All the Missing Girls(19)
“Yes. I’m fine,” I said, pulling my arm away.
Jackson frowned, downed the shot, and slammed it back on the counter. “Something’s about to happen, Nic. You can feel that, right?”
Like static in the air. A net closing, a car circling. Two weeks of digging into the past, and all the lies were rising to the surface. Annaleise goes missing and the box of Corinne’s evidence is shaken up, tipped over. All the names fall out again.
I was at the front door when I saw it. The blue sedan, tinted windows, rolling slowly down the block. I waited for it to pass before walking to my car.
* * *
ANNALEISE’S LAPTOP HAD NO password protection, which I found slightly odd, but maybe not unexpected if she lived by herself in the middle of nowhere. Or maybe the police had hacked in to it, leaving it unsecured. I scanned through the folders of college projects and grad school applications, sorting by date last modified to see if there was anything new or potentially relevant. Then I did the same with her pictures.
The photos weren’t sorted by anything other than date, time-stamped from as long as five years ago to as recent as three weeks ago. I lingered on one of Tyler in his truck, his mouth slightly open, his hand slightly raised: Smile, she says. He puts a hand up to wave or to block her shot. A frozen moment. A hundred different possibilities existing all at once. And most recently, a few shots from this year’s fair. The Ferris wheel looming, empty carts, lights glowing in the dusk. A child eating cotton candy, his mouth sticky with pink sugar, the wisps of cotton melting as soon as they touched his lips. Vendors reaching with change or hot dogs, their fingers starting to unfurl, and the people on the other side looking toward their children, or over their shoulders, already half turned away.
I could picture Annaleise standing there, like when she was a kid. A bystander to the story, watching other lives play out. I closed the images and quickly scanned the files and saw the discrepancy. The image file names were in numerical order, but there were a few jumps—a few gaps. The trash had been emptied. Could’ve been that Annaleise didn’t like how they’d turned out. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone else had been through here, checking for something he or she didn’t want seen. I jotted down the date range for the missing files: a chunk from four or five months ago.
By the time Everett called to be picked up from the library, I’d searched every corner of the computer. Found the portfolios that she must’ve scanned in and photos of her artwork. I’d checked the list of last-visited websites, which were mostly school websites or job boards.
Where the hell are you, Annaleise?
I wiped down the keyboard and the rest of the laptop and slid her key into the front pocket of my shorts, the metal still hot from the sunlight. I’d store both in Dad’s closet until it was night again, and the world was sleeping, and silent, and waiting.
* * *
I COULD PROBABLY FIT all of my conversations with Annaleise into the span of an hour, yet I had an odd intangible connection to her, tied to my sharpest memories.
Because in that box, the one I imagined in the corner of the police station hidden just out of reach, her name will forever be tied to ours. The cops had interviewed each of us, asking us about that night—about why Daniel had a broken nose, and why Tyler had scraped-up knuckles, and why I looked like someone had knocked me around. It was Tyler who remembered. “That Carter girl,” he’d told the cops. “Begins with an A. She was there. She saw us.”
I imagine they questioned her, and I imagine she confirmed our story, because they never asked again.
Annaleise had been our alibi.
The Day Before
DAY 13
Everett’s here,” I said. I stood facing the corner of the bathroom, mumbling into the phone, with the shower running in the background.
“Everett’s where?” Daniel responded.
Steam filled the room, the mirror coated with a fine layer of fog. “Here.” I looked over my shoulder. “In my bedroom. I called him about Dad, and he showed up yesterday to help. He is helping.”
I could hear Laura in the background—something about paint fumes and pregnancy and open the damn window, which made me love her a little in that moment.
“Okay, good. That’s good.” A pause, and I imagined him walking away from Laura. “What did you tell him?”
I cracked the door, and the steam escaped into my bedroom, wisps curling up toward the vents. Everett was still sprawled facedown on the bed; I had my money on a hangover. I eased the door shut, walked across the tiny bathroom, out through the other door to Daniel’s old room.
“I told him the truth, Daniel. That the police were trying to question Dad in the disappearance of a girl ten years ago, regardless of his mental state. He marched down to the police station and Grand Pines, threatening legal action if it happened again.”
“It’s done? Is that it?”
“He needs to follow up on Monday. Get some paperwork from the doctor or something. But they’ll back off until then.”
“So he’s staying through Monday?”
“Looks that way.”
I heard Laura again: Who’s staying through Monday? And then everything sounded muffled, like Daniel was covering the phone with his hand. He cleared his throat. “Laura wants you to bring him by for dinner tonight.”