The clock on the nightstand said 3:04. Perfect. This was the empty gap—that time between when everyone went to sleep, when the last stragglers headed home from Kelly’s Pub, and the earliest risers were up, when the newspaper delivery began. The world was silent and waiting.
I left the room, stepping over the piece of flooring that 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 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.