The Last to Vanish(18)

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—”

He started laughing again. Head tipped back, unhinged. I thought about calling someone. Backing down the steps, locking myself in the lobby, safe behind tempered glass and solid wood and locks made of steel.

“Squirrels. Coincidence. Answer me this, then. Where is my brother’s phone? He always recorded his interviews with it.”

My eyes went wide. “If you have questions about the investigation, you should talk to the sheriff. All of us looked for him. Here, and out there.” He flinched, but I continued. “My guess? His phone was on him.” I looked around the chaos again, an understanding slowly setting in. “Is that what you’re looking for? You think there’s a missing phone in here?”

He rounded the room, to the far side of the bed. “No,” he said as he pushed the bed farther away from the wall, leveraging his weight behind the headboard. And then he shook his head. “I don’t know.”

I saw him differently then. Not at all how the sheriff implied—as some kid worthy of our sympathy—but something more: illogical, panicked, something on the cusp of dangerous. I squeezed my eyes shut, desperate for control of the situation. “Stop,” I said. “Just, stop.” I gripped the closest bedpost, like that could stop him. “Please just calm down.”

The desk light caught on the scar below his jaw, and this time, I imagined a fight. A hotheaded punch, a returning jab, a knockout blow, and his chin colliding with the surface of a bar.

I ran through the possibilities of who to call. The sheriff; Celeste; Ray at the tavern, who might get someone here faster than the police; Cory, even, who was probably somewhere out there, right now.

But suddenly, Trey stilled. His hands were still gripping the headboard, but he was looking at me closely now, like he was reclassifying me, just as I was doing to him. “Was it you, Abby, who noticed he was missing?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t notice,” I said. “None of us did. Not until he missed checkout. I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t, either,” he said. He deflated, looking around the room, like he could see himself finally as I did.

Okay, everything was okay. He was coming down from the episode. His reaction tonight was just the setting, his guilt, the lack of information. All of us, bombarding him at once.

“We weren’t close,” he said, in a confessional tone that belied our relationship. “I was away on business.” An excuse that sounded like an alibi he’d had to give to the police. “It was the start of a new consulting assignment, and when my mom called, I didn’t see what difference it would make if I were here or there. He was a grown man, we both were, he had his own life, his own way of doing things. We weren’t cut from the same cloth, him and me. Do you have siblings?”

I shook my head. Had imagined it sometimes, how different my life would’ve been if the makeup of my family had been just a little different, a little larger. The small shifts that changed the entire trajectory of a life.

“Well,” he said, like I couldn’t possibly understand the dynamics of such things—of people forced to occupy the same space, with little in common. Of growing apart. “I thought maybe he was trying to emulate the experience at first, you know? The disappearances. He wasn’t… He got his stories in… nontraditional ways.”

I guessed that nontraditional was a generous way of saying that Landon West did not find himself beholden to the same ethics as others. The papers had reported that he had a reputation of keeping his stories and his progress under tight wraps until they were ready. Whatever he’d been working on, it was never printed. No details had emerged. His editors at the magazine he often freelanced for didn’t know much about it, other than he had said he had a fresh lead into the mysteries of Cutter’s Pass. His friends knew less, just that he was planning to be off grid for a time.