by David Bell
“About three years ago there was a guy. He wasn’t from the country club. She met him—” He cleared his throat, lifting his fist to his mouth. “They met through a group she belonged to at church, of all things. It never got serious, I don’t think. It’s funny that in some ways that makes it worse. I mean, maybe it would be easier to swallow if they really loved each other or something, but this was apparently only about sex.”
Jenna looked down at the nearly empty salad bowl. The remains of her lunch, greens and a few vegetables sitting in oil, looked so unappealing she couldn’t stand to think she’d just eaten most of it.
“It ended,” he said. “I found out when we bought new phones. She still had the texts right there. Times to meet and all that. I can tell you don’t believe me.”
“She never said a word. . . .”
“Did her behavior change three years ago, in the summer? Did you notice anything different about her?”
Three years. Around the time Celia and Ian joined the country club, around the time Jenna and Celia started seeing less of each other. Did their drifting apart begin in the summer? She couldn’t say. She didn’t answer Ian’s question.
“We got it together after that. Mostly.” The look in his eyes seemed far away. “I thought we were moving in the right direction at least. For a while, we spent more time together. We went away on that trip. You remember?”
“Europe. Ursula stayed with your mother.”
“We were fine. Good, even. We were getting somewhere, I thought.”
“And then?” Jenna asked.
“Then she disappeared.” He said the word casually, without any special emphasis or hesitation. Disappeared. It was a fact of life for both of them. “I never knew for sure about the most recent affair. I suspected it in the weeks leading up to her disappearance, but I didn’t know with certainty. The police brought it up again over the last few days. They keep turning the same earth hoping something new appears. I’m sure that’s why Poole tracked you down and asked you the marriage question again. I can even see the smug look on her face when she asked you, like she was the all-knowing schoolteacher leading a precocious student toward a lesson.”
“That is what she looked like.”
“I don’t know what they’re thinking. They won’t say, which seems ridiculous to me. I should be able to know as much about my wife’s case as I can possibly know. Maybe they’re so desperate for a lead they’re just shaking the trees to see what falls out. The guy . . .” His voice dripped with distaste. “Some dentist who lives about twenty miles away from here, in Youngblood or someplace like that. I didn’t listen much to the details. They hurt too much. Talk about getting kicked in the balls. But she’d been involved with him for a little while. A month or so, at least from what they can tell.”
“So this guy, this dentist, he might be—”
“They cleared him. I asked the same thing. He has an alibi for that time. It’s rock solid. He was with a group of his friends in a bar. Twenty people saw him. I wish it was different. . . .”
“I’m sure the cops wished it went that way too. But maybe one of these guys was following her. . . .”
“They’ve been through it all, Jenna. It’s humiliating. Try having to go over your wife’s two affairs with the cops.”
“Ugh,” Jenna said. “But if this is true about Celia and this dentist . . . how did you not know about it when it was happening?”
Ian smiled again, the same weak, wistful smile. “Celia could have been in the CIA apparently. They used some kind of throwaway cell phones, the ones drug dealers use. No paper or electronic trail. I worked a lot. We’d drifted some.”
His gaze trailed out the window. Jenna followed it and didn’t see anything worth noting. Ian appeared lost in his own thoughts, and she struggled with hers. She’d missed so much of Celia’s life, and that life might be over. And again she wondered about the role she could have played if she had known everything that was going on with her friend.
But then she came back to the important questions at hand. “Did anybody else know about it? The thing with the dentist?”
“You think I haven’t been thinking about that for the last week? You think I haven’t been through every name of every person we knew?” Ian looked at his watch. “I can’t look at anybody the same way again.”
Jenna studied Ian’s profile as he continued to stare out the window. “Is that the only reason you agreed to come out to meet me? To ask me what I knew? After you haven’t said a word to me for months?”
He turned back to face her, a look on his face she couldn’t read.
“You could have spoken to me a long time ago. Let me apologize or something. Instead I waited . . .”
Ian stopped her by reaching out and placing his hand over the top of hers. She felt the warmth of his skin, its surprising softness. He let it rest there for several moments, and then he squeezed it gently.
Without saying anything else, he stood up and left.
Jenna remained in her seat until well after Ian was gone, processing the conversation. When the waiter came back, she asked for the bill. He informed her that it had already been taken care of by Mr. Walters.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The day felt like spring, the temperature climbing into the high forties. Jared walked home alone, his backpack bumping lightly against his body as he moved along, ignoring the passing streams of cars and buses filled with his fellow students. A few voices shouted at him as they went past, calling his name or just yelling. What else is there to do while riding a ridiculous school bus when you’re in high school?
It took Jared ten minutes to reach the edge of downtown. He was south of Tabitha’s neighborhood, and he stood still for a moment, his head turned toward the north where she lived. He could easily walk that way, swing by her house, and see what was going on. But did he really need to push? Mike had offered the unsolicited advice to move on, to find someone less complicated. Someone allowed out of the house after seven o’clock in the evening.
Jared understood why Mike said that, but he wasn’t going to listen.
He didn’t want anyone else. He only wanted Tabitha. He wanted everything to go back to the way it had been.
But he walked toward home, crossing through downtown. She’d be back in school the next day, he told himself. They’d pick up where they left off. But even as those thoughts trailed through his mind, he doubted them. There seemed to be too much to overcome. Her father’s kiss, the rock through the window. His lack of any real knowledge about her.
His thoughts ping-ponged. Maybe Mike was right. If he could get one girlfriend, he could get another, right? But he didn’t want another.
He was a few blocks from his house when the car pulled up alongside him. He didn’t recognize it. An older Ford Taurus, green with fading spots around the fenders and on the roof. He thought they were going to ask for directions, or maybe it was someone from school wanting to talk to him.
Then he saw the face through the passenger window. Tabitha.
Jared looked past her to the driver’s seat. It was her dad, his broad face staring straight ahead, looming over the steering wheel like a resting lion.
Tabitha stepped out and closed the door behind her. Jared’s heart raced, the kind of excitement he felt when he was a kid on the verge of receiving a new toy. She was here. It was going to be okay.
But Tabitha wore a somber look. There was no light in her eyes.
She placed her hand gently on Jared’s elbow and guided him a few feet away from the car. He wanted to hug her, to pull her close so he could take in the scent of her hair, the softness of her body, but she had a wall up. There was a stiffness to her posture, a formality as though the two of them were distant relatives and not two people who had spent the previous few weeks falling in love.
“Listen,” Tabitha said. “I need to talk to you.”
<
br /> “Are you sick? Is that why you weren’t in school?”
“Not exactly.” She looked over her shoulder and back toward the car. Her father hadn’t moved. He still stared straight ahead. But Jared got the sense he knew exactly what the two of them were doing, even if he wasn’t looking. He seemed like the kind of guy who wouldn’t miss a thing.
Jared assumed he knew about the night before. Jared lurking in the yard, the rock through the window right after the weird kiss on the lips.
“I’m sorry about last night,” Jared said, trying to get his words in preemptively. If she could only hear him and know what he felt.
But Tabitha was shaking her head, the movement quick and urgent as if she was late for something. “It’s okay,” she said. “I know the whole thing is weird.”
“It doesn’t have to be. I don’t care if it’s weird or not weird.”
Jared didn’t know why, since he’d never dated anyone before, but he felt her words coming before she said them. She was going to break up with him.
“We can’t see each other anymore,” she said. She hesitated, as though there was something else to add. She looked back at the car again. “We just can’t,” she said, her voice lower.
“That’s not true.”
“It is.”
Jared saw the look in her eyes, something between fear and sadness. She had broken off physical contact with him, hadn’t touched him since she first put her hand on his elbow. But she reached out again, quickly, and placed her hand over his. She gave it a quick squeeze.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is all too messed up for both of us.”
“I’ll pay for the window. I have money saved. I’ll apologize to your dad. I was just worried about you.”
For a moment, she looked confused, and then the look on her face softened. “It’s not that. Really. I have to go.”
Jared took a step past her. “I’ll talk to your dad. Man-to-man. I’ll explain that everything was my fault. If we just talk—”
She took his arm in a tighter grip. “No, you can’t talk to him.” Her voice was sharp and biting, like the cold wind. It cut through everything. “He insisted on coming with me to keep an eye on me, to make sure I don’t . . .”
“To make sure of what?”
“Just . . . talking to him won’t work. He wants me with him.”
“Sure. He’s your dad, but we can still be together.”
“I know how he is.”
But Jared didn’t listen. He slipped free and stepped to the car. He raised his fist and knocked on the passenger-side window. Up close he saw the pockmarks on the side of the man’s face, saw the power behind his heavy-lidded eyes. He knocked again, and still the man didn’t flinch. In fact, he turned away, showing Jared the back of his head. The gesture seemed defiant, as if the man wanted to prove how little he needed to heed anything Jared had to say. As if he wanted Jared to feel small.
“Sir? Mr. Burke?”
Jared straightened up and started around the car, heading for the driver’s side. But Tabitha intercepted him. Her face looked desperate, more scared than he’d ever seen it. Even more scared than the day before when he tried to walk with her to her house and speak to her dad as he paced on the porch, cigarette glowing.
“That’s it, Jared. I’m going. I have to go with my father. And you have to go home. Really, just go home. It’s better that way, I promise.”
Again she gave him a shove, lighter than the one she’d given him the day before. The message was the same. She didn’t want him around. She wanted him away from her.
Jared lost his balance, the backpack pulling him toward the ground. He didn’t fall, but by the time he righted himself, Tabitha was slipping into the passenger side of the car. He reached out, a fruitless attempt to stop her, but her father hit the gas and the car sped off before she even buckled her seat belt.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
When Jenna came home, she found the door to Jared’s room closed, the lights off. His backpack sat on a kitchen chair, dropped there as if he’d been in a hurry. It wasn’t like him to do that, since he usually started on homework pretty soon after coming in the door.
Jenna stood in the hallway her ear pressed to his door. Nothing. No fumbling, no moaning. No music or sounds of video games. She knocked lightly, using the knuckle of her index finger.
A muffled reply came back. “Yeah?”
“Just seeing if you’re here.”
“I’m here,” he said. “And I’m alone.”
Jenna felt chastened. But she had been worried about that. She didn’t want her house to turn into a hookup location for her son or anyone else. As a single mother, she felt as though she was under greater scrutiny from other parents. If something went wrong, if some disaster occurred in her house, she knew what they’d say. Well, she’s trying to raise that boy alone. . . .
And Tabitha’s dad sounded so strict. She ran out of their house the day before in order to meet a curfew, an early curfew. Jenna didn’t need the community’s toughest dad on her case.
“Are you hungry?” Jenna asked, still standing before the closed door.
Jared offered her a soft grunting noise. She couldn’t tell if it was a yes or a no. She placed her hand on the knob and turned. The door swung inward, and she stuck her head in. The room was dark, her son an indistinct lump beneath a pile of covers. His shoes and socks lay scattered on the carpet, his jeans tossed over a chair.
“Honey? What did you say? Are you hungry?”
“No.”
She waited for more of an explanation but didn’t get one.
“Is everything okay?” Jenna asked. She came closer to the bed, but Jared didn’t move. “What is it?”
“I’m just . . . I’m not feeling well. I’m not going to eat.”
Jenna placed her hand against his forehead. He didn’t flinch or try to turn away. But he didn’t feel warm. A little clammy from being wrapped in the covers, but no fever. “Are you sick to your stomach?”
“Sure.”
“Sure? What is this about, really?”
“Mom, I just . . . I want to be alone.”
Jenna remembered the night before, how she pushed too hard and drove him away. If he wanted to be in a mood and hole up in his room, so be it. He rarely acted like a depressed, angsty teenager, so she figured she could indulge him this once. If he wasn’t sick, it must be girl trouble. And she didn’t think he wanted her advice about that, not yet anyway.
“That’s fine,” she said. “I’ve had kind of a long day too. But I only had a salad for lunch, so I’m going to make grilled cheese or something.” She threw out one of his favorites, hoping to see if he might go for it. But he didn’t respond. He pulled the covers tighter around his body, returning to his cocoon. “If you want something later, just let me know.”
He grunted again. She backed away and slipped out of the room, leaving him to his misery.
• • •
But Jenna didn’t make anything.
She changed her clothes in the bedroom, kicking off her shoes and peeling off the scrubs and then changing into a pair of yoga pants and a favorite University of Kentucky basketball sweatshirt. On her way through the kitchen, she grabbed some carrots and a tub of feta cheese dip and carried them to the spare bedroom she used as an office. She kept a desk in there, a laptop, and a filing cabinet. She also kept the closet stuffed with summer clothes and papers she couldn’t justify getting rid of. She placed the dip and the carrots on the desk and signed on to the computer.
Jenna always felt dirty when she did it. Almost as if she were logging on to look at pornography. In a way, she was. Before Celia disappeared, Jenna never realized an entire world existed online devoted to news and theories about missing persons cases and unsolved crimes. It made sense once she thought about it—there was something on the Internet for every
body. Every fetish, every hobby, every obscure interest or wish.
In the first weeks after Celia’s disappearance, Jenna found herself visiting the sites simply hoping for more information. The police only talked about so much, and the media, national and local, devoted only a certain amount of time and energy to any one case. And the reporters and journalists selected only the juiciest details to share, the ones that played best on a national stage.
But the Web sites and message boards struck the right balance. Yes, crazies and rumormongers jumped into every conversation, spinning the most outrageous theories possible, including alien abduction, satanic cults, and government conspiracy. But that was the lunatic fringe. A lot of people on the sites seemed to want to help. They approached the scant evidence with a logical mind-set and offered constructive ideas that managed to make Jenna feel comforted. She never knew what the police were doing or thinking, but she imagined they were tracing some of the same connections, no doubt with more thoroughness and more practical experience than the amateur sleuths on the Web.
Jenna went to the Dealey Society page first. They kept their breaking news section current, and the message boards were always active. A thread, dedicated to Celia’s case, received constant traffic and updates from members. Jenna posted from time to time. If a thread or a conversation was going in an interesting direction, and she wanted the discussion to keep going, she would jump in and ask something pointed to keep things in motion. In an effort to avoid a flood of private messages and possible attacks, she used a pseudonym, Polly Baker, a name she chose at random, and she tried to never reveal anything that would let others know how close to the case she really was. When she clicked on the thread about Celia, a cascade of new information unrolled before her. Understandably so. A number of things had happened in the last couple of days, and everybody wanted to offer their opinions about them.
People went after Reena Huffman, calling her a sensationalistic hack who exploited the tragedies and vulnerabilities of crime victims. A few people dissented, defending her and giving her credit for keeping victims’ stories in the news. But it wasn’t a majority opinion.
