All the Missing Girls(29)

“Everett, you know everyone in a town like this. We weren’t ever friends or anything, if that’s what you mean. She’s younger than me, but she lived behind us.” I tilted my head toward the kitchen, and Everett went to the window.

“I only see trees.”

“Okay, well, not right behind us. But they’re our closest neighbors.”

“Huh.” He didn’t pull away from the window, and that made me nervous. There were secrets in those woods—the past rising up and overlapping, an unstoppable trail of dominoes already set in motion. I shook my head to clear the thought as Everett turned around. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

The disappearing girls; the police and my father and the things he was saying; the papers in the closet that I had to get rid of before someone else came looking.

“I lost the ring,” I said, my breath coming in shallow spurts as I tried to tamp down the panic. The sting as tears rushed to my eyes, and Everett going all fuzzy. “I’m so sorry. I took it off to box things up, and we were moving everything around, and now I can’t find it.” My hands started shaking, and he grabbed them and pulled me close. I rested my forehead against his chest.

“Okay. It’s okay. It’s somewhere in the house, then?”

“I don’t know. I lost it.” I heard an echo in the house, my ghost, maybe, another version of myself in these halls from another time. I pulled my hands back, balled them into fists. “I lost it.” Two missing girls, ten years apart. The fair, back in town. And all of us. Closing the gap of ten years like it was nothing but an inch. Just a blink. A quick glance over the shoulder.

“Don’t cry,” he said, running his thumb across my cheek, wiping up the tears. Just a piece of metal, Tyler had said. Just money. “It’s insured,” Everett added. “I’m sure it’ll turn up.”

I nodded into his chest. His hands pressed lightly against my shoulder blades. “Are you sure you’re okay?” I nodded again. Felt him laugh in his chest. “I never pictured you as a girl who’d cry over a lost ring.”

I took a slow breath and pulled back. “It was a really nice ring.”

He laughed for real, louder this time, his head tilted back, like always. “Come on.” He slung an arm over my shoulder as he walked up the stairs, luggage in his other hand. “Finish the tour?”

I laughed into his side. “You’re going to wish you picked the hotel.” We stood together in the narrow hall that extended the length of the upstairs. One master with a bath, two other bedrooms, connected by a shared bathroom.

“That’s my dad’s room,” I said, gesturing to the queen bed and the old armoire. I pulled Everett along, shut the door as we passed. “This one was Daniel’s,” I said at the next door, “but he took his furniture.” It had become a dumping ground of things my dad didn’t know what to do with: old novels, teaching material, boxes of lesson plans, dog-eared philosophy books, and notes written in slanted script. “We’re getting a Dumpster delivered next week. Moving on.” I cleared my throat. “This is mine.” The yellow bed looked drab. And the room looked way too small now that Everett was here. He didn’t like staying at my studio; I couldn’t imagine his feelings on this.

“Maybe we should stay in the other room? It’s got a bigger bed,” he said.

“I am not sleeping in my parents’ bed. I’ll take the couch if it’s too small for you.”

He eyed me. Eyed the bed. “We’ll work it out later.”



* * *



EVERETT HELD HIS PHONE against the car window and muttered a sarcastic “Hallelujah” when we were halfway to Grand Pines. His phone dinged in response, downloading emails now that we were back in the land of the data plan.

He scanned the surroundings quickly before diving into his emails. “We should come back in the fall. I bet it’s a sight,” he said. Tap, tap, tap from his cell as he typed.

“Yeah,” I said, even though we knew we wouldn’t. Fall comes with a vengeance here after the leaves change—for two days, when the wind blows, they rain down in a storm, coating everything like snow.

“It’s prettier in the winter,” I said.

“Hmm.”

“Except if you’re trying to get anywhere. Then this road feels like Donner Pass.”

“Mmm.” Tap, tap, tap on the keypad, and a whoosh as his message was sent.

“There’s a monster out here,” I said.

“Mmm. Wait. What?”

I grinned at him. “Just checking.”



* * *



THE WOMAN WORKING THE reception desk of Grand Pines started preening when we walked in the front door. Back straight, hair flipped, chest out. I was used to it, the unconscious way people reacted to Everett.

Everett is old-money Philadelphia. His whole family is that way, like old stately buildings and cobblestone and ivy. And as with the Liberty Bell, the imperfections only make them more interesting. More worthy of the life that fate has bestowed on them. Everett can hold court, quite literally—even with his friends, even with me. It’s a spell, a beautiful spell, the way he’s assertive without being bossy, confident without being smug. I imagine his family members were taught this line to walk as they were taught to crawl—Know thy classics and thy beer. Finely tuned, all of them, with a father to disapprove instantly if they veered off course.