The Last to Vanish(78)

Celeste’s eyes were closed, but I could see them moving back and forth under her eyelids, as if she were watching the scene unfold.

And then her eyes shot open. “It was dark. It was dark, and it was hard to see what was happening. But there was a struggle—Brian, lunging for the gun, Toby, pulling back. And then it happened.” Her throat moved as she swallowed, the words quiet, raspy. “A quick, crack, and the shot had gone right through Toby’s chest. Right there.” She gripped her heart, like she could stop it.

I wasn’t breathing. I felt like I was there, so close, standing where Celeste stood, reaching out and trying to stop it.

“You think everything goes silent after a shot. But that’s not what happens. The woods came alive, instead. The animals, the birds. Everything was moving. Running. It was hard to know where to go. What to do.”

I closed my eyes, willed her to run.

“Everything happened so fast after that. So fast,” she repeated, in a whisper. “Brian had his head in his hands, and Jerome took that as his cue to rush him—but he turned, quick. Bam.”

I felt the jolt with each word. Saw Jerome fall, eyes wide in shock and confusion.

“And then it was just me and Neil, and both of us, we were the smallest ones. Neil had his hands up, so I did the same. Neither of us made a move, and then Neil started talking, just low and calm. Brian, it’s okay, put the gun down. And of course Brian couldn’t put the gun down, he knew there was no going back. Two dead, and we were witnesses. I was just terrified. I didn’t see a way out. But Neil kept going, like maybe it could still work.”

The terror was in the room with us now. The truth, not at all what I’d thought. Not at all what I wanted to hear. I wanted to tell her to stop, but I couldn’t. Not now.

“I think about that a lot. The hope he still had, when I knew it was too late.” She breathed in slowly, and I could hear the shudder of her exhale. “He tried to humanize himself. That’s what you’re supposed to do, you know. Please, Brian, he said. It’s me. He was smart. It makes it harder to pull a trigger when you’re putting a human face to it. When you’re not just reacting to someone in a physical struggle, but making a choice. It’s a different type of killing, you know. He did his best,” she said, reaching for me across the table. And this time, I let her. “He really did his best.”

She put her cold hand on my arm, a faint tremble to it. “He said, Please, Brian, I have a daughter.” The room hollowed, and my ears were ringing, and I couldn’t hear her say it. But she continued. “Brian didn’t believe him. He said, You do not.” She was looking at me now, asking me to see it with her. “But Neil kept going. He said, I do, and I haven’t even met her yet. But her mom lives in Tennessee, and I send them money when I can. He said, I have a daughter, and she’s beautiful, and her name is Abigail Lovett.”





PART 5


Abby Lovett

Date of arrival in Cutter’s Pass: January 7, 2013

First seen: Main Street, outside the Last Stop Tavern





CHAPTER 21


SHE KNEW. I COULDN’T get the words out—couldn’t ask how, or when, or why.

Every memory, every interaction, my understanding of her, of us—everything was realigning. Of course Celeste had known. Celeste had known of my connection to the Fraternity Four before even I did.

My mother’s fixation on the Alice Kelly case was not about Alice Kelly at all. It wasn’t that she saw her as some manifestation of her fear—a girl about to be abandoned, set to navigate the rest of her life alone. It was about the location: There’s something wrong about that place, she’d said, her hand gripping mine between us on the couch.

It was the place where my mother’s entire life had forked, though she’d never stepped foot there. It was the place that both of our lives had forked, though I’d never known it.

She told me once, and only once. Your father was Neil Smith. He was part of the Fraternity Four. They were the last words of record of Tasha Lovett. Before I’d lost her to the drugs, and then the cancer, a day later.

The facts she had told me about my father before then had not been lies. Not really. She’d said, It was a short-term thing. She’d said, I told him about you after you were born, and he sent us money. He wanted a better life for you. She’d said, But then he disappeared.

I didn’t press her on it; a disappearance to me back then was a very different thing. As far as I was concerned, my father had made a choice, to leave us. To leave me behind, in the past. She let me believe that; and I was not interested in a person who had no interest in me.

But after she told me who he was, I could only imagine another life stretched out before me. An almost life. Another future I could’ve had, another person I could’ve become.

There was a single photo of him in her things, though I might’ve passed right over it, if I hadn’t been looking for it. It was her, and the group of them—the Fraternity Four, on horseback, at the stables where she worked, when they came through Tennessee. Neil beside my mother, her looking over at him, a slight grin.

It was worse than if there had been nothing at all. This one image, four inches by six inches, a bread crumb, a trail, to follow.

We were not so different, Neil and I, both only children of single mothers. I looked her up—this person who would’ve been my grandmother—but she had long since passed on. There was no one who held his memory, or his past to connect with, to search through.