Everett didn’t spend long at the window, slumping into a chair at the kitchen table and rubbing his temple as he sipped the coffee. “God, what do they put in the drinks down here? Tell me that was moonshine so I can maintain a little self-respect.”
I pulled open a cabinet, surveying the cups. “Ha,” I said. “This is the South. More bang for your buck. Not everything gets watered down and jacked up in price.” I could bring my parents’ wedding china to Daniel’s tonight and be nearly done with the kitchen. I could leave the money for him before he could notice and say no. And since Everett was here, that was probably all I’d be getting done anyway.
“Daniel and Laura want us to come for dinner tonight,” I said.
“That sounds great,” he said. “Would be even better if they had Internet.”
“I’m sure they do. But Laura’s probably going to ask about three hundred wedding questions. Just so you’re prepared.”
He tilted his head back and grinned from across the room. “Three hundred, huh?”
“The price of Internet access.”
“A fair trade, I suppose.”
He walked to the dining room, where his laptop and briefcase sat on the table. It was a tiny alcove, visible from the kitchen, where I’d been organizing and storing most of the boxes. He glanced around the empty room. “You got a lot done. How long have you been up?”
“A while,” I called, opening the rest of the cabinets so the room seemed even smaller, the walls closing in on us. “Look around. There’s still so much to do.”
“Yeah, well, I probably could’ve done that for you in half the time if you’d waited—”
“Everett, please,” I snapped.
He tapped his pen against the dining room table. “You’re stressed.”
I grabbed a stack of plates, setting them down on the table across from him. “Of course I’m stressed. Imagine the police treating your father like this.”
“Okay, calm down,” he said, and I suddenly hated how practical he sounded. How condescending. He shifted in his seat, wood scraping against wood. “About your dad, Nicolette.”
“Yes?” I stood on the other side of the wooden table, folded my arms across my chest.
“I can stop people from officially questioning him, but I can’t stop him from volunteering information. You get that, right?”
My stomach twisted. “But he doesn’t even know what he’s saying! He’s borderline senile. You get that, right?”
He nodded, powered up the computer, flicked his eyes to me and back to his screen. “Is it possible he did have something to do with it?”
“With what?” I asked.
He kept his eyes on the screen. Made like he was half working, but I knew him too well. “The girl. Ten years ago.”
“No, Everett. God,” I said. “And her name is Corinne. She wasn’t just some girl. She was my best friend.”
He flinched, his gaze flitting over me, as if he’d just woken up in my roomful of painted furniture. “You’re acting like I should know this, but you’ve never mentioned her. Not once. Don’t get mad at me because you neglected to tell me.”
Neglected. Like it was my duty. My failure. My fault. All the stories I hadn’t told him: Corinne and me in the principal’s office. Corinne and me in the kitchen with my mother, flour on our clothes, licking the sugar from our lips. Corinne and me in the back of Officer Bricks’s car senior year, his first month on the job, trying to keep a straight face when he said, I’m not a taxi service. Next time I’ll bring you down to the station, make your parents come for you. Nearly every story from my childhood included Corinne. And Everett hadn’t ever heard her name.
Everett didn’t like it when details surprised him. He was once blindsided in the middle of a trial—information his own client had kept from him—and he lost. It was an unforeseeable outcome for him, something he wasn’t expecting, and it hit him with a ferocity I wasn’t expecting. Behind closed doors, he became impenetrable. Closed off and borderline depressed. You couldn’t understand, he kept saying, and he was right. I couldn’t. Three days later, he started a new case, and he was back. Never mentioned it again.
If Corinne were here, she would’ve poked at this vulnerability over and over until she could expose it, and then it would be hers. And so would he.
I was more generous with people’s flaws. Everyone had his or her own demons, including me.
“I don’t know a thing about you from high school, either,” I said. “Because guess what? It doesn’t matter.”
“My family wasn’t part of a potential murder investigation.” He didn’t look at me when he said it, and I didn’t blame him.
I leaned across the table, my palms sweaty on the surface. “Oh, I get it. This would look bad for you, right? Taint your perfect family image?”
He brought a hand down on the table, harder than either of us expected to judge from the look on his face. He ran his hand through his hair and leaned back in his seat, taking me in. “This isn’t you,” he said.
It was my own fault. I wasn’t sure Everett had ever got a real grasp of who I was. We started dating when I was off for the summer, so I spent most of the summer being Everett’s girlfriend. I could be whatever he needed, whenever he needed it. I was the very definition of flexibility. I could bring him lunch at the office, say hi to his dad, stay out as late as I wanted, and sleep until noon. Could help his sister move apartments, browse the flea markets in the afternoon, always free by the time he got home from work, always willing to do what he wanted. By the time I went back to work the next month, we had crammed triple the time into the same amount of space.
I’d made myself small and unobtrusive, and I fit neatly into his preexisting life. One year later, and he knew things about me like a list of evidence presented in a case—everything removed from the scene, labeled and numbered in plastic bags: Nicolette Farrell. Age twenty-eight. Father, Patrick Farrell, vascular dementia following stroke. Mother, Shana Farrell, deceased following cancer. Hometown: Cooley Ridge, North Carolina. Education: bachelor’s in psychology, master’s in counseling. Brother: Daniel, insurance claims adjuster. Favorite foods and favorite shows and the things I liked and the way I liked them. My past just a list of facts, not something that ever truly existed for him.
“I didn’t come here to fight,” he said.
“I know.” I took a deep breath. “Corinne was screwed up, and I missed it. Or I ignored it. I don’t know. And the investigation was even more screwed up. But my dad didn’t do anything.”
“Tell me, then,” he said. “Tell me the story.” When I balked, he put his hands up, as if attempting to calm me. “This is my job. I’m good at it.”
The story. That’s exactly what it was now. A story with gaps that we attempted to fill with things that made sense. A story with different perspectives and different narrators and a single girl at the center.
“We were eighteen, had just graduated.” My voice turned low, and even to me, it sounded haunting. Haunted. “It was this time of year, almost exactly ten years ago. The fair was here, just like last week. We were all at the fair that night.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” he asked.
I threw my hands up. “All of us. Everyone.”
“Even your dad?”
I flashed to this image—me on the stand and Everett asking questions. Getting to the truth. “No, not my dad. Daniel. Corinne and me and our other friend, Bailey—we went together in Daniel’s car. Our friends were going to be there. All of our friends.”
“And did you leave together?”
“Everett, are you going to let me tell the story, or are you going to cross-examine me?”
He folded his hands on the table. “Sorry. Habit.”
My limbs twitched. Too much caffeine. I paced in front of the table, trying to wear it off. “No, we didn’t leave together. Daniel and I got
in a fight. It was kind of chaotic after that, keeping up with who stayed and who left, exactly. But I left with someone else when Corinne was still there.” I shrugged. “That’s my part of the story. Bailey couldn’t find Corinne after, so she caught a ride home with my brother later. She assumed Corinne had made up with her ex—Jackson. But Jackson swore he never saw her that night.”
Everett took a sip of his coffee, staying silent, waiting for more.
I shrugged again. “Her mom called my house in the morning, looking for her. Then Bailey’s and Jackson’s. By the end of the night, we were already searching the woods.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.” You couldn’t explain the rest to someone who wasn’t there. Who didn’t know her or us. That a story is the most simplified version of events—something to file away into a sound bite, dulled and sharpened at the same time.
“I know how these things go, Nicolette.”
I nodded, but I didn’t sit down. Didn’t get any closer. “Other than the sorry excuse of an investigation, it got ugly—people accusing each other, saying things about Corinne . . . Everyone’s secrets out in the open, everyone’s thoughts and suspicions. It was a mess. I left at the end of the summer, but nothing changed. We never found her.”
Everett paused. The light on his face shifted as his computer screen turned black from disuse. “So who did it?”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, if I go sit at the bar”—he shuddered—“after I recover from last night, at least . . . If I go sit at the bar and buy people drinks and ask, ‘What happened to Corinne?’, what are they going to say? There’s always a name. Even if it never gets to an arrest or trial, there’s always a common assumption. So who’s the name?”
“Jackson,” I said. “Jackson Porter.”
“The boyfriend?”
The one who mixed your drinks last night, I wanted to tell him. But The Boyfriend, yeah, that was what the investigation made him. “Right,” I said.
Everett took another sip, went back to his work. “It usually is. Are they looking at him for this other girl?”
“Annaleise,” I said, staring back out the window. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“What do you think? Did he do it?”
“I don’t know.” There was too much to explain, too much to whittle down into a testimony under cross-examination on the stand. “The thing is, Jackson and Corinne were always fighting. It was nothing new.”
They spent at least half their time breaking up and the rest getting back together. If Corinne hadn’t disappeared, I could imagine them caught in the cycle still. Her pushing him to do something he shouldn’t have done; him getting fed up and leaving; her “forgiving” him; and him coming back for her. He always came back for her.
Didn’t matter that she once sent Bailey after him when he was three drinks past drunk to see if she could get him to kiss her. Or that half the time, Corinne didn’t show up when she said she would. Or she’d show up unexpectedly, swearing you had plans, and How could you forget? and Did you have a mind-fuck or something?
Didn’t matter that she was constantly trying to get us all to prove our loyalty to her.
“She liked to test him,” I said. “She liked to test everyone. But he still loved her.”
Everett raised an eyebrow. “This was your best friend?”
“Yes, Everett. She was also fierce and beautiful and I’d known her forever. She knew me better than anyone. That counts for a lot, you know.”
“If you say so.”
He went back to his work, calm and contained, but I was wound tight with adrenaline.
Everett had never been a teenage girl—maybe there was some equivalent in the adolescent male, something that simmers under the surface of a friendship like that. But the simple truth was that when a girl like Corinne loves you, you don’t ask why. You just hope it doesn’t change.
Tyler never understood, either. Inevitably, he was the thing that changed us. Winter break, senior year, Corinne had dragged me to a party where I didn’t want to be in the first place—mostly because my brother would be there. Don’t tell Tyler, Corinne had said. It’ll be a surprise. She told me to find a place for our jackets, and I watched from inside as she practically threw herself at Tyler, who was sitting in the back of his truck, tailgate down, legs dangling over the edge. He tossed her aside—it wasn’t a hard push, but he was firm, and Corinne remained in motion until colliding with the car beside his.
“Domestic abuse, asshole,” she’d said, rubbing her side as a crowd started to gather. I was already outside, had started moving the second I saw her lean in to him.
“Not interested,” Tyler said, his eyes scanning the crowd, settling on me. He pushed through the crowd, into the house, while Corinne recounted the story to everyone who would listen.
“Were you really wondering what I would do?” he’d said to me. “I’m not one of her games. Don’t play them with me, Nic.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I didn’t know she would do that.”
He cut his eyes through the crowd, and I saw where they landed. I watched as Corinne stared back. “You’re friends with her, you’re already playing.”
Truth or dare. Dare. Dare. Always take the dare.
Tick-tock, Nic.
I confronted her as we were leaving, while Tyler waited for me at the front door. “What the hell, Corinne?” I asked.
“You needed to know,” she said, smiling at me. “And now you do.” She rubbed her arm, leaned close when she saw Daniel watching us. “But tell me, does he always push that hard?”
That was six months before she disappeared. I started to pull away, just a little. Eighteen, on the cusp of adulthood, and perpetually shaken by the feeling that at any moment I might burst from my skin. That I was trapped, and Cooley Ridge was the thing I had to escape.
I had missed something. That was what I’d told Everett. Ignoring her calls while I was with Tyler. Brushing her off when she showed up pretending we had plans, heading out with Tyler instead.
I hadn’t been looking, and then she was gone.
* * *
PARTS OF THESE STORIES made it into that imaginary box—the official investigation—in witness statements, in people’s suspicions.
Tyler pushing Corinne made it into the box.
Bailey kissing Jackson made it into the box.
But there were countless stories that never did. Things I held on to that felt too private, like her whisper in the middle of the night from the sleeping bag beside mine. Like the time the bird flew into the high living room window at her house, how she didn’t flinch, just rolled her eyes and took a shovel from the garage and bashed the bird as its wings beat against the sidewalk, how the noise of the wings on the concrete haunted me for months. And so did her words: You’re welcome, she’d said to it after.
Or the senior-year camping trip, how she dragged me with her into the outdoor shower—Don’t be such a prude—making it seem like a show, our bare feet visible under the swinging door, hanging our clothes over the wall. Soap my back? she’d asked, loud enough for someone outside to whistle. She’d turned slowly so I could see the gash running from spine to shoulder blade and another below, fine and precise, as if made by a razor. I never said anything, just moved the bar of soap around, never too close. Never knew if it was from Jackson or her dad or something else, but she showed me, and I knew.
And when we walked out, our wet skin clinging to our dry clothes, I’d felt the heat of Jackson’s glare—felt him watching me through the trees for the rest of that trip.
Corinne was larger than life here. Had become even larger because she disappeared. But she was just a kid, eighteen, and bursting out of her skin. Believing the world would bend to her will. Must’ve torn her up something good the first time she realized it wouldn’t.
* * *
&nbs
p; EVERETT PUSHED THE WINDOWS up, the edges scraping wood against wood in high-pitched resistance, his papers fluttering on the table, the sound hypnotic.
I spent the rest of the afternoon wrapping the china in old newspapers, my fingertips black and sooty, and loading the car with boxes for Daniel. When it was time to go to Daniel and Laura’s, I shut and locked the windows Everett had opened.
“It’ll be like an oven when we get back,” Everett said.
“It gets chilly at night. You’re in the mountains. Go ahead and start the air in the car,” I called.
I heard the engine turn over, and I peered out the kitchen window once more. Then I dragged the chair from the kitchen table and wedged it under the handle of the back door. If someone tried to come inside again, I’d know. The chair would be moved. Or the windows would be unlocked.
I’d know.
* * *
THERE WERE BLACK SMUDGES under Laura’s eyes as she greeted Everett, and Daniel was rubbing the back of his neck like there was a kink he couldn’t work out, but Laura was nothing if not a Southern hostess. She’d reached the size where it was impossible to hug without coming at her from the side, which Everett was doing, her expression switching to a practiced glow. “I’ve heard so much about you,” she said to Everett, her swollen fingers on the back of his neck as she air-kissed his cheek.
“You, too,” he said, backing away, his hands shoved deep in his pockets. “I’m so glad I finally get to meet you.”
“Same,” she said. “I can’t wait to hear all about the wedding! Nic’s been too busy with the house since she got back.” Playful grin in my direction.
Everett fought a smile as I raised an eyebrow at him. “When are you due?” he asked.
All the Missing Girls Page 7