I hated that he was right, because I wanted in that room. Needed to be the one to see with certainty that Tyler wasn’t there—that the visions in my head of his lifeless body beside his ringing phone weren’t real. That he was okay somewhere. I needed to see the phone and know why he left it, look in his closet and know where he went.
I watched as Jackson maneuvered the air-conditioning unit and heaved himself inside along with it. I stared up, waiting, the glare of the sun off the top of the window making my eyes burn. The uncertainty making my breath hitch.
Jackson leaned out the window. “Empty,” he called. He spent way too long trying to get the air unit back in. When he eventually came down, he folded up the ladder and wordlessly walked back inside.
“What did you see? Where is he? Do you know?” I asked, trailing behind him. I followed him all the way to the storage closet before he answered.
“Nah, didn’t want to go through his shit. He’s not there. That’s all I know. Maybe he went camping or something.”
Useless Jackson Porter. It should’ve been me. I would’ve checked for his sleeping bag and canteens. I would’ve looked for his toothbrush. Scrolled through his phone. Logged on to his computer and checked the search history.
Or maybe Jackson did. Maybe he just didn’t want to tell me.
We stood in the middle of the empty bar, the stools on the counter, the panic in my chest slowly unraveling.
“Here,” he said, taking down a stool. “Let me make you breakfast. We can catch up.”
I slid onto the stool, felt the adrenaline burning through the last of my energy. The crash just beginning. “Coffee,” I said. “Strong.”
He kept the sign turned to CLOSED and kept the lights off, so all we had was the glare through the window. My eyes were adjusting to the dark. “You serve breakfast at a bar?”
“No,” he said. “I make breakfast for myself. We open at noon today. Still, if we turn the lights on, people will try.”
“So much for a shitty economy.”
“It’s beyond shitty, Nic.” He cracked an egg, dumped it directly into a pan. “It’s great for business.”
“Real nice, Jackson. Doesn’t it feel like you’re taking advantage?”
“It doesn’t feel like anything. Unless you think about it too much. Who am I to judge? Meanwhile, I’ve got the most stable job in the state.”
“Good for you,” I mumbled.
He slid a sunny-side-up egg on a plate in front of me and I poked it with my fork, the yolk bleeding out. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Don’t like eggs?”
I scooped some into my mouth, but it tasted wrong: metallic somehow. Just a little off. “Do you remember Hannah Pardot?” I asked.
“Who?”
“You know. The woman from the State office who was investigating Corinne’s disappearance.” How could he not remember that?
“Oh, right. Detective Pardot. I had no idea what her first name was. Wow, she let you call her Hannah? God. She must’ve really liked you.”
No, she didn’t. And now that he mentioned it, she never called herself Hannah, and I never called her that, either. Yes, Detective. No, Detective. Thank you, Detective. I’m sorry, Detective. Yet I remembered her as Hannah Pardot.
Hannah wants to speak with you, Nic. That had been my father, standing just outside my door. You don’t have to, but I think you should.
I already told Bricks everything.
So tell Hannah the same thing.
That was my dad. Thanks for your help, Hannah. He’s a well-educated man, and he can recite lines of poetry, quote philosophy when the time is right. He’s a widower just trying to get by. His son hit his daughter, and I listened to them speaking through the bathroom grate. Listen, Hannah—can I call you Hannah? This is a family problem, that’s all. I have a feeling that Corinne’s might be a family problem, too. That girl was always here, trying to get away from something.
My father was handsome in the way that professors sometimes are, with their mismatching suits and bow ties and penny loafers and hair that they don’t bother styling. He had an easy smile and eyes that sparkled from the slight buzz he carried with him through the day.
“I heard someone call her that,” I told Jackson. “She didn’t like me, either.”
“So what about her?” he asked.
“They’re gonna bring her in. Or someone like her. And if we’re all here, who do you think they’ll go after?”
He paused, scooped the rest of his breakfast into his mouth, chased it with half a glass of orange juice. He wiped his mouth with his bare hand. “We should all go on a long trip.”
I smiled. “That wouldn’t look suspicious at all.”
He took my plate and tossed them both into the sink, ran the water without looking at me. “I want to tell you something. You don’t have to say anything back.”
“Okay.”
He focused on the running water, the way it hit the bottom of the silver bin. “I didn’t hurt Corinne. I loved her.”
“I know,” I said.
He glanced up, and his look nearly crushed me. I picked up my glass so my hands would have something to do.
“The thing is, Nic, the baby wasn’t mine.”
I froze. My cup halfway to my mouth.
“Did Tyler tell you that?” he pressed.
“No,” I said, barely any voice coming through.
“I don’t know if he believed me when I told him. He was right, though—I couldn’t say that. It’d still be a motive. Jealousy, right?”
I nodded, picturing Tyler and Jackson down by the river. Be smart, he’d said.
“But I didn’t know, Nic. I didn’t even know . . . she didn’t tell me. Why didn’t she tell me?” He put his hands on top of the bar, right in front of me. “We never had sex, Nic.”
I felt my cheeks heating up, the cup turning slippery. “Okay.”
He shook his head, then looked back at me, out from under his long lashes. “Do you believe me? Did she tell you that? Did she tell you who?”
“She didn’t tell me anything,” I said. “Jackson, this is what the cops want. They want us to start doubting again. To question each other. To drag it all out again. Let it go. Let her go.”
He turned the faucet off, his hands dripping as he held them. “I can’t. You know what she said to me that night?”
He’d seen her after the fair, I knew that, but this was the first time he was admitting to it, and I wasn’t sure why. “She begged me to take her back, and I said no. I said I was done with her. That I’d found someone else. I was so stupid, so stubborn—it never would’ve worked out anyway, not with Corinne around. Not out in the open. I came second to Corinne for her, too.”
“Bailey?” I asked.
He pushed off the bar, leaned against the cabinet of liquor bottles. “Corinne knew, I could tell. She told me she’d take me back, and I said no. She did it to herself, you know. The cuts on her back.”
I nodded. I didn’t know it then. But I did now.
“God, I should’ve said yes. I think about that all the time. I was just some stupid kid. I should’ve said yes, and she’d be here still.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I trust you.” He stayed where he was, but his smile made him seem closer. “Because I’d never tell anyone how one night last week, Tyler comes back from a date, sits at the bar, and then your brother comes in and buys him a round and asks him to please leave you alone in no uncertain terms. And then Tyler’s phone rings, and he gets this big-ass smile and says to Dan, ‘You really should be having this talk with her.’ And he picks up the phone right there, right here, right in front of Dan, like he’s gloating. ‘Hey, Nic,’ he says, and then his face falls, and he tells you to calm down, and he leaves his drink on the bar and gets the hell out of here, and your brother follows a few minutes later. They both tear out of the parking lot on their way to you, and then Annaleise goes missing.”
My hands shook under the bar. My entire body on edge. “It’s not—”
“I’m sure it’s not,” he said. “But you know how shit gets around here. You hear a story like that, or like Corinne begging me to take her back when she’s pregnant with someone else’s kid—you say something like that, and it’s over.”
We were silent, pretending to go about our normal activities, like he hadn’t both threatened and confided in me. And then I started to laugh. “I hate this place.”
“You miss it,” he said.