Page 103 of Last Seen

“Who is he, Noah? Who is the man with my sister? And why were you taking pictures of him?”

He is shaking his head and humming nervously. She realizes he’s saying “No, no, no” like a scared little boy. His reaction is not helping her concern.

“Noah? Who is it?”

“Ian.” His voice holds a note of terror that makes her spine tingle.

“Who is Ian?”

“He’s the one we don’t speak of.”

He says this robotically. He’s clearly been deeply shocked by the photos.

She grabs his face and points it toward hers. “Noah. Who is Ian?”

He meets her eyes, and what she sees in them she will never be able to erase. “He’s my half brother. He’s the oldest. He’s the one who survived my father’s encampment in Maine. I thought he was dead. Dad said he was dead.”

“What? Survived ... What are you talking about?”

“My dad had a group of followers who went into the woods with him, to live off the land. They all died, taken by a terrible fever. Ian survived. He was a tiny baby, came out with my dad. He was the only one. But he’s been dead for years. He died when I was just a kid. My dad ...”

The words are choked off.

“Your dad?”

“He caught him. He caught him doing things to a neighbor girl. There was a fight. My father hit him. He fell, hit his head, and died. My dad told us. He took responsibility. He killed his son and saved us from that monster. He was wrecked by it. That’s when my mother took me away the first time.”

Noah is shaking. The trauma of the memory is overwhelming him. She wonders what else the monster he describes did. Fathers don’t kill their sons. They don’t hide their sons’ deaths. They certainly don’t hide when women come to town and go missing.

What in the hell is this place?

“Noah. He’s alive. You can see proof of that. This is from seven years ago. And those pictures are from Brockville, aren’t they?”

“Yes. That’s the farm. October 2010. He was just a little older than Cameron.”

Watch out for the oldest, Tammy Boone had warned. Not Cameron.Ian.

“Who knows about Ian?”

“The people who lived here while he was alive, obviously. But I was eight when he died.”

“But he’s not dead,” she says again. “He was in Marchburg just this week. He confronted me. He said how surprised he was I didn’t recognize him. Why should I recognize him, Noah? Why should I know him?”

“I don’t know. I swear it.”

“Who took these pictures? These are pictures of your dead brother and my dead sister—who took them?”

His eyes are bleak, revulsion and fear and something deeper, a terror she is starting to understand. A terror that has to do with her, somehow.

“I inherited this phone. I swear to you I didn’t take those pictures. There’s no way I could, I was out of the country in October of 2010. I was in France.”

“Then who did? Whose phone is it?”

He swallows, hard. “It was my dad’s.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Well, well. At last, you’ve finally arrived at the truth. My truth. Are you surprised? You shouldn’t be. You should have known from the beginning. I left you a trail to follow. I gave you everything you needed to discover who I am.