Page 18 of One Last Secret

“I’ll check inside.”

I rush back into the house, relieved that Evelyn is no longer with Celeste. I hate to think this way, but shewasthe last person to see him. I follow Celeste’s voice as she calls her father’s name. A quick glance at the living room and dining room shows he’s not there. I rush to the basement and see Celeste on her knees in the middle of the room, weeping and staring out at the horizon.

“He’s gone,” she whimpers. “He’s gone to the vanishing point.”

I look pensively out at the balcony. The door to the path is ajar. I don’t want Celeste to run, but I don’t like my chances of moving her when she’s hysterical like this.

“Stay here,” I tell her. “I’ll check the closet.”

I walk into the small room where I find the painting of Annie earlier that morning. She’s still there, beautiful and haughty and alive, but Victor is not there. Nothing appears disturbed either.

I return to Celeste and kneel beside her. “He’s not down here, Celeste.”

“He’s vanished.”

“He hasnotvanished,” I say firmly. I hate that I lie to her, but I must break through her hysterics. “Come upstairs with me and look for him. He could be in his bedroom, or in the schoolroom or the theater.”

“He’s not,” she weeps. “He’s vanished.”

I press my lips together. I can’t leave her here.

I wrap my arm around her and lift her up. To my profound relief, she doesn’t resist but allows me to help her up the stairs.

Victor isn’t in the theater or the schoolroom. We check his bedroom and find it unkempt but not ransacked. Most importantly, we also find it empty.

We check our own rooms, and finally, we check the laundry room and garage. Nothing. There’s no sign of him.

“His car’s still here,” Celeste sobs. “He’s vanished. He’s gone to the vanishing point.”

I want to snap her out of this, but I don’t think there’s anything I can say to make this better. Not right now. I help her downstairs instead. She allows me to lead her, but there’s no strength in her body. She’s lost all hope.

A part of me feels an intense anger toward Victor for this. It’s unfair because it’s almost certainly not his fault, but I feel it anyway. I was just getting through to Celeste, and now he’s gone and ruined all of the progress I’ve made.

And I’ll never know how he knew Annie. I was right on the cusp of an answer to the greatest mystery of my life, and now that answer has vanished.

And despite my words of encouragement to Celeste, so has Victor.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I sit on the couch in the living room, exhausted in all ways by the events of the morning. The lights from the police cars outside flicker through the house.

Celeste has stopped weeping. She sits next to me, a vacant expression on her face. I have my arm around her. Evelyn is outside talking to the police detective.

Officers move through the house, checking thoroughly for anything that might indicate what happened here. The studio is roped off, and soon, crime scene investigators will arrive to take photographs, dust for prints, test for blood spatter and dig through every little thing that might shed some light on Victor’s disappearance.

From time to time, they glance at the two of us as we sit and wait our turn with the detective. Their faces are stony. I find that incredibly frustrating. I know they have jobs to do, and they can’t allow emotion to interfere with their work, but would it kill them to have a little compassion for a poor young girl whose only surviving family is missing?

I offer Celeste a smile of my own. If she notices, she doesn’t react to it. Her eyes remain riveted out the window, staring at the vanishing point where the Pacific Ocean meets the inlet that leads to the magical Fairy Cove.

Not so magical today. Not the kind of magic that warms hearts anyway.

“Come on,” I tell her. “Let’s sit somewhere else.”

She doesn’t react, but when I try to lift her to her feet, she remains rigidly planted where she is. I recognize this as a symptom of shock. She’s dissociated enough that she can’t focus on anything but the vanishing point outside, and herbody is semi-consciously reinforcing her superstition by stolidly refusing to allow her perspective to be changed.

There’s nothing I can do to help with that right now. It’ll have to run its course.

In any case, I wouldn’t have the chance to move because a voice calls, “Mary Wilcox?”

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