All the Missing Girls (4 page)

His eyes drifted to my hand, and he tapped the back of my ring finger. “Where is it?”

Inwardly, I cringed. But I smiled at Dad, glad he'd remembered this detail. It made me happy to know he remembered things I told him in my letters. He wasn't losing his mind, he was just lost within it. There was a difference.
I
lived in there.
Truth
lived in there.

I flipped through my phone for a picture and zoomed in. “I left it at the house. I was cleaning.”

He narrowed his eyes at the screen, at the perfectly cut angles, at the brilliant stone. “Tyler got you that?”

My stomach dropped. “Not Tyler, Dad. Everett.”

He was lost again, but he wasn't wrong. He was just somewhere else. A decade ago. We were kids. And Tyler wasn't asking me to marry him, exactly—he was holding it out like a request.
Stay,
it meant.

And this ring meant . . . I had no idea what this ring meant. Everett was thirty, and I was closing in on thirty, and he'd proposed on his thirtieth birthday, a promise that I wasn't wasting his time and he wasn't wasting mine. I'd said yes, but that was two months ago, and we hadn't discussed a wedding, hadn't gone over the logistics of moving in together when my lease was up. It was an
eventually.
A
plan.

“Dad, I need to ask you something,” I said.

His eyes drifted to the papers sticking out of my bag, and his fingers curled into fists. “I already told him, I'm not signing any papers. Don't let your brother sell the house. Your grandparents bought that land. It's
ours.
”

I felt like a traitor. That house was going to get sold one way or the other.

“Dad, we have to,” I said softly.
You're out of money. You spent it indiscriminately on God knows what.
There was nothing left. Nothing
but the money tied up in the concrete slab and four walls and the unkempt yard.

“Nic, really, what would your mother think?”

I was already losing him. He'd soon disappear into another time. It always started like this, with my mother, as if conjuring her into thought would suck him under to a place where she still existed.

“Dad,” I said, trying to hold him here, “that's not why I came.” I took a slow breath. “Do you remember sending me a letter a few weeks ago?”

He drummed his fingers on the table. “Sure. A letter.” A stall tactic—I could feel him grasping, trying to remember.

I pulled out the paper, unfolded it on the table between us, saw his eyes narrow at the page. “You sent this to me.”

His gaze lingered on the words before he looked up, his blue eyes watery, slippery as his thoughts.
That girl. I saw that girl.

I heard my heartbeat in my head, like her name, knocking around. “Who did you mean? Who did you see?”

He looked around the room. Leaned closer. His mouth opening and closing twice before the name slipped through in a whisper. “The Prescott girl.”

I felt all the hairs, one at a time, rise on the back of my neck. “Corinne,” I said.

He nodded. “Corinne,” he said, as if he'd found something he was looking for. “Yes. I saw her.”

I looked around the cafeteria, and I leaned closer to him. “You saw her? Here?” I tried to picture the ghost of her drifting through these halls. Or her heart-shaped face and bronze hair, the amber eyes and the bow lips—what she'd look like ten years later. Slinging an arm around me, pressing her cheek against mine, confessing everything in a whisper just for me:
Best practical joke ever, right? Aw, come on, don't be mad. You know I love you.

Dad's eyes were far off. And then they sharpened again, taking
in his surroundings, the papers in my bag, me. “No, no, not here. She was at the house.”

“When, Dad. When?” She disappeared right after graduation. Right before I left. Ten years ago . . . The last night of the county fair.
Tick-tock, Nic.
Her cold hands on my elbows, the last time I touched her.

Not a sighting since.

We stapled her yearbook picture to the trees. Searched the places we were scared to search, looking for something we were scared to find. We looked deep into each other. We unearthed the parts of Corinne that should've remained hidden.

“I should ask your mom . . .” His eyes drifted again. He must've been pulling a memory from years ago. From before Corinne disappeared. From before my mother died. “She was on the back porch, but it was just for a moment . . .” His eyes went wide. “The woods have
eyes,
” he said.

Dad was always prone to metaphor. He'd spent years teaching philosophy at the community college. It was worse when he was drinking—he'd pull on lines from a book, reordered to suit his whim, or recite quotes out of context from which I'd desperately try to find meaning. Eventually, he'd laugh, squeezing my shoulder, moving on. But now he would get lost in the metaphor, never able to pull himself back out. His moment of lucidity was fading.

I leaned across the table, gripping his arm until he focused on my words. “Dad,
Dad,
we're running out of time. Tell me about Corinne. Was she looking for me?”

He sighed, exasperated. “Time isn't running out. It's not even
real,
” he said, and I knew I had lost him—
he
was lost, circling in his own mind. “It's just a measure of distance we made up to understand things. Like an inch. Or a mile.” He moved his hands as he spoke, to accentuate the point. “That clock,” he said, pointing behind him. “It's not measuring time. It's creating it. You see the difference?”

I stared at the clock on the far wall, at the black second hand moving, moving, always moving. “And yet I keep getting older,” I mumbled.

“Yes, Nic, yes,” he said. “You change. But the past, it's still there. The only thing moving is you.”

I felt like a mouse in a wheel, trying to have a conversation with him. I had learned not to argue but to wait. To avoid agitation, which would quickly slide into disorientation. I'd try again tomorrow, from a different angle, a different moment. “Okay, Dad. Hey, I gotta get moving.”

He pulled back and looked at me, his eyes roaming across my face. I wondered what version of me he was seeing—his daughter or a stranger. “Nic, listen,” he said. I heard the ticking of the clock.
Tick-tock, Nic.

He drummed his fingers on the table between us, twice as fast as the clock. There was a crash from the other side of the room, and I twisted in my chair to see a man picking up a tray of dishes he must've dropped while clearing tables. I turned back to Dad, who was focused on his plate, twirling his pasta, as if the last few minutes hadn't existed.

“You really should try the pasta,” he said. He grinned, warm and distant.

I stood, stacked the edges of the paper against the table, matched his warm, distant smile. “It was really good to see you, Dad,” I said. I walked around the table, hugged him tight, felt him hesitate before bringing his hand up to my arm and squeezing me back.

“Don't let your brother sell the house,” he said, the conversation in a loop, beginning anew.

THE PORCH LIGHT WAS
on and the sky almost dark, and I had a message from Daniel when I parked the car in the gravel driveway.
He'd be back in the morning, and I should call if I needed anything, if I changed my mind and wanted to stay with him and Laura.

Sitting in my car, watching the lantern move with the wind, the light casting shadows across the front of the house, I thought about it. Thought about driving straight across town and pulling out the blow-up mattress in the unused nursery. Because I could see us, the shadows of us, a decade ago, telling ghost stories on that porch with the dancing light.

Corinne and Bailey rapt with attention as Daniel told them how there was a monster in the woods—that it wasn't a thing they could see but a thing they could feel. That it took people over, made them do things. I could hear that version of me in my own head, saying he was full of shit. And Corinne tilting her head at Daniel and leaning back against the porch railing, sticking out her chest, placing her foot against a slat of wood, bending one of her long legs, and saying,
What would it make
you
do
? Always pushing us. Always pushing.

I hated that the ghosts of us lived here, always. But Laura was almost due, and there wasn't a place for me there, and even though Daniel had offered, it was implied that I would say no. I had a house here, a room here, space here. I wasn't his responsibility anymore.

I pushed the front door open and heard another door catch at the other end of the house, as if I had disturbed the balance of it.

“Hello?” I called, frozen in place. “Daniel?”

Nothing but the evening wind shaking the panes of glass in a familiar rattle. A breeze, thank God.

I flipped the wall light switches as I walked toward the kitchen at the back of the house, half of them working, half not.

Daniel wasn't here. Nobody was here.

I turned the deadbolt, but the wood around it was rotted and splintered, the bolt cutting through the frame whether it was locked or not. Everything looked as I'd left it: a box on the table, a used glass in the sink, everything coated in a fine layer of dust.

The ring.
I took the steps two at a time and went straight for the nightstand, my fingers trembling as I reached inside the ceramic bowl, frantic heartbeats until my finger brushed metal.

The ring was there. It was fine. I slid it back on my finger and ran my shaking hand through my hair.
Everything's fine. Breathe.

The bed was still bare, but the sheets were folded and stacked on top, the way Daniel used to leave them when he started taking over for the things Mom couldn't do. I moved the shoe boxes back to the closet and the rug back under the legs of the bed. I centered the jewelry box under the mirror, a dust-free square where it had sat for the last year, at least. Everything resettling. Realigning.

I felt the memories doing the same. Falling back into place. The investigation. All I'd left behind, neatly boxed away for ten years.

I looked around my room and saw the rectangles of discolored paint. I closed my eyes and saw the pictures that had hung in each spot.

My stomach churned, unsettled. Corinne had been in every one.

A coincidence,
I thought. Corinne was so wrapped up in my childhood, I could probably find her shadow in anything here if I went looking for it.

I needed to find out what thought had surged and then faltered, driving Dad to a sheet of paper and an envelope with my name. What memory had been flickering from the dying portion of his brain, begging for attention before it faded away for good. Corinne.
Alive.
But when? I had to find out.

Everything was stuck here. Waiting for someone to step in and reorder the evidence, the stories, the events—until they came together in a way that made sense.

In that way, Dad was right. About time. About the past being alive.

I walked down the wooden steps into the kitchen, the linoleum shrinking away from the corners. And imagined, for a moment,
catching sight of a girl with long bronze hair, her laughter echoing through the night as she skipped up the steps of the back porch—

Tick-tock, Nic.

I had to focus, make sense of this house, and get out. Before the past started creeping out from the walls, whispering from the grates. Before it unpacked itself from that box, layer after layer, all the way back to the start.

PART 2

Going Back

It is quite true what philosophy says; that life must be understood backwards.

—SØREN KIERKEGAARD

Two Weeks Later

DAY
15

I
f I kept my
eyes closed, I could almost imagine that we were driving back to Philadelphia. Everett in the driver's seat and the backseat full of luggage and Cooley Ridge fading away in the rearview mirror—no missing girls; no unmarked cars circling town; nothing at all to fear.

“You okay?” he asked.

Just one more moment.
I wanted more time. Another minute to pretend this wasn't happening.

Not here in Cooley Ridge. Not again.

Not another girl fading away in these woods in the middle of the night, disappearing without a trace. Not another missing poster stapled to the trees, hung in the storefront windows—another innocent face, asking to be found.
Please, not like this.

But the back of my neck prickled as the world shifted into focus, and there she was, inescapable, her huge blue eyes staring out from under the red
MISSING
letters of the poster on the telephone pole: Annaleise Carter. Gone.

“Nic?” Everett said. God, a few days in this place, and apparently, he's calling me Nic, too. It got its claws in him already.

“Yeah,” I said, still looking out the window.

My eyes caught hers again at the next stoplight, her face under the white painted letters of Julie's Boutique, right next to a display of handmade jewelry and a green silk scarf. Annaleise Carter, whose property backed to my own, who had been dating my ex-boyfriend the night she disappeared. Annaleise Carter, gone and missing for two weeks.

“Hey.” Everett's hand hovered over my shoulder before he pressed down and squeezed. “You with me?”

“Sorry, I'm fine.” I turned toward Everett, but I felt her gaze on the back of my neck, like she was trying to tell me something.
Look. Look closer. Do you see?

“I'm not leaving until I know you're okay.” His hand rested on my shoulder, his silver watch—steel, he'd told me—peeking out from his long-sleeved button-down. How was he not sweltering?

“I thought that was the purpose of the appointment.” I raised the paper prescription bag at Everett. “I'll take two and call you in the morning.” I mustered a smile, but his expression tightened as his eyes settled on my bare finger. I dropped my hand back to my lap. “I'll find the ring,” I said.

“I'm not worried about the ring. I'm worried about
you.
”

Maybe he was talking about the way I looked: hair thrown back in a messy ponytail; shorts that had fit two weeks ago but were now hanging off my hip bones; an old T-shirt I'd found in my closet where it had been hanging for the last ten years. Meanwhile, his hair was cut and styled, and he was dressed for work like this was all part of the agenda:
Take Nicolette to the doctor because she hasn't been sleeping; follow up on paperwork re: future father-in-law; take cab to airport and prepare for trial.

“Everett, honestly, I'm fine.”

He reached over and brushed back the wisps of hair that had escaped my ponytail. “Really?” he said.

“Yes, really.” My eyes burned as they drifted back to Annaleise's picture. Only a sane person would realize how close he or she was to the edge. Not like my dad, who didn't know when he was teetering too close to that chasm, didn't seem to notice the change in velocity as he went tumbling into the abyss.

But I knew. I knew how close we all were to that edge. And if I knew, then I was fine. Those were the basic rules of holding one's shit together, according to Tyler.

“Nicolette, I don't want to leave you here alone.” A car behind us laid on the horn, and Everett jumped, revving the motor of my car as he sped through the green light.

I stared at the side of his face, watched the road blur past behind him. “I'm not alone. My brother's here.”

Everett sighed, and I could hear the argument in his silence.

Missing girls had a way of working their way into someone's head. You couldn't help but see them in everyone—how temporary and fragile we might be. One moment here, and the next, nothing more than a photo staring from a storefront window.

It was a feeling that settled in your ribs and slowly gnawed at you from the inside—the irrational fear that people were slipping away right before your eyes. I felt it, lingering just under the surface, in the haunting monotone of Tyler's voicemail recording, and in Daniel's increasingly unreadable expression. I felt it with greater urgency every time I walked into Grand Pines. Two weeks back in Cooley Ridge and everyone in danger of disappearing.

Everett pulled into the gravel driveway, parked, and got out of the car without speaking. He was staring at the front of the house, like I'd done when I first arrived home.

“I need to get my dad out of Grand Pines,” I said, walking toward him. Everett had stopped the cops from questioning Dad for
the time being, but I knew it was only a matter of time before his ramblings about “that girl” earned him another visit from detectives desperate for a lead.

Everett put a hand around my waist as we walked inside. I felt him grasping the loose fabric of my shirt between his fingers. “You need to take care of yourself right now. The doctor said—”

“The doctor said there's nothing
wrong
with me.”

Everett had insisted on coming into the exam room with me. First the doctor asked about my family history, which was depressing but unrelated. Then came the
When did it start
question, and Everett answering about Annaleise—my
neighbor
—who went missing, and the doctor nodding like he understood.
Stress. Fear. Either. Both.
He scribbled a prescription for some anti-anxiety medicine and a sleeping aid and issued a warning about my mind getting duller, slower, if I didn't start getting some more sleep. And the elevated risk for daytime blackouts the longer this went on, which was how Everett ended up with my keys.

You try sleeping,
I wanted to tell the doctor.
You try sleeping when there's another missing girl and the police are trying to question your father, whether he's in his right mind or not. You try sleeping when you know someone has been in your house.
As if everything would settle down if I could just
relax.

Everett was still holding me like I might float off into the atmosphere otherwise. “Come home with me,” he said. But where was home, really?

“I can't. My dad—”

“I'll take care of it.”

I knew he would. It was why he was here. “The house,” I said, gesturing to the broken-down boxes in the corners, the back door that needed fixing, all the items on my list that I hadn't tackled.

He shook his head. “I'll pay to have someone help finish up. Come on, you don't need to be here.”

But I shook my head again. It wasn't the organizing, or the fixing, or the cleaning. Not anymore. “I can't just leave. Not in the middle of this.”
This
being the wide eyes of the girl in the poster, watching us all, on every telephone pole, in every store window.
This
being the investigation, just beginning.
This
being the darkest parts of my family about to be broken open yet again.

Everett sighed. “You called me for advice, and here it is: It's not safe for you here. This place, the cops are circling it like goddamn vultures, grasping anything they can. They're interviewing people without cause. It doesn't make sense, but it doesn't change the fact that it's happening.”

Everett didn't get why, but I did: Annaleise had sent a text to Officer Stewart's personal cell the night before she disappeared, asking if he could answer some questions about the Corinne Prescott case. His return call the next day went straight to voicemail. By then she was already gone.

The cops were all from around here, had been here ten years ago when Corinne disappeared. Or they'd heard the stories through the years, over drinks at the bar. Now there were two girls, barely adults, disappearing without a trace from the same town. And the last-known words from Annaleise were about Corinne Prescott.

It made perfect sense if you came from a place like Cooley Ridge.

If the entirety of Corinne's official investigation existed inside that single box I pictured at the police station, I'd imagine this was all the evidence you would see: one pregnancy test, stuffed into a box of candy and hidden at the bottom of the trash can; one ring with remnants of blood pulled from the caverns; cassette tapes with hours of interview reports to sort through—facts and lies and half-truths, wound up in a spool; Corinne's phone records; and names. Names scrawled on ripped-up pieces of paper, enough pieces to pad the entire box, like stuffing.

Until recently, I imagined that this box was taped up and hidden in a corner, behind other, newer boxes. But now there's the feeling that all it would take is a simple nudge for it to topple over, and the lid to fall free, and the names to scatter across the dusty floor. The box is exactly like it is in Cooley Ridge. The past, boxed up and stacked out of sight. But never too far away.

Open the top because Annaleise mentioned Corinne's name and disappeared. Close your eyes and reach your hand inside. Pull out a name.

That's how it works here.

That's what's happening.

Yes, I had called Everett for advice. For my
dad.
He could've told me what to do about the cops who were ambushing my senile father at his nursing home, but he hopped a plane three days ago and paid a ridiculous amount of cab fare and set up his own base of operations in the dining room. He showed up at this house and stood on the front porch because he said I'd scared him, and I loved him for it. I loved that he came. But I couldn't dig through our history with him here. Couldn't figure out what the hell had happened to Annaleise without dragging him into it.

My advice to him:
Leave. Leave before we pull you down with us.

“It's my family,” I said.

“I don't want you staying here,” he whispered, pointing to the backyard that stretched as far as we could see, disappearing into the trees. “A girl went missing from right there.”

“I'll take that prescription, and I'll try to sleep more, I promise. But I have to stay.”

He kissed my forehead and mumbled into my hair, “I don't know why you're doing this.”

Wasn't it obvious? She was everywhere I looked. On every telephone pole. In every store window. The same places I'd hung posters of Corinne, stapling them with a knot in my stomach, handing
them out faster and faster, as if my speed could somehow change the outcome.

Annaleise on those posters now, with her huge, open eyes, telling me to open mine. Everywhere I looked, there she was.
Look. Look. Keep your eyes open.

THE TAXI COMPANY SAID
a car would arrive in twenty minutes, but I guessed it would be more like forty. Everett was leaning against the laundry room doorjamb, watching me dump his clothes from the dryer into the warped plastic bin with half a smile on his face. “You don't have to do that, Nicolette.”

I cleared my throat and balanced the laundry basket on my hip. “I want to,” I said. I wanted to fold his clothes and pack them up and kiss him goodbye. I wanted him to get home and open his suitcase and think of me. But I also just wanted him to go.

He watched me fold his clothes into perfect squares on the dining room table. And then he watched me stack them in his suitcase, as if performing a delicate surgery. “See if you can break your lease,” he said, striding toward me, wrapping his arms around my waist as I folded his last shirt. He brushed my ponytail to the side and put his lips against my neck. “I want you living with me as soon as you're back.”

I nodded and kept my arms moving. It should be easy for me to say,
Yes, of course, yes.
It should be easy for me to envision: me, with my clothes taking up half his closet; us, cooking together in his kitchen, curled up on his couch with the red throw blanket over my legs because he kept the temperature about five degrees cooler than I liked it. Him, talking about court. And me, talking about my students as I poured two glasses of wine.

“What's the matter?” Everett asked.

“Nothing. Just thinking of everything I need to do here first.”

“Do you need anything?” he asked, stepping back. He cleared his throat, tried to make his voice seem natural. “Money?”

I flinched. He'd never offered me money. We'd never even talked about money. He had it and I didn't, which meant we circled the topic like a fire that could quickly burn out of control and consume us both. It was why I never brought up the wedding, because then he'd have to mention the prenup that I knew his dad would demand I sign, and I would, but there it would be, out in the open, ready to burn. “No, I don't need your money,” I said.

“That's not what I— Nicolette, I just meant I can help. Please let me help.”

He'd told me, back when we first met, that I was the embodiment of everything he wished he could be. Setting out in a car by myself, working my way through school, self-made.

But as I'd told him back then, you have to come from nothing to have that chance. You have to pay your debts.

“Yeah, well, I have ten years' worth of loans,” I'd said.

Sometimes I wondered if, when we got married, he would pay them off. If that would make me a different person. If he'd like me quite as much.

“Everett, thank you, but money isn't going to help.” I zipped up his suitcase and leaned it against the wall.

I heard a car turn off the road in the distance. “Your cab's here,” I whispered, bringing my arms around his waist and resting my head against his chest again.

“Think about it?” he asked, pulling back. I wasn't sure which he was referring to—moving in with him or taking his money—and I hated that he was bringing both up right
now.
That it took this—seeing me here, hovering near some indefinable edge—that made him seem to want me more.