Page 43 of The Missing Half
Chapter Forty-two
Jenna’s body crumples. I have the inane urge to reach out, to guard her head from the fall, but I’m too late, and it cracks against the faux wooden floorboards like a ceramic bowl. The gun drops from her hand and skitters into the baseboard, black and glinting but no longer ominous—a defanged snake. Without Jenna between us, I’m suddenly face-to-face with Kasey for the first time in seven years.
Without preamble, she crouches down to press two fingers deep into Jenna’s neck. “She’s dead,” Kasey says, the first words she’s spoken to me in almost a decade.
My stomach lurches.
“No!” She throws out a hand. “Don’t do it near her body. Vomit contains DNA.”
The implications of this seem abstract and faraway, but even after all this time, it feels natural to take instructions from my big sister, so I whirl around to the open doorway behind me and stagger out, a hand clamped over my mouth. I make it to the wooden railing and lean over, retching into the yard below. Like an echo in my right arm, I can still feel the force of the hammer colliding with bone, as if my body is memorizing what it’s like to inflict such violence. I throw up again.
“Close the door behind you,” Kasey says when I step back inside. Blood is pooling around Jenna’s head, crimson and slick. Her face looks blank—not peaceful or sleeping, like corpses in the movies, but hollow. The hammer, which I don’t remember dropping, is on the floor beside her, the metal stained red. “Lock it.”
Everything is moving too quickly, as if I’m in a film that’s being fast-forwarded. I need to pause, rewind. “Wait, Kasey…” I don’t know how to finish. I know she pressed her fingers into Jenna’s neck, pronounced her dead, but my brain is sludge, and the words aren’t making sense.
“We don’t have time for all that right now,” Kasey says, and that’s when I notice the wad of towels in her hands. She must have gotten them when I was outside. Gingerly, she steps around Jenna’s body and crouches down to lay a towel on the floor by her head. The blood seeps into it, turning the brown terry cloth black. With the other towel she grabs the hammer and begins to rub it down. “We need to do this first, then we can talk.”
“Do what first?” I say.
Kasey looks up. On her face is a mixture of pity and impatience. “We need to get rid of her body.”
“Wait. No. Shouldn’t we call the police?”
“And tell them what?” she says. “That you hit her in the head with a hammer? And now she’s dead?”
“B-but,” I stammer, “she was going to kill you. That’s self-defense, isn’t it? I mean, not self -defense, but something.”
Slowly, Kasey stands up. “Nic, what she said is true. The car crash may have been an accident, but Jules died that night, and I covered it up.”
Everything inside me sinks. Even in the face of all Jenna’s evidence, I’d been clinging to the hope that she’d gotten something wrong, that Kasey hadn’t killed Jules that night after all. But with my sister’s words, the last of that hope fades.
“So, if we call the police,” Kasey continues, “I go to jail for a very long time. And”—she nods at Jenna’s body—“so do you.”
I stare at the blood-soaked towel by Jenna’s head, and the word that has been crowding at the edge of my consciousness since I swung the hammer mere minutes ago finally crashes through: murderer. Jenna is dead, and I killed her. I gulp in a breath, then another. My hands start to tingle. Blackness swoops into my vision.
“Hey,” Kasey says, and her voice is softer now. Through the haze of my confusion and distress, it reminds me of our childhood, when I’d crawl into bed with her after a nightmare and she’d murmur to me, the sleepy words comforting and warm like honey. “You saved my life tonight. That woman was going to kill me.”
But she wasn’t that woman, I think. She was Jenna. And I loved her.
I must’ve voiced this out loud, because Kasey says again, “She was going to kill me.”
She’s right, isn’t she? Hadn’t I waited until Jenna cocked the gun? And if faced with the same choice now, between Jenna and Kasey, wouldn’t I choose the same thing? The answer feels so deeply ingrained in me, articulating it is like trying to describe what it feels like to breathe: Jenna may have become like a sister to me, but Kasey is blood, and I will always choose her. Again and again and again.
Still, I am a killer now. For the rest of my life, Jenna will be dead and I will be the one who murdered her. It is depraved what I have done, evil. It will twist around my DNA and change me from the inside out. The thought makes me start to hyperventilate again.
“Nic,” Kasey says. “I need you to hold it together. You can react to all of this later, but right now I need you to trust me and do what I say.”
I stare into my sister’s eyes, feeling as if I’m standing on the edge of a great precipice. If I take one step forward, I’ll go into free-fall, with God knows what waiting for me at the bottom. But this is my sister. And right now, she needs me.
“Okay,” I say. “What do I do?”