[TEXT WITH A PINlocation drop]
This is the last stop. I promise.
The road you’re going to drive on will say Closed to Tourists, but don’t worry about that. I’ve made arrangements (I always do, don’t I?) When you get to the chain and theROADCLOSEDsign, park to the side of the road. You can walk the rest of the way into Afton, the ghost town. It’s not far.
You’ll see.
And I’ll seeyou, soon.
I’ll explain everything.
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SO FAR, THEY’VE DELIVERED. But according to our deal, they owe me one more thing.
I’mfinished. I’ve done everything they asked of me.
And now I’m waiting for my reward.
I sit cross-legged on the floor with my back against the mud-plastered bricks and scroll through the photos on my phone. The backpack of food sits next to me. If they don’t need it, I can take it with me when I go. I’m not going back to Sonnet. I’m finished there.
I can see the spot where they slept last night. It’s a clean place on the dusty floor, near where the altar used to be.
Dusky light comes through the old windows of the ghost town church, the wavy panes making it watery.
They should be back soon.
Go home and rest,their most recent text said.You’ve earned it. I’ll be in touch tomorrow.
No, I wrote back.Let’s finish it tonight.
Officer Flanigan let me take pictures of the photos they showed me at the police station, the ones they developed from the disposable camera in the yellow plastic dry bag they found with Eve’s body. Even though I’ve been through them before, even though they’ve told me so much already, Igo through them again now one by one. Scrutinizing. Zooming in. Making sure that I haven’t missed anything.
Here’s one of my sister and my grandma at the events center where they used to work. Their arms are around each other and they are laughing. They’re wearing their uniforms: black blouses, black slacks, white aprons, hair pulled back. Eve’s is in a high ponytail; Gram’s is in a chignon. I was ten years younger than Eve, and so on nights when they both worked, I’d stay home alone, falling asleep on the couch waiting for them.
There are several other photos of them with the rest of the staff, the college students and older people like Gram who needed money and could work evenings and weekends. Gram got the job because it supplemented her income as an elementary school teacher, and once we moved in with her (I was four, Eve was fourteen), she needed the extra cash. These photos must have been taken after a wedding, because the tablecloths are white and the flowers cream-colored.
I remember how Eve and Gram would come home with leftovers from weddings that the parties didn’t want. We often had bouquets of flowers and miniature cups of butter mints and pastel-covered almonds and crab salad for puff pastries in our fridge or on our countertops. The guests left disposable cameras behind, too, sometimes with only one or two shots taken on the roll, and the staff brought those home as well if no one ended up claiming them. No point in wasting the film.
Officer Flanigan didn’t understand why you’d take disposable cameras into the Underground or on a hike. There are a few reasons. If you don’t want to take your phone or you can’t afford it getting ruined. Hope and her friends took them because of the former; Eve and I because of the latter. We didn’t have money to replace our phones if they got dropped or ruined or broken or lost.
Sometimes we didn’t have the money to develop the film. After Eve vanished, I developed them all, hoping I’d see something that clued me in to her disappearance, but I found nothing.
The pictures fromthisroll, though, are different. She must have broughtthis camera to college with her, had fun taking pictures. I can’t believe they’ve lasted all this time, that they weren’t ruined in the canyon. There are pictures of her in her dorm room, making faces with her roommate, Meg, who she loved. I wonder where Meg is now.
Eve loved everything about going to college. She loved living in the dorms; she loved making friends; she loved the classes. She thought maybe she wanted to be a doctor. “The professor thinks I can,” she told me. “He said I’m smart enough and that he thinks I could get a scholarship and some funding. Medical school isexpensive.”
“You want to be adoctor?” I’d been impressed but also surprised, because Eve and I were so much alike (at least, I wanted to believe that), and I hated the sight of blood.
And there he is, on the film from the camera in her dry bag. Right after the shots with her roommate and right before the pictures of the Underground—her last hike—begin. Eve, standing in a classroom, with a smiling, glasses-wearing professor. Dr. Stewart. Caro’s dad.
Pay attention to the details, Eve would tell me when we were doing our homework. When she was in high school or home for the weekend, I would pretend to do mine long after I was finished. That way, I could sit by her at the kitchen table and watch her brow furrow and clear, furrow and clear, as she figured things out. I have never seen anyone as beautiful as Eve in real life, except maybe Hope Hanover.The details are how we get into college, Eve would tell me, as she checked over one of her assignments for a third or fourth time, revised a paper she was writing until it was perfect.They’re how we get out of here.Eve and I loved where we lived. We were fiercely proud of where we came from, and we wanted to return to Spring Creek, to Eden. But we also wanted togo. We didn’t want to be drunks who never had enough money and died on I-15 heading to Vegas like our parents. We didn’t want to be sad all the time like our grandma, even though we loved her with all our hearts.
The key, we decided, was that you had tochoosethis place. Not in the way the tourists or the move-ins chose it, with their LikeMe accounts andthe photos they took for their followers and their demand for organic groceries and their second homes with heated flooring. But year-round, on the ground, because you grew up here and you couldn’t get it out of your bones. And to choose it, you had to leave it first. You had to have other options and see other things andthencome back.
I have questions for him. I’m going to make him answer.
