All the Missing Girls Read online

  “I guess I’ll be seeing you around, then.”

  He was halfway out the door already. “Anyone I know?” I asked, gesturing toward the window.

  He shrugged. “Annaleise Carter.”

  That’s why he was in the area. The Carter property backed up to ours, and Annaleise was the oldest Carter, but not as old as we were. “What is she, thirteen?” I asked.

  He laughed like he could see right through me. “Bye, Nic,” he said.

  Annaleise Carter used to have these big doe eyes, so she always looked both innocent and surprised. I saw those eyes now—saw her leaning out the car window, eyes fixed on me, blinking slowly, like she was seeing a ghost. I raised my hand—hi—and then the other—not guilty.

  Tyler got into the driver’s seat with one last wave to my window before pulling away.

  What was she now, twenty-three? She would always be thirteen to me. And Tyler would be nineteen and Corinne eighteen. Frozen at the moment when everything changed. When Corinne disappeared. And I left.

  * * *

  TEN YEARS AGO, RIGHT around this time—the last two weeks of June—the fair had been in town. I hadn’t been home for it since then. And yet for all the time and distance, this still remained my sharpest memory—the thing that came to me first, before I could push it away, any time Everett asked about home:

  Hanging over the edge of the Ferris wheel cart, the metal digging into my stomach, calling his name. Tyler down below, too far to focus on his face, frozen with his hands in his pockets as people weave around him. Watching us. Watching me. Corinne whispering in my ear: “Do it.” Bailey’s laughter, tight and nervous, and the cart rocking slowly back and forth, suspended over all of Cooley Ridge. “Tick-tock, Nic.”

  Me, climbing over the edge though we were all wearing skirts, the shift in my weight swinging the cart even more, my elbows gripping the bar at the top of the cage behind me, my feet balancing on the waist-high ledge below. Corinne’s hands at my elbows, her breath in my ear. Tyler watching as the Ferris wheel started to circle downward again. The wind rushing up with the ground, my stomach dropping, my heart racing. The ride screeching to a stop at the base and me stepping off a moment too soon.

  The impact from the metal loading dock jarring my knees as I ran down the ramp, dizzy and full of adrenaline, calling back to the worker who was yelling after me, “I know, I know, I’m leaving!” Racing toward Tyler, faintly smiling, his eyes telling me everything he wanted in that moment as he stood near the exit. An enabler. That was what Daniel called him, trying to find someone to blame other than me.

  Run, Tyler had mouthed to me. I was out of breath, not quite laughing but something close, as I raced toward him. His lips curled into one of his half-smiles, and I knew we wouldn’t make it out of the parking lot. We’d be lucky if we made it to his truck.

  But then a hand gripped me—“I said I’m leaving,” and I yanked my arm away.

  But it wasn’t security. It was Daniel. He grabbed me, solid and forceful, and hit me. He hit me across the face with a closed fist, and the impact knocked me off my feet onto my side, my arm twisted on the ground between my stomach and the dirt.

  Shock and pain, fear and shame, they all felt like the same thing in my memory, all tangled up with the taste of blood and dirt. He’d never hit me before. Not even when we were little kids, really. Ten years later and that moment hangs between us in every interaction, in every passive-aggressive text message and ignored phone call.

  And later that night, sometime between the fair closing and six A.M., Corinne disappeared, and everything that had happened that day took on new weight, new meaning. In the weeks that followed, the potential for death became palpable. It was all around us, intangible yet suffocating, existing in every different permutation of events. She could always be dead, in a thousand different ways.

  Maybe she left because her father abused her. Maybe that’s why her mother divorced him and left town a year later.

  Or maybe it was the boyfriend, Jackson, because it’s usually the boyfriend, and they’d been fighting. Or the guy she was flirting with at the fair whom none of us knew—the one at the hot dog stand. The one who Bailey swore had been watching us.

  Or maybe she stuck her thumb out for a ride home, in her too-short skirt and her long-sleeved, gauzy top, and maybe a stranger passing through town took her, used her, left her.

  Maybe she just left. That’s what the cops finally decided. She was eighteen—legally, an adult—and she’d had enough of this place.

  What happened, the cops asked, in those hours, with all of you? Lay bare your secrets, the Who and the What and the Why, between the hours of ten P.M. and six A.M. The same cops who broke up our parties but then drove us home instead of calling our parents. The same cops who dated our friends and drank beer with our brothers or fathers. And those secrets—the Where were we between ten P.M. and six A.M., the What were we doing, the Why—they wouldn’t keep with those cops. Not at the bar, not in the bed, not in this town.

  By the time the people from the state arrived to help out, it was too late. We’d already turned inward, already had our theories set, already believed what we needed to believe.

  The official line: Corinne last existed to everyone who knew her just inside the entrance to the fair, and from there, she disappeared.

  But she didn’t, really. There was more. A piece for each of us that we kept hidden away.

  For Daniel, she disappeared from outside the fair, behind the ticket booth.

  For Jackson, from the parking lot of the caverns.

  And for me, she faded to nothing from a curve of the winding road on the way back to Cooley Ridge.

  We were a town full of fear, searching for answers. But we were also a town full of liars.

  * * *

  THE CAFETERIA OF GRAND Pines is a great deception—hardwood floors and dark-linen-covered tables better suited for a restaurant instead of a long-term rehab facility. A piano in the corner, though it seems to be more for decoration, and faint classical music playing in the background during dinner. The food, I’ve heard, is the best in any rehab facility in the South—well, that’s what Daniel was told when he picked this place, as if that should make him feel better and make me feel better, by proxy. Don’t worry, Dad, we’ll visit. And the food is to die for.

  Today the nurse near reception escorted me into the room, and I caught sight of Dad at a corner table for two. His eyes slid over the nurse and me, then refocused on his fork twirling in the pasta.

  “He didn’t tell us you were coming or we would’ve reminded him to wait,” the nurse said, her mouth scrunched up in worry.

  Dad looked up as she walked me to the table and opened his mouth like he was about to say something, but the nurse spoke first, her smile practiced and contagious—my own and Dad’s stretching in return.

  “Patrick, your daughter’s here. Nicolette,” she said, facing me, “it’s been so nice seeing you again.”

  “Nic,” I said to the nurse. My heart squeezed in my chest as I waited, hoping the name caught, contagious as a smile.

  “Nic,” Dad repeated. His fingers drummed on the table, slowly, one, two, three, one, two, three—and then something seemed to click. The drumming sped up, onetwothree, onetwothree. “Nic.” He smiled. He was here.

  “Hi, Dad.” I sat across from him and reached for his hand. God, it had been a long time. A year since we’d been in the same room. Calls, for a time, when he’d drift in and out of lucidity, until Daniel said they were making him too agitated. And then just letters, my picture enclosed. But here he was now. Like an older version of Daniel but softer, from age and a lifelong appreciation for fast food and liquor.

  He closed his hand around mine and squeezed. He was always good at this part. At the physical affection, the outward displays of good-fatherhood. Hugs when he stumbled in late at night, half drunk. Hand squeezes when
we needed groceries but he couldn’t pull himself out of bed. Hand squeeze, take my credit card, and that should make up for it.

  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.