Page 46 of The Missing Half

“No. He—” I almost say it. The wordaffairis on the tip of my tongue. But I can’t. It would destroy my dad. I think instead of Brad’s alibi for Kasey’s disappearance. “He goes on fishing trips with you and comes over for weekly beers, but when you actually needed him, he wasn’t there.” I’m talking around it like my dad does, but he knows exactly what I mean. I can tell from the way he’s watching me, as if I’m a bomb that may explode.

“Brad was there for me when nobody else was,” he says. “He was there for this family. From day one.”

“Well, not actually day one. He was out of town, wasn’t he? At his family reunion with Sandy and the boys. The day we needed him most he was on vacation at the lake.”

“No, he wasn’t,” my dad says. “Sandy took the kids a few days earlier, but Brad stayed in town for a work thing. Who do you think organized the search party that first day after Wyler told us Kasey—”

The words that had been tumbling out of his mouth cut off. He stiffens then turns around to face the sink.

So, Brad hadn’t gone to the family reunion with Sandy and the boys. At the search party that day, when Sandy told Lauren that her family had been out of town, she must’ve been referring to herself and their kids, not Brad. Which means that on the night Kasey went missing from Grand Rapids, Brad was an hour closer to her than we originally thought. And he was alone.

In the span of five minutes, my dad has destroyed the only two alibis Brad had.

“Dad,” I say. “Can we talk about what happened to her? Please?” This is the first time I’ve ever asked, and I know he will resent me for it, but I can’t stop.

My dad stands with his back to me, quiet. As if I said nothing at all.

“Do you remember the weeks before Kasey went missing?” I continue. “Do you remember how strange she was acting?” Brad may now be a clear suspect, but there are still things that don’t add up. Why was Kasey scared that night she told me to be careful? Why was she driving through Grand Rapids before she was taken? Where elsedid she go that accounted for all those miles? And how does Brad fit into any of it? Maybe my dad won’t know the answers, but I have to ask.

He yanks the sink faucet to high and the rushing sound of water fills the kitchen. “I’m glad you came over, Nic. It’s always good to see you.”

“Dad,” I say. “Please. Just talk to me. Something was going on with Kasey before she went missing. I used to think she was just stressed, but now I think she was scared.”

I know he can hear me. I’m practically shouting over the sound of the water, but he just grabs a sponge and begins to scrub the plates like he’s scouring year-old stains.

“Did you ever notice Kasey going anywhere during that time?” I say. “Did you or Mom ever catch her sneaking out at night?”

“You should come back again soon.”

Tears sting my eyes, but he could know more than he thinks he does. “I looked around our old car the other day,” I say. “We got our oil changed two weeks before Kasey was taken. There was a difference of over—”

An enormous crash cuts me off—the plates shattering in the sink. My dad turns, and I see that his hands are soaking wet, a stream of blood and water running down his wrist. But it’s his expression that unnerves me most. It’s a stone façade about to lose its hold.

“Nic.” His voice trembles. “There’s a baseball game on right now. I was thinking about watching it.”

I like to pretend I’m nothing like my parents, but that’s far from the truth. I drink like my mom, and for seven years, I’ve been just like my dad too: content to hide my wounds from myself so long as it meant I never had to examine the pain. But all that does, I realize now, is make the sores fester and grow.

“Right,” I say. “I guess I’ll just use the bathroom, and then I’ll take off.”

The moment I turn the corner out of the kitchen, I drop my hands to my knees. It feels as if the confrontation cleaved me in two. As I catch my breath, I hear my dad tear off a paper towel—I assume to mop up the blood. Then he cracks open another beer, and there’sthe sudden murmur of voices as the TV comes to life. I straighten and head to the bathroom.

The door I find myself in front of though is the one to Kasey’s old room. I haven’t been in it since she vanished, but it is a flame and I a moth, and I can’t stop my hand from twisting the knob. Then, for the first time in almost a decade, I open the door and step inside.

My parents left the room exactly as it was the day Kasey went missing. Her closet gapes open, clothes spilling out. There’s a bunched spaghetti-strap shirt on the floor near her hamper, aimed but missed. On her desk, a textbook lies open, a highlighter on top, uncapped and long since gone dry. My eyes flick to her unmade bed, to the indentation in her pillow the size of a skull, where one of her long auburn hairs still clings to the fabric. I walk over and dip my palm into it, careful not to touch the pillowcase, because it feels too precious to disrupt.

As I straighten, I spot Kasey’s favorite jean jacket, the one that was immortalized in her missing poster, hanging in her closet. I walk over and run a fingertip along the seam at the shoulder. The jacket is so quintessentially Kasey, I get a pang of sorrow that she didn’t have it with her when she was taken. The thought makes me envision her decomposing body underground somewhere, shreds of T-shirt clinging to bone. I tug the jacket off the hanger and pull it on,wishing I could absorb it into my skin and take it—take her—withme.

As I turn to go, my eyes catch on something pinned to Kasey’s bulletin board, and I walk over to look at it. I remember most of the stuff there: a photo from one of our road trips to Dayton, Kasey and me sticking our tongues out at the camera in the back seat of our family’s car. There’s a picture of her and Lauren in tank tops and chokers, and my favorite of Kasey holding me as a baby. But the one that caught my eye I don’t recognize.

In it, Kasey is alone, the same age she was when she went missing, only months or maybe weeks before. Her body’s turned away from the camera, but she’s looking over her shoulder as if someone just called out her name. Around her, leaves are frozen midflutter, the sun low in the sky. Unlike the rest of the photos, this one isdecorated with Kasey’s telltale pink hearts, the same she used to decorate the mix CD Jenna found.

Past Kasey, I see water and the cut-off corner of a dock—Brad and Sandy’s lake house. Lauren’s words fill my head:Kasey did that a lot with Brad that summer. Spent nights away with him.It’s obvious now where they went. I pull the photo from the board and flip it over. Blank. Still, it’s evidence enough. I slip it into the pocket of Kasey’s jean jacket, only to discover that the pocket isn’t empty. Inside is a little slip of paper folded into a square the size of a quarter.

I unfold it and see that it’s a receipt from a gas station. With all those miles she was putting on the car, she probably had a lot of these lying around. I skim it and see nothing to indicate the station’s location. On the back though is something more interesting: an address, written in handwriting I don’t recognize. I pull my phone from my back pocket and type it into my maps app. A pin pops up—the bait shop in Nyona. But who wrote the address? And why would Kasey have had it in her pocket? I flip the receipt over, and my breath catches in my throat.

I was so preoccupied searching for the location of the gas station, I missed the date she visited it. Printed in ink that’s faded but clear, it reads, August 17. The day Kasey disappeared. If she went to the bait shop that day, it means that sometime in the twenty-four hours before she was taken, she was less than a mile from Brad’s lakehouse.

The last shred of loyalty I had to Brad disappears, sloughing off me like dead skin. In its place I feel nothing but a seething, burning rage. I’ve been delusional, ignoring evidence that the man is a monster because once upon a time he put a Band-Aid on my knee. Jenna has been right all along.

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