“In a minute. Go ahead,” I said.
I spent a few moments in the bathroom, which had always been my favorite place for a good cry.
* * *
THE SHOWER WAS IN full-on party mode, Laura’s friends holding punch, grouped together with cupcakes and miniature sandwiches. Her mom and sister restocking the trays and moving effortlessly from group to group. People placing bets on the birth date on a sheet of paper hung over the gift table. I leaned against the entrance, readying myself for the show. Smile. Be friendly. For Laura.
“I don’t think they’re related,” I heard one of her friends say as she pulled the papers out from underneath the table. She was in Laura’s high school class; I knew her. Knew of her, at least. Same shade of hair, dyed a deep red. Monica Duncan. At least that had been her maiden name. “Annaleise was nothing like Corinne Prescott.”
They hovered around the search-party grid and Annaleise’s picture, which I’d taken down and hidden to specifically avoid nosy hands, prying words—everything I hated about this place.
Laura stood on the other side of them, her back to us, but she looked over her shoulder and said, “Oh, hush now, Monica.”
They waited for Laura to turn back around, and Monica lowered her voice. “What?” she said. “It’s true. Don’t you remember? That girl used to come around to our parties when she was barely fourteen—fourteen—the bunch of them. Remember?” Laura looked over her shoulder again, and I saw her face turning red, her eyes scanning the room. I shrank back into the kitchen. “Hitting on our boyfriends, acting like they owned the town—I mean, what did they think was going to happen? If that was them at fourteen, imagine them at eighteen. Wait, we don’t even have to imagine. There were more than enough rumors.”
I couldn’t believe they were talking like this at Laura’s baby shower. Laura, who was married to Daniel, an unofficial suspect in that case. Laura, sister-in-law to Corinne’s best friend.
“Annaleise was such a sweet thing. Never made a stir. Knew her place. The Prescott girl, she was different. She was a disaster waiting to happen. Who here is really surprised?”
“I don’t know,” someone else said. “Annaleise was supposedly seeing Tyler Ellison.” I heard nervous laughter. “So maybe not so sweet after all.” They all laughed.
“Martin said the police showed up at Tyler’s place this morning. For questioning. But he wasn’t there,” a third woman in the group added.
God, the rumors, the conspiracy theories. This is how it starts. This is how people decide on innocence and guilt. Time for me to get out there, make them stop because of my presence, and because they have nice Southern manners, after all.
“Can we please not talk about this at my shower?” Laura asked.
“Oh, I don’t want to upset you, dear!” Monica said, a hand around Laura’s waist. “What I’m saying is, there’s nothing for us to worry about. It’s not the same thing. No pattern. No reason to think this is all connected,” she whispered. I guess they hadn’t heard about the text that Annaleise had sent to Officer Mark Stewart asking about Corinne’s case. It wouldn’t be long, though. I rounded the corner, heading for the punch. Monica added, “Corinne, she got what she deserved. Put them all in their place, didn’t it.”
Laura had gone pale and was looking directly at me. “Monica,” she said.
“What?” Monica said.
Laura pushed away from her toward me, but I backed out of the room again.
“Oh. Oops,” I heard Monica say.
There was no way to get through this shower without making a scene. By embarrassing either Laura or her friends.
Laura still looked pale as she followed me into the kitchen.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, searching for my purse. “I have to go.”
“Nic, don’t. Please.”
I found the strap to my black bag, swung it over my shoulder. “Congratulations, Laura,” I said.
They were right. This wasn’t my place. I knew my place, and it wasn’t here—wasn’t in Cooley Ridge.
Laura couldn’t keep up. I disappeared inside that storage room closet, walked up the back steps, and remembered the combination from three years earlier—Ten-ten-ten, people really are too trusting, Tyler had said—pushed through the unlocked storm cellar door, and was gone.
* * *
CORINNE WASN’T AT FAULT, but she wasn’t innocent. That’s what Monica—and everyone else—implied. Corinne incited passion and rage, lust and anger. Someone couldn’t help himself. But she brought it on herself, obviously. That’s what you say to convince yourself: It will never be me.
She didn’t know her place.
She incited too much passion.
It’s typically men who commit murder in the heat of passion. Their fingers tightening of their own accord around our slender necks. Their practiced arm swinging forward in an arc, beyond their own intention, into our fragile cheekbones. Passion. Heat. Instinct.
Women are more deliberate. Adding to silent lists of slights, tallying the offenses, building a case, retreating inward.
Passion belongs to the men. Statistics say an unplanned attack will likely come from them. So the investigation started there: Jackson, Tyler, Daniel, her father.
But the police were wrong to start there, with statistics. They needed to start with Corinne, needed to know her first. Then they would’ve seen that perhaps there is nothing more passionate than loving someone in spite of yourself. Didn’t matter who you were. If you loved Corinne, it was all passion.
What the detectives wanted were facts. Names. Events. Grudges and slights that could boil over into a girl losing her life outside the county fair. Hannah Pardot exposed that Corinne—the real one. But I didn’t know whether it really mattered. Whether that one was any more real than the one I knew, the one living inside my head. A haunting, blurred image, twirling in a field of sunflowers. I never could grasp her, but she was the realest person I knew.
Jump, she’d said. And then she leaned in close, so only I could hear, and whispered, If I were you, I’d do it.
But I didn’t.
The facts. The facts were fluid, and changed, depending on the point of view. The facts were easily distorted. The facts were not always right.
What would she do? they should’ve asked.
After I said no.
After Daniel pushed her away.
After Jackson abandoned her.
What would she do if we all pushed her away in a single day? If she had nowhere else to go? What would she do?
I can feel her cold fingers at my elbows, and her whisper becomes a scream: Jump.
You want to believe you’re not the saddest person on earth. That there’s someone worse, someone there with you. Someone suffering beside you through the unfathomable darkness.
Jump, she said, like I had no future.
But she was wrong. So wrong.
Because when I was standing on the edge of the Ferris wheel cart, my breath lost to the wind and Tyler waiting for me down below, everything became so strikingly clear.
* * *
I WANT TO TELL someone about that night. About Corinne. About what she said.
About me.
But I don’t know how. It’s impossible, really. They’re not separate things. They come in pairs. One event gets tied up in another and you can’t tell one story without the second. They’re forever entwined in your mind.
Two days before the fair, standing in her bathroom, Corinne holding the test in her hand. “Ninety seconds,” she said, not letting me see. The ticking of the clock from her bedroom nightstand. “Tick-tock, Nic.”
“I’m glad you think this is funny,” I said.
“Moment of truth.” She looked first, and I had the sudden urge to rip it from her hands.
She smiled, flipping it around.