All the Missing Girls(67)

She slid the napkin into her back pocket. God, she was beautiful. Every movement of her body looked choreographed. “Goodbye, Nic.”

“Your daughter is beautiful,” I said.

She started leaving, tossed her hair over her shoulder, gave me one last searing look. “I hope she isn’t like us.”

I heard the ride beside us, the gears shifting, metal on metal as the cars came to an abrupt stop and began spinning the opposite way. The squeals of delight from inside. I tried to focus on that, on every individual sound, so I wouldn’t think about me and Bailey and Corinne at the top of the Ferris wheel.

I must’ve seemed so pathetic to Bailey, standing here pretending not to know what she was talking about when that whispered word had become louder and louder over the years. So that sometimes when I thought of Corinne, it was the only thing I heard.

Her cold hands at my elbows. Her breath in my ear. Bailey’s laughter, tight and nervous, in the background. The scent of Corinne’s spearmint gum. Her fingers dancing across my skin. Jump, she said.

She told me to jump.





The Day Before





DAY 6

I had a few hours before I needed to be at Laura’s baby shower in the church basement. But every time I thought of that room, I pictured Officer Fraize organizing us into search parties, and I saw the pictures of Annaleise and Corinne hanging from the walls, interchangeable in my mind now.

“So you’ll be there at noon?” Daniel was outside the house with a pressure washer, two steps up a ladder leaning against the siding.

“I said I would.”

“Give me the list,” he said, hand extended.

“Seriously? You’re just going to work on the house now? Get it ready to sell?”

He jerked his hand forward a second time. “Come on, I’m not allowed to be there anyway.”

I reached up to hand him the paper, and he skimmed the page. “Pressure washer, got it. Okay, I’ll do the grouting after, and the painting if Tyler comes to help.”

“Tyler’s coming?”

“I don’t know. He was going to, but I haven’t heard from him,” he said, cutting his eyes to me. “So do me a favor and pull all the furniture you can away from the walls. I’ll handle the bigger pieces. Go get the plastic sheets out of the trunk.”

He went back to spraying the house. We were really doing this. Selling the house. Getting it ready. Going about our lives. Moving on.

“Nic,” he said. “Trunk. Go.”

I felt ungrounded as I walked to his car, as if in a daze. Sleep had been hard to come by the last few nights, and it was doing something to my head—like there was too much space to sort through and I couldn’t get a grip on any one solid thing. I pulled the sheets of plastic from the trunk, the smell slightly nauseating, held them against my chest so they billowed up in front of my face. I imagined suffocating inside them, draping them across crime scenes. My mother used to lay plastic sheets across the floor so Daniel and I could paint on easels in the kitchen, and after, they’d be covered in spills and drips, speckles of colors—a beautiful accident.

I couldn’t breathe. I dropped them at the bottom of the porch steps, and Daniel turned to look at me. “Nic, really,” he said, like I was the colossal disappointment of his life.

“I don’t feel good.”

He turned off the machine, walked down the ladder. “Well, if you’re not gonna help here,” he said, “then get to the church and help there.”

I nodded. “I’ll probably be back late. I have plans after.”

“You have plans after?”

“Yes,” I said. “I have plans.” Plans that consisted of wanting to be anywhere but here.

“You can stay with me and Laura tonight. The paint fumes. I wouldn’t want to breathe them in, either.”

“Maybe,” I said.

He nodded. “Good. See you later, then.”



* * *



MAYBE IT WAS THE church’s proximity to the police station, or maybe it was the graveyard behind it, where my mother was buried beside my grandparents, but there was something unsettling about this place, with the wooden pews smelling like earth, and the way you had to walk down the narrow aisle and over the altar to get to the basement steps beyond. I’d spent every Sunday here as a kid, but I’d stopped attending after my mom died, as did Daniel. My dad wasn’t usually there, either. Too busy sleeping off the Saturday binge—or just sleeping. And Tyler went only if I asked him to go with me. There was nothing for me under this steepled roof anymore.

Church was just another part of my life here. The thing you did on Sunday mornings, followed by snacks from CVS with Corinne and Bailey and whoever else was hanging out with us at the time. We’d sit on the top of car hoods in the summer, or huddle inside the store when the weather turned, Luke Aberdeen usually behind the cash register, keeping an extra-close eye on us, for good reason.

The last time I’d been to church here was for Daniel and Laura’s wedding, three years ago. I had that unsettled feeling back then, too. Standing up beside the altar in a watermelon-pink dress Laura had picked out and guessed my measurements on, because I’d never sent them to her. It was a little too long—hitting at shin level instead of just below the knee—too tight across the top, and gaped at the armholes. I felt out of place. I looked out of place.