Since She Went Away (11 page)

“Hey, Jenna,” Naomi said, as casual as anything. She pushed the glasses up her nose. If someone didn’t know any better, they’d think Naomi and Jenna worked together, and the older woman was just greeting her at the start of another day. “I’m sorry to show up this way, but I needed to talk to you.”

Jenna knew the detective’s arrival wasn’t as casual as she’d made it seem. Naomi could have returned her call or could have texted. She’d done it before for smaller things about the case. She could have caught Jenna on her lunch break or even at home before she left. If there was one thing Jenna had learned since the night Celia disappeared, it was that detectives liked to talk to people on their own terms. They liked to decide the time and place of the conversation. They set the tone and the ground rules, even if it seemed that they weren’t. Jenna knew Naomi had something on her mind.

“Maybe we can sit on those benches over there?”

“Can I at least—”

Naomi smiled, the wise woman who had thought of everything in advance. “I already told them you’d be a few minutes late. They’re fine with it.”

They walked across the spacious lobby where everyone who entered the Medical Arts Building came in and studied the board to find out which floor their physician worked on. Functional, comfortable sofas and chairs ringed the perimeter of the room, and a security guard in a blue uniform sat at a desk, pretending not to be texting as patients started wandering in.

Naomi led Jenna to a sofa on the far side of the room, against a large window that allowed the morning light to stream in. Jenna placed her lunch and coat on the floor as the two women sat.

“What is the deal with this earring they found? And this guy? I’ve been going nuts and there’s no news about it.”

“We’re still piecing it together.”

It drove Jenna crazy that Naomi could be so calm and detached even in the midst of a crisis. Jenna knew it was part of her job to be cool, but would it kill her just once to be as riled up as Jenna was?

“Just tell me anything,” Jenna said.

“Yesterday a man went into Will’s Pawnshop, the one out on Hammond Pike? He tried to sell an earring. The clerk was on his game. He recognized it from the hot sheet and called us. A cruiser got there while the guy was still in the store. He claims he found the earring in a field on Western Avenue. He was out looking for aluminum cans and came across it in the grass. The snow had just started to melt. He says he’s heard about Celia’s case but didn’t put the two together when he found the earring.”

“Who is he, Naomi?” Jenna asked.

“His name is Benjamin Ludlow. He’s forty.”

“Benjamin Ludlow . . .” Something scratched below the surface of Jenna’s brain, something itching to get out.

“What is it?” Naomi asked.

“We went to high school with him.”

“I thought you might have. He’s a local guy, your age.”

“Jesus, Naomi. He’s a total creep. At least he was in high school. He was one of those guys who was always slinking around the corners of the building, leering at the girls but never actually talking to them. He scared us.” Jenna felt flushed. “Is he a suspect? Did he hurt Celia?”

“Everything’s on the table right now. This guy’s kind of rootless. Grew up here, as you know, and then served in the army. Moved around in the South and came back here about a year ago.” She stopped talking, but Jenna saw there was more.

“What is it?” she asked. “Don’t keep me hanging.”

“He has an arrest for sexual assault. It was ten years ago, and he served six months. This was down in Georgia.”

If Jenna’s hand hadn’t been resting against her thigh, it would have been shaking. She stared at the floor, the intricate pattern in the tile.

“Did he do it?” Jenna asked. “Did he hurt her?”

“He’s saying no. By the way, we’re trying to keep as much of this as possible out of the press until we’ve had a chance to look into this guy more. That’s why it’s so quiet this morning.”

“Do you believe him?” Jenna asked. “Naomi, he was a scary guy in high school, one of those guys you just assumed would end up in prison someday.”

“I’ve been a cop so long I don’t believe anybody. I’m sorry, Jenna, you’re going to have to be patient on this one. We just got this guy into our hands yesterday. I’ve barely filled Ian in on it.”

“I think I’m going to die being patient.”

“Have you seen him since high school? Benjamin Ludlow?”

“Benny, everybody called him. And no, I haven’t seen him. If I saw him, I’d run the other way.” Jenna rubbed her temple. “What a week this is turning into.”

“I’m sorry about what happened yesterday,” Naomi said. She had a way of talking that made every word seem easy and natural. Nothing to be stressed about here. No crisis, no fears.
Sure, we might have a suspect in custody, but it’s nothing to get worked up over.
“I hope you know I never would have called you to that scene. None of our officers would have.”

“It was Becky McGee.”

“I know,” Naomi said. “She wanted a story, and she got one. Not the one she envisioned, but a story nonetheless.”

“I walked right into it. I should have stayed at work, but I couldn’t say no. I wondered . . . I wondered about it really being Celia. If it was, shouldn’t I be there and not leave her alone to be handled by a
bunch of strangers?” Jenna studied Naomi’s face, evaluating her. “Is that morbid?”

“Not at all.” She reached over and patted Jenna on the knee. “It makes perfect sense.”

“You don’t have to apologize for a reporter’s behavior.”

“I have to ask you about something else.”

“Is this about Benny? Benjamin or whatever?”

Jenna wondered why she felt a different kind of guilt when a police officer wanted to ask her a question. It wasn’t the guilt she felt over Celia’s disappearance. That was a guilt she lived with every day, a duller ache, like a nagging cavity that sometimes—rarely—managed to slip below her consciousness.

But when a cop wanted to ask her something, she felt an acute sense of guilt, a feeling that the officer knew something about Jenna that she might not even understand herself.

“Not exactly,” Naomi said.

“Do I want to know what this is?” Jenna asked, the question slipping out of her mouth with an edge she hadn’t intended. It was the kind of quick, tart response that so often landed her in trouble.

Naomi studied her for a moment, a practiced pause that had the desired effect of putting Jenna back on her heels.

“I’m happy to help if I can,” Jenna said. “Is this something else about Celia’s case?”

“Maybe,” Naomi said, taking her time. A woman was pushing a crying baby in a stroller, the child’s screams echoing off the high ceiling. Naomi looked over and gave the mother a sympathetic smile. It occurred to Jenna that she knew very little about Naomi’s life. She wore a wedding ring but hadn’t mentioned children. The whole relationship seemed asymmetrical. Naomi could turn Jenna’s life inside out, while Jenna had no such recourse toward her. “Do you know someone named Holly Crenshaw?”

“Holly Crenshaw.” Jenna thought it over, trying to be certain before she opened her mouth again. “I don’t think so.”

“She lives over in Clay County, about twenty miles from here.”

“Should I know her?”

“She disappeared two days ago. She went out with some friends while her husband was away on business. It took a little while for anyone to know something was wrong. She’s young, twenty-three. She doesn’t have any kids and only works part-time.” Naomi brought out her phone. She opened a picture and showed it to Jenna. “See? A pretty girl, isn’t she?”

Jenna’s hands shook as she took the phone. The girl looked young, even younger than her twenty-three years. She was a kid, not much older than Jared. And she was beautiful, almost as pretty as Celia was at the same age. Jenna saw right away the general resemblance between the two women. The hair color and length most notably, the fresh-scrubbed beauty.

“You think there’s a connection,” Jenna said, handing the phone back.

“We’re wondering,” Naomi said.

Jenna waited a moment and then said, “There has to be a reason for you to wonder. What is it?”

“Holly worked at the country club Celia and Ian belong to.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

T
he only thing Jenna managed to say sounded defensive and petty. “I’m not a member of that country club. I’ve never even been there.”

“The country club may not be a connection. There may be no connection.” Naomi studied the screen for a moment, then slipped the phone away. “So far it doesn’t look like Celia and Holly Crenshaw knew each other. Maybe they were passing acquaintances and nothing more. Holly worked in human resources, so she probably didn’t have a lot of contact with the members.”

Jenna looked around the lobby. More people came and went, and she studied the faces, wondering about each and every one of them. Did they all carry pain and regret like hers? “So there could be some kind of killer in the area, someone who is preying on women? Do you think it’s Benjamin?”

Naomi was shaking her head. “We don’t know any of these things. The town’s nervous enough as it is. This is going to dial that up even higher. We can’t jump to any conclusions.”

But Jenna already knew people would. She could imagine the field day someone like Reena Huffman would have with that kind of
news. A killer on the loose, beautiful women being targeted in small-town America. What tagline would she come up with next?
Maniac in the Heartland
?
Killer in Kentucky
?

“Don’t jump to any conclusions?” Jenna said, repeating Naomi’s words and adding her own sarcastic edge. “I’ll stay nice and calm when the creeps call me on the phone. Or the next time I get summoned to a crime scene.”

“You’re still getting those phone calls? You know we can look into them again.”

“I got one last night, but that’s only because of my performance on CNN.”

Jenna wondered if Naomi would say anything about that, but she didn’t. She directed the conversation an entirely different way, still sounding casual. “Any other thoughts on Celia’s marriage?”

Naomi made it sound as though the two women had just been discussing the topic a few minutes earlier.

“Other thoughts? I answered fifty questions about their marriage when Celia disappeared.”

“I know.” Naomi looked calm, unruffled. “But sometimes I like to check back with people close to the case in the event something new has occurred to them. The mind is a tricky thing. Thoughts can emerge from places we aren’t even aware of.”

“I’d tell you the same thing now I told you then. They weren’t perfect, but they seemed happy. I hate to say it, but I felt maybe neither one of them was paying enough attention to Ursula. Ian worked a lot. Celia had an active social life. And all of that was going on right when their daughter was hitting puberty and adolescence. But I’m a single mom. I’m not home when my son gets out of school.” She’d seen the Jim Beam bottle in Jared’s room the night Celia disappeared. Her interruption of Jared and Tabitha just the day before. No, she couldn’t throw stones at any other parents. Everyone did their best. And then
they hoped. “Some people have suggested that Celia ran away and wasn’t taken. There’s no way that’s true. She wouldn’t leave Ian or Ursula.”

“Who’s suggesting she ran away?” Naomi asked.

“People online mostly. I go to those message boards sometimes, especially the one at the Dealey Society.” As Naomi well knew, the Dealey Society was an organization, founded by Paul and Pam Dealey, dedicated to discovering answers about missing persons cases involving adults. The site featured a clearinghouse of names, photos, and other information, as well as a message board where anyone could log on and discuss active and closed cases. They’d gained national attention over the past five years when members of their online community helped solve a couple of long-cold cases. The Dealeys started the site when their twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Sheila, was kidnapped and murdered. “I know I shouldn’t. I know it just stirs up difficult emotions. But there’s something comforting about talking to other people. It feels like there are individuals who really care.”

“And you feel like you’re being useful,” Naomi said. “You’re helping.”

“Yeah,” Jenna said, her voice trailing away. It hardly seemed like any form of real help. And it also required interacting with the occasional crazies who made the creeps on the phone seem normal and well adjusted. More than once, Jenna made vows to never go back, to stop dipping her toe in the online waters of the Dealey message board. But she inevitably went back, drawn there by the constant stream of new information, the ongoing sense that a group of people were trying to keep Celia’s memory and case alive.

“So nothing about the marriage,” Naomi said, drawing her back to the matter at hand.

“I’m hardly the person to evaluate that.” Jenna tried to sound light and joking, but she could still feel a small measure of shame over the failure of her own marriage. Conversations with her mother or chats
with other, happily married couples could still sting. “Mine flamed out pretty spectacularly.”

“You’re not alone in that category,” Naomi said.

“I haven’t spoken to Ian since Celia disappeared.”

“Really? Still?”

“I told you we were never that close. I was friends with Celia, not really with Ian.”

“Sometimes events bring people closer.”

Jenna thought she detected something, an ever-so-slight emphasis on the word “closer” as Naomi completed her sentence. Or was she imagining things? If the emphasis had been there and not simply in Jenna’s head, what did it mean? If the people who knew Celia and Jenna and Ian the best, the friends they’d had since high school, remembered everything accurately and told the truth about the past, then the police would know that it was Jenna whom Ian first showed interest in when they were all fifteen years old, that it was Jenna who first caught Ian’s eye when they all ended up in the same chemistry class during their sophomore year at Hawks Mill High School.

Celia knew it, although the two friends never ever talked about it. But Jenna remembered how high Celia turned up the volume on her thousand-watt smile as soon as she saw Ian’s interest in Jenna. Once Celia set her sights on Ian, Jenna knew she didn’t have a chance. Celia was prettier, more polished. Celia came from a better family, one almost equal in stature to Ian’s in Hawks Mill. Like a fighter who knew when she’d met her match, Jenna bowed out gracefully and let things progress the way they were supposed to.