All the Missing Girls (20 page)

I saw a shock of blond hair first, then a shoulder. Half a face, his long, lanky legs. He came out shaking his head, tucking something in the back of his pants.

“Didn't see anyone,” he said.

“Is that a
gun
?”

He didn't answer. Kept moving toward the house, expecting me to keep up. “Are you sure you heard someone?” he asked.

“Why the hell do you have a gun?”

“Because we live in the middle of nowhere and it takes the cops too long to get to the house. Everyone has a gun.”

“No, not everyone. That can't be safe, just walking around with it tucked inside your pants.”

He held the door for me, waited until we were inside, and took a deep breath. “Nic, are you sure? Tell me exactly what you heard.”

I couldn't meet his eyes. “I was at the clearing, the one where we used to make forts, and I thought I heard footsteps.” I strained to hear in my memory, but I felt like I was forcing it, making the leaves crunch, turning up the volume. “I thought I smelled someone smoking. But I'm not sure.”

Maybe someone was watching me, but maybe there wasn't. Like Daniel said, there's a monster out there. It's not too much of a stretch when you haven't been sleeping enough, when you've just been threatened, when the people you love have disappeared. It's not too hard to believe in monsters here.

“Maybe you should've figured that out before you called, scaring the shit out of me.”

I glared at him. “
I
was scared.”

He did that deep-breathing technique, trying not to explode at me. I felt my shoulders tightening, like his did when he was tense. “Your eyes are all bloodshot. Have you been sleeping?” he asked. I could tell he didn't quite trust me. As the time grew between then and now, I didn't quite trust myself, either.

“A little . . . I can't, really,” I said. “I can't sleep here—”

“I told you to come stay with us, Nic. Come stay with us.”

I started to laugh. “Because that would solve everything, right? When did you get the gun, Daniel?”

He picked at the pile of receipts on the table, narrowing his eyes, putting them back where they'd been. “Laura told me what happened at the shower. She feels terrible. Let her take care of you. She's driving me crazy.”

“And how would you explain that? Why I suddenly want to stay?”

“Air-conditioning,” he said, the side of his mouth quirking up for a second.

“I can't, Daniel. Besides, and no offense, but Laura is really nosy.”

He shook his head but didn't argue. “Listen, I have to be on-site tomorrow, but I'll swing by in the morning to check on you. If you can't reach me, you know you can call Laura. She can handle it.”

“Right.”

“You don't give her enough credit, Nic.”

I saw the outline of the gun as he walked away. “It's a family trait,” I called after him, but he shook his head and kept moving. “Daniel?” He stopped, spun around. “Thank you for coming.”

He turned back around and waved in acknowledgment as he walked away. At the car, he rested his arms on top of it. “Did you get the affidavits?”

“One for two,” I said. “Working on the other one.”

He nodded. “The gun was Dad's,” he said. “I didn't think it was safe for him to have it anymore. I took it from him so he wouldn't hurt himself. Or someone else.”

SO WE HAD A
father who drank too much. So he didn't come home sometimes. So he forgot to get groceries. So he left us to our own devices. We were lucky. In the grand scheme of life, ten years later, I could see: We were lucky.

Corinne was not that lucky. We never knew this. Hannah
Pardot was the one who broke Corinne's father open, let him weep out all his secrets. Hannah Pardot knew how to push and where. Probably because of what my father had told her.
It's a family matter,
he'd said, lowering his voice, giving it meaning.

Corinne had two much younger siblings. She was eleven when her parents had Paul Jr.—PJ, Corinne called him—and Layla followed two years after. They were little kids, seven and five, when Corinne went missing. Silent and stoic, unusual for children—that's what Hannah Pardot told Bricks and what Bricks told everyone else. Hannah asked them questions as they sat on the white sectional sofa in their living room and their mother handed out lemonade and they looked at their father, waiting for their orders. They looked at their father when Hannah asked if Corinne had seemed sad or upset, or if they'd heard her say anything.
Any little thing at all,
she'd said. Anything about her
state of mind.
They looked at their father, questioning. They looked at him like the answer.

CORINNE'S MOTHER HAD TAKEN
her to the hospital twice. Hannah Pardot read the reports out loud to Corinne's father: once for a dislocated elbow—
climbing out the window,
Corinne had told us, rolling her eyes; another for a laceration at the hairline—
river jumping, damn slippery rocks.

“Yes,” her dad said to Hannah Pardot. “Because of me.” Sobbing big, ugly tears. Hannah Pardot called Bricks and Fraize in because she was so sure he was going to confess to everything.

He wasn't the kind of drunk to sit at the bar, like my father, getting lost in himself. He was the kind who drank whiskey in the living room, finding people to be pissed at instead of himself.

“I didn't hit her,” he claimed. “I never hit her.”

No, her mother said. He never did. Just punished her. Pushed
her if she tried to talk back. Once he pushed her down the stairs. Just the once. That was the elbow.

His grip was tight and unyielding. He threw dishes at walls, near their heads. One time he missed. He was full of threat and menace, and at some point, Corinne grew immune. Immune to the sound of a bird flying into a window, its wings beating relentlessly upon the ground.

She'd leave her house, coming over to mine, telling me we had plans. I can see it now, the meaning under her words.
What, did you have a mind-fuck or something? We have plans. I was supposed to sleep over.

Eventually, I stopped going along with it. I pushed her away, too.

They searched her house for blood. For evidence. For signs that there was another
accident
that her father covered up.

I couldn't imagine Corinne giving the fake stories at the hospital;
I fell. I was sneaking out the window and I fell.
Letting her father win. I couldn't picture that Corinne. The one who cowered, keeping her eyes on the floor. Her power, I realized, was not limitless, as we had all believed. It had borders, and when she left that house, she refused to give another inch. It was a learned trait: how to push, how to manipulate. She knew the line to walk. She learned that from her father—
push but not too hard; crack but do not break.
The darkness lives in everyone. She knew this better than anyone. Everyone had two faces, and she looked deep into us each until she found it.

I SEE A CORINNE
every year. Can pick her out from the other side of my desk. The strong-willed, the cruel, the worshipped. The sad, sad girl sketched in pencil that you see only when you remove the people surrounding her.

Don't remove them.

Please. Don't.

She's mean, but she loves you,
I want to tell them.
Wait it out, look closer.

I see the long sleeves and I know what's underneath.

The uneaten lunch tray, ignored as she cuts someone down.

The boys she pushes away over and over, hoping they'll come back, because they can't get too close. She can't let them.

I want to call her into my office for no reason at all—ignore the one struggling with too much school pressure, or parents getting divorced, or the one literally starving for attention. I want
this
girl, who doesn't show up in my files. I want to call her in just so she knows, as they grow up, and as everyone abandons her—as they inevitably will—that I am here.

This time I am here.

TYLER CALLED, JARRING ME
awake just as I'd drifted to sleep. His name on the display, and there he was, an image in my mind, safe and nearby. “Hello? Tyler?” I pushed myself out of bed, walked down the hall in case he was in his truck out front, underneath the steady drizzle.

“Hey, Nic.”

“You're okay? You're home?” The night was dark, and I didn't see any sign of Tyler.

“Yeah. Jackson said you were worried.”

“
He
was worried. I mean, I was, too. Where were you?”

“Taking care of some stuff.”

“Why'd you leave your phone?”

A pause like I should know better. “Forgot it.”

I hated that Tyler was lying to me. We weren't supposed to lie to each other. We might not say all of what we were thinking, but we never lied—I'd made him promise that. “Tyler,” I said. “Talk to me. Please. I thought you were hurt. I thought . . .”

I shifted uncomfortably in the silence that followed.

“I went to Mississippi,” he said, his voice quick and hushed. Without his phone, the unspoken understanding.

“To her father's place?”

“I just wanted to check for myself. No sign of Annaleise,” he said. “No sign of anything.”

I stayed on the phone, listening to him breathe.

Eventually, he broke the silence. “You were right,” he said. “We need some space.”

I felt him drifting even further as we spoke. “Tyler—”

“Do you need anything, Nic?” Like a professional courtesy.

What did I really need? From him? For him. “Just to know you're okay.”

“I'm okay,” he said. “See you 'round, Nic.”

THERE WAS SOMETHING BOTH
familiar and discomforting about the rain here. In the city, it hit the windows and streets and flooded the gutters, like it was encroaching on us. It caused traffic jams and made apartment lobbies too slippery. But here, the rain was just another part of the landscape. Like it was the thing that lived here and we were merely visitors.

It made me feel small and temporary. Made me imagine my mother in this very house, hearing this very rain. The same water molecules, recycled and replaying, like the circular diagram in science class. And before that, my grandparents buying this land, building this house from the ground up, standing in front of this window, listening to the same thing.
Some religions believe time is cyclical,
my father had said.
That there are repeating ages. But to others, time is God. A gift for us to stretch out and exist in.

It was a comfort to me, the sound of my father's voice, trying to make sense of things.

Because the thing about standing here in the middle of the mountains with the rain coming down, in a house your grandfather built, is that it's too easy to notice how insignificant you are.

How quickly you might go from something to nothing.

How one moment you can be a girl laughing in a field of sunflowers, and the next, a haunting face on a poster in a storefront window.

How terrifying, empty and hollow, and then: how absolving.

I brought Tyler outside in the rain once. Asked him, “Do you feel it?” Laced my fingers with his and waited for his whispered “Yes.” He could've been talking about anything—the cold on his face, the rainwater in his shoes, the sky whispering to him about love and loneliness and me. But I liked to believe he felt the same. That he was the person who always understood.

I tried to get back to sleep. I lay in bed and closed my eyes, concentrating on the sound of the rain on the roof—hoping it might keep my mind empty, lull me into a gentle oblivion.

But Cooley Ridge was talking to me with each drop, nudging me awake.

Keep your eyes open. Look.

Time can weave around and show you things if you let it. Maybe this was how. Maybe Cooley Ridge was trying to show me. Time was trying to explain things.

Tick-tock.

The Day Before

DAY
7

T
he house looked brighter,
more alive, with the fresh coat of paint that Laura had picked out—pale almond, she'd called it. But the furniture had been pulled away from the walls and sat at unnatural angles, haphazardly covered with sheets of plastic, giving the whole downstairs a fun-house feel. I must've grown immune to the smell of paint sometime during the night. It wasn't until I stepped out to toss the plastic in the trash and went back inside that it hit me—the wall of fumes, sticky and suffocating—that no open windows could alleviate. We needed to run the air, to circulate everything through the filters. We needed the damn air-conditioning.

I positioned Daniel's box fans throughout the downstairs, turned them on, and left the windows open.

And then I left. An accidental catastrophic electrical fire would not be the worst thing that could happen to this house.

THERE'S A SUNDAY BRUNCH
at Grand Pines that makes it family day. Go to church, then visit the family you've sent away. A day of penance. Eat your weight in sins. Guilt by omelet.

It was a buffet, and I was following Dad down the line, my tray sliding along the metal grooves behind his, sounding like nails on a chalkboard.

“Try the bacon,” he said, and I obligingly placed a strip on my plate. “Skip the eggs,” he said from the side of his mouth. “Biscuits. Take two.” I took one—I had no appetite and didn't want to waste them if they weren't really that good.

In the bag slung over my shoulder, I carried a paper signed by a doctor that I'd picked up at the front desk. An affidavit attesting to my father's mental incompetency and his need for a guardian. We needed one more before filing with the court, and the on-site doctor had already gotten me a referral for someone who would visit later this week.

I felt like I was lying to Dad, placing bacon on my plate, taking his advice, acting like I was here for the food, for his company. I wasn't
not
here for those things, but they weren't the primary reason. I wondered if Daniel and Laura made it a habit to meet him here for brunch. Probably. Dad had smiled when I came in, like it was the most natural thing in the world for me to be here, and part of me wondered if the affidavit was wrong. If maybe he
was
getting better. If this was all reversible—a horrible, temporary thing that would gradually unwind itself.
Gosh, Dad, remember that time you couldn't remember us? Really gave me a scare.

We sat at the table where I'd met him at last week—apparently, his regular spot. “You should see Laura,” I said to him. “I went to her shower yesterday. She looks like she's about to pop.”

He laughed. “What are they having?”

He knew this. He should've known. “A girl.” A slight nod from him. “Shana,” I said, and his eyes locked on mine, then slowly drifted to the side. It was the wrong thing to say; I'd lose him to her now. Watch them both disappear.

“You know, when your mother brought me home the first time, I fell in love.”

Or this time he would take me there with him.

“With Cooley Ridge?” I asked.

“Well, you don't have to make that face, Nic.” He grinned. “But no. Not Cooley Ridge. I fell in love with
her.
Because I could see all of her there. She was like a puzzle piece out of context, but when I put her there, where she was from, it was like I understood. She was so beautiful.”

My clearest memories of my mother were the ones where she was fading. Sick. In a wheelchair with a yellow and blue quilt across her legs because she was always cold, Daniel holding a cup with a straw in front of her, both of them getting skinnier, paler, sharper. In pictures, she was beautiful. Before the cancer, she was this perfect mix of sharp and soft, with a genuinely warm smile.

“You really do look like her. You and Daniel both, spitting images of her,” he said.

“Daniel looks like you.” I tried the bacon, but in rolled the nausea. I broke it into smaller pieces so he wouldn't notice.

“Now, sure, that's what people say. But when you guys were kids, it was all Shana.” He looked me over. “Imagine if she hadn't had kids. All of her would be lost now.”

“Okay,” I said. I didn't like the way he was looking at me, like there was something of her still living—a puzzle piece out of context, part of her stuck over my left eye, to my bottom lip, the ridge of my spine. Concentrating on me like Corinne once had, until she pretended she could find the monster in us.

“We almost didn't, you know. When her parents died in that
accident and she found herself all alone in the world, she told me she would never have just one child. It was none at all or more than one. There was no debating.” He chewed his food, rolled his eyes. “So stubborn. For a long time I thought it would be none. I really did. Daniel caught us by surprise, you know.”

“No, I didn't know.” My parents were older when they had us, but I assumed that was deliberate: careers first, then family.

“That's when we moved back. She was desperate to have you as soon as possible. God, she drove me crazy. I really didn't get why it was such a big deal, but she was determined that what happened to her would never be her child's fate. Alone with no family. She was adamant that you'd have each other always. Now that she's gone, I can see she was right, of course. Daniel needed you.”

“I'm sure he wouldn't agree with that.” I laughed. “I'm a pain in his ass.”

“No, no, Nic. You're exactly what he needs. He knows it. You know how he is, though.”

There were no safe topics anymore. Doctors sending affidavits to declare my dad incompetent. Missing girls. A house full of secrets. Accidental children. Daniel. And there were eyes everywhere. Not just in the woods. In this place, too. I felt my eyes roaming, my fingers drumming on the table. I could only tap in to subjects with Dad, circling them from far away, grazing off the top. Not getting him worked up. Not pushing things to the surface that needed to remain below. But I needed him to know some things—I needed him to
understand.

“Tyler's been doing some work on the house for us,” I said, picking at the biscuit.

“That's good. He's a good man.”

“You never liked him when we were kids,” I teased.

“That's not true. He worked hard, and he loved you. What's not to like?”

“I thought fathers of teenagers were supposed to hate their daughter's boyfriends. It's a rule.”

“I never read the handbook. Obviously,” he said. Then he pushed himself back in the chair. “I never knew what to do with you, Nic. About you, I mean. You turned out good, though, all on your own.”

“I didn't turn out good,” I said, half laughing, crumbling the biscuit so it fell into uneaten sections.

“You did, though. Look at you. Look at you now.”

I needed to steer the conversation gently back. Carefully. “Tyler said the house would be worth more if we finished the garage,” I said. “Remember when you and Daniel were going to do it?”

He looked into my eyes, smiling. “He asked me,” he said, thinking about the wrong thing, the very wrong thing. “Or he told me. You know Tyler. Said he wanted to marry you.”

I felt warmth flooding my face, my fingertips tingling, trying to imagine that conversation. I hadn't known that, and the surprise caught me by the neck. “He did, huh? What did you say?”

“I said you were just kids, of course. I told him to see the world first. I told him about time . . .” His eyes drifted to the side, and I could sense his mind starting to drift as well.

“What about time?” I asked, pulling him back.

He refocused on me. “That it shows you things if you let it.”

I tilted my head to the side. “That's what Mom used to say.” When she was sick and I was crying, and she said she could see me, me and Daniel both, the beautiful people we would become.

“Well, that's what I told her. When she was pregnant with Daniel, she worried so much, and the same with you, so we used to make up these stories . . .” Dad was getting sucked into the memories. I'd lose him if I didn't ground him in the now.

“What did Tyler say to that?” I asked. Maybe I just really wanted to know. To see the conversation, a fly on the wall, Tyler sitting on the couch, my dad in his chair.

“Hmm?” He looked up and shrugged. “He didn't say anything. He wasn't asking for my permission. So I told him: Don't be mad when she says no.”

I smiled.

“I thought you should know that. It was the day the Prescott girl . . . Well. There were more important things after that, and then you left. But I wanted you to know about that. He's good. He's a good guy. I think he's still mad at me, though. For not giving him your new number.”

“You're a good dad,” I said. “You really are.”

“I'm a shitty dad, and I know it. But I tried to do the right thing when it counted. I'm not sure how that went.”

“Dad, look at me. It's done,” I said. I stared at his eyes, willing him to remember this conversation. “Whatever happened back then, it's over. It's done. It's time to put the house up for sale.”

He sliced into his biscuit, pointed the butter knife at my heart. “Eat your breakfast, sweetheart. You're starting to disappear.”

I KNEW THAT THE
answers to Annaleise's disappearance hinged on what she saw ten years ago, even if the police weren't quite there yet. I knew the answers were going to come all at once. That people wouldn't find out what had happened to Annaleise without finding out what had happened to Corinne, and neither would I.

I had to go back in time.

I had to, while the investigation was still in the
find her
stage. Before it morphed into something more, something worse.

Hannah Pardot showed up from out of town ten years ago, with her stoic expression and bright red lipstick, on a mission. The investigation morphed from
find the girl
to
solve the case.
Those were two very different things. Two very different assumptions.

One week after Annaleise's disappearance and I could feel the shift starting.

I had to understand how everything looked from Annaleise's point of view—all of it—starting at the beginning of that night ten years ago. Starting with what she saw at the fair.

THE FAIR DOESN'T REALLY
have an official entrance. It has a field that turns into a parking lot that funnels between the buildings that were stables, now used to sell ticket stubs for rides and games. There's a storage shed of first-aid equipment off to the side of the stables/ticket booths, and past that, nothing but trees.

Through the old stables, the space opens up to fields where once a year, for two weeks, the booths come to life and the Ferris wheel looms, proud and majestic. In the fall, hot-air balloons rise up, tethered to the earth. It was the place we went to touch the sky.

The air tonight was full of noise: kids cheering or whining, parents laughing and shouting. Music from the rides, bells from the game booths. Teenagers calling to each other across the grounds—from a picnic table, from the front of the portable restrooms, from the top of the Ferris wheel. My breath caught, seeing it circle from the parking lot. Unlike most things that appeared smaller now that I'd grown, the Ferris wheel looked bigger. More untouchable. I tried to picture a girl hanging from the outside of the cart. I'd be panicked. I'd be sick. I'd be furious.

A girl in a skirt on the outside of the cart, her best friend whispering in her ear, her boyfriend watching from below. Maybe we did bring it on ourselves.

This right here was the closest I'd felt to Corinne in a long time. I could feel her cold hands at my elbows, hear her breath at my ear, smell the spearmint gum on her whisper. If I could just close
my eyes and reach across time and hold her wrist. Wrap my arms around her for no reason at all. I wouldn't dare. I never dared.

Someone slammed into my side—a little kid, maybe three years old, colliding with me before changing trajectory, running into someone else on his rush inside. His parents gave me a hurried
sorry
and chased after him. The sun was low, almost gone, and the field lights turned on as I stood there watching. The grounds were garish and exposed, my eyelids slamming closed in response.

I walked between the ticket booths. The grass had always been worn away here; it was mostly dirt with small patches of green. Right near the entrance, right here in this dirt, this was where I fell to my side. This was where Daniel hit me in full view of the Ferris wheel. I spun around, pictured Annaleise leaning against the side of this building, eating her strawberry ice cream. Watching us all.

Me running for Tyler.

Tyler waiting for me.

And Daniel grabbing me by the arm, hitting me across the face.

Tyler lunging, punching Daniel in the face, then crouching beside me. His hands pulling my twisted arm away from my body. “You okay? Nic, are you okay?”

“I don't know. I don't . . .” Frantically scrambling in the dirt, standing, leaning on Tyler, feeling everything realign, the burn of the hit, the sting of the moment. “I'm okay,” I said. His hands were everywhere. Pushing my hair aside, over my face, down my neck, my arms, my waist. He glanced over my shoulder, his jaw set, and I saw Corinne jogging toward us. Bailey was in the distance, weaving through the crowd.

I didn't know if Annaleise was still there. I hadn't looked again. Maybe she was just outside the entrance. Maybe she'd run behind the building, watching through the stable slats that I could see now, with her doelike eyes. Yes, she had confirmed our alibi, but I was wondering if she had also witnessed what came next.

Tyler had pulled me up, checked me again, asking over and over
if I was okay. “Wait here,” he'd said. He stood over my brother, put a hand down, and leaned toward him, said something in his ear. Daniel looked straight at me, straight into me, so I had to look away. “Nic,” he pleaded from across the way, but by then Corinne was already there.