“Not even a little.”
His laugh was soft, like cotton.
Truth is, I was a terrible counselor in terms of actual counseling. Said the wrong things, never had the right advice to give. But I excelled at listening, so I learned not to speak much. I could direct students to the right resource or the resource to them, to find the help they needed. I saw what they were hiding and let them show it to me. They spilled their collective adolescent guts in my office. On paper, I was an excellent counselor.
Perhaps it was because they sensed a kindred spirit or saw something inside me, like what I saw in Hannah Pardot—the feeling that she knew more because she once was one of us.
Maybe they knew I had seen darker things. That I would understand.
Or perhaps they would sense that I am an excellent keeper of secrets.
I am.
* * *
I ENDED THE CALL when Everett’s dinner arrived, already feeling he was unreachable, in a world too far away. With Tyler, it had been the opposite. I’d had to delete his number from my phone to keep from calling him on impulse after a drink at the bar, after a bad date, and especially after a relatively good one.
But one second off the phone with Everett and all I could feel was the distance between us and him turning insubstantial, a figment I had conjured up out of hope that something so good could happen to me.
I slept fitfully, until I gave up. Too many thoughts swirling through my mind, too many names. I thought of anyone who’d have reason to break into this house, to look through Dad’s things or to rifle through Daniel’s old room. The list spanned ten years. I wasn’t sure I was solving what had happened then or what had happened now. Maybe Dad was right, that time wasn’t real. Just a thing we created to move on. Just a label to make sense of things.
* * *
“IF I WERE A monster,” Corinne had told us on the front porch with the lanterns swinging and the shadows dancing, “I’d pretend to be human.”
Bailey had laughed, and Daniel had smiled. She’d walked up to him, taking his chin in her hand, turning his head side to side, squinting as she stared into his eyes. “No,” she said to him, “human through and through.”
She looked at Bailey next, running her fingers through her long black hair as she did it, which was because Daniel was there and she always put on a show. Her nose touched Bailey’s, and Bailey didn’t flinch. We’d learned to let her have her way. Go along for the ride, and it turns out all right. There’s a plan that only Corinne knows, and we’re a part of it.
“Hmm,” she said. “No, no, not here, but he’s been here. He visits sometimes. What does he make you do, Bailey? Does he make you kiss other people’s boyfriends?” That was you, Corinne, I thought but didn’t say. Neither did Bailey. “Does he make you like it?” Her hand was on Bailey’s back, under her shirt, her body pressed to Corinne’s, and Daniel’s eyes had gone dark and hazy, under a spell. “Does he make you dream of him at night? Of boys who aren’t yours?”
She stepped back, breaking the spell. Bailey blinked twice, and Daniel walked into the house.
Corinne smiled like nothing had changed. She took my chin, looked deep into my eyes. I could see myself reflected in her pupils from the lantern swinging overhead. She blinked and pressed her cheek against mine, facing away from Bailey, and whispered in my ear, “There you are.”
The Day Before
DAY 8
Now that we’d emptied the garage, I could see why Daniel had tried to convert it years earlier: windows on both sides and light streaming through, exposed beams inside a steepled roof; a corner tucked away for storage that would be perfect for a bathroom. I stood at the entrance, staring at the unfinished walls, lost in my memory of Daniel and Dad, Tyler and his father, working together out here in the early-June mornings ten years ago. Before everything changed.
The low rumble of an engine cut off, and I backed out of the garage.
“Nic?” a deep voice called from across the yard. One I didn’t recognize at first. It tickled my memory, pulling at threads while I tried to place it.
I spun around to find a man down by the road, sliding off a motorcycle, the sun behind him, his face in shadows. I walked toward him, my hand shielding my eyes, until he became less shadow, more person. Where his sleeves ended, dark writing began—scripted and curling—all the way down his thumbs.
“Jackson?” I asked, still too far to see his face.
He nodded. “Yeah, hey. Hi. Sorry to drop by like this. I’m looking for Tyler.”
“He’s not here.”
I stood at the edge of the road and watched as the words on his arm seemed to ripple when he ran his hand through his shaggy brown hair. Erase the tattoos, crop the hair, change his clothes, and he was classically all-American. Strong jaw and defined cheekbones, broad shoulders, lean frame. There was a reason he was Corinne’s. Just one version nested inside another now. He had a tremor in his left hand as he brought a cigarette to his mouth, assessing me through the smoke. “You sure?” he asked.
I rolled my eyes. “Do you see his truck?” I looked over my shoulder, cupped my hands around my mouth. “Hey, Tyler, you here?” I turned back to face him, the smoke more pungent now. “I’m sure.”
“It’s not a joke,” he said. “I’ve been looking for him. And I’m not the only one. Haven’t seen him since Friday.” And today was Monday. Seven days since Annaleise was reported missing.
“What makes you think I have?”
The heels of his black boots dug into the dirt as he leaned against his bike. “I work at a bar, Nic. Where people talk. A bar that Tyler lives above.”
“I haven’t seen him, Jackson. I swear it. Not since Friday.”
He paused, shifted his feet in the loose dirt where the road met the grass. “I can hear his phone from inside his apartment. And . . . I don’t want to call the police. I don’t think that would be such a good idea. But I was wondering if . . . maybe you had a key? Just to check.”
My stomach turned hollow—I hadn’t seen Tyler in three days. Hadn’t heard from him at all. I’d thought of many possible reasons for him not showing up in the last few days, but until that moment, none of them had anything to do with his safety.
“I don’t have a key,” I said. I used to, and then he moved. I was already backing up to the house to get my car keys. “Let me just grab my purse.”
Jackson nodded. “Yeah,” he said.
* * *
AT NINE A.M. ON a Monday morning the bar was closed, which I was glad for. Jackson had implied that there were enough rumors already. “His truck is gone,” I said, standing in the gravel lot behind the bar. I looked up at the window—the blinds pulled shut.
“I know. It’s been gone all weekend. But the phone . . .”
“No, you’re right,” I said.
“I can call the landlord, but I don’t want to leave Tyler with a paper trail. Not with the cops already stopping by. Part of me thinks he’s just avoiding them—it’s what I would do. But . . .”
“The phone.” Ringing inside and no sign of Tyler.
“Right. The phone.”
Jackson unlocked the main door, and the vestibule area felt claustrophobic with the bar dark and locked to the side, and the narrow stairway, and the glass door streaked with dirt. He locked the door behind me and motioned for the stairs. “After you.”
Our steps echoed in time, and the hall smelled faintly of cigarettes, and his hand brushed mine once on the railing. The floorboards creaked at the landing, and Jackson stood behind me, fidgeting with his phone.
“Let me,” I said. I took out my cell and called Tyler, keeping the phone by my side, pressing my ear to the door.
“You hear it?” Jackson asked, leaning way too close.
“Yeah, I hear it.” I closed my eyes, straining to hear more. The slow and periodic drip of a faucet leak. The rattle o
f the air-conditioning unit as it stirred to life. But no footsteps. No rustling of bedsheets. No call for help. “I don’t hear him,” I said.
“That’s what I’ve been saying.”
There’s something distinctly different about being told someone is missing over the phone, or seeing signs stapled to trees or a picture on the news, and confirming it in person, feeling the absence. It’s a pinprick of discomfort that grows into a hollow terror. It’s a void that gets filled with all the horrible possibilities existing all at once.
I knocked on the door again, in the same way I’d checked the same places for Corinne over and over—back to the caverns, wondering if there was a corner I’d forgotten, a room tucked out of sight. “Tyler, it’s me,” I called, my voice wavering with panic. “Tyler.” My fist was clenched when Jackson pulled it away from the door.
“Come on,” he said, heading back downstairs to the bar. He led me through the empty bar to a storage room and grabbed a ladder. He carried it effortlessly out the door and around back into the parking lot and situated it directly below Tyler’s window. “You’re my alibi and I’m yours. We weren’t breaking in. We were checking on him. Got it?” We nodded at each other, sealing a pact.
He checked the streets behind us, empty now. I put my hands on the rungs, but Jackson placed a hand on my shoulder. “Me. I look like maintenance. You look like a pretty girl on a ladder. People won’t question me.”
I hated that he was right, because I wanted in that room. Needed to be the one to see with certainty that Tyler wasn’t there—that the visions in my head of his lifeless body beside his ringing phone weren’t real. That he was okay somewhere. I needed to see the phone and know why he left it, look in his closet and know where he went.
I watched as Jackson maneuvered the air-conditioning unit and heaved himself inside along with it. I stared up, waiting, the glare of the sun off the top of the window making my eyes burn. The uncertainty making my breath hitch.
Jackson leaned out the window. “Empty,” he called. He spent way too long trying to get the air unit back in. When he eventually came down, he folded up the ladder and wordlessly walked back inside.
“What did you see? Where is he? Do you know?” I asked, trailing behind him. I followed him all the way to the storage closet before he answered.
“Nah, didn’t want to go through his shit. He’s not there. That’s all I know. Maybe he went camping or something.”
Useless Jackson Porter. It should’ve been me. I would’ve checked for his sleeping bag and canteens. I would’ve looked for his toothbrush. Scrolled through his phone. Logged on to his computer and checked the search history.
Or maybe Jackson did. Maybe he just didn’t want to tell me.
We stood in the middle of the empty bar, the stools on the counter, the panic in my chest slowly unraveling.
“Here,” he said, taking down a stool. “Let me make you breakfast. We can catch up.”
I slid onto the stool, felt the adrenaline burning through the last of my energy. The crash just beginning. “Coffee,” I said. “Strong.”
He kept the sign turned to CLOSED and kept the lights off, so all we had was the glare through the window. My eyes were adjusting to the dark. “You serve breakfast at a bar?”
“No,” he said. “I make breakfast for myself. We open at noon today. Still, if we turn the lights on, people will try.”
“So much for a shitty economy.”
“It’s beyond shitty, Nic.” He cracked an egg, dumped it directly into a pan. “It’s great for business.”
“Real nice, Jackson. Doesn’t it feel like you’re taking advantage?”
“It doesn’t feel like anything. Unless you think about it too much. Who am I to judge? Meanwhile, I’ve got the most stable job in the state.”
“Good for you,” I mumbled.
He slid a sunny-side-up egg on a plate in front of me and I poked it with my fork, the yolk bleeding out. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Don’t like eggs?”
I scooped some into my mouth, but it tasted wrong: metallic somehow. Just a little off. “Do you remember Hannah Pardot?” I asked.
“Who?”
“You know. The woman from the State office who was investigating Corinne’s disappearance.” How could he not remember that?
“Oh, right. Detective Pardot. I had no idea what her first name was. Wow, she let you call her Hannah? God. She must’ve really liked you.”
No, she didn’t. And now that he mentioned it, she never called herself Hannah, and I never called her that, either. Yes, Detective. No, Detective. Thank you, Detective. I’m sorry, Detective. Yet I remembered her as Hannah Pardot.
Hannah wants to speak with you, Nic. That had been my father, standing just outside my door. You don’t have to, but I think you should.
I already told Bricks everything.
So tell Hannah the same thing.
That was my dad. Thanks for your help, Hannah. He’s a well-educated man, and he can recite lines of poetry, quote philosophy when the time is right. He’s a widower just trying to get by. His son hit his daughter, and I listened to them speaking through the bathroom grate. Listen, Hannah—can I call you Hannah? This is a family problem, that’s all. I have a feeling that Corinne’s might be a family problem, too. That girl was always here, trying to get away from something.
My father was handsome in the way that professors sometimes are, with their mismatching suits and bow ties and penny loafers and hair that they don’t bother styling. He had an easy smile and eyes that sparkled from the slight buzz he carried with him through the day.
“I heard someone call her that,” I told Jackson. “She didn’t like me, either.”
“So what about her?” he asked.
“They’re gonna bring her in. Or someone like her. And if we’re all here, who do you think they’ll go after?”
He paused, scooped the rest of his breakfast into his mouth, chased it with half a glass of orange juice. He wiped his mouth with his bare hand. “We should all go on a long trip.”
I smiled. “That wouldn’t look suspicious at all.”
He took my plate and tossed them both into the sink, ran the water without looking at me. “I want to tell you something. You don’t have to say anything back.”
“Okay.”
He focused on the running water, the way it hit the bottom of the silver bin. “I didn’t hurt Corinne. I loved her.”
“I know,” I said.
He glanced up, and his look nearly crushed me. I picked up my glass so my hands would have something to do.
“The thing is, Nic, the baby wasn’t mine.”
I froze. My cup halfway to my mouth.
“Did Tyler tell you that?” he pressed.
“No,” I said, barely any voice coming through.
“I don’t know if he believed me when I told him. He was right, though—I couldn’t say that. It’d still be a motive. Jealousy, right?”
I nodded, picturing Tyler and Jackson down by the river. Be smart, he’d said.
“But I didn’t know, Nic. I didn’t even know . . . she didn’t tell me. Why didn’t she tell me?” He put his hands on top of the bar, right in front of me. “We never had sex, Nic.”
I felt my cheeks heating up, the cup turning slippery. “Okay.”
He shook his head, then looked back at me, out from under his long lashes. “Do you believe me? Did she tell you that? Did she tell you who?”
“She didn’t tell me anything,” I said. “Jackson, this is what the cops want. They want us to start doubting again. To question each other. To drag it all out again. Let it go. Let her go.”
He turned the faucet off, his hands dripping as he held them. “I can’t. You know what she said to me that night?”
He’d seen her after the fair, I knew that, but this was the fi
rst time he was admitting to it, and I wasn’t sure why. “She begged me to take her back, and I said no. I said I was done with her. That I’d found someone else. I was so stupid, so stubborn—it never would’ve worked out anyway, not with Corinne around. Not out in the open. I came second to Corinne for her, too.”
“Bailey?” I asked.
He pushed off the bar, leaned against the cabinet of liquor bottles. “Corinne knew, I could tell. She told me she’d take me back, and I said no. She did it to herself, you know. The cuts on her back.”
I nodded. I didn’t know it then. But I did now.
“God, I should’ve said yes. I think about that all the time. I was just some stupid kid. I should’ve said yes, and she’d be here still.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I trust you.” He stayed where he was, but his smile made him seem closer. “Because I’d never tell anyone how one night last week, Tyler comes back from a date, sits at the bar, and then your brother comes in and buys him a round and asks him to please leave you alone in no uncertain terms. And then Tyler’s phone rings, and he gets this big-ass smile and says to Dan, ‘You really should be having this talk with her.’ And he picks up the phone right there, right here, right in front of Dan, like he’s gloating. ‘Hey, Nic,’ he says, and then his face falls, and he tells you to calm down, and he leaves his drink on the bar and gets the hell out of here, and your brother follows a few minutes later. They both tear out of the parking lot on their way to you, and then Annaleise goes missing.”
My hands shook under the bar. My entire body on edge. “It’s not—”
“I’m sure it’s not,” he said. “But you know how shit gets around here. You hear a story like that, or like Corinne begging me to take her back when she’s pregnant with someone else’s kid—you say something like that, and it’s over.”
We were silent, pretending to go about our normal activities, like he hadn’t both threatened and confided in me. And then I started to laugh. “I hate this place.”
All the Missing Girls Page 17