All the Missing Girls(93)

“Tell me what to do. Tell me how I can help.” Tyler had told Daniel I was pregnant after hitting him. I knew from the way Daniel had looked at me with so much regret.

“It’s too late.”

“Get out of the tub, Nic. I can’t help you unless you get out of the tub.”

“I don’t want your help.”

And him: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

His shadow retreating. The door closing.

The water eventually running cold, pulling myself up, grabbing a towel from the bar.

My clothes off the floor and the laundry running downstairs. Wrapping myself in the fleece pajamas I used in the winter, sinking into the center of my bed, hearing Daniel on the phone in his room. “No, Tyler, you don’t understand. You have to come.”

Me calling back through the bathroom between our rooms: “He can’t.”

Daniel hanging up, standing in the doorway to my room, looking as helpless and lost as I felt. “What do I do? What can I do?”

Me, crying again—everything from that night too tangled together—and wanting to go back years, a decade, to a time when every possibility could exist. Saying, “I want Mom.” The most unreasonable request.

And Daniel, expression unreadable, with his chin set, his nose swollen, his eyes faintly bruised, saying, “Well, I’m all you’ve got,” as he came to sit beside me.



* * *



TYLER MADE IT ANYWAY. On foot. Over the river. I heard him downstairs later, with Daniel.

I’d tell him in the stairwell, on my feet. I’d stop crying.

I’d lost his ring. I’d lost everything. And I wasn’t sure if his offer still stood. If he still meant it. It was easier to pretend it just never happened at all.



* * *



EVERYTHING IN THAT BOX in the police station had belonged to me: the pregnancy test, the ring, the stories, even. And in a way, it was fitting. That girl faded to nothing from the curve of the road on the last night of the county fair. She disappeared. She changed her hair and her accent, her phone number, her address. She did not look back.

Do what you need to do, Nic.

Pick yourself up.

Start over again.





PART 3


   Going On

   It is quite true what philosophy says; that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards.

   —S?REN KIERKEGAARD





Two Weeks Later





DAY 15

The sirens were faint in the distance but growing louder, and Tyler was halfway across the room, and his words—body at Johnson Farm—echoed in my mind. I pictured sunflowers. The ghost of Corinne, spinning in the field. Her body resting there now, ten years later.

But Daniel had said he was taking her to a job site. It couldn’t be Corinne.

“Annaleise?” I asked. “Is she dead?”

“Yes,” he said. “She was just lying there in the middle of the field.”

“Was she shot?” I asked, because Daniel had access to Dad’s gun, and he’d been chasing her through the woods. Because I’d found that purse buckle near the river, where Daniel said he’d lost her, and he had her key, which must’ve been inside her bag.

Tyler nodded. “This family found her—the kids had run off after pictures and . . .” He tugged his fingers through his hair, leaving the thought. “This guy I work with, his wife works dispatch, and she got the call. I tried to get there first when I heard. I tried.”

“Oh, God,” I said. “Daniel?”

“I don’t know, Nic,” he said, but he wouldn’t look at me when he said it.

Everett was probably at the airport by now. I couldn’t call to ask for advice again—not about this, and not after everything else.

What was Daniel thinking? The body, all the evidence, leading right back to him. And Annaleise . . . Jackson had told me there were rumors, that Laura had left Daniel for a time because of them. The rumors would spin to fact, into motive, in someone else’s hands. I knew my brother could fall for the wrong person—he’d done it once before—but I couldn’t imagine Daniel allowing Annaleise to take his picture if he’d truly been seeing her. Except someone had gone through her computer late at night, deleting images from months earlier. I’d heard his steps through the woods, seen his shadow in her home. Someone who knew his way in the dark, in these woods, by heart. Daniel. Annaleise must’ve taken them when he wasn’t looking or when he was sleeping. Like all those pictures I’d seen in her files, pictures of girls caught unaware. They had no idea someone was watching. Annaleise, with her big wide eyes behind the camera, fading into the background. You’d never know she caught you.

He should’ve been smarter than this.

Daniel had reached her at the river and grabbed her purse, and the buckle broke. He took her purse, her phone. He must have buried it all somewhere or ditched it in his car, because I knew he didn’t have it when he met up with us again behind the house. He’d kept her house key, which was now tucked away in my father’s slipper. Add my brother to the missing gaps, and the story begins to take shape.

He must’ve found her and . . .