Page 66 of The Missing Half

I see a flash of that wall in her living room, the one with all the research, and one final possibility pops into my head. It’s shitty and sneaky and I don’t want to do it, because even after everything, I still care about Jenna. I want to trust her. But whatever she’s lying to me about has to do with our sisters’ cases, and everything we know about them is on that wall.

I glance at the clock on my stovetop. 4:40p.m.Jenna gets off work at five, and if she goes straight home after like she usually does, she’ll probably get there around 5:15. Which means I’ll have to wait until tomorrow. I don’t want to be rushed when I break into her house.

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I leave my apartment at eleven the next morning to catch the bus to Osceola. I’m skipping work again today, but Brad’s in a pretty bad position to make any noise about it, and he doesn’t.Take as long as you need, he texted yesterday afternoon when I asked for some time off. I didn’t respond. I still need a job, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to return to Funland. My relationship with Brad and Sandy will never recover.

We get to my stop and I step off the bus, my backpack heavy with the hammer I found gathering dust in my hallway closet. I won’t use it—I brought it only as a last resort—but still, it serves as a reminder of the seriousness of what I’m planning to do. My handlebars slip through my sweaty palms as I heave my bike from the bus’s front rack.

You have plenty of time,I remind myself as I hop on and pedal toward Jenna’s house. And the truth is I won’t need much of it. OnceI’ve broken in, I’ll go straight to the living room where Jenna has assembled her wall of research. Since I’ve seen it before, anything new should stand out. I’ll find whatever she’s hiding from me, take a picture of it, and leave. I’ll be in and out in under five minutes.

When I round the corner onto her street, I slow, passing her neighbors at a crawl and craning my neck to catch a glimpse of her driveway. I can’t think why her truck would be there, why she wouldn’t be at work in the middle of a Tuesday, but I’m about to break the law. I’d be an idiot not to be cautious. When I get close enough to see her house, my shoulders slump with relief. The driveway is empty. I turn around and pedal a block and a half to the copse of trees Jenna once told me she liked. I can’t imagine any of her neighbors would think twice about an unfamiliar bike left on the curb, but, again, I’m not taking any chances. Hopping off, I walk it over, then weave my handlebars through the tree line and lean my bike against a cluster of trees at an angle perpendicular to the curb. Not foolproof, but it’s something.

I make my way quickly to Jenna’s house and up to her front door. The driveway is still empty, but I knock anyway, just to be safe. A small part of me hopes she’ll answer. I imagine her swinging open the door with an expectant smile that turns contrite at the sight of me. I envision her ushering me inside, pouring me a cup of coffee, telling me how all of this is just some big misunderstanding. I would believe her. I would.

The door remains closed, the house dark. I knock again for good measure, call out her name, but I’m met with silence. I try the knob. It’s locked. I look around for a place where she might hide a spare key, and my gaze catches on the welcome mat beneath my feet. It’s one of the cheap kinds made from synthetic fiber, old and fading. I flip it over, but there’s nothing there. I stand on my tiptoes to check above the doorframe. Nothing. There’s no flowerpot or fake rock or any sort of chip in the exterior wall where she could slip a key. Not that I was expecting one. When you lose your sister to the worst kind of evil, you understand how precarious your own safety really is.

I walk around the side of the house to find a gate in the woodenfence and quickly slip through. In the backyard, I spot four possible ways into Jenna’s house—three windows and the back door. I try them all. Unsurprisingly, they’re locked. I knew I was going to have to break in, but this is officially where my plausible deniability ends. No longer can I tell a passing neighbor that I’m just a friend of Jenna’s, picking something up from her house with a spare key. No longer can I say she left the back door open for me—not if, when I’m caught, I’m jimmying its lock.

When Kasey and I were young—she was probably nine or ten, I was seven or eight—she discovered Nancy Drew at our local library and decided she wanted to be a detective. Then she passed the books on to me so I could be one too. The idea that our little world was riddled with mysteries to be solved was irresistible to us, and soon we were writing notes to each other using a made-up code, searching the neighborhood for where someone might hide their secrets, shining flashlights into every hole of every tree, so sure we’d find a map to treasure. Most practically, we learned how to use a card to open a locked door, and even after all these years, I’ve never forgotten the way you have to bend the corner just so in order to slide it smoothly into place.

The back door to Jenna’s house is old and wooden, clearly the original, its knob rusted brass. I peer into the sliver of space between the door and the frame and am relieved when I don’t see a deadbolt.

I pull my wallet from my backpack and find the card I tested out on my own door last night—an old expired debit card I forgot to throw away. As I re-bend one of its corners, I hear a car on the street out front, and I freeze. What if it’s Jenna coming home for lunch or to pick something up? I listen, the sound of the engine getting louder and louder until it is right in front of the house. Then it fades.

“Chill,” I say aloud as I shake out my hands, trying to purge the sudden adrenaline.

I slide the corner of the card into the doorframe above the lock. With my free hand, I grab the doorknob and start to jimmy it around, but the card’s not catching. The brass knob is old and rusted and it twists jerkily in the plate surrounding it. I rattle it harder, but still,the lock doesn’t budge. I pause, thinking of the hammer in my backpack. But if Jenna has an alarm, smashing a window will have the cops here within minutes. I loosen my grip on the doorknob and shake it more gently this time, working the card slowly downward.

And then, finally, I feel it—the thin plastic sliding behind the lock. The knob twists in my hand and the door creaks open.

Chapter Thirty-five

With one last glance around the yard, I slip my backpack on, step into the kitchen, and click the door shut behind me. Jenna’s house is quiet. The lights are off, but the midday sun is bright through the windows, and I can see that everything looks neat and tidy. The edges of the cereal boxes are aligned, the counters are clean, and the kitchen chairs are tucked beneath the table where, not long ago, I sat and told Jenna if she ever lied to me again, I’d make her regret it.

I move quickly through the kitchen. Now that I’m in, I can feel the clock ticking, and I don’t want to risk spending a single minute more than I have to here. But when I round the corner into the living room, I stop short.

The wall that used to be cluttered with articles and sticky notes and highlighted maps is empty. I turn dumbly in a circle, as if the collage of evidence will suddenly pop up somewhere else, but there’s no trace of it anywhere. I look in the console beneath the TV and riffle through the things on the coffee table. I even look beneath the couch and behind the chairs. Nothing.

The only reason I can think that Jenna would have taken downthat research is if she believed she didn’t need it anymore. Is it possible she thinks she figured it all out? Is that what she’s hiding from me, the name of the man who took our sisters? But why? I stare at the blank wall where all that evidence used to be. I have to find it.

The living room bleeds into the entryway, and on the other side of that are two doorways, which are currently closed—Jenna’s bedroom and Jules’s old one. I don’t know which is which, so I head to the closest.

When I open it, it’s immediately apparent that I’m standing at thethreshold of the room where Jules used to live. The floor and bed are littered with things—old makeup, clothes, cardboard boxes—as if Jenna started packing up her sister’s life, then quit halfway. It’s an instinct I understand well. When all you have left of someone are the objects that made up their life, those things become precious.

Other than the brief interactions I had with Jules when I used to go to Harry’s Place, I never knew Jenna’s sister, but she comes alive now. The far wall is lined with dozens of drawings, their corners curling, overlapping, and I remember the time in Jenna’s truck when she told me her sister had started to pursue art. The drawings don’t seem technically accomplished, but there’s something about them that grabs me. There are a few cityscapes and landscapes, but mostly they’re of people. One is of a woman with a shaved head, her chin tilted up, hooded eyes locked on mine. Another shows a man lighting a cigarette in profile. Another is of a child, their knees to their chest, their face buried between them. Darkness crowds at the edges of the paper like a swarm of bats.

I scan the rest of the room for anything that might catch my eye, but I feel instinctively that Jenna doesn’t come in here often. If she found a piece of evidence that unlocked the answer of what happened to our sisters, I think she’d keep it somewhere closer. Quietly, I click the door shut.

The other room is Jenna’s. And just as her sister’s was so idiosyncratically Jules, this bedroom is the epitome of the woman I’ve come to know over the past month. The queen bed is made, its blue quiltsmooth. A desk is pushed against one wall, an organized clutter of pens and sticky notes surrounding her laptop. A gallery wall of framed art hangs on the space above the bed, and the biggest piece is clearly a Jules original—a drawing of the two sisters, arms around each other’s necks, their faces animated with laughter.

I start with the desk, scanning the sticky notes, but they’re just scribbled reminders—to-dos, grocery lists, and what I’d guess to be a handful of unlabeled passwords. There’s a book beside her laptop with a title I don’t recognize. I flip through its pages, but the only thing that falls out is a bookmark. Just as I’m stepping forward to open her laptop, the toe of my shoe knocks into something tucked beneath the desk. I bend down to look and find a clear plastic box the size of a printer. Through the side, I can see it’s stuffed with papers, everything from newspaper clippings to computer printouts. This is it.

The box feels so final, the way it’s pushed under the desk, its yellow top closed tight, and I think back to the last time I was here, when Jenna told me she was taking a break to care for her mom. I remember this evidence was still up on her living room wall that night. I clocked it the moment I stepped into her house. So, what changed between then and now? What did she find that has her so convinced she’s done investigating? And, as all my questions have since yesterday, this one dovetails into my biggest point of confusion: Why is she hiding it from me?

I slip my arms out of my backpack and drop it to the floor. Then I pull out Jenna’s desk chair to sit and tug the box onto my lap, prying off the lid. The newspaper article on top is one I recognize. Its headline reads: “Missing Mishawaka Girls.” Beneath it is the picture of Kasey in her jean jacket. I place it on the laptop and move to the next, a printed Google map of the road where Jules went missing, the exact location marked with an X. I’ve seen this too.

Carefully, I go through it all, but with each subsequent piece of paper, my hope sinks a bit further in my chest. I already know everything in here. I check my phone and see that it’s almost noon. Jenna won’t be home for hours, yet with every passing minute I’m here, myanxiety kicks up a notch. I flip through the remaining documents quickly, but they’re all dead ends.

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