Page 20 of The Missing Half

Everything inside me drops. Angry tears sting my eyes. I’ve been mad for years, mad at the man who took Kasey, mad at God or the universe or random fucking chance for allowing the person he chose to be my sister. But I’ve also spent that time thinking I knew everything there was to know about her. Whatever this “Kasey and Brad” thing is—it knocks me out at the knees. I may not know the details yet, but I know it is bad. It is wrong.

I can’t seem to speak, so Jenna does. “We don’t know everything, but we do know about them.”

Lauren scans the street behind us, then says, “Fine. You can come in. Just—hurry.” The moment we’re through the door, she closes it and twists the deadbolt. “Here. Come into the living room.”

We follow her, and somewhere beyond my haze of shock and confusion, I register eggshell-colored walls, dark wood furniture, family photos framed in silver. The Tates clearly have more money than Kasey and I ever did, but it’s sterilized, cookie-cutter. As if it were intentionally designed to be the set of some wholesome, universally appealing Midwest sitcom. The Tates: America’s Favorite Family. A clamor of little footsteps reverberates around the house like a tiny storm. Beth Anne. Lauren said Matthew was out of town. I wonder vaguely where Thomas is.

In the living room, bright plastic toys are strewn across the rug and crumbs litter the coffee table. Lauren goes to the window, peers out, and twists the blinds tightly shut. There’s so much we need to ask her, so much I don’t understand.

“How did you find out?” she says once we’re all sitting down, Jenna and me on the couch, Lauren across from us in an armchair. Her back is rigid, fingers jittery. “About the affair?”

Affair. The word slices through me. It doesn’t fit, not when it comes to Kasey and Brad. Kasey, who spent her last summer alive reading textbooks and lying curled up in bed with me on weekend mornings. Kasey, who was only nineteen when she was taken. And Brad who is our dad’s age, who is a dad himself. Something floats into my mind, a memory of Kasey and me lying tangled in her quilt. “They’re such boys,” she would always say when she talked about the guys we hung out with that summer. “I need a man, Nic. A real fucking man.”

“It doesn’t matter how we know,” Jenna says. “But that’s basically all we do know. Can you tell us the details?”

Before Lauren can respond, Beth Anne launches herself into the room.

“Mama!” She’s in gingham shorts and white T-shirt with frills on the shoulders, her blond hair in unruly curls. “Time for pool now.”

“Beth Anne,” Lauren says. “We’re supposed to be having downtime. Why aren’t you watching your movie?”

“Because I wanna go pool!”

“We can’t go to the pool right now. I just put your brother down for a nap.”

“But I wanna,” Beth Anne says with a dramatic wobble in her voice. “I wanna play fishy.”

“We’re not doing that right now. We’re not going outside. Do you hear me? If you don’t wanna watch your movie, why don’t I get you a cookie and you can color in the kitchen while Mama talks for a minute, okay?” She stands, steers Beth Anne into the kitchen, and reappears a few minutes later alone.

Without her daughter there, it’s easier to hang on to my anger, which is what all my incredulity and bewilderment are turning into. How could Lauren have known this and kept it a secret for all these years? “Tell us what happened between them,” I say.

She twists her wedding band around her finger, her eyes darting anxiously around the room. “If I tell you, that’s it. You can’t come back, and you can’t tell anyone I talked to you.”

Jenna and I both nod.

Lauren sighs. “Brad and Kasey were sleeping together that summer, the summer she went missing. I don’t know exactly how it started. I mean, I know your families were friends, but other than that…” She hitches a shoulder. “Anyway, I caught them one day in her car. She was on a break. I was taking the trash out in the alley behind the shop, and I saw her in the back seat with him. I was so shocked I almost didn’t realize it was Brad.”

“How did you know him?” Jenna says.

Lauren looks surprised at the question. “Just from around town. My parents knew him and his wife. And their boys were a little older than us, but before they graduated, I saw Brad and Sandy every once in a while at school functions and stuff. When I confronted Kasey about it, she denied it. But then I told her I’d seen them together, her and Brad—actually, I probably called him Mr. Andrews.”

She lets out a sad laugh, then says, “Anyway, that’s when she finally opened up. She told me they’d been seeing each other basically since the beginning of summer. He worked at Funland, obviously, which was near the record store, and on his lunch break, he’d come over and the two of them would sit in her car and…I don’t know. Talk. Hook up.

“She made me promise never to tell anyone,” Lauren continues. “And I said something like ‘If you have to keep it a secret, it’s probably not a good idea to be doing in the first place.’ She was being reckless. Stupid. If anyone found out, it could destroy his family. But also, you know how it is. If word got out that she was involved with someone like that, people would make it her fault. She’d be a homewrecker. She didn’t exactly take it well.”

“So that’s why you guys were fighting that summer,” I say.

“Who told you we were fighting?” It’s me she asks, but it’s Jenna who responds.

“We tracked down Steve McLean, Skeevy Steve. He told us he remembers you from that summer, said when you started working with him at the barbecue place, you talked a lot about Kasey. He got the impression you guys were—he used the word ‘frenemies.’?”

“Oh,” Lauren says with a little frown. “Well, I was the only person who knew, and I didn’t know how to handle it. For weeks, we fought about it, and finally I just gave up. I didn’t want to deal with it anymore. That’s why I got the job at Mesquite. I don’t actually remember talking about Kasey that much, but I was really worked up about the whole thing, so I guess I could have.”

It explains why Kasey didn’t say anything about Lauren changing jobs. If anyone had pried, their questions would lead to a truth that, as Lauren put it, could destroy lives. I understand now why it was a secret, but I still don’t understand why it was a secret from me.

“Did you and Kasey ever fight in the parking lot?” Jenna says.

“The parking lot outside the restaurant, you mean?”

Jenna nods.

“Um…no? At least I don’t think. Why?”

Jenna opens her mouth to answer, but I cut her off. I don’t give a shit about explaining anything to Lauren, not now. “You made it seem like you and my sister were super tight that summer,” I say.

“I’m sorry. I was trying to protect her. That’s why I didn’t tell you. I’ve never told anyone.”

Beside me, Jenna leans forward. “Didn’t you think that Kasey having an affair with an older, married man was incredibly relevant to an investigation into her disappearance?”

Lauren holds up her hands. “Yes, of course I did. Well, actually, when I first heard she went missing, I thought she’d just run away with him. Not forever but, like, for a few days. She did that a lot that summer. Spent nights away with him. So, that’s why—”

“Wait,” I say. “Kasey spent all those nights with you. At your house.”

“That’s just what she said. Which was another reason we were fighting. I was sick of being her excuse, being complicit or whatever.”

All of Kasey’s lies are spinning into one enormous tornado in my head. And the same, single question is its eye: Why didn’t she trust me with the truth?

“So, that’s why I didn’t say anything when it first happened,” Lauren continues. “There was all this confusion about the circumstances of her disappearance, and the details about her car and wallet and all that didn’t make it to me for a while, so I thought the whole thing was far more innocuous than it was. And I didn’t want to get Kasey in trouble or ruin her life. I don’t know what your parents would’ve done if they found out about the affair, but I knew it would be bad. And to be honest, Brad might’ve been a jerk for cheating on his wife, but I know how close your families were. I didn’t want to ruin everyone’s life if he had nothing to do with it.”

“But what about after that?” Jenna says. “When it was obvious Kasey hadn’t just run away. Why didn’t you say anything then?”

“I was going to. I swear. When I learned the details of her disappearance, I thought maybe Brad wanted out and had done something to her. But I was scared. I was nineteen. The police hadn’t even talked to me yet, so I was trying to figure out how to approach them when I ran into Brad’s wife. It was during one of the first searches we all went to, in Grand Rapids around where Kasey’s car had been found. The two of us started talking, and Sandy told me she wished she and Brad could’ve been there for your parents earlier, the moment they found out Kasey went missing, but her family had been out of town. It was completely unprompted. Without even knowing I was suspicious of him, she gave me Brad’s alibi. He’d been on vacation with his family when Kasey was taken.”

I open my mouth, then close it. My head is too crammed full of shock and confusion and resentment to shape any of it into a logical question.

“Back then,” Jenna says, “in 2012, did Brad know that you’d found out about their affair?”

Lauren shakes her head. “I don’t know. If he did, Kasey never told me. Why?”

“Well, what you said earlier, outside. You made it seem like…Did something happen to you since we talked last week? Did somebody threaten you or try to get you to stop talking to us?”

Lauren’s eyes fill with tears as she nods.

“What happened?”

“It was terrible.” She grabs a tissue from the side table to wipe her wet cheeks. “Two days ago, on Friday night, Matthew had already left town, so I was alone with the kids. I took them to this event at our church. It was, like, a potluck thing. They’d set up tables and chairs by the playground and there was a bouncy house and they hired someone to do face-painting. There were so many people there, there had to be over a hundred.” She inhales a shaky breath. “God, I’m a terrible mother. I can’t believe I let this happen.”

“What?” Jenna says. “What happened?”

“Well, I fixed a few plates for me and the kids and we were sitting around with a bunch of the other moms, just talking. There’s, like, a little group of us with kids all about the same age. After we ate, the big kids went to play on the playscape. I was keeping an eye on Beth Anne, but I had Thomas too, and eventually, I needed to change his diaper. It was a messy one, so I wanted to do it in the bathroom, and I asked my friends if they could watch Beth Anne while I went into the church and they said yes, of course. And I don’t blame them for what happened. Really, I don’t. Because Beth Anne would’ve only disappeared for a minute, max. She could’ve just walked behind the bouncy house or the slide and reappeared sixty seconds later and no one would’ve known.”

I shoot a glance at Jenna, who has a look of dread on her face.

“Anyway,” Lauren says, “I was walking out of the church with Thomas when Beth Anne ran up to me. She looked fine. Totally normal. She had her face painted like a fairy and she was smiling, you know. She was having fun. That’s when she told me she had a secret and she could only tell me. But, you know, four-year-olds have secrets all the time. They saw a cute doggy and it’s a secret, or they didn’t brush one tooth. Whatever. So I was only half listening, but then she told it to me and my blood just ran cold.”

“What was it?” I say.

“?‘Stop talking about Kasey Monroe.’ That was my four-year-old’s secret.”