“You really can’t see this?” Ashley asked.
“No, I can’t see it,” Logan snapped. “I can’t tell if you’re … is this a prank? There’s no way this is real.”
Ashley shook her head. “I can’t really see him anymore.”
Logan pressed her face into her palms. The cabin spun around her. It was like she was stuck in a nightmare again. This had to be a joke, some ruse to make fun of her, but Logan couldn’t understand the punch line.
“He’s gone,” Ashley murmured. “I don’t understand. I—”
“Who was he talking to?” Logan asked quickly. “My dad?”
“I don’t know.” Ashley ran a shaking hand through her ponytail. “I don’t know what I saw. I don’t—”
Logan checked her phone, but they were miles from service. She wanted to ask Alejo about this. She needed real answers, not Ashley’s I don’t knows.
“Do you think your dad is the one who lived here?” Ashley asked. “He said something about ‘the house.’”
“Here?” Logan gestured to the ruined living room. “This place has been abandoned for decades at least. There’s no way he lived here.”
“Then why would he be here?”
“It wouldn’t make any sense to live here,” Logan said. “It’s miles from anything. It’s completely isolated. He’d be completely…”
“… alone,” Ashley finished.
Ashley joined Logan on the sofa. They sat in silence, Logan with her face in her hands and Ashley facing the front door. The breeze through the cabin was colder now, though Logan suspected that was because of the anxiety churning in her gut. Brandon had been right when he said that things in Snakebite were wrong. But the disappearance, the ghosts, they weren’t supposed to involve him. She came out here with Ashley to clear Brandon’s name, not tie him to the mystery.
First Ashley had seen the ghost of her boyfriend. Now she’d seen Brandon. It would be impossible to convince her the two weren’t connected.
“What do we do now?” Logan asked.
Ashley leaned back. Her hands still shook. She looked out the cabin window and closed her eyes. “You come with me. We have … a lot to talk about.”
12
Herd Of Black Sheep
They drove back to Snakebite in silence.
Ashley led Logan into the Chokecherry, Snakebite’s one and only pub. She wondered how the Chokecherry looked to an outsider. She’d grown up ogling the walls packed with old records and toy trains and football jerseys and acoustic guitars. It smelled like wing sauce and grease, the air coated in a film of oily kitchen heat. Pictures of cattle farms and rusty tractors were nailed haphazardly into the wood paneling. An old shotgun was mounted behind the bar, complete with gold antlers engraved on the handle. There wasn’t a building in Snakebite that was more quintessentially Snakebite. The history of their little town was recorded here in piles of memorabilia.
Today, the pub was empty, which was unsurprising on a weekday. The sky outside careened toward dusk, and Ashley’s stomach moaned for some old-fashioned bar food. They slipped into an old vinyl booth, Logan on one side and Ashley on the other. Gus—the Chokecherry’s owner, bartender, waiter, and janitor—made his way to their booth with a notepad in his hand.
“Hey, Gus,” Ashley said. “Just the Black Butte and some fries.”
Gus nodded and turned to Logan, who looked from Ashley to Gus and back again like the whole setup was a trap. Finally, she took a look at the menu and cleared her throat. “Uh, I’ll have the drink she said, plus some wings? And can I get those to go?”