“Nic,” she’d said when my mom died, pulling me to her chest, crying herself. “I love you. I’d trade you one if I could. You know that, right?”
I clung to her, not speaking. Corinne would talk like that, like people were things to trade, pieces on a chessboard that we could move around, that we could control.
“Want to watch something burn?” she’d asked.
That night we went to the Randalls’ abandoned barn. She had a red container of gasoline that she shook out, tracing the perimeter.
She let me strike the match, and she held my hand as we watched it burn to the ground. We stood too close to it, so close we could feel each time a piece of wood caught, sparked, ignited.
She called Tyler to come pick me up, and told us to say we’d been together the whole night. “Go,” she said, right before she called 911. She took the fall for the barn all on her own. “I told them I was practicing how to make a fire. Like in the Girl Scouts. In case of emergency. It got out of hand.” Her smile, huge. The whole thing just a tiny favor. Six months of community service and the wrath of her father, a small gift to help me through my mother’s death.
How could I not love Corinne Prescott back then? How could anyone not? I liked to believe it was for things like this and not because I was drawn to the mean in her, or how she could destroy things without flinching—a dying bird, an abandoned barn. I liked to believe she did these things because she loved me, too.
I can see it all a little clearer now with the filter of time. How, if you tilt the frame and change the perspective, maybe she wasn’t taking the fall only for me. That maybe it was just one more link in a chain of IOUs, emotional blackmail that would one day be called up and cashed in.
I think Corinne believed that life could break even somehow. That there was an underlying fairness to it all. That the years on earth were all a game. A risk for a payoff, a test for an answer, a tally of allies and enemies, and a score at the end. I know now that everything we did or said, and everything we didn’t, was kept in a ledger in her mind—and always in the back of ours, too.
* * *
I CALLED DANIEL FROM the car on my way to find Tyler. He picked up on the first ring. “Hello?” he said, typing in the background.
“Tell me you were not messing around with Annaleise Carter.”
The typing stopped. “Jesus Christ, Nic.”
“Damnit, Daniel, are you kidding me? What the hell were you thinking? What the hell were you doing? And Laura—”
“I know you’re not lecturing me on fidelity, Nic. But no,” he said. “No.” More emphatically. But I didn’t believe him. This is what you say when you’re being questioned. This is what you cling to against all else, against all evidence. This is what you say, and you pray that someone will back you up.
I’d done it for him once before.
Ten years earlier, I’d heard Hannah Pardot asking my brother in the living room, “Were you and Corinne ever in any sort of relationship?” I pressed my ear to the grate in the bathroom floor and heard him swear: “Never. Never.”
When my turn came around, I repeated his words. Never, I said. Never.
“Nic? Are you listening to me?” Daniel’s voice tightened through the phone.
“Jackson said—”
“Jackson doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on. So do you need anything else, or were you just calling for the interrogation?”
“Okay. Okay.” I hung up, feeling sick to my stomach. Once again, I saw a missing girl in the center of a web. Jackson’s words twisting into a warning. Annaleise had been worming her way into the lives of anyone connected to Corinne Prescott. As if she’d been looking for something.
A missing poster lingered in my peripheral vision at the stoplight, her eyes wide and searching. A shudder ran through me, the tremor in my hands coming back.
I was looking for something, too.
I wondered if maybe she’d found it.
* * *
TYLER WASN’T AT THE railway station. He was about a hundred yards past it, where they were extending the track, a wide frame and cement base already in place. Across the street, even surrounded by men all dressed the same—worn jeans, tan work boots, and a T-shirt, the same uniform he’d adopted eleven years ago—I could pick him out right away. Whereas the rest of the crew had on yellow hard hats, he wore a black baseball cap with ECC in block letters across the front.
A skinny man looked over Tyler’s shoulder, gestured with his chin. “I think you got some company.”
Tyler turned in slow motion. His face remained passive as he took me in, which was the most un-Tyler-like thing of all. Normally, I’d show up and he’d turn and smile. Hey, Nic, like I’d been gone only a day. Not six months, a year, more.
But now his face didn’t change. “Hi,” he said. The twitch of his thumb, the only indication that I was anything other than a stranger. His eyes shifted quickly to the side, to where the skinny man was watching us. “Can I help you with something?”
“I need to speak to you. It’s urgent.” I mentally berated myself. Urgent, like Everett would say in a business meeting.
“Sure.” He gestured to a small trailer, and I worried I’d have to talk in front of his father, but when I got inside, I realized the office was his. Single desk, his truck keys sprawled on top of some papers. A few straight-back chairs throughout. Plans and permits tacked to the corkboard walls. When he’d worked for his dad during school and then after, I’d always thought it was temporary. That he’d want something more, like I did. But he didn’t go to college when he graduated, and I should’ve known it then. Not just assumed he was working for his dad because he was waiting for me.
Ten years later and he was running the company. Ten years later, two fewer degrees than I had, and he was twice as accomplished.
He followed me in, closed the door, and leaned back against it. “Sorry, I wasn’t expecting you.” He glanced out the window. “This really isn’t the best time.”
“I’m sorry. But something happened.” I tried to get a good look at his face, but the brim of his hat was pulled down low, and I couldn’t see his eyes. Just his mouth, a set line.
“What happened?” he asked, his back still pressed up against the door. The distance between us felt tangible, forced and awkward.
“Last night. After midnight. Someone was in Annaleise’s place.” A muscle at the side of his jaw twitched. I wanted to rip the hat off his head. I needed to see his eyes.
“And you know this because?”
“Because I saw them.”
“Nic, you’ve got to stay out of the fucking woods. You’ve got to let this go.”
“Tyler . . .”
“What?” he asked.
“I have to ask you.” I paused, wishing he wouldn’t make me.
He readjusted the brim of his hat, turned to stare out the window. “What, exactly, do you need to ask me?”
How many ways could I say it? I stepped closer, but his face remained in shadow. “Was it you?”
He looked back to me, like the whole conversation had caught him off guard. “Was what me? What the hell are you talking about?”
I lowered my voice even though we were alone. “Were you in her place last night? After midnight?” I asked.
Tyler turned and fixed his eyes on mine—What are you saying, Nic?—until I had to look away.
“Do you have a key?” I asked.
“Are you fucking kidding me right now?”
“You never told me,” I said. “You never told me whether you were serious or just screwing her.”
He took his hat off, ran his hand through his hair, pulled it back down. He shifted his lower jaw around. “Just screwing, Nic. Happy?”
“No, I’m not happy.” My voice wavered, and I took a slow breath to steady myself. �
�Someone was in there.”
“Probably the police. Since they were just here.”
Fuck. Fucking Jackson being fucking right.
“What did they want? What did you say?”
He looked out the window again. “They want to find Annaleise. And they want to poke holes in my alibi. They want to catch me in a lie.”
I paused, thinking. “What is your alibi, Tyler?”
He grimaced. “That’s the problem. I don’t have a fucking alibi. My alibi is just that I wasn’t there. Except I obviously was a few hours earlier. So my alibi is that I wasn’t there when she went missing. That we didn’t have a fight that got out of hand.”
“That’s what they think?”
He shrugged. “That’s the story they seem to want. That I called her. We fought. For some reason they haven’t quite worked out yet, we agreed to meet up in the woods. She accused me of being with you. I . . . did something.” He reached out in front of him, fingers curling in as if closing around her slender neck.
“It’s up to them to prove that,” I said.
“Is it? Is it really? If everyone already believes it and then you show up at my work in the middle of the day?”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, heat rising to my face. “I’m sorry I came. I just needed to know.”
He nodded. “No, I’m sorry. I’m pissed. I’m pissed at them. Not at you. It was probably the police in her place, Nic.”
“No, not the police. There weren’t any cars. Someone on foot.” Someone who didn’t want to be seen. Someone who had a key. Someone who knew the woods by heart.
“Her family, then.”
“Through the woods, Tyler. Someone walked through the woods.”
Then he stared again, walked toward the door, readjusted the brim of his hat so it was perfectly centered. Nodded once. “It wasn’t me.” He looked me over once more. “Go home,” he said. “Get out of here before they come knocking on your door, too.”
I followed him out the trailer door into the sunlight, the work site too bright, like an overexposed photo.
* * *
MEALS STARTED BLENDING TOGETHER, along with the hours, losing structure, just as the days had been. Sleep was hard to come by, and I overcompensated with too much caffeine all day. It was after nine P.M. by the time I remembered to eat. There were too many possibilities. All those names and events tied together in that hypothetical box, weaving around, untangling in my mind. And more—the stories that never made it inside the box. The things we never asked each other slowly unraveling.
To solve a mystery, to solve a mystery here, you can’t come from the outside.
There were people here who knew more than they said, who chose to keep it silent, like Jackson seeing Corinne. Like me seeing them together. There must be more of us. I had to understand the silence. With Corinne comes Annaleise. With Annaleise comes Corinne.
Apply one filter to the next, watch it all slide into focus.
* * *
THERE WAS A LIGHT outside the window, in the woods. Someone near her place again. I didn’t bother grabbing my phone, just the flashlight that had been in the drawer beside the microwave as long as I could remember.
I was losing them, and I couldn’t. I had to know.
The new cop from State, staying at the motel in town? Someone else? Annaleise?
Find them. Find answers.
I sneaked through the yard like I used to when I was a kid, keeping silent and to the shadows until I reached the tree line. I saw the flashlight bobbing periodically in the distance, and I sprinted toward it until I got too close. I kept my own light off. The moon was enough for my footing, or maybe that was my memory.
But the light wasn’t moving toward Annaleise’s place anymore, or my own. It was heading away. Backtracking. Moving sure-footedly and with purpose through the forest. Toward a hiding spot, maybe. Or a car on the other end.
We’d been moving for at least half an hour, and a sliver of panic had wedged itself inside my chest. I was at the disadvantage, I was alone, I was unarmed, unprotected—with no phone, or map, or GPS. My options were to keep following the flashlight or stop with no sense of where I was.
And yet.
I had the sense that I knew where we were heading. Not from the direction but from the timing. I’d taken this trek before at night.
But it wasn’t until we reached the clearing that I was sure. Big open space set back from the road. Small narrow path, cordoned off, leading to the caverns. I stayed in the woods, watching the flashlight. Eventually another light appeared on the path, and I willed it closer until it shone on the person I was following.
For a moment I think I expected to see skinny arms and blond hair and huge eyes; pale skin and dirty clothes. Maybe it was nothing but hope, but there it was: I expected to see Annaleise.
But it was a boy. A teenager. Her brother. And the person with him was a tall girl with dark hair, an arm held up to shield her eyes. “God, you’re blinding me, asshole.”
“Where’s David?”
“Bringing the drinks. Carly’s in the car. She doesn’t like it out here when it’s just us. Says it’s not safe.” The girl paused. “Any word about your sister?”
“Nah,” he said, lowering the flashlight.
“I’m sorry, Bryce,” she said.
Bryce. Right. He didn’t look particularly shaken up by the fact that his sister was missing. And they didn’t look the same—not like Daniel and I used to. Bryce was stocky, had inherited his father’s square jaw and broad shoulders.
“Could still turn up,” he said.
Nine days, and that was all he could say. I’d find it suspicious if I didn’t already know his type—part of a generation of kids expecting everything handed to them: the missing people, returned. The mystery, solved for them. Ten years ago, we’d torn these woods to pieces. We’d followed the cops to the places they searched, and we’d searched the places they didn’t. But not these kids. Apparently, they could just shrug it off, give their condolences, wait for the beer to arrive.
Maybe it was that Annaleise wasn’t theirs. A little too old, she’d already left, gone to college, come back. She didn’t belong to them or to us. Lost in the gap with no one to seek her out.
I heard an engine and shrank away from the flashlights and headlights. “There he is,” the girl said. “Come on, the woods creep me out. My brother used to tell me there was a monster.”
Bryce nodded and followed her.
If you let yourself get swept away in legend, let it become more than story, then it’s not such a stretch to imagine Corinne disappearing without a trace. It happens all the time, all across the country, especially in the woods, in the middle of the night. And if Corinne did, then so could Annaleise.
Wasn’t a stretch to imagine a monster, even. Watching and waiting and making you do things. Breathing in the lick of smoke as the teenagers made a fire. Watching them fall all over each other in a heap of beautiful limbs. Feeling the cold dirt settle under its nails as it waited, listening to the theories and the stories and the bullshit. Waiting until they fell asleep so it could creep back to the caverns and see what—if any—secrets they had to offer.
It’s not so hard. From where they were sitting, there was something doing the same, and they had no idea.
Right then I was the monster.
The Day Before
DAY 9
I had my back pressed against the bedroom wall, ear to the open window, like a kid eavesdropping on the conversation outside. Daniel trying to send the police away, to stop them from dragging us into yet another investigation.
Stay out of it, he’d said to me, and he was right.
I’d already given my statement to Officer Fraize, useless as it must’ve been. Did you see anything in the woods? Hear anything that night? Anything at all?
No sir, no si
r, no sir.
I had no relationship with Annaleise. There was nothing on paper tying us to each other, except in that hypothetical box in the police station from ten years ago, and that was just a corroboration of alibi. And yet here was a new cop out front, asking to speak with me.
His voice was gravelly but tentative. Careful. “If I could just ask her a few quick questions about her relationship with Tyler Ellison . . .”
And there it was. Tyler. Tyler ties to me and me to Daniel. Suddenly, the whole knotted mess of us is sucked down, prodded and pried until we reveal something unintentional. Something used to break apart the other. Hannah Pardot was an expert at that. This guy, not so much. He was tripping over Daniel, or Daniel was overpowering him. Either way, this cop wasn’t getting in to see me.
“I think she’s sleeping,” I heard Daniel say. “Look, I’m on my way to work, so I can’t stick around. Maybe try again this afternoon.”
“It’s important. A woman is missing, and every day she’s not found, she’s more at risk. It’s our moral duty to track down every possible lead.”
Like it had come straight from Witness Questioning 101. What was he, a month out of training? Moral duty. Hilarious. Like it was their moral duty to crack open every facet of anyone’s life, anyone who came within three degrees of separation. To destroy the living to find the dead.
It had been eight days since Annaleise was reported missing. Asking me questions about Tyler now wasn’t going to change the outcome for her. They weren’t looking for her. They were looking at him. Despite Daniel’s good intentions, despite his warnings, if I didn’t go out there, the police might think I had something to hide.
I pulled on fresh clothes and padded barefoot down the stairs, the conversation muted behind the wood and plaster. I pushed open the screen door and shaded my eyes from the sun. “Daniel?” I called.
The unmarked car was parked halfway up the driveway. This cop wanted it to seem like he was just dropping by, just in the neighborhood, nothing serious. It was navy blue with tinted windows, and it needed to be washed.
All the Missing Girls Page 14