The Last to Vanish(29)
“People do,” I said. “When there isn’t too much ice, or snow.” There was something haunting about the winter. Not like in the summer, with the vegetation growing in thick and tight in sections, obscuring your vision. After the leaves fell, and the landscape turned brown, and then gray, everything felt so vast and exposed. Like the photos on Farrah’s camera, stark branches overlapping as far as the eye could see. You couldn’t hide in the winter. The mountain knew you were here. But there was also a safety in it: Nothing could hide from you, either.
The rest of the hike passed in silence—with Trey in his head, and me in my own. Until finally, the path narrowed before us, curving against a rock face, makeshift steps leading down and disappearing out of sight.
“We’re almost there,” I said, slowing my pace. “It can get slippery. Be careful.”
I imagined Farrah leaning back for a better angle to her shot, losing her grip, losing the camera. I imagined Farrah slipping, head colliding with rock.
It was treacherous in the winter, and Farrah was unprepared. How easy it could’ve been for her to slip, get hurt on the steep steps down to the falls. To succumb to exposure. It could’ve been an accident, easily.
But whoever had found her camera hadn’t helped. Hadn’t turned it in. Had let her disappear, just like all the rest.
I let Trey go in front of me, hand on the wooden rail, while I took my phone out of my pocket, trying to imagine Farrah standing in this very spot, wondering what she might’ve seen down there. Wondering what she might’ve been looking for. And what she didn’t notice coming.
The perspective of her photo seemed to match up right here. The rocky ledge, the path descending. I brought my phone into my line of vision and snapped a photo, then slid it into my pocket just as Trey turned back to check what I was doing.
“Watch your step,” I called.
CHAPTER 8
THE FALLS WERE THE same as every other time I’d been out here—a surge of water that grows louder in the approach, cool mist hanging in the air, a slickening of the surrounding rocks.
Unlike Celeste, I didn’t gain any solace from this place. I could not imagine safety anymore, not after standing in front of Landon West’s empty cabin, allowing his things to be cataloged. Not after joining the search.
The trail had felt like something different then. A place where the sun set too quickly. A place where the present slipped effortlessly into the past.
We had gone out in groups of three and four, weaving down the path, stepping off to the side but staying a fingertip’s length from each other, at most. The creeping spring foliage had made everyone nervous, desperate to remain in sight. The scent of the blooming rhododendron turned the air too cloying, too suffocating.
We’d all joined in the search. Celeste sometimes leading the way, and Sloane, before she took the new assignment, and Georgia keeping close behind, with a hand on my shoulder, an unbreakable chain. Sometimes I’d see Cory, or Ray and Marina; Sheriff Stamer himself, or Rochelle, when she could get away from the phone lines at the sheriff’s office, out of her jewelry and sandals and transformed into something entirely different; Barbara and Stu Schultz, the owners of the Edge, and Charlie Jameson, who ran CJ’s Hideaway; and Jack Olivier, who was still haunted by being the last person to talk to Farrah Jordan. Even Harris, who had a young daughter at home and normally preferred to stay on the outskirts of Cutter’s Pass, even though he’d grown up here.
We all rotated through, the trail constantly monitored and explored, with someone venturing as far off the marked trail as others could see, in case Landon West had done the same. The official search and rescue crews went farther, brought in dogs, used drones to make it to the places we couldn’t—or wouldn’t. And still, there was no sign of him.
When Farrah had disappeared three years earlier, we weren’t able to search as well. We were limited by the snow, the weather, the lack of appropriate resources, when we weren’t even sure she’d been out there. Only those with experience had set out then: Sheriff Stamer, Cory, Celeste, and Jack, particularly shaken and committed to bringing her back.
Back at the inn, I set out hot chocolate for the crew, and they would reconvene in the lobby after, as I sat in the back office, my cell in hand, refreshing the news, looking for any trace of her. But all I ever found were personal statements from her friends and colleagues: She knows the woods. She’s spent days in them before, on assignment. She teaches others. She’s calm, and smart. She can survive it.
Celeste was glad we were closed for the winter renovations, and so was I. I couldn’t concentrate on anything but Farrah’s face, her haunting gaze. That dark hair, the red scarf. It was all I saw anytime I closed my eyes.
Cory had come to me once in the back office after a day of searching, an extra paper cup in his hand, steam and the scent of chocolate rising from the top. He’d placed the cup on the table, looked at me closely, head tilted to the side. The tips of his hair were coated in ice, and I could practically feel the cold coming off him. He’d smiled slightly, scanned me up and down. Baby’s first disappearance, he’d said. Then he took a sip, took a step back.
I had jolted. Literally, metaphorically. Everything shuttered, and slid, and I felt adrift. The vanishing was no longer just a story Cory told down at the tavern at night. She was a real person, and she was gone, and he was making light of it, even then. How could anyone be found in a place like this?