Since She Went Away (26 page)

“Thank you for being so encouraging with Jared,” Jenna said. “I don’t really know what to say to him about this girl. Here I’ve spent a couple of months complaining about people who don’t know what to say to me, and now I’m in the same boat. I don’t know what sounds right or makes sense.”

“I try to be positive,” Naomi said, “until I can’t be anymore.”

“Do you really think this Natalie might still be alive?” Jenna asked.

“Her dad brought her here for some reason instead of killing her back at home. That means he had something in mind for her. It can’t be easy bringing a teenage girl along with you.”

“No. I guess I’m holding out hope he really cared about her in some way. Like you said, he let her go to school.”

“She didn’t run. If she was scared enough, that might motivate her to stay. He could have threatened her. Intimidated her. We don’t even know if the girl is aware that her father is a suspect in the mother’s death. That might change her tune if she knew that. But it doesn’t look like she has much family. She could be completely dependent on him.”

Jenna thought of the kiss Jared described. If you combined that with her father’s controlling, domineering nature, it seemed hard to come up with a benevolent scenario.

Detective Poole considered Jenna. The wind rose and tossed the detective’s short hair around on top of her head. “So, you don’t know Henry Allen, do you?”

“No. I don’t remember him from the soccer games.”

“Did Celia know him?” Naomi asked.

Jenna knew she should have expected the question, but it still knocked her off balance. “I have no idea, Detective. It’s a small town. Anything’s possible, and Jared said their kids are friends.”

“But you don’t know the parents of all of Jared’s friends.”

“Not his girlfriend’s dad. Thank God.”

The detective didn’t walk off. She seemed to be lingering, to be taking her time as if she were retired without a care or a deadline in the world. “Have you spoken with Ian anymore?” she asked.

“He came over the night the news broke about the affair.”

“He came over?”

“He didn’t have my number. I guess he was worried about the impact the news would have on me. He knew Reena was going to be targeting me and he wanted to offer support.”

“Did you talk about the case?”

“Not really. No.”

“It’s good you two are supporting each other that way.”

“Can I ask you something, Detective?”

“Sure.”

“Ian has a solid alibi for the night Celia disappeared, right?”

Naomi shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She winced a little as if something pained her, and she rubbed her back with her right hand. “Why do you ask?”

“No particular reason. People online have always said things about Ian needing to be investigated more closely. And I know the statistics. Usually it’s someone very close to the victim who commits the crime. Parents kill children. Husbands kill wives. . . .” Her voice trailed off. Just giving voice to the thought felt like a betrayal of Ian, even though she wasn’t sure what loyalty she owed him. Wasn’t her greater loyalty to Celia?

“This has all been made public, you know,” Naomi said. “Two people can place Ian at home at the time Celia disappeared. His mother, to whom he was speaking on the phone, and his daughter. Now, usually we want more than a family member’s account of things, but the phone records back it up. He was thoroughly questioned. More than once. Do you have reason to think he was involved?”

“No, of course not. And you asked me all this when Celia disappeared. I never saw any abuse or violence between them. Celia never mentioned being afraid of him. There was nothing.”

“But you didn’t know about the affair, so . . .”

“It’s not that. With Ian talking to me again I started thinking about it.”

Naomi studied Jenna for a long time. “The media have been a little rough on you lately,” she said. “A Reena Huffman type doesn’t like it when someone doesn’t keep jumping through her hoop. The media giveth and the media taketh away.”

“What does that mean?” Jenna asked.

“It means they’ll have a field day if you keep getting closer to Ian. They’re distracted by Holly Crenshaw now, but they may get back to you if they get bored.”

Jenna wanted to be offended, to protest her innocence, but she knew the detective had seen through her. It was her job, and Jenna had opened herself up enough to be read like an X-ray.

“Talk soon,” Naomi said as she walked away into the cold morning.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

J
ared felt like a prisoner in his own house.

News of the discovery of the body broke quickly and spread through town like a rushing tide of water. The phone started ringing off the hook again, and local reporters in their makeup and perfectly tailored clothes showed up at their house. They parked their news vans at the edge of the property and crept up to the door, smiling ever so brightly and trying hard to convince Jenna to let Jared just say a few words on the air.

It was a frenzy like nothing Hawks Mill had ever seen: a missing woman, a dead woman, and a dead man . . . all within the space of a few months.

Jared felt as if he’d been transported to the set of a TV show or movie. So much craziness. So many rumors and ideas and theories.

So much fear.

His mom turned all the reporters away, begging them to give her son his space.

“He’s only fifteen,” she said over and over as he listened from his bedroom.

Then the reporters tried her, asking for her comments on the, as
they put it, bizarre turn of events. His mom refused to comment, except to remind the reporters that a family in town had suffered a terrible loss and everyone should be thinking about them.

She also called the police, asking Detective Poole to send someone around to shoo the reporters away. A patrol car arrived, and two beefy cops in dark jackets, their badges and shiny zippers visible from the house, stepped out. They smiled as they talked to the reporters, but Jared could tell they were trying to get them to leave. The reporters kept pointing at the house, and he could imagine the case they were making. The public’s right to know. The first amendment.

The reporters moved back to the property line, but they didn’t leave. Jared considered it a small victory.

He tried to concentrate on school. He worked ahead in his classes, tackling the readings and assignments for the next day and the day after that. But he had a hard time getting anything accomplished. His mom buzzed around the house, cleaning the kitchen floor and then the bathrooms, her usual routine when something was bothering her that she couldn’t do anything about.

Around noon, Detective Poole called and suggested Jared and his mom put out a statement, something asking for privacy and referring all future questions to the police. So they did, hoping everything would calm down.

Jared’s phone pinged all day. His closest friends called and texted, and then kids he barely knew wrote to him through e-mail and social media. The friends wanted to know how he was doing. The acquaintances said all kinds of things. They wanted to know how bad the body smelled or why weird shit kept happening to his family.

He heard his mom talking to his grandma. He knew what Grandma was saying. The old lady was like clockwork with her complaints.

How do you expect to raise a child with the police there all the time?

Jared didn’t know how his mom put up with it. And he didn’t know how she turned out so well adjusted with his grandma for a mother.

He also tried to ease off on feeling too sorry for himself or thinking of himself as a prisoner. Natalie had been a prisoner of some kind. He’d seen the lock on the outside of her door. He knew the strict curfew she lived under. And her father had simply taken her away, swept her up and out of town. Back on the run. If she was lucky. If something worse hadn’t happened to her.

Could his first love really end that way?

•   •   •

Shortly after dinner, while the reporters were still out on the lawn but seemed to be wrapping up after doing some kind of live shot of their house for the evening broadcasts, his mom retreated to her office. Jared sat in the kitchen picking at the remains of the leftover spaghetti he’d heated in the microwave. His mom said she didn’t have an appetite.

Jared thought he’d imagined the light knocking against the door. It could have been the house settling or a squirrel running through the gutters.

But then the knock came again.

He didn’t bother his mom. He figured it was a rogue reporter, one who hopped the fence into the backyard because he felt bold, hoping to get a scoop by bugging the family while they sat in the kitchen. Jared intended to tell him to get lost, refer him to the statement the police had issued on their behalf.

He eased the door open.

Ursula blinked as the light from the kitchen spilled out onto the small back stoop. Jared jumped a little. Hers was the last face he’d expected to see out there.

“What do you want?” he asked.

Ursula raised her finger to her lips. “I need you,” she said, her voice just above a whisper. “Someone needs to talk to you.”

“Who?”

“Look, can you just come out? There aren’t any reporters back here. We can cut through the yard behind us and talk to my friend. It won’t take long.”

“Who is your friend?” Jared asked, his heart rate rising a little with anticipation.

Ursula looked past him into the brightly lit kitchen. She took the whole scene in—the cramped space, the out-of-date table, the plate of spaghetti. Then she looked at Jared again. “Get your coat if you want. It’s kind of cold.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

J
ared stepped into the backyard, the stiff frozen grass crunching under his feet. He looked around and didn’t see Ursula.

He walked toward the back of their property to the chain-link fence bordering the neighbor’s yard. Someone emerged from the darkness. It was Ursula. She stood in the neighbor’s yard, her hands dangling at her sides. Jared found the way she stood—hips cocked, chin up—attractive, and he wished he didn’t. Seeing Ursula that way made him feel like a little kid again.

And he thought of Natalie. He really missed Natalie.

“Climb over,” she said. “It’s easy.”

“I know. I’ve done it a million times in my life.”

When they’d first moved in, a family with two sons around his age lived behind them. Jared used to climb the fence whenever they were out in their yard, and the three of them ran around playing football and war and hide-and-seek until the family moved away, the dad having taken a job in Pennsylvania. Jared couldn’t remember if he’d even said good-bye to them. There seemed to be a lot of that going around.

He easily scaled the fence and landed next to Ursula. She didn’t
look at him or say anything. She just started walking, heading for the front of the neighbor’s house and the street that ran parallel to Jared’s.

Jared watched the way Ursula’s hips moved as she walked, her jeans fitting her shapely body perfectly. No surprise. She’d have the best of the best. The best-fitting clothes, the most expensive brands.

They reached the next street, and Ursula turned to the left. A black SUV sat at the curb, its parking lights burning in the dark. Ursula walked over and tugged open the passenger-side door.

“Go ahead,” she said, sweeping her arm like a game show hostess.

In the glow of the dome light, Jared saw Bobby Allen.

Jared climbed in. Ursula pulled open the rear door and came inside, a gust of cool air following her. In the faint glow from the dashboard, Bobby looked tired. His eyes were red, his mouth turned down.

“I’m sorry, Bobby.”

Bobby nodded. He took a deep breath, his broad shoulders rising and falling beneath his coat. They were the first words Jared had spoken to Bobby since they’d played soccer together.

The car’s engine hummed. It was warm in the cabin, the soft rush of heat coming out of the vents. Jared loosened the top buttons on his coat, letting the heat dig in against his body. Bobby didn’t look at him. He stared straight ahead, as if something were coming down the street at him. Jared even turned and looked through the windshield, but the horizon was empty and quiet.

“Are you going to ask him?” Ursula said from behind.

Bobby didn’t move when she spoke, but his eyes narrowed just a bit as though her question annoyed him. Jared wanted to know if the two of them were dating, or did Ursula even confine herself to just one boyfriend at a time? He knew a lot of kids at school were like that, even though he’d been content with just the one person in his life. Natalie.

“I want to know what it was like,” Bobby said. “Seeing my old man that way.” He took another deep breath, this one shuddering a
little as if he might be about to cry. But no tears came, and Bobby collected himself. “Somebody bashed his fucking head in. It’s a shitty way to die, and I just want to know what you saw.”

Jared hadn’t expected that. His mind raced as he searched for the proper response. “Are you sure—”

“He’s sure,” Ursula said. “We talked about it all day. Just tell him what you saw. You don’t have to pull any punches.”

Jared hesitated. Then he said, “I didn’t see too much. It was dark. He, your dad, was on the floor in the living room. On his back by the TV. I could tell he wasn’t breathing, and . . . there was a pool of blood around his head. I didn’t get close and look. If I’d seen his face clearly, I would have recognized him as your dad. I remember him from when we were kids. But I left. The cops showed me a picture and told me who he was.”

“So you didn’t see his face?”

“Not really. Like I said, it was dark.”

“Could you tell if he suffered?” Bobby asked.

Jared knew what the right thing to say was. “I bet not. With the way he was lying there, and the blood on the floor, he probably got hit pretty hard. He was probably out right away.”

“Did he smell?” Ursula asked.

Jared turned a little, but knew he couldn’t see Ursula since she was sitting right behind him. So he looked at Bobby. “Yeah, it smelled. It smelled pretty bad. I had to put my sweatshirt over my face. You know, when people die . . .”