All the Missing Girls (7 page)

The Day Before

DAY
13

E
verett's here,” I said.
I stood facing the corner of the bathroom, mumbling into the phone, with the shower running in the background.

“Everett's where?” Daniel responded.

Steam filled the room, the mirror coated with a fine layer of fog. “
Here.
” I looked over my shoulder. “In my bedroom. I called him about Dad, and he showed up yesterday to help. He
is
helping.”

I could hear Laura in the background—something about paint fumes and pregnancy and
open the damn window,
which made me love her a little in that moment.

“Okay, good. That's good.” A pause, and I imagined him walking away from Laura. “What did you tell him?”

I cracked the door, and the steam escaped into my bedroom, wisps curling up toward the vents. Everett was still sprawled facedown on the bed; I had my money on a hangover. I eased the door
shut, walked across the tiny bathroom, out through the other door to Daniel's old room.

“I told him the truth, Daniel. That the police were trying to question Dad in the disappearance of a girl ten years ago, regardless of his mental state. He marched down to the police station
and
Grand Pines, threatening legal action if it happened again.”

“It's done? Is that it?”

“He needs to follow up on Monday. Get some paperwork from the doctor or something. But they'll back off until then.”

“So he's staying through Monday?”

“Looks that way.”

I heard Laura again:
Who's staying through Monday?
And then everything sounded muffled, like Daniel was covering the phone with his hand. He cleared his throat. “Laura wants you to bring him by for dinner tonight.”

“Tell her thanks, but—”

“Great. Six o'clock, Nic.”

I DIDN'T WAKE EVERETT
until nearly noon, and only then because his work was stacked in the middle of the dining room table and I knew he had to make up for the time lost yesterday. I nudged him on the shoulder and held the over-the-counter painkillers in one hand, a glass of water in the other. He moaned as he rolled over, his gaze roaming around my room as he tried to orient himself.

“Hey there,” I said, crouching beside the bed, trying to hide my smile. I liked Everett in the morning most of all, when he was lazy and malleable, when his thoughts lagged a few seconds behind; he always looked surprised while his mind caught up to what was happening. Before the caffeine hit his bloodstream and he sharpened into focus.

I liked him even better on the rare mornings he'd wake in
my apartment and sit up and fumble for the alarm on his phone, misjudging the distance to my nightstand, confused by the studio apartment and the painted furniture.

“Hey,” he said, then winced. He propped himself up on his elbows and downed the painkillers before flopping back onto the mattress.

“Want to sleep it off some more?”

He peered at the clock, threw an arm over his eyes. “Ugh, no.”

He'd been out for nearly twelve hours. Meanwhile, I'd been busy moving all the boxes from the dining room to the newly finished garage. Stacked them against the walls, organized them into piles:
For Dad; For Daniel; For me.

Everything else must go. And everything else was heaped in the middle of the floor in garbage bags: cookbooks and glass figurines, magazines from a year ago and floral curtains that had seen better days, old credit card notices and pens that had run out of ink.

“Coffee's downstairs,” I said. “When you're ready.”

I POURED MYSELF A
mug and stood in front of the kitchen window with the view over the back porch, straight to the woods. Everett brushed my arm, and I jumped. “Sorry, didn't mean to sneak up on you,” he said, reaching around me for the coffeepot. I brought the cup to my lips, but the liquid seemed bitter and left a foul aftertaste. I dumped it in the sink as Everett filled his cup. “I'll make a new pot,” I said.

The steam rose from his cup as he took a sip. “It's perfect. Nice view,” he said, standing beside me.

We were down in the valley, so we didn't have much of a view other than trees, but I guessed it was better than the view in the city—buildings and sky or, from my place, the parking lot. There was also the hill that rose up behind us here, with a great view into
the valley on this side, and the forest stretching to the river on the other side. I should take him there. Show him something worth seeing.
This piece of land,
I'd tell him,
it's been in my family for three generations.
It wasn't much, but Dad did have a point. Small though it was, it was ours. The Carter property jutted against ours at a stream that had dried out long ago and was now a narrow ditch that got shallower every year from leaves decaying, land eroding. The next generation would have to put up a fence or a sign if they cared to know where the line fell.

Everett didn't spend long at the window, slumping into a chair at the kitchen table and rubbing his temple as he sipped the coffee. “God, what do they put in the drinks down here? Tell me that was moonshine so I can maintain a little self-respect.”

I pulled open a cabinet, surveying the cups. “Ha,” I said. “This is the South. More bang for your buck. Not everything gets watered down and jacked up in price.” I could bring my parents' wedding china to Daniel's tonight and be nearly done with the kitchen. I could leave the money for him before he could notice and say no. And since Everett was here, that was probably all I'd be getting done anyway.

“Daniel and Laura want us to come for dinner tonight,” I said.

“That sounds great,” he said. “Would be even better if they had Internet.”

“I'm sure they do. But Laura's probably going to ask about three hundred wedding questions. Just so you're prepared.”

He tilted his head back and grinned from across the room. “Three hundred, huh?”

“The price of Internet access.”

“A fair trade, I suppose.”

He walked to the dining room, where his laptop and briefcase sat on the table. It was a tiny alcove, visible from the kitchen, where I'd been organizing and storing most of the boxes. He glanced
around the empty room. “You got a lot done. How long have you been up?”

“A while,” I called, opening the rest of the cabinets so the room seemed even smaller, the walls closing in on us. “Look around. There's still so much to do.”

“Yeah, well, I probably could've done that for you in half the time if you'd waited—”

“Everett, please,” I snapped.

He tapped his pen against the dining room table. “You're stressed.”

I grabbed a stack of plates, setting them down on the table across from him. “Of course I'm stressed. Imagine the police treating
your
father like this.”

“Okay, calm down,” he said, and I suddenly hated how practical he sounded. How condescending. He shifted in his seat, wood scraping against wood. “About your dad, Nicolette.”

“Yes?” I stood on the other side of the wooden table, folded my arms across my chest.

“I can stop people from officially questioning him, but I can't stop him from volunteering information. You get that, right?”

My stomach twisted. “But he doesn't even know what he's saying! He's borderline senile.
You
get
that,
right?”

He nodded, powered up the computer, flicked his eyes to me and back to his screen. “Is it possible he did have something to do with it?”

“With what?” I asked.

He kept his eyes on the screen. Made like he was half working, but I knew him too well. “The girl. Ten years ago.”

“No, Everett.
God,
” I said. “And her name is Corinne. She wasn't just
some girl.
She was my best friend.”

He flinched, his gaze flitting over me, as if he'd just woken up in my roomful of painted furniture. “You're acting like I should
know this, but you've never mentioned her. Not once. Don't get mad at me because you neglected to tell me.”

Neglected.
Like it was my duty. My failure. My fault. All the stories I hadn't told him: Corinne and me in the principal's office. Corinne and me in the kitchen with my mother, flour on our clothes, licking the sugar from our lips. Corinne and me in the back of Officer Bricks's car senior year, his first month on the job, trying to keep a straight face when he said,
I'm not a taxi service. Next time I'll bring you down to the station, make your parents come for you.
Nearly every story from my childhood included Corinne. And Everett hadn't ever heard her name.

Everett didn't like it when details surprised him. He was once blindsided in the middle of a trial—information his own client had kept from him—and he lost. It was an unforeseeable outcome for him, something he wasn't expecting, and it hit him with a ferocity I wasn't expecting. Behind closed doors, he became impenetrable. Closed off and borderline depressed.
You couldn't understand,
he kept saying, and he was right. I couldn't. Three days later, he started a new case, and he was back. Never mentioned it again.

If Corinne were here, she would've poked at this vulnerability over and over until she could expose it, and then it would be hers. And so would he.

I was more generous with people's flaws. Everyone had his or her own demons, including me.

“I don't know a thing about you from high school, either,” I said. “Because guess what? It doesn't matter.”

“My family wasn't part of a potential murder investigation.” He didn't look at me when he said it, and I didn't blame him.

I leaned across the table, my palms sweaty on the surface. “Oh, I get it. This would look bad for you, right? Taint your perfect family image?”

He brought a hand down on the table, harder than either of
us expected to judge from the look on his face. He ran his hand through his hair and leaned back in his seat, taking me in. “This isn't you,” he said.

It was my own fault. I wasn't sure Everett had ever got a real grasp of who I was. We started dating when I was off for the summer, so I spent most of the summer being Everett's girlfriend. I could be whatever he needed, whenever he needed it. I was the very definition of flexibility. I could bring him lunch at the office, say hi to his dad, stay out as late as I wanted, and sleep until noon. Could help his sister move apartments, browse the flea markets in the afternoon, always free by the time he got home from work, always willing to do what he wanted. By the time I went back to work the next month, we had crammed triple the time into the same amount of space.

I'd made myself small and unobtrusive, and I fit neatly into his preexisting life. One year later, and he knew things about me like a list of evidence presented in a case—everything removed from the scene, labeled and numbered in plastic bags:
Nicolette Farrell. Age twenty-eight. Father, Patrick Farrell, vascular dementia following stroke. Mother, Shana Farrell, deceased following cancer. Hometown: Cooley Ridge, North Carolina. Education: bachelor's in psychology, master's in counseling. Brother: Daniel, insurance claims adjuster.
Favorite foods and favorite shows and the things I liked and the way I liked them. My past just a list of facts, not something that ever truly existed for him.

“I didn't come here to fight,” he said.

“I know.” I took a deep breath. “Corinne was screwed up, and I missed it. Or I ignored it. I don't know. And the investigation was even more screwed up. But my dad didn't do anything.”

“Tell me, then,” he said. “Tell me the story.” When I balked, he put his hands up, as if attempting to calm me. “This is my job. I'm good at it.”

The story. That's exactly what it was now. A story with gaps
that we attempted to fill with things that made sense. A story with different perspectives and different narrators and a single girl at the center.

“We were eighteen, had just graduated.” My voice turned low, and even to me, it sounded haunting. Haunted. “It was this time of year, almost exactly ten years ago. The fair was here, just like last week. We were all at the fair that night.”

“Who's ‘we'?” he asked.

I threw my hands up. “All of us. Everyone.”

“Even your dad?”

I flashed to this image—me on the stand and Everett asking questions. Getting to the truth. “No, not my dad. Daniel. Corinne and me and our other friend, Bailey—we went together in Daniel's car. Our friends were going to be there. All of our friends.”

“And did you leave together?”

“Everett, are you going to let me tell the story, or are you going to cross-examine me?”

He folded his hands on the table. “Sorry. Habit.”

My limbs twitched. Too much caffeine. I paced in front of the table, trying to wear it off. “No, we didn't leave together. Daniel and I got in a fight. It was kind of chaotic after that, keeping up with who stayed and who left, exactly. But I left with someone else when Corinne was still there.” I shrugged. “That's my part of the story. Bailey couldn't find Corinne after, so she caught a ride home with my brother later. She assumed Corinne had made up with her ex—Jackson. But Jackson swore he never saw her that night.”

Everett took a sip of his coffee, staying silent, waiting for more.

I shrugged again. “Her mom called my house in the morning, looking for her. Then Bailey's and Jackson's. By the end of the night, we were already searching the woods.”

“That's it?”

“That's it.” You couldn't explain the rest to someone who wasn't there. Who didn't know her or us. That a story is the most simplified version of events—something to file away into a sound bite, dulled and sharpened at the same time.