All the Missing Girls

by Megan Miranda

  I looked around my room and saw the rectangles of discolored paint. I closed my eyes and saw the pictures that had hung in each spot.

  My stomach churned, unsettled. Corinne had been in every one.

  A coincidence, I thought. Corinne was so wrapped up in my childhood, I could probably find her shadow in anything here if I went looking for it.

  I needed to find out what thought had surged and then faltered, driving Dad to a sheet of paper and an envelope with my name. What memory had been flickering from the dying portion of his brain, begging for attention before it faded away for good. Corinne. Alive. But when? I had to find out.

  Everything was stuck here. Waiting for someone to step in and reorder the evidence, the stories, the events—until they came together in a way that made sense.

  In that way, Dad was right. About time. About the past being alive.

  I walked down the wooden steps into the kitchen, the linoleum shrinking away from the corners. And imagined, for a moment, catching sight of a girl with long bronze hair, her laughter echoing through the night as she skipped up the steps of the back porch—

  Tick-tock, Nic.

  I had to focus, make sense of this house, and get out. Before the past started creeping out from the walls, whispering from the grates. Before it unpacked itself from that box, layer after layer, all the way back to the start.

  PART 2

  Going Back

  It is quite true what philosophy says; that life must be understood backwards.

  —SØREN KIERKEGAARD

  Two Weeks Later

  DAY 15

  If I kept my eyes closed, I could almost imagine that we were driving back to Philadelphia. Everett in the driver’s seat and the backseat full of luggage and Cooley Ridge fading away in the rearview mirror—no missing girls; no unmarked cars circling town; nothing at all to fear.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  Just one more moment. I wanted more time. Another minute to pretend this wasn’t happening.

  Not here in Cooley Ridge. Not again.

  Not another girl fading away in these woods in the middle of the night, disappearing without a trace. Not another missing poster stapled to the trees, hung in the storefront windows—another innocent face, asking to be found. Please, not like this.

  But the back of my neck prickled as the world shifted into focus, and there she was, inescapable, her huge blue eyes staring out from under the red MISSING letters of the poster on the telephone pole: Annaleise Carter. Gone.

  “Nic?” Everett said. God, a few days in this place, and apparently, he’s calling me Nic, too. It got its claws in him already.

  “Yeah,” I said, still looking out the window.

  My eyes caught hers again at the next stoplight, her face under the white painted letters of Julie’s Boutique, right next to a display of handmade jewelry and a green silk scarf. Annaleise Carter, whose property backed to my own, who had been dating my ex-boyfriend the night she disappeared. Annaleise Carter, gone and missing for two weeks.

  “Hey.” Everett’s hand hovered over my shoulder before he pressed down and squeezed. “You with me?”

  “Sorry, I’m fine.” I turned toward Everett, but I felt her gaze on the back of my neck, like she was trying to tell me something. Look. Look closer. Do you see?

  “I’m not leaving until I know you’re okay.” His hand rested on my shoulder, his silver watch—steel, he’d told me—peeking out from his long-sleeved button-down. How was he not sweltering?

  “I thought that was the purpose of the appointment.” I raised the paper prescription bag at Everett. “I’ll take two and call you in the morning.” I mustered a smile, but his expression tightened as his eyes settled on my bare finger. I dropped my hand back to my lap. “I’ll find the ring,” I said.

  “I’m not worried about the ring. I’m worried about you.”

  Maybe he was talking about the way I looked: hair thrown back in a messy ponytail; shorts that had fit two weeks ago but were now hanging off my hip bones; an old T-shirt I’d found in my closet where it had been hanging for the last ten years. Meanwhile, his hair was cut and styled, and he was dressed for work like this was all part of the agenda: Take Nicolette to the doctor because she hasn’t been sleeping; follow up on paperwork re: future father-in-law; take cab to airport and prepare for trial.

  “Everett, honestly, I’m fine.”

  He reached over and brushed back the wisps of hair that had escaped my ponytail. “Really?” he said.

  “Yes, really.” My eyes burned as they drifted back to Annaleise’s picture. Only a sane person would realize how close he or she was to the edge. Not like my dad, who didn’t know when he was teetering too close to that chasm, didn’t seem to notice the change in velocity as he went tumbling into the abyss.

  But I knew. I knew how close we all were to that edge. And if I knew, then I was fine. Those were the basic rules of holding one’s shit together, according to Tyler.

  “Nicolette, I don’t want to leave you here alone.” A car behind us laid on the horn, and Everett jumped, revving the motor of my car as he sped through the green light.

  I stared at the side of his face, watched the road blur past behind him. “I’m not alone. My brother’s here.”

  Everett sighed, and I could hear the argument in his silence.

  Missing girls had a way of working their way into someone’s head. You couldn’t help but see them in everyone—how temporary and fragile we might be. One moment here, and the next, nothing more than a photo staring from a storefront window.

  It was a feeling that settled in your ribs and slowly gnawed at you from the inside—the irrational fear that people were slipping away right before your eyes. I felt it, lingering just under the surface, in the haunting monotone of Tyler’s voicemail recording, and in Daniel’s increasingly unreadable expression. I felt it with greater urgency every time I walked into Grand Pines. Two weeks back in Cooley Ridge and everyone in danger of disappearing.

  Everett pulled into the gravel driveway, parked, and got out of the car without speaking. He was staring at the front of the house, like I’d done when I first arrived home.

  “I need to get my dad out of Grand Pines,” I said, walking toward him. Everett had stopped the cops from questioning Dad for the time being, but I knew it was only a matter of time before his ramblings about “that girl” earned him another visit from detectives desperate for a lead.

  Everett put a hand around my waist as we walked inside. I felt him grasping the loose fabric of my shirt between his fingers. “You need to take care of yourself right now. The doctor said—”

  “The doctor said there’s nothing wrong with me.”

  Everett had insisted on coming into the exam room with me. First the doctor asked about my family history, which was depressing but unrelated. Then came the When did it start question, and Everett answering about Annaleise—my neighbor—who went missing, and the doctor nodding like he understood. Stress. Fear. Either. Both. He scribbled a prescription for some anti-anxiety medicine and a sleeping aid and issued a warning about my mind getting duller, slower, if I didn’t start getting some more sleep. And the elevated risk for daytime blackouts the longer this went on, which was how Everett ended up with my keys.

  You try sleeping, I wanted to tell the doctor. You try sleeping when there’s another missing girl and the police are trying to question your father, whether he’s in his right mind or not. You try sleeping when you know someone has been in your house. As if everything would settle down if I could just relax.

  Everett was still holding me like I might float off into the atmosphere otherwise. “Come home with me,” he said. But where was home, really?

  “I can’t. My dad—”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  I knew he would. It was why he was here. “The house,” I said, gesturing
to the broken-down boxes in the corners, the back door that needed fixing, all the items on my list that I hadn’t tackled.

  He shook his head. “I’ll pay to have someone help finish up. Come on, you don’t need to be here.”

  But I shook my head again. It wasn’t the organizing, or the fixing, or the cleaning. Not anymore. “I can’t just leave. Not in the middle of this.” This being the wide eyes of the girl in the poster, watching us all, on every telephone pole, in every store window. This being the investigation, just beginning. This being the darkest parts of my family about to be broken open yet again.

  Everett sighed. “You called me for advice, and here it is: It’s not safe for you here. This place, the cops are circling it like goddamn vultures, grasping anything they can. They’re interviewing people without cause. It doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s happening.”

  Everett didn’t get why, but I did: Annaleise had sent a text to Officer Stewart’s personal cell the night before she disappeared, asking if he could answer some questions about the Corinne Prescott case. His return call the next day went straight to voicemail. By then she was already gone.

  The cops were all from around here, had been here ten years ago when Corinne disappeared. Or they’d heard the stories through the years, over drinks at the bar. Now there were two girls, barely adults, disappearing without a trace from the same town. And the last-known words from Annaleise were about Corinne Prescott.

  It made perfect sense if you came from a place like Cooley Ridge.

  If the entirety of Corinne’s official investigation existed inside that single box I pictured at the police station, I’d imagine this was all the evidence you would see: one pregnancy test, stuffed into a box of candy and hidden at the bottom of the trash can; one ring with remnants of blood pulled from the caverns; cassette tapes with hours of interview reports to sort through—facts and lies and half-truths, wound up in a spool; Corinne’s phone records; and names. Names scrawled on ripped-up pieces of paper, enough pieces to pad the entire box, like stuffing.

  Until recently, I imagined that this box was taped up and hidden in a corner, behind other, newer boxes. But now there’s the feeling that all it would take is a simple nudge for it to topple over, and the lid to fall free, and the names to scatter across the dusty floor. The box is exactly like it is in Cooley Ridge. The past, boxed up and stacked out of sight. But never too far away.

  Open the top because Annaleise mentioned Corinne’s name and disappeared. Close your eyes and reach your hand inside. Pull out a name.

  That’s how it works here.

  That’s what’s happening.

  Yes, I had called Everett for advice. For my dad. He could’ve told me what to do about the cops who were ambushing my senile father at his nursing home, but he hopped a plane three days ago and paid a ridiculous amount of cab fare and set up his own base of operations in the dining room. He showed up at this house and stood on the front porch because he said I’d scared him, and I loved him for it. I loved that he came. But I couldn’t dig through our history with him here. Couldn’t figure out what the hell had happened to Annaleise without dragging him into it.

  My advice to him: Leave. Leave before we pull you down with us.

  “It’s my family,” I said.

  “I don’t want you staying here,” he whispered, pointing to the backyard that stretched as far as we could see, disappearing into the trees. “A girl went missing from right there.”

  “I’ll take that prescription, and I’ll try to sleep more, I promise. But I have to stay.”

  He kissed my forehead and mumbled into my hair, “I don’t know why you’re doing this.”

  Wasn’t it obvious? She was everywhere I looked. On every telephone pole. In every store window. The same places I’d hung posters of Corinne, stapling them with a knot in my stomach, handing them out faster and faster, as if my speed could somehow change the outcome.

  Annaleise on those posters now, with her huge, open eyes, telling me to open mine. Everywhere I looked, there she was. Look. Look. Keep your eyes open.

  * * *

  THE TAXI COMPANY SAID a car would arrive in twenty minutes, but I guessed it would be more like forty. Everett was leaning against the laundry room doorjamb, watching me dump his clothes from the dryer into the warped plastic bin with half a smile on his face. “You don’t have to do that, Nicolette.”

  I cleared my throat and balanced the laundry basket on my hip. “I want to,” I said. I wanted to fold his clothes and pack them up and kiss him goodbye. I wanted him to get home and open his suitcase and think of me. But I also just wanted him to go.

  He watched me fold his clothes into perfect squares on the dining room table. And then he watched me stack them in his suitcase, as if performing a delicate surgery. “See if you can break your lease,” he said, striding toward me, wrapping his arms around my waist as I folded his last shirt. He brushed my ponytail to the side and put his lips against my neck. “I want you living with me as soon as you’re back.”

  I nodded and kept my arms moving. It should be easy for me to say, Yes, of course, yes. It should be easy for me to envision: me, with my clothes taking up half his closet; us, cooking together in his kitchen, curled up on his couch with the red throw blanket over my legs because he kept the temperature about five degrees cooler than I liked it. Him, talking about court. And me, talking about my students as I poured two glasses of wine.

  “What’s the matter?” Everett asked.

  “Nothing. Just thinking of everything I need to do here first.”

  “Do you need anything?” he asked, stepping back. He cleared his throat, tried to make his voice seem natural. “Money?”

  I flinched. He’d never offered me money. We’d never even talked about money. He had it and I didn’t, which meant we circled the topic like a fire that could quickly burn out of control and consume us both. It was why I never brought up the wedding, because then he’d have to mention the prenup that I knew his dad would demand I sign, and I would, but there it would be, out in the open, ready to burn. “No, I don’t need your money,” I said.

  “That’s not what I— Nicolette, I just meant I can help. Please let me help.”

  He’d told me, back when we first met, that I was the embodiment of everything he wished he could be. Setting out in a car by myself, working my way through school, self-made.

  But as I’d told him back then, you have to come from nothing to have that chance. You have to pay your debts.

  “Yeah, well, I have ten years’ worth of loans,” I’d said.

  Sometimes I wondered if, when we got married, he would pay them off. If that would make me a different person. If he’d like me quite as much.

  “Everett, thank you, but money isn’t going to help.” I zipped up his suitcase and leaned it against the wall.

  I heard a car turn off the road in the distance. “Your cab’s here,” I whispered, bringing my arms around his waist and resting my head against his chest again.

  “Think about it?” he asked, pulling back. I wasn’t sure which he was referring to—moving in with him or taking his money—and I hated that he was bringing both up right now. That it took this—seeing me here, hovering near some indefinable edge—that made him seem to want me more.

  “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 arm
s 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.”