All the Missing Girls(43)

“Annaleise Carter,” he said. “They’re pushing Tyler hard on it. And you being here? Doesn’t look good for him.”

“How do you know this?”

“It doesn’t matter. Just don’t add more fuel to the rumors, Nic.”

“What rumors?”

He cut me off with a look, and I brushed the comment aside. “I’m engaged. I just need to talk to him.”

“You need to stay away from him. Annaleise was . . .” He trailed off, thinking. Annaleise was still a thirteen-year-old girl to me. I’d left and missed what she had become.

“Annaleise was what?”

“She was obsessed.” He cleared his throat. “With Corinne. She’d been hanging out here a lot. Being way too friendly. Asking questions.”

“About what happened?”

“Not really. It’s not like she was obsessed with what happened, exactly. Just . . . her.” Jackson looked over my shoulder, into the bar, his mouth close to my ear. “She’d say things I swear Corinne used to say to me in the same tone of voice. It was creepy, Nic. Seriously f*cking creepy. She could do a pretty sick impression of her.” His jaw tensed, every muscle in his body tensed. “I never . . . She creeped me out, more than anything. But the cops still talked to me. They were here just this morning. I bet they’re with Tyler now, since they also wanted to know where he worked. Bet they’ll talk to your brother soon enough.”

“Daniel? Why the hell would they talk to him?”

Jackson’s lips pressed together and he stared back, unwavering.

“You’re not serious,” I said. “Daniel wouldn’t.”

He shrugged. “I hear she called him a lot. She’d come in here looking for him, just like you’re looking for Tyler right now. Hear his wife spent a few days at her sister’s place a few months back—don’t know if it was related. Rumors. You know how it goes.”

Rumors. They always start from something. Daniel hadn’t told me Laura had left. But then again, would he?

“Just tell me where he works, Jackson.”

“I really don’t know,” he said, his eyes sliding away from me.

Lie. Again.

He left me standing in the entrance to the bar. And somewhere along the way, as I felt myself losing a grip on everything I’d fought to hold together—my family—and as the panic surged up and over, I lost all semblance of pride. I followed him in. Raised my voice in the dim quiet. “Does anyone know where I can find Tyler Ellison?”

The man with the whiskey coughed into his fist. I walked over to him, stood too close. “Do you know?” I asked, leaning so close that the liquor on his breath stung my eyes.

He held the glass between us like a shield, smiled as he raised it to his lips. “Nah, I’m just curious what he did to make a girl barge into a bar looking for him.” He laughed to himself.

The man with the beer ignored him. He frowned and tipped his glass toward me. “Patrick Farrell’s daughter, right?”

The other man went silent. I nodded.

“Ellison Construction’s got a project going at the railway. New station. Funded by the goddamn township.” He took a gulp of his beer, dropped it to the counter. “For the goddamn tourists.” The other man mumbled something about money and funding and streets and the schools. “My guess, you’ll find him there. How’s your dad?”

“Not good,” I said. “Worse. He’s getting worse.”

“You selling the house? That what I hear?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Everything was fluid again. Dad hadn’t signed the papers. But the house was just the tip of the thing now.

I turned to leave, and Jackson grabbed my arm. “Be smart,” he said.

And, like an echo, I heard Tyler whispering to Jackson down by the river. Be smart, he said, and then I stepped on a twig, and they both turned around, pretended they were talking about something else.

Jackson told the police he didn’t see her after the fair, Nic, Tyler had told me later. He claims he never saw her at all that night.

But that was a lie.

I saw Jackson and Corinne. After the fair. But if I said that . . . you had to understand the way things were. The stories people could weave from the few facts they had, the truths they pulled together from that box.

They needed someone to blame. Someone to vilify and put in a cell so they could feel safe again. Someone to play the part, be the monster.

I couldn’t tell that. It would be enough to close the box forever. I’d be sentencing him.

Jackson wasn’t some pushover who let Corinne wrong him time and time again. He wasn’t some angry kid who felt betrayed, like the investigation would have you believe. It had nothing to do with any baby, any fight. When Corinne turned on him, cut him down and made him push back, enough to push her away—he liked it.

I know this because we all did.

He liked it because of what came next—the phone call begging him to return. That phone message they played for all of us: Please. Please come back. The way she’d love him, surely, when he did. Nobody would ever love you so fiercely, so meanly, so thoroughly. And the parts of you that you wanted to keep hidden—she loved those most of all.

“Nic,” she’d said when my mom died, pulling me to her chest, crying herself. “I love you. I’d trade you one if I could. You know that, right?”