All the Missing Girls

When Nic goes to Annaleise’s apartment to search for evidence, she notices that the walls are covered with pictures of girls. Underneath the bed, she finds a box with “the sketches that hadn’t made it onto the wall,” including one of Corinne that is “a goddamn replica of a picture that had hung in [Nic’s] room” (59). These photos, taken by Bailey, have been adapted to not include Nic; Annaleise’s focus is completely on Corinne. The artwork is Annaleise’s version of reality. It is a physical byproduct of her obsessive interest with Corrine. Annaleise has kept this photo hidden away, like her photographs of Corinne’s body on the Ferrell’s porch. The art functions as a form of self-expression, hidden away under stacks of drawings inside a box. They represent Annaleise’s unmediated obsession with Corinne and the friend group. Her other actions—the blackmail, the secrecy—are done out of desperation and feelings of necessity. It is, therefore, the unseen aspects of Annaleise that reveal what her priorities are. 

Patrick articulates early on in the novel that time is “a measure of distance we made up to understand things. Like an inch. Or a mile” (30). His philosophical musings stem from his long-term career as a professor. He is saying that time is a way to understand life, but not necessarily the way to understand it. Although he is often confused and/or disoriented, all of his statements bear truth (that there are skeletons at the house, that he saw Corinne on the porch). 

This configures with the structure of the book, which works largely from end to beginning. Within each chapter, memories are visited and revisited, becoming more coherent and clearer with each repetition. The received structures of time-management in the book, like the two-day searches for the missing girls, are not practices that actually help solve the mysteries. It is Nic’s jumbling of time and mixing of times and places that ultimately prevail.

At the police station, Corinne’s evidence sits stored away in a box. The contents of the box, like the ring and the pregnancy test, were supposed to be the clearest indicators that Corinne had run into some sort of trouble with Jackson and possibly a secret lover, which had driven her to leave, or to be murdered. Nic ultimately admits that “everything in the box in the police station had belonged to me” (335). 

These objects are made dynamic because they hold such different value depending on who assesses them. They are also an example of what happens when the secret, personal belongings of people’s lives are institutionalized. Narratives become forced onto them, leading people away from an answer, rather than toward one.