Page 62 of The Missing Half

Detective Aimes holds up a hand. “Nic. Please. Listen. Wyler may have ruled out McLean, but I haven’t.”

“Oh.”

“As you know, all the evidence points to a man who knew Jules and Kasey both. And you’re right. McLean fits. His alibi isn’t airtight, but it’s enough that in order to be sure of anything, in order to prove anything, we would need far more evidence against him. So I’ll look into everything you’ve said. The money is a good lead. Thank you for sharing it with me.”

“I…sure.” This conversation is going so far in the direction opposite to the one I expected, I can’t seem to find the words to keep up my side of it.

“And to answer the first thing you asked me,” Detective Aimes says, “no, we haven’t uncovered anything new since I inherited the case from Wyler.”

“Oh. Right. Okay.”

“However, there is one piece of evidence I don’t believe he ever told you about. Now, before you get upset, he wasn’t hiding it for the sake of hiding it. He was doing what he thought was best for the investigation. I probably would’ve done the same in those early days. But as you obviously know, a lot of time has passed, so I’m planning to release this piece of evidence to the public soon to get people talking again. If you can assure me that you’ll keep it to yourself until we issue our press release, I’m happy to tell you now. Does that sound okay to you?”

My heart grows wings and starts to flap around my chest. A new piece of evidence? It’s what I hoped for, of course, but it’s far more than I ever expected. “I, yes, that sounds good. What is it?”

She leans forward, resting her forearms on her desk. “When they processed Kasey’s car after she went missing, they found something. One of Jules Connor’s hairs was in the driver’s seat.”

“I don’t understand,” I say slowly. “Jules was in Kasey’s car that night?”

“Until we know one hundred percent what happened, anything’s possible, but I don’t think that’s how it got there. More likely, it was there from some kind of transfer. As in, when whoever took Kasey actually took her, he was wearing an item of clothing he also wore on the night he took Jules. Jules’s hair got caught in the fibers of a jacket or a T-shirt on August 4th, and it was still there on August 17th. It’s why we’ve been so convinced all these years that the cases are connected.”

I think of McLean and that lecherous smile he had as he talked about Kasey, the cagey way he spoke about Jules—he’s the one person we’ve been able to connect to them both.

As if reading my mind, Detective Aimes says, “It doesn’t point to anyone in particular, but it doesn’t rule out McLean. I will look into him, Nic, I promise.” She gives me a somber smile. “Is there anything else you’d like to ask me?”

I open my mouth instinctively, but realize I already got everything I came for. “No,” I say. “I guess not.”

“In that case, I’ll do my best to keep you updated, but feel free to email me anytime. Now, why don’t I walk you out?”

As if in a trance, I rise from my chair and sling my backpack over my shoulder. I’m so used to being disappointed, so used to my opinion being ignored, that I feel oddly whiplashed from the conversation. I thank her for meeting with me, and then together we retrace our steps back to the lobby and out the front door.

“By the way,” she says after shaking my hand goodbye. “I meant to ask earlier but forgot. What happened between you and Jenna Connor?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, your email made it seem like the two of you were working on your sisters’ cases together, but you met with me separately.”

“Wait,” I say. “Jenna came to talk to you?”

She nods.

“When was this?”

“Let’s see, it would’ve been…Saturday afternoon. Not this past Saturday but the previous. I told her what I told you, about the hair.” Detective Aimes must see how much this throws me, because she says, “I didn’t mean to overstep. I just hope everything’s okay. I thought it was smart, the two of you teaming up like that.”

I force a smile, tell her that everything’s fine, but I feel as if she’s reached forward and pushed me off the edge of a cliff. Saturday was the day Jenna bailed on me when I went to talk to my dad, the day she told me she wanted to step back from our investigation to take care of her mom. She made me feel so insensitive for accusing her of using that as an excuse, but now I know I was right. Jenna is lying to me—I just don’t know if that should make me angry or scared.

Chapter Thirty-three

On the two-hour bus ride back from Grand Rapids, I sit, my forehead pressed to the cool window, staring, unseeing, at the scenery passing by, thinking about a memory I haven’t thought about in a very long time.

In elementary school, there was this night toward the end of the year when parents would come to school to see what their kids had been working on. The science teacher would display our three-panel poster boards on the solar system or tarantulas or the ocean tides. The English teacher would line her walls with our handwritten essays—biographies of our favorite historical figures accompanied by drawn portraits. All those Lincolns in top hats. The art teacher would prop our paintings on easels, put out a grocery-store cheese platter, and pretend her nine- and ten-year-old students were artists in a gallery. Spring Show-and-Tell, we called it. When I was in fourth grade, it was a very big deal.

For me, the art room show-and-tell was the pinnacle of the evening. I’d worked on my painting—a landscape of the woods—for what felt like ages, talked about nothing else at the dinner table in weeks. Two nights before the event, though, my dad told me he was going to miss it. He’d just taken a second job, which he didsometimes when money was tight. This one was selling shoes at the mall, and he couldn’t rearrange his shift. I was devastated. Everybody else would have two parents there.

Despite this, I woke up on the day of the Spring Show-and-Tell hyper with excitement, and it only intensified as the day went on. Our art teacher had given us the option of staying after school to finalize our projects if we wanted, and I got the idea to add a moon to my landscape, so I stayed.

It took me the entire two hours between the end of school and the time my mom was due to arrive to paint my moon, taking pains to make sure the contours of the orb weren’t all the same shade. I pictured my mom admiring it, holding it delicately by the edges, insisting it lie flat in the car on the ride home. She might even frame it, I thought. It really was that good. But my mom wasn’t in the first round of parents to pass through the door, nor in the second. The minutes ticked by, and after almost an hour, she still hadn’t showed. Her absence felt like a stone in my stomach getting heavier and heavier.

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