“This is fine, Nicolette. But maybe we can hit the library on the way to see your dad, so I can send a file.”
“Are you sure? Because—”
“I’m here to see you,” he said. “Not sit in a library. I missed you.”
Now that he mentioned it, we hadn’t been apart for this long. Not like we went out of our way to never be separated, but I wondered if we’d just been stuck in the pull of forward momentum, never taking a step back or a step away. What would happen if we paused the track, took a breath?
He missed me, sure. He wanted to help, sure. But I also had the feeling that his case was getting to him. Maybe he needed a break. Distance. I could hear that in his voice on the phone.
“What did the police say?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Not much they can say. They didn’t look too happy to see me, but it doesn’t seem to be their top priority at the moment. I’m not sure his statement will help with the current situation.” He looked at me from the corner of his eye as he set up his work on the table. “Tell me about this missing girl. The posters are everywhere.”
“I wouldn’t call her a girl, exactly, but her name is Annaleise Carter. Her brother saw her walk into the woods, and she wasn’t home the next morning. Nobody’s seen her since.” My eyes involuntarily strayed to the backyard, toward her property.
“You know her?”
“Everett, you know everyone in a town like this. We weren’t ever friends or anything, if that’s what you mean. She’s younger than me, but she lived behind us.” I tilted my head toward the kitchen, and Everett went to the window.
“I only see trees.”
“Okay, well, not right behind us. But they’re our closest neighbors.”
“Huh.” He didn’t pull away from the window, and that made me nervous. There were secrets in those woods—the past rising up and overlapping, an unstoppable trail of dominoes already set in motion. I shook my head to clear the thought as Everett turned around. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
The disappearing girls; the police and my father and the things he was saying; the papers in the closet that I had to get rid of before someone else came looking.
“I lost the ring,” I said, my breath coming in shallow spurts as I tried to tamp down the panic. The sting as tears rushed to my eyes, and Everett going all fuzzy. “I’m so sorry. I took it off to box things up, and we were moving everything around, and now I can’t find it.” My hands started shaking, and he grabbed them and pulled me close. I rested my forehead against his chest.
“Okay. It’s okay. It’s somewhere in the house, then?”
“I don’t know. I lost it.” I heard an echo in the house, my ghost, maybe, another version of myself in these halls from another time. I pulled my hands back, balled them into fists. “I lost it.” Two missing girls, ten years apart. The fair, back in town. And all of us. Closing the gap of ten years like it was nothing but an inch. Just a blink. A quick glance over the shoulder.
“Don’t cry,” he said, running his thumb across my cheek, wiping up the tears. Just a piece of metal, Tyler had said. Just money. “It’s insured,” Everett added. “I’m sure it’ll turn up.”
I nodded into his chest. His hands pressed lightly against my shoulder blades. “Are you sure you’re okay?” I nodded again. Felt him laugh in his chest. “I never pictured you as a girl who’d cry over a lost ring.”
I took a slow breath and pulled back. “It was a really nice ring.”
He laughed for real, louder this time, his head tilted back, like always. “Come on.” He slung an arm over my shoulder as he walked up the stairs, luggage in his other hand. “Finish the tour?”
I laughed into his side. “You’re going to wish you picked the hotel.” We stood together in the narrow hall that extended the length of the upstairs. One master with a bath, two other bedrooms, connected by a shared bathroom.
“That’s my dad’s room,” I said, gesturing to the queen bed and the old armoire. I pulled Everett along, shut the door as we passed. “This one was Daniel’s,” I said at the next door, “but he took his furniture.” It had become a dumping ground of things my dad didn’t know what to do with: old novels, teaching material, boxes of lesson plans, dog-eared philosophy books, and notes written in slanted script. “We’re getting a Dumpster delivered next week. Moving on.” I cleared my throat. “This is mine.” The yellow bed looked drab. And the room looked way too small now that Everett was here. He didn’t like staying at my studio; I couldn’t imagine his feelings on this.
“Maybe we should stay in the other room? It’s got a bigger bed,” he said.
“I am not sleeping in my parents’ bed. I’ll take the couch if it’s too small for you.”
He eyed me. Eyed the bed. “We’ll work it out later.”
* * *
EVERETT HELD HIS PHONE against the car window and muttered a sarcastic “Hallelujah” when we were halfway to Grand Pines. His phone dinged in response, downloading emails now that we were back in the land of the data plan.
He scanned the surroundings quickly before diving into his emails. “We should come back in the fall. I bet it’s a sight,” he said. Tap, tap, tap from his cell as he typed.
“Yeah,” I said, even though we knew we wouldn’t. Fall comes with a vengeance here after the leaves change—for two days, when the wind blows, they rain down in a storm, coating everything like snow.
“It’s prettier in the winter,” I said.
“Hmm.”
“Except if you’re trying to get anywhere. Then this road feels like Donner Pass.”
“Mmm.” Tap, tap, tap on the keypad, and a whoosh as his message was sent.
“There’s a monster out here,” I said.
“Mmm. Wait. What?”
I grinned at him. “Just checking.”
* * *
THE WOMAN WORKING THE reception desk of Grand Pines started preening when we walked in the front door. Back straight, hair flipped, chest out. I was used to it, the unconscious way people reacted to Everett.
Everett is old-money Philadelphia. His whole family is that way, like old stately buildings and cobblestone and ivy. And as with the Liberty Bell, the imperfections only make them more interesting. More worthy of the life that fate has bestowed on them. Everett can hold court, quite literally—even with his friends, even with me. It’s a spell, a beautiful spell, the way he’s assertive without being bossy, confident without being smug. I imagine his family members were taught this line to walk as they were taught to crawl—Know thy classics and thy beer. Finely tuned, all of them, with a father to disapprove instantly if they veered off course.
I stood confidently by Everett’s side as he marched into Grand Pines. They never stood a chance, and I knew it.
As he walked off to see the director, the woman behind the desk raised an eyebrow at me, then the corner of her mouth, as in Nice.
I nodded. I know.
But then her eyes assessed me, like she was picking me apart, and I felt the clothes that didn’t fit right, and my hair that wasn’t done, and I knew my hands were probably still trembling from the caffeine.
“I’m here to see my dad. Patrick Farrell,” I said.
“Okay, sure,” she said, picking up the phone.
The nurse I’d seen on the first day led me to the common room, where Dad was playing with a stack of cards, some game that looked like solitaire but didn’t seem to follow any rules I understood.
“Look who I found, Patrick. Your daughter.”
He looked up, smiled big and real, and I felt my face doing the same. “Hi, Nic.”
Such a simple, beautiful sentence.
“You sure are popular today,” the nurse said, leaving us.
I grabbed her arm as she walked away. “Who was here? The police?”
“The . . . what?” She stared at my fingers on her sleeve, and I quickly released her. “No, the man who comes for lunch.” She brushed her hand over her arm, smoothing out the wrinkles.
“Daniel?” I asked, looking from her to my dad.
She shook her head. “No, the other one. Patrick, who’s the man who comes to lunch on Fridays?”