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 9-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “Part 2, Day 8”
As Nic works on the house, a faintly recognizable voice calls to her. As she approaches it, she realizes it’s Jackson. He wants to know if Nic has seen Tyler, who has been missing since Friday. It’s now Monday, and the two of them set off to visit Tyler’s apartment. Upon arrival, they can hear his cell phone ringing inside as they call it, but there’s no answer. Jackson grabs a ladder, saying to Nic, “You’re my alibi and I’m yours. We weren’t breaking in. We were checking on him. Got it?” (198).
Nic waits outside as Jackson climbs in. He returns empty-handed. He assumes Tyler has gone camping, but Nic isn’t satisfied. She would have gone through his laptop; she would have checked to see if he’d brought his camping gear with him. They head downstairs and Jackson makes them breakfast at the bar before opening.
In a moment of unusual intimacy, he turns to her and tells her, “I didn’t hurt Corinne. I loved her” (199). It’s true that Corinne was pregnant, but it wasn’t his child, because the two of them had never had sex. She’d tried to get back together with him at the fair. He’d denied her. Furthermore, the cuts on her back were self-inflicted. Jackson says he’s telling Nic this because he trusts her.
She drives home and goes for a walk up the hill, where she can see all the way to the Carter property. She remembers how she and her friends used to play in the clearing when they were children. She, Corinne, and Bailey would take over and defend the land from the boys. They’d say there was a monster in the woods. Now, Nic wonders if the monster was “Annaleise crouched in the bushes,” watching (204).
Nic hears footsteps in the woods. In a moment of fear, she calls her brother. Daniel tells her to stay on the phone and get back to the house. As she walks, she keeps herself busy talking as she feels a presence following her. She gets back to the house just as Daniel pulls up. He tells her to stay put and takes off into the woods. When he comes back, he says he didn’t see anyone. Nic notices he has a gun. It belonged to their father but Daniel “took it from him so he wouldn’t hurt himself. Or someone else” (210).
It’s revealed that their father drank too much, though Nic knows he never would have hurt her or her brother—not like Corinne’s father hurt her. Corinne had been to the hospital with a dislocated elbow and a laceration at the hairline. During Hanna Pardot’s investigation, she discovered that these injuries were no accidents. Her father was abusive. Nic could never picture Corinne in this vulnerable position, but when she learned about this, she learned that Corinne’s “power […] was not limitless” (212).
As she’s falling asleep, Tyler calls to tell her he’s okay. He’d gone to Annaleise’s father’s house, all the way in Mississippi, but found out nothing.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Part 2, Day 7”
During Sunday brunch at Grand Pines, Nic can barely eat, so she pushes the food around her plate as her father tells her which of the menu options are good and which aren’t. She talks to him about Laura’s pregnancy, reminding him of the baby’s name—Shana—the same as she and Daniel’s mother. Patrick talks about how he first fell in love with their mother, and how they are the pieces of her left to him after her death.
She finds it hard to navigate this conversation—and indeed any conversation—with him, because she has to approach them “from afar, grazing off the top” (222). She doesn’t want to upset him or lose his train of thought by bringing up the affidavit or the house. He talks to her about Tyler, about how he always liked him and about how Tyler once told him he was going to marry Nic. These are things Nic never knew. Patrick says, “I’m a shitty dad, and I know it” (224). Nic won’t let him veer from what’s important. When she mentions putting the house up for sale, she says it’s time to move forward with their lives.
Later that day, Nic thinks about what it is that Annaleise saw 10 years ago at the fair, and heads to the fairgrounds to remap the fateful night of Corinne’s disappearance. She walks into a recognizable scene, imagining herself hanging off the Ferris wheel all those years ago. Were she to witness the scene today, she’d be “sick” and “furious” (225). That night, when Tyler went to find her ice for her face, he left to wash off his own hand, which was bloodied from hitting Daniel. In his absence, Nic felt an undeniable force to talk to Daniel, sensing that this moment, this conversation, would have the capacity to change their lives forever. What she stumbled upon when she found him was he and Corinne, her lips brushing his collarbone. She could tell by the way they touched each other that it “wasn’t the first time” (228). Daniel sees her and pushes Corinne off, but it’s too late: Nic has seen it all.
Nic keeps walking the fairgrounds, watching the crowd. She catches a woman staring at her through the crowd—it’s Bailey. She catches up with her, surprised to see that she has a young daughter from a failed marriage. Soon after the two women begin to talk, the soon-to-be ex-husband comes to take the girl home for the night. Nic brings up the missing girls. At first Bailey refuses to discuss the topic, but she soon tells Nic that Annaleise had been trying to forge a friendship with her a few months ago. They spot who they think might be Jackson, and then an argument erupts.
Nic still doesn’t understand why Bailey ruined Jackson. Bailey blames Corinne: “It wasn’t me. She was the monster. Can’t you see that now? We’re all better off without her” (232). Nic can’t bring herself to agree. She doesn’t believe it. Before Bailey leaves, she slips Nic a piece of paper with her phone number.
Nic is left standing alone again with her thoughts. Ten years ago, while Nic swayed, dangling off the edge of the Ferris wheel, Corinne had leaned into her ear, telling her, “Jump” (235).
Chapter 11 Summary: “Part 2, Day 6”
As she walks into the church for Laura’s baby shower, Nic feels and looks “out of place” (241). Her mother and grandparents lay dead in the graveyard and the smells and sights inside the building remind her of a life that is no longer hers. She hasn’t been here since Daniel and Laura’s wedding, and that was already three years ago.
Since she’s early, Nic offers to help Laura set up for the party. The church basement has been used as police headquarters for Annaleise’s investigation; pictures of her face are pinned to the wall. Nic takes them down and then hands her gift to Laura. She’d had a difficult time picking out anything from Babies “R” Us, and had decided on a tiny pink outfit. More importantly, she gives Laura a silver jewelry box engraved with her mother’s name, Shana Farrell. Laura begins to cry, saying she can’t accept it. Nic insists, saying, “She would’ve given it to you if she were here. I know it” (245).
The baby shower turns sour when some of the local women spot one of the investigation papers underneath a table and begin to gossip. They patronizingly pity Annaleise and maliciously attack Corinne. Laura tries to stop the gossip, turning red in the face, but there is nothing she can do. The woman, Monica, continues, saying, “Put them all in their place, didn’t it” (247). Nic grabs her things, says goodbye to Laura, and exits through the storm cellar door, which Tyler had told her the secret door code for years ago.
Corinne and Nic had stood in the bathroom two days before the fair. The pregnancy test the police had found in Corinne’s trashcan had, in fact, belonged to Nic. She was pregnant with Tyler’s child. Later that night, she’d met him at the river to tell him the news. When Corinne had told Nic to jump from the Ferris wheel, Nic realized the precious and fleeting nature of life. She’d realized that it was “something worth holding on to” (251). Nic knows that deep down, Corinne despised them all. Nic had been scared of what Corinne might have done. She might have pushed her that night, and in the aftermath of her death, everyone would have thought she’d done it to herself when really she “wanted nothing more than to live” (250).
Chapters 9-11 Analysis
The scene at the fair is central to the entire book. Many of the current relationships between characters have been formed by the events that unfold over the course of the evening: Daniel hits Nic, Nic catches Daniel and Corinne in an intimate embrace after the punch, Tyler proposes to Nic with a ring, Annaleise watches it all unfold. There is a voyeuristic quality to it all, as if Cooley Ridge is a specimen under a microscope. The fact that they all hold witness to these actions makes them accountable for keeping each other’s secrets. What the reader learns in this section is that Corinne urges Nic to jump off the Ferris wheel, after daring her to dangle from it, as they reach the top of its rotation. It is this act of cruelty that makes Nic realize “how paralyzingly temporary we all are” (251). If Corinne had intended to hurt Nic, she’d only made her stronger.
Although Tyler’s whereabouts are unknown until Day 8, he is a presence in these scenes. Nic learns that Tyler had once approached her father to ask for Nic’s hand in marriage. When she leaves to escape the gossip at the baby shower, she uses a door code that Tyler told her when they were younger. When he finally calls her on her cell phone, she notes that they “might not say all of what [they] are thinking, but [they] never lied” (213). Their being broken up and separated for years hasn’t disturbed the special bond that existed when they were a couple, and so his change in demeanor towards her is particularly painful. She cares deeply about maintaining his trust, which only underlines how absent Everett is in these chapters. He does not exist in Cooley Ridge; there are no reminders of him.
Nic has a long, emotional conversation with Daniel on the evening that she is followed through the woods. Her speaking is an attempt to ward off harm—to alert her pursuer that she is not alone—and she shares a strange anecdote with Daniel. We don’t often hear Nic speak about her work as a counselor. When she tells Daniel about the student who invites her to the football game so that she can witness his father yelling at him afterwards, she says, “Sometimes it’s easier to show” (207). The idea of showing, rather than telling, is a central theme to the book. Nic consistently wonders what it is she’s supposed to be seeing; mostly, she wonders what clues the missing girls have left behind that might help her find them. Nic’s friends in Cooley Ridge harbor many secrets. They have secrets they keep to themselves, secrets that only a few know, and secrets that the whole circle must shield from the outside world. But these secrets have proved to be harmful over the years. As Patrick says, time “shows you things if you let it” (223). It’s clear that Nic begins to feel that much of the trauma could have been avoided if they had confronted their pain, rather than shutting it away.
Related Titles
By Megan Miranda
