Page 26 of The Missing Half

Chapter Twenty-five

Urgency tidal-waves through me, but it is so belated, I want to scream. I haven’t heard from Jenna since she walked out of my apartment on Tuesday night—five days ago. So much could have happened between then and now. I pray that I’m just being paranoid, that revisiting Kasey’s disappearance is fucking with my head, but I feel in my bones that something more is going on. Jenna’s words from the other week echo in my mind: Someone out there knows what we’re doing and doesn’t like it.

I stride to the door, my hand pausing on the knob. I need to get to Jenna’s house, but how? I biked to my dad’s, but it’ll be dark soon. Plus, biking to Osceola will take far longer than I’m willing to wait. My dad’s been drinking, so I can’t ask him to drive. And with my license suspended, he won’t let me borrow his car.

My fingers feel maddeningly slow as I pull up my Uber app. There’s no filter for cars with bike racks, so I click on the last option, cars with wheelchair access, hoping I’ll be able to contort my bike into the space meant for the chair. I balk at the estimated price of the trip—rideshares are a luxury I can’t afford—but that doesn’t matter right now. I order the car.

“Dad?” I call, walking through the house.

He’s in the living room, in his recliner, hand wrapped around a beer. On the TV is a baseball game.

“I have to go,” I say. “Thanks again for dinner.”

“Sure.” He doesn’t take his eyes off the TV. “Talk to you soon.” No Let’s do it again or Come over anytime. Not that I was expecting it after our disastrous conversation, but still.

I pace for the entire six minutes it takes for my Uber to arrive. It’s a white minivan driven by a guy named Gabe, and when it finally pulls up, I yank open the sliding side door and am relieved to find one of the bucket seats has been removed.

“Can I put my bike in here?” I say before Gabe, a twenty-something guy with acne, has a chance to say hi.

“Oh, um…” He glances from me to the bike.

“Come on, dude. You have plenty of space. I’ll give you five stars if you let me.” The pettiest bribe. When he hesitates, I add, “One if you don’t.”

He rolls his eyes. “Sure. Whatever.”

I heave my bike into his car, then jump into shotgun.

“I have that you’re going to 200 Erie Street, Osceola,” Gabe says. “That right?”

“Yes.”

It’s not Jenna’s address. I’ve only been to her house once, and her neighborhood was a goddamn maze, so when Uber’s map popped up, I typed in Osceola, zoomed in on the area of town where she lives, and chose an address at random. Once I get there, I’ll have to hop on my bike and pray I can find it.

As we pull away from the curb, I call Jenna again, but again it rings through. I glance at the map on Gabe’s phone. Ten minutes to our destination. My knee jitters.

The moment we hit Osceola’s main road, I say, “This is good. You can just drop me off here.” I remember turning right into the neighborhood somewhere around where we are now, and I don’t want to risk losing my sense of direction.

“You sure?” Gabe says. “We’re still a few blocks away.”

“I’m sure.”

“All right, then.”

Before he’s even come to a complete stop, I fling open the door and jump out. I hear him mutter, “Jesus, lady,” as I tug open the sliding side door and lug my bike out of the back. A sudden pain shoots up my leg like a knife. I look down to see that one of my pedals has sliced my calf, and a line of blood is running down my leg.

I lift my head to ask Gabe if he has a napkin or something, but the automatic sliding door is already closing. “You know,” he calls through the shrinking gap, “those ratings go both ways.” And then the door is closed and he’s driving away.

I swing my bleeding leg over my bike, and as the air catches the cut, it stings all over again. I pedal off in the direction where I think Jenna’s house is, my calf throbbing as my bike lurches over the train tracks and into the residential area beyond.

The sun has set now, and what little light lingers on the horizon is quickly fading. The endless chirp of crickets joins the deafening buzz of cicadas, but otherwise the town feels still and quiet. Almost preternaturally so. I bike past dark houses and empty lots, the grass overgrown and wild. The streetlights flicker above me, casting an eerie yellow glow over everything I pass.

I’ve been riding for about five minutes when I notice the same rundown church I passed by a few minutes earlier. The same white steeple, the same peeling red paint. I’m going in circles. I pedal past, then take a right. It’s little more than a blind guess, and I pray I’m headed on a path I haven’t explored yet.

And then, after another few minutes, I spot something I recognize from the time Jenna drove me here—a dense copse of trees she mentioned she liked because it made her feel surrounded by nature. I take a right at the next street then turn left into the neighborhood behind it. It’s hard to tell in the dark, but I think this looks right.

“Come on,” I mutter as I pass by house after house. “Where are you?”

And then I see it. The little white house with the towering tree out front. I skid my bike to a stop, the rubber tires squealing against the pavement. But my excitement is short-lived. There’s not a single light on in the house, and the driveway is empty. The garage door is closed, so Jenna’s truck could be inside, but there’s no way to tell.

I launch myself off my bike, letting it crash into the yard, and race to the front door. For a fleeting moment, I think how Jenna would hate this plan—or rather, lack thereof. I haven’t thought through anything. But there’s no time to worry about that now. I lift a fist to the door and pound.

Nothing. No lights turn on. There’s no noise beyond the door.

“Shit,” I hiss.

I knock again, louder this time, but again there’s only silence.

There’s a hedge on both sides of the door, lining the outside walls beneath two symmetrical windows. I step off the concrete stoop to the right and squeeze my body between the plant and the side of the house, the stiff twigs scraping my bare thighs as I inch toward the window.

Suddenly, a light flicks on, and I freeze. I hear the sound of a deadbolt and turn to see Jenna’s front door creaking open.

“Nic?”

I hear her voice before I see her. Then, from the sliver of darkness in the doorway, Jenna steps onto the stoop and into the light.

“What’re you doing?” she says.

“Jenna?” She looks…fine. She’s wearing a robe over pajama pants and a T-shirt, her hair dripping against the worn terrycloth. She hadn’t been kidnapped. She wasn’t being held prisoner in her own home. She was in the shower. “Jesus,” I breathe. “You scared the shit out of me.”

Her gaze flicks around the shadowed yard. “What’re you doing here?”

“You didn’t show up at my dad’s tonight.” I inch my way around the hedge and step back onto the stoop. “You haven’t responded to any of my texts or answered a single one of my calls. I’m making sure you’re still alive, that’s what. Now, can I come in, or are you gonna make me stand here all night?”

She hesitates, and I notice a look in her eye I can’t quite place. Wariness, maybe. Or fear. And that’s when I realize that, although she is safe and unharmed, I wasn’t wrong to worry. Something’s happened.

“Jenna? What the fuck’s going on?”

“Nothing,” she says a little too quickly. “Sorry. Of course you can come in.”

I slip through the doorway and into her dark house. She closes the front door behind me and flips on the light. I catch a glimpse of that wall covered in research as I turn to face her. Jenna doesn’t normally wear much makeup, but now her face is completely bare, and it makes her look older, tired.

“What happened?” I say. “Why didn’t you show up tonight?”

She starts to respond, but then she glances down and stops. “Whoa. Nic, you’re bleeding.”

I look at my leg to see the cut looks far worse in her bright house than it did in the dark. It’s about two inches long and deep. Luckily, it’s stopped bleeding, but a long swath of skin, from my calf to my ankle, is painted in sticky-looking blood, and it’s pooled in the top of my sock.

“It’s fine,” I say, even though the sight of it has made it start throbbing again. “I’m more worried about you. What happened tonight?”

“You need to get that cleaned. Let me go get some stuff.”

I start to protest, but she’s already walking out of the room.

“Jenna,” I say when she reappears a moment later, holding a wet, folded paper towel in one hand and a plastic caddy with gauze, Band-Aids, and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in the other. “Forget about my fucking leg. Why didn’t you meet me at my dad’s earlier?”

She sighs, not quite meeting my eye.

“Did someone threaten you?” I say. “Like they did to Lauren?”

“No.”

“Well, I can tell something happened. So, please, just—”

She lifts a hand. “It’s my mom. It’s the cancer.”

“Oh.” It’s so unexpected, for a moment, my brain can’t process it, as if she spoke the words in a foreign language. “Oh, Jenna. I’m sorry.”

“I’ve been so wrapped up in it all, I’ve just been letting everything else fall by the wayside. But I’m sorry for not texting you back. And about tonight…with everything going on, I honestly just forgot.”

“Oh. No. Of course. That’s okay.”

“With the cancer, you know, she has good days and bad days. But recently there’ve been more and more bad ones, and this past week has been the worst I’ve seen.”

I don’t know what to say. “Is she in the hospital?”

Jenna shakes her head. “She refuses to go. I don’t blame her, really. She’s been through a lot these past few months.”

“Is there anything I can do? You know, to help?”

“No. But thank you.”

I nod. Hesitate. Eventually, I say, “You were right. About Brad. I talked to my dad earlier and his alibis are worthless. Both of them. And I found something else too. In Kasey’s old room.” I feel like an asshole bringing up all of this right now, but I think Jenna would want to know what I discovered tonight no matter what else is going on in her life.

It must be true, because she says, “What’d you find?”

I tell her about the picture of Kasey at Nyona and the receipt from the day she went missing with the address scrawled on the back.

“You were right,” I say again. “I was being delusional because, you know, Brad’s like an uncle to me. At least he was. But he’s a bad guy, whether he was the one who took our sisters or not. And I’m finally ready to talk to him. He’s at the lake right now for that reunion they do every summer.” As I say this, the coincidence of the timing strikes me. Almost seven years ago to the day, Kasey was taken. “I think we should go.”

“Nic, it’s almost nine at night. We can’t go now.”

“In the morning, then.”

“I need to go to my mom’s tomorrow,” she says.

“Okay. No problem.” But I get the feeling that there’s something I’m missing, something she’s not telling me. “We can go after you’re done.”

“Nic,” she says. “Maybe it’d be best if we put a pin in all of this for a bit.”

“Wait—what?”

“With everything going on with my mom, this just doesn’t feel like the best timing.”

I study her face. Three weeks ago, Jenna would have given an organ for answers about Jules’s disappearance. Now she doesn’t want to talk to the man who could be responsible for it? Something has to have happened this week that changed that—something other than her mom’s cancer.

“Jenna,” I say. “If something else is going on, you can tell me.”

“Look, I’d be lying if I said what happened to Lauren didn’t rattle me. I mean, approaching a kid on a playground is a pretty messed up thing to do to get someone to stop talking. So, yeah, I’m also worried that we don’t know what we’re getting ourselves into.”

Something’s still not adding up. We were both unnerved by Lauren’s story, but afterwards, Jenna was nearly rabid to confront Brad.

“I get that,” I say. “But it also means we’re getting closer to the truth. I think we just need to talk to Brad. We’ve come this far. We need to find out what happened between him and my sister.”

“You’re not listening, Nic. I don’t have time right now. So…” She hesitates. “If you’re dead set on talking to Brad anytime soon, you’re just gonna have to do it on your own.”

My chin jerks back. “But—Jenna. I mean, I know how much you want to be there. Why don’t I just wait for you? It’ll be better with the two of us.”

It’s true, but the other truth is that I don’t want to do this on my own. If someone had told me three weeks ago, when Jenna first approached me in the Funland parking lot, that my friendship with her would turn into the best part of my life, I wouldn’t have believed it. But sometime when I wasn’t looking, that’s exactly what happened.

She sighs. “I don’t know how long this rough patch with my mom is gonna last. This one’s bad, and she has no one else. I can’t just leave her alone. So, like I said, if you wanna talk to Brad, that’s fine, but I’m not going to be able to do it with you.”

It occurs to me then that she might be bluffing. After all, I haven’t done a single thing on our sisters’ cases without her. Maybe she’s counting on me not taking her up on it.

“I’ll go to the lake alone, then,” I say. “Talk to him myself.”

She looks taken aback at this, which makes me think I read her right, but after a moment’s hesitation, she nods. “Just…be careful. Okay?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“I’m serious, Nic. If it was Brad who threatened Lauren, we don’t know what else he’s capable of.”

“I’ll be careful,” I say. “Promise.”

“All right, well, I have a lot to do tomorrow, so I should probably get some sleep. How’d you get here? Do you need a ride home?”

“I biked, but I can just—”

“No,” she says with a wry smile. “You can’t just. I’ll give you a ride. But first, you need to put a bandage on that leg. I don’t want you gushing blood all over my truck.”

I live closer to Jenna’s place than my dad does, and there’s hardly any traffic now, so the drive goes fast. Before I know it, we’re pulling up to my building. I’m about to open the door and hop out when I turn to face Jenna.

“Hey,” I say. “Will you be honest? Did something else happen this week? Did someone try to scare you?”

“Nic—”

“Because,” I continue over her, “you can tell me. I get that you’re used to taking care of people. You did it with Jules, you’re doing it with your mom, and Jesus, did you see yourself tonight with my leg and the hydrogen peroxide? Sometimes you can have real big-sister energy.” I grin and she returns it, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “But if you’re trying to protect me,” I say, “don’t.”

“Nic, my mom has cancer and she’s not doing well right now. We may not have the best relationship, but I’m all she’s got. I’m not just gonna leave her to fend for herself when she can hardly get out of bed.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Jenna sighs. “No one threatened me. Okay? I swear.”

I stare at her for a long moment. Then, I nod and tell her I’m sorry about her mom, to call if she needs anything. But as I slide out of the truck and walk through the dark night, I remember how afraid she looked when she answered the door earlier, and my suspicion solidifies: Despite all her denials, I think someone tried to scare her. And just like it did with Lauren, whatever the threat was, it worked.