Missing Dead Girls


 
 
 
 
 
 
 Copyright © 2023 by Sara Walters
 Cover and internal design © 2023 by Sourcebooks
 Cover design by Maggie Edkins
 Cover images © by Reilika Landen/Arcangel Images
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 The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
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 Contents
 Front Cover
 Title Page
 Copyright
 Content Warning
 Chapter One
 Chapter Two
 Chapter Three
 Chapter Four
 Chapter Five
 Chapter Six
 Chapter Seven
 Chapter Eight
 Chapter Nine
 Chapter Ten
 Chapter Eleven
 Chapter Twelve
 Chapter Thirteen
 Chapter Fourteen
 Chapter Fifteen
 Chapter Sixteen
 Chapter Seventeen
 Chapter Eighteen
 Chapter Nineteen
 Chapter Twenty
 Acknowledgments
 About the Author
 Help and Resources
 Back Cover
 
 
 This one’s for me.
 
 
 Content Warning
 Missing Dead Girls contains potentially triggering material, including mentions of sexual assault. If you or someone you know needs help or support, see the resources listed in the back of the book.
 
 
 I didn’t kill Madison Frank. But there was a picture of her body on my phone screen—on everyone’s phone screen. She was broken like a porcelain doll dropped from a flight of stairs. Blood dripping from the corner of her open mouth.
 The entire school hallway was filled with a symphony of phone alerts and rings, screens lighting up with the sickening twist of blond and red. And every eye turned to me.
 They were looking at me because the message was sent from an account under my name. They were looking at me because the photo was followed by a text.
 TILLIE GRAY KILLED MADISON FRANK.
 Someone screamed. It cut through the symphony, silencing it.
 My pulse was thudding in my ears. I felt a match strike in the center of my chest, burning through my rib cage.
 Beside me, the door to the main office swung open and the principal and a group of administrators spilled into the hallway followed by the school resource officer.
 His hand rested on his holstered gun, and in that moment, I wished he’d fire it.
 “Tillie,” Principal Vaughn spoke gently, like she was talking down a jumper. “You need to come with us.”
 I wished for a fire. I wished for the whole place to go up in flames, taking me and all my secrets with it.
 A girl made of ash. A ghost.
 A killer.
 
 
 Chapter One
 Lottie Southerland was pretending to drown again.
 I watched her from the lifeguard stand, blinking behind my sunglasses. Her head dipped under the water, then came back up. She gasped for air, thrashing her arms. I smacked my stale gum and blew a bubble.
 Lottie finally set her feet down in the three-foot-deep water, glaring at me.
 “Weren’t you going to help me?”
 My bubble popped, and I lazily pushed the gum back into my mouth. I shrugged.
 “Weren’t you being a little faker?”
 Lottie stuck her tongue out at me. I stuck mine out, flashing my middle finger. She turned and splashed away, kicking water in my direction.
 The kids in this town were insufferable. They showed up at the club with their nannies and inattentive mothers, who ignored them while they pissed in the pool and barfed undigested frozen Snickers bars on the sand of the volleyball courts. They took swimming lessons in the mornings and came back after lunch for a few hours of screaming and ignoring my whistle. Lottie was the worst of them. When I started a few weeks ago, I’d fallen for her fake drowning act a few times and dragged her stupid nine-year-old living corpse out of the shallow end when she spit water in my face and erupted into laughter.
 Lottie’s nanny, some Temple University student who was home for the summer, would barely glance up from her phone.
 “You get used to her bullshit,” she’d told me after the third fake rescue attempt. She shouldered a Saint Laurent bag that I’d seen her leave sitting in a puddle of pool water.
 “Just ignore her next time.”
 Back in Philly, ignoring a girl usually led to the worst kind of things. Just ignore her while she screams for help. Sure, I’d thought. Easy enough for Some Girl Who Goes to Temple to say.
 But now, weeks later, Lottie could kill someone in front of me and I would ignore her. Nothing I haven’t seen before.
 ***
 I took the summer job only so my mother would untangle the barbed wire she had wrapped around my very existence and breathe without her watching me. Since we’d left Philly, she’d been hovering—in doorways, in the chair across the dinner table after we’d finished eating, in the front window while I pulled my bike out of the garage. I wanted to swat her away like a gnat buzzing in my ear, but I knew she was only trying to love me. She was only making sure I knew that she did. After everything.
 I tried to imagine her at eighteen, barely a year older than I was now, with a sleeping baby tucked into her zipped-up hoodie while she filled out college applications. I tried to imagine the weight of it, how heavy it was to keep someone alive when you didn’t even know how