All the Missing Girls (26 page)

I ran through the rain, back into the house, pacing the downstairs. I dialed Tyler, and he answered on the first ring. “Hey,” he said, “I'm just finishing up here. I'll be over in a bit, okay?”

“Daniel lost his shit. He's digging up the garage.”

A pause, and his voice dropped lower. “He's doing what?”

“He's digging up the garage, because he doesn't know who finished the floor ten years ago.” I gripped the phone tighter, waiting for him to provide a safe explanation, an answer that made sense.

Silence.

“Was it you, Tyler? Did you lay the concrete? With your dad?”

“God, that was ten years ago. I don't really remember.”

“Well, think,” I said. “Was it you?”

I heard him breathing on the other end before he answered. “I really don't think so, Nic.”

“He's got a sledgehammer and a shovel, and he's
digging
all over the property. He's lost his mind.”

“Hold on,” he said. “I'm coming.”

I WAITED THE FORTY-FIVE
minutes for Tyler to show up so we could handle Daniel together. I couldn't go back in there and have
a real conversation with him alone—I had no idea how to talk to him about anything. He was paranoid. He was crazed. He had a sledgehammer, and I didn't know if I believed him about why he was digging up the floor.

I stood on the porch when I heard Tyler's truck. He pulled something out of the back of the truck and headed straight for the garage. I took off after him. “What the hell is that?” I asked.

He was already at the door, knocking. Daniel flinched when he opened it, scowling at me over Tyler's shoulder. “You called Tyler? What the hell, Nic?”

Then he saw what was in Tyler's hand, just as I had. A goddamn jackhammer.

“Let him finish, Nic. He already started,” Tyler said, walking into the room, his eyes slowly taking it all in, then drifting closed. “Okay. Let's do this.”

I threw my hands in the air. “You're both completely out of your minds.”

“We have to know,” Daniel said.

“No, we don't!” I said. I had my head in my hands, searching for understanding, for answers. “Why is this happening? How did this happen?”

Daniel slammed the spade into the concrete. “You're not asking the right questions. You want to know
why
and
how,
and you're getting strangled by it! Listen to what Dad's saying.
Don't sell the house.
What do you think he means? He means this. The garage floors. It wasn't me. I came in one day after, and they were just
done.
”

“That doesn't mean it was him. It doesn't mean he did it,” I said, storming out of the garage.

I slammed the door on them, the thunder directly overhead, muffling the sound of the jackhammer. Daniel had emptied the garage, and all the material sat behind it, out in the rain. The gardening supplies, the tools, the wheelbarrow.

I grabbed the wheelbarrow and pushed it back to the door, silently cursing them, and myself, and my dad, and Corinne for disappearing in the first place. Tyler and Daniel paused to stare at me when I threw open the door again. I started picking up chunks of concrete, hauling them into the wheelbarrow. “Well? What should I do with this?” I had my hands on my hips, trying to focus on the task. Just the task.

Tyler met my eyes. “Back of my truck,” he said.

I wheeled it out into the rain, lifted the tarp, and hauled the pieces underneath, my hands turning chalky, like Daniel's. When I turned back for the garage, Tyler was standing a few feet away, watching me. “You should go to Dan's place,” he said. The rain fell from his hair, soaked his clothes, came down in a torrent between us.

“Did he send you out here to tell me that?”

He stepped closer, and I couldn't read the expression on his face in the dark, in the rain. “Yeah, he did.” Another step. “Look, it might be nothing.”

“If you believed that, you wouldn't be here.”

He came closer, put a hand on the truck behind me. Dropped his head, letting out a breath I could feel on my forehead, resting his own against mine for a second. “I'm here because you called me. It's as simple as that.” And then his lips were sliding over mine in the rain, my back against his truck, and my fingers were in his hair, pulling him impossibly, desperately closer, until the jackhammer started up once more. “I'm sorry,” he said, pushing himself away. “I wish we could go back.”

My hands were shaking. Everything about me was shaking, and the rain was coming down harder.

“You really should go,” he said, striding back to the garage with his head tucked down.

I should've listened. I wanted to. I wanted nothing more.

But it wasn't fair to them or Corinne. I had to bear witness. I had to pay my debts.

THE NEXT FEW HOURS
consisted of Daniel and Tyler dislodging fragments of the floor and me moving the pieces in a wheelbarrow to Tyler's truck, all of us covered with white powder.

None of us spoke. None of us came close to touching each other again.

The floor was in pieces, and Tyler stood back, hands on his hips, breathing heavily with exertion. The earth was exposed and waiting. Tyler got a shovel from his truck, Daniel used the one in the corner, and I used the garden spade from out back, softening the earth until it crumbled, coming up in chunks.

The only sounds were our breathing, shovels hitting earth, dirt hitting dirt, and rain and thunder.

And from deep in my memory, Corinne's words in my ear, the scent of spearmint, her cold fingers, and my skin rising in goose bumps as I dug in once more, hitting something that was not earth, not rock.

My fingers reached in, touched plastic, and I jerked back. Used my shaking hands to brush aside some dirt. It was a blue tarp, like the one Tyler had in the back of his truck at this very moment.

Of course it was me.

It was me with the tiny shovel and the corner of the garage.

It was me, and it was fitting—that I should be the one to find her.

I stood too quickly, my vision swirling as I pressed myself against the wall. Tyler and Daniel had stopped, moved to see what I had uncovered. Stood around the spot I'd left. Daniel used the side of the shovel to brush more dirt off the tarp, to nudge it a bit to the side, exposing a corner of quilt.

Daniel sucked in a quick breath. “Oh, fuck.”

Blue material and yellow stitching.

My mother's blanket that she wore around her legs in her wheelchair. Long, dull hair, matted and spilling out the top.

Like whoever had put her here, in the earth, couldn't bear the thought of her being cold.

MY MOTHER DIDN'T DIE
in this house. She intended to, but I guess at one point she also intended to live. Intention is nice, but it's a thing sometimes based more on hope than on reality.

It had been winter, and with winter comes the common cold, and we all had it. My father came down with it first, which wasn't something I'd typically remember; Daniel and I had the chicken pox together, and I remembered my mother dunking us into oatmeal baths, dousing us with calamine, but I couldn't remember which of us got it first. This cold, I remember: Dad's dry cough echoing at night, and the hospital mask we attached over our mom's ears, and him sleeping on the couch. And then Daniel coming down with it, and then me, and then her.

The cold quickly running its course through all of us but becoming pneumonia for her. Packing her up to the hospital, the onslaught of fluid in her lungs and ineffectual IV treatments, and her sudden death.

She was terminal—had been terminal—and yet her death was unexpected. Caught us all unprepared. I guess I imagined last words of wisdom from my mother, something meaningful to hold on to, something worthy of a story to tell my children. Something with weight that would belong to me alone.

I felt robbed.

It was my dad's fault. Even he knew it. I suppose if I'm being honest with myself, I know that it was a virus's fault and cancer's before that. And she could've caught it from any of us. But if my
dad traced back the threads—which of course he had, as he was the type of person to follow every thread no matter what rabbit hole it led him down—it would end with him.

Maybe he knew where it came from, that virus. A student at school, a colleague from the workroom. The man behind the counter of the coffee shop, or the woman who asked for directions. Maybe he had his own point of blame. Maybe he saw this person with his girlfriend, or laughing next to his car, or staring out the window absently, and thought:
You killed my wife.
And they never knew. How many people out there are responsible for some tragedy and don't even know it?

THIS WAS WHAT I
was thinking about when I saw the quilt. This was what I did to protect myself for just one more moment. Focusing on my anger, on my mother, on who was to blame—the fault, and the suddenness, and maybe even its bitter insignificance—and not on what lay underneath the blanket.

A rustle of plastic as Daniel moved the tarp again, and then it hit me with its own suddenness.
Corinne.

I lunged outside the garage, knees in the grass and sickness in the earth. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

Daniel was standing over me, a hand on my shoulder. I shrugged him off. He dragged the hose from the side of the house, even though it was already raining, to clean up the mess. And for once, just once, I wished we would discuss what was actually happening. At least mention it. Acknowledge it.
What should we do? What?
My mouth formed the
W,
but no sound would come forth.

Daniel was already making a list:
Clean up the mess.
“We'll burn it down,” he said.

“And what,” Tyler said from inside, “get the cops here so they can find a body? Get an investigation started?”

Inside the door, in the dim light, I could just make out Tyler's profile—still staring down at the blanket, which would implicate someone in this house. And the plastic tarp, and the concrete floor, which might implicate him.

He cursed, kicking the tools on the floor. Stormed past us and tore the tarp from the top of the truck bed. He threw it over the exposed plastic, used the shovel to tuck it under at the edges. I stayed outside while Daniel helped Tyler roll the tarp up.

Daniel peeled back the corner to check and ended up in the grass beside me.

“Is it Corinne?” I asked.

He didn't answer at first, just dragged his arm across his mouth, spitting out anything left, which was answer enough. A body with long hair buried under our garage. Of course it was her. “It's her clothes,” he said, and then he gagged again, retching over the grass.

“Nic,” Tyler said, “watch the woods.”

I watched the woods. Tried not to notice the rolled-up tarp, and the blanket underneath, and Corinne underneath that, being carried from the garage to the back of Tyler's truck. Tried not to picture the girl she had been or the times I had stood in that very spot, the truth just inches below the surface.

Daniel put a hand on Tyler's shoulder. Took the keys from his grip. “Not your responsibility,” he said.

Tyler rubbed a hand down his face. “We've got work sites.”

“This won't come back to you,” Daniel said. “Thank you.”

“Daniel,” I said.

“I know plenty of places, Nic. This is my region. It's full of abandoned sites.”

We were doing this. Really doing this. Moving a dead body with no idea how it truly got there. I thought of police and lawyers and all the ways her body being under this house might get twisted around. And then I thought of Everett trying to get the phone
records thrown out in the Parlito case. “Leave your phone,” I said. “It's a GPS.”

“It's in the kitchen,” Daniel said. And then, tilting his head toward the mess, “Will you take care of this?” He looked at Tyler, since I am unreliable, apparently. Tyler nodded.

He drove away, and I began to cry, hoping the rain would cover for me.

“I need your car,” Tyler said, pretending not to notice. He kept his gaze focused on the garage as he spoke to me.

“For what?”

“Gravel. Concrete. We need to pour a new floor.”

“Shouldn't we wait until morning?”

“I don't think that's a good idea. We need to clear the area. Level it. Can you do that?”

This was a task. I could do the task. “Okay,” I said. “Yes.”

Stop crying.

Focus on the pieces of concrete. Focus on the dust. On the pressure washer. On the thunder.

Focus on the tiny insignificant details.

Leave out what's happening

Pull yourself together, Nic.

Pick yourself up and move.

Tick-tock.

The Day Before

DAY
2

I
t was just after
midnight.
A new day,
I thought. The long drive home behind me. Me and Cooley Ridge, slowly adjusting to each other once more. I'd get some sleep before sunrise and see it again with fresh eyes, and I'd do what I had to do to get Dad to talk, to remember what he'd seen. I'd come at it from a different angle. Work my way back to it. Find out what had been hiding, buried, for the last ten years. The ghost of Corinne, spinning and blurring in my mind.

I need to talk to you. That girl. I saw that girl.

I turned off the hall light, and the house was completely dark. I put my hand against the wall, feeling the familiar chips in the paint at the corners. Five steps from here to the stairs. I knew the way by heart.

Shit, the ring.
I forgot the ring again. I'd left it in the middle of the kitchen table so it wouldn't get lost amid the cleaning supplies.

Two steps back to the light switch, and the give of the floorboards
at the kitchen entrance, and the faint flickering of something out in the night. I kept the light off, took a step closer to the window.

There was a shadow moving up on the hill. I could see it because there was a light in front of it. A narrow beam cutting through the trees. I pressed my face closer to the window. It was descending the hill, and for the briefest moment my heart soared and I thought,
Tyler, like always.

But the shadow was too small. Too narrow. In my backyard, her blond hair caught the moonlight, and she flicked off the flashlight with her delicate fingers.

It occurred to me, as she stared at the darkened windows, that she couldn't see me watching her.

She had an off-white packet of some sort under her arm, and I watched her bend down, disappearing from view. Then the gentle sound of paper wedging itself under the back door. It wouldn't come completely inside, even as she tried to jimmy it a few times. She stood, and the door handle slowly began to turn.
What the
—

My hand went to the knob on instinct, pulling the door open before her. Then I hit the light switch, bathing us both in light. She jumped, gripping the envelope to her chest, her eyes wide and innocent. She blinked slowly, her face stoic.

“Hi,” I said, stepping back so she could enter. “Annaleise.”
What can I do for you?
or
What's up?
seemed inappropriate now that I realized how late it was and that she'd been about to open my back door without knocking.

She stepped inside tentatively, her fingers pressing into the envelope, her knuckles blanching white.

“Is that for me?” I asked. I saw my name in boxy print, done in a ballpoint pen. Just
Nic.
Nothing more. “Is this a ‘Back off my boyfriend' letter? Look, I could've saved you the trip. Tyler and I are done. He's all yours.”

She cleared her throat, relaxed her grip on the envelope. “No,
it's not,” she said, sliding her phone from her back pocket and resting it on the kitchen table. She sat at my table, crossing her legs, her hands fidgeting in her lap. “That's not what this is at all.” Her large eyes met mine, and her smile stretched wide, and I was taken aback—how different this Annaleise was from the thirteen-year-old girl I remembered. She pulled apart the envelope seal and flipped it over, dumping the contents on my kitchen table.

I saw the typed piece of paper first,
the cost of silence
and
the price for the flash drive
and
leave at the abandoned Piper house,
and my mind was scrambling to keep up with the dark, shadowy images strewn across the kitchen table.

“I don't understand,” I said, my hands touching the glossy surface of the rest of the sheets. Pictures. Shades of black and gray, grainy and pixelated. Everything dark. So dark. I leaned closer, could make out almost nothing but the way the light shone out of a window and the shape of the tree branches. But I knew it was my house.

“I don't— What is this?” I asked.

“Our agreement,” she said, her voice firm and measured.

I leaned closer, focusing on the backlight, the way it reflected off something—something lower, on the porch. A lump—a carpet? A blanket? There was a shadow hovering near the side of the frame. And at the edge of the blanket, something bronze and willowy. Hair.
Hair.
Bronze hair spilling out of a dark blanket. I threw the picture back on the table, jerked my hand back. “What—”

“Wrong question.
Who.
Looks to me like the body of Corinne Prescott. There's no statute of limitation on murder, you know,” she said as my face gave way to a horrified understanding. Here, finally, the answer we'd sought for so long. Here was the body of Corinne Prescott—at my house.

“And you think I—”

She waved me off with a brush of her hand. “I don't think anything. Actually, you're going to pay me not to think.”

I picked up a picture with my pointer finger and thumb, strained to see the shadow off to the side. I could make out an arm . . . a dark shadow . . . nothing more. For a moment I thought,
Daniel.
Because there was a girl's long hair and our back porch and it was dark. But it could've also been Dad—no, it could've been
anyone.
Maybe I just didn't want it to be them.

“That part would be for the police to decide,” she said, tapping the shadow in another picture.

“Where did you get these?” The room had hollowed out, and my voice sounded tinny and far away.

“I've always had them, just didn't know it,” she said. I had to struggle to focus on her words, which were slipping through the room like smoke. “I got this new camera the week before Corinne went missing. I was messing around with the settings, trying to figure out how to take pictures at night. Your house always seemed like this haunted place to me through the trees.” She shrugged. “Maybe because your mom died, but then the flowers went, too. I used to think it was contagious somehow.” Like death was leeching from the center, spreading out. “So I took these pictures that night after the fair, but I couldn't see anything. Then my senior year, I got this new software, and a new computer, and I transferred everything—about to purge these old things. But I was tinkering with the setting and the software, and look what appeared.”

As with a Polaroid picture, shadows coming to life.

“You look sick. You really didn't know?” she asked. “You never suspected?”

I
was
going to be sick. There wasn't enough air in the room. Annaleise had seen these pictures at eighteen, a dangerous age. Boys and their uncontrollable passion, impulsive and coiled to snap. Girls, with the uncontrollable yearning for something intangible. Something else.

“No,” I said, trying to get a grip. And then to Annaleise, “Get the fuck out of here.”

She tilted her head to the side. “You think I won't tell?” She picked up her phone, a mean smile on her face, her fingers flying across the keypad—

“Wait. Stop. What are you doing?”

She turned the phone around so I could see. “I went to school with Bailey Stewart's brother. Officer Mark Stewart?”

The edges of my vision turned hazy. I struggled to focus on the screen.
I have a few questions about the Corinne Prescott case. Can we set up a time to talk?

“You have until he wakes up and sees this tomorrow morning to change your mind.”

My throat burned. I stared at the images once more. This was happening. This was really fucking happening. The room was buzzing, the air electric. “How do I know you won't send these out anyway?”

“Because,” she said, “I haven't yet.”

“Yet?”

“I left these for your father years ago with this same note,” she said. She leaned forward in her chair. “And he paid. He
pays.
Why do you think he does that, Nic?”

My father had paid for her silence. Why does anyone pay? You have to pay your debts.

I picked up the note again; it trembled in my hand. “I can't pay you this much.” Ten thousand to keep quiet. Twenty thousand for the flash drive.

“Tyler said you're getting married. Said your ring was worth more than this house. Said you're a counselor at some fancy private school and you're off for the summer.”

“I don't have any money, Annaleise. I have nothing to my name. Bet I'm worth less than you, even.”

She rolled her eyes and stood, but I still had to look down at her. “You're here to sell the house, isn't that right?”

I nodded.

“I'll give you some time, then.” She slid her phone into her back pocket.

“You're fucking crazy,” I said. “Does Tyler know you're this fucked up?”

She held her hands up, like I'd done from the window as she peered at me. “I just need a way out, Nic.”

“Get a job,” I said, then remembered the money my brother had given me to help me get out. I had someone. I had help.

“Yeah, I'm working on it.” She stood at the door. “Two weeks, Nic. I'll give you two weeks.”

“I can't—”

“Really,” she said. She grabbed the ring from the center of the table. “I bet this is worth that amount alone, isn't it?” I couldn't answer. I didn't know. She slid it onto her pointer finger. “I'll keep it safe until you pay.”

“You're making a mistake. You can't take that,” I said.

She opened the door. “Call the police. I dare you. I'll hold this as insurance.”

She really was daring me.
What will you do, Nic? The past or the future? Run away again, or stay and pay your debts?

I couldn't figure out why Annaleise was doing this to me. Why she thought she
could.
She was a quiet girl, a timid girl, a lonely girl.

That's what I could see of her from the fragments of my memory.

And what must she have seen of me?

Me on the other side of the door, after my mother died, as she delivered food and I stood there, silent and broken. Me at the fair as Daniel hit me, as I remained on the ground, weak and shaken.

Sad and quiet and pushed around.

She saw me as the broken girl.

She didn't know the other parts of me. She didn't know me at all.

AFTER I HAD PARKED
Tyler's truck behind the caverns, and after he'd slid that ring on my finger and I'd crawled across his lap—

I saw Corinne. Saw Jackson's car come to a halt at the edge of the cavern parking lot, over Tyler's shoulder, through the trees.
What is it?
he'd said.
Nothing,
I'd said.
Just Jackson and Corinne. Ignore them. They can't see us.

I saw Corinne throw open the door and yell something at Jackson. Heard Jackson's muffled voice yelling something back, then him pulling away, the tires kicking up dirt. Through the woods, that's the way she'd go to my place. But she disappeared around the curve, walking down the road.

“Should we go after her?” asked Tyler, twisted around in his seat, watching the same scene.

But I was full of her words, telling me to jump, and seeing her with my brother, which seemed like the ultimate betrayal after he'd just hit me. She went to comfort him, not me. She knew, and she leaned against his side.
Ignore her,
I'd said to Tyler, turning his head to face me, and Tyler had been all too happy to oblige.

We left for home not long after. I eased the truck out onto the road, high beams on in the dark, Tyler's ring on my finger. We took the first curve, and there, thumb out, skirt blowing with the breeze, stood Corinne Prescott.

She stood at the edge of the road with nothing. She'd left her bag at my house earlier, a common Corinne maneuver to see who would pay for her. Whether she could talk the vendors into covering the cost, whether she could convince one of us. I'd paid for her Ferris wheel ticket. I'd paid for everything. Because on the tip of
Corinne's tongue was a truth I wasn't ready to share. A trump card. Emotional blackmail. A dare.

Bailey had sneaked in a few miniature vials of whiskey from her dad's collection. She pulled one out at the top of the Ferris wheel, took a gulp, passed it to Corinne, and Corinne handed it to me, her eyebrows raised. I took it from her outstretched hand, held it to my mouth, felt the burn of the liquor on my tongue, on the back of my throat. I was starting to make a decision right at that moment, as I let it slide back into the bottle instead.

She'd grinned at me. “Tyler's here,” she said, pointing him out in the crowd.

I leaned over the edge with her. “Tyler!” I called.

She took another swig, then followed it up with a piece of spearmint gum. “Truth or dare, Nic,” she said, slowly rocking the cart back and forth as Bailey giggled.

“Dare,” I said too fast. There were too many truths, too close to the surface.

“I dare you to climb on the outside of the cart. I dare you to ride it like that. On the outside.”

And then later, with her thumb sticking out, her eyes meeting mine through the windshield:
I dare you to drive on by. I dare you to pretend you don't see me here. I dare you.

Annaleise didn't know—I always took the dare.

I STILL KNEW TYLER'S
number by heart. He answered his phone, and I could tell from the low hum of noise in the background that he was at the bar. “Hey, Nic, what's up?”

The kitchen light shone off the glossy surface of the pictures, and I squeezed my eyes shut. “Did you know your girlfriend blackmailed my dad?”

“What?” he asked.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Want to know how I know? Because she just came to my house, trying to blackmail me.”

“Calm down. Hold on. What?”

“Your girlfriend! Your fucking girlfriend! She has pictures, Tyler.” I saw them again on the table, and I sucked in a sob with my breath. “Pictures of a girl. A dead girl. A dead fucking—”