My flashlight skimmed over the shadows, the branches hanging low and the roots reaching up from the earth and something small and fast darting away as I approached. I stopped worrying so much about staying quiet, my footsteps growing louder as I moved faster.
I broke through the tree line, now firmly on Carter property. The studio, where Annaleise had been living while applying to grad school for the last year, was dark and set back from the main house. Neither was particularly large, but they’d been kept up well enough, if you didn’t count the yard or the shingles. The main house had the outside lights on, as if they were expecting Annaleise to return at any moment.
Her place was once a stand-alone garage, before her father renovated it into an art studio years earlier—My daughter has so much promise, he’d told my dad. But that was before he lost his job—downsizing, he’d said, sitting on the back porch with my dad, drinks in hand. Before the divorce—She gets the goddamn house; been in my family and she gets the goddamn house. Before he left for a job in either Minnesota or Mississippi, I could never remember. Back when promise was a thing that felt real.
We’d almost done the same thing to our garage for Daniel, years earlier. Finding a place to live in Cooley Ridge wasn’t as easy as it was up north—there’s not a constant inventory of apartments turning over, and most rentals are occupied for years at a time. There were apartments over the stores on the main drag, and basements to rent out, and trailers you could lease and park on other people’s land for a price. So when Daniel decided to stay, he thought converting the garage would be the cheapest option. Ellison Construction—Tyler’s father’s company—was going to do the job, but my dad and Daniel would help out to defray some of the cost.
They built a carport between the garage and the house before starting, and they got as far as laying a new concrete layer over the unfinished garage floor, leaving space for the pipes. But they never got to the insulation or the plumbing. Corinne disappeared, and the world halted. Daniel changed his mind about how to spend that money, opting to live with Dad until years later, when he purchased his own place with Laura.
I was guessing Annaleise knew better than to put down permanent roots in Cooley Ridge. She left once, after all. She left and came back, and I bet she and Cooley Ridge didn’t know what to do with each other anymore. This apartment was hers now, but next it could belong to her brother, who was in high school. Just for now, I could imagine her saying any time it came up. Just until the right opportunity comes along. Just until I find my way.
A driveway snaked from the road to the side wall, from when it was a garage. Annaleise’s car and two others were lined up under the extra-wide carport beside the main house.
I kept my flashlight off as I ran the remaining distance to her back door, the teeth of the key cutting into my palm. I took a breath and guided the key into the lock, each groove falling into place. My palm shook against the door as I turned the lock, the bolt sliding effortlessly open.
My whole body tingled with anxiety when I stepped inside. I shouldn’t be here.
I turned the flashlight back on, keeping it low, away from the windows. The place looked a little like my apartment, with half-walls to partition the rooms but no doors. There was a queen bed with a white duvet in front of me, and an art desk pushed against the other wall, the supplies organized in containers, lined up in a perfectly straight row.
Through the partition, I saw a couch across from a television attached to the wall. The whole place was sparsely furnished but expertly done. Everything was understated and minimalistic except the walls themselves. They were covered in art, in sketches, but even those looked like they were done in pencil or charcoal, the whole place completely devoid of color.
I ran the flashlight from picture to picture. Framed sketches—Annaleise’s, I assumed—though some of them appeared to be replicas of famous pictures. Marilyn Monroe, looking down and off to the side, standing against a brick wall. A little girl, her scraggly hair blowing across her face. I had seen this somewhere, but I couldn’t place it. And there were some I didn’t recognize at all. Didn’t know whether they were copies or originals created by Annaleise.
Oh, but there was a theme: Girls, all alone, all of them. Girls looking exposed and sad and full of some longing. Girls passed over, passed by, staring out from the walls: Look. Look at us.
Girls, like Annaleise on the telephone poles, silent and silenced.
Annaleise had gone to some well-known art school, which wasn’t surprising. Back in middle school she’d won a statewide photography competition, and that had made the local news. She looked the part—the girl on the other side of the camera. Timid and fine-boned, with too-wide eyes, every move tentative, careful, deliberate. The one creating, seeing, but never seen. The opposite of Corinne.
I knew the cops had been here, but the place looked completely undisturbed.
There obviously hadn’t been a struggle in the apartment. Besides, we know she went out walking. If she had been hurt, it hadn’t happened here. Her purse was gone, but that could’ve been because she had it with her when she left. Her car was here. That was the Big Sign. Who leaves without her car? They hadn’t found her cell phone, so the general consensus was that it was with her, wherever that was. And it was powered off, since they hadn’t been able to trace it.
The cops had been through here, and probably her parents, though I hadn’t heard a thing about any evidence or clues. But this key was something real and solid and gut-twisting. This key was dangerous.
I went through her desk. Her closet. Her bathroom cabinets. Even the garbage can, remembering the pregnancy test they’d found at Corinne’s, stuffed inside the box of Skittles.
There was nothing here. A tissue, an empty stick of deodorant, the wrapper from a bar of soap. Though it was possible that someone had swept through here before the cops, cleaning up after her, saving her the embarrassment, letting her keep the parts of her that should’ve remained hidden.
I checked her dresser drawers. Everything neatly folded and everything hers. No men’s clothes. No spare toothbrush beside the sink. No notes on her desk. Nothing at all there except the sleek laptop next to a bundle of wires. I chewed the side of my thumb. They’d probably already been through it. I could have it back before anyone noticed. I could.
I grabbed it before I could change my mind.
I checked under her bed on the way out. There was a suitcase—more potential evidence that she hadn’t gone on a trip. And beside that, a white box that could hold a large photo album. I placed the laptop on the hard floor and slid the box out from under the bed. Lifting the top, I saw that it held the sketches that hadn’t made it onto the wall.
I flipped through them rapidly, the flashlight cold and metallic between my teeth, wondering if she’d stuffed anything else amid the drawings. Something the cops missed, something she’d tried to keep hidden. But no, only art. More sad girls. Eyes open, eyes closed, all forlorn, somehow. I had to squint to see their faces, their outlines so faint. Drafts, maybe. Sketches to darken and shade and bring depth to later. All blurring together as I turned them over faster and faster.
But then I stopped, flipped back a few pictures. I took the flashlight from my mouth, ran the light over the familiar angles of the face, the curve of her smile, the freckle at the corner of her right eye. The bow shape of her mouth and the flowing peasant dress that hit just above her knees—
Corinne.