Since She Went Away (7 page)

Sally held the wine bottle up. “More?”

Jenna shook her head, which still hurt. She always drank with Sally. It was one of the pillars of their friendship—alcohol consumption. The glass of wine on top of the beer made Jenna’s head feel as if it had been stuffed with cotton.

“I’ve told you before that Becky McGee is a pill,” Sally said. “I knew her older sister in high school. She was a brat when she was a little kid, and I bet she still is.”

“She’s always seemed decent.”

“As long as the story is flowing her way, she’s decent,” Sally said. “But there haven’t been any new leads. The story has to go somewhere.”

Jenna saw a freeze frame of her face on the screen. “Oh, God. That’s the worst image ever. I’m going to turn it up.”

“Jenna—”

“I want to hear it.”

Reena Huffman was ranting in her high, grating voice.

“. . . been holding off on saying some of these things. I always try to be respectful of the friends and family members of a crime victim. And make no mistake, what happened to Celia Walters is a crime. It’s a tragedy. But someone knows something about it. A young, beautiful woman like this, this Diamond Mom, doesn’t just disappear without a trace without someone knowing something about it.”

The images on the screen shifted. Jenna’s pale, ugly photo remained, but it was joined by a portrait of Celia, the one most widely distributed in the wake of her disappearance. In the photo, Celia looked radiant. Perfect smile, shining brown hair. Wide brown eyes. She looked like everybody’s sister, friend, daughter, girlfriend. The all-American dream.

“This friend, this Jenna Barton, I’m starting to wonder if she has been entirely forthcoming about the events of that night, November the fourth. She says the two women, who had been best friends since junior high, were just going out for some girl time. But why were they going out at midnight? Who does that? Why did Jenna call Celia up that night and invite her out for a drink at midnight? Jenna says they were just reliving their old glory days when they were wild and free young people. But who does that? Who does that when they’re parents? Both of these women are parents to teenagers. And Jenna is a single mom, so who was home with her son when she went out that night? Who does those things at that age? I think there’s much more to know here, and I hope . . . no, I pray that the police start asking these questions of Jenna Barton. This language she used today . . . it tells me this is not a normal person.”

Jenna groaned.

Sally fumbled around, looking for the remote.

But Reena shifted gears.

“As if this case wasn’t getting strange enough,” she said.

“Wait,” Jenna said. And Sally stopped looking.

“There’s another piece of news breaking about this case, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll finally get some light shed on these events.”

Jenna’s mind raced. What else could be going on besides the bones in the barn?

“This is breaking news,” Reena said, “something we are just learning as we went on the air. Apparently the earring, the match to the
earring that was found near the park where Celia Walters is believed to have disappeared, has been found.”

Jenna stood up, her hands hanging limp and useless at her sides.

“We’re still learning about this, and we’ll have more to report as the show goes on here. But what we know is that someone was taken into custody just this evening for trying to sell that earring, the match to the one that belongs to Celia Walters, at a pawnshop. Police have taken a man into custody, and that’s all we know right now. But we’ll keep you up-to-date. And we’ll be right back.”

“No,” Jenna said, stepping toward the screen. “No. You can’t do that. You can’t just start and stop like that.”

“It’s a commercial,” Sally said. “She’ll be back. She’s teasing us because she doesn’t know anything.”

Sally muted the TV. Jenna stared at the images. The president talking at a lectern, a teaser for a foreign affairs show. And then a commercial for orange juice.

“Honey.” Sally came up beside her and placed her hands on Jenna’s shoulders. “It will be okay. They’ll come back.”

“What if they found the guy?” Jenna asked, not really addressing her words to anybody. “What if this is it?”

Sally guided her to a chair. Jenna dropped into it, her body moving without any conscious thought on her part. She felt like a robot, an automaton.

“We’ll know more in a minute,” Sally said. “Well, maybe not even then. They’re piecing the story together. Becky is probably running around bugging the shit out of the cops.”

“I should call Detective Poole.”

“Why don’t you wait and see what Reena says? Here.” She handed Jenna a glass of wine. “Let’s see if it comes back on.”

Jenna finished the little bit of wine in the glass.

The show returned, but Reena went to another story, something
about a woman who discovered she had a sister she didn’t know about until her mother was murdered.

Sally muted it. “Let’s talk while they go through these other things.”

They sat in silence for a moment, and then Jenna grabbed the wine bottle and filled her glass. She needed it. She could slow down tomorrow. She took a long drink and then said, “I haven’t eaten anything.”

“Do you want to order something?” Sally asked. “Or do you want me to make you some eggs? Or a sandwich?”

“I’m good.”

“Do you want to be alone?” Sally asked.

“No. No way.” Jenna gave Sally a smile that she hoped conveyed the depth of her gratitude. “I like your company. I like having someone to talk to. It’s been hard to talk to some of my other friends about all this. It’s so freaking awkward.” She pointed to the TV screen. “I think this is what everybody thinks about me. People I’ve known for years. They have these questions. They blame me. You just said that everybody’s scared and on edge in town. You’ve felt it. When people get scared, they look for someone to blame. No one will say it, but they do blame me. I wish they’d actually just say it instead of dancing around it.”

“I doubt they feel that way about you. I think a lot of this is in your head. It’s guilt talking.”

“I don’t know. . . .”

Sally took a swallow from her own glass. She looked thoughtful. “I’ve never asked you anything about the case because I figured you’d had your fill of talking about it. And we’ve only started to get to know each other well.”

“You asked me to your book club the month Celia disappeared.”

“Was that rude?” Sally asked.

“It was a lifesaver,” Jenna said. “You were the first person to treat me like I was normal. That’s all I wanted, for people to act normal.”

Sally laughed. “No one ever accused me of that,” she said. “Well, there is something I’ve always wanted to ask you.”

“What’s that?” Jenna asked.

“What the hell were you doing going out that night?”

Jenna took another big swallow of wine. She nodded, ready to go on.

CHAPTER EIGHT

J
ared froze on the sidewalk in front of Tabitha’s house.

The curtains were drawn, the porch light out.

He’d started home, cursing himself for letting Tabitha run late and cursing himself for not having the guts to walk her all the way to the door. All he had to do was stick out his hand and introduce himself to her father. Wasn’t that what boyfriends were supposed to do? Go to the door, shake hands with the dad? Times like that, he did wish he had a father, someone who could guide him through the complicated waters of manhood. But Jared knew he made a good impression on adults. He was clean-cut, well dressed, polite, and friendly. He needed to take the heat so Tabitha wouldn’t have to.

But he couldn’t will himself up the front walk to the door. He couldn’t stop thinking about the look on Tabitha’s face, the combination of fear and sadness. She’d shoved him with a force he couldn’t have guessed she’d have in her body, almost knocking him down. What if he rang the bell like an idiot and made it all worse? He didn’t want to be like his mom, barging into any situation and then thinking about the consequences later.

Jared needed to go home. His mom would be waiting, and he had
homework to do, things he would have been working on except he spent that time with Tabitha. But he wouldn’t hear from her all evening. There’d be no texts or calls, no messages. He’d have to go home and work, all the while wondering if she ended up in trouble with her dad—and if she did, what kind of trouble might inspire so much fear? If the guy was so strict about everything else, might he hurt her if she came home late? And what if he had happened to look up the street and see her saying good-bye to a boy?

Jared looked to the houses on either side of Tabitha’s. They were dark, as still and quiet in the night as empty tombs. Jared took a few steps up the city sidewalk, moving parallel to the houses, then turned to his left, cutting across the grass between Tabitha’s house and their neighbors’. It was getting colder, and he’d forgotten to bring gloves. His fingertips tingled, so he stuffed his hands in his pockets.

The door of Tabitha’s house came open, a shaft of light spilling across the lawn.

Jared acted without thinking. He dropped to the grass, face-first. He pressed his body against the ground, hugging it as tightly as he could. The blades of grass tickled his face, and the cold seeped into his clothes, clinging to his skin like a tight suit.

He risked a look, moving his eyeballs slowly to the left. The man stood on the porch, his large body obscuring most of the light. He tossed a cigarette out into the yard, its glowing tip landing ten feet from Jared’s head.

Jared waited. Every atom in his body clenched. A pressure rose in his bladder, a painful surging of liquid. He gritted his teeth until he thought they’d chip.

Then the door closed. The man was gone, back inside.

Jared waited as long as he could. When he thought it was okay to stand up, he counted to twenty and then rose.

He was colder, his pulse racing. But he didn’t stop.

At the back of Tabitha’s house, a light burned in a window and then spilled into the darkness. Given the window’s placement, he guessed it was the kitchen. Jared felt a churning in his gut as he moved closer, a swirling of adrenaline and nerves that seemed to be on the brink of bursting through his skin. He still needed to pee. He knew if he was seen, if someone from the neighborhood or Tabitha’s father called the police on him, then Tabitha would know he’d been sneaking around. The relationship would be over. Game, set, match. But he needed to know she was safe. He’d seen guilt over Celia’s kidnapping rip his mother apart, felt his own guilt over that night like broken glass in his stomach. Did he want to feel the same way about Tabitha if something happened to her?

He came to within ten feet of the window. A dog started barking nearby, a harsh ripping sound that cut through the night, freezing Jared in his tracks. His breath came in quick huffs, but he realized the dog wasn’t barking at him. Somebody a few houses away shouted at the dog to be quiet, and the barking stopped. He willed his body to move forward again, avoiding the spill of light from the Burkes’ kitchen window.

He saw a row of brown cabinets, and a light fixture hanging from the ceiling by a decorative chain. The wallpaper was yellow and faded, a couple of corners peeling loose and curling away from the plaster.

Tabitha sat at the kitchen table. Her head rested in her hands, so Jared couldn’t see her face. Her shoulders rose and fell once as though she’d heaved a big sigh. Was she crying? A coil of anger wound its way through Jared’s chest. If someone hurt her, if someone made her cry . . .

Then the man came into the room, the same man he’d seen on the porch. He was close to fifty and overweight, his midsection straining against the confines of a stained sweatshirt. His face was flat and broad, and in the harsh overhead light of the kitchen, Jared
saw pockmarks on either side of his bulbous nose. The lids of his eyes looked heavy, and his graying hair was greasy and thick. He lifted a newly lit cigarette to his lips and took a long drag, his eyes squinting as the smoke curled up toward the ceiling. Then he made a jabbing motion against the table, stubbing the cigarette out.

Tabitha hadn’t moved. Jared couldn’t even bring himself to look for a physical resemblance between such an ugly man and beautiful Tabitha. The thought was too distasteful. Jared’s anger switched to something else, something similar and even more pointed and painful. He understood it, even though he hadn’t experienced it in quite this way before. But the man’s proximity to Tabitha, the fact that he could be in the same house with her and know her so well, made Jared seethe. Jared was jealous, and the distance between him and Tabitha never felt greater. What else didn’t he know about her if he didn’t know what went on in her house?

The man said something, and Tabitha looked up. She didn’t appear to be crying, although she didn’t look happy either. Her face was a mask of caution as she considered her father from the corners of her eyes.

The man continued to speak, wagging his index finger in the air for emphasis. He didn’t seem angry, didn’t appear to be losing control of his emotions, but the lecture continued for several minutes while Tabitha listened without responding or moving.

And then the man stopped his talking. He stared down at Tabitha as though he was waiting for something. Finally Tabitha nodded, moving her head up and down three times.

The man moved closer to Tabitha. He hovered over her, looming like a massive shadow. Tabitha looked small. Young. Defenseless.

CHAPTER NINE

J
enna had met Celia Springer on the first day of junior high. They ended up sitting next to each other in homeroom, and at first, Celia acted as if Jenna weren’t there. Maybe that made the possibility of her friendship more appealing. Maybe it made Jenna want to work harder to earn that friendship from her. While the teacher, an older man with a comb-over named Mr. Phelps, read announcements, Celia studied her perfectly manicured nails, occasionally looking up with a casual flip of her flawless brown hair.