Missing Dead Girls

Also by Sara Walters

The Violent Season

Copyright © 2023 by Sara Walters

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Cover design by Maggie Edkins

Cover images © by Reilika Landen/Arcangel Images

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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.

Contents

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

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 to file your own taxes. Whenever she annoyed me, I went there in my head, sitting at that kitchen counter in my grandmother’s house beside my eighteen-year-old mother cradling one-month-old me, and reminded myself that being her burden was a choice I had to actively make. I didn’t have to choose it, but I did, too many times. And there she would be, in my bedroom doorway, tucking a lock of her short black bob behind one ear and eyeing me like I was a bomb, poised to explode at any moment. A daughter made of fire and smoke.

• • •

I blew the long whistle to signal adult swim, and a collective groan emanated from the kids in the pool as moms and nannies slid into the water with their floats. It was my break, so I hopped down from the lifeguard stand and swung my whistle lanyard around my finger, flip-flops smacking on the concrete as I made my way to the snack bar.

Halfway across the pool deck, Lottie approached me, her lips purple from the Popsicle she was eating, an overexaggerated look of disgust on her face.

"You’re gonna get fired, ya know, she taunted, sticky purple melting down her fingers. I’ll tell my mom on you."

I feigned interest and concern, lifting my eyebrows at her.

Me? Fired? From this absolute paradise of employment? Aw, man, I snapped my fingers. What’ll I do then?

Before she could open her stupid purple mouth again, I blew my whistle sharply. She flinched and covered her ears, dropping her Popsicle. I knew I was grinning, even as Lottie stared at me slack-jawed and curled her small hands into fists at her hips.

No food on the deck. I said, swinging my whistle again and walking toward the snack bar. Lottie stomped off behind me.

• • •

The snack bar at the club wasn’t like the hot dog carts outside the neighborhood public pool in Philly, where we’d grab syrupy snow cones. The snack bar was less a snack bar and more an actual bar manned by one pretty pool boy or another. It usually rotated between Jackson and Liam, who were always dressed in navy-blue Westshore Country Club polos and khaki shorts.

Jackson was twenty-two, and I’d occasionally catch him staying after his shift to shoot the shit with the golf caddies in the club’s main bar, throwing back Heinekens and eating the free bar nuts. He was born and raised in Willow Creek, which he’d mentioned during one of my first afternoons at the country club, before the pool had officially opened for the season. He’d been standing behind the pool deck bar, dark hair smoothed back and thick shoulders hunched lazily.

This place is like a black hole, he’d said, endlessly drying a fully dry glass with a bar towel. Even when you think you’re out, it sucks you back in.

Later I learned from the gossipy club waitresses that his pessimism was due to being forced back to Willow Creek by circumstance. He’d lost his server job in Harrisburg after he got caught selling coke out of the restaurant’s parking lot and had to move back home. Or so they said.

I still thought there was some merit to his angst. Willow Creek seemed like one of those towns that sank its dull teeth into you and locked its jaw.

• • •

Liam was eighteen, fresh out of Willow Creek High School and practically foaming at the mouth to get out of town. Penn State was waiting for him in the fall, complete with frat parties and keg stands, or so I imagined. He looked the type. He had a head full of loose honey-blond curls and the kind of tall, lean stature that turned the nannies and moms all dreamy eyed. He was always tossing his hair out of his eyes and flashing his white smile at the club ladies, and I would try to imagine him in braces or with acne, or with any kind of awkward imperfection to humanize him. He was at least relatively normal otherwise. He talked to me like I was a person, something I wasn’t used to from people on this side of Willow Creek. His family were club members—they had a big house in the rich neighborhood in the north end of town—but when I asked Liam why he chose to waste his last high school summer working here, he shrugged.

Nothing comes without a price, he’d told me, pushing his curls back with one hand. Especially not shit from my parents. I’d rather not pay it.

• • •

That day, it was Liam behind the bar. He saw me coming and shot me a finger gun before setting a plastic cup on the bar and filling it with ice, 7 Up, and a splash of grenadine. As I stepped up to the bar, he dropped two maraschino cherries into the drink and slid it over to me. I pushed my sunglasses to the top of my head, and then dropped my elbows onto the bar with a loud sigh.

That bad? Liam asked, chuckling. I made a face and took a sip of my drink, glancing around to see if any club moms were within earshot.

I swear to fucking God, I said, voice low. Some of the people here make me wonder if straight white people deserve rights.

Hmm… I think that’s been up for debate for a while. Leaning toward maybe not.

I lifted my drink to cheers his words and took a long sip. I looked around again, scoping out the people gathered under the pool cabanas they could rent. I saw a group of girls draped over the chaise longues underneath the nearest cabana, a set of BMW keys spilling from one of their designer tote bags.

I locked eyes with a blond in the middle chaise. Her hair fell almost to her elbows, cat-eye sunglasses perched on top of her head. She wore a black bikini that tied behind her neck and sat low on her hips. She had one leg bent as she leaned back on the chaise, a queen surveying her kingdom. I’d seen her there before, always flanked by a handful of other impossibly beautiful girls. They were the kind of beautiful that felt like a threat. A razor blade hidden inside a tube of red lipstick.

She looked at me for a beat too long, and I felt my insides twist. It was as if she knew me, even though I knew she didn’t. It still made my pulse jump.

Madison Frank. Liam said.

His voice made me break eye contact with her.

Huh?

He leaned his elbows on the bar and nodded toward the blond.

That’s Maddie Frank. She lives a few houses down from me. You’ll probably see her here most days in the summer.

I looked back at Maddie.

She was the embodiment of what I imagined all the girls from the north end looked like—a mirage of long limbs and tan skin and a smattering of freckles on her cheeks and nose that looked like they’d been individually and strategically placed. The sort of girl who men used to start wars over. Back in Philly, I’d fought a girl like that in the school parking lot.

I had been so angry back then. Sometimes, I still was.

Maddie caught me looking at her again, and this time she lifted an eyebrow, one side of her mouth turning up into a smile.

My neck prickled with heat.

I wouldn’t. Liam’s voice brought my eyes back to him.

Hm? What?

Maddie. I wouldn’t.

My neck grew even hotter, and I took a long sip of my drink while he watched me, half amused.

You wouldn’t what, I said.

I wouldn’t get involved, he said. He glanced over at Maddie. Her and her friends? All they do is chew girls up and spit them out. You know, fake a friendship, and then demolish them until they barely wanna show their face at school again.

I tried to imagine this, that pride of lionesses draped over those chaise longues, enticing some pretty girl to trust them, only to go for her throat once she was close enough. Killing for sport, not sustenance.

Yeah, I know girls like that, I said under my breath, remembering the sharp sting of red-polished fingernails digging into my arm. I knew too well the damage girls could do to each other. Especially girls who looked like Maddie. All that power in their pretty.

But still. I kind of wanted to know what her shampoo smelled like.

• • •

My shift ended at three. I climbed down from the lifeguard stand and tossed the foam rescue tube to Gigi as she came to take over.

Save anyone today, Til?

Gigi’s real name was Ji-young, but she went by Gigi because she got tired of white people mispronouncing it, as she’d told me with a shrug on my first day. Her parents were both first-generation Korean Americans, and sometimes I’d listen to her talking on the phone with them during swim breaks, her home language sounding like a poem.

I decided to let people be independent and work on saving themselves today.

Gigi tossed the rescue tube up to the chair, nodding.

Good call. These people could stand to do a thing or two for themselves, for once.

I waved over my shoulder at her as I walked off to grab my things from the lifeguard office—or what we called an office. It was really a closet-sized room by the exit with member records and medical supplies stacked along the walls, crowding an ancient desktop computer at a cluttered desk. In one corner, the duty guards piled our stuff. I pulled my black cotton shorts over my red one-piece, throwing the strap of my bag over my shoulder. As I passed the bar to leave, I waved to Liam, but my gaze strayed to the cabana where Madison Frank had been with her friends. It was empty.

• • •

Out front, I knelt by the bike rack to undo my lock, cursing the fact that I had to ride the miles to the country club and back home every day if Mom wasn’t off work to pick me up. My mom could probably afford to help me get a car, but after Philly, I knew she dreaded the idea of me having so much freedom. So much scared her now.

My lock was jammed. I tugged hard on it, cursing. I looked closer. The rust I’d been ignoring had probably gotten it stuck. I stood, landing a swift kick against the rack.

Fuck.

Looks like you’ve got yourself in a predicament.

The voice came