57 pages • 1 hour read
Megan MirandaAll the Missing Girls
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 12-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary: “Part 2, Day 5”
Nic wakes up after having spent the evening at Tyler’s house. She watches TV, and he comes in to join her. As he sits beside her, she relaxes, while still feeling that “everything right about the night before” became “exposed in the daylight and undeniably wrong” (257). All those years ago, after the incidents at the fair, Nic drove Tyler’s truck for him. He asked her to pull over, producing “[t]wo silver bands woven together. A line of blue gems where they interlocked” (259). Nic had left soon after that, abandoning their plans, her life in Cooley Ridge. On their way out of his apartment, she tells him they have to stop seeing each other because she is destroying his life.
After stopping by the house, she heads to the church basement, for the second day of searching for Annaleise. The crowd is much smaller today than on the first day, and she’s paired with a young man and woman whom Nic first believes to be siblings. She then realizes they are romantically involved. The trio are assigned to check along the river, and she learns that her two companions knew Annaleise. The boy looks into the river and says, “She’d think that was fitting, I bet. Very Ophelia. Very art. Very significant” (263). They weren’t friends with her. They used to think she was the kind of person that kept to herself, but she was “loud with her art” (263). She would draw terrible things into the backdrops of school plays, things one would only notice upon looking closely. They tell Nic her brother is a useless pothead. She realizes neither of them really care about the missing girl.
Nic heads to the Riverfall Motel, alone, after they’re done searching. The man in the office tells her he hasn’t seen Annaleise. The police have already been by today to question him. She walks down the row of twenty rooms, knocking on every door. She comes to one and feels “someone looking out the peephole” (266). A man opens the door; to Nic, he seems the sort of person who would not have spoken to the police. He tells her that “maybe” he saw a girl run from the woods and climb through the open window in the unit at the end of the row (267). Once inside, Nic finds nothing notable. There is no evidence of Annaleise having occupied the space, but when she uses the motel phone to redial the most recent number, she gets the answering machine at Daniel and Laura’s house.
Later, when Nic finds Daniel working on the house, she questions him. She wants to know what secrets he’s been keeping from her. He refuses to answer her question, and tells her the police are in the woods. He knows, Nic realizes, because “[h]e had been watching. Standing out there, watching the woods, and listening” (268).
Chapter 13 Summary: “Part 2, Day 4”
Nic and Tyler stand in the living room of the house while Tyler waits for Daniel to come home with his truck. Time is running out, because they both need to be to the church basement for the first day of the search party soon. They’re both covered in white powder and dust. Nic is nervous. If Tyler takes Nic’s car, people will talk, more than they already have been. Nic offers him her father’s old clothes and says he can shower there. Daniel returns home with the car and Tyler takes off, saying he’ll see them at the search. Nic runs to the kitchen sink to vomit, covering it in “water and bile and fine white powder” (274). She stuffs his clothes in her dresser, hiding them, and heads to the church.
As the search groups are organized, Nic notices Officers Bricks and Fraize. When her name is called and she walks up to Fraize, he tells her, “Didn’t realize you’d moved back, Nic” (276). He asks her questions about what she saw in the woods last night, though Nic knows that he’s really still searching for Corinne.
As the search party enters the woods, they are held up by an older woman who is both slow and stops to look at every notable rock and piece of garbage in the forest. At one point, the woman finds “two letters floating inside a circle” (277). Most of the search party thinks it is part of a bracelet with a woman’s initials, “MK” (277). The woman returns it to the ground. Nic knows what it is: part of a Michael Kors purse. She picks it up; later, upon going to CVS, she throws it in the garbage.
Nic eats dinner with Tyler that night at his apartment. She tells him how she threw away the evidence from Annaleise’s purse, and he gently responds that she needs to stop interfering with the investigation. Nic is worried that this kind of evidence will stop people from really looking. She knows Annaleise is not okay. Tyler offers his apartment to Nic, because he doesn’t think it wise for her to stay alone at the house. She can even sleep in his bed. Nic feels his hand brushing her hair and embraces him. His touch reminds of “a feeling to coming home” and of “someone who has seen all the different versions” of her (283).
Chapter 14 Summary: “Part 2, Day 3”
Annaleise has been missing for one day. She went missing after her brother saw her walking into the woods. Her purse is gone, and her cell phone is turned off. They also know that before her disappearance, she texted Officer Mark Stewart inquiring about the Corinne Prescott case.
Tyler is at Nic’s house when Annaleise’s mother shows up. She wonders whether Nic might have seen anything, since their properties are so close. The mother asks to speak to Tyler, whose presence is explained by the broken air-conditioner he’s there to fix. Tyler says he hasn’t seen anything.
Corinne’s mother also paid her a visit after the disappearance, but Nic hadn’t had the heart to tell her any truths, that Corinne “had a meanness. A darkness” (290). After the case went cold, Mrs. Prescott divorced and left town with her two remaining children.
When Annaleise’s mother leaves, Tyler also leaves, though only after a hug that is much longer than “what might be considered appropriate for a girl with a fiancé and a guy with a missing girlfriend” (291). Nic calls a local pawnshop in search of her missing ring. She checks all the local stores but comes up empty-handed. Back at home, she finds Daniel locked in the garage, with his hands “covered in white chalk” and the floor “fractured and splintered” (294). He’s digging up the garage; he doesn’t know who laid the concrete. She calls Tyler, but he doesn’t remember having poured the concrete.
When Tyler arrives, the two of them enter the garage to talk to Daniel, who is still working in a frenzy. They decide to help him; Daniel and Tyler dismantle the concrete while Nic drags it to the back of the truck. After all the concrete is broken, Nic digs her spade into the ground, “hitting something that was not earth” (298). She sees her mother’s blanket wrapped around a body. Long hair spills out of the top: it is Corinne.
Nic falls to the grass, vomiting. Daniel and Tyler move quickly and decide that Daniel will move the body to one of the work sites, despite the fact that they have “no idea how it truly got” to the house (301). Tyler leaves to get materials so they can repave the floor. Nic focuses on the tasks at hand: the leftover pieces of concrete, the pressure washer, the weather, “the tiny insignificant details” (302).
Chapters 12-14 Analysis
These chapters move quickly, revealing a lot of information in a short number of pages. Thus far, Nic and Tyler’s relationship has been tumultuous. When they confronted each other on Day 12 at the pub, the night that Nic and Everett drank together, Tyler tells her, “do me a favor and stay away” (116). While encountering this scene, we as readers have yet to realize that the two had been seeing each other. There is a two-week period of intimacy that predates their bickering at the bar, and it becomes understandable that Tyler would react violently to seeing Nic’s fiancé. Aside from having sex, the two uncover a body together, along with Daniel. This provides a literal meaning to Patrick’s talk about skeletons in the house. Corinne’s murderer has been a shifting target over the course of the book, and after she is found under the floor of the garage, Patrick becomes a likely culprit, which only puts further strain on whatever romance might exist between Tyler and Nic.
The scene in which Corinne’s body is found is an urgent example of a recurring dynamic in the novel. When Daniel and Tyler are discussing who will hide the body, Daniel tells Tyler, “Not your responsibility” (301). When Tyler argues, Daniel states, “This won’t come back to you” (301). Every friend of Corinne realizes that they are all at risk of being pegged as the murderer. Their concerns are for the group—not for themselves, as individuals. If Tyler were to be pegged for Corinne’s disappearance, they’d all be questioned and probed. The case would be reopened, and their secrets would be revealed. This codependency is, above all, a means of survival, because if one falls down, they all fall down.
During the two days’ search for Annaleise, Nic comes into contact with two young people who were classmates of the missing girl. They have less-than-flattering opinions of her, citing her as someone who “walked the halls with this obnoxious smile all the time, like she was getting away with something” (263). She acted artistic and arrogant. What is most important is that no matter what people thought of her, she didn’t fit in. It seems likely that Nic begins to identify with Annaleise after she realizes that Annaleise was a bit of a loner, just like Nic and her friends. That Nic and her friends are outsiders is well known throughout the town. This is highlighted during Laura’s baby shower at the church, when the local women gossip and say Corinne deserved what she got.
A notable part of the two days’ search for Annaleise is when Nic throws away the remnant of the Michael Kors bag. She tampers with the evidence, because she thinks “when people disappear, it’s because they’re not okay” (280). People stopped looking for Corinne because the evidence gave them an easy answer, one that reassured them that their gossip and assumptions about her were right. Nic thinks that if they realize part of her bag is in the forest, they’ll assume she ran away. Thinking about this scene retrospectively, Nic already knows that she, herself, is implicated in Annaleise running away. She wants to be the one to find out what happened, if only for her own sanity. If the police begin accumulating evidence, it interferes with Nic’s personal investigation. At this point, she knows more than any other single character in the book.
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