The Last to Vanish(58)

“That must be tough,” I said, because I didn’t know what was needed from me in the moment. I didn’t know why he was telling me this.

He lifted one shoulder slightly, like that was beside the point. “They wanted me to go through the room. Pack it away.” He swallowed, like he was steeling himself for something. “They waited for me to come home, and asked me to help them with it. I figured it was the one thing I could do for them.”

“I know what that’s like,” I said. I’d had to do the same, after my mom passed. Packing away her things, the entire apartment, because there was no one else to do it for me. Mostly I’d sold what I could, donated the clothes, took only what fit comfortably in the back of the car.

Trey took a deep breath. “So I’m there in his room with a bottle of beer, looking through my brother’s high school yearbooks and concert stubs from fifteen years ago. Just throwing out as much as I could, boxing up the rest, and I find this in the top drawer of his desk.” He slammed a lined sheet of paper on the table between us, like it was a trump card. The edges fluttered in the night breeze.

I didn’t know when it had gotten into his hand. Whether he’d had this all along. Everything about Trey felt like a magic trick.

I sat up straighter. The paper had been folded up, and I could picture it in the pocket of his pants, all this time. There were several numbers written on the page, but only one sequence stood out.

“Something familiar?”

“Yes,” I said. It was a phone number. The area code was local. My throat felt parched. “It’s the inn.”

“It’s the inn,” he repeated.

Then he placed his pointer finger on the numbers above it. But I could only focus on his fingernail, down to the quick. There was a roughness to his hands that didn’t exist earlier in the week.

“What do you think this is?” he asked.

I shook my head. The other number was in hyphen form: 8-1. “I don’t know.”

He jabbed his finger at the page, and I tried again. “A date?”

He sank back into his chair, like I’d given the right answer. “That’s what I thought, too. Imagine, I’m sitting there at my brother’s desk, and I see this date. August first? And the inn’s number?” His eyes widened. “I came down, almost straightaway, to make it. Like he was leading me somewhere. It felt like a sign.”

“This was just lying around in his old room?”

“He must’ve written it down and called from our parents’ place, then stuffed it in his desk and forgot about it.”

“He didn’t make a reservation,” I said. “Showed up one day just like you did. Georgia checked him in.”

He grinned. “Yeah, but that’s the thing. I don’t think it’s a date anymore. I just put it together this morning, when you told me about your shift. I think,” he said, punctuating the k, “this is a time.”

I felt my breath leave me in a quick gust. Because he was right, of course. The phone number of the inn. A window of time of when to call.

“So my question is, why was he calling the inn between eight and one?”

I knew the answer, and he could see it on my face.

“To talk to someone on shift during that time.”

“That’s what I think, too.”

“I’ll talk to her—”

“I already tried,” he said, and I could feel myself grimace. “After breakfast, I went back to the lobby. She kept saying, I don’t know, I have no idea, I didn’t get any call from him that I recall.” He widened his eyes in an uncanny approximation of Georgia’s expression when she was caught on her heels. He shook his head. “But I’ve seen her before, Abby. I have.”

Georgia, always nervous about interacting with Trey, worried he would come to the lobby and ask her something—always waiting for me to return so she could keep away.

I thought about the things she’d hidden under her demeanor—a fear, not of the danger to her, but something more. Now I pictured her at night, using a master key to the cabin beside Trey’s, or sliding into the cabin window if she was afraid of being seen. Trying to get him to leave.

She’d opened up a locker with my name on it. Left Farrah’s camera and Landon’s journal and phone inside. Then made me dinner and talked about her past, and I had bought it all. Hadn’t Celeste tried to warn me? I had no idea who she was, this woman who had shown up out of the blue with signs of the mountain on her. A set determination. Someone who, I thought, could also do the hard things. I’d crafted a story for her—a reinvention—and I’d believed it.

“Now I have a question for you,” he said while I was still reeling from this new information.

“I didn’t know,” I said.

He smiled slightly. “That wasn’t my question.” He sat back, large hands on his knees, so that I was very aware of his size, and mine. “Yesterday, the sheriff walked me through the investigation. He was much more forthcoming than I expected. Told me Georgia had been the one to find the empty room, that she and Celeste had been interviewed. Told me everyone had been cleared, that the general feeling was he’d gone into those woods, gotten lost. And I get that all, it makes sense. I guess I’m just wondering, now, why he never mentioned you.”