Page 41 of The Missing Half
The words ring through the night like a gunshot, and everything feels suddenly surreal. The accusation is absurd, like the punchline of some horrible, sick joke. I envision Jenna taking out her gun and pulling the trigger, only to see a stream of water come out, or a little flag that says Bang . But her face is contorted into an unfamiliar mask of rage. Something dangerous is building inside of her, a snake coiling tighter.
“You killed Jules,” she says again.
“W-wait,” Kasey says, her voice trembling. “Please. It’s more complicated than that.”
“Is it?” Jenna snaps. “Because now that I’ve got it all figured out, it seems pretty fucking simple. You hit my sister with your car that night, and when you realized you’d killed her, you got rid of her body.”
“I didn’t—”
“I saw you,” Jenna shouts. “When Jules didn’t come home that night, I went looking for her and just before I found her car pulled over on the side of the road, I saw another one driving off. It was spectacularly bad timing on your part. If you’d left even sixty seconds earlier, I probably never would’ve seen your car, but I did. I remember it because of its bumper sticker. In the beam of my headlights, that’s all I saw—a big white sticker against dark metal. We are not two, we are one. That’s what it said. I looked it up later and found out it was a line from a song.”
Standing in the shadow of the stairway, I feel as though the earth is tipping beneath me. I never told Jenna about that bumper sticker.
“I told the police about the car,” she continues. The words are pouring out of her in angry spurts as if she’s not entirely in control of what she’s saying. “But I couldn’t remember anything else, not the make, the model, nothing. And so nothing ever came of it. I all but forgot about it until two weeks ago when your sister went through your old car, and I found a CD you’d burned. You’d decorated it with that line.”
I think back to that night in my living room, to the way Jenna’s smile had dropped when she saw that CD. It reminds me of Jules, she’d said, and I thought I knew exactly what had happened. Nostalgia turned to grief. Kasey loved it too, I told her, trying to be comforting. She wrote out the lyrics to it all the time.
“Wait,” Kasey says. “You said my sister? What does Nic have to do—”
Jenna’s body jolts at the sound of my name, and she cuts Kasey off. “You don’t get to worry about your sister, okay? Not in front of me. Your sister is alive, and mine is dead—because of you.”
“I didn’t—”
“Stop denying it! I have proof.”
“That you saw my car that night?” Kasey says. “That doesn’t prove anything.”
“You’re right. It doesn’t.” There’s a sudden coolness in Jenna’s voice that scares me more than if she’d shouted. “That same night, when your sister and I were going through the rest of the stuff from your car, I found a business card for an auto shop out of town. It didn’t mean anything to her, but after seeing that lyric, I was starting to get suspicious. I went to the shop the next day and offered the guy working there two hundred dollars to show me their records between August 4th and August 17th, 2012—the day my sister went missing and the day you did. I found it within ten minutes. A black Honda Civic with a banged-up front bumper. The repair shop had taken dozens of photos of the car. Most were of the damage, but there was one picture of the back, and there it was—that fucking bumper sticker.”
Finally, everything that’s happened over the past week clicks into place. Jenna was trying to get me off the case when she told me she was taking a break to care for her mom, but she wasn’t doing it to protect me—from McLean or anything else. She was doing it to get me out of the picture while she investigated Kasey.
“I’m right,” Jenna says. “Aren’t I? You hit her. You hit her that night and then you hid her body to cover up what you’d done.” Anger is consuming her body like fire eating through wood. “I need to hear you say it.” Then she reaches behind her and pulls out the gun. “Say you killed my sister.”