The Last to Vanish(87)

Trey had dropped the phone, and the light pointed upward, and all I could see were our shadows, stretching. People, moving.

“No,” Harris said, his voice suddenly behind me. “No one is coming, Abby. No one ever comes. No one ever looks. You know that. You’re one of them.”

But he didn’t know I’d been looking for a decade. I had always been looking.

It all happened so fast.

I heard Celeste’s whisper, felt the impact of her word: Bam. Just like that, and everyone’s life had changed. Hers, theirs, mine.

I thought of Harris’s daughter, the large brown eyes, and her life—her future. The things she would one day search for.

You only get one shot. I swung the fire poker fast, across the space I imagined him to be. I felt the resistance of his body, heard the sharp intake of his breath.

The moment was suspended in animation, his arm in shadow, held outward, until Trey collided with him, both of them making contact with the stone wall. I heard the gun skitter to the ground, and we were all desperate for it. Scrambling for it.

But it was Trey who came up with it. Standing over Harris, who was still crouched on his hands and knees, probably bleeding from where I’d cut him. “I wasn’t going to hurt you, Abby—” He pulled his hand from his shoulder and groaned, falling to his side.

“Go get someone,” Trey said, voice flat and emotionless. “Go!” he yelled at me.

But I couldn’t. I wanted to run for Celeste, but I couldn’t leave him there, alone with the gun and the man who had killed his brother. Couldn’t trust what he would do when I was gone. Couldn’t let anything else happen; couldn’t ruin him, too.

“I already called for help,” I said, my grip still unrelenting on that fire poker. I could still feel the vibration in my hand, from when it had made contact.

Harris laughed into the dirt, and Trey was saying, “Go ahead, move again,” and I was trying to figure out how to get Trey to give me the gun instead, when headlights crested the hill.

I could’ve sobbed, and maybe I was, because I was sucking in air, and my voice was wavering as I yelled, “Here, over here,” as the wheels skidded in the gravel lot and the door opened and a man stood in the beams of his headlights.

The sheriff stumbled out in gym shorts and a T-shirt, gun haphazardly in his hand, like he’d just rolled out of bed. “Abby?” he called into the night.

“Here!” I called.

“She attacked me,” Harris was shouting from the ground, trying, and failing, to push himself up. “She fucking attacked me.”

The sheriff had a flashlight on the scene, at Trey standing over Harris, and he was pointing his own gun now, shouting, “Put down the gun, slowly, put it down!”

That was it, one car, one man as Trey stepped away from Harris and lowered his weapon to the earth.

But not thirty seconds later, a second car pulled up, and Rochelle raced from the driver’s side, Jack following behind, flashlights dancing as they ran.

And then a third, a fourth.

Cory, Ray, Marina.

Until the road was blocked by them, the people of Cutter’s Pass, who had been waiting for a very long time. Who were being absolved as they watched; and their parents and friends and loved ones absolved, in turn.

Celeste rounded the corner, shawl wrapped around her shoulders, pushing through the crowd until she could reach me. A hand on my shoulder, which she squeezed tight, and said, “My god, Abigail. You’re okay.” Which was both a question and an observation, and required no response.

I dropped the poker to the ground, felt her hands on my face, on my hair, on my shoulders. One rough thumb under my eye, though I wasn’t sure if I was actually crying.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s get you home.”

“Celeste,” the sheriff called. “We need her at the station.”

“Well,” she said, her words weighted with everything between them, “it can wait.”

She had that kind of power.



* * *



THE QUESTIONS STRETCHED DEEP into the night, after we made it down to the station, and there was a recorder positioned between me and the sheriff, dark circles under his eyes. Wanting me to walk him through it again, but I was tired, and so was he. Finally, he pressed “stop,” leaned back in his chair.

“Stop holding back, Abby,” he said, as if he knew there were pieces missing, people I was protecting. “How did you know?” Things I wouldn’t give him.

“I told you, the picture with Alice, from her sister. Harris told me everything. Trey heard us outside. Harris practically admitted that he hurt Landon, that he’d gotten too close.”

“But before that.” The journal, he meant. The locker with my name. The secrets I would keep.

“Maybe if you hadn’t been so afraid of digging, this wouldn’t have happened,” I said, and he looked at me sternly.

“You know who I am,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

“It doesn’t have to be part of this.” He gestured to the recording.

“I know who you are, too.”

He continued to stare, hollows under his eyes, a reddish-gray stubble running down his jaw. “I don’t know what you mean, Abby.”

“Where are they buried,” I whispered, leaning forward. “Please.”