CHAPTER 1
HE ARRIVED AT NIGHT, in the middle of a downpour, the type of conditions more suitable for a disappearance.
I was alone in the lobby—removing the hand-carved walking sticks from the barrel beside the registration desk, replacing them with our stash of sleek navy umbrellas—when someone pushed through one of the double doors at the entrance. The sound of rain cascading over the gutters; the rustle of hiking pants; the screech of wet boots on polished floors.
A man stood just inside as the door fell shut behind him, with nothing but a black raincoat and some sob story about his camping plans.
Nothing to be afraid of: the weather, a hiker.
I was only half listening at first, his request buried under a string of apologies. I’m so sorry, I’m usually more prepared than this and I know this is a huge inconvenience but—
“We can get you taken care of,” I said, making my way behind the desk, where I had the room availability list already pulled up on the single computer screen. This was the type of rain that drove hikers off the mountain—sudden and fierce enough to shake their resolve, when they’d give a second thought to their gear, their stamina, their will. Unlike him, I had been ready for this.
The back of our property ended where the local access trail began: It was marked by a small wooden sign leading day hikers on a path to the falls, but the trail then continued on in a steep ascent, pressing upward until it ultimately collided with the great Appalachian beyond. Our guests loved the convenience, the accessibility, that touch of the wild—the mountain looming, so close, from the other side of their floor-to-ceiling windows.
From the ridge of that mountain, at the T intersection of the two trails, I knew, you could see us, too: the dome of the inn, and the town just beyond, with the steeple of the church pushing up through the treetops; the promise of civilization. Sometimes, on nights like this, they spilled down the mountain like ants scurrying out of a poisoned mound, searching for a place of last resort. Our lights drawing them closer, the first sign of respite off the trail.
Sometimes if there was only one room, strangers would join forces and bunk up, in the spirit of things.
Right now, it was high season and we were booked solid in the main building, but three of the four outside cabins were vacant. The accommodations out there were more rustic, mainly used for either long-term stays or purposes such as this.
The man was still standing on the far side of the lobby, hands cupped in front of his mouth, as if the storm carried a chill. I saw his gaze flick to the freestanding fireplace in the center of the room. “You’re going to have to come a little closer to check in,” I said.
He laughed once and lowered the hood of his raincoat as he crossed the lobby, shaking out his hair, and then his arms, in an uncannily familiar gesture. I felt my smile falter and tried to cover for it with a glance toward the computer screen, running through the possibilities. A return visitor. Someone I’d seen in town earlier this week. Nothing. Coincidence.
“Here we go,” I said, turning my attention his way again, hoping the sight of him so close would trigger a memory, place him in context: brown hair halfway between unkempt and in style; deep-set blue eyes; somewhere in his thirties; no wedding ring; the sharp line of a white scar on the underside of his jaw, which I could only see because he was a solid head taller. I imagined him falling during a hike, hands braced for impact, chin grazing rock; I imagined a hockey stick to the face, helmet dislodged, blood on ice.
I did this sometimes, imagined people’s stories. It was a habit I was actively trying to break.
I was sure I knew him from somewhere, but I couldn’t place it, and I was usually good at this. I remembered the repeat visitors, could pull a name from three years earlier, recognizing those who’d gotten married or divorced, even, changing names and swapping partners. I paid attention, kept notes, filed away details. The stories I imagined for them sometimes helped.
He looked behind him at the empty lobby before leaning one arm on the distressed wooden countertop between us. “I’m so sorry,” he repeated, though I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to his lack of reservation or the puddles of water he had trailed across the wide plank floor. “It’s just, I left my wallet somewhere. Out there.” His raincoat rustled as he gestured toward the door. He was pointing in the opposite direction of the mountain, but I let that go because of the dark and the rain, and because I knew how disorienting it could get out there, on a bad night. “I had some cash in my car, though,” he said, hand stuffed deep into the pocket of his coat before he pulled out a damp roll of twenties. “For emergencies.”
He extended the money my way, an offering held between the tips of his fingers.
Hikers sometimes arrived like this, it wasn’t unheard of, but I started reassessing him. The clean fingernails. The collar of his blue T-shirt, just visible, still dry. The familiar squeak of too-new rubber-soled boots, before they’d gotten any good miles on them.
Celeste wouldn’t approve of this—a man with no ID and no credit cards, showing up just before closing. She’d say I needed to look after myself first of all, and then the guests, and then the inn. Would warn me that we were alone up here, that the only way to project control was to make sure others didn’t think they held the reins. Celeste would rather the lost customer than the lost upper hand. She’d say, So sorry, we’re all full, and she’d mention the campgrounds down by the river, the rentals over the storefronts, the motel in the next town. But I’d been known to make some exceptions. I didn’t like the idea of leaving anyone alone out there, especially on nights like this. Besides, I was sure he’d been here before at some point.
“No problem,” I said, “Mr.—”
His gaze was drifting around the lobby again, taking everything in, like he’d never seen this place before: the fireplace encased in stone and glass, visible from all angles, logs piled up into perfect pyramids on either side; the two-story arch of the dome with the exposed wood beams, the large picture windows that made up the entirety of the far wall, for the best views; the keys hanging from the pegboard in a locked display behind me.
“Sir?” I repeated.
He finally made eye contact. “Clarke,” he said, clearing his throat. “With an e.” He smiled apologetically, a little lopsided, a dimple in his left cheek—another twinge of familiarity.
The name didn’t ring a bell.
“Sure thing, Mr. Clarke. Let’s see what I can do for you.”
Cutter’s Pass was a seasonal, small-town haven: river guides and zip lines; a well-maintained campground a half mile outside downtown; horseback tours and an abundance of hiking trails forking off into the surrounding mountains. There were three types of visitors we typically got at the inn. The high-end vacationers who wanted a taste of rustic without actually roughing it; the hikers who thought they were ready to rough it, and discovered they were not, asking for a cabin, or any availability please; and the tourists who came for our eerie history, our notoriety—usually groups of friends who asked a lot of questions and drank a lot of beer at the tavern down the road and stumbled in late, laughing and clinging to one another, like they had escaped something. They always seemed surprised by the reality of Cutter’s Pass—that it was more REI and craft beer, overpriced farmers’ markets and upscale accommodations, less whatever stereotype of Appalachia had taken root in their heads.
From the way this man was looking around the place, and his questionable story, I would’ve put my money on category three. Except. That familiar gesture. That dimple when he smiled.
I slid a sheet of paper in front of him. “All right,” I said, “jot down your license plate so we don’t tow you.”
He blinked twice, mouth slightly open, a single drop of rain trailing along the edge of his jaw, toward the scar. “Tow me?”
“Lots of people try to park here to get to the mountain,” I explained. “The spots are for guests.”
“Oh, um, I don’t know it by heart…”
God, he was bad at this.
“Make and color, then,” I said. “And state, if you remember that.” I smiled at him, and he laughed.
“I do,” he said. I watched as he scrawled down Audi, black. Maryland. I felt myself holding my breath. It clicked, where I’d seen him, why he looked so familiar. The family picture with the joint statement. The reward offered in a long-shot plea for help.
I tried to keep my smile in place: cordial, careful. “Maryland, huh? Long way from home,” I said.
“Yes, well, next time I’ll stick to a beach vacation. Lesson learned.”
He was charming, which almost made up for the lack of plan, but wouldn’t get him very far here.
I felt for him, really. I’d been an outsider for years; to those who’d grown up here, I probably still was.
“Any preference on room?” I asked.
“Oh,” he said, narrowing his eyes, looking toward the balcony of the second floor, just beyond the dome of the lobby. “I… I wouldn’t know.”
My heart was too soft, I knew this. I unlocked the display case on the wall behind me and took the key off the hook for Cabin Four. I knew what he wanted; what he was here for. “You look just like him,” I said.
His entire body deflated, almost like he was making himself prostrate, his forehead down to the counter between us before he stood again, as if he were unveiling someone new.
“I’m sorry,” he said, face contorted into a grimace. It was the first time I believed him.
“No,” I said. “I get it. Really. I understand. I would do the same.”
He pulled a wallet out of his back pocket, took a deep breath in and out, started again. “Trey West,” he said, leaving a pause for me to fill. A question, an offering.
“Abby,” I said.
“Abby,” he repeated, turning over his license, a credit card. “I’m not good at pretending. It’s a relief.”
It was his brother, Landon, who was good at that. We didn’t know he was a journalist when he came to stay. We’d thought he was trying his hand at writing a book, that he was on a personal retreat, that he needed the peace and quiet, the lack of distractions, the ambiance—that’s what he’d told us. We’d thought he was here to get away from something. Not that he was here for something instead. But those things were hard to differentiate on the surface. It wasn’t until he disappeared that we knew the truth.
I didn’t know what Trey was looking for all these months later. Whether he thought there was still something worth finding, that the police and the searchers had all missed; whether he was here to pay his respects, hoping for some sort of closure.
Closure was a hard thing to come by here.
“It’s not what I expected,” Trey said as I charged the night to his card.
I wasn’t sure whether he meant the inn or the entire town. The road into town climbed up for a stretch of miles before swerving down again, narrowing as it dipped from the mountains into the valley, vegetation pushing closer and creeping over the guardrails. It was a drive you didn’t want to do at night, riding the brakes as the curves grew tighter, branches arcing over the pavement. But then the trees opened up, and Cutter’s Pass presented itself, a lost city. A found oasis.
“It never is,” I said. There was always a slight disorientation when you arrived, nothing quite as expected from the drive in. The inn appeared older than it was from the outside, with the weatherworn cabins set back from the main three-story structure, and the forest steadily encroaching over the cleared acreage, but that was just how fast nature worked. Inside, the fireplace was gas; the logs, just for show; the antique locks on all the guest room doors could be overridden with an electronic badge.
It was already clear that Trey was different from his brother, who was closed off and blended in, whom I didn’t even notice for the first four days of his stay, because Georgia checked him in and could only remember, when pressed, that he had asked for the Wi-Fi password, and she had told him the service didn’t reach the cabins, that it was slow and barely consistent in the main building as well, which was why we had to keep the credit card slide under the register, old-fashioned carbon copies that people thought quaint, so it worked in our favor.
Other things that worked in our favor but were neither authentic nor necessary: the wooden key rings with the room names etched in by hand; the poker beside the fireplace, angled just so.
Things here were designed to appear more fragile than they were, but reinforced, because they had to be. We lived in the mountains, on the edge of the woods, subject to the whims of weather and the forces of nature.
The large guest room windows were practically soundproof. Frosted skylights in the upper-floor halls echoed the fall of rain or sleet, but were fully resistant to a branch lost to a storm. There were tempered glass panels in the thick wooden doors at the entrance, which could hypothetically stop a bullet, but thankfully had never been tested.
I pulled one of the umbrellas from the barrel, each a uniform navy blue with a tastefully small logo: a single, bare tree, white branches unfurling against the evening sky.
“Come on,” I said, “I’ll show you the way.”
This was not part of my job, but I couldn’t help myself. I never could.
OUTSIDE, THE RAIN WAS unrelenting, puddles forming in the gravel lot, water seeping into my shoes. Trey West had to duck to fit under the shared umbrella, his arm brushing up against mine as we walked.
“The cabins are this way,” I explained, gesturing to the trail of marked lighting along the brick path on the other side of the parking lot.
We passed his car, that black Audi with the Maryland plates, on the far end of the lot, and he looked at me sheepishly.
“Is it always this dark?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered, because it wasn’t really that dark out front, all things considered, but he must’ve had an entirely different frame of reference. The lit pathway did a fair enough job, along with the lights of the main building, both kept on from dusk to dawn. From the edge of this lot, even, you could see the road slope down into the town center: a geometric grid of antique shops and breweries and cafés, stores that specialized in expert hiking apparel or kitschy tourist gear, all named for the thing that could’ve been our downfall, but seemed to put us on the map instead.
Down there, you could find the Last Stop Tavern; Trace of the Mountain Souvenirs; the Edge, which sold camping gear and rented out lockers but also featured a menu of coffee and hot chocolate and beer, depending on the time of day; and CJ’s Hideaway, a top restaurant of the western Carolinas, with its entrance tucked in a back alley, a commitment to the con, even though it boasted a growing waiting list on most nights during peak season. Each storefront a subtle nod to what the rumors implied: that there was something hidden under the surface here. Some secret only we knew, that we weren’t letting on.
The town was best known, and we weren’t known for much, for the unsolved disappearance of four hikers more than two decades earlier. The Fraternity Four, they were called, even though they hadn’t been members of any frat together. But they were in their twenties, youthful and carefree, and they had last been spotted here in town, had set off toward the Appalachian and were never seen again.
Here one moment in Cutter’s Pass, gone the next. No clues, no leads. Just vanished. Over the years, their story had morphed into something of an urban legend, layers added with each retelling, rumors spreading in absentia.
Maybe the mystery would’ve faded with time, attributed to circumstance, buried with history, if not for the string of disappearances that continued to follow, with haunting regularity.
Most recently: Landon West, onetime resident of Cabin Four. He’d vanished four months before, in early April, when the inn was still ramping up to high season.
We didn’t notice, at first.
His disappearance had kicked it all up again: the stories, the press, the headlines calling us the most dangerous town in North Carolina.
It didn’t matter that the first thing a visitor saw when they passed the sign for Cutter’s Pass and took the wide bridge over the river was a welcome center and, across the street, the sheriff’s office. Didn’t matter that there were bright painted signs for rafting and horseback riding and adventure tours around the town green, where people milled around each morning as the vendors set up for the day. Or that thousands of visitors came through our small town to experience all we had to offer. The simple truth was that Landon West had vanished on our watch, just like all the rest.
“This is you,” I said as the path snaked off to the string of cabins, set back in the trees. There were technically only two cabin buildings, but we had subdivided them with a poorly insulated wall, the separate doors side by side in the middle of each log-home-style building. The only light coming from any of them was the soft glow of the floor lamp in Cabin One, visible in the curtain gaps of the front window. If Trey wanted real dark, he could walk the twenty yards into the trees around the back of his cabin and face the mountain.
I handed Trey the umbrella, slid the key into the lock of Cabin Four, felt the gust of cold as I opened the door, my hand stretching for the switch on the inside wall. Here, the wood paneling gave way to smaller windows that slid open on the front and back walls, to let in the fresh mountain air. There was a heating unit under the back window, for off-season stays.
The cabin furniture was simple and spare: a wood dresser, a nightstand, a four-poster bed with a quilted blanket, a desk and hard-back chair. Everything was shades of brown, except for the hotel guidebook, a white three-ring binder of information, perfectly centered on the surface of the desk.
Trey remained on the other side of the entrance, still holding the umbrella over his head. Now he was looking at the place Landon had once slept, the chair he’d once sat in, the place at the foot of the bed where Georgia had found his suitcase, mostly packed but still opened, only his hiking boots noticeably missing.
“Okay, well, I’ll leave you to get settled,” I said. I took the umbrella from his hand, which prompted him to finally step inside, switching places with me. He looked shell-shocked, unprepared. “If you need anything, the phone at the front desk will reach me.”
“Thank you, Abby,” he said, one hand on the door.
My hand lingered over his for a moment as I placed the key in his open palm, cold and wet and unsure. It took some time to get your bearings here. “Welcome to the Passage.”
CHAPTER 2
GEORGIA WAS STANDING AT the registration desk, the inn’s landline phone halfway to her ear, when I returned.
“The lines are down,” she said as I shook the rain from the umbrella and leaned it in a groove beside the entrance. She held that same pose, that same haunted expression, as a door opened somewhere on the second floor—the cry of a hinge I’d have to get fixed.
“Probably the rain,” I said as I crossed the lobby. It was more the wind than the rain that managed to cut us off most times, though we weren’t the only ones. The entire grid of the town center had been known to lose power from a downed tree limb—or, once, a car that collided with a telephone pole. It was that sort of night.
“I heard it ringing,” she said, quieter this time. “It just kept going, and I came out to answer it, but…” I took the phone she extended my way—nothing.
Well, not quite nothing. There was a low clicking sound coming from the receiver, something between dead air and static. It had happened before.
“It’ll come back,” I said, replacing the phone in its cradle. Georgia’s gaze flicked to the dark windows, like she expected something to be out there, watching back. A year working here, and she still wasn’t accustomed to the whims of the weather. The coincidences she took as signs. The sound of the local wildlife outside our windows at night. The dangers she feared could exist behind a dropped phone call, a missed connection.
When she’d first arrived, I couldn’t help but notice our similarities: We’d both come to the area soon after losing a parent, and we’d both chosen to remain—a waypoint that had turned permanent. It took longer to notice our differences: Georgia seemed to process everything by sharing, expecting me to do the same. She said whatever she was thinking, airing her insecurities, and her fears.
But Georgia always seemed on high alert, just by nature of the shape of her face—narrow and fine boned, with large brown eyes and her blonde hair in a pixie cut. You could almost imagine her as some mystical creature, something you might catch a glimpse of hiding between the trees, if not for the fact that she was nearly six feet tall, sharp angles and long limbs and very hard to miss.
“Was that a hiker you just checked in?” she asked.
I shook my head, straightening the paperwork into the binder behind the desk, just to have something to do with my hands. “Actually, it was Landon West’s brother,” I said without making eye contact. I could imagine her expression well enough.
She stood perfectly still, waiting for me to look up. When I finally did, I lifted one shoulder, as in, I know.
“Are you going to tell Celeste?” she asked.
“Wasn’t planning on it.” After nearly a decade of working with her, Celeste now paid me to keep the details from reaching her, content to spend her time in a semiretirement. And I wasn’t sure whether this was a problem just yet.
I started closing up for the evening, shutting down the computer, gathering anything of value to store in the office behind us, which would remain locked until the morning.
“How much longer until this rain breaks?” Georgia asked, pulling out her cell and taking it into the back office, which was the best place to get any signal here—the closest to the town center you could get, ...
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