Since She Went Away

by David Bell

  “I know. He was really into this girl, I think. It’s a long story.”

  “Maybe that’s what’s going on with your gentleman caller,” Sally said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Celia’s husband. He’s hurting. His heart’s broken. The disappearance. The affair. Hell, the guy’s been crushed. He probably sees you as someone he can open up to. An old friend, right?”

  Sally’s logical explanation disappointed her a little. Disappointed because it made sense.

  “Maybe,” Jenna said. “You’re probably right.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  When she came in the door, Jared was at the kitchen table, doing his homework. He had books and papers spread all over and headphones covering his ears. He slipped them off when he saw her and offered a small smile.

  He still looked as if someone had run over his puppy.

  “How’s it going?” she asked, trying not to sound falsely chipper.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I thought I’d make spaghetti. Are you hungry?”

  He nodded. “Sure.”

  “Clear your stuff and I’ll get it going.”

  He ate quickly and didn’t say much. Jenna wanted to give him his space, let him lick his wounds over being dumped by Tabitha. Jared was more outgoing than Marty, better able to express himself and open up. It was likely a consequence of growing up with a single mom. She edged toward bringing up the elephant in the room rather than ignoring it, but before she said anything, Jared spoke up.

  “So Celia was really having an affair before she disappeared?” he asked.

  “It looks that way.”

  “And she kept it hidden from everybody?”

  “People usually hide affairs.” Jenna pushed the food around on her plate. At least he was talking. Not what she wanted to talk about, but at least the boy was talking. “For all I know, she has friends who knew. Just because we were close for a lot of years doesn’t mean I knew everything about her.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded as though he were listening to music. He wasn’t. The headphones were off. Jenna could tell he was absorbing the knowledge about Celia, processing it, learning some things about the adult world. “And this weird, random guy shows up trying to pawn her earring?”

  “He’s a suspect,” Jenna said. “Or he might be. We went to high school with him.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. He was a total oddball back then. Just thinking about the way he used to creep around the school in his army jacket makes my skin crawl. Even after all these years. I need to call Detective Poole and see if they’ve learned anything.”

  “I guess it takes a lot of trust to be in a relationship.”

  “It does.” She twirled spaghetti on her plate. “Do you think you trusted Tabitha that much?”

  He grew defensive. “She didn’t betray my trust.”

  “I didn’t say she did.” They ate in silence for a few minutes. “Who am I to talk? I don’t think I’ve ever trusted a man that much in a relationship. Not your dad. Not anybody else.”

  Jared looked up, his face showing surprise. And not just at the content of the revelation, but also the raw nature of it. They were moving into that territory where parent and child found themselves standing on the same level for a short time, sharing the same view. It could be invigorating and unnerving for both parties.

  “I just thought Tabitha and I would go on and be together. For a while. And you know what the really frustrating part is?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know why she did it. I don’t know if I did something wrong or what it was.”

  “I doubt it was you. And I’m not just saying that because I’m your mom. When I talked to her the other day in the parking lot, I could tell she cared about you a great deal. That’s why she brought that book back to me. She wanted me to tell you that. She cared.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I suspect it’s her dad. Or something else we don’t know about. Has she been back in school?”

  “No. No one’s seen her. They think she’s gone. Moved away.”

  “Are they looking into it?”

  “I asked Mrs. Timmons. You know, the counselor. The one who looks like a hippie? She said they have to file some reports when a kid stops coming to school. They’re doing that with the proper authorities.” He shrugged, trying to put away all his awful feelings with one gesture. Jenna knew it wouldn’t work. Nothing was ever that easy.

  Jared took a second serving, and Jenna poured some wine for herself while he ate. She offered him ice cream for dessert, but he shook his head, saying he might eat some later.

  “Can I ask you something else?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “I always thought Ian was kind of cold and, you know, had a stick up his ass. Like, way up. Not mean or anything. Just . . . distant.”

  Jenna tensed at the mention of Ian’s name. Her hand tingled where his thumb had rubbed. In that very room, at that very table.

  “He can seem that way,” she said. “But he’s not. He’s just serious about work. He has a lot of responsibility at the foundry.”

  “I know he’s your friend. And you know him well, right?”

  He gave her a sidelong look, one that seemed to anticipate her response, as though the words she used to answer him might be surprising or revelatory in some way. She kept her eyes on Jared, her hand on the wineglass, resisting the urge to look down at the back of her hand. Had he seen something the other night when he came home?

  “Pretty well. We were better friends in high school. Why are you asking about this?”

  “The other night when he was here, and I walked to the door with him, he was pretty chill. You know, friendly and everything. Friendlier than I’ve ever seen him.”

  “You’re older now. Maybe he feels more comfortable around someone your age than a little kid.”

  “Maybe. And Celia was cool. Is cool, sorry. I always . . . I like her. She’s friendly and warm.”

  “What is this all about?” Jenna asked.

  “How did Ursula end up being such a royal bitch?”

  Jenna held in a laugh and a mouthful of wine, which burned against the back of her throat. She finally swallowed. “She’s going through a brutal time. Cut her some slack.”

  “She wasn’t that bad when she was a little kid. She was tough and bossy, but not mean. You don’t see her at school. She picks on other kids, weaker kids. She’s always trying to undermine everybody’s confidence in class. I think I really hate her.”

  “I always thought you had a crush on her,” Jenna said. “Celia did too. We could tell the way you looked at her.”

  “That’s gross.”

  “Look, some people in our lives are just difficult,” Jenna said. “Hell, look at Grandma.”

  “That’s true. But she’s old. Ursula’s young. She’s always had a lot going for her.”

  “She’s a pretty girl.” Jenna paused. “Just like her mom.”

  Jenna heard the moroseness creeping into her voice and wished she’d cut it off.

  Jared must have heard it too. He tried to keep it light, and he did. “I may be single now, after my three-week relationship, but that’s one girl I’m not interested in.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Detective Poole called as Jenna finished cleaning the kitchen. She dried her hands on a towel and answered, trying not to guess about what the detective was calling for.

  “I was thinking of calling you,” Jenna said.

  “Great minds think alike,” Naomi said. “I promised I’d do my best to keep you in the loop, so I’m letting you know the latest on Benjamin Ludlow.”

  Jenna felt cold. She shivered, even though she’d been working in the small kitchen. “I’m guessing this isn’t the news we’re looking for.”<
br />
  “He has a rock-solid alibi for the time Celia disappeared. It took us a while to follow up on it, but it’s solid. There’s no way he could have harmed Celia.”

  Jenna pulled a chair out from the table and sank down into it, her butt hitting the wood with a solid thump. She didn’t even feel relief. She felt fear, a tugging, dragging ache in her heart. It’s not over, she thought. It’s still not over.

  “Jenna?”

  “I’m here. I’m just . . . worn down, I guess.”

  “There’s more,” Naomi said.

  Jenna almost hung up. She took the phone away from her ear and looked at the screen, her thumb hovering over the red button. More?

  She returned the phone to the side of her head. “What else could there be?” she asked.

  “Ludlow’s story about finding the earring keeps changing. He’s told a couple of versions.” She paused. “I’m not sure what it means, but we’re still looking into all of it.”

  “Is he in jail?” Jenna asked.

  “We can’t just hold him forever. He has a couple of outstanding misdemeanor charges we can use to make his life unpleasant. But he’ll be out soon. Don’t worry, we’ll keep an eye on him.”

  “You said he’s a vagrant. He could leave town.”

  “He won’t.”

  “What about Holly Crenshaw? Maybe Benny is behind it all. Maybe we’re safe with him behind bars, and you’ll make the case.”

  “We’ll consider everything,” Naomi said. “Believe me.”

  “People are scared, Naomi. I’m scared.”

  “I know. The police are well aware of that.”

  Naomi sounded understanding, but her tone didn’t comfort Jenna at all. She wanted something to end, something to conclude. And nothing seemed to be. Doors kept opening, leading to more long hallways and doors. She didn’t know where she was in all of it.

  “Thanks, then,” Jenna said.

  “We’ll talk soon.”

  • • •

  Jenna had things to do online. She paid a few bills. She responded to a few e-mails. Later in the month, she was scheduled to volunteer at a community health day in Hawks Mill, an event where local doctors and nurses provided free blood pressure and cholesterol screenings to people without health insurance. Jenna checked the Web site, making sure to mark the correct time and date in her calendar.

  She didn’t walk away. She tried another search for Tabitha’s name. She used a variety of search engines and people finders. No results came back. Nothing on social media—no Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram accounts. None that she could find. But Jenna knew people sometimes used different names and odd handles on social media. And it was possible Tabitha was one of the few teenagers in the country without those accounts.

  The girl looked a little economically disadvantaged. And intense. With a strict father and an absent mother. Maybe she was the smart one. Maybe the girl just put her head down and worked, hoping to finish high school and go to college and have a better life than her parents.

  But Tabitha clearly believed in having some fun. She’d come back to the house with Jared and climbed on top of him. Jenna wondered if they were having sex already. She’d had the “talk” when he was twelve, offering him plenty of words of wisdom from a woman’s perspective, including lots of information about birth control. He squirmed through the conversation, admitting to his mother that he’d heard most of it already from his friends. Did Jared need to hear it from a man? Jenna’s dad was dead. She didn’t have brothers. Who the hell served as a masculine role model in his life?

  She almost felt a measure of relief that Tabitha was out of the picture. Maybe she was too fast for Jared. Jenna always swore she’d never be one of those overprotective mothers, the ones who guarded their sons, believing that no girl who came along would ever be good enough for their little boy. But she felt a twinge, something between jealousy and fear, when she thought about Jared and Tabitha spending time together. He’d started dating. He had just over two years of high school left, and very soon he’d be driving.

  It was all going by so fast, like a film stuck in fast-forward.

  So why would she spend time online looking at that nonsense?

  Because she couldn’t look away once she came near it.

  She took a quick glance at the Dealey Society page. She avoided all mention of Celia. She could guess what they would be talking about on the new threads, the ones that rose to the top of the page with a flaming icon next to them indicating they were the most popular discussions of the day. They’d be talking about the affairs. They’d be talking about her.

  She skipped past them and went to the index, the listing of the names and details of thousands of missing persons cases going back to the turn of the twentieth century. Jenna scanned through them. So many were familiar to her after so much time looking, but she scrolled past the faces anyway.

  They progressed from black and white to color, from slicked-back pompadours to hippie curls to mullets. Some of the faces looked happy and optimistic in their photos, just people smiling for the camera before some unimaginable tragedy befell them. Others looked haunted and scared, as though they could already see some doom rushing toward them, and they merely hoped to stay out of its way as long as possible.

  The faces haunted Jenna. They scared her. As they paraded by, her skin crawled, a deep and profound unease settling over her body. We are all so vulnerable, she realized. We all dance on the knife’s edge. One push, and we are over. Even someone like Celia. The wrong place at the wrong time and you become a statistic, one of the many missing, their faces fading into the past with every day that went by.

  Jenna shivered. She looked behind her like a scared child.

  Nothing there. A closed closet door, a shoe box full of photos. All the things people would find if she disappeared or died. A collection of dead objects that might not even mean anything to her son. He’d just have to dispose of it someday.

  “Why are you thinking this way?” she whispered to herself.

  Because you’re scared.

  She clicked the back button a few times, reversing to the home page.

  She saw the story about a suspect in an abduction and murder being spotted in Louisville, just an hour away.

  And then she saw the photo that froze her.

  She knew where she’d seen Tabitha before.

  • • •

  She stared at the screen for what felt like an eternity. While she stared, her mouth went dry. She felt a tingling along her scalp, something uncomfortable and itchy.

  A man named William Rose was a suspect in the murder of his ex-wife and the abduction of his daughter. His daughter, the girl who had stood right there in her house, the girl she’d stood face-to-face with in the parking lot of Hawks Mill Family Medicine, was named Natalie Jane Rose.

  In the photo, she looked younger, her features less defined and more childlike. It appeared to be a school photo, and the girl—Tabitha!—wore a plain red sweater, the ruffled collar of a white shirt peeking out of the top. She looked nervous in the photo as lots of kids did on school picture day. Her eyes were wide, her smile forced.

  But she was the same girl. Tabitha.

  Jenna had read about it a few times during her search for information about Celia. Unlike the amateur sleuths online, Jenna never believed she’d actually solve a crime herself, never thought she’d stumble across a missing person in the grocery store or cross paths with a suspect at a gas station.

  And yet she had. The details came back to her, vague and sketchy. A man in Nebraska who was believed to have murdered his wife and daughter. Their bodies were never found. The man was on the run, possibly headed to Mexico.

  Jenna remembered seeing the girl’s face on the Dealey Society site, that awkward school portrait. Even the nervous look, the deer-in-the-headlights stare as some photographer told her to sm
ile before the flash went off, couldn’t hide the girl’s beauty. What a pretty girl, Jenna thought then. What a tragedy that she was likely dead, her short life snuffed out while she was still a teenager.

  Jenna couldn’t say how many times she’d scrolled past Tabitha’s face over the past few months. Ten? Twenty? Enough that it stuck somewhere in the folds of her subconscious.

  She was even more beautiful two years later when she stood in Jenna’s hallway. When Jenna had made the bumbling comment about her mother, and the girl answered her like someone who had seen so much more of the world than most adults.

  But not the girl. The girl wasn’t dead, as the authorities feared, at least not as of a few days ago. Her father, the murder suspect, had shoplifted from a store and been filmed on a closed-circuit camera. A cop working security in the store recognized him from a wanted poster. A new alert was issued . . . but no one had seen the girl with him. And the story was front and center again.

  Jenna stood up. Her legs felt wobbly. She needed to remain calm. She needed to tell the police.

  And she needed to tell Jared.

  How on earth was she going to tell Jared?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Jared felt sleepy. He’d spent the past two hours reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court for English class. At times the book was funny, and at other times it became quite disturbing. He liked it okay but probably not as much as other things they’d read, such as Lord of the Flies or even The Last of the Mohicans. But the book passed the time, and he knew a quiz and a paper were coming up, and he needed to do well on both.

  He’d spent the weekend thinking about his life and what he wanted to do next. He liked his friends a lot. He liked Hawks Mill, even if it did seem small compared with most places in the world. But there was enough to do—a bookstore, a movie theater, a comic shop.

  But he decided he wanted to get out. He needed to dedicate himself to school and not his friends or a girlfriend. If he pushed himself hard enough and got the best grades possible, he could try to go to school anywhere he wanted. Maybe California or New England. Maybe he could use his dad’s address and apply to the University of Texas, which he’d heard was a great place to go and live.