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 17-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 17 Summary: “Part 3, Day 15”
The narrative returns to the defining moment in which Nic and Tyler stand in the living room of the Farrell house, after Tyler has just said he’s found a body in the field. Daniel has told her, over the phone, to run.
She asks Tyler if Annaleise is dead; he says he saw her lying in the field with a gunshot wound. They both wonder if it was Daniel that shot her. The public would think his motivations were related to his secret affair with Annaleise. They’d think that he’d kill her to save his marriage. But Nic realizes that version of the story doesn’t make sense: Daniel couldn’t have killed her because he lost her at the river on the night they’d all chased after her and the ring.
In a moment of lucidity, Nic realizes Laura killed Annaleise. After running to the motel, Annaleise had called Daniel’s house to speak to Laura, as a last resort: “Her only way out. Tell Laura. Tell her about her dangerous husband, his dangerous family” (343). Laura, Nic thinks, must have gone to pick up Annaleise from the hotel, and then told the girl that they needed somewhere private to speak. They’d walked into the tall field of sunflowers at the Johnson Farm, and Laura must have taken out Patrick and Daniel’s gun and killed her. She’d wanted to preserve “the life she was owed,” her baby, and the future of her family (344). The people of Cooley Ridge would do anything for one another. Nic thinks about how much she misses it here.
As sirens sound in the distance, growing closer, Tyler tells Nic he found a letter on Annaleise, a letter naming them both as Corinne’s murderers. She’d meant to anonymously deliver it to the police. People had likely seen Tyler’s car there when he’d discovered it. The law would find them now, and blame them for killing Corinne.
In a moment of hysteria, Nic thinks back to the night at the fair. Nic says to Tyler, “You swore I didn’t kill her. You promised I didn’t do anything wrong. You swore,” to which he replies, “She threw herself in front of the truck… She did it” (347). Nic believes it. Corinne did everything intentionally and with calculation, keeping a ledger of favors owed in her head. And now it was time for Nic to pay her “very last debt” (347).
Nic and Tyler get into the shower together. They answer the door in their robes, and tell Officer Bricks they know nothing about what is going on. Meanwhile, Daniel has run into Everett on Everett’s way to the airport, and the two are back at the house, on the scene. Everett plays the role of the lawyer, demanding that the police stay off the property until they’ve secured a warrant. Inside, Nic tells him what’s going on, and that the police have just found a body in the field. Everett is now suspicious. He believes they’ll find something on the property. He asks, “What was your father saying? Why did you need the cops to stay away from him? Why do you need him silent?” (354).
When Everett asks Nic what she’s done, she pauses, then says, “I slept with Tyler” (355). Everett closes his eyes, in order to remain calm. He squeezes her arm hard enough to form a bruise, muttering something to her, before walking out the door.
Tyler and Nic flush Corinne’s key down the toilet then clean the mud from Tyler’s boots. Nic wonders when it was that Annaleise first felt a connection form between herself and Corinne. Nic thinks that maybe it was the night of the fair, when she’d played witness to a whole chain of events. Perhaps she’d wanted to uncover the real Corinne, that “sad, lonely girl” (357).
The police return with the warrant and enter the house. They search everywhere, tearing up the new concrete in the garage and digging through the garden. When they leave, Hannah Pardot arrives. She produces the note found on Annaleise’s body. Nic sticks with the easy story: when she came home, she got back together with Tyler, and Annaleise grew jealous. The girl had a lot of enemies, despite appearances, she tells Hannah. Hannah questions them, but they have an answer to everything: fresh concrete has been poured in the garage because their father will be coming back home for good. Further, They have no idea where their father’s gun went, because the back door is broken and anyone could have come in and taken it. Nic isn’t getting married to anyone in Philadelphia; there’s no ring on her finger. The story Nic weaves as she speaks brings her life back together, “lining up to bring [her] safely home” (361).
Chapter 18 Summary: “Part 3, Day 15”
After the initial questioning, Nic does not have to speak again. They all stay quiet—Tyler, Jackson, Daniel, and Laura—until they became “a town without a voice” (366).
Patrick is back at the house now, and although he occasionally wanders off, there is always someone in town to account for him and bring him home safely. Sometimes, he mistakes the now-pregnant Nic for Shana, his wife, saying, “I hope it’s a girl this time. He needs a sister. Someone to protect. It will make him a better man” (366). She and Tyler have rearranged the house to make room for a nursery.
Nic loved Corinne. She loved her and hated her and, when it came down to it, Nic knows in her heart that Corinne “made [Nic] kill her” (367). Nic sometimes still sees Corinne’s face at night, and Tyler will pull her close. This is how she knows she has a place in life where she belongs. In Cooley Ridge, she can face the truth, even if the truth is concealed from others. She will always have to live with the ghosts, and although she says, “I am terrified of all I have to lose and how close I will always be to losing it,” she believes that surviving is the only way forward in life (368). All anyone can do, really, is “Pick yourself up. Start over again” (368).
Chapters 17-18 Analysis
The novel draws to a close chronologically. It picks up where the beginning of the book left-off: with Nic and Tyler in the kitchen, sirens wailing in the background. The suspense of the early chapter suggested that Tyler had killed Annaleise, but this is debunked, as when Tyler found her, she was already dead.
That Laura killed Annaleise comes as a surprise. She is one of the only characters not involved with all of the secrets and the lies. She wasn’t friends with the group in high school. She barely knew Corinne, and she knew Annaleise even less. One of her characteristics that has been demonstrated consistently is, however, her commitment to family. What makes Laura unique is her position in life. She is married and a soon-to-be mother, with “an entire life stretching out before her” (344). What is interesting about this detail of the plot is that the reader is pulled in two directions. We have sympathy for her bright outlook, for her need to protect and maintain her family. We do not, however, have sympathy for the unforgivable crime she has committed. Laura’s multifaceted nature can also be seen in Annaleise. The young girl was trying to find a way to survive and get herself an education, but her means of reaching her goal were both cruel and illegal.
Corinne’s case is also closed in this section. Nic has never been able to replay the scene in her head in its entirety. Early on in the novel, Nic says how time is “a measure of distance. A way to understand. A way to explain things. It can weave around and show you things if you let it” (50). By reliving each day—from locating of Annaleise’s body all the way back to her first day returning to Cooley Ridge—she is able to make sense of what happened. She cannot bring herself to say, “I’d killed Corinne” (355). The only thing that made this apparent to her was her ruling out every other scenario and trying out every perspective.
Nic ends up staying in Cooley Ridge and pursuing a life with Tyler. This is foreshadowed over the course of the book as her relationship with Everett became less rooted in love and more rooted in circumstance. She became tethered to him during her years of displacement. When she returns to her childhood home, he becomes an outsider. This is clear whenever he comes to town. He warns the police that if they “stay on their property and [he will] file a complaint with the state” (351). Such invocation of the law and forcefulness makes him out-of-place in a town where everybody knows everybody. There are social codes that Nic grew up learning, and this ease of movement is what she is keen on returning to.
The book ends on a self-reflective note, though not necessarily a happy one. Nic addresses the necessity of carrying on after trauma, of the necessity to “survive” (368). Although she seems more ruminative than content, we know that her ending up with Tyler was inevitable, for their unspoken understanding of each other creates all the right parameters for love.
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