The Last to Vanish(43)
That image was still visible on the screen. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t understand.
I grabbed the phone and started running. Down the hall, employee badge in my grip, hand shaking as I held it to the door. Stumbling down the steps, into the basement, past Georgia’s room with the music blaring.
It took three tries for me to get the key in the lock of my apartment, and then I was throwing open the door, throwing on the lights, sliding to my knees before the bag I’d left propped up against the wall, hours earlier.
It was that backpack. Beige, with orange threading down the straps. I felt myself breaking into a cold sweat. There had to be more than one of these. Obviously, there was more than one—it was a mass-produced bag. But it was the smaller details: the label that had been torn off, revealing a darker patch beneath it. I zoomed into the photo on my phone until I could see it clearly: the missing zipper clasp of the smaller pocket, where I’d looped a zip tie. My vision began to swim, even as the image gained clarity.
No. No. Not my bag. Not this place. Not her, too.
This was the bag I’d dug out of the lost and found bin almost ten years earlier, just months after she’d gone missing. Alice’s bag. Here, at the inn.
I leaned against the wall, wanted anything else to be true. But there was no avoiding it: For the past ten years, I’d been wearing the pack that had once, a decade earlier, belonged to Alice Kelly. Alice Kelly, who had walked out of these woods, into the town of Cutter’s Pass, and disappeared. Never to be seen again.
PART 3
Alice Kelly
Date missing: September 2, 2012
Last seen: Cutter’s Pass, North Carolina
The Last Stop Tavern
CHAPTER 11
I KNEW THE STORY OF Alice Kelly well. I had arrived in its aftermath—after the search, after the investigation, after the cloud of suspicion over the town had dissipated. The case may have been behind them when I’d arrived that winter, but I could feel it in every aspect of Cutter’s Pass.
It was the first disappearance since the Fraternity Four, fifteen years earlier. And that made it all the more notable: Young Woman Disappears in Same Town as Unsolved Case of the Fraternity Four. Their story was excavated and rehashed, becoming something bigger, a part of the present. Comparisons were drawn. People who had lived in town for both were given a closer look. It didn’t matter that the cases differed in every aspect except for the location. When I drove in, Cutter’s Pass was a town on edge; borders pulled tighter, residents grew quieter, everything turned inward.
The story had spread up and down the Appalachian, eventually spilling over to the other side. I’d been living on the outskirts of Nashville at the time, in a third-level two-bedroom apartment with no elevator, because I understood the severity of my mother’s illness—that she needed my help, and also that there was a clock, and it was running out. Time bent differently for us, every day moving in a slow monotony while also slipping away too fast.
I’d first seen Alice Kelly’s smiling face, high cheekbones and a spatter of freckles, on a local news program my mom kept on all day in our dimly lit living room. My mom then followed the case with a vigilance I didn’t understand—there were missing people everywhere, tragedies behind us and tragedies awaiting us—but she held my hand as I sat beside her on that brown couch, eyes trained to the television, as if we knew her. And then, as we continued to watch, eventually we felt that we did.
Alice Kelly, just starting her senior year of college, who had been hiking with a large group from the Outdoors Club over the long Labor Day weekend—a trek that was supposed to end the next day. But her group of three had splintered off, fallen behind, and decided to camp near the intersection of the trails. Alice didn’t want to. As her hiking partners explained in interviews, tear faced and noticeably shaken, Alice said she had a test the day after next, couldn’t risk missing it. She saw the town in the distance—the dome of the inn and the steeple pushing up through the trees—and decided she could make it by sunset. She was the most experienced hiker among them. She had a plan.
I’d watched those interviews sitting beside my mother, listened as she said, There’s something not right about that place.
I’d imagined Alice often since then, standing on the ridge in the distance and seeing Cutter’s Pass—a town, a safe harbor, an option—as she packed up her things while telling her friends she’d be fine.
And at first, she was. She’d made it out of the woods and followed the road into town, where the streets and restaurants were packed for the Labor Day weekend. She made her way to the Last Stop Tavern, and her cell phone must’ve been dead when she’d tried to turn it on, finally back in range. Because, according to witnesses, she’d used the phone behind the bar to place a single call before leaving.
And that was the last time she was ever seen.
It took until the next day to realize she’d gone missing, when the other hikers made it back in cell phone range and tried to reach her. That’s when they discovered that something was wrong. That Alice had slipped from her known life. She hadn’t returned to school. Her family hadn’t heard from her. Her friends hadn’t heard from her. No one had heard from her.
All of the calls from the tavern that night were local numbers. None of them had lasted very long. But every call made from that line was traced, and none of the recipients remembered hearing from a young woman, for any reason. Two of the calls had gone to a cab company, but neither driver picked up a girl matching her description. Still: Every cab driver was interviewed, every patron of that bar, every person who had cause to be in the downtown of Cutter’s Pass that evening. No one could remember seeing her after she left the tavern.