Page 5 of The Missing Half

I tell Jenna everything I remember about the day Kasey disappeared, from the moment I woke up to the moment I talked to Lauren in the record shop.

When I finish, Jenna says, “I assume it was unusual for Kasey to miss work?”

“Oh yeah. She never did that. Kasey may’ve gone out and drank and stuff, but like I said, she was responsible. Super responsible. There’s no way she would’ve skipped work without at least calling in some excuse.”

Jenna jots this down. “Then what happened?”

“I asked Lauren for a ride. It was the end of her shift too. She drove me home and when we pulled up, there was a police car parked out front.”

This next part is a blur—getting out of Lauren’s car and running inside, seeing the officer sitting on the couch. I don’t remember who broke the news to me, who said what first. All I remember is shouting into the room, “What happened? Where’s Kasey? Where is she?”

“We had to have the fucking police tell us Kasey was missing,” I say. “She’d been gone for hours by that point and none of us had even noticed. Or I guess I had—I just hadn’t cared enough.”

Jenna gives me a look. “Nic, you can’t—”

“I know,” I say. “I know.” But if I’d put the pieces together earlier, if I’d understood something was wrong that morning, Kasey might still be here today.

“Her car was reported as abandoned on the side of the road,” Jenna says. “Right? That’s what the police were there to tell you?”

“Yeah. Up in Michigan. Some little feeder road off I-131 just north of Grand Rapids.”

“Do you know where she was going?”

I shake my head. This is the part that always sticks in my throat, the piece I can never swallow. Kasey and I were the kind of sisters without walls. We shared eyeshadow and bras and lip gloss. Hair from both our heads intertwined in the same brush. When one of us got too much sunscreen on our hand, we’d slap it on the other’s thigh. Both of us knew every boy the other had ever had a crush on. The night before she went missing, she told me she was staying in. Had she changed her mind? Had something—someone—changed it for her?

“A family called it in,” I say. “They were taking a road trip, I guess, and had pulled over because the car door was open and they thought someone might need help. They said it looked suspicious.”

“The driver’s side door,” Jenna says. “That’s the one that was open.”

“Yeah. And all her stuff was there. On the passenger seat. Her purse, phone, everything. There was cash in her wallet, and bank cards. Nothing had been taken. But she was gone.”

“Just like Jules.”

I’ve always known Kasey’s and Jules Connor’s disappearances were nearly identical, but when Jenna says this, the magnitude of it settles on me like an anchor. When we first learned of Kasey’s disappearance from the police, all the information was so overwhelming, it took me days to realize that they, and we, knew next to nothing. In fact, they would’ve had exactly nothing to go on had it not been for Jules going missing the same way two weeks earlier.

“The only difference,” Jenna says, “is that Jules’s car was broken down. And I was the one who found it.”

“I didn’t know that. But how? You were out driving and just…happened to see her car?”

“No. I was looking for her. We were living together in Osceola at the time, but she was working over in South Bend, at Harry’s Place.” Osceola, Mishawaka—they’re all just offshoots of South Bend, the area we call Michiana.

“My friends and I used to go to Harry’s sometimes,” I say. “It was the only place around that took our fake IDs.”

Jenna’s mouth tugs slightly at the corner. “Yeah. That tracks.”

A memory emerges. “Actually, that’s how I first learned about Jules going missing. I went there one night and these cops were hanging around inside, asking everyone questions.”

“Did they talk to you?” she says.

“Me and my friends, yeah. For like a second. At first, we were terrified because we thought we were gonna get in trouble for underage drinking, but they said if we cooperated with their investigation, they wouldn’t do anything about it.”

When I hear this out loud, I realize how self-absorbed it must sound. Here Jenna’s sister was missing and the teenage kids who could’ve known something were too distracted by the thought of getting punished to help. Though the truth is I told the police everything I knew.

“They showed us a photo of Jules,” I say, “told us she was a bartender who’d gone missing. Mainly, I remember they wanted to know if there were any sketchy guys who hung out there.”

“What’d you say?”

“That half the people in there were sketchy guys. They had us describe some faces, but we couldn’t give them any names. Then they gave us their cards and told us to call if we thought of anything.”

“She was working the night she went missing,” Jenna says. “That’s why they were so focused on talking to people at the bar. Jules usually got home late, around one or two. But that night, I woke up around three and she wasn’t there. I called her cell and it went straight to voicemail. I wasn’t worried exactly—not then, anyway.But she had a shitty car and sometimes forgot to charge her phone. And I didn’t like the idea of her being stuck at the bar after it closed. Like you said, lot of sketchy guys.

“So, I decided to drive over to make sure she was okay, but she wasn’t there. On my way home, I took a different route and found her car pulled over on the side of the road. It was the middle of nowhere, a cornfield on one side, trees on the other, and it all looked so…wrong. The only light was her car’s interior one. Her door was wide open.”

I suppress a shudder. It’s eerily similar to the scene I’ve imagined all these years.

“I learned later from the police that her car had broken down,” Jenna says. “That’s why she’d pulled over. I just…” She shakes her head. “She was fifteen minutes from home, you know. If her car had lasted fifteen more minutes, she wouldn’t have pulled over and he wouldn’t have found her.”

He. He is the part we haven’t gotten to yet.