Page 77 of The Missing Half

Kasey aimed the flashlight toward the road behind her, illuminating the pavement and the dirt shoulder. Nothing. She took a fewtentative 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’sLittle Mermaidarm 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 movefast. 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 takingthe 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.

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