Page 27 of The Missing Half

He juts a thumb over his shoulder. I turn to look at the bar and see a man behind it, his back to us, shaking a cocktail shaker. He has short brown hair, average build, average height. There’s nothing remarkable about him.

“Stevie’s a great guy,” Matty says, waggling his eyebrows. It’s clear he thinks he’s in on whatever game we’re playing, acting like cupid for the table of cute girls. “Here, let me get him for you.”

“Oh, no, that’s okay—”

But it’s too late. Matty has already called out his name. Steve McLean turns around, and at first his gaze lands on Matty, then Jenna, then slowly, almost leisurely, it moves to me. Across the room, our eyes lock, and a grin spreads across his face. Spiders crawl up my spine.

Chapter Fourteen

Thank God it’s a Saturday night. McLean’s attention is pulled quickly to a patron at the bar, then another, and even though he keeps looking over at our table, it’s obvious he’s too busy making drinks to break away. The moment Matty brings our food, Jenna asks for the bill.

“We can’t approach him here,” she says after he’s swiped her card. “If what we’re asking gets out, it could jeopardize his job, and then he’ll never talk to us.”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

For the first time, Jenna and I are on the same page about our next step. But not because I give a shit about Steve McLean losing his job. Or because, like she’s always telling me, I think we need to strategize our approach. Being in the same room as my sister’s possible killer has the walls closing in around me. I can feel his gaze on my face, my neck, my mouth. It makes me want to crawl out of my own skin.

“I wanna eat fast and get the fuck out of here,” I say.

We do, and it’s only outside the restaurant, sitting shotgun in Jenna’s truck, the doors closed and locked, that I can finally relax. For amoment, we sit in silence, the hot summer air a relief from the prickling chill of Mesquite.

“We can talk to him another time,” Jenna says. “It doesn’t have to be tonight.”

“No. I wanna do it. We can wait in the car till he’s off work.”

“We shouldn’t talk to him here.”

“Fine,” I say. “Then we’ll follow him home.”

I feel Jenna looking at me from the corner of her eye. “Are you sure? We can take a day or two to regroup. He’s not going anywhere.”

“No. If we wait, between both our jobs and my community service, we won’t be able to do it for another week.” The truth is though, I just don’t want to wait. I want to confront this man who harasses the women around him and manages to still charm his way to employee of the year. I want to talk to the man who worked alongside Jules and close to my sister. If he had anything to do with their disappearances, I need to know.

Jenna glances at the clock. “Okay. If he’s bartending, he’ll stay till closing, which means we probably have an hour or two.”

I slump back against the seat. “God, the world can be so fucked up. Here our sisters were murdered all because they were women, alone on the road at night. Then this asshole is groping girls in a back alley and he still gets his name on a goddam plaque.”

“I know,” Jenna says. “Meanwhile, the media literally commodify Jules and Kasey for being young women who died.”

“Fucking exactly.” I wipe angry tears from my eyes. “And they all got it so wrong, you know? All of them.”

Jenna looks over at me but doesn’t say anything.

“Watching the news talk about Kasey was, like, beyond surreal. And not because what was happening was so hard to believe. I mean, it was, but it was more than that. They made her out to be someone I didn’t recognize, a total stranger. When the police came to us for a photo, they told us to choose one that didn’t have much significance, because by the time everything was over, we’d never be able to look at it in the same way again. But we had no idea how much the media would fabricate Kasey’s entire personality based on one fuckingpicture of her. In the one my mom picked out, Kasey was wearing her favorite jean jacket and her hair was pulled over one shoulder. It looked like her, yeah, but it was such a specific look, like she was a cheerleader who got straight As. And when people talked about her on the news, you could literally hear in their voices that they felt sad she’d disappeared because she was, like, pretty and did well in school. I think one anchor actually used the wordsall-American.”

I’ve never said this much to anyone before, not to my parents orany of my friends, not to Brad or Sandy. It makes me feel naked, but also lighter too, so I continue. “They painted this whole portrait of her that—you know, it wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t even close tothe full picture. They made her seem boring. Kasey was so muchmore than that. And people bought it too. I used to get all this mail from strangers telling me to have faith, to not give up on God’s plan, blah blah blah. And they would write all these things about Kasey…”

I think back to a card some grandmotherly type had sent, in which she’d handwritten this saccharine poem titled “Nic and Kasey, Sisters Forever.” Somehow it weaseled its way into my brain and I’ve had it memorized ever since:

Two branches of the same tree,

two pieces of a soul.

Where one sister goes, the other will be,

for she is but half of the whole.

“I could just tell,” I continue, “that they thought they knew Kasey because they’d heard about her on the news. But she would’ve hated all that shit.”

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