The Last to Vanish(88)

His throat moved, and I thought he’d pretend not to know what I was asking, and maybe he would’ve if he’d slept, if he wasn’t so tired, if he hadn’t just realized there were likely three victims buried nearby. “I don’t know,” he began, voice scratching.

But his eyes were still locked on mine, deciding. He dropped his voice even lower, even though it was just the two of us now. “The scene. The bullets. The gun.” His throat moved. “I did that. But the rest?” He shook his head, closed his eyes, like he never wanted to look again. “Only Vincent knows,” he said. “And he’s gone.”

I opened my mouth, closed it again. I couldn’t imagine it, didn’t see how it was possible for one person to handle that, all alone. But right then, I could choose to let it go, choose to leave it with him.

A history, wiped clean.

The sheriff opened his eyes again, then raised them to mine, in question. We stared at each other for a long moment.

He pressed “record” again.



* * *



LATER THAT NIGHT, AFTER the interviews, Trey was waiting for me. I saw him in the headlights of the car, where he was sitting on a log, in the dark, at the edge of the lot. He ran his hand through his hair as I approached.

“You okay?” I asked. I pictured him again, gun held over Harris. I wondered if he regretted his choice. If he was playing it back through, imagining pulling the trigger instead. Whether I would’ve backed him up, said he’d had to do it—

He stood, the sound of his steps in the gravel cutting through the night. “The journal,” he said, voice low. “I want it.”

He’d heard me, the things I’d said to Harris when I tried to escape outside. Trey had been drawn outside by the lack of lights, the feeling of wrong; the locked door of the inn, knowing something was happening. He had been waiting and listening in the dark.

But I couldn’t give him the phone, the journal. They had to go. The photo over the bar, even.

“It’s already gone. There was nothing in there for you,” I said.

“Why are you protecting them?”

But how to even begin; it would take ten years to make him understand.

“Good night, Trey.” Goodbye, I meant.



* * *



I KNEW WHAT I would do, as soon as it was safe to do it. I’d light a fire for the guests in the pit out back, and when they went inside, I would watch as it all turned to ash, bit by bit.

Reshape our history, the whispered path it takes. I had the power to change it. Smooth it flat, something safe to look at. Something we could all be okay with.

I’d watch as the smoke drifted up over the mountain, and I would watch as it disappeared, into nothing.





SEPTEMBER 3, 2022





CHAPTER 24


IT WAS LABOR DAY weekend and the town was overflowing.

We wondered, for a brief time, what this would do to the town. But the killer wasn’t from Cutter’s Pass, after all, had grown up beyond our boundaries, had never really been seen as one of us.

And the threat was behind bars: Harris didn’t fight it, in the end. Not after the bodies were found on his property. A trace of Landon’s blood in the back of Harris’s van. A gunshot wound, matching the weapon he’d pulled on us that night. The trail of evidence, leading decidedly back to him. His wife took their daughter and left this place, back to her family in Florida, before they’d even started digging on the property—severing all ties. A buried fear that she’d never given voice to, proving true.

It was the talk of the news, for weeks. Each of the stories rehashed, back to the Fraternity Four—though there was still no sign of them.



* * *



WE WORRIED MORE, AT the inn. A man taken from one of our cabins. A killer, steps away from the rest of our guests. But the crime didn’t seem to put a damper on our reservations. The danger was behind us. If anything, the calls and bookings only grew.

Sometimes, I could see the guests looking at it, the spot where it happened, beside the inn. Where a worker on shift took a fire poker to the perpetrator before he could hurt anyone else, and Landon West’s brother held him there until help could arrive.

The story was good for business.



* * *



PEOPLE DIDN’T ASK ANYMORE about Alice and Farrah and Landon. Tragedy had a different shape than a mystery. The acreage around the Donald Farm was a graveyard. Three bodies, buried far out, and separately, in the parts of the farmland that had run wild, gone to disrepair. Areas no one would have cause to go, that nature had already started to creep back over.

Most people took the long way around that abandoned land, to avoid it. But sometimes, I drove past: I could imagine it, in the years to come, how quickly it would happen, the trees pushing closer, and the wildlife encroaching, and how fast a place could be swallowed up, so that you didn’t even notice it as you drove by. Just a groove in the pavement where a driveway used to be, without even knowing what you were looking at.



* * *



BUT THEY ASKED, STILL, about the Fraternity Four. That mystery, almost the same as a memory, keeping them sharply in focus. How they’d heard that the famous photo, the last shot, the one that hung over the wall at the tavern, had disappeared. Stolen by some enterprising tourists who’d managed to sneak in, undetected.