The Last to Vanish(61)

But there were other names here, too, a longer list written below, that I didn’t recognize. Lacy, James, Caroline. All I could think was that these had been the people who had been hiking with her. On the outskirts of any investigation. Not all of these names had numbers beside them, as if he were still working to find them.

It was then I noticed the tiny blue check marks beside all of the names with phone numbers. As if he’d been making his way through.

“Cory…” I began.

“Yeah,” he said, “this is about as far as I got before you came in.”

My eyes met his over the list of names on the page. Cory’s was the first name listed, under Alice’s name, with a blue check mark beside it. “Cory, did he call you?”

“Yeah,” he said, hand running through his hair. My god, how many people had lied about their contact with him? How had this been missed?

“He called from the inn. Abby, the number turned up as an outgoing call from you, from the inn. So of course I picked it up.”

“Cory, my god. What did you say?”

“I didn’t say anything. He wanted to talk about Alice Kelly. I’ve gotten enough calls in my life about that. I told him I’d said all I had to say and hung up. That’s it.” He looked into my eyes, big and dark and pleading. “I didn’t know who he was. I swear.”

“He didn’t try again?”

“No, he didn’t try again.” But his eyes drifted to the side; I’d caught him snooping, and it still felt like he was trying to maneuver his way out of something. Giving me just enough, like everyone else.

“He called all of these numbers. All of these people.” Jack, and Cory’s parents, and Celeste, and the sheriff. All of these people we walked beside each day.

Landon West had been making calls from the inn, so they’d pick up. That time I saw him out in the lobby, the item he’d tucked away in his jacket—had he been looking through this notebook, making the local calls? Had he called the wrong person?

Cory turned the page, and a new list of names stretched in rows and columns. It was like seeing a census of the town of Cutter’s Pass—except it looked like it had been limited to everyone over the age of forty.

A list of people who had been here for each and every disappearance, since the Fraternity Four.

“Jesus,” Cory said, letting out a sharp breath.

The list of suspects—if this was a list of suspects, and it seemed clear that it was—spanned the boundaries of Cutter’s Pass, across the valley.

The truth is… The truth is, none of us would have wanted this journal out there. Not with all these names. Not with this proof, that Landon West was digging into the old investigations.

“He was looking for the connection,” I said. Just as every trauma tourist who had come before, asking their questions, thinking they would be the one to solve it. But suddenly it seemed that he had, or that he was well on his way to it, anyway. The camera had led him here—

Cory turned the page again, and stilled. The room stilled. Our breathing stilled.

On the last page, there was a single name, written large, with a question mark. Abby??

Cory didn’t say anything, didn’t need to. We were all implicated here. Anything we asked of one another would open ourselves to those same questions.

“We could burn it,” he said, and I couldn’t tell whether he was joking.

“Georgia has seen it.”

“Georgia,” he repeated with disgust. “I wish I could say I’m surprised, but that’s not true.”

“Oh, please, Cory, I’ve seen you down here. The same way you came down here when I first arrived.”

“That’s not—” He closed his eyes. “Look, Celeste didn’t trust her when she arrived, the way she just showed up, the way you just took her in. She asked me to look into her, and I did.”

I flinched; it stung that she didn’t tell me. I’d thought that Celeste was honest with me, but Cory had come first. Cory came first for all of them.

“You ‘looked into’ her?” I repeated, deadpan.

He waved his hand. “It wasn’t like that. I would’ve told you, if you’d asked.” But I’d asked Cory a thousand questions over the years, and he’d never answered any of them in a way that counted. He didn’t get to play that card now. “Look, I asked Rochelle to run a check on her quietly. Turns out she dropped out of school when her dad died.”

“I know, she told me—”

“Wait. She lived with her mom in Pennsylvania, has her last name, but her dad was from Maryland. I looked it up, Abby, after Landon West disappeared. Her dad lived in the next town over from his family. How much do you want to bet their paths had crossed in the past? She was probably shitting herself after he disappeared, waiting to see if anyone found the connection between the two of them.”

My head dropped into my hands. From the note Trey had found in his brother’s room, with the time to call, I knew it was true. Georgia’s fear when he had disappeared—it wasn’t only that he was gone, but that she was the one who had brought him here. She must’ve gone to great lengths to erase that trail. Going through his computer, his room, panicking. Afraid. And I mistook her unease as innocence. I had been right about one thing: Georgia was someone who could do the hard things after all.