Page 23 of The Missing Half

Chapter Twenty-two

After the police found my sister’s car on the side of the road and declared it a crime scene, they taped it off, investigated it, and a mere day and a half later, they packed everything up and told us the car was ours again. They seemed to think they were doing my family a favor, expediting the process so we could have the vehicle back. What they didn’t understand was that none of us would be able to drive it ever again.

My mom wanted to sell it, but my dad put his foot down. Kasey would need something to drive when she came back. I wasn’t going to drive around the crime scene of my sister’s abduction, so I took every penny I’d ever made and bought the world’s cheapest car on Craigslist. To free up space in the garage for it, my dad got a storage unit to store Kasey’s old car, and that’s where it’s been ever since.

That car, I realized, is at the center of everything. It was the last place Kasey was before she was taken, and apparently, it was where she and Brad hooked up on their lunch breaks. The police combed through it years ago, but what if they missed something?

It’s a little before nine in the morning when I pedal up to the storage facility on my bike. Last night, I called my dad to ask how to get into our unit, inventing a feeble lie about wanting to store some boxes. He pretended to believe me, then tracked down the two codes I’d need. I enter the first into the box by the gate. It shudders open and I pedal through. The facility is small, with no more than forty or so units, and I find ours easily. I enter the second code into the lockbox, use the key inside to unlock the metal door, then tug it open.

And there it is, our old car. It’s a black Honda Civic with the one bumper sticker Kasey snuck onto the back before our mom saw and told us not to put on any more. It was tacky, she said, and would decrease the resale value. The sticker is big and white, stark against the dark metal, printed with that song lyric Kasey loved so much: We are not two, we are one.

The unit is just big enough for me to walk around the car, open the driver’s side door, and slip into that old familiar seat. The air inside is sweltering. Suddenly, I feel as if I’m back in the summer of 2012, on my way to pick Kasey up from the record store and drive us home with the stereo blaring and the windows down. But just as longing starts to fill my chest, I replace it with numbness.

I came here to investigate. I don’t want to feel.

Looking around the dark interior, I find the key nestled in the cupholder. I turn it in the ignition, but the engine only kicks over a few times. In the foot space on the passenger side, I see a smattering of receipts, a tube of lip gloss. I envision Kasey on the night she was taken, running the little brush over her lips, checking her reflection in the overhead mirror. I reach for it, imagining the ghost of my sister’s hands, the whorls of her old fingerprints interweaving with my new ones.

“Stop,” I say aloud.

I pull from my backpack one of the plastic bags I brought to collect everything I found, toss the lip gloss in unceremoniously, then grab the receipts. The first is from Wendy’s, the price of a couple Frosties. The next is from Sonic, the next from a gas station. I look at the dates, study the prices, but I feel like an idiot. These aren’t clues. These are meaningless slips of paper.

I twist in my seat to look into the back and spot the big black CD case where Kasey and I used to store our music. “No way,” I breathe, reaching for it. Once we were in high school, we were mainly using our iPods and those tape adapters, but every once in a while, we’d pull out this binder and play some of our old stuff.

I tug the binder onto my lap and unzip it. At the first page of CDs, I can’t help but laugh. There’s the Killers, Destiny’s Child, Green Day, Spice Girls. I think back to our middle school years, to this onemonth of time when Kasey and I played “Wannabe” from the CD player in her room on repeat every day until we knew every word. I flip through the binder, each subsequent album dredging up a new memory. Kasey and me riding our bikes, singing “We Go Together” from Grease as we pedaled around the neighborhood, Kasey and me sunbathing in the backyard, holding invisible microphones while we sing-shouted the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way,” Kasey and me painting our toenails in her room, dancing to “Semi-Charmed Life” by Third Eye Blind. Kasey and me, Kasey and me, Kasey andme.

Finally, I get to the end and the golden bubble of memory pops. Kasey is gone. I am alone. Suddenly, the car seems to shrink around me, and I buzz with the need to get out of here. I shove the binder into my backpack, crawl over the center console, and dig around the back seats. I find some loose bits of paper, an old bottle of nail polish, the liquid crusted along the edge. I chuck it all into the plastic bag, then clamber back into the driver’s seat, where I pull out my phone and photograph the entirety of the car’s interior—the seats, the dash, the roof, the floors.

When I’m done, I glance at the time on my phone and groan. This took longer than I thought, and now I only have thirty minutes to get to work. Thirty minutes till I have to pretend Brad is my family friend and amiable boss instead of what he really is—a lying, cheating prick.

—

I’m home from work and finishing one of Sandy’s brownies when there’s a knock on my front door. It makes me jump even though I know it’s Jenna. It’s been three and a half days since we saw each other, and although I’m no closer to understanding how Brad fits into what happened to our sisters, she’s given me the time I asked for. I’ve been dreading this all day. I know she’s going to push for us to talk to Brad or to go to police, but I’m still not ready for either. The thought of what he did turns my stomach, and I wanted to punch him in the face so badly today at work my fingers twitched with it. But I can’t get myself to believe he’s a killer.

“You’ve been okay?” Jenna says once we’ve settled into my living room, she on the couch, me on the floor. “You still haven’t gotten any threats, right? No one’s approached you or sent you any messages or anything?”

I shake my head. “I would’ve told you if they had. You?”

“No. And same. I hope that means whoever got to Lauren doesn’t know she talked to us again.” Just as I’m feeling grateful she said whoever instead of Brad, she adds, “Have you spent any time looking into him? Brad, I mean?”

“I searched around our old car this morning,” I say. “The one Kasey was driving the night she was taken. The one she and Brad…you know. It hasn’t been touched since that day, and there was a ton of stuff in it. I brought it all home to go through.”

“I didn’t realize you guys still had it,” Jenna says. “Jules’s car was so old when it died, we never brought it home from the impound lot. I can help you go through whatever you found.”

“Thanks,” I say. “I’ve been thinking more about the alibi Lauren told us too, that Brad and his family were out of town when Kasey went missing. I didn’t realize it at first, but I know where they were. They have a reunion at their lake house the same time every summer in August. I’ve heard about it for years. They have dozens of people crammed into a handful of houses for almost a week. The alibi holds up. Brad couldn’t have left in the middle of all that without someone noticing.”

“Where’s their lake house?” Jenna says.

“On Nyona Lake. Near Macy, if you know where that is.” I’ve been there many times. It’s where our two families used to vacation together. “I looked up the drive Brad would’ve had to do if he’d taken Kasey—it’s three hours from Nyona to Grand Rapids. And he would’ve had to do it twice in one night to make it back unnoticed. That’s six hours.”

“That is pretty far,” she says.

“Exactly!”

“I said it’s far, Nic, not impossible.”

But now I’m on a roll. “When did Jules go missing, again?” I know the date is somewhere in the back of my mind, but it isn’t branded into my memory the way August17 is.

“August 4th.”

“Hang on.” I pull out my phone and open my calendar app. At the top, I navigate from the month display to the year, scroll all the way back to 2012 and find August 4. “That was the first weekend of August.”

“Yeah?” Jenna says. “So?”

“My dad goes on a fishing trip with Brad the first weekend of August every year. They have for decades, since before I was born.”

“Where do they go?”

“Same as the reunion. The Andrewses’ place in Nyona Lake. When Jules was taken, Brad would’ve been over an hour away.” I sit up onto my heels. This is the evidence I’ve been looking for.

“Hang on,” Jenna says. “Are you sure they went that weekend? I mean, what’re the odds they go the exact same weekend every year?”

“They have it blocked off, always have. My dad used to joke about how it’s the one nonnegotiable he ever had.” My voice is getting louder, faster. Finally, I feel as if the evidence is lining up with what I’ve known to be true all along.

“Slow down,” she says. “You said this lake house is only an hour outside town? That’s hardly iron-clad proof of anything. Jules was taken in the middle of the night. He could’ve left the lake, driven to Mishawaka, killed her, and come back.”

“That would’ve taken—what—four, five hours? At a minimum. My dad would’ve noticed if Brad had disappeared in the middle of the night for that long.”

“Nic,” Jenna says wearily. “That’s not necessarily true.”

“You’re just looking for ways he could’ve done it because you think he’s guilty.”

“And you’re looking for ways he couldn’t have because you think he’s innocent.” She huffs out a frustrated breath. “We need to talk to him. That’s the only way we’re gonna find anything out.”

“I know,” I say. “I just…I need more time.”

“For what?”

“Let me talk to my dad first. Let me ask him about the family reunion and his fishing trip with Brad that year.” If my dad figures out that I’m digging into Kasey’s disappearance, the conversation isn’t going to go well—if it goes at all. “After that, I promise we can talk to Brad. But this way, when we do, we’ll be ready.”

Jenna studies my face. “Fine,” she says eventually. “But I’m coming with you.”

“Obviously.”

She lets out a half laugh, half groan. “Why does everything have to be so hard with you?”

“I’m being thorough!” I give her my best innocent look. “You taught me that.”

She rolls her eyes. “God, sometimes you can have serious little-sister energy.” The words swell inside me, warm and golden. But there’s something beneath the feeling too, something like an ache. Before I can look at it too closely, Jenna grabs one of my couch pillows and tosses it at my head, and then we’re both laughing. After a moment, it fades. “By the way,” she says. “I’ve been meaning to ask. Did you ever reach out to that detective? The one who inherited your sister’s case after Wyler’s promotion?”

For a moment, I have no idea what she’s talking about. Then my mind flashes to the other week, after we met with Wyler. Jenna suggested we reach out to his successor, and I said I’d do it. But then we’d met with McLean and Lauren, and I’d been so distracted by all this Brad stuff that it fell right out of my head. “Shit,” I say. “I totally forgot.”

“Do you just want me to do it?”

“No, no, no. I’ll do it tonight.”

“Okay,” she says with a little grin. “So stubborn. Hey, do you wanna go through the stuff you found in your car now?”

“Yeah.” I grab my backpack and pull out the plastic bag. I put the CD case on the coffee table, followed by the nail polish and lip gloss, then turn the bag over and let the rest fall out in a rain of junk.

Jenna plucks one of the receipts from the pile. “Mind if I take pictures?”

I don’t know how a fast-food receipt could possibly solve the disappearances of our sisters, but I just say, “Go for it.” She snaps a photo while I take another from the pile.

“What’s this?” she asks. “Does it mean anything to you?”

I glance over to see her holding a business card, something I hadn’t noticed this morning. I lean over to read the finely printed words: O’Neil’s Auto—Oil, Tires, and Body.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe it’s the last place we got our oil changed? I took pictures of the car’s interior, so I can check.” I pick up my phone, navigate to the photo I’d taken of the windshield, then zoom in to view the oil change sticker. “No, never mind. They don’t match.”

“Hmm.” Jenna takes another picture while I start scanning the rest of the photos on my phone. “Oh my god,” she says, reaching for the big black binder. “Is this all your old music?”

I grin. “Yeah, I had so many flashbacks when I went through it this morning.”

She unzips it and a laugh bubbles out of her. “Spice Girls, of course, classic. And the Killers. God, I loved ‘Mr. Brightside.’?”

“Who didn’t?”

She flips through the pages slowly, a small smile on her lips. I go back to the pictures on my phone. A few minutes pass in silence until it is broken by an odd, constricted sound like a moan caught in the back of a throat. I glance over and see Jenna’s smile has vanished.

“Jenna?”

She looks up quickly as if she’s been caught shoplifting.

“Are you okay?”

She glances down at the binder and then up again. “Yeah. Sorry, I just— What is this?”

She points at one of our mix CDs, one of the ones Kasey decorated with a marker. In her neat, loopy handwriting are the words We are not two, we are one. Around them are little multicolored dots, yellow stars, pink hearts.

“Kasey burned that one,” I say. “With stuff from the seventies and eighties. She loved all that kind of music. That’s a lyric from one of her favorite songs.”

“?‘Strangers,’?” Jenna says. “By the Kinks.”

“You know it?”

“I…” Jenna clears her throat. “It reminds me of Jules.”

I realize then what’s happening. I know because it happened to me only a few hours earlier. A memory of her sister has knocked her out at the knees, like walking along a sidewalk and falling into a pothole she didn’t see coming.

“Kasey liked it too,” I say. “Loved it, actually. She wrote out the lyrics to it all the time. On her homework, her binders, everywhere.” I hesitate. “The one that got me earlier was ‘I Want It That Way’ by the Backstreet Boys.”

I was trying to make her laugh, but Jenna’s face remains stony. Then, abruptly, she says, “Where’s your bathroom?”

“Oh, uh, it’s through there.” I nod toward my bedroom.

She stands and disappears through the doorway.

“Shit,” I mutter, slumping back against the couch. Had I been narcissistic, talking about Kasey, who felt like an extension of me, when Jenna was lost in thoughts of Jules? Or had I sounded flippant when I mentioned the Backstreet Boys? Despite how our relationship started, Jenna is the closest thing I have to a friend right now, but I don’t know how to behave in the face of her grief. Probably because I’ve never dealt with my own.

I stand up and walk to the kitchen to open a bottle of wine. I was trying not to drink tonight, but Jenna could obviously use a glass, and this investigation has a way of chipping through my willpower. I take my phone with me, continuing to scroll through the photos of our car’s interior as I go. As I’m screwing off the wine top, I study the picture of our oil change sticker, then swipe to the next, a photo of our odometer. I’m about to flip to the next when something catches my eye, and I set the bottle of wine down halfway through my pour.

“Wait a second.” I squint at the photo, then flick back to the previous one. “Jenna!” I call.

I hear my bathroom door open, and a moment later she walks back into the living room. She still looks rattled, but her eyes are dry. “What?”

I tap my phone’s screen. “According to this sticker, the last time we got our oil changed was August 2nd. At the time, our car’s mileage—the mileage on this sticker—was 164,021 miles.”

“Okay…”

“In the picture of our odometer”—I swipe to the other photo—“the one that stopped clocking miles the night Kasey went missing, the night of August 17th, the car has 164,589.” I look up at her. “That’s a difference of over five hundred miles in, like, two weeks.”

She hesitates. “Well, a hundred and fifty of those are from driving to Grand Rapids that night…”

“Which leaves…” I look around the room. “Three hundred and fifty miles?”

“That doesn’t sound right?” she says.

“That doesn’t sound possible. There’s no way Kasey and I drove that much in two weeks. Especially because those were the weeks when she was refusing to go out and studying alone in her room most nights. We were going to work and stuff, and I mean, I was still going out some, but I got a ride most of the time. Which means…”

Jenna finishes my thought. “Kasey went somewhere else that night.”

“Or,” I say, “in the two weeks leading up to her disappearance, without telling anyone, she was sneaking off enough to put over three hundred miles on our car.”

But where had she gone?