Page 35 of The Missing Half

Chapter Thirty-four

I stare at Mrs. Connor, the word remission bouncing around my skull like a pinball.

She takes a drag from her oxygen mask, peering at me with a look of amusement in her beady, watery eyes. “What do you think now?” she says. “You still think Jenna’s one of the best people you’ve ever met ?”

I think of the tears on Jenna’s face when she told me only last Monday that her mom was dying. I’m not going to spend the last few weeks of her life chasing answers we’re never going to get.

Mrs. Connor laughs. “Like I said, liar, liar, liar.”

I fantasize about striding to the kitchen and throwing open the drawers, banging around their contents until I find a pair of big, rusting scissors. In my mind, I grab them, go to the living room, yank the plastic tube of Mrs. Connor’s oxygen mask, and snip. I see the tube flailing around the old rug like a snake with its head cut off. I see Mrs. Connor smacking her lips open wide, sucking in air that isn’t enough. A fish in the bottom of a boat.

I open the front door and walk through without another word.

At the curb, I throw myself onto my bike and pedal fast out of the neighborhood. Within minutes, my muscles are on fire and my lungs are tight. It’s not smart to bike this recklessly on the busy roads between Mrs. Connor’s home and mine, but I need to feel the distance between me and her growing, need to focus on my burning thighs instead of that word: liar. I’m so preoccupied, I swerve into a lane of traffic and a car slams on its brakes, its honk loud and long. I swerve out again, waving an apologetic hand as it passes. The driver flips me off.

A sweaty half hour later, I’m back in my apartment, my helmet and bag dumped by the door. I pluck my shirt from my damp skin and billow it back and forth.

Before today, I assumed Jenna was lying in order to get me off our sisters’ cases because she thought it was dangerous. But that conviction is waning with every passing second. If that were the case, why would she be pursuing the investigation on her own? Because she clearly used her mom’s cancer as an excuse to buy herself time. It’s possible, I suppose, that she could be keeping me safe and not herself. But another possibility, the one that’s seeping into my mind like poison, is that she has a more self-interested reason for lying.

The deception is like a switchblade between my ribs. Jenna has confided in me about Jules and opened me up about Kasey. She’s given me rides, laughed when I tried to be funny, she’s talked straight to me instead of dancing around all my shit like everyone else. More than that though, she’s inspired me to be better, to stop running away from my problems and commit to our sisters’ cases. How could the person who did all that possibly be the same one who lied about her mom’s impending death?

But then I think back to the first day I met Jenna and the way she dangled a made-up development about Kasey’s disappearance just to get me to talk. So I guess it’s my fault for giving her a second chance, for letting her in. But even so, I keep coming back to why. The first time Jenna lied, she was trying to get information about Jules. Why is she doing it now?

My instinct is to call her this very moment, to demand answers, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Jenna, it’s not to be rash. Come up with a strategy first, I imagine her telling me. Get the facts before you go confronting someone.

I think through all the possible ways I could learn the truth, but none of them seem even remotely likely to work. Jenna’s not going to get tricked into letting something slip, nor do I think she’ll break no matter how many times I ask her. I could straight-up tell her I know she’s lying, but she’s fast enough to come up with some plausible excuse to explain it away. She probably already has another lie ready in the event I do just that. And there’s no point in me threatening to walk away from the investigation, because it’s clear that’s exactly what she wants me to do.

I see a flash of that wall in her living room, the one with all the research, and one final possibility pops into my head. It’s shitty and sneaky and I don’t want to do it, because even after everything, I still care about Jenna. I want to trust her. But whatever she’s lying to me about has to do with our sisters’ cases, and everything we know about them is on that wall.

I glance at the clock on my stovetop. 4:40 p.m. Jenna gets off work at five, and if she goes straight home after like she usually does, she’ll probably get there around 5:15. Which means I’ll have to wait until tomorrow. I don’t want to be rushed when I break into her house.

—

I leave my apartment at eleven the next morning to catch the bus to Osceola. I’m skipping work again today, but Brad’s in a pretty bad position to make any noise about it, and he doesn’t. Take as long as you need , he texted yesterday afternoon when I asked for some time off. I didn’t respond. I still need a job, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to return to Funland. My relationship with Brad and Sandy will never recover.

We get to my stop and I step off the bus, my backpack heavy with the hammer I found gathering dust in my hallway closet. I won’t use it—I brought it only as a last resort—but still, it serves as a reminder of the seriousness of what I’m planning to do. My handlebars slip through my sweaty palms as I heave my bike from the bus’s front rack.

You have plenty of time, I remind myself as I hop on and pedal toward Jenna’s house. And the truth is I won’t need much of it. Once I’ve broken in, I’ll go straight to the living room where Jenna has assembled her wall of research. Since I’ve seen it before, anything new should stand out. I’ll find whatever she’s hiding from me, take a picture of it, and leave. I’ll be in and out in under five minutes.

When I round the corner onto her street, I slow, passing her neighbors at a crawl and craning my neck to catch a glimpse of her driveway. I can’t think why her truck would be there, why she wouldn’t be at work in the middle of a Tuesday, but I’m about to break the law. I’d be an idiot not to be cautious. When I get close enough to see her house, my shoulders slump with relief. The driveway is empty. I turn around and pedal a block and a half to the copse of trees Jenna once told me she liked. I can’t imagine any of her neighbors would think twice about an unfamiliar bike left on the curb, but, again, I’m not taking any chances. Hopping off, I walk it over, then weave my handlebars through the tree line and lean my bike against a cluster of trees at an angle perpendicular to the curb. Not foolproof, but it’s something.

I make my way quickly to Jenna’s house and up to her front door. The driveway is still empty, but I knock anyway, just to be safe. A small part of me hopes she’ll answer. I imagine her swinging open the door with an expectant smile that turns contrite at the sight of me. I envision her ushering me inside, pouring me a cup of coffee, telling me how all of this is just some big misunderstanding. I would believe her. I would.

The door remains closed, the house dark. I knock again for good measure, call out her name, but I’m met with silence. I try the knob. It’s locked. I look around for a place where she might hide a spare key, and my gaze catches on the welcome mat beneath my feet. It’s one of the cheap kinds made from synthetic fiber, old and fading. I flip it over, but there’s nothing there. I stand on my tiptoes to check above the doorframe. Nothing. There’s no flowerpot or fake rock or any sort of chip in the exterior wall where she could slip a key. Not that I was expecting one. When you lose your sister to the worst kind of evil, you understand how precarious your own safety really is.

I walk around the side of the house to find a gate in the wooden fence and quickly slip through. In the backyard, I spot four possible ways into Jenna’s house—three windows and the back door. I try them all. Unsurprisingly, they’re locked. I knew I was going to have to break in, but this is officially where my plausible deniability ends. No longer can I tell a passing neighbor that I’m just a friend of Jenna’s, picking something up from her house with a spare key. No longer can I say she left the back door open for me—not if, when I’m caught, I’m jimmying its lock.

When Kasey and I were young—she was probably nine or ten, I was seven or eight—she discovered Nancy Drew at our local library and decided she wanted to be a detective. Then she passed the books on to me so I could be one too. The idea that our little world was riddled with mysteries to be solved was irresistible to us, and soon we were writing notes to each other using a made-up code, searching the neighborhood for where someone might hide their secrets, shining flashlights into every hole of every tree, so sure we’d find a map to treasure. Most practically, we learned how to use a card to open a locked door, and even after all these years, I’ve never forgotten the way you have to bend the corner just so in order to slide it smoothly into place.

The back door to Jenna’s house is old and wooden, clearly the original, its knob rusted brass. I peer into the sliver of space between the door and the frame and am relieved when I don’t see a deadbolt.

I pull my wallet from my backpack and find the card I tested out on my own door last night—an old expired debit card I forgot to throw away. As I re-bend one of its corners, I hear a car on the street out front, and I freeze. What if it’s Jenna coming home for lunch or to pick something up? I listen, the sound of the engine getting louder and louder until it is right in front of the house. Then it fades.

“Chill,” I say aloud as I shake out my hands, trying to purge the sudden adrenaline.

I slide the corner of the card into the doorframe above the lock. With my free hand, I grab the doorknob and start to jimmy it around, but the card’s not catching. The brass knob is old and rusted and it twists jerkily in the plate surrounding it. I rattle it harder, but still, the lock doesn’t budge. I pause, thinking of the hammer in my backpack. But if Jenna has an alarm, smashing a window will have the cops here within minutes. I loosen my grip on the doorknob and shake it more gently this time, working the card slowly downward.

And then, finally, I feel it—the thin plastic sliding behind the lock. The knob twists in my hand and the door creaks open.