All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda Page A

squeaked, tiptoeing across the wooden floor to my parents’ old room, to the bedroom closet with the worn-out slippers and ratty shoes and work clothes that my dad would never need again. I slid my hand inside one slipper, where I’d hidden the key until I could check—until I could be sure—what it was for. I felt the imprint of a foot in the matted fake fur. The key was cold in my grasp, and in the dark, I couldn’t see the intricate patterns on the rectangular metal key chain. But I could feel them, infinitely swirling, closing in on one another, as I tightened my fist around it. Tick-tock, Nic.
    My sneakers waited beside the back door, and I felt a gust of chilled air brush against my arms. Everett must have opened the downstairs windows again.
    I hopped on the counter and pushed the windows back down, flipping the locks.
    And then I was gone.
----
    THESE WOODS ARE MINE.
    These were the woods I grew up with. They stretched from my home and wove through all of town, connecting everything, all the way down to the river and out to the caverns. It had been years, but if I stopped thinking so much and moved by heart, I could follow countless paths through them, day or night. They were mine, and I was theirs, and I shouldn’t have to remind myself of it. But now there were too many unknowns. The scurrying of animals in the night, something so unsettling about the nocturnal, about things that needed the dark to survive. Things breathing and growing and dying. Everything in perpetual motion.
    These woods are mine.
    I ran my fingers along the tree trunks as I walked, as I repeated the words to myself. These were the woods I used to sneak through in the middle of the night to see Tyler, who’d park his truck in the lot of the convenience store and meet me halfway, at a clearing my brother showed me when I was younger. Daniel and I once built a fort there out of tree branches and lined the perimeter with thorny vines— to keep the monster out, he had said. The storm that had swept through when I was in middle school destroyed the fort, and Daniel was too old to care by that point, so the clearing became mine and mine alone.
    But these were also the woods where Annaleise was last seen. These were the woods we searched ten years ago for Corinne. The woods we searched again last week. I was out here alone, in that empty gap of time when only the nocturnal and people craving the darkness roamed.
    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