The Last to Vanish(63)

They were childhood friends who had met at a summer camp in their youth and spent three weeks every summer from twelve to sixteen in the same cabin. When they’d aged out of camp, they continued the tradition—this time, taking their adventures across the country. They were very different young men, from different backgrounds, with different paths they had taken, and would’ve continued to take. You could see yourself in any of them, if you wanted. Imagine their lives, playing out, as I had often done.

Neil, skinny and wiry, the smallest of the group, but not small by other comparisons, the son of a single mother from Ohio; Jerome, heavyset in earlier photos, but he’d replaced that bulk with muscle in the later years, who’d grown up in DC with a large extended family; Toby, who attended boarding school with his two sisters while his parents moved for business from Boston to Paris and back again; Brian, the jock of the group, who had gone to college on a baseball scholarship. The trips were usually his idea; he was the group’s planner. It was his hat, emblazoned with the Greek letters from his old fraternity, that had given them the moniker.

They’d been river rafting in the Grand Canyon, gone skydiving outside Las Vegas, ridden horses across a stretch of Tennessee, fished and hunted in Montana. The news had shown photos from all of these yearly trips. Brian had worn a broken-in ball cap with that faded fraternity symbol on each, and the last image taken of them before they set off had that same symbol, and so they were dubbed: the Fraternity Four.

There was never any indication there had been a fifth.

I watched Cory carefully as he stared at the words on the page of Landon’s journal, his brow furrowed, his throat moving, trying to see if those words meant anything to him. Cory, who had grown up in this place, with parents who were questioned, teachers who were interviewed, and friends who had been through the same. Who’d witnessed the investigation receding farther and farther into the past over the years, with no leads. Who watched as the whole town leaned in to the trauma, an identity built around the notoriety. Who stared at that picture of those four young men over the bar, every day of his life. A piece of his history. Of his foundation.

Finally, his gaze rose to meet mine, eyes wide and questioning. I believed I knew him well enough to know this was a surprise for him, too. Of all the stories he’d told and heard, this was not one of them.

“It could just be a guess? A theory,” he said, and I nodded, because they had vanished twenty-five years ago, and it was all any of us could do—guess—looking that far back now.

With all of them gone, no one could even say much with certainty about what they’d been up to. No one even knew whose plan it had been to come to Cutter’s Pass. Brian’s girlfriend said it wasn’t his; Toby’s sisters hadn’t even known he was going; Jerome had booked his flight relatively last minute; Neil had put in for time off work but told his boss it was a family emergency. The shaky foundations of the legend were already in place in the days before their arrival.

One challenge of their disparate lives was that their families didn’t really know one another, other than in name. There was no united search. There were rewards given periodically, for any information. But there were certain families with more, who demanded more, who pushed the search in different ways.

Those in town who had been through it, who’d searched for them, who’d answered questions and withstood the suspicions, had come out with a stronger bond forged from it. The entirety of Cutter’s Pass had emerged from that time as something different.

“We should burn it all,” Cory said, voice low, as if someone else were listening in. “You don’t know what it was like, when Alice went missing. It brought all of this back to the surface. All these questions about what had happened, fifteen years earlier. They interviewed practically every person in town. You don’t know what it will be like if you turn this over.”

“I was here for Farrah,” I reminded him.

“There wasn’t some great mystery about that, Abby.”

“Are you serious?” I stomped over to the closet, where he’d found the journal. Had he not dug any deeper? Everyone here, grabbing the first thing they could see, never digging any further, never wanting to know how it connected with all the rest. “Did you not see this?”

I held, in my hand, a broken camera. Shattered lens, fraying strap. Something had happened to it, just as something had happened to Farrah.

All these things were coming back: Alice’s backpack, Farrah’s camera, Landon’s journal. Rising up from the ground, the earth turning over, like weeds pushing through in spring. Like they were begging for someone to find them, to see them. As if, all along, they’d been waiting for me to put the pieces together.

“Where did this come from?” Cory asked.

I shrugged. “I have no idea. It was in the locker, with that journal.”

A noise outside the living room window jolted Cory’s attention. He strode across the room and threw open the curtains, staring out into the dark. Then he moved into my bedroom without asking, like this place were his own. He stood close to the windows, light off, peering up, eyes focused on the dark.

“No one can get up there,” I said from the bedroom doorway.

He turned my way, and from the look on his face, I knew that I was wrong.

His eyes drifted to the windows again, a sort of nervous energy thrumming in his body. I wasn’t sure what he was worried about—whether it was something real he could sense coming, whether it was the things he was afraid to ask, the things he didn’t want to know about the people and place he loved so much. Or whether there was something else—something more he was keeping—that he didn’t want me to know.