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 15-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 15 Summary: “Part 2, Day 2”
This is Nic’s second day in town, and she has relaxed after the long drive. The house is empty, and as she wanders, she sees someone moving in the forest, “her blond hair caught in the moonlight” (306). The back door begins to open, and Annaleise Carter steps inside, holding a box. She dumps the contents onto the kitchen table. In these photographs full of trees and darkness, Nic can make out the back of her house. On the porch is a girl, “bronze hair spilling out of a dark blanket” (307). It’s Corinne’s body. Annaleise explains that after Corinne’s disappearance, she wanted to test out her new camera. She’d always been attracted to the haunted atmosphere surrounding the Farrell house. Upon uploading the images to her computer, she noticed the body.
“You look sick. You really didn’t know?” Annaleise asks Nic (308). Annaleise says they have an agreement: that Patrick Farrell has been paying her to remain silent. For $10,000, she won’t alert the police. For $20,000, she will destroy the flash drive containing the photos. Nic doesn’t have that kind of money, and Annaleise suggests she get the money from Everett, who is wealthy. She offers to give Nic two weeks to do so. Annaleise then reaches over and snatches the ring off Nic’s finger, returning to the forest and disappearing into the night.
The night of Corinne’s disappearance, Nic drove herself and Tyler home in the truck. On the side of the dark road, they spotted Corinne hitchhiking, “thumb out, skirt blowing in in the breeze” (311). She didn’t have her bag—she’d left it at Nic’s house earlier, so she could guilt people into paying for her. Tyler says to ignore Corinne and let it go.
This memory prompts Nic to call Tyler. She asks if he’s aware of Annaleise’s blackmailing of her father. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about and rushes over to the house. They examine the photos together, spotting a shadow in one of them. They wonder whose it is, but before they can come to a conclusion, Daniel walks in the door. They try to hide the evidence from him, but he sees it. He says the shadow is their father. Daniel demands that they speak to Annaleise in person, but the only way to coax her into it is to trick her into believing she is meeting only with Tyler.
After calling Annaleise to tell her he thinks he’s left his keys at their house, the three of them drive over to the Carter property. Annaleise realizes right away that she’s been tricked; “You made a mistake. The ring. Give it back,” Tyler tells her (317). They begin to argue. Annaleise knows they are all covering for someone; she thinks that Corinne was murdered and that they all had a hand in it. Annaleise finally agrees to give back the ring, but when they walk toward her studio, she runs into the woods. Tyler and Daniel take off after her, leaving Nic at the edge of the forest. They stay there until sunup, unable to find her. One thing they know is that they have to go talk to Patrick.
At Grand Pines, Nic immediately but gently guides her father into talking about Corinne. That night, he’d received a call that Nic had pulled some stunt at the fair on the Ferris wheel. He decided to be a good father and head to the grounds, but he was drunk, so he pulled over near the caverns. He heard voices, yelling. Nic asks her father what he did. She can see her father’s anxiety mounting as he tenses up. He changes the subject, telling her that she needs to leave, so she goes.
Nic dives back into her memory of the fateful evening, stating “I have to work my way up to it. Work my way back to it” (324). After spotting Corinne on the side of the road, she presses the gas down even harder, forging ahead, thinking “Screw you, Corinne” (324). Corinne steps into the road. Nic slams on the breaks as the car veers to the side of the road. After the crash, Tyler helps pull her out of the side of the car. She screams for Corinne, but there’s no answer. Tyler peers over the side of the road—where there is a drop-off—and checks the perimeter. Nic is too drunk to admit anything to the police. Tyler says he can fix the car, and, “in that moment, [they] made a decision, a pact. [They] nudged a domino, and it set off something” (327).
Nic imagines Corinne playing some sick game, hiding and snickering in the woods as they call her name. Nic now tells herself that it must have been a joke, and thinks that the truth is “too brutal in its simplicity” (328).
Chapter 16 Summary: “Part 2, Day 1–Night”
After driving from Philadelphia, visiting her father, and cleaning, Nic is exhausted. She touches base with Everett, and then slips into a memory from 10 years ago that she cannot look “directly in the eye” (333).
It had been two days since the incidents at the fair, and Nic stands in the shower, barely able to keep her thoughts straight. Daniel knocks and asks if she needs any help. She is sobbing, and she tells him, “I don’t want your help” (334). She can hear him on the phone down the hall, telling Tyler he needs to come to the house right away. Later, as they sit in Nic’s bedroom, Daniel speaks to her softly. “I’m all you’ve got,” he says (334). Nic had lost the ring. She decides that perhaps it was best to pretend that none of it ever happened after all.
Nothing in that box belonged to Corinne: “The pregnancy test, the ring, the stories” were all Nic’s (335). In a way, on the night of the fair and Corinne’s disappearance, Nic had disappeared, too.
Chapters 15-16 Analysis
These are the only scenes in which we see Annaleise speaking and interacting with other characters in the book. Otherwise, our impressions of her are all filtered through Nic’s firsthand accounts and other people’s opinions. When she discloses that she is blackmailing the family she is direct: “You have until he wakes up and sees this tomorrow morning to change your mind,” she orders Nic (309). Her boldness is driven by how sure she is that she’ll keep the Farrell family indebted to her. However, Annaleise knows nothing about Nic’s relationship to her family and to her friends. Annaleise had seen Bailey, Jackson, Corrine, Nic, Tyler, and Daniel interact over the years. She took a special interest in them; she saw them that fateful night at the fair. She drew pictures of Corinne, based on photographs of the three girls. Nic had thought Annaleise was “a quiet girl, a timid girl, a lonely girl,” who spent time by herself (310). Annaleise thought she knew it all, and that her intense and prolonged voyeurism had led her to a flawless plan to bleed a family of its money. What she failed to notice was that Nic and the rest are endlessly bound to each other. When Tyler asks for the ring back, he tells Annaleise to get out of “our lives” (318). It is also, perhaps, all of the time that Annaleise has spent alone that has failed to show her the capacities of friendship. Perhaps she cannot imagine that one person would sacrifice so much for another, given her own short-lived relationship with Tyler and the almost nonexistent relationship she has with her own brother.
There is something very unsettling about the photographs Annaleise lays on the table of the Ferrell house. Every aspect of them is ghostlike. Corinne’s hair spills haphazardly out of the blanket. It is dark outside. The shadow of someone shows in the background. It is the lack of clarity that makes everything so spooky. This is indicative of what makes the book, at large, unsettling. There is oftentimes a lurking suspicion implicit in its scenes. For example, whenever Daniel and Nic interact, the reader remembers when Daniel hit her. Even in Patrick’s moment of lucidity, we remember how he seems to have hidden away some crucial information about Corinne. Of course, we consistently wonder what happened to Corinne and Annaleise, and even the moments of the books where Nic experiences minor happiness—when she reunites with Tyler, when she greets her father at Grand Pines—are shadowed by trauma and mystery. As we travel backward in time, the past becomes increasingly inescapable.
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