Page 79 of The Missing Half

“It was my choice,” she says. “To protect you. And me. Our futures.”

I try to see my old life through her eyes, all the potential I had at seventeen. I could have left Funland, gone to college, made new friends who didn’t drink for the fun of it. I could have done more, been more. But what Kasey failed to consider in all her careful preparations was how her supposed death would tear my life apart. She’d simply exchanged one life of pain for another. But I can’t tell her that. Not when she sacrificed so much.

“I would’ve done anything to keep you safe,” she says. “You would’ve done the same for me. You did. Tonight.”

We share a fleeting glance, her words conjuring Jenna’s ghost so tangibly between us that I can’t hold her eyes, and we lapse into silence.Where do we go from here?I think.What do we do?

“We should get going,” Kasey says eventually. “We still have a long way to go.”

As we pull back out onto the street, I say, “Where did you go that night?” Those un-accounted-for miles on our odometer represent the last missing piece to this nightmare. “The night you—I—hit Jules? Where did you put her body?”

Kasey looks unbearably tired, so much older than her twenty-six years. She has long been ravaged by the guilt I am just starting to feel. It has robbed her of her youth. “Remember the road trips Mom and Dad used to drag us on when we were kids?” she says. “The ones to visit Aunt Jean in Dayton?”

“Yeah…”

“Do you remember what we used to say when we passed that one swamp?”

A shiver laces up my spine as I think back to those drives and the way the two of us would hold our breath, cheeks puffed out dramatically, as we passed the swamp—our twist on the cemetery classic. “Somewhere like that,” I say, parroting our younger selves, “has to be full of dead bodies.”

“It was the first place I could think of,” Kasey says. “That’s where we’re headed now.”

Chapter Forty-six

We drive the rest of the way in silence. I still have one last question—or rather one last favor—to ask of Kasey, and I chew it over in my mind.

We reach the outer edges of the swamp hours later, when the moon is hanging directly above us in the sky. Other than it and thestars, the night is dark, the swamp an infinite blackness. I point the beam of a flashlight Kasey grabbed from her home earlier intothe tree line, but the darkness swallows it. A cacophony of wildlife hums in the air, frogs trilling, mosquitos buzzing.

“You ready?” Kasey says. I try not to think about what we’re doing, but it creeps into my brain regardless. We’re hiding a dead body—Jenna’s body. “We can’t take the tarp. It’ll stand out too much. We’re going to have to move her as she is.”

Kasey opens the back of the truck, and we stare at the roll of blue plastic. All I want to do is run back to the passenger seat and put my head between my knees until it’s all over, but I can’t let Kasey carry this burden for me. Not this time. Taking a fortifying breath, I climb into the bed of the truck.

“Let’s get her out up here,” I say. “Then we can push her to the edge together.”

I reach a hand to help Kasey up, and her eyes widen ever so slightly in surprise. This is the first time she’s ever seen me take the lead, the first time she hasn’t had to guide me through my own mess. After a moment’s hesitation, she puts her hand in mine.

Awkwardly, we unroll Jenna’s body, then heave it out of the truck bed. I grab her ankles and Kasey grabs her wrists, and together we start to carry her to the tree line. Our only source of light is from the flashlight I hold with my mouth, and it shines an eerie spotlight on Jenna’s corpse swinging in our grip. Her head lolls heavy on her bent neck, exposing the soft underbelly of her chin. Her hair drags through the grass on the ground. I’m grateful I can’t see her eyes.

“Let’s put her down,” Kasey says through panting breaths once we reach the trees. “It’s hard navigating in there. Most of it’s just mud and water, and it’s really dense.”

Denseis an understatement. Within seconds of stepping through the tree line, I’m covered in stinging scrapes, the underbrush more like a wall than individual plants. We make it less than ten feet before we need to put the body down again.

“Shit,” Kasey says, glancing over her shoulder. “We’re already almost at the water.” Sure enough, I look behind her and see moonlight bouncing off its black surface. I grab the flashlight from my mouth, and the bright beam turns the water a murky greenishbrown.

We catch our breath, then continue deeper into the swamp. Soon the hard ground turns soft, our shoes squelching in mud. And then we’re in the water. In all the dark places around us my mind conjures threats: snakes coiled in the earth, spiders hanging over our heads, fish slipping against our legs in the watery depths. This is how we make our slow progress—moving through the water to solid ground and then back to water again, catching our breath every few feet, Jenna’s lifeless body suspended between us.

“What about here?” I say when we’ve made it to a patch of harder terrain. It feels as if an hour has passed. My clothes are soaked, my arms and legs sting with scrapes, and my muscles are starting to fatigue. Soon, I won’t be able to lift Jenna anymore. “This feels far enough, don’t you think?”

Kasey looks around. “Yeah, okay.” She hesitates. “We need toweigh her down, make sure she doesn’t float. I don’t think anyone will find her back here, but we can’t take the chance.”

“Jesus,” I say. I hadn’t thought of that.

“We can do it with rocks. You know, fill her pockets.”

I shine the flashlight in slow arcs on the ground so we can search for anything heavy. When we find a rock, one of us picks it up then tosses it into a pile.

“Hey, Kase?” I say after a few minutes. “If you never want to see me again after this, I’d understand.” I have a new and painful thrum in my veins, as if my heart is pumping poison.My fault, my fault, my fault.If I were her, I don’t think I’d ever be able to even look me in the eye.

Kasey is quiet for a long time, staring down into the mud. Finally, she says, “When I was here last time—with Jules, I mean—I was terrified. I was alone, and I didn’t have a flashlight because I’d been in such a hurry I’d forgotten to bring one, and I kept thinking I was going to get caught. It was irrational—there was probably no one else around for miles—but I couldn’t get it out of my head that someone was going to see my car and walk into the swamp and find me. And if that happened, I knew I’d go to prison for the rest of my life.”

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