then, the impermanence of our choices. These people who wouldn’t remember us, just as we wouldn’t remember them. In a year, two, they’d be nothing more than the redhead who broke her wrist working the zip line; the kid from Texas who wore a cowboy hat on the river.

The only reliable fixture of that world was Sloane, who’d managed the river center from spring through fall for five years running. She’d become my closest friend, another in-betweener—not a temporary employee, but not someone with deep roots here, either.

That night, as we’d closed out the evening at the Last Stop—a tradition, a calling—we ran into Cory, who’d said, Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend, Abby? I’d given Georgia a not-so-subtle shake of the head, which she pointedly ignored. Georgia answered for herself, with one long, fine-boned arm extended his way.

Georgia barely knew me then, no better than the seasonal workers who would soon disappear. Had no reason to trust what I was saying, which was: If you’re planning to stay, Cory was unavoidable, infallible. This was not a choice that could be forgotten.

At least it gave us something else to bond over now. Though it took everything within me to bite my tongue when she’d say, I don’t want to deal with him.

“Abby?” she pleaded, as the shadowed mass of the tour group drew nearer.

“Shit,” I said, racing for the exit, grabbing the umbrella, and pushing out into the storm once more.



* * *



FROM MY SPOT IN the parking lot, I watched as the group in dark hoods crested the top of the steep drive, huddled close together, faces low, like some sort of cult. Even in the distance, I could pick out Cory Shiles, the glow of the bottom half of his face, square jaw, a familiar regret. That tattoo of ivy creeping up the side of his neck as the light swung back and forth from his hand. He had a lantern, for God’s sake.