All the Missing Girls (6 page)

She'd been standing by herself near the entrance as I ran from the Ferris wheel; I hadn't seen her at first. I'd seen only Tyler, waiting for me. It wasn't until Daniel hit me so hard that I dropped to my side, until I untwisted my arm and turned my head away and saw her face frozen behind a melting scoop of strawberry ice cream, her tongue still out, halfway up the cone.

I heard a fist collide with flesh—something snap—and I didn't have to look to know exactly what it was. Annaleise's ice cream scoop fell off the cone, and she ran out the front entrance. I turned my head the other way in time to see the drops of blood collecting on the ground as Daniel bent over, his hands cupped over his nose, and Tyler cursing to himself, shaking out his hand.

I slid the box back under the bed. But I folded the sketches of Corinne and tucked them inside the laptop. They were almost mine, anyway.

“NICOLETTE?” EVERETT WAS SITTING
on the side of my bed this morning as I stared at the empty space where the pictures once hung on my walls. “What are you doing?”

“Just thinking.” I opened the top drawer and pulled out a change of clothes. I'd hidden the laptop and the sketches in my dad's closet, along with that damn key, before sneaking back into bed. But his eyes had opened as I slid under the sheets, and I'd felt him staring at the side of my face as I rolled over.

“Did you sleep at all? I woke up, and you weren't here.”

“A little. I couldn't get to sleep for a while, so I did some more packing.” I walked into the bathroom and turned on the shower, hoping Everett would drop it.

“I heard you,” he said. He was standing in the doorway, watching me squeeze toothpaste on my toothbrush.

I started brushing my teeth and raised my eyebrows at him, buying myself some time.

“I heard you come in. What were you doing out there?” He gestured through the walls to the woods. Everett grew up in a city where a girl wandering the streets at night wasn't safe. Where woods were unfamiliar or dangerous or an adventure to be shared with friends and a tent and a six-pack of lukewarm beer.

I spat into the sink and said, “Just taking a walk. Clearing my mind.”

I felt him in the room, taking up space, and I held my breath. He knew how to get to the truth. It was his goddamn job. If he wanted, he could push from every different angle until I cracked in half. He was very good at what he did.

But he let it drop. “I need to spend the morning at the library,” he said. “Can I take the car?” Any time he needed the Internet, he had to go there. This house didn't even have a phone line.

“No problem. I'll drop you off.” I watched the water circling the sink drain, my mind on the other side of the trees, searching through Annaleise's drawings.

Everett was beside me then, and he pulled my chin so I was facing him, the toothbrush sticking out of my mouth. I jerked back. “What?” I said.

His hand dropped, but his gaze held, the corners of his mouth tipping down. “You look exhausted,” he said. “Your eyes are all bloodshot.”

I looked away, put the toothbrush down, and started stripping for the shower, hoping he'd focus on something else.

“You know, you can take something to help. To sleep. We'll go to the doctor tomorrow.”

In charge. Taking over. Making the plan. Averting the crisis.

The steam slowly began to fill the room. Even as he backed away, he was looking into my eyes.

I PULLED THE CAR
up to the library entrance, which looked like a library only if you knew what you were looking for. It was once a Victorian home, two stories with bay windows and a wraparound porch. It had been partially renovated—walls knocked down to open up the spaces—but the creaky stairs and heavy banister and single bathrooms remained.

“How long do you need?” I asked.

“Sorry, I'll probably be most of the day. We go to trial next week.”

“Didn't take the plea?”

He cut his eyes to me. “You're not supposed to know about that.”

I'm never supposed to know. Didn't stop me from asking, though. A few nights before I left for here, I was trying to finish all the school counselor documentation for the end of the year. I'd sat across from Everett at the table while he worked, the contents of his briefcase strewn across the entire tabletop. I'd run my fingers across his papers, the highlighted lines, the notes in the margins. “Parlito case?” I'd asked. There was a phone trace he was trying to get thrown out. And if I was reading it right, there was a proposed plea bargain.

He had grinned and stacked the papers back up. Reached under the table, at my legs resting on the chair beside him, and squeezed my calf. I ask every time. It's a game at this point. He never tells. Truth is, I love that he doesn't. That he is both good at what he does and good down to the core.

“Call me when you're ready,” I said, squinting from the glare through the windshield.

He grabbed my elbow before opening his car door. “Make an appointment to see a doctor, Nicolette.”

SOMETIMES, WHEN I'M NOT
focused, I'll end up someplace I had no intention of going. Like muscle memory. Head to the store but end up at school. Walk to the bank, end up at the subway. Drive to Daniel's but find myself in front of Corinne's old place. Which must've been what just happened, and how I ended up parked on the corner by Kelly's Pub even though I had every intention of heading home.

My eyes drifted over the storefront, over the awning, to the window a floor up with the air-conditioning unit hanging over the edge. The blinds were open.

I needed to talk to him about that key, anyway. And he wasn't answering my calls—not that I really blamed him.

I pushed through the entrance into the vestibule area of Kelly's Pub and cringed as the bell chimed overhead. At least at night, there was too much noise to notice. I could smell smoke and grease and something stale underneath as I passed the open doorway inside on the way to the narrow stairwell. “He's not here!” someone called, and the sound of laughter drifted out from the darkened room.

I took the steps two at a time to the alcove with a door on either side, facing the one on the right. I knocked rapidly three times, waited, and tried again, pressing my ear to the door. Then I called from my cell, my ear still pressed to the door, and heard the periodic vibration of his phone from somewhere inside, until the voicemail picked up:
Hey, this is Tyler. Leave a message.
Maybe he was in the shower. I tried to listen for the sound of water in pipes or any movement inside. I called again—the vibration, the voicemail, and nothing else.

Another round of laughter from downstairs. I checked the time
on my phone: one
P
.
M
. on a Sunday. The new five
P
.
M
. I used to find my dad here during summer break. But not this early. Never this early.

I turned to go, but the creeping feeling that I was being watched started at the back of my neck, worked its way down my spine. The stairwell was empty. The door at the bottom was closed. I listened for movement somewhere nearby. A shuffling in the walls. A breath in the vents. There was a shadow in the tiny strip of light escaping from the apartment door across the hall, but it hadn't moved. I stepped closer, keeping my movement as quiet as possible.

Could be the angle—sunlight and furniture—but . . . I stared at the peephole, leaning closer, my own face distorting in the reflection. Like a fun-house mirror, too-big eyes and too-small mouth and everything elongated and sickly.

I knocked once, softly, but the shadow didn't move. The tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I closed my eyes, counted to ten. This was what happened during an investigation. You felt eyes everywhere. You became suspicious of everyone. Everything fell apart if you didn't hold yourself together.
Hold it together.

I jogged back downstairs, my footsteps echoing in the hollow underneath the steps, and walked through the bar entrance. A crowd of faces I vaguely recognized glanced in my direction, and one man leaned over to say something to another. I watched his lips move—
That's Patrick Farrell's daughter
—and the other man tilted a bottle of beer to his lips.

I tried to catch the bartender's eye, but either he didn't see me or he didn't care. Probably the latter. I knocked on the bar top. “Jackson,” I said, trying to keep my voice low.

He came closer, the muscles and sinew of his forearm straining as he cleaned and stacked the dishes behind the bar, before fixing his bloodshot green eyes on me. “Yes, Nic?”

“Who lives in the other apartment upstairs?” I asked. “Across from Tyler?”

The skin at the corners of his eyes tightened as he looked me over, and he rubbed a tan hand over the dark scruff on his face. “I do. Why?”

I shook my head. “No reason.” I had to get home. Had to check the laptop. Had to get it back inside Annaleise's place before anyone went looking for it.

He narrowed his eyes as he gave my entire body a quick skim. “Sit down, Nic,” he said. “You look like you could use it.” Jackson poured a shot into a glass with lip smudge marks from the last customer visible on the rim. “Vodka, right? On the house.”

My stomach churned, and I pushed it back in his direction across the sticky surface. “I gotta go.”

He grabbed my wrist, tried to hide the grip under a playful smile. “There's a blue car,” he said, facing away from everyone. “I've seen it pass three times in the last half hour. You're not the only one looking for Tyler. He's been gone all weekend.”

Gone all weekend.
Except his phone was here. “I was just in the area,” I said.

“Sure you were.”

I wondered if Jackson knew anything more, but his face gave nothing away. He tilted his head, his fingers circling my wrist.

A man at the far end of the bar raised his glass—a friend of my dad's, or at least someone he used to drink here with. He had a sprinkling of gray hair and cheeks that burned bright red like apples. “Regards to your father, hon. Are you okay?” His eyes slid to Jackson's hand, then back to me.

“Yes. I'm fine,” I said, pulling my arm away.

Jackson frowned, downed the shot, and slammed it back on the counter. “Something's about to happen, Nic. You can feel that, right?”

Like static in the air. A net closing, a car circling. Two weeks of digging into the past, and all the lies were rising to the surface. Annaleise goes missing and the box of Corinne's evidence is shaken up, tipped over. All the names fall out again.

I was at the front door when I saw it. The blue sedan, tinted windows, rolling slowly down the block. I waited for it to pass before walking to my car.

ANNALEISE'S LAPTOP HAD NO
password protection, which I found slightly odd, but maybe not unexpected if she lived by herself in the middle of nowhere. Or maybe the police had hacked in to it, leaving it unsecured. I scanned through the folders of college projects and grad school applications, sorting by date last modified to see if there was anything new or potentially relevant. Then I did the same with her pictures.

The photos weren't sorted by anything other than date, time-stamped from as long as five years ago to as recent as three weeks ago. I lingered on one of Tyler in his truck, his mouth slightly open, his hand slightly raised:
Smile, she says. He puts a hand up to wave or to block her shot.
A frozen moment. A hundred different possibilities existing all at once. And most recently, a few shots from this year's fair. The Ferris wheel looming, empty carts, lights glowing in the dusk. A child eating cotton candy, his mouth sticky with pink sugar, the wisps of cotton melting as soon as they touched his lips. Vendors reaching with change or hot dogs, their fingers starting to unfurl, and the people on the other side looking toward their children, or over their shoulders, already half turned away.

I could picture Annaleise standing there, like when she was a kid. A bystander to the story, watching other lives play out. I closed the images and quickly scanned the files and saw the discrepancy. The image file names were in numerical order, but there were a few
jumps—a few
gaps.
The trash had been emptied. Could've been that Annaleise didn't like how they'd turned out. But I couldn't shake the feeling that someone else had been through here, checking for something he or she didn't want seen. I jotted down the date range for the missing files: a chunk from four or five months ago.

By the time Everett called to be picked up from the library, I'd searched every corner of the computer. Found the portfolios that she must've scanned in and photos of her artwork. I'd checked the list of last-visited websites, which were mostly school websites or job boards.

Where the hell are you, Annaleise?

I wiped down the keyboard and the rest of the laptop and slid her key into the front pocket of my shorts, the metal still hot from the sunlight. I'd store both in Dad's closet until it was night again, and the world was sleeping, and silent, and waiting.

I COULD PROBABLY FIT
all of my conversations with Annaleise into the span of an hour, yet I had an odd intangible connection to her, tied to my sharpest memories.

Because in that box, the one I imagined in the corner of the police station hidden just out of reach, her name will forever be tied to ours. The cops had interviewed each of us, asking us about that night—about why Daniel had a broken nose, and why Tyler had scraped-up knuckles, and why I looked like someone had knocked me around. It was Tyler who remembered. “That Carter girl,” he'd told the cops. “Begins with an
A.
She was there. She saw us.”

I imagine they questioned her, and I imagine she confirmed our story, because they never asked again.

Annaleise had been our alibi.