The Last to Vanish(81)

But I thought of the blueprints, hidden away in the carriage house. The thing Landon must’ve wondered, when he saw them. The back wall of the storage area, pulled closer in. The horror I imagined.

“Celeste,” I whispered, and even as I said it, I didn’t want to hear it. “Are they here?”

“On the mountain? Yes, I assume. I pay my respects, as often as I can.” Up and on that mountain every day before dawn. A cairn, a grave marker, at the sight of their deaths. A flower cut from her garden, left as homage. For my father?

“No, not the mountain. Here.” I grabbed the framed blueprint from the floor, dropped it onto the tabletop between us. Pointed to the room in the basement, my finger noticeably shaking. “The wall in the outer storage room, it’s not as deep as the other one, like it’s supposed to be. Like someone changed it.” I covered my mouth with my hands, like I couldn’t believe I’d said it. Made the possibility solid and real.

She stared into my eyes for a beat too long before waving her hand between us, severing the moment. “Don’t be silly. Of course not. These blueprints were a guide, but they’re not definitive. More like a draft. You know how the landscape is here, too much uncertainty. That area, in the basement, there was a big rock outcropping, goes down pretty deep. We couldn’t dig into it. So we built around it.” She shrugged, like it was so obvious.

It was easy to believe if I wanted. It was just as easy to disbelieve, and I was wavering.

“The inn had guests, Abigail. It’s not possible. Two people, in the night, on that trail, could not bring four…” She trailed off, not wanting to say the word. Bodies. There were four bodies, and she had covered it up. Her gaze returned to mine. “We wouldn’t bring that back here to this place. That would be a very dangerous thing.” She blinked rapidly, and every word she said made sense, if only I would accept it. But I thought of how hard she worked to keep the investigation away from the inn, with Farrah. I wondered if she wasn’t sure, either. If it haunted her, the not knowing.

“You never asked?”

“We never spoke of it again. Not any of us. Vincent had to make it back to his hotel for checkout, so he’d be seen there. Patrick was on duty the next day. There was no time. We all had to keep going. You make a decision, and then you live with it.” Her breathing shuddered. “I ruined them that night. The both of them. If he hadn’t been here, if he hadn’t seen me…” It took me a moment to realize she was talking about the sheriff and Vincent, not my father. “They were never the same. Stuck, the both of them. Because of what I did. Vincent lost sight of the beauty of the place, could only see that night in it. Could only picture what had almost happened to me. And Patrick, well. You see. His life never moved forward. Like he’s always circling back here. Like he still can’t escape that night.”

I saw him differently then: the sheriff, never moving on. Living a life of atonement, picking Celeste up for service each Sunday. The connection they had. What must they have been thinking each weekend, sitting side by side, heads bowed? As if they were bound by trauma, as opposed to love. Maybe we all were. Could any of us even tell the difference anymore?

I closed my eyes, trying to make a decision of my own. “You just got rid of the evidence and let their families… you let them wonder, for years?”

“What do you think would have happened to this place? Not just me and Vincent and Patrick, but this place—bankrupt, gone. This inn, this life—it was Vincent’s dream as much as my own. It would’ve ruined all of it. This town would never be the same.” And then she shook her head. “Do you believe in this place, Abby, like I do?” Not in a god, then, but in something else. The magic of the place. “Because in the year after Vincent’s death, when I was more alone than I’d ever been, and the nightmares returned after so long, you arrived on my doorstep. Like a second chance, to make things right. To pay it back to him.”

An obligation; a debt. Guilt. Motivations were slippery like that.

“I always wondered if you knew,” she continued. “I assumed there was something that brought you to me. But you never asked. You never said anything, in all this time.”

Ten years, and I’d given up hope that there was anything here to find. I’d been right at the center, all along.

“I thought you’d tell me to go. And—” The unspoken truth. She was all I had.

She sucked in a breath. “I did the best I could, Abigail.” I didn’t know whether she meant that night, or with me—all these things she was leaving for me now, the longest atonement.

“What about Alice? And Farrah? And Landon?”

She frowned, straightening in her chair. “What about them?”

“Landon West thought… everyone thinks… that all the disappearances are tied together.” I’d heard his voice on the recording. He was looking at the residents who had been here for each disappearance. He believed he could find the thread connecting them all.

“It isn’t true. It’s been twenty-five years. I don’t know anything about the others. What would a college girl have to do with something that had happened fifteen years earlier?” She shook her head. “Tragic, every one of them.” She leaned forward. “But a different sort of tragedy.”

But she wasn’t the only one with secrets.