All the Missing Girls

by Megan Miranda

  I felt Daniel’s whole body change in that moment of understanding. He didn’t look at me, kept his head down, ran his hand through his hair as he walked slowly out the front door.

  I watched him go, watched Officer Fraize put his hand out as Daniel approached his car. Watched as Daniel slowly spread his arms out from his sides.

  “What are they doing to him?” I pressed my palms to the window as Officer Fraize patted his hands up and down Daniel’s body before stepping back and nodding.

  “Looks like maybe the warrant is for a weapon,” Everett said. “They’re making sure he didn’t leave with it.” He paused. “Are there any weapons here, Nicolette?”

  “What?” I turned to face him. “No, there aren’t any weapons here, Everett.”

  He looked out the window again, squinting against the sun. “Time to tell me what the fuck is happening here.”

  I stepped away and turned to Tyler, who was sitting on the couch in silence. “You should go home, too,” I said.

  He shook his head, glanced from me to Everett, and said, “I’ll be out front.” The screen door banged shut behind him, and I saw him sitting on the bottom step, chin in his hands.

  Everett followed as I walked into the kitchen. He was too close when I turned around.

  “Okay. Here’s what’s happening. Annaleise Carter is dead,” I said, “and she’s trying to bring us down with her. She left some note that said the police should look into me about what happened to Corinne. The note said Corinne’s body might be here.”

  “And why would Annaleise want to do that? Why would she make something like that up?”

  “Because she’s fucked up. The world is full of fucked-up people, Everett. Do you know how many I see a day? And those are just the ones I can see.”

  “But Annaleise is dead, Nicolette. Somebody killed her with that note on her. Do you see how that looks?”

  “Oh, I see. Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “They’re getting a warrant. A warrant. What do they think they’ll find?”

  “I don’t know!” I said.

  Everett got closer, and I backed up. “What was your father saying? Why did you need the cops to stay away from him? Why do you need him silent?”

  “Back up,” I said, my hand on his chest. I opened the fridge, grabbed a soda, buying myself time, clarity.

  He paused, hands hanging at his sides. “Okay, let me put it to you this way,” he said. “You’re called up on the stand. A lawyer asks, ‘What happened to Corinne . . .’”

  “Prescott,” I said.

  “‘ What happened to Corinne Prescott?’ What would you say, under oath, on the stand?”

  I tipped the can of soda to my mouth, but he didn’t back away. The carbonation fizzed against my lips. “Well,” I said, “I guess I’d plead the Fifth.”

  “This isn’t some cop show, Nicolette. And the Fifth Amendment is only admissible to protect yourself.”

  I looked out the back window, lowered my voice. “Everett? You’re bound by oath, right? This is confidential?” I put the drink on the table, eyes on his, and hated the way he was staring at me, his head tilted to the side. What was he looking for? What would he see?

  He staggered back, or maybe I’d pushed him—my hand was charged, numb, and I couldn’t tell.

  “What did you do, Nicolette?” he whispered.

  Everett lived in a world that didn’t touch mine. In a place where he saw the injustices elsewhere—somewhere lesser than his place in life. His moral compass did not falter. His world was black and white. He could not look into the darkness, or take it home with him, or love it. He’d never welcome the monster into his heart. Would he hide a body for his daughter? Move one for his sister? Everett’s world was all on paper, because he’d never been tested. What was it he’d told me? The terribly dark thing that nobody else knew about him?

  He’d seen someone die.

  And what had I done? he wanted to know. So many things. I’d killed Corinne—it was the only explanation remaining, no matter whose fault it had been. Abandoned her on the side of the road. Lied to the police then and now. Lived with her underneath my house. Run away from Tyler and home because of it. Left them all to pick up the pieces.

  But I didn’t owe Everett that truth.

  Pay your debts, she insisted. Pay them all.

  I thought of my apartment with the painted furniture and the desk with my nameplate, waking up and feeling for Everett beside me in his darkened room.

  “I slept with Tyler,” I said.

  Everything about Everett hardened, and I realized this was a blindside. Not something he’d anticipated. I waited for seconds, moments, as it sank in.

  “Tell me again,” he said.

  I backed up, felt the cold, impersonal wall. “I slept with Tyler,” I said again, my heart pounding, my skin tingling.

  Tyler was outside, and it was just us now. I waited to see what Everett might do. If he was going to rush out front and hit Tyler. Grab my shoulders and shake me. Call me words that would burn in my memory. But he closed his eyes and lowered his head as he backed away. Everett wasn’t like that. He wouldn’t kill, or move a body, or lie to take the heat or blame. He was a better person than the rest of us.

  “I’m going to be sick,” he said.

  Let us both believe it was because I’d been unfaithful.

  * * *

  HE CALLED A CAB—HAD to ask for my phone because he didn’t have a signal—and even speaking those words seemed to kill him. He didn’t look at me during the wait, didn’t speak to me as I sat across the table from him, drumming my fingers.

  We heard the car pull up. He grabbed his luggage, headed for the entrance, didn’t look at Tyler as he walked through the door. Not a violent bone in his body.

  “I’m sorry,” I said as I stood at the top of the porch beside the screen door.

  No, I was wrong. As he was leaving, he took my upper arm in his hand and whispered in my ear, something about how he had really loved me, and something more, like How could you or I hope you’re happy—some empty platitude—but I couldn’t hear him clearly because I was focused on his fingers, digging and digging into my skin, grinding into the tendons, pinching a nerve, my knees giving slightly as my mouth opened in silent pain.

  He left, and the bruise was already forming.

  * * *

  I SAT BESIDE TYLER on the steps, watching him go.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Come on,” I said. “Come inside.”

  They’d be back. That’s what Everett had said. They’d be back with a search warrant, and they were watching us now. As soon as the door shut behind us, I leaned in to Tyler, felt his arms slowly come up around me. “There’s a key in the vent. I need to get rid of it,” I said.

  Tyler and I decided we’d flush the key, using a plunger to make sure it wouldn’t float back up. But first I studied the intricate pattern of the A of the key chain, and I told him I’d found it at Daniel’s—told him everything I believed about Daniel and Laura. I whispered all of it under the sound of running water as he scrubbed the mud from his boots.

  I noticed now that there was a thin line bisecting the key chain, and I instinctively pulled the two halves in opposite directions. A lid slid off, revealing a flash drive.

  My ring for the flash drive. In the end, it turned out I’d paid that debt, too.

  I wondered when Annaleise had felt that unbreakable thread growing between her and Corinne. If it was after she saw the pictures. If it was before. If it started all the way back that night at the fair.

  I imagined Corinne looking away after Daniel pushed her back, and Annaleise standing there watching, their eyes locking for a moment too long. I imagined Annaleise seeing Corinne cry, all alone, maybe, something I’d never witnessed. Or maybe Corinne looked deep into Annaleise and saw something dar
k and appealing inside. Something that bound them together.

  Or maybe it was brief and one-sided, like most moments we assign weight to. Maybe Corinne didn’t even notice her standing there, but Annaleise saw something she needed. A likeness or a comfort. That even Corinne might fall. Even the strong are lonely. Even the adored are sad. I hoped she loved her in that moment—when no one else did.

  Or maybe it wasn’t until later. When she saw the photos shifting back into focus.

  I know what it’s like to leave, to come back, to not fit. To feel that distance between you and everything you’ve ever known. But Annaleise couldn’t find a place out there. Couldn’t let go enough. A lonely kid, a lonelier woman. She came back to what she knew.

  You want to believe you’re not the saddest person in the world.

  Annaleise found her there, in the pictures. The sad, lonely girl. She found her in the old, dark photograph, covered in a blanket. But still she wanted more. To find her in Jackson and Daniel, Bailey and Tyler. To pull her from my father’s guilt. One more thread when I showed up. To take her from me.

  I pictured Annaleise staring deeply at the image of Corinne’s limp body with fear, with longing. Am I you? she asks. Is this what we become? How we fade away and disappear?

  The woods have eyes and monsters and stories.

  We are them as much as they are us.

  * * *

  ANOTHER CAR PULLED IN before sunset but not much earlier. The fireflies were flashing in the yard. Detective Charles walked up the porch steps, warrant in hand, detailing what they were searching for.

  Everett was right—they were looking for a gun. A gun and a body. I stepped aside, grateful that I had burned my father’s ledgers and all the receipts. The history of his debt to me, his money for Annaleise’s silence. I’m late, he’d said to me at Grand Pines. Late on hush money. My daughter’s not safe.

  Mark Stewart sat at the dining room table with me and Tyler, like a babysitter, but he wouldn’t look directly at either one of us.

  I moved out to the front porch an hour later, when a new team showed up with machines. They tore up the new garage floor, as if the fresh concrete was evidence enough. Dug through the garden. Brought out a dog to sniff around the rest of the property from the road to the dried-up streambed. But eventually they left, too.

  And in the late evening, when I was sitting in the kitchen with Tyler as the officers finished dismantling the house, Hannah Pardot walked into the room. Her hair was longer, the curls dyed darker, and she’d traded her red lipstick for a muted maroon. Her body was softer, but her face harder. And she still didn’t smile. “Nic Farrell,” she said. “So it all comes back to this.” As if no time had passed at all. We were merely picking up a conversation left midsentence just a moment ago.

  “There’s nothing here,” I said.

  She sat down in the chair across from me and said, “Annaleise Carter, I remember her. She was an alibi for your brother, you remember that? For all of you, really.”

  “I remember.”

  She pulled out a piece of paper sealed inside a Ziploc bag. Evidence removed from the scene. “She was killed with this note on her, Nic. Explain that.” I dare you.

  It was written on a small rectangle of paper in neat handwriting—probably from the pad at the motel. But the ink had bled out from the rain, softening the paper, tearing it in places.

  “I came home, Tyler dumped her, she blamed us both. She wasn’t a nice person, Detective.”

  Hannah tilted her head to the side as Detective Charles came to stand behind her. “You lied to me about your relationship with Tyler,” he said. “Either you’re lying then or you’re lying now. Either way, hard to believe you.”

  “You lied first, Detective. Standing in my front yard, putting on this schoolboy act. Telling me you didn’t want to get Tyler in any trouble. Please.”

  Hannah frowned at him, then turned her attention back to me. “Explain it to me, then. Who, besides the two of you that she implicated in that note, would have a reason to kill her?”

  “Oh, you don’t know Annaleise very well, do you?” I asked. “Annaleise had a lot of enemies.” I turned to Hannah again. “Ask the people she went to school with. She liked to expose them, tell their secrets. Like she was daring them to do something in retaliation. I’m sure she got tangled up in some mess she had no business being a part of. Thought she was so much better than everyone else. Break her open, just like you did to Corinne. You’ll see.”

  “Is that so,” Hannah Pardot said.

  “Yes,” Tyler said.

  Do you hear what I’m saying? She incited too much anger, too much feeling. She’s not at fault, but she’s hardly innocent.

  Brought it on herself, you know.

  “Okay, let’s get down to the details then, shall we? You know how this goes.” Hannah placed the recorder between us on the table. “Where were you, the both of you, the night she disappeared?”

  “Right here, cleaning the house,” I said.

  “Anyone who can vouch for you?”

  “Tyler. I called him, he was at the bar, and he came. Broke up with Annaleise standing right across the room from me, to do the right thing. He stayed here the whole night.”

  “So you’re each other’s alibi, is that it?”

  Tyler leaned back in his chair. “Jackson Porter was with me when Nic called. He saw me leave. Knew I was coming here.”

  Hannah leaned across the table. “Your father has a gun registered in his name.”

  “He does?”

  “Yes. Any idea where it might be?”

  “I haven’t seen it anywhere.” I shrugged. “We moved him out last year. The back door lock’s been broken for a while—I need to get it fixed. Someone was actually messing around in here the other day.” I stared at Detective Charles. “It could’ve been anyone.”

  Hannah’s jaw shifted. “The concrete was fresh in the garage. What were you doing in there, Nic? Tyler? I’m assuming she had help.”

  “We’re refinishing it,” Tyler said.

  “To bring my dad home,” I added. I smiled at her. “He always liked you, Hannah.”

  She frowned. “I thought you were getting married to some lawyer in Philadelphia.”

  “Do you see a ring?” I asked.

  She shifted in her seat. “You’re filing guardianship to sell the house. We’ve seen the paperwork.”

  My mind drifted, but only for a second. I shook my head, smiled to myself. “No, not to sell. There’s no sign. It’s not on the market. We have a court date for guardianship. I’m bringing him home with me.” As if this had been my plan from the start.

  The distance, like time, just a thing we create.

  All the pieces falling in a beautiful crescendo—lining up to bring me safely home.

  Three Months Later

  Somewhere there’s a storage unit full of painted furniture. And when the money runs out and they can’t reach me because I’ve left no forwarding address, they will auction it off or cart it out to the Dumpster in the parking lot behind the building.

  That person will disappear. A ghost in their memories.

  I changed my number. It’s just easier this way.

  The ring hasn’t turned up. Maybe Annaleise’s brother found it before the police swept through. Maybe her mother hid it to save her from something she didn’t understand. Maybe it’s buried in her purse along with everything else, wherever Daniel left it. Maybe it will turn up one day in the form of a new car, or a redone garage, or a year of college.

  Nothing stays lost forever here.

  * * *

  THEY TOOK ANNALEISE’S LIFE apart, put it back together again. Broke open her family and the people she went to school with, tracked down leads from college, dug into her past. As for me, I was done talking. I didn’t have to speak again. I knew that much from Everett.


  Tyler stopped talking, too, and then Jackson and Daniel and Laura, until we slowly became a town without a voice. Could they really blame us after last time?

  There were whispers about us. But the whispers I could deal with.

  If the entirety of Annaleise’s investigation existed in a box, I imagine this would be all you’d see: a folded-up letter, addressed to the Cooley Ridge Police Department; an autopsy report with the findings: gunshot wound to the chest, bled out, clean and simple; all other evidence washed away; her phone records, which Daniel explained away—I told her to stop calling. She was harassing me—as he rocked his baby in his arms; and lies: He was home with me, Laura swore. Came home from Kelly’s just after midnight. We were here together. I was up sick with heartburn from the pregnancy. He made me pasta to settle my stomach. We were here together the rest of the night.

  * * *

  THE HOUSE WAS COMING along. We completed the garage first, for Dad. Sometimes I thought maybe there was nothing wrong with him—he was doing better back home, surrounded by the things he knew. But occasionally, he’d wander off, end up across town. Someone always brought him back. And sometimes he’d walk inside in the morning and sit at the kitchen table and call me Shana, like he was existing in some other time. His eyes might drift to my stomach those days, and he might say something like I hope it’s a girl this time. He needs a sister. Someone to protect. It will make him a better man.

  * * *

  IT WAS A WEEK after we brought Dad home when I noticed I was four days behind on my pills. It was two weeks later when I noticed the same nausea, the same feeling of bone-tiredness, that I’d felt in Corinne’s bathroom two days before everything changed.

  Tyler’s been renovating room by room, making a place for us. My bedroom will be the nursery. Daniel’s old room will become Tyler’s office. He had to gut my parents’ room before I could sleep in it—repainting it, putting in carpet and new furniture. I thought of Laura, of the hoops she made Daniel jump through, and I thought I understood.