Page 41 of The Missing Half

“That’s too bad.” Another long beat of silence. “And what about the Perkins girl? The one you told me you talked to. What’s her name again?” His voice is oh so casual.

“Who, Lauren?”

“That’s it. Did you ever talk to her after that first time?”

“No.” If Bradwasthe one who threatened Lauren, I’m not about to put a target on her back by letting him know it didn’t work. “After we talked that one time, I reached out again over Facebook, but she never got back to me. I don’t wanna push it.”

He turns into my apartment complex. “Well, she probably told you everything she had to say the first time anyway.”

“Probably. By the way, do you remember which building I’m in?” He’s driven me home a handful of times since my license was suspended, but my complex is huge, and I pray to a god I don’t believe in that he’s forgotten. I’m trying to hang on to my belief that he has nothing to do with any of this, but the truth is I don’t know what he’s capable of. If he doesn’t remember my building number, I’ll give him a fake one and bike from there.

“Of course I do,” he says. “This thing’s a steel trap.” He taps a finger to his temple as he navigates to my building and puts the car in park. “I even remember which apartment you’re in. That one right there.” He leans over me to gesture at it, and I turn my head to look: He’s pointing straight at my front door.

—

It’s only when I’m in my apartment with the deadbolt locked behindme that I can exhale. I walk to the kitchen and twist off the top of a bottle of wine. I pour myself a glass, take a sip, then top it off, replaying the drive home with Brad in my mind, trying to see it objectively.

But I’m at war with myself, defensiveness and suspicion clawing their way over each other like rabid animals. Did Brad instigate that conversation to check on my emotional well-being, or is he keeping tabs on my progress in the investigation? Did he bring up Lauren out of innocent curiosity or because he was trying to see if his message had gotten through to her? And most unnerving of all, was that joke about his mind being a steel trap just Brad being Brad, with his lame attempt at humor? Or was it a reminder that he knows where I live?

If I could just understand what happened between him and Kasey that summer, I could prove he had nothing to do with her going missing. But how? Where do I start?

As I gaze into my glass of wine, I realize with a jolt that I’m supposed to be at my weekly AA meeting right now. I was supposed to go after work today, but Brad wiped it from my mind. “Shit.” I’mgoing to have to find another meeting this week so I don’t break my probation.

At the thought of AA my mind flashes, as it always does, to the accident that put me there—and that’s when it hits me. An idea of where to go next. It’s a long shot, I know, but at this point, it’s all I’vegot.

Chapter Twenty-two

After the police found my sister’s car on the side of the road and declared it a crime scene, they taped it off, investigated it, and a mere day and a half later, they packed everything up and told us the car was ours again. They seemed to think they were doing my family a favor, expediting the process so we could have the vehicle back. What they didn’t understand was that none of us would be able to drive it ever again.

My mom wanted to sell it, but my dad put his foot down. Kasey would need something to drive when she came back. I wasn’t going to drive around the crime scene of my sister’s abduction, so I took every penny I’d ever made and bought the world’s cheapest car on Craigslist. To free up space in the garage for it, my dad got a storage unit to store Kasey’s old car, and that’s where it’s been ever since.

That car, I realized, is at the center of everything. It was the last place Kasey was before she was taken, and apparently, it was where she and Brad hooked up on their lunch breaks. The police combed through it years ago, but what if they missed something?

It’s a little before nine in the morning when I pedal up to the storage facility on my bike. Last night, I called my dad to ask how to get into our unit, inventing a feeble lie about wanting to store someboxes. He pretended to believe me, then tracked down the two codes I’d need. I enter the first into the box by the gate. It shudders open and I pedal through. The facility is small, with no more than forty or so units, and I find ours easily. I enter the second code into the lockbox, use the key inside to unlock the metal door, then tug it open.

And there it is, our old car. It’s a black Honda Civic with the one bumper sticker Kasey snuck onto the back before our mom saw and told us not to put on any more. It was tacky, she said, and would decrease the resale value. The sticker is big and white, stark against the dark metal, printed with that song lyric Kasey loved so much:We are not two, we are one.

The unit is just big enough for me to walk around the car, open the driver’s side door, and slip into that old familiar seat. The air inside is sweltering. Suddenly, I feel as if I’m back in the summer of 2012, on my way to pick Kasey up from the record store and drive us home with the stereo blaring and the windows down. But just as longing starts to fill my chest, I replace it with numbness.

I came here to investigate. I don’t want to feel.

Looking around the dark interior, I find the key nestled in the cupholder. I turn it in the ignition, but the engine only kicks over a few times. In the foot space on the passenger side, I see a smattering of receipts, a tube of lip gloss. I envision Kasey on the night she was taken, running the little brush over her lips, checking her reflection in the overhead mirror. I reach for it, imagining the ghost of my sister’s hands, the whorls of her old fingerprints interweaving with my new ones.

“Stop,” I say aloud.

I pull from my backpack one of the plastic bags I brought to collect everything I found, toss the lip gloss in unceremoniously, then grab the receipts. The first is from Wendy’s, the price of a couple Frosties. The next is from Sonic, the next from a gas station. I look at the dates, study the prices, but I feel like an idiot. These aren’t clues. These are meaningless slips of paper.

I twist in my seat to look into the back and spot the big black CD case where Kasey and I used to store our music. “No way,” I breathe,reaching for it. Once we were in high school, we were mainly using our iPods and those tape adapters, but every once in a while, we’d pull out this binder and play some of our old stuff.

I tug the binder onto my lap and unzip it. At the first page of CDs, I can’t help but laugh. There’s the Killers, Destiny’s Child, Green Day, Spice Girls. I think back to our middle school years, to this onemonth of time when Kasey and I played “Wannabe” from the CD player in her room on repeat every day until we knew every word. I flip through the binder, each subsequent album dredging up a new memory. Kasey and me riding our bikes, singing “We Go Together” fromGreaseas we pedaled around the neighborhood, Kasey and me sunbathing in the backyard, holding invisible microphones while we sing-shouted the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way,” Kasey and me painting our toenails in her room, dancing to “Semi-Charmed Life” by Third Eye Blind. Kasey and me, Kasey and me, Kasey andme.

Finally, I get to the end and the golden bubble of memory pops. Kasey is gone. I am alone. Suddenly, the car seems to shrink around me, and I buzz with the need to get out of here. I shove the binder into my backpack, crawl over the center console, and dig around the back seats. I find some loose bits of paper, an old bottle of nail polish, the liquid crusted along the edge. I chuck it all into the plastic bag, then clamber back into the driver’s seat, where I pull out my phone and photograph the entirety of the car’s interior—the seats, the dash, the roof, the floors.

When I’m done, I glance at the time on my phone and groan. This took longer than I thought, and now I only have thirty minutes to get to work. Thirty minutes till I have to pretend Brad is my family friend and amiable boss instead of what he really is—a lying, cheating prick.

—

I’m home from work and finishing one of Sandy’s brownies when there’s a knock on my front door. It makes me jump even though I know it’s Jenna. It’s been three and a half days since we saw eachother, and although I’m no closer to understanding how Brad fits into what happened to our sisters, she’s given me the time I asked for. I’ve been dreading this all day. I know she’s going to push for us to talk to Brad or to go to police, but I’m still not ready for either. The thought of what he did turns my stomach, and I wanted to punch him in the face so badly today at work my fingers twitched with it. But I can’t get myself to believe he’s a killer.

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