All the Missing Girls(95)

Nothing keeps in this place.

Tyler paused. Lowered his voice. “That they could find the body of Corinne Prescott on the property of Patrick Farrell. Advising them to take a hard look at Nic Farrell and Tyler Ellison.”

I felt my body start to tremble, mirroring Tyler’s. “Oh, God.”

Annaleise had not meant to be tied to the letter. An anonymous note and Laura. She was counting on both in a desperate effort to come out unscathed.

“Listen, I’m sure someone saw my truck. The family who found her was waiting out on the road. Even if they didn’t see me, someone saw the truck. They can place me in the field. I’m covered in pollen. It looks bad. I need to go. I have a cabin in Tennessee. It’s not registered under any name, just this place I built on my own a few years back. I need to disappear for a while. I set it up this weekend just in case.”

Tyler had been in the field of sunflowers with Annaleise’s body, with a note implicating us. Maybe he could explain away Annaleise. Maybe he could even prove it. But not without revealing what had happened ten years ago. Corinne comes back to us.

To me.

His truck, which I had been driving. He’s always known. But he let me believe that I wasn’t at fault. That something else must have happened to Corinne on the side of the road after we left. He let me believe I was innocent.

The box is full of lies, but none of them has the same type of power. There is nothing more dangerous, nothing more powerful, nothing more necessary and essential for survival than the lies we tell ourselves.

I stuck my finger in his chest, a desperate plea rising in my throat, coming out in a gasp. “You swore I didn’t kill her. You promised I didn’t do anything wrong. You swore.”

His eyes closed and he took a slow breath—time stretching, pausing, giving me one more moment, just one more. “You didn’t, Nic. She threw herself in front of the truck. She killed herself. She did it.”

There’s a moment when you know, Everett said. When you can’t explain it away anymore. And you can never go back.

Up until the moment I saw those pictures, all the possibilities could still exist. She left. She ran away. Someone else hit her. She jumped.

She jumped.

I believed she would do that. Hearing her whisper at the top of the Ferris wheel. Seeing her step out in front of my car. After Hannah Pardot broke her open, I believed it even more. Corinne Prescott was the most deliberate person I knew. She would’ve done it.

But it had been me—me behind the wheel, Corinne dead, and Tyler the one who would pay for it.

“Get out of here, Nic. Right now. Drive straight back to Philadelphia. There’s still time. Don’t look back.”

No, I suddenly saw what I needed to do.

How to ask for Cooley Ridge to let me come back. How to pay my very last debt.

It’s your turn now, Nic.

“You were never at Johnson Farm,” I said. “Whoever saw your truck is wrong. You’ve been here. Listen to me, Tyler. Listen, and do exactly what I say.”



* * *



THE SIRENS GREW INSISTENT, but Tyler was wrong, we had time. I could make time work for us. Right now it could save us.

I could see it so clearly, the debts I was meant to pay. Ten years. That’s the cost. That’s the trade. Corinne has weighed and assessed and assigned it a value. The ten years I’ve fought for. That’s what was owed. Like it’s a blink. Like nothing.

Pay your debts, like everyone else.

My father for hiding her body. Jackson for not taking her back. Tyler, my enabler.

The fairness of it all, the give-and-take, like a ledger of rights and wrongs. I could feel her in this house. How could I not see it before? Of course she had been here. Of course.

And it was so clear that I would do it. I would pay. But not for Corinne.

“Get in the shower,” I said.

“Nic, it’s too late—”

“Leave your clothes in the bathroom and get in the shower.”

“It’s the middle of the day, and it’s not my house. This makes no sense. I came to say goodbye.”

I gripped his arm. “I know you did. And I’m telling you to get in the goddamn shower, Tyler. Please trust me.”

I used a paper towel to wipe up the mud he’d trailed through the kitchen, as the sirens got closer. They were coming here. They were coming for us. “Run,” I said. And he did.

I left his work boots in the back of Dad’s closet, as if they were his. Took the key in the slipper and tossed it into the vent, as far as it would go.

Then I ran to my bathroom. His clothes were on the floor, like I’d asked. I picked them up and ran them down to the laundry room with a pile of my own clothes, starting the machine. Tyler’s clothes from last week were still in my dresser drawer, and I threw them on the floor of the bedroom. Slid out of my own and left them on the floor, too.

“Okay,” I said, stepping into the bathroom. “Everything’s okay.”

The first thing they see is everything. The first thing we say. An investigation lives and dies by first impressions. The story takes a life of its own from there.

The first thing they need to see is me and Tyler coming out of the shower together. It’s the story they wanted in the first place. The motive they wanted to nail Tyler with. Me and him together and Annaleise dead because of it. Now jealousy would be Annaleise’s motive instead.