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.
Introduction-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Summary: Introduction and Chapter 1: “Part 1, Day 1”
The novel opens with a missed phone call from Nic’s brother, telling her that their father is in “bad shape” (3). She ruminates throughout the day before responding, letting him know that she’s going to come home.
She packs up her apartment, surveying the emptiness. Her fiancé, Everett, stops by briefly to wish her well before he must go to a meeting across town. The drive from Philadelphia to Cooley Ridge, North Carolina, is nine hours. As Nic drives, memories of her family and her past cross her mind. Nic, whose full name is Nicolette Farrell, left home 10 years ago, moving from her small town to a big city. Time and distance have made her past a haze of memory, “the outline of a ghost town full of ghosts” (8).
She and her older brother, Daniel, had put their father into a facility, and their mother died when Nicolette was 16. A letter her father had written, which includes, “I need to talk to you. That girl. I saw that girl,” nags Nic’s thoughts (4).
When Nic arrives to the house, awkward formalities exist between her and her brother; time has truncated their relationship. Between the silence and unnecessary mentions of thanks, Nic realizes that the only thing that has changed since she left is that everything has been quietly weathered and layered with a coat of dust. Whatever un-mended injuries exist between her and her brother are left over from long ago.
As she’s preparing to go to visit her father, Nic’s ex-boyfriend, Tyler, materializes in the frame of her open window. The “dark circles under his eyes that never went away” have finally disappeared since she saw him last year, and he looks healthier than she’d remembered (21). He’s got a date waiting in his truck, Annaleise Carter, whose family lives just a short walk from Nic’s. Nic tells him about her engagement. He’s impressed by her ring. Tyler has stopped by to drop off a lawnmower to Daniel and promises to see her around.
A memory resurfaces in Nic from the night Corinne disappeared. They’d all been at the fair, and Nic had been climbing around on the Ferris wheel as it was in motion. She jumps off at the bottom and runs as fast as she can so as not to be caught and ejected from the grounds by security. She feels a hand grab her wrist, and when she turns around, Daniel strikes her so forcefully that she is knocked to the ground, steeped in “shock and pain, fear and shame” (25). Later that night, Corinne goes missing: “The official line: Corinne last existed to everyone who knew her just inside the entrance to the fair, and from there, she disappeared” (26). Daniel, Nic, and Corinne’s boyfriend, Jackson, all remember spotting Corinne at another, final location before never seeing her again. This, however, remains a secret in a “town full of fear, searching for answers” (26). The memory comes to an end.
At Grand Pines that afternoon, Nic is pleased when her father remembers her. Although he confuses her fiancé, Everett, with her ex-boyfriend, Tyler, he does recall her engagement. Things turn momentarily sour when Nic brings up the paperwork to sell the house. Her father refuses, firmly stating that Nic’s “grandparents bought the house. It’s ours” (28).
She drops the subject, moving on to mention the cryptic letter she received from him weeks ago about having seen Corinne. He says he saw her on the porch of the house, and that “[t]he woods have eyes” (30). She presses him, but his philosophical musings—he was a philosophy professor at the community college—redirect the conversation toward the topic of the nonlinearity of time.
Later that evening, alone at the house, the wind and the shadows give Nic an unsettled feeling as her memories begin “falling back into place” (33). The past has resurfaced, and she tells herself that it is time to make sense of all that has happened and all that she left behind.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Part 2, Day 15”
Another female has gone missing; it has been about two weeks since her disappearance. It is Annaleise Carter, a woman Nic has known since childhood and who she’d just seen on a date with her ex, Tyler, days before.
Everett is visiting now. “I’m worried about you,” he tells Nic (40). Nic’s not been able to sleep for days; Everett has taken her to the doctor for anti-anxiety medication and sleeping pills. Nic has also, alarmingly, lost her engagement ring, though she thinks it’s been stolen. He offers to help sell the house and hire help to organize all of the remaining belongings, but Nic refuses. The disappearance of a second girl intrigues Nic. The last evidence of Annaleise’s presence was a text sent to a local police officer, inquiring about the Corinne Prescott case: Annaleise “mentioned Corinne’s name and disappeared” (44).
As much as Everett is trying to help, Nic feels stifled. He tells her that he wants her to move in with him as soon as she returns to the city, and that he wishes she’d accept some money from him to help out. She finds herself unable to directly address his questions. His cab pulls up, and she is once again alone in the house.
Nic opens the fridge to find something to drink, sticking her head into the cool draft. Tyler suddenly bursts through the backdoor. His shoes are “coated in a thick layer of mud” and his arms are “shaking” (48). She kneels to help him clean off his shoes and receives a call from her brother.
Nic’s brother asks if she’s alone: he commands “Get out. Now” (49). It is not until this point that Nic notices the dried blood on Tyler’s body and the dirt underneath his nails. A siren screams in the distance; Tyler tells her a body has been found. He approaches her, slowly.
Introduction-Chapter 2 Analysis
From the beginning of the book, it’s clear that the theme of time will play a large role. As Nic returns home, she drives past locations she used to know, which triggers memories from a decade ago, when everything went wrong. Her unresolved feelings resurface and become unavoidable. As she crosses the state line, she remembers “Corinne running down the side of the road” in front of her, and then “[o]ne decade, twenty miles away,” Nic sees childhood home (13). These moments, which are introduced very early on in the book, are ones that become revisited and elaborated upon as Nic moves backward in time. This introduces another crucial element of the book: its structure. Author Megan Miranda has organized the bulk of the chapters so that they move backward in time, from the end of Nic’s trip to its beginning. When she first meets with her father, for example, she thinks, “What memory had been flickering from the dying portion of his brain, begging for attention before it faded away for good. Corinne. Alive. But when? I had to find out” (33). These kinds of asides are to be expected as Nic jumps out of the achronology of the story and into her reflections. She does not discount her father’s memories; rather, she wants to find a method of probing without confusing. Although Patrick’s memories seem coherent (e.g. he remembers Corinne, his wife, and the other significant figures of his life), his timeline of events is confused. He says, “I should ask your mom…” (who is dead) before trailing off (30). His dependency on his children is established here, as Nic is forced to continuously corral him so as not to lose him during the conversation. And although he is not always present, Nic’s early fixation on his cryptic sayings and philosophies places lasting emphasis on his character.
At the beginning of the trip, as Nic leaves Philadelphia, she seems to have an unbreakable bond with Everett, and when he leaves, after seeing her off on her trip, “the reality of the day suddenly made [Nic’s] limbs heavy, [her] fingertips tingle” (6). On day 14 of being in Cooley Ridge, Nic outwardly pulls away from Everett. When he brings up living together upon her return to Philadelphia, she can’t give a direct answer, although she knows “it should be easy for [her] to say, Yes, of course, yes” (45). By placing these two scenes in close succession, their opposing dynamics are made stark, and we wonder what it is during Nic’s time at home that has caused such a rift. It is also important to note that Nic rarely mentions Everett to other characters.
The final scene of Chapter 2 is the one held in suspension over the course of the book. Because we, as readers, are unaware what has taken place in between the previous chapter (Day 1) and the following one (Day 15), we are left using context clues to fill in the gaps. Tyler appears menacing here, approaching Nic as Daniel, on the phone, warns Nic, “ Get out. Now” (Page 49). The approaching siren, the body in the field, and the soiled clothing all seem to point toward the idea that Tyler has committed a crime and is now about to harm Nic. Tyler appears regularly after this chapter in less tense settings, which only increases the suspense of the narrative and draws the reader’s attention to his actions.
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