All the Missing Girls (5 page)

“Okay,” I said, and from the look on his face, I wondered if I had just unintentionally agreed to something.

“I wish I could stay longer,” he said, pulling me into a kiss. “But I'm glad I got to meet your family.”

I laughed. “Yeah, good thing.”

“I'm serious,” he said. Then, lower, “They're good people.”

“Yeah,” I whispered, and I let him pull me in so tight I'd probably have indentations from the lines of his collar on my cheek. “So are you,” I said as he released me.

He dragged his hands down my arms as he backed away and lifted my left hand to his face. “I'll file a claim tomorrow.”

“It might still turn up.” I cringed. “It's probably in one of those half-packed boxes. I'll look again.”

“Let me know if you find it,” he said, pulling his suitcase behind him toward the front door. “And Nicolette?” My heart stopped, from the way he was looking at me. “If you're not home by next weekend, I'm coming back for you.”

AFTER WATCHING HIS CAB
drive off, I shut the door behind me, turned the lock, and twisted the knob to double-check. I circled the house, checking them all, closing the windows that Everett had insisted on opening, and wedging the kitchen chair under the handle of the back door with the broken lock. Everything felt slow and labored, even my breathing. It was this heat. The damn air-­conditioning unit that still wasn't fixed. I dragged myself to the kitchen—I needed a drink. Something cold. Caffeinated. I bent over and stuck my head in the fridge, debating my choices.

Water. Gatorade. Cans of soda. I sank to my knees in front of the open door, breathing in the cold air—
wake up, Nic
—as the electricity hummed in my ear and the fridge light illuminated the space around me.

There was a sudden, high-pitched cry as the chair scraped against the floor. The back door swung open as I spun around, my
back to the open refrigerator, my hands grasping for anything I could use to defend myself.

Tyler stood in the open doorway, his arms trembling, covered in sweat and dirt and something that smelled like earth and pollen. His body shook like he was wound tight with adrenaline and was fighting to keep himself still. He frowned at the chair, toppled on its side, and then scanned the room behind me.

“Tyler? What are you doing?” His brown work boots were coated in a thick layer of mud, and he braced an arm against the doorframe. I pulled myself upright and shut the fridge, and the house settled into an uncomfortable silence. “Tyler? What's going on? Say something.”

“Is anyone here?” he asked, and I knew he didn't mean just
anyone.

“He left,” I said. His arms were still shaking. “It's just me.”

He was not okay. This was Tyler at fifteen when we all went to the service for his brother, and the folded American flag was placed on his mother's lap, and he appeared to be sitting perfectly still, but if you looked closer, you could see his entire body was trembling. I was so sure he was on the edge of cracking into a thousand pieces, and all the strangers pushing closer and closer to him were making it worse. This was Tyler at seventeen on the day we got together for real, when I scraped my car door against his, and at first he looked so tense, all coiled-up adrenaline, before he noticed me holding my breath, waiting for his reaction. “Just a piece of metal,” he'd said.

“It's just us,” I whispered.

He took a step inside, and pieces of caked dirt settled on the linoleum floor. “I'm sorry,” he mumbled, seeing what he was doing to the floor.

“Where have you been?” I asked.

But he was focused on his shoes and the mud on the floor. I was
scared he was going to leave. That he'd leave and disappear and I'd never see him again.

“Here,” I said, kneeling in front of him, prying at the muddy laces of his work boots. His breathing was ragged, and up close, I could see a fine yellow powder clinging to his pants. I concentrated on keeping my hands steady, trying to settle the growing unease.
Tyler. This was just
Tyler. I had one shoe unknotted when my phone on the table rang, making us both jump. Tyler watched me move across the room while he took off his other boot.

“It's my brother,” I said, frowning at the phone display. Tyler's face mirrored mine. I held the phone to my ear.

“Nic,” Daniel said before I'd even said hello. “Tell me where you are.”

“I'm home, Daniel.”

“Are you with Everett?” he asked, and I could hear wind through the phone. He was moving. Fast.

“No,” I said. “He left. Tyler's here.” I looked over at Tyler, who had taken another step closer. He was halfway across the room, his head tilted to the side, like he was trying to hear the conversation.

“Listen to me,” Daniel said as an engine came to life in the background. “Get out.”

My stomach dropped, and I looked at Tyler's boots once more.

“Get out.
Now.
”

My hand dropped to my side. “Tyler?” I asked as the phone slipped from my hand, cracked as it made contact with the floor.
Pollen,
I thought.
Earth.

“What? What did he say?” Tyler said, his words quiet and laced with panic.

I looked at his hands, at the dirt caked under the nails, at the thin line of dried blood running between his thumb and pointer finger.

“Tyler,” I said. “What did you do?”

He leaned against a chair, his fingers pressing into the wood. “I'm running out of time, Nic.”

And then I heard it—faint and far away—the high-pitched call of a siren.

Tick-tock, Nic.

“What happened?” I asked.

He squeezed his eyes shut, and a slow tremor made its way through his body. “They found a body at Johnson Farm.”

The field of sunflowers.
Pollen. Earth.

The siren, growing insistent.

Tyler, coming closer.

And time standing perfectly, painfully still.

It's just a thing we created. A measure of distance. A way to understand. A way to explain things. It can weave around and show you things if you let it.

Let it.

The Day Before

DAY
14

T
ime had gotten away
from me. I'd been searching through the boxes of Dad's old books and teaching material while waiting for Everett to fall asleep, pulling scraps of paper from between the pages, checking the margins for comments. It must've been well after midnight, and I wasn't finding anything meaningful. Simpler and safer to trash it all. I stacked the boxes out in the hall to bring down to the garage in the morning.

The sound of rustling sheets carried through the open doorway, and I silently padded back to my bedroom in bare feet. Everett was sprawled across the middle of my bed, the yellow comforter discarded and crumpled on the floor beside him. He wasn't the deepest sleeper, but now his breathing was slow and measured. I placed my hand on his shoulder, and his back rose and fell in the same steady rhythm.

The clock on the nightstand said 3:04. Perfect. This was the empty gap—that time between when everyone went to sleep, when
the last stragglers headed home from Kelly's Pub, and the earliest risers were up, when the newspaper delivery began. The world was silent and waiting.

I left the room, stepping over the piece of flooring that squeaked, tiptoeing across the wooden floor to my parents' old room, to the bedroom closet with the worn-out slippers and ratty shoes and work clothes that my dad would never need again. I slid my hand inside one slipper, where I'd hidden the key until I could check—until I could be sure—what it was for. I felt the imprint of a foot in the matted fake fur. The key was cold in my grasp, and in the dark, I couldn't see the intricate patterns on the rectangular metal key chain. But I could feel them, infinitely swirling, closing in on one another, as I tightened my fist around it.
Tick-tock, Nic.

My sneakers waited beside the back door, and I felt a gust of chilled air brush against my arms. Everett must have opened the downstairs windows again.

I hopped on the counter and pushed the windows back down, flipping the locks.

And then I was gone.

THESE WOODS ARE MINE.

These were the woods I grew up with. They stretched from my home and wove through all of town, connecting everything, all the way down to the river and out to the caverns. It had been years, but if I stopped thinking so much and moved by heart, I could follow countless paths through them, day or night. They were mine, and I was theirs, and I shouldn't have to remind myself of it. But now there were too many unknowns. The scurrying of animals in the night, something so unsettling about the nocturnal, about things that needed the dark to survive. Things breathing and growing and dying. Everything in perpetual motion.

These woods are mine.

I ran my fingers along the tree trunks as I walked, as I repeated the words to myself. These were the woods I used to sneak through in the middle of the night to see Tyler, who'd park his truck in the lot of the convenience store and meet me halfway, at a clearing my brother showed me when I was younger. Daniel and I once built a fort there out of tree branches and lined the perimeter with thorny vines—
to keep the monster out,
he had said. The storm that had swept through when I was in middle school destroyed the fort, and Daniel was too old to care by that point, so the clearing became mine and mine alone.

But these were also the woods where Annaleise was last seen. These were the woods we searched ten years ago for Corinne. The woods we searched again last week. I was out here alone, in that empty gap of time when only the nocturnal and people craving the darkness roamed.

My flashlight skimmed over the shadows, the branches hanging low and the roots reaching up from the earth and something small and fast darting away as I approached. I stopped worrying so much about staying quiet, my footsteps growing louder as I moved faster.

I broke through the tree line, now firmly on Carter property. The studio, where Annaleise had been living while applying to grad school for the last year, was dark and set back from the main house. Neither was particularly large, but they'd been kept up well enough, if you didn't count the yard or the shingles. The main house had the outside lights on, as if they were expecting Annaleise to return at any moment.

Her place was once a stand-alone garage, before her father renovated it into an art studio years earlier—
My daughter has so much promise,
he'd told my dad. But that was before he lost his job—
downsizing,
he'd said, sitting on the back porch with my dad, drinks in hand. Before the divorce—
She gets the goddamn house; been in
my
family and she gets the goddamn house.
Before he left for a job in either Minnesota or Mississippi, I could never remember. Back when promise was a thing that felt real.

We'd almost done the same thing to our garage for Daniel, years earlier. Finding a place to live in Cooley Ridge wasn't as easy as it was up north—there's not a constant inventory of apartments turning over, and most rentals are occupied for years at a time. There were apartments over the stores on the main drag, and basements to rent out, and trailers you could lease and park on other people's land for a price. So when Daniel decided to stay, he thought converting the garage would be the cheapest option. Ellison Construction—Tyler's father's company—was going to do the job, but my dad and Daniel would help out to defray some of the cost.

They built a carport between the garage and the house before starting, and they got as far as laying a new concrete layer over the unfinished garage floor, leaving space for the pipes. But they never got to the insulation or the plumbing. Corinne disappeared, and the world halted. Daniel changed his mind about how to spend that money, opting to live with Dad until years later, when he purchased his own place with Laura.

I was guessing Annaleise knew better than to put down permanent roots in Cooley Ridge. She left once, after all. She left and came back, and I bet she and Cooley Ridge didn't know what to do with each other anymore. This apartment was hers now, but next it could belong to her brother, who was in high school.
Just for now,
I could imagine her saying any time it came up.
Just until the right opportunity comes along. Just until I find my way.

A driveway snaked from the road to the side wall, from when it was a garage. Annaleise's car and two others were lined up under the extra-wide carport beside the main house.

I kept my flashlight off as I ran the remaining distance to her back door, the teeth of the key cutting into my palm. I took a breath
and guided the key into the lock, each groove falling into place. My palm shook against the door as I turned the lock, the bolt sliding effortlessly open.

My whole body tingled with anxiety when I stepped inside.
I shouldn't be here.

I turned the flashlight back on, keeping it low, away from the windows. The place looked a little like my apartment, with half-walls to partition the rooms but no doors. There was a queen bed with a white duvet in front of me, and an art desk pushed against the other wall, the supplies organized in containers, lined up in a perfectly straight row.

Through the partition, I saw a couch across from a television attached to the wall. The whole place was sparsely furnished but expertly done. Everything was understated and minimalistic except the walls themselves. They were covered in art, in sketches, but even those looked like they were done in pencil or charcoal, the whole place completely devoid of color.

I ran the flashlight from picture to picture. Framed sketches—Annaleise's, I assumed—though some of them appeared to be replicas of famous pictures. Marilyn Monroe, looking down and off to the side, standing against a brick wall. A little girl, her scraggly hair blowing across her face. I had seen this somewhere, but I couldn't place it. And there were some I didn't recognize at all. Didn't know whether they were copies or originals created by Annaleise.

Oh, but there was a theme: Girls, all alone, all of them. Girls looking exposed and sad and full of some longing. Girls passed over, passed by, staring out from the walls:
Look. Look at us.

Girls, like Annaleise on the telephone poles, silent and silenced.

Annaleise had gone to some well-known art school, which wasn't surprising. Back in middle school she'd won a statewide photography competition, and that had made the local news. She looked the part—the girl on the other side of the camera. Timid
and fine-boned, with too-wide eyes, every move tentative, careful, deliberate. The one creating, seeing, but never seen. The opposite of Corinne.

I knew the cops had been here, but the place looked completely undisturbed.

There obviously hadn't been a struggle in the apartment. Besides, we know she went out walking. If she had been hurt, it hadn't happened here. Her purse was gone, but that could've been because she had it with her when she left. Her car was here. That was the Big Sign. Who leaves without her car? They hadn't found her cell phone, so the general consensus was that it was with her, wherever that was. And it was powered off, since they hadn't been able to trace it.

The cops had been through here, and probably her parents, though I hadn't heard a thing about any evidence or clues. But this key was something real and solid and gut-twisting. This key was dangerous.

I went through her desk. Her closet. Her bathroom cabinets. Even the garbage can, remembering the pregnancy test they'd found at Corinne's, stuffed inside the box of Skittles.

There was nothing here. A tissue, an empty stick of deodorant, the wrapper from a bar of soap. Though it was possible that someone had swept through here before the cops, cleaning up after her, saving her the embarrassment, letting her keep the parts of her that should've remained hidden.

I checked her dresser drawers. Everything neatly folded and everything hers. No men's clothes. No spare toothbrush beside the sink. No notes on her desk. Nothing at all there except the sleek laptop next to a bundle of wires. I chewed the side of my thumb. They'd probably already been through it. I could have it back before anyone noticed.
I could.

I grabbed it before I could change my mind.

I checked under her bed on the way out. There was a
suitcase—more potential evidence that she hadn't gone on a trip. And beside that, a white box that could hold a large photo album. I placed the laptop on the hard floor and slid the box out from under the bed. Lifting the top, I saw that it held the sketches that hadn't made it onto the wall.

I flipped through them rapidly, the flashlight cold and metallic between my teeth, wondering if she'd stuffed anything else amid the drawings. Something the cops missed, something she'd tried to keep hidden. But no, only art. More sad girls. Eyes open, eyes closed, all forlorn, somehow. I had to squint to see their faces, their outlines so faint. Drafts, maybe. Sketches to darken and shade and bring depth to later. All blurring together as I turned them over faster and faster.

But then I stopped, flipped back a few pictures. I took the flashlight from my mouth, ran the light over the familiar angles of the face, the curve of her smile, the freckle at the corner of her right eye. The bow shape of her mouth and the flowing peasant dress that hit just above her knees—

Corinne.

It was a sketch of Corinne. No, it was a goddamn replica of a picture that had hung in my room. We had been in a field of sunflowers. Johnson Farm. It was only a few towns away, practically a tourist attraction—people driving from hours away to take pictures there. It was Bailey's favorite shoot location.

This picture had been taken with Bailey's camera the summer before senior year. We'd taken at least a hundred shots that day, posing beside each other for so long that we forgot we were posing. Bailey liked to make us spin as fast as we could, and she'd set the camera for long exposure, and after she got the film developed, we'd look like haunting, blurred images. Like ghosts.

I never picked those pictures to keep—I hated how you couldn't tell us apart when we were spinning. I took the ones with
us smiling, frozen-faced and happy, and I hung them on my walls, like proof.

I had been in this picture, too. Corinne's eyes were closed, and she had a small smile, caught between moments. She'd been telling us a story that I could no longer remember, her hand brushing the top of a waist-high sunflower. I'd stood beside her, watching her. Laughing.

This was my favorite picture of us. But Annaleise had sketched only Corinne. She'd left me behind when she transferred Corinne, and filled the white space I'd occupied with sunflowers. I was gone, removed from the memory. An unnecessary complication, easily excised. Without me in it, Corinne looked lonely and sad, like every other girl in this box.

I moved the page aside, and there was another behind it. Another sketch of one of my pictures, this time of Corinne and Bailey and me. Again, the sketch was just Corinne, staring forlornly to the side. We'd both been looking at Bailey in the picture, at her twirling with her head back and her white skirt flying up around her dark legs. Now it was Corinne alone in a field of sunflowers.

How the hell did Annaleise get my pictures? She must've been in my house. She must've been in my
room.
Who was this girl I'd lived beside for years?

Annaleise was five years younger, and we barely noticed her back then. Noticed her even less because she was a quiet kid, and the times I remembered her, she'd been in that awkward phase between kid and adolescent, skinny and unsure of herself.

This was all I knew of her: Her parents sent her over with food for a solid three months after my mother died, and she never seemed to know what to say when she brought it over, so she never said anything at all; she didn't have a lot of friends, I didn't think, because any time I remembered seeing her, she'd been alone; she won that photography contest, but I'd known about it
only because Bailey had entered it, too; and she liked strawberry ice cream. Or she liked it enough to be eating it at the county fair ten years ago.