The Last to Vanish(31)

“The trail keeps going?” Trey called, startling me. He was out of the water now, legs pale and dripping wet, standing on my side of the falls.

I stood, positioning myself between his view of the cairn and the bright red flower. “This is the end of the Shallow Falls Trail,” I said. I jutted my thumb over my shoulder. “But the trail keeps going, up to the Appalachian.” His gaze was focused on the spot over my shoulder. “It’s not easy,” I added.

There was a distinct difference between the trail we’d just taken and the trail in front of us.

He stepped carefully, barefoot, in my direction. “How long would it take?” he asked.

“A couple more hours, probably. It’s beautiful if you catch the sunset up there, but you want to be prepared.” More food, more water, a lot of just in cases. “There’s a pretty deep ravine on the way, which is how this town got its name. Cutter’s Pass through the mountains. You’ve got to hug the mountain wall.” There were handholds bolted into the rock face on the side of the ravine path, just in case. A rope you could hold on to while you crossed, just in case. “I wouldn’t recommend it at night. And definitely not in the winter.” The hikers who made it down in the dark had headlamps, experience, a pressing need to get down from the mountain. It’s not something you did on a whim.

“You’ve done it, though, right?”

“Only once.”

He seemed surprised, but these were two very different experiences. I’d come up on a trip with Sloane and a group of summer workers a couple years back, near the end of the season, one last hurrah, and listened while they laughed at the stories they told around the campfire, like the ghosts were long gone and not barely two decades old.

The noises of the night felt closer up there, more predatory. I didn’t feel the awe of the mountain then. I felt only the reality of being exposed in the night, the possibilities laid stark before me. “I hike, I don’t camp. And that,” I said, gesturing into the dense woods, “is for camping.”

“Landon didn’t have camping gear. But I could see him going for it,” he said, teeth pressed together, a comment made in irritation, as opposed to pride.

“It was searched,” I added. “I promise.” The ravine was always one of the first places that the rescue crews checked. If someone fell in, and if they survived the fall, they wouldn’t be able to climb back out.

“People live out here, don’t they?”

“Here? No.”

“I meant—” He extended his hand to the mountain, beyond.

I swallowed. I knew what he was asking. It was long rumored that there was a man who lived out here, whom none of us had ever seen. Warnings passed around with the seasonal workers, who saw the remnants of a burned-out campfire along the river, and shivered. Who spotted a flash of color in their peripheral vision as they navigated downstream and looked again. It was a legend that continued to grow with nothing to disprove it.

Other visitors had asked about it as well, something to tie each case together. A singular danger they could understand. That the threat was not the things we warned them about (exposure; animals; dehydration and disorientation), but human. “Well, there’s not really a census,” I said.

“Isn’t that exactly the problem? No one knows who might be out there. But people talk, right?”

People talk? Not about anything that mattered. Not about anything real.

“You think someone’s been out here, just waiting, for the last twenty-five years?” I asked. It was a stretch to believe that over that amount of time, one person had tracked the Fraternity Four—four strong young men, armed with knives and bear spray, traveling together; had seen Landon West, and done the same; had followed Alice Kelly out of the woods. Had done something to Farrah, right here, in the snow.

“I don’t know what to think. My brother disappeared in sight of these woods, and no one has seen him, and he wasn’t some small guy.” He blew out a sharp breath, ran a hand down his face, shook his head. “Okay then, Abby,” he said, changing his demeanor, trying again. “If it’s not someone out here, what do you think?”

That was a dangerous question. Of course, the visitors asked from time to time, and we had each developed our rote responses. Cory, with a smirk: You won’t find any secrets here. Sheriff Stamer, grim and serious expression: It’s statistics. Which wasn’t really an answer at all.

“I think twenty-five years is a long time for anything to be relevant from back then,” I said. “I think there are plenty of places where people get injured, or worse, year after year, and it doesn’t become a thing.” There was a waterfall in this very state, not too far from here, where seven people had died in the last two decades, while hiking off the side trails. But I couldn’t say that to Trey, looking for his brother.

“But,” Trey said, “in those places, where people get injured, or worse—they find the bodies.”

And that was the mystery. The thing that kept people coming, kept people wondering.

It was dangerous, to go looking for a way to connect everything. Because there was only one thing you could circle back to with certainty. There were no commonalities between the people who disappeared. There was no trend. There was no type.

There was just this place, and us.

I had considered some of the theories myself: copycat crimes and predatory animals. I knew that people, by nature, did not share everything they knew, or saw. None of which would help to say now.