Free All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda Page A

sprinkling of gray hair and cheeks that burned bright red like apples. “Regards to your father, hon. Are you okay?” His eyes slid to Jackson’s hand, then back to me.
    â€œYes. I’m fine,” I said, pulling my arm away.
    Jackson frowned, downed the shot, and slammed it back on the counter. “Something’s about to happen, Nic. You can feel that, right?”
    Like static in the air. A net closing, a car circling. Two weeks of digging into the past, and all the lies were rising to the surface. Annaleise goes missing and the box of Corinne’s evidence is shaken up, tipped over. All the names fall out again.
    I was at the front door when I saw it. The blue sedan, tinted windows, rolling slowly down the block. I waited for it to pass before walking to my car.
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    ANNALEISE’S LAPTOP HAD NO password protection, which I found slightly odd, but maybe not unexpected if she lived by herself in the middle of nowhere. Or maybe the police had hacked in to it, leaving it unsecured. I scanned through the folders of college projects and grad school applications, sorting by date last modified to see if there was anything new or potentially relevant. Then I did the same with her pictures.
    The photos weren’t sorted by anything other than date, time-stamped from as long as five years ago to as recent as three weeks ago. I lingered on one of Tyler in his truck, his mouth slightly open, his hand slightly raised: Smile, she says. He puts a hand up to wave or to block her shot. A frozen moment. A hundred different possibilities existing all at once. And most recently, a few shots from this year’s fair. The Ferris wheel looming, empty carts, lights glowing in the dusk. A child eating cotton candy, his mouth sticky with pink sugar, the wisps of cotton melting as soon as they touched his lips. Vendors reaching with change or hot dogs, their fingers starting to unfurl, and the people on the other side looking toward their children, or over their shoulders, already half turned away.
    I could picture Annaleise standing there, like when she was a kid. A bystander to the story, watching other lives play out. I closed the images and quickly scanned the files and saw the discrepancy. The image file names were in numerical order, but there were a fewjumps—a few gaps. The trash had been emptied. Could’ve been that Annaleise didn’t like how they’d turned out. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone else had been through here, checking for something he or she didn’t want seen. I jotted down the date range for the missing files: a chunk from four or five months ago.
    By the time Everett called to be picked up from the library, I’d searched every corner of the computer. Found the portfolios that she must’ve scanned in and photos of her artwork. I’d checked the list of last-visited websites, which were mostly school websites or job boards.
    Where the hell are you, Annaleise?
    I wiped down the keyboard and the rest of the laptop and slid her key into the front pocket of my shorts, the metal still hot from the sunlight. I’d store both in Dad’s closet until it was night again, and the world was sleeping, and silent, and waiting.
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    I COULD PROBABLY FIT all of my conversations with Annaleise into the span of an hour, yet I had an odd intangible connection to her, tied to my sharpest memories.
    Because in that box, the one I imagined in the corner of the police station hidden just out of reach, her name will forever be tied to ours. The cops had interviewed each of us, asking us about that night—about why Daniel had a broken nose, and why Tyler had scraped-up knuckles, and why I looked like someone had knocked me around. It was Tyler who remembered. “That Carter girl,” he’d told the cops. “Begins with an A. She was there. She saw us.”
    I imagine they questioned her, and I imagine she confirmed our story, because they never asked