Page 13 of The Missing Half

“Yeah?”

“Well, that reminded me.” I start pacing. “Sometime before Kasey went missing, she started acting strange too. It was kinda the same stuff you said about Jules, staying in and isolating herself. She kept saying she was stressed with school stuff, and at the time I believed her, but now I’m not so sure.”

“Okay…”

“When Jules started acting like that,” I continue, “three years before she went missing, she was working at that barbecue place, right? Famous Jake’s?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, when Kasey started acting weird, she was working at the record shop, Rosie’s Records.”

“I don’t—”

But I keep talking. “Listen, I googled Famous Jake’s, and at first I thought it had closed, but it turns out”—I glance at my phone’s screen—“it’s still here on Grape Road. It just changed names.” I’ve been walking aimlessly, but as I say this, I turn to face the commercial strip and the two businesses in front me. “Famous Jake’s is called Mesquite Barbecue now. Mesquite and Rosie’s Records—Jenna, they share a wall.”

Chapter Nine

I follow Jenna up the path to her front door. Her home in Osceola is a white one-story, small and old, but well-kept. She unlocks the door, and we go inside.

After I told her about the proximity of Mesquite and Rosie’s earlier, we decided to meet up at her house to talk through everything this evening. When I asked about the bus route, she offered to pick me up from work and drive me to my apartment after we were done. It was a bit out of the way, she admitted, but her place had food and, from glancing at my laptop the other day, a better computer. I suspect though that she just wanted to go somewhere that didn’t look like a hurricane had hit.

I follow her through the front door, the wood floorboards creaking beneath our feet.

“Is this where you lived with Jules?” I ask. I’m still mad at her, but in the wake of what I found, it feels as though we’ve slipped into a temporary truce. The storm is on the horizon, but it’s not here yet.

“Yeah,” she says. “I thought about moving, but…I don’t know. She loved this place so much.”

We walk into the living room, and I stop short. On the side wall, covering almost its entire surface, is a collection of research—newspaper clippings, printed articles from online publications, maps marked up in Sharpie—all about our sisters’ cases. The other day, when Jenna said she’d consumed everything about the two investigations, I thought she was being hyperbolic. It’s clear now she wasn’t.

“Oh, right,” Jenna says when she sees me looking. “I know it’s a lot.”

A lotdoesn’t come close. This is the kind of wall serial killers have, or detectives in TV shows when they’re slipping into obsession. The sheer amount of information in front of me makes me dizzy. I don’t think I’ve seen even half these articles before, and it’s a reminder that I’m the shitty kind of survivor while Jenna’s the good kind. Unlike me, she went looking for her sister the night Jules went missing, and she hasn’t stopped searching since. I walk closer and touch my fingertips to the curling edge of a newspaper cutout with the headline “Another Missing Mishawaka Girl—Are the CasesConnected?” My sister’s name in the article catches my eye:19-year-old Kasey Marie Monroe…

“Nic?” Jenna says and I jump a little. “Hey, are you hungry? I could make us sandwiches.”

Ever since the DWI, my expenses have skyrocketed. At first it was the legal fees that were drying up my bank account, now it’s the payment plan to cover the state’s fine. For months now, all I’ve been able to afford in the way of food is Cup Noodles and leftover pizza from work. I may still be angry with Jenna, but I’m not turning down a free meal. “Sure.”

We head into the kitchen and I sit at a little round table while she moves around, pulling out sliced meats and cheeses, whole grain bread. She piles salt-and-vinegar chips onto plates, slices a fat tomato, washes crisp lettuce. With my first bite, I realize how long it’s been since I’ve had a fresh vegetable. I can almost feel an influx of my vitamins and minerals. We eat in silence for a while. Then, as we’re picking at the last few chips on our plates, Jenna looks up atme.

“I’m glad you decided to work with me on this,” she says. “I think we should—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I wave a hand. “Hang on. There’s no ‘we’ yet, Jenna. I mean, I want to do this—obviously, because I called you—but we need to hash some shit out first. For starters, you liedto me. You deliberately misled me about my own sister’s case. That’s a pretty fucked up thing to do.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“I mean, honestly, how furious would you be if someone did that to you?”

“I know,” she says again. At least she sounds genuinely contrite. “It was a really shitty thing to do. But it wasn’t like it was premeditated or anything. I wasn’t trying to hurt you, it just came out. Honestly, I was probably as surprised to hear me say it as you were. Normally, I have everything all planned out. But I didn’t think there was any chance you wouldn’t talk. I just assumed you’d want to figure out what happened too. When you didn’t, I got desperate and made something up. Not that it’s an excuse for lying, but that’s why I did.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to know what happened,” I say. “Jesus, I’d sell my soul if it would help me understand what happened to Kasey. But when I think about that summer, about my sister, I…” I shake my head. “Look, the good memories just make me miss her, and the bad memories—they make me feel like shit. Plus, I thought what you were trying to do was, you know, futile. I didn’t think learning anything new about her case was even possible.”

“I get it,” Jenna says. “I do. But what about now? You learned something new.”

I eat a chip, then another. I’m already in—I was in the moment I biked up to the commercial strip this morning—but I want to make her sweat like she made me. “If I agree to help, you have to swear on your life you won’t lie to me again.”

“Done.”

“I’m serious, Jenna. If I do this and I ever find out you’re lying or holding something back about our sisters’ cases, I’ll…” I look around her kitchen. “I’ll make you wish you hadn’t.”

---