The Last to Vanish(80)

More than that—she covered for me. Gave me a story, for others to believe.

Celeste, who said to Rochelle and Jack, when they’d started peppering me with their rapid-fire questions, She’s Vincent’s niece—and told me after, offhand, like it was inconsequential: Trust me, it’s just easier this way.

“You knew who I was,” I said, forcing out the words. From the very first day. Had known exactly what mattered most to me. This person I thought had taken me in, grown to value me, love me, even—had she been working me, all along?

“It was the last thing he said,” she explained. I saw her again, squinting at my name, asking me to say it. Abigail. “It’s haunted me for years. You were the appeal he gave for his life.”

But it hadn’t worked. I hadn’t been enough to save him. I had to know. Quietly I asked, “What happened to him?”

“Oh,” she said, a long sigh escaping. She sat back on the chair, her entire body shrinking, and she looked so small. “Well, I made a mistake.”

I stared at her, eyes burning, until she said it.

“Brian was going to shoot him. I believe he was. And then, I would be next. I had only a moment, you only get one—one single moment to decide.” She raised her green eyes, and they were pleading, and sad. “I went for the gun.”

Her eyes snapped shut, and I could imagine it before she said it. Bam, so fast. I imagined Neil, eyes wide, mouth open, my name the last words ever spoken, still warm on his lips.

I was so stuck in that moment that I almost didn’t process when she kept speaking. Because she was still there—alive—and she was the only one to tell the story now. “It fell from his hands from the impact, but it was too late.”

“Celeste, what did you do.” Because she wasn’t looking at me anymore, and she had hidden this, had let the truth be buried for twenty-five years, no closure, no answers—for anyone.

“It all happened so fast,” she repeated, and now I wondered which part she had meant. Whether it was the lead-up; whether it was this. “You think you know what you’ll do, Abby. But you don’t. You don’t always.”

She stared out the window, toward the mountain. How was that place not a nightmare for her? How could she stand to be here?

“I scrambled for the gun in the dark, and I found it, and I shot him.” Bam. “He was so much bigger than me. What was I going to do? Run?”

Yes, I thought. Run. Get help. Go, fast. She had the gun. No one knew these woods better than her. She could’ve made it, slipping through the trees—

She dropped her head into her hands, and I thought she was coming to terms with something. But then I realized she was still there, still watching it play out. “Neil was still alive, and I tried to stop it, but there was just so much blood—” She held her hands in front of her face, like she could still see the blood on them as she pressed her hands to the wound. “I wrapped him up, where he was shot in his stomach, told him to hold on. I told him I was going to get help.” She sucked in air. “But you know how long that trail is. You know how much longer it takes in the night.” She shook her head. “By the time we got back, it was too late.”

“We?” My head shot up. We? She had gotten help? Someone else was there? “I know Vincent was gone,” I said. If not Vincent, who?

Her mouth twitched. “Well, you have done your research.” Her eyes drifted shut. “Patrick and I, we go way back. He was here, at the inn, when I came out of the woods. He had been looking for me, and so—there I was, running from the woods, holding a gun and covered in blood, begging him to help me.” She swallowed. “He didn’t even think, just took the gun from me and started following. He wasn’t on duty, we had no cell phones, it was just us, running through the woods. Or him, following me, thinking he could help.”

“And?” I asked, feeling my temper rising.

She let the silence stretch before responding. “There was nothing to do.”

I slammed my hands on the surface of the table between us. “Oh, but you did something. Where are the bodies, Celeste?” Thinking: Please, let it not be that I have been living in a graveyard. Please let it not be that I had been surrounded by their bones. So close, all along.

“Look,” she said, and I could tell she was getting irritated, too. Like this was not what she had expected of me, after all this time. But for ten years, I’d been listening, and looking. Ten years, I’d been waiting—the hardest thing. “We ran it through, a hundred different ways. The gun, and me, and the blood. I’d fired it, too. And now I’d dragged Patrick into it. His prints would be on it, too, and he was going to be sheriff someday, and the inn was just getting off the ground, and there is a difference, Abigail, between a disappearance and a fucking bloodbath.” She was shaking then, and so was I. “None of us would’ve survived it. Not Patrick, or me, or this place you call your home. Not the town, either.”

“So, what? You told no one?”

“I told Vincent. Called him at his hotel as soon as I got back here, and he drove home right then, in the night. Went straight out with Patrick, to help.”

“To help…” I repeated, feeling sick. “Where are they, Celeste,” I repeated, through my clenched teeth.

She pushed back from the table, clearly exasperated. “That, I do not know. That, I cannot give you. They sent me back here… I was in no shape to… There were guests and people had to see that I was here, if it came down to it.”