All the Missing Girls(16)

I ran the flashlight from picture to picture. Framed sketches—Annaleise’s, I assumed—though some of them appeared to be replicas of famous pictures. Marilyn Monroe, looking down and off to the side, standing against a brick wall. A little girl, her scraggly hair blowing across her face. I had seen this somewhere, but I couldn’t place it. And there were some I didn’t recognize at all. Didn’t know whether they were copies or originals created by Annaleise.

Oh, but there was a theme: Girls, all alone, all of them. Girls looking exposed and sad and full of some longing. Girls passed over, passed by, staring out from the walls: Look. Look at us.

Girls, like Annaleise on the telephone poles, silent and silenced.

Annaleise had gone to some well-known art school, which wasn’t surprising. Back in middle school she’d won a statewide photography competition, and that had made the local news. She looked the part—the girl on the other side of the camera. Timid and fine-boned, with too-wide eyes, every move tentative, careful, deliberate. The one creating, seeing, but never seen. The opposite of Corinne.

I knew the cops had been here, but the place looked completely undisturbed.

There obviously hadn’t been a struggle in the apartment. Besides, we know she went out walking. If she had been hurt, it hadn’t happened here. Her purse was gone, but that could’ve been because she had it with her when she left. Her car was here. That was the Big Sign. Who leaves without her car? They hadn’t found her cell phone, so the general consensus was that it was with her, wherever that was. And it was powered off, since they hadn’t been able to trace it.

The cops had been through here, and probably her parents, though I hadn’t heard a thing about any evidence or clues. But this key was something real and solid and gut-twisting. This key was dangerous.

I went through her desk. Her closet. Her bathroom cabinets. Even the garbage can, remembering the pregnancy test they’d found at Corinne’s, stuffed inside the box of Skittles.

There was nothing here. A tissue, an empty stick of deodorant, the wrapper from a bar of soap. Though it was possible that someone had swept through here before the cops, cleaning up after her, saving her the embarrassment, letting her keep the parts of her that should’ve remained hidden.

I checked her dresser drawers. Everything neatly folded and everything hers. No men’s clothes. No spare toothbrush beside the sink. No notes on her desk. Nothing at all there except the sleek laptop next to a bundle of wires. I chewed the side of my thumb. They’d probably already been through it. I could have it back before anyone noticed. I could.

I grabbed it before I could change my mind.

I checked under her bed on the way out. There was a suitcase—more potential evidence that she hadn’t gone on a trip. And beside that, a white box that could hold a large photo album. I placed the laptop on the hard floor and slid the box out from under the bed. Lifting the top, I saw that it held the sketches that hadn’t made it onto the wall.

I flipped through them rapidly, the flashlight cold and metallic between my teeth, wondering if she’d stuffed anything else amid the drawings. Something the cops missed, something she’d tried to keep hidden. But no, only art. More sad girls. Eyes open, eyes closed, all forlorn, somehow. I had to squint to see their faces, their outlines so faint. Drafts, maybe. Sketches to darken and shade and bring depth to later. All blurring together as I turned them over faster and faster.

But then I stopped, flipped back a few pictures. I took the flashlight from my mouth, ran the light over the familiar angles of the face, the curve of her smile, the freckle at the corner of her right eye. The bow shape of her mouth and the flowing peasant dress that hit just above her knees—

Corinne.

It was a sketch of Corinne. No, it was a goddamn replica of a picture that had hung in my room. We had been in a field of sunflowers. Johnson Farm. It was only a few towns away, practically a tourist attraction—people driving from hours away to take pictures there. It was Bailey’s favorite shoot location.

This picture had been taken with Bailey’s camera the summer before senior year. We’d taken at least a hundred shots that day, posing beside each other for so long that we forgot we were posing. Bailey liked to make us spin as fast as we could, and she’d set the camera for long exposure, and after she got the film developed, we’d look like haunting, blurred images. Like ghosts.

I never picked those pictures to keep—I hated how you couldn’t tell us apart when we were spinning. I took the ones with us smiling, frozen-faced and happy, and I hung them on my walls, like proof.

I had been in this picture, too. Corinne’s eyes were closed, and she had a small smile, caught between moments. She’d been telling us a story that I could no longer remember, her hand brushing the top of a waist-high sunflower. I’d stood beside her, watching her. Laughing.

This was my favorite picture of us. But Annaleise had sketched only Corinne. She’d left me behind when she transferred Corinne, and filled the white space I’d occupied with sunflowers. I was gone, removed from the memory. An unnecessary complication, easily excised. Without me in it, Corinne looked lonely and sad, like every other girl in this box.

I moved the page aside, and there was another behind it. Another sketch of one of my pictures, this time of Corinne and Bailey and me. Again, the sketch was just Corinne, staring forlornly to the side. We’d both been looking at Bailey in the picture, at her twirling with her head back and her white skirt flying up around her dark legs. Now it was Corinne alone in a field of sunflowers.