All the Missing Girls (31 page)

I noticed now that there was a thin line bisecting the key chain, and I instinctively pulled the two halves in opposite directions. A lid slid off, revealing a flash drive.

My ring for the flash drive. In the end, it turned out I'd paid that debt, too.

I wondered when Annaleise had felt that unbreakable thread growing between her and Corinne. If it was after she saw the pictures. If it was before. If it started all the way back that night at the fair.

I imagined Corinne looking away after Daniel pushed her back, and Annaleise standing there watching, their eyes locking for a moment too long. I imagined Annaleise seeing Corinne cry, all alone, maybe, something I'd never witnessed. Or maybe Corinne looked deep into Annaleise and saw something dark and appealing inside. Something that bound them together.

Or maybe it was brief and one-sided, like most moments we assign weight to. Maybe Corinne didn't even notice her standing there, but Annaleise saw something she needed. A likeness or a comfort. That even Corinne might fall. Even the strong are lonely. Even the adored are sad. I hoped she loved her in that moment—when no one else did.

Or maybe it wasn't until later. When she saw the photos shifting back into focus.

I know what it's like to leave, to come back, to not fit. To feel that distance between you and everything you've ever known. But Annaleise couldn't find a place out there. Couldn't let go enough. A lonely kid, a lonelier woman. She came back to what she knew.

You want to believe you're not the saddest person in the world.

Annaleise found her there, in the pictures. The sad, lonely girl.
She found her in the old, dark photograph, covered in a blanket. But still she wanted more. To find her in Jackson and Daniel, Bailey and Tyler. To pull her from my father's guilt. One more thread when I showed up. To take her from me.

I pictured Annaleise staring deeply at the image of Corinne's limp body with fear, with longing.
Am I you?
she asks.
Is this what we become? How we fade away and disappear?

The woods have eyes and monsters and stories.

We are them as much as they are us.

ANOTHER CAR PULLED IN
before sunset but not much earlier. The fireflies were flashing in the yard. Detective Charles walked up the porch steps, warrant in hand, detailing what they were searching for.

Everett was right—they were looking for a gun. A gun and a body. I stepped aside, grateful that I had burned my father's ledgers and all the receipts. The history of his debt to me, his money for Annaleise's silence.
I'm late,
he'd said to me at Grand Pines. Late on hush money.
My daughter's not safe.

Mark Stewart sat at the dining room table with me and Tyler, like a babysitter, but he wouldn't look directly at either one of us.

I moved out to the front porch an hour later, when a new team showed up with machines. They tore up the new garage floor, as if the fresh concrete was evidence enough. Dug through the garden. Brought out a dog to sniff around the rest of the property from the road to the dried-up streambed. But eventually they left, too.

And in the late evening, when I was sitting in the kitchen with Tyler as the officers finished dismantling the house, Hannah Pardot walked into the room. Her hair was longer, the curls dyed darker, and she'd traded her red lipstick for a muted maroon. Her body was
softer, but her face harder. And she still didn't smile. “Nic Farrell,” she said. “So it all comes back to this.” As if no time had passed at all. We were merely picking up a conversation left midsentence just a moment ago.

“There's nothing here,” I said.

She sat down in the chair across from me and said, “Annaleise Carter, I remember her. She was an alibi for your brother, you remember that? For all of you, really.”

“I remember.”

She pulled out a piece of paper sealed inside a Ziploc bag. Evidence removed from the scene. “She was killed with this note on her, Nic. Explain that.”
I dare you.

It was written on a small rectangle of paper in neat handwriting—probably from the pad at the motel. But the ink had bled out from the rain, softening the paper, tearing it in places.

“I came home, Tyler dumped her, she blamed us both. She wasn't a nice person, Detective.”

Hannah tilted her head to the side as Detective Charles came to stand behind her. “You lied to me about your relationship with Tyler,” he said. “Either you're lying then or you're lying now. Either way, hard to believe you.”

“You lied first, Detective. Standing in my front yard, putting on this schoolboy act. Telling me you didn't want to get Tyler in any trouble. Please.”

Hannah frowned at him, then turned her attention back to me. “Explain it to me, then. Who, besides the two of you that she implicated in that note, would have a reason to kill her?”

“Oh, you don't know Annaleise very well, do you?” I asked. “Annaleise had a lot of enemies.” I turned to Hannah again. “Ask the people she went to school with. She liked to expose them, tell their secrets. Like she was daring them to do something in retaliation.
I'm sure she got tangled up in some mess she had no business being a part of. Thought she was so much better than everyone else. Break her open, just like you did to Corinne. You'll see.”

“Is that so,” Hannah Pardot said.

“Yes,” Tyler said.

Do you hear what I'm saying? She incited too much anger, too much feeling. She's not at fault, but she's hardly innocent.

Brought it on herself, you know.

“Okay, let's get down to the details then, shall we? You know how this goes.” Hannah placed the recorder between us on the table. “Where were you, the both of you, the night she disappeared?”

“Right here, cleaning the house,” I said.

“Anyone who can vouch for you?”

“Tyler. I called him, he was at the bar, and he came. Broke up with Annaleise standing right across the room from me, to do the right thing. He stayed here the whole night.”

“So you're each other's alibi, is that it?”

Tyler leaned back in his chair. “Jackson Porter was with me when Nic called. He saw me leave. Knew I was coming here.”

Hannah leaned across the table. “Your father has a gun registered in his name.”

“He does?”

“Yes. Any idea where it might be?”

“I haven't seen it anywhere.” I shrugged. “We moved him out last year. The back door lock's been broken for a while—I need to get it fixed. Someone was actually messing around in here the other day.” I stared at Detective Charles. “It could've been anyone.”

Hannah's jaw shifted. “The concrete was fresh in the garage. What were you doing in there, Nic? Tyler? I'm assuming she had help.”

“We're refinishing it,” Tyler said.

“To bring my dad home,” I added. I smiled at her. “He always liked you, Hannah.”

She frowned. “I thought you were getting married to some lawyer in Philadelphia.”

“Do you see a ring?” I asked.

She shifted in her seat. “You're filing guardianship to sell the house. We've seen the paperwork.”

My mind drifted, but only for a second. I shook my head, smiled to myself. “No, not to sell. There's no sign. It's not on the market. We have a court date for guardianship. I'm bringing him home with me.” As if this had been my plan from the start.

The distance, like time, just a thing we create.

All the pieces falling in a beautiful crescendo—lining up to bring me safely home.

Three Months Later

S
omewhere there's a storage
unit full of painted furniture. And when the money runs out and they can't reach me because I've left no forwarding address, they will auction it off or cart it out to the Dumpster in the parking lot behind the building.

That person will disappear. A ghost in their memories.

I changed my number. It's just easier this way.

The ring hasn't turned up. Maybe Annaleise's brother found it before the police swept through. Maybe her mother hid it to save her from something she didn't understand. Maybe it's buried in her purse along with everything else, wherever Daniel left it. Maybe it will turn up one day in the form of a new car, or a redone garage, or a year of college.

Nothing stays lost forever here.

THEY TOOK ANNALEISE'S LIFE
apart, put it back together again. Broke open her family and the people she went to school with, tracked
down leads from college, dug into her past. As for me, I was done talking. I didn't have to speak again. I knew that much from Everett.

Tyler stopped talking, too, and then Jackson and Daniel and Laura, until we slowly became a town without a voice. Could they really blame us after last time?

There were whispers about us. But the whispers I could deal with.

If the entirety of Annaleise's investigation existed in a box, I imagine this would be all you'd see: a folded-up letter, addressed to the Cooley Ridge Police Department; an autopsy report with the findings: gunshot wound to the chest, bled out, clean and simple; all other evidence washed away; her phone records, which Daniel explained away—
I told her to stop calling. She was harassing me
—as he rocked his baby in his arms; and lies:
He was home with me,
Laura swore.
Came home from Kelly's just after midnight. We were here together. I was up sick with heartburn from the pregnancy. He made me pasta to settle my stomach. We were here together the rest of the night.

THE HOUSE WAS COMING
along. We completed the garage first, for Dad. Sometimes I thought maybe there was nothing wrong with him—he was doing better back home, surrounded by the things he knew. But occasionally, he'd wander off, end up across town. Someone always brought him back. And sometimes he'd walk inside in the morning and sit at the kitchen table and call me Shana, like he was existing in some other time. His eyes might drift to my stomach those days, and he might say something like
I hope it's a girl this time. He needs a sister. Someone to protect. It will make him a better man.

IT WAS A WEEK
after we brought Dad home when I noticed I was four days behind on my pills. It was two weeks later when I noticed
the same nausea, the same feeling of bone-tiredness, that I'd felt in Corinne's bathroom two days before everything changed.

Tyler's been renovating room by room, making a place for us. My bedroom will be the nursery. Daniel's old room will become Tyler's office. He had to gut my parents' room before I could sleep in it—repainting it, putting in carpet and new furniture. I thought of Laura, of the hoops she made Daniel jump through, and I thought I understood.

Despite the tiredness, I still have trouble sleeping in long stretches. Sometimes I can't differentiate night and day, sleep and wake.

And sometimes the tremble comes back in my right hand. So I press it to my stomach to keep steady. I'm still scared. I feel like it's all too close to the surface. That it would take only a nudge and our fragile story would tumble down, crack open, exposing us.

But it hasn't yet.

I think we'll be okay.

HOW DO I SLEEP
at all? After everything?

I don't know who it would help at this point to tell: Corinne was beautiful, and a monster, and I loved her once. But in the end, I abandoned her, like everyone else. In the end, she made me kill her.

There. There's my confession. But she was the most deliberate person I knew—she knew what she was doing. She had to. That's how I sleep at night.

But sometimes she's all I can think about. And that night, barreling straight for me. Sometimes when I'm falling asleep, I see her eyes in the headlights, locked on mine.

On those nights, as on this one, Tyler pulls me closer, like he knows.

If there's a feeling to home, it's this. A place where there are no
secrets, where nothing stays buried: not the past and not yourself. Where you can be all the versions of you, see it all reflected back as you walk the same stairs, the same halls, the same rooms. Feel the ghost of your mother as you sit at the kitchen table, hear the words of your father circling round and round over dinner, and your brother stopping by, wishing you'd be a little better, a little stronger. Just checking in to be sure. And Tyler. Of course Tyler.

It's four walls echoing back everything you've ever been and everything you've ever done, and it's the people who stay despite it all. Through it all. For it all.

Where you can stop fearing the truth. Let it be part of you. Take it to bed. Stare it in the face with an arm tucked around you.

The truth, then.

The truth is, I'm terrified of all I have to lose and how close I will always be to losing it. But it happened before. And I survived it.

I like to believe that's what Everett saw in me and what Tyler knows. That I survive. It's only one thing. But it's also everything.

Pick yourself up.

Start over again.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to my agent, Sarah Davies, who encouraged this idea when it was just a one-sentence pitch, who offered invaluable advice along the way, and whose unwavering support and belief in this project helped bring it to life.

Thank you to my editor, Sarah Knight, who saw exactly how to make this book stronger and showed me how to get it there. I'm so grateful for your sharp eye and your insight. And to the entire team at Simon & Schuster, especially Trish Todd and Kaitlin Olson.

Thank you to Megan Shepherd, who read so many drafts of this book that I've lost count, and to Elle Cosimano, Ashley Elston, and Jill Hathaway, for all the brainstorming sessions, the feedback, and the friendship. Huge thanks also to everyone at Bat Cave 2014, for your insight and encouragement on this project.

And last, thank you to my husband, Luis; my parents; and my family, for all of your support.