Page 44 of The Missing Half
Chapter Forty-three
I get the tarp from the back of Jenna’s truck while Kasey cleans up the rest of the blood, then together we move the body. Jenna is far heavier in death than I ever could have expected, and Kasey and I have to wedge our arms beneath her torso to flip her over onto the tarp, her hands falling onto it with fleshy thuds. I swing violently from sorrow to disgust and then back again.
Slowly, we heave her body down the stairs of the garage apartment, across the lawn, and into the truck bed. I climb into shotgun and Kasey slides into the driver’s seat, using the key she found in the back pocket of Jenna’s jeans to turn on the engine.
As we pull out of the yard, I study my sister’s face. What I did to Jenna is looming at the edge of my mind like a storm on the horizon, but for now, I hold on to the distraction that is Kasey. For years, I tried to numb the pain of losing her with alcohol, but it never came close to the feeling of being in her presence. I drink everything in: her hands, her fingernails, the curve of her ear, the soft, peachy, all-but-invisible hair on her cheek. She’s wearing jewelry I’ve never seen before, and something about this makes me ache. Her arms are slimmer than they were in college, more muscular too.
There are so many questions I need to ask her, but before I can verbalize any of them, she says, “How do you know Jenna Connor? She said you were going through the stuff in our car together? And how did she find me after all this time? How did you get here?”
All of that feels like so long ago now. I quickly tell her the basics, how Jenna and I teamed up to look into her and Jules’s disappearances, how Jenna, I assume, pieced bits of information together to find her, how I jumped in the back of Jenna’s truck when I saw the gun in her bag. “I didn’t know it was you she was coming to kill,” I say. “I didn’t even know you were alive. I can’t believe you’re alive.”
My voice is thick with incredulity and relief and gratitude, but beneath is a thread of anger. Kasey’s been alive this whole time, and she never once reached out. She looks over at me, and I can tell she knows exactly what I’m feeling.
“I know,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“But I don’t understand.” The conversation I overheard between her and Jenna earlier had major gaps, and I’m growing more and more impatient for her to fill them in. “What happened that night after…after you hit Jules with the car? What did you do?”
Kasey shoots me a sideways look I can’t read. “What Jenna said was true,” she says. “I hid Jules’s body. I was going to call 9-1-1—I was—but it was clear she was dead. There was no chance of saving her. If I called the police…well, everything would’ve been ruined, and for what? A split-second freak accident.”
Beyond my window, the black sky blurs with the dark wash of trees. None of this is what I imagined. This whole time, Jenna and I were looking for a depraved man, someone evil and sociopathic, and it turns out the person we should have been looking for—the person responsible—was my sister. “So, you hid her body and staged the car so it would look like she’d been taken.”
Kasey nods.
“And then what?” I ask, but suddenly I realize I already know the answer. If Kasey faked Jules’s abduction, it means she faked her own too. The truth has been staring me in the face since I learned about the accident earlier, but until this moment I’d been too addled by shock to see it.
“Even after hiding the body,” Kasey says, “I thought it could still look like a hit-and-run, and I was scared it would come back to me. We lived in such a small place, I didn’t think it would take much for the police to learn about the damage to our car and link it to Jules. But two missing girls—that looks like something else entirely. I thought if I could make the circumstances of our disappearances look similar enough, the police would start looking for some guy. Instead of a reckless driver, they’d be looking for a kidnapper, a killer.”
Tears are spilling onto my cheeks. Kasey wasn’t taken from me. She left. “What the fuck?” I choke out. “How could you just leave like that?”
“I didn’t want to, Nic,” she says. “I promise. It was the only thing I could think to do.”
“But the police never even suspected Jules was hit by a car that night. They thought she was taken—because that’s what you staged it to look like.”
“I couldn’t be sure what the police were thinking,” she says. “For all I knew, they were getting close to the truth.”
“Why didn’t you at least tell me?” My voice is pleading, desperate. “I’m your sister. You could’ve trusted me.”
“I know that,” Kasey says. “I do. But…I needed the whole thing to be as real as possible. Let’s face it, you’ve never been great at hiding your emotions, and I didn’t want to put you in the position of lying to the police. It wouldn’t have been fair to you.”
“And you think it was fair to let me believe you died? Because that is what I thought. For years.”
I’m expecting this to jolt her into an apology, but instead, she says, “I did what I thought was best.”
I want to yell. I want to swing my fists against the dash of Jenna’s truck, but something stops me: Beneath all my anger and frustration, something feels off about all of this. I just can’t put my finger on what. It feels as if Jenna and I put together a puzzle with one final missing piece, which Kasey is handing over, only for me to find out it doesn’t actually fit. “Why did you wait?” I say. “You went missing two weeks after Jules did.”
Kasey hesitates.
“Were you waiting for the money from Sandy?”
She snaps her head sideways to look at me. From the horrified expression in her eye, it’s clear she understands the implication of my question. I don’t just know about the money. I know about the affair too.
“I regret that,” she says eventually.
“What? The money or the affair?”
“Both. But the affair.”
“How did it even happen in the first place?” I say. “Brad’s practically our uncle.”
“Believe me, Nic, I already feel shitty enough about it. It was…” She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I was home from college for the first time, and I felt antsy, out of place, like I’d outgrown the person I was before I left. And I think I wanted something to match that, something I thought was mature.” She lifts her fingers from the steering wheel. “I know, I know. Sleeping with Brad was the most immature thing I’ve ever done. Then Sandy caught us and the accident happened and suddenly the police were investigating Jules and that’s when I got the idea to leave. I knew I could get some money from Sandy, which would help me start over. And I knew she’d never tell anyone about it, because if she did, she’d have to explain that her husband had slept with his best friend’s daughter.”
“What about Lauren Perkins?” I say. “She knew about the affair. You weren’t worried about her talking?”
Again, Kasey shoots me a surprised look. “How did you…”
“I told you,” I say. “Jenna and I were looking into your disappearance. Yours and Jules’s.” Look at how hard I worked to find you, I think. And here you’ve been all along. Seven hours away. “We found out a lot. About the affair, you fighting with Lauren, McLean—”
“Who’s McLean?”
For a moment, I’m speechless. Here I’d been convinced McLean was the one who took Kasey, meanwhile she doesn’t even recognize his name. “Steve McLean. He worked at the barbecue place next to the record store. You guys used to call him Skeevy Steve.”
“Why were you looking into him?”
I let out a small, hysterical laugh. “Because I thought he killed you, Kasey! Because I thought you were dead! Because he raped Jules and I didn’t know you hit her with your car and got rid of her body because you lied to me!”
“What was I supposed to do, Nic? Huh? I’d slept with a married man. I got rid of a body to cover up a crime. I didn’t want to burden you with any of that because it would have ruined your life.”
“You know what ruined my life?” I say. “Losing my only fucking sister. Did you really not consider the damage that would do?” The words are spilling from me now like blood from sliced skin. “Did you honestly think I’d just get over it? Here I’ve been mourning your death, and the whole time you’ve been selling records in Nashville fucking Tennessee?”
Kasey’s knuckles are white around the steering wheel. Her mouth is clamped shut.
“I get that you were trying to protect yourself,” I continue, “but you were pretty selfish.”
“Don’t,” she says. Her voice is like venom.
“Don’t what? Call you selfish for letting everyone in your life believe you were dead? Your disappearance tore apart our family, Kasey. Mom’s gone, did you know that? She left a year after you went missing. Dad can’t even say your name, and I—” My voice cuts out. I am a mess. I am a walking wound, a collection of pain. “So, yeah. I think selfish is pretty fucking spot on.”
“Everything I did,” she says through gritted teeth, “all of it, was for you.”
“Right, I forgot. You were saving me from the secret of your affair. And from lying to the police. That would’ve really ruined my life, Kasey. I much preferred believing you were dead. Thank you so much.”
“You honestly don’t know what happened,” she snaps. “Do you? You honestly have no idea.”
I freeze.
This is it—I can feel it—the piece of the story she’s been hiding, the reason her explanation hasn’t quite fit.
“What do you mean?” I say slowly.
She is silent.
“Kasey?”
“Never mind. Forget it.”
“No. Tell me.”
“I’m just upset,” she says. “I was lashing out.”
But I know she’s lying. The story she’s told me is a like a crumbling house, and I’m standing inside it, watching as the shingles drop from the roof.
“Tell me,” I say again.
“There’s nothing to tell, Nic.” Her voice sounds strained, as if I’m squeezing my hands around her neck. “I told you everything already.”
My gaze darts around the inside of the truck, and an idea hits me. It’s idiotic and dangerous, but at this point I don’t care. Without letting myself second-guess it, I lunge sideways and grab the steering wheel with both hands.
Kasey screams.
I jerk the wheel to the left—she wasn’t expecting this, and her grip gives little resistance—then I swing it back to the right so we don’t crash off the side of the road.
“What the fuck, Nic!” she shouts. “Let go.”
“Tell me the truth and I will.”
“You’re going to get us killed!”
I spin the wheel again. This time, though, she’s gripping it hard, and it’s a fight. The truck lurches off the edge of the road, then lumbers back on. I hear a tumbling sound from the back and realize with a sickening jolt that it’s Jenna’s body.
It reminds me of all the ways she kept me in the dark. But while Jenna might not have done it to protect me, as I originally suspected, I know with a bone-deep certainty that’s what Kasey’s doing now. I’m so sick of being lied to, sick of being condescended to and coddled. I have not been the same since the summer of 2012, and if anyone deserves to know the truth about what happened, it’s me.
“I know you think you’re doing what’s best for me,” I say. “But you’re not.”
She scoffs.
“I don’t need you to take care of me, Kasey. I never have. So just tell me the truth!”
“I’ve already told you—”
I jerk the wheel again and she shrieks.
“Like fuck you have!” I shout. “You’re still trying to shelter me. And you know what? I always thought the reason you did everything for me when I was younger was because I couldn’t take care of myself. But it’s the other way around, isn’t it? I couldn’t take care of myself because you did everything for me.” I’m so angry now, so desperate for answers, I’m not even sure I believe the words pouring out of my mouth, but I don’t stop them. This is Kasey’s button, and I’m going to push it. “You’re the reason I’m like this. You’re the reason I’m such a fuckup, because you babied me and then you abandoned me.”
“Stop it,” Kasey says.
I wrestle the steering wheel and we veer sideways. “If you hadn’t shielded me from everything all the time, I might’ve actually done something with my life.”
“Shut up!”
“Without you—”
But Kasey cuts me off. “You killed Jules! Okay? Without me, you’d be in fucking prison.”
And with that, the last of the crumbling house shatters to the ground.