The Last to Vanish(20)

I entered the code, and the box disappeared, displaying the contents of the drive. “Holy shit,” he said. Any question whether this belonged to Landon West was gone.

Inside, there was a single Word document, unnamed. And a folder, labeled with one word, in all caps.

FARRAH.

I sucked in a breath. Farrah Jordan. The woman with the dark hair and haunted expression, whose icy gaze had stared back at me from every frost-coated storefront window in town, three years earlier.

I closed my eyes, the room spinning, time splintering.

Most people who went digging through the history of Cutter’s Pass started at the beginning, with the flashiest story. The Fraternity Four. As if that case could solve all the rest, in simple succession.

But new cases brought new information, and Landon West must’ve understood the trick. You had to start at the most recent, the freshest trail—and work back.

“Oh my god,” Trey said, his face so close to mine.

I watched as something settled onto his features: A sobering. A sharpening.

I knew that look—it was foolish and reckless and too far gone. I’d seen that look reflected in each person who came here with a new theory, a new spark. There was no going back now. I saw it in his eyes.

He believed he could find him.

He believed he could find them all.





PART 2


Farrah Jordan

Date missing: January 16, 2019

Last seen: Cutter’s Pass, North Carolina

Shallow Falls Trailhead





CHAPTER 6


“OPEN THAT FOLDER,” TREY said. Too much time had passed as I stared at the contents of the flash drive, my inaction veering too close to being interpreted as a choice.

I could feel his breath at my shoulder and the proximity of his body hovering over mine, could see both our faces reflected in the glow of the computer screen, as I clicked the folder marked FARRAH.

A grid of thumbnails loaded across the page, and a wave of nausea rolled through me, as Trey cursed under his breath. These were photos. Photos in a folder marked with her name.

Farrah Jordan had disappeared three winters earlier. She had arrived in town one morning in January and was last seen at the wooden sign that marked the Shallow Falls Trailhead, with a camera hanging around her neck.

Everyone said it had been bad luck. Bad luck, that she had stopped in Cutter’s Pass on a frozen Wednesday, drawn by the beauty of the landscape, lured in to take a closer look. Bad luck, that her car had been found abandoned between the Edge and Trace of the Mountain Souvenirs, covered in a heavy snowfall, three days after she’d presumably gone missing.

I clicked the first photo, preparing myself for her image, her stare, something that dragged her across the past, brought her abruptly into focus. Something sharper than the image we’d all been shown later that week, driver’s license quality, reducing her to the haunting eyes, the set of her mouth.

But this was a photograph of nothing. A white blur, a camera in motion. I clicked the next picture, and it was more of the same, but slightly more in focus. In this image, I could make out the vague definition of the tread of a snow boot on white earth. Like she’d snapped these pictures inadvertently, camera pointing at the ground, while she was doing something else.

Maybe outside the Edge, where she’d stopped for a coffee and asked for the way to the Shallow Falls Trailhead. Beautiful morning, Jack had said. He’d stepped out front and pointed down the snow-lined road, past the Last Stop Tavern, a straight shot from Main Street to the rise of Mountain Pass, leading the way.

Can I walk it from here? The last words on record of Farrah Jordan.

Sure, most people do. His reply still haunted him, three years later.

Now I could feel the tension building in Trey’s breathing beside me. These images were useless, nothing worth hiding on a flash drive in a hollow bedpost.

One more click, and suddenly the room chilled, the world expanded. We were staring at a crisp photograph of bare branches against a pale gray sky.

Trey released a sharp exhale. “Is that here?” he asked.

“I can’t tell,” I said. I couldn’t even tell if the photo was in color—all the warmth had been leached out of the winter landscape. I moved on to the next: more bare trees, narrow trunks and crooked branches overlapping, fading into the distance, giving the illusion of something disappearing. Next: a circle of bare branches against the winter sky, as if someone had taken this while lying on the cold earth. As if the thing disappearing in the previous photo all along was you.

I shivered as Trey leaned across me, impatient, and I moved to the side as he began scrolling faster—searching for her, for Farrah, or maybe something else—and gripped the edge of the reception desk.

But the only images, passing one by one across my screen, were of trees, of sky, of snowy ground and a cold, barren landscape. They felt wrong somehow, disconnected from the name on the folder.

I knew before he’d reached the end: We wouldn’t find her in these pictures. There would be no haunting gaze staring back at us, or glimpse of her in town. There wasn’t even a strand of dark hair that had fallen across the frame, or her unsettling reflection against the frozen landscape.

“She was a nature photographer,” I told Trey as he hit the arrow key again. “Lived in South Carolina, but taught courses all across the Southeast. She’d been on her way to Asheville, to teach a course for the spring semester. Stayed in Springwood the night before she disappeared, about thirty minutes from here.” We had learned, during the search, that she’d told her family she would be taking her time on the way up, would be in and out of cell phone range. They didn’t worry at first—she was independent, thirty-six, and often off the grid for work.