Page 71 of The Missing Half

Jenna shakes her head. “I’m not here to answer your questions.”

But in light of everything she just said, I’m starting to suspect I already know. My mind flashes to that day in Jenna’s truck, after she picked me up from jail and all but forced me to close my eyes andpicture Kasey somewhere she’d always wanted to go. I envisioned her in Nashville. And then there was that first conversation Jenna and I had with Lauren outside her church, when she told us Kasey loved working at the record shop so much, she started joking about doing it full-time. I don’t understand how Jenna knew Kasey was going by her middle name, Marie, but the name itself is all over the internet. She could’ve just seen it enough and guessed. With those few pieces of information, it would’ve been hard, but not impossible, to track down someone who fit the parameters.

And yet none of that explains how Jenna knew to look for Kaseyin the first place, or what she’s doing here now, or—most disturbingly—why she has a gun tucked into the back waistband of her jeans.

“What—” Kasey begins, but Jenna cuts her off.

“I just fucking said I’m not gonna answer your questions. You’re the one who killed Jules. You’re the reason my sister is dead.”

Chapter Forty

The words ring through the night like a gunshot, and everything feels suddenly surreal. The accusation is absurd, like the punchline of some horrible, sick joke. I envision Jenna taking out her gun and pulling the trigger, only to see a stream of water come out, or a little flag that saysBang. But her face is contorted into an unfamiliar mask of rage. Something dangerous is building inside of her, a snake coiling tighter.

“You killed Jules,” she says again.

“W-wait,” Kasey says, her voice trembling. “Please. It’s more complicated than that.”

“Is it?” Jenna snaps. “Because now that I’ve got it all figured out, it seems pretty fucking simple. You hit my sister with your car that night, and when you realized you’d killed her, you got rid of her body.”

“I didn’t—”

“Isawyou,” Jenna shouts. “When Jules didn’t come home that night, I went looking for her and just before I found her car pulled over on the side of the road, I saw another one driving off. It was spectacularly bad timing on your part. If you’d left even sixty seconds earlier, I probably never would’ve seen your car, but I did. Iremember it because of its bumper sticker. In the beam of my headlights, that’s all I saw—a big white sticker against dark metal.We are not two, we are one.That’s what it said. I looked it up later and found out it was a line from a song.”

Standing in the shadow of the stairway, I feel as though the earth is tipping beneath me. I never told Jenna about that bumper sticker.

“I told the police about the car,” she continues. The words are pouring out of her in angry spurts as if she’s not entirely in control of what she’s saying. “But I couldn’t remember anything else, not the make, the model, nothing. And so nothing ever came of it. I all but forgot about it until two weeks ago when your sister went through your old car, and I found a CD you’d burned. You’d decorated it with that line.”

I think back to that night in my living room, to the way Jenna’s smile had dropped when she saw that CD.It reminds me of Jules,she’d said, and I thought I knew exactly what had happened. Nostalgia turned to grief.Kasey loved it too,I told her, trying to be comforting.She wrote out the lyrics to it all the time.

“Wait,” Kasey says. “You said my sister? What does Nic have to do—”

Jenna’s body jolts at the sound of my name, and she cuts Kasey off. “You don’t get to worry about your sister, okay? Not in front of me. Your sister is alive, and mine is dead—because of you.”

“I didn’t—”

“Stop denying it! I have proof.”

“That you saw my car that night?” Kasey says. “That doesn’t prove anything.”

“You’re right. It doesn’t.” There’s a sudden coolness in Jenna’s voice that scares me more than if she’d shouted. “That same night, when your sister and I were going through the rest of the stuff from your car, I found a business card for an auto shop out of town. It didn’t mean anything to her, but after seeing that lyric, I was starting to get suspicious. I went to the shop the next day and offered the guy working there two hundred dollars to show me their records between August 4th and August 17th, 2012—the day my sister went missing and the day you did. I found it within ten minutes. A blackHonda Civic with a banged-up front bumper. The repair shop had taken dozens of photos of the car. Most were of the damage, but there was one picture of the back, and there it was—that fucking bumper sticker.”

Finally, everything that’s happened over the past week clicks into place. Jennawastrying to get me off the case when she told me she was taking a break to care for her mom, but she wasn’t doing it to protect me—from McLean or anything else. She was doing it to get me out of the picture while she investigated Kasey.

“I’m right,” Jenna says. “Aren’t I? You hit her. You hit her that night and then you hid her body to cover up what you’d done.” Anger is consuming her body like fire eating through wood. “I need to hear you say it.” Then she reaches behind her and pulls out the gun. “Say you killed my sister.”

Chapter Forty-one

Light from the outside bulb glints off the shiny black metal in Jenna’s hand, and the air around me electrifies.

“Wait,” I hear Kasey say from the doorway. “Please, just—wait.” I’ve never before heard her sound so scared, and it’s this, almost more than the sight of the gun itself, that clarifies what, deep down, I already knew but wasn’t willing to believe: Jenna isn’t here to get a confession out of my sister. She’s here to kill her.

For close to a decade, I’ve lived with a hole in my heart, the space carved out when Kasey disappeared. Now, after all that time, we’ve found our way back to each other and that emptiness in my chest has filled. I’m not willing to lose her—not again.

My world narrows to one objective: Get the gun out of Jenna’s hands.

“Just say it,” Jenna says. Tears are choking her speech now, slurring her words. The gun, which she’s pointing somewhere between the floor and Kasey, looks heavy in her hand. “Say you killed my sister.”

Holding my breath, I take one tentative step up the stairs. It’s impossible to be completely soundless, but the edge of the staircase is more fortified than the center, and I’m praying that Jenna’s too distraught to hear the almost imperceptible noise it makes. Plus, I’mstill hidden in the house’s shadow, which should obscure her peripheral vision.

---