Page 45 of The Missing Half

Chapter Forty-four

Kasey, 2012

The sound of her cell vibrating on the bedside table lurched Kasey from sleep. She blinked blearily, her eyes adjusting to the dim light of her room. She’d forgotten to turn off the lamp, and the textbook she’d been studying when she drifted to sleep was open beside her. The night outside her window was still and black. It must have been late.

Yawning, she grabbed her phone and glanced at the screen. Her first reaction at seeing her sister’s name was relief that it wasn’t Brad. He hadn’t called her since she’d broken things off last week, but she kept anticipating it. He’d actually cried when she told him it was over, and every bit of attraction she’d ever felt for him had turned in that moment to pity and disgust. Just because he was older, she’d realized, didn’t mean he was wiser or more mature. He was just lost—like her, like everyone.

Her second reaction to seeing Nic’s name was annoyance. Her phone’s clock read almost 2 a.m. , which meant her sister was probably at a party somewhere and wanted a ride home. Kasey had gotten the same call many times from Nic over the summer, and no matter how frustrated it made her, she always got out of bed. But the moment she heard her sister’s voice over the phone, Kasey knew something was different.

“I need your help.” Nic’s words were slurred, frantic.

Kasey sat up and the textbook fell to the ground. As it did, she caught a glimpse of the circulatory system diagram she’d been studying earlier, the network of blood in the human body.

“What happened?” she said.

Nic let out something between a sob and a groan.

“ What happened? ” Kasey repeated. Her mind was already spinning with scenarios—greedy boys drunk on beer, dares gone too far. “Are you hurt?”

“I fucked up,” Nic said, starting to cry.

“Take a deep breath.” Kasey waited for her sister to do as she said. “And another…Okay. Now tell me what happened.”

“I was at Harry’s Place, y’know that bar we sometimes go to, the one that takes our IDs? Well, I was driving home and I…” Nic hesitated, and Kasey closed her eyes, the nightmare scenarios shifting. She hadn’t even remembered that Nic had the car. “I hit something,” Nic finally finished.

“Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“What did you hit?”

“A tree.” Nic sobbed again. “Mom and Dad are gonna be so pissed.”

Kasey slumped with relief. Her sister was an idiot. A reckless, careless idiot who risked too much for nothing. But nobody had gotten hurt. “Where are you?” she said. “I’ll come and drive you home.”

The night was pitch black, but Kasey had a small light affixed to the front of her bike, and it didn’t take long for her to find their old Honda Civic. It was pulled off the pavement near a dense wooded area. Trees towered beside the car, swallowing the light from the moon and stars.

“You came,” Nic said after Kasey got off her bike and walked up to the driver’s side window. Her sister’s eyes were unfocused, their lids heavy. Her smokey makeup was smudged, making her sockets look black.

“Jesus Christ, Nic, what were you thinking?” By now, all Kasey’s relief had curdled to anger.

“I know,” Nic said. “I’m such a fuckup. You should disown me.”

Kasey rolled her eyes. “Just get out so I can drive.”

She opened the door and Nic slipped out, then Kasey helped her walk around the front of the car to the passenger seat. As if she were a toddler, Nic grabbed Kasey’s hand in hers then pulled it up her face, rubbing the back of it against her cheek. Her skin was sticky with tears. “I’m sorry you’re always taking care of me, Kase. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Kasey was too furious to speak. Plus, there was no use reprimanding her sister when she was like this. Nothing would sink in, and she probably wouldn’t even remember it in the morning. Tomorrow, Kasey would have a real conversation with her. She’d tell her she had to stop drinking so much, tell her she couldn’t use the car anymore, not when she was going out. Kasey opened the passenger side door, scanning the car for any evidence of the accident. It looked like the right side of the front bumper was dented, but that was it—surprisingly little damage considering how enormous the trees along the road were.

“Really,” Nic continued as she slid into the seat, her body boneless. “I’d be such a fucking mess without you.”

“You’re a mess with me, Nic.” Kasey buckled her sister’s seatbelt, then closed the door.

As she walked back to her bike, she studied the gaping blackness of the road behind her, the slightest hint of unease crawling up her spine. Where was the tree Nic had hit? Kasey had assumed it’d be obvious to spot—the one that stuck out from the rest—but she could hardly make out anything at all. She pulled her phone from her pocket and shined the flashlight toward the woods. The tree line was still a dark blur, but with the light, she could tell that it was far from the road, at least ten feet. Even in Nic’s state, it seemed unlikely that she would’ve swerved so violently.

Kasey aimed the flashlight toward the road behind her, illuminating the pavement and the dirt shoulder. Nothing. She took a few tentative steps forward, gravel crunching softly beneath her tennis shoes. Was it possible Nic had actually hit a deer and, in her disorientation, hadn’t seen it? It could’ve limped off into the woods before Kasey got there.

But then her light caught on something just off to the left. At first, Kasey didn’t understand what it was. It was small and white and so out of place here in the middle of the night, it took a moment for her brain to register that what she was looking at was a human hand.

She gasped, stumbling backwards, then fell to the ground, her phone clattering to a stop in front of her. Kasey stared horror-struck into the beam of light, which was now illuminating a woman’s face, one cheek pressed into the dirt, a cluster of grass grazing her parted lips. Her eyes were open in a vacant gaze.

Kasey tried to scramble to her feet, but her legs were limp and she sunk back to the ground. When she was finally able to stand up, she inched toward the body, snatched up her phone, then clambered backwards again. She needed space between her and this horrible, unnatural thing.

At the distance of a couple feet, her phone’s flashlight revealed the scene in full—a woman prone on the ground, her arms flung wide, legs akimbo. Kasey forced herself to look away, to focus instead on dialing 9-1-1. But just as she was about to hit the call button, she paused.

The woman was clearly dead.

Nic had killed her.

The police would come, take one look at Nic, pronounce her wasted, then slap handcuffs on her. They wouldn’t be able to save the woman. And Kasey would be responsible for sending her sister to prison.

She bent over, hands on her knees, head spinning. Who was this woman? Where had she come from? The closest house was half a mile away, and it wasn’t like she’d gone out for a late-night stroll. Not on a road with such bad visibility and this close to the woods. The woman was wearing black jeans, tennis shoes, a thin black T-shirt that clung to her skin. She would’ve been nearly impossible to see in the dark. There was also, Kasey noticed, a phone near the body. It was miraculously intact, without even a crack.

A small yellow light in the distance caught Kasey’s eye. When she squinted at it, she could just make out the interior of a car. Carefully, she stepped around the woman’s body, giving it a wide berth, then walked until the beam of her phone’s light caught on a metal bumper. The car was pulled over on the side of the road, the driver’s door open, the dome light flickering. When Kasey looked inside, she spotted a purse on the passenger seat and a key in the ignition, a small heart-shaped keychain dangling from it.

It was all starting to make sense. The woman’s car must have broken down, and she’d gotten out to walk. The whole thing looked eerie, as if the driver had simply vanished.

And that was when the idea came to her.

Kasey could remember this time when Nic was three or four, she was five or six, and their mom had taken them to a pool party at some neighbor’s house. Kasey was comfortable in the shallow end by then, but Nic, still a toddler, wore floaties whenever she went in the water. Kasey had been splashing around on the pool steps with some of the other kids when she noticed the little body floundering beneath the surface. It was Nic. For one heart-stopping second, Kasey was paralyzed, looking around as if her sister might actually be somewhere else, playing with the hose in the yard or eating a popsicle on the deck. But then she saw them—Nic’s Little Mermaid arm floaties discarded on the edge of the pool. Kasey gulped in a breath, dove beneath the water, and looped her arms around Nic’s waist. They breached the surface moments later, both gulping for air. As she dragged Nic to the edge, Kasey spotted their mom in a lawn chair, in the middle of a conversation, a drink in her hand. It took another few seconds of Nic spluttering for her to notice her youngest had almost drowned, and in that moment, Kasey understood that her sister was her responsibility. She was the one who was going to have to keep Nic safe.

The idea Kasey had was wrong and fucked up. She knew she shouldn’t do it. She also knew, without a flicker of a doubt, that she would.

Quickly, she walked back to the woman’s body. If anyone caught her now, it wouldn’t just be Nic who went to prison. She had to move fast. Kasey grabbed the woman’s phone from the ground—it was dead—and put it in the purse in the woman’s car, using the edge of her T-shirt to wipe the phone and door handle afterward so she wouldn’t leave any prints.

Then she hurried back to their Honda. Peering through the driver’s side window, she found her sister slumped in shotgun, her eyes closed, her chest rising and falling with the slow, melodic rhythm of sleep. Good. Quietly, Kasey opened the car door and slid into the driver’s seat. She wanted to shorten the distance between the woman and the car’s trunk so she didn’t have to waste time dragging the body over. She just prayed Nic stayed asleep through it all. Her sister thought she’d hit a tree, and for Kasey’s plan to work, she needed to keep it that way. But when she turned the key in the ignition, Nic stirred.

“Kase?” she muttered. “What’re you doing?”

“I’m gonna put my bike in the car,” Kasey said. “But I have to take the front wheel off first, so it’ll be a few minutes. Go back to sleep.”

“D’you need any help?”

“No. Go back to sleep.”

“You’re a good sister,” Nic said as her eyelids drooped, then slowly shut. “Just don’t let it go to your head.”

Kasey stared at her sister’s peaceful face and felt as if a deep fault line were tearing through her—love on one side, loathing on the other. You killed someone, she thought. A woman is dead because of you. I am about to become a criminal because of you. But she didn’t have time for any of that. Not now. She put the car in reverse and tapped the gas until the body appeared in the rearview mirror.

If it hadn’t been for the immense amount of adrenaline coursing through her veins, Kasey wasn’t sure she would have been able to heave the body into the trunk. It was far heavier and more cumbersome than it looked, and by the time she’d pushed the woman’s limp feet inside, her chest was heaving, her body damp with sweat. She gazed down at the corpse, the fingers white and curling in on themselves, the hair spiderwebbed over the woman’s face, obscuring everything but that pink, gaping mouth.

Kasey pulled out onto the road a few minutes later, after taking the wheel off her bike and stuffing both parts into the back seat. She decided to make a U-turn so she could drive by the scene one last time and make sure she’d covered her tracks. But just as she was about to pass the woman’s car, Kasey saw something in her rearview that made her flush with hot fear. Headlights were approaching from behind.

Don’t be a cop, she thought furiously as her panic-riddled brain envisioned sudden flashing lights. White, blue, red. A siren. But the car remained dark except for the two bright beams of its headlights.

Kasey breathed in relief—she’d gotten away with it.

And yet, as she drove, her brain kept sticking on a moment earlier as she closed the trunk. Had she simply hallucinated it, or had that tiny movement in her periphery been the woman’s hand twitching with life?

—

In the days after, Kasey couldn’t sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the woman’s face, pale and soft in death. When she did eventually pass out from exhaustion, she’d wake up not long after gasping in panic, covered in sweat. She kept waiting for the police to knock on their front door asking for Nic, for her. But they didn’t come. She kept tuning in to the local news stations, but no one seemed to be covering the case of the woman who’d disappeared from the side of the road. She began to compulsively google “missing woman + Mishawaka + abandoned car,” but there was nothing. Then finally, on the third day, the woman’s face appeared on the screen in front of her. Jules Connor, the text read, age 24 .

Kasey was keeping a close eye on Nic too. The morning after that horrific night, she knocked on her sister’s bedroom door, and from the way Nic moaned for her to come in, Kasey knew she was regretting how much she’d drunk.

“How’re you feeling?” Kasey asked, fighting to keep her voice neutral.

Nic moaned into her pillow.

“You were pretty drunk last night. Do you remember what happened?”

“Oh god,” Nic said. “No. What did I do? Was I awful?”

Kasey watched Nic’s face for any glimmer of recollection, but it was clear the only thing her sister was preoccupied with was her hangover. “No,” she said. “Well, I mean, yes. You called me from the bar to pick you up, and I had to bike all the way to South Bend. Other than that, you were fine.”

Having kept the affair with Brad from her sister all summer made hiding this secret a tiny bit easier, but lying to Nic didn’t come naturally. And the horror over what she and her sister had both done felt like a fever—a disease that wouldn’t go away. Kasey stopped taking Nic up on offers to hang out, claiming school was too stressful. She stopped going out at night, stopped seeing her friends. The idea of continuing to live in the same house as the person who put her in this position felt unbearable, but neither could Kasey imagine going back to college. She didn’t want to go to parties where people drank from Solo cups and yelled at each other over bad music. She didn’t want to sit in class taking notes on how to save lives—not when Jules Connor’s twitching hand haunted her every waking moment.

And then one morning, something happened that changed everything.

Nic was in the shower while Kasey got dressed for work. She was looking for her old Rolling Stones T-shirt when she remembered that Nic had borrowed it a few weeks before.

“Nic!” she called through the bathroom door and over the running water. “I want my Stones shirt back. I’m going in your room to find it.”

Kasey didn’t wait for an answer. She just opened the door to her sister’s bedroom and went to her closet. When she didn’t find the shirt hanging up, she bent down to sift through the clothes in the dirty hamper. As she did, she spotted something on the floor—a business card. She picked it up, flipped it over, and her breath caught in her throat.

Mishawaka Police Department , the card read. Then, beneath that, Phillip Johnson, Detective.

Kasey knew from her online searches that Detective Johnson was the one investigating Jules’s case. How much did he know? What questions had he asked Nic? More terrifying still, how had she answered?

This whole time Kasey had thought Nic’s greatest defense was that she believed herself to be innocent, that she wasn’t even aware a crime had occurred. But if the police asked her about the night Jules disappeared, Nic would have no reason to hide that she’d been at Harry’s Place. Would they put two and two together? Would they pull up a map and see that the most direct route from the bar to Nic and Kasey’s home was the road where Jules’s car was found? Had they done all of that already? With the business card in her hand, Kasey understood the unnerving reality: If the police had Nic’s name in association with Jules’s case, surely it was only a matter of time until they uncovered the truth.

Kasey fought back the weary tears that had begun to fill her eyes. After everything she’d done to insulate her sister from the accident, it wasn’t enough. But what more could she do? The only thing she could think of was to somehow bolster the image that Jules had been taken, to do something that would steer the police away from the theory of a drunk driving accident and toward an abduction.

Another missing girl.

The idea was impossibly heavy. Disappearing would mean Kasey would never see her friends or parents again. She’d never finish college. She’d miss Nic’s life, her future. But at least Nic would have one. Plus, if Kasey were being honest, a very small part of her felt relieved at the thought of the anonymity disappearing would afford her. No longer would she have to look her dad in the eye while thinking, I fucked your best friend. She’d never have to see Sandy and witness the pain she’d caused. She wouldn’t have to study for school when all she could think about was Jules Connor’s face as she lay curled inside the trunk. She’d no longer run into Nic in the hallway and feel her chest constrict with everything she’d lost.

Kasey didn’t want to leave forever. She didn’t want to vanish from her own life. But as she looked down at the word detective staring up at her, she realized she didn’t have any other choice. This was the only way to protect her sister—and she’d do anything to keep Nic safe.