Annaleise was unofficially declared missing when the police station opened that morning, but the storms rolling through the mountains meant there would be no searching today. She was twenty-three years old and had been missing only a day, but it was the circumstances that got the police curious: Her brother said he saw her walk into the woods sometime after midnight. Her mother went to get her for their trip to visit a grad school around lunch, but she wasn’t there. Her cell went straight to voicemail. Her purse was gone.
And then there was the text message. The one she sent to Officer Mark Stewart, the one that asked if they could set up a time to discuss the Corinne Prescott case.
Tyler showed up at my place just after breakfast, dressed in khakis and a button-down. He was pacing the downstairs, leaving rainy footprints across the floor. “That message is going to make everyone uneasy around here.”
“Do the police have any idea why she sent it?”
“Not that I heard. Doesn’t matter, though. It’s one hell of a coincidence, don’t you think?” He opened his mouth to say more, but we heard tires crunching gravel under the rain.
“Someone’s here,” I said, walking to the window.
A red SUV I didn’t recognize had pulled into my driveway and parked behind Tyler’s truck. A woman about my dad’s age stepped out—hair gray like his, face round and soft—and pulled an umbrella over her head, keeping her eyes on the woods as she walked up the front porch steps. She was built thicker than Annaleise, but her eyes were as large and unsettling.
“Annaleise’s mom,” I said, heading for the door. I pressed my back to the door, watched him stare at the wall past me as if he could see through it. “Why are you here, Tyler? Why are you here?”
He blinked twice before responding. “I’m fixing the air-conditioning,” he said.
“Then go fix it,” I hissed before pulling open the front door.
Her mother was facing the driveway, her umbrella still up even though she was under the protection of the porch; the rain dripped off the spokes in slow motion. “Hi, Mrs. Carter.” I pushed open the screen door and stood on the threshold.
She turned her face slowly toward me, her eyes lingering a moment behind. She was looking at my driveway, at Tyler’s truck. “Good morning, Nic. It’s nice to see you home.” Manners first, always.
“You, too. I heard about Annaleise. Any word?”
She shook her head, let the umbrella rest against her side. “My son says he saw her walking in the woods. She’s like that, you know. Keeps her own company, goes for walks. I’ve seen her out there; it’s not too unusual, really. But she and I had plans yesterday . . . and her phone . . . Well.” She pressed her lips together. “It would’ve been late, after midnight. Since we share property, I wanted to check. Any chance you saw her? Or anyone? Anything?”
“No, I’m sorry. I was cleaning the house, and I fell asleep early. I didn’t notice anything.”
She nodded. “Is that Tyler Ellison’s truck, dear?”
“Oh, yes. My brother hired him to do some work on the house for us.”
“I don’t have his number, and I need to talk to him. Do you mind?” She moved forward, forcing me to back up, and stepped inside my house, placing the open umbrella on the ground.
“Sure, I’ll just go find him. Sorry about the heat. It’s the air-conditioning unit. Busted. That’s why he’s here. Tyler?” I called from the hallway. “Tyler, someone’s here to see you!”
He came down the steps, and before we could see his face, before he could see us, he said, “I think it’s the condenser fan. If you buy a replacement part, I can— Oh, hi,” he said, his steps slowing.
“I’ve been trying to reach you,” said Mrs. Carter.
“I’m sorry, I’ve been working. We’ve got a project with a crazy deadline. I’ve actually got a meeting at ten down at the county clerk’s office. I should probably be heading that way.”
“Of course. I was just wondering if you’ve heard from Annaleise?”
“I haven’t.”
She took another step into the house. “When did you last see her? What did she say?”
Tyler paused, removed his hat, ran his hand through his hair, pulled the hat back down. “We went to a movie after dinner Monday night. I dropped her off a little before ten. Had an early morning myself the next day.”
“Did she mention anything else? What she was planning?”
“No, I haven’t seen her since.”
“Did she mention going to look at grad schools?”
“No,” he said.
“Do you know what she was doing in the woods?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
Her questions came fast, but Tyler’s answers came faster. “I’m so sorry,” I said, opening the screen door for her. “Please let us know if you hear anything.”
“Okay,” she said, dragging her eyes from Tyler. “If she doesn’t turn up by tomorrow, they’re going to organize a search—” Her voice broke.
“I’ll be there,” Tyler said. “But I’m sure she’s okay.”
She picked up her umbrella, her eyes shifting between me and Tyler as she backed out of the house.
CORINNE’S MOTHER HAD COME to see me a week after she went missing, after we’d scoured the woods, the river, the caverns. “Just tell me, Nic. Tell me the things you think I don’t want to know. Tell me so we can find her.”
I remembered the feeling of wanting to tell her something, to give her something. I remembered thinking she was so young, too young to lose a full-grown daughter.
But I shook my head because I didn’t know. This was before Hannah Pardot broke Corinne open, and all I had to tell her mother was She had a meanness. A darkness. She loved me and hated me, and I felt the same. I couldn’t say that to the broken woman on my front porch, not with my father in the kitchen, not with Daniel upstairs in his room, probably listening out the window.
“Tell me this,” she’d said. “Do you think she’s okay?”
A week was too long to keep up the charade, even for Corinne. “No,” I’d said. Because that, too, was something I could give her.
A year later, when the investigation was fading to a memory for everyone else, Mrs. Prescott got divorced. She took those kids, and she left Cooley Ridge. I don’t know where they went. Somewhere there aren’t any woods to cut through or caverns to crawl inside. Or a river to cross and logs to slip from. Where a man does not push her down stairs or throw plates near her head. Where her other children will not hold dominion over a town and where, I hope, they will never be abandoned.
TYLER STOOD BESIDE ME on the porch as Annaleise’s mother drove away. “I have to go,” he said. “I have to be in a meeting about a land survey. But I’ll come back later.”
“Okay, so go.”
He stood too close, like he was going to kiss my forehead, and had to change movement at the last minute. He put an arm around my shoulder and pressed down, like Daniel might do. “Don’t look at me like that. I can’t bring you with me to work.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“No, you just looked at me like that.”
I pushed him in the arm. “Go.”
He changed his mind, pulled me to his chest anyway, and said, “Everything’s okay.” I wanted to stay like that indefinitely. Everything was not even close to okay, but that was the thing about Tyler—he made me think that it might be.
I clung to him much longer than what might be considered appropriate for a girl with a fiancé and a guy with a missing girlfriend.
“I’ll be back tonight,” he said, pulling away.
“Maybe you shouldn’t,” I said.
“Why not? Her mother just showed up and saw my truck here. There are going to be rumors anyway,” he said.
“Your missing girlfriend really isn’t something to joke about.”
“She’s not missing. She’s just not here. And I think it’s safe to say, whenever she shows up, that we’re over.”
“Oh my God, stop joking.”
He sighed. “I don’t know what else to do, Nic.”
I nodded at him, squeezed his hand. And then I watched him go.
As soon as his truck was out of sight, I went back inside and pulled open the kitchen drawers, dumping the contents on the floor, trying to piece together my father’s life over the last ten years.
THE RAIN WAS SUPPOSED to break the heat, but it didn’t. It was a hot rain, as if it had manifested out of the humidity, the air unable to hold it any longer. The only thing it did was keep us all from searching the woods.
I drove to the library after lunch, sat at one of the computers in the corner, and pulled up the Yellow Pages site, looking for pawnshop listings. I scribbled down the number and address for any within an hour’s drive, then stepped into the back courtyard of the library, which was essentially the backyard of a home encircled by a high brick wall, plants along the sides and benches in the middle. It was abandoned in the rain. I stayed pressed against the wall, under the lip of the roof overhang, the water streaming down six inches in front of my face, and dialed the first number on the list.
“First Rate Pawnshop,” a man answered.
“I’m looking for something,” I explained, keeping my voice low. “It would’ve come in sometime yesterday, probably. Or maybe today.”
“I’m going to need a little more information than that,” the man responded.
“It’s a ring,” I said. “Two-carat diamond. Brilliant setting.”
“We’ve got some engagement rings,” he said, “but nothing that’s come in recently. Have you filed a police report?”
“Because if you don’t, if this was stolen from you and it turns up in a shop somewhere, we’re not just gonna hand it over to you. That’s the first step, honey.”
“Okay, thanks,” I said.
“Do you want to leave a number in the meantime, in case it shows?”
I paused. “No,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”
Shit. I shoved the list deep in my purse to keep it from getting wet and headed through the library back to my car. I would have to see for myself. Navigating the roads in the rain, browsing the crappy stores on the corners. Just looking, I’d say. Just passing through. The sign just caught my eye, is all.
FIVE HOURS LATER AND I needed dinner. I hadn’t found the ring, and I was irritable, and I knew it was partly because I was hungry, but also because of the ring, and also because Daniel’s car was in the driveway and I wanted quiet. I needed time to think, to work this all through. I needed to understand.
I ran through the rain, holding my purse over my head. “Daniel?” I called from just inside the front door. The only noise was from the rain on the roof, the wind against the windows, the distant rumble of thunder. “Daniel!” I called from the bottom of the stairs. Getting no reply again, I took the steps two at a time to the second-floor landing and paced the hall, calling his name.
The rooms were empty.
I went back downstairs for my phone, called his cell, and heard the familiar ringing from somewhere in the house. I pulled the phone from my ear and followed the noise into the kitchen, saw his phone on the edge of the table, beside his wallet and car keys. “Daniel!” I called louder.
I threw open the back door, eyes drilling into the woods. Surely he wouldn’t be out there in this storm. I switched on the back porch light and stood in the rain calling his name. Down the steps, around the side of the house, and no sign of Daniel. I ran to his car, peering in the window, now completely drenched. I saw a few tools in the backseat but nothing too out of the norm. Then I heard a sharp thud, like a hammer, just under the thunder—from the garage. A faint light seemed to be coming from the side window. I shielded my eyes from the rain, walking closer.
The sliding doors to the garage were shut, and Daniel had hung something over the windows. I pounded on the side walk-through door. “Daniel!” I yelled. “Are you in there?”
The noise stopped.
“Go in the house, Nic,” he called through the door.
I pounded more. “Open the fucking door!”
He unlocked the handle, pulled it open. His hands were covered in white chalk, and the floor was fractured and splintered—chunks of concrete off to the side, the earth below it exposed.
“What the hell is this?” I asked, pushing past him into the room. “What the fuck are you doing?”
He closed the door behind me. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m digging.” He ran his hand over his face, the white chalk streaking down with his sweat. “I’m looking.”
“You’re looking . . . for what?” I asked.
“What do you think, Nic?”
For something buried. Something that’s been buried for ten years.
“And you think it’s here? You know this?” I stuck my finger in his chest, but he backed away. “Why do you know that, Daniel? Daniel, look at me!”
“I don’t know, Nic. Not for sure.”
“Really? Because you’re tearing up the goddamn floor. You seem awfully sure of yourself.”
“No, but I already dug up the fucking crawl space and the garden, and this is the only place left I can think of. We were getting ready to lay the floor the day Corinne went missing. But it wasn’t done.”
“You didn’t finish it?”
“No, I didn’t finish it. I assumed it was Tyler and his father, but don’t know for sure who finished it. And isn’t that a little troubling?”
His face was all shadows. I was shaking from the rain, and I wanted to be anywhere but here.
“Now, get out of here,” he said. “Go check on Laura. Tell her I’m working on the house. Tell her not to worry.”
I ran through the rain, back into the house, pacing the downstairs. I dialed Tyler, and he answered on the first ring. “Hey,” he said, “I’m just finishing up here. I’ll be over in a bit, okay?”
“Daniel lost his shit. He’s digging up the garage.”
A pause, and his voice dropped lower. “He’s doing what?”
“He’s digging up the garage, because he doesn’t know who finished the floor ten years ago.” I gripped the phone tighter, waiting for him to provide a safe explanation, an answer that made sense.
Silence.
“Was it you, Tyler? Did you lay the concrete? With your dad?”
“God, that was ten years ago. I don’t really remember.”
“Well, think,” I said. “Was it you?”
I heard him breathing on the other end before he answered. “I really don’t think so, Nic.”
“He’s got a sledgehammer and a shovel, and he’s digging all over the property. He’s lost his mind.”
“Hold on,” he said. “I’m coming.”
I WAITED THE FORTY-FIVE minutes for Tyler to show up so we could handle Daniel together. I couldn’t go back in there and have a real conversation with him alone—I had no idea how to talk to him about anything. He was paranoid. He was crazed. He had a sledgehammer, and I didn’t know if I believed him about why he was digging up the floor.
I stood on the porch when I heard Tyler’s truck. He pulled something out of the back of the truck and headed straight for the garage. I took off after him. “What the hell is that?” I asked.
He was already at the door, knocking. Daniel flinched when he opened it, scowling at me over Tyler’s shoulder. “You called Tyler? What the hell, Nic?”
Then he saw what was in Tyler’s hand, just as I had. A goddamn jackhammer.
“Let him finish, Nic. He already started,” Tyler said, walking into the room, his eyes slowly taking it all in, then drifting closed. “Okay. Let’s do this.”
I threw my hands in the air. “You’re both completely out of your minds.”
“We have to know,” Daniel said.
“No, we don’t!” I said. I had my head in my hands, searching for understanding, for answers. “Why is this happening? How did this happen?”
Daniel slammed the spade into the concrete. “You’re not asking the right questions. You want to know why and how, and you’re getting strangled by it! Listen to what Dad’s saying. Don’t sell the house. What do you think he means? He means this. The garage floors. It wasn’t me. I came in one day after, and they were just done.”
“That doesn’t mean it was him. It doesn’t mean he did it,” I said, storming out of the garage.
I slammed the door on them, the thunder directly overhead, muffling the sound of the jackhammer. Daniel had emptied the garage, and all the material sat behind it, out in the rain. The gardening supplies, the tools, the wheelbarrow.
I grabbed the wheelbarrow and pushed it back to the door, silently cursing them, and myself, and my dad, and Corinne for disappearing in the first place. Tyler and Daniel paused to stare at me when I threw open the door again. I started picking up chunks of concrete, hauling them into the wheelbarrow. “Well? What should I do with this?” I had my hands on my hips, trying to focus on the task. Just the task.
Tyler met my eyes. “Back of my truck,” he said.
I wheeled it out into the rain, lifted the tarp, and hauled the pieces underneath, my hands turning chalky, like Daniel’s. When I turned back for the garage, Tyler was standing a few feet away, watching me. “You should go to Dan’s place,” he said. The rain fell from his hair, soaked his clothes, came down in a torrent between us.
“Did he send you out here to tell me that?”
He stepped closer, and I couldn’t read the expression on his face in the dark, in the rain. “Yeah, he did.” Another step. “Look, it might be nothing.”
“If you believed that, you wouldn’t be here.”
He came closer, put a hand on the truck behind me. Dropped his head, letting out a breath I could feel on my forehead, resting his own against mine for a second. “I’m here because you called me. It’s as simple as that.” And then his lips were sliding over mine in the rain, my back against his truck, and my fingers were in his hair, pulling him impossibly, desperately closer, until the jackhammer started up once more. “I’m sorry,” he said, pushing himself away. “I wish we could go back.”
My hands were shaking. Everything about me was shaking, and the rain was coming down harder.
“You really should go,” he said, striding back to the garage with his head tucked down.
I should’ve listened. I wanted to. I wanted nothing more.
But it wasn’t fair to them or Corinne. I had to bear witness. I had to pay my debts.
THE NEXT FEW HOURS consisted of Daniel and Tyler dislodging fragments of the floor and me moving the pieces in a wheelbarrow to Tyler’s truck, all of us covered with white powder.
None of us spoke. None of us came close to touching each other again.
The floor was in pieces, and Tyler stood back, hands on his hips, breathing heavily with exertion. The earth was exposed and waiting. Tyler got a shovel from his truck, Daniel used the one in the corner, and I used the garden spade from out back, softening the earth until it crumbled, coming up in chunks.
The only sounds were our breathing, shovels hitting earth, dirt hitting dirt, and rain and thunder.
And from deep in my memory, Corinne’s words in my ear, the scent of spearmint, her cold fingers, and my skin rising in goose bumps as I dug in once more, hitting something that was not earth, not rock.
My fingers reached in, touched plastic, and I jerked back. Used my shaking hands to brush aside some dirt. It was a blue tarp, like the one Tyler had in the back of his truck at this very moment.
Of course it was me.
It was me with the tiny shovel and the corner of the garage.
It was me, and it was fitting—that I should be the one to find her.
I stood too quickly, my vision swirling as I pressed myself against the wall. Tyler and Daniel had stopped, moved to see what I had uncovered. Stood around the spot I’d left. Daniel used the side of the shovel to brush more dirt off the tarp, to nudge it a bit to the side, exposing a corner of quilt.
Daniel sucked in a quick breath. “Oh, fuck.”
Blue material and yellow stitching.
My mother’s blanket that she wore around her legs in her wheelchair. Long, dull hair, matted and spilling out the top.
Like whoever had put her here, in the earth, couldn’t bear the thought of her being cold.
MY MOTHER DIDN’T DIE in this house. She intended to, but I guess at one point she also intended to live. Intention is nice, but it’s a thing sometimes based more on hope than on reality.
It had been winter, and with winter comes the common cold, and we all had it. My father came down with it first, which wasn’t something I’d typically remember; Daniel and I had the chicken pox together, and I remembered my mother dunking us into oatmeal baths, dousing us with calamine, but I couldn’t remember which of us got it first. This cold, I remember: Dad’s dry cough echoing at night, and the hospital mask we attached over our mom’s ears, and him sleeping on the couch. And then Daniel coming down with it, and then me, and then her.
The cold quickly running its course through all of us but becoming pneumonia for her. Packing her up to the hospital, the onslaught of fluid in her lungs and ineffectual IV treatments, and her sudden death.
She was terminal—had been terminal—and yet her death was unexpected. Caught us all unprepared. I guess I imagined last words of wisdom from my mother, something meaningful to hold on to, something worthy of a story to tell my children. Something with weight that would belong to me alone.
I felt robbed.
It was my dad’s fault. Even he knew it. I suppose if I’m being honest with myself, I know that it was a virus’s fault and cancer’s before that. And she could’ve caught it from any of us. But if my dad traced back the threads—which of course he had, as he was the type of person to follow every thread no matter what rabbit hole it led him down—it would end with him.
Maybe he knew where it came from, that virus. A student at school, a colleague from the workroom. The man behind the counter of the coffee shop, or the woman who asked for directions. Maybe he had his own point of blame. Maybe he saw this person with his girlfriend, or laughing next to his car, or staring out the window absently, and thought: You killed my wife. And they never knew. How many people out there are responsible for some tragedy and don’t even know it?
THIS WAS WHAT I was thinking about when I saw the quilt. This was what I did to protect myself for just one more moment. Focusing on my anger, on my mother, on who was to blame—the fault, and the suddenness, and maybe even its bitter insignificance—and not on what lay underneath the blanket.
A rustle of plastic as Daniel moved the tarp again, and then it hit me with its own suddenness. Corinne.
I lunged outside the garage, knees in the grass and sickness in the earth. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
Daniel was standing over me, a hand on my shoulder. I shrugged him off. He dragged the hose from the side of the house, even though it was already raining, to clean up the mess. And for once, just once, I wished we would discuss what was actually happening. At least mention it. Acknowledge it. What should we do? What? My mouth formed the W, but no sound would come forth.
Daniel was already making a list: Clean up the mess. “We’ll burn it down,” he said.
“And what,” Tyler said from inside, “get the cops here so they can find a body? Get an investigation started?”
Inside the door, in the dim light, I could just make out Tyler’s profile—still staring down at the blanket, which would implicate someone in this house. And the plastic tarp, and the concrete floor, which might implicate him.
He cursed, kicking the tools on the floor. Stormed past us and tore the tarp from the top of the truck bed. He threw it over the exposed plastic, used the shovel to tuck it under at the edges. I stayed outside while Daniel helped Tyler roll the tarp up.
Daniel peeled back the corner to check and ended up in the grass beside me.
“Is it Corinne?” I asked.
He didn’t answer at first, just dragged his arm across his mouth, spitting out anything left, which was answer enough. A body with long hair buried under our garage. Of course it was her. “It’s her clothes,” he said, and then he gagged again, retching over the grass.
“Nic,” Tyler said, “watch the woods.”
I watched the woods. Tried not to notice the rolled-up tarp, and the blanket underneath, and Corinne underneath that, being carried from the garage to the back of Tyler’s truck. Tried not to picture the girl she had been or the times I had stood in that very spot, the truth just inches below the surface.
Daniel put a hand on Tyler’s shoulder. Took the keys from his grip. “Not your responsibility,” he said.
Tyler rubbed a hand down his face. “We’ve got work sites.”
“This won’t come back to you,” Daniel said. “Thank you.”
“Daniel,” I said.
“I know plenty of places, Nic. This is my region. It’s full of abandoned sites.”
We were doing this. Really doing this. Moving a dead body with no idea how it truly got there. I thought of police and lawyers and all the ways her body being under this house might get twisted around. And then I thought of Everett trying to get the phone records thrown out in the Parlito case. “Leave your phone,” I said. “It’s a GPS.”
“It’s in the kitchen,” Daniel said. And then, tilting his head toward the mess, “Will you take care of this?” He looked at Tyler, since I am unreliable, apparently. Tyler nodded.
He drove away, and I began to cry, hoping the rain would cover for me.
“I need your car,” Tyler said, pretending not to notice. He kept his gaze focused on the garage as he spoke to me.
“For what?”
“Gravel. Concrete. We need to pour a new floor.”
“Shouldn’t we wait until morning?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. We need to clear the area. Level it. Can you do that?”
This was a task. I could do the task. “Okay,” I said. “Yes.”
Stop crying.
Focus on the pieces of concrete. Focus on the dust. On the pressure washer. On the thunder.
Focus on the tiny insignificant details.
Leave out what’s happening
Pull yourself together, Nic.
Pick yourself up and move.
Tick-tock.