Since She Went Away

by David Bell

  4. Jenna and Celia have been close friends since childhood, but they have drifted apart in the years before Celia’s disappearance. Is it unusual for close friends to drift apart like this as their adult lives change? Do you think Jenna and Celia drifted apart because Celia had moved into a higher social class? Is it possible for friends to grow close again at some point? Draw from examples in your own life, if possible.

  5. On the night Celia disappeared, Jenna was late to meet her because she discovered alcohol in Jared’s room and wanted to talk to him about it. Do you think Jenna handled this the right way? Do you blame her for putting her son ahead of her friend? Why do you think Jenna feels as guilty as she does about Celia’s disappearance? Should she feel so guilty?

  6. Jenna and Ian have a complicated relationship, starting all the way back in high school when the two of them almost started dating. Do you think they have unresolved feelings for each other? Are you surprised that Celia “stole” Ian away from Jenna? Would Jenna have harbored anger toward Celia? Have there been times in your life when a friend betrayed you? Were you able to forgive?

  7. What role does Sally play in Jenna’s life? Is she the kind of friend who tells someone the truth even when they don’t want to hear it? Do we all need a friend like that? Do you have a friend like that, or are you that friend?

  8. What did you think of Reena Huffman? What part do the news media have to play when someone like Celia disappears? Do they sometimes overstep their bounds in an effort to get a story? How can the media affect people’s perceptions of a crime? Do you think Jenna made the right decision by not going on Reena’s show?

  9. William Rose is obviously not a role model as a father, so why do you think he kept Natalie with him as he traveled around? Do you think in some way he really cared for his daughter?

  10. Were you surprised to find out that Ian had Celia followed in the wake of her infidelity? Do you understand why he felt he had to take extreme measures to try to keep his family together? Do you agree or disagree with what he did? What would you do if you found out your spouse was having you followed?

  11. Were you surprised to find out that Ursula was responsible for Celia’s death? Can you understand at all the pressures that might have contributed to her violent outburst against her mother? How difficult would it be as a teenager to watch your parents’ marriage almost fall apart as the result of infidelity?

  12. How difficult will it be for Jenna and Jared to put their lives together and move on after the end of the novel? Do you think they will maintain a relationship with Natalie?

  Don’t miss another exciting novel of suspense from David Bell.

  SOMEBODY I USED TO KNOW

  Now available from New American Library

  CHAPTER ONE

  When I saw the girl in the grocery store, my heart stopped.

  I had turned the corner into the dairy aisle, carrying a basket with just a few items in it. Cereal. Crackers. Spaghetti. Beer. I lived alone, worked a lot, and rarely cooked. I was checking a price when I almost ran into the girl. I stopped immediately and studied her in profile, her hand raised to her mouth while she examined products through the glass door of the dairy cooler.

  I felt like I was seeing a ghost.

  She looked exactly like my college girlfriend, Marissa Minor, the only woman I had ever really loved. Probably the only woman who had ever really loved me.

  The girl didn’t see me right away. She continued to examine the items in front of her, slowly walking away from me, her hand still raised to her mouth as though that helped her think.

  The gesture really got me. It made my insides go cold. Not with fear, but with shock. With feelings I hadn’t felt in years.

  Marissa used to do the very same thing. When she was thinking, she’d place her right hand on her lips, sometimes pinching them between her index finger and thumb. Marissa’s lips were always bright red—without lipstick—and full, and that gesture, that lip-twisting, thoughtful gesture, drove me wild with love and, yes, desire.

  I was eighteen when I met her. Desire was always close at hand.

  But it wasn’t just the gesture that this girl shared with Marissa. Her hair, thick and deep red, matched Marissa’s exactly, even the length of it, just below her shoulders. From the side, the girl’s nose came to a slightly rounded point, one that Marissa always said looked like a lightbulb. Both the girl and Marissa had brown eyes, and long, slender bodies. This girl, the one in the store, looked shorter than Marissa by a few inches, and she wore tight jeans and knee-high boots, clothes that weren’t in style when I attended college.

  But other than that, they could have been twins. They really could have been.

  And as the girl walked away, making a left at the end of the aisle and leaving my sight, I remained rooted to my spot, my silly little grocery basket dangling from my right hand. The lights above were bright, painfully so, and other shoppers came past with their carts and their kids and their lives. It was close to dinnertime, and people had places to go. Families to feed.

  But I stood there.

  I felt tears rising in my eyes, my vision starting to blur.

  She looked so much like Marissa. So much.

  But Marissa had been dead for just over twenty years.

  • • •

  Finally, I snapped out of it.

  I reached up with my free hand and wiped my eyes.

  No one seemed to notice that I was having an emotional moment in the middle of the grocery store, in the milk aisle. I probably looked like a normal guy. Forty years old. Clean-cut. Professional. I had my problems. I was divorced. My ex-wife didn’t let me see her son as much as I wanted. He wasn’t my kid, but we’d grown close. My job as a caseworker for the housing authority in Eastland, Ohio, didn’t pay enough, but who ever felt like they were paid enough? I enjoyed the work. I enjoyed helping people. I tended to pour myself into it.

  Outside of work, I spent my life like a lot of single people do. I socialized with friends, even though most of them were married and had kids. I played in a recreational basketball league. When I had the time and motivation, I volunteered at our local animal shelter, walking dogs or making fund-raising calls.

  Like I said, I probably looked like a regular guy.

  I decided I needed to talk to that girl. I started down the aisle, my basket swinging at my side. I figured she had to be a relative of Marissa’s, right? A cousin or something. I turned the corner in the direction she had gone, deftly dodging between my fellow shoppers.

  I looked up the next aisle and didn’t see her. Then I went to another one, the last aisle in the store. At first, I didn’t see the girl there either. It was crowded, and a family of four—two parents, two kids—blocked my view. One of the kids was screaming because her mom wouldn’t buy her the ice cream she wanted.

  But then they moved, and I saw the girl. She was halfway down the aisle, opening the door of another cooler, but not removing anything. She lifted her hand to her mouth. That gesture. She looked just like Marissa.

  I felt the tears again and fought back against them.

  I walked up to her. She looked so small. And young. I guessed she was about twenty, probably a student at my alma mater, Eastland University. I felt ridiculous, but I had to ask who she was. I wiped at my eyes again and cleared my throat.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  She whipped her head around in my direction. She seemed startled that anyone had spoken to her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  But I really wasn’t. In that moment, I saw her head-on instead of in profile, and the resemblance to Marissa became more pronounced. Her forehead was a little wider than Marissa’s. And her chin came to a sharper point. But the spray of freckles, the shape of her eyes . . . all of it was Marissa.

  If I believed in ghosts . . .

  Ghosts from a happy time in my past . . . />
  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  The girl just looked at me. Her eyes moved across my body, sizing me up. Taking me in. She looked guarded.

  “I was wondering if you were related to the Minor family,” I said. “They lived in Hanfort, Ohio. It’s been about twenty years since I’ve seen them. I know it’s a long shot—”

  The girl had been holding a box of Cheerios and a carton of organic milk. When I said the name “Minor,” she let them both go, and they fell to the floor at my feet. The milk was in a cardboard carton, but the force of it hitting the floor caused it to split open. Milk leaked onto the cruddy linoleum, flowing toward my shoes.

  “Careful,” I said, reaching out for her.

  But the girl took off. She made an abrupt turn and started walking away briskly, her bootheels clacking against the linoleum. She didn’t look back. And when she reached the far end of the aisle, the end closest to the cash registers, she started running.

  I took one step in that direction, lifting my hand. I wanted to say something. Apologize. Call her back. Let her know that I hadn’t meant any harm.

  But she was gone.

  Just like Marissa, she was gone.

  Then the family of four, the one I had seen earlier with the child screaming for ice cream, came abreast of me. The child appeared to have calmed down. She clutched a carton of Rocky Road, the tears on her face drying. The father pointed to the mess on the floor, the leaking milk and the cereal.

  “Something wrong with her?” he asked.

  My hands were shaking. I felt off-balance. Above my head, the cloying Muzak played, indifferent to my little drama with the girl who looked so much like Marissa.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I don’t even know who she was.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  I thought of Marissa all evening. It’s safe to say I was feeling a little sorry for myself. Indulging in nostalgia, which can be enjoyable up to a point.

  I drank beer on the couch in my apartment while a basketball game I didn’t care about played on the TV. A pile of work waited in my briefcase, but I ignored it. I never did that, but after seeing the girl in the store, I did. I ate some cheese and crackers but gave up on my plan to cook the spaghetti I’d bought. My only company that night was Riley, the aging mutt I’d rescued from the local humane society shortly after my divorce two years earlier. I volunteered there to keep myself busy and to give something back. Eventually, they convinced me to take a dog home. He looked to be a mixture of German shepherd and retriever, and the humane society had estimated his age to be at least eight when I adopted him, maybe older.

  The humane society didn’t know much about Riley’s life before he was abandoned to their care, but they suspected he’d suffered some neglect or abuse, because he was so passive and skittish when I adopted him. He used to jump and cower at every noise, and he rarely if ever barked or growled. He’d grown slowly more comfortable and confident over the previous couple of years, and I’d grown used to having him around. As I lounged on the couch, brooding, he sat at my feet, hoping for cracker crumbs.

  Marissa and I had met during our freshman year at Eastland University. When I thought of who I was when I arrived at college, I realized I was just an awkward man-boy who only dreamed of meeting his soul mate. Marissa was beautiful, confident, outgoing, determined. Meeting her unlocked things in me that might never have been unlocked otherwise. She got me like no one ever had. And no one has since. We understood each other without words. I felt my connection to her in the deepest core of my being. How many people meet someone like that in their lives? Not many, but I did. And then, two years later, she was taken away from me in a house fire on a warm fall weekend.

  That was why seeing the girl in the grocery store shook me to the core. I had managed to get on with my life. I had managed to tell myself I’d gotten over losing Marissa.

  But I hadn’t.

  I went into my bedroom and dug around in the bottom of my closet. I kept a shoebox there full of items from my time in college, mostly things from my relationship with Marissa. Letters, notes, ticket stubs. And the multiple-time-zone watch she gave me on my twentieth birthday.

  We were supposed to travel after college, which explained the need for a multiple-time-zone watch. We never got to take those trips, and I never wore the watch again after Marissa died. But I kept it, and from time to time I’d take it out of the box. When the battery died every few years, I’d take the watch to the jewelry store and have it replaced. I liked to think about that watch being there, close by me, and always running like a beating heart.

  I brought it back to the couch with me and slumped down into the cushions, opening another beer. I was supposed to play in my basketball league, but I just didn’t feel like it. I never drank very much, never more than one a day, if that, but when I came home from the grocery store that night, I threw back three and then four and opened a fifth, staring at my watch and wondering who that girl was. And why she’d acted so damn spooked when I simply spoke to her.

  • • •

  I fell asleep on the couch, the TV still playing, the open but unfinished fifth beer on the coffee table before me. My neck felt like hell from sleeping at an odd angle, and a trail of drool ran down my chin.

  I slept until something started beating against my apartment door.

  Someone was there, pounding on the outside. Each heavy knock caused a miniature earthquake in my skull. I winced. A hangover at my age. Pathetic. I vowed never to have more than one beer again. I vowed to stop thinking about Marissa.

  I probably would have agreed to anything to get the pounding on the door to stop. But it didn’t.

  I turned my head to the right, looking at the watch Marissa gave me. 6:53 a.m. 12:53 a.m. the next day in New Zealand, as if I needed to know that.

  I normally woke up around eight. Made it to the office by nine. But I felt like shit. I needed a shower. Coffee. Food. I stood up, feeling a little wobbly. I looked down at Riley. He hadn’t barked despite the pounding on the door. He never barked.

  “Nothing?” I said to him. “Not even a growl?”

  His tail thumped against the floor, and he yawned.

  “One of these days I’m really going to need your help,” I said. “I hope you’re ready.”

  Riley walked off toward the kitchen, which meant he was hungry.

  I was still wearing my work clothes from the day before. My tie and my shoes were off, and I needed to pee. But whoever was outside the door really wanted to talk to me. The person beat on the door again, shaking my brain like dice in a cup.

  “Stop,” I said. “Jesus.”

  I thought about calling the apartment complex security guard and asking him to find out who was making the endless racket. But he was an elderly man, the owner’s uncle, and he usually didn’t arrive until late morning and was gone by five. The noise wasn’t the knock of a friend or someone selling something. It sounded urgent, determined. But my desire to make it stop overwhelmed any fears I had about who was out there. I stumbled to the door and looked through the peephole.

  It took a moment for the scene outside to make sense to me, but when it did, my heart started racing.

  I understood immediately why the knock was so heavy.

  Through the peephole I saw two uniformed police officers and a detective I already knew.

  “Mr. Hansen,” the detective said. “It’s the Eastland Police. We know you’re in there. Open up.”

  “Damn,” I said.

  An already rough morning became totally shitty.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The morning sun nearly killed me.

  It poured in when I opened the door, its rays penetrating my eyeballs like knitting needles. I took a step back, feeling as if I were a man under siege.

  “Can we come in?” the detective said.

  I didn’t have to answer. He was
already stepping across the threshold with the two uniformed officers right behind him.

  “You can do anything you want if it means you’ll stop knocking,” I said.

  Detective Reece stood about five-nine, a few inches shorter than me, but he was powerfully and compactly built. I suspected he’d wrestled in high school. Or maybe played nose tackle at a small college. He looked like that kind of guy. He didn’t offer to shake my hand, but I’d shaken it before, the last time he and I had encountered each other. I remembered he possessed a strong grip, and I always pictured him sitting at his desk, endlessly squeezing one of those hand strengtheners.

  Reece saw the beer cans on the coffee table, and he raised his eyebrows. He was probably a few years younger than me, and his hair was thinning. He wore it cropped close to his head, and his suit coat looked too small for him.

  “It’s recycling day,” I said.

  “Think green, right?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  He pointed at Riley. “Does the dog bite?”

  “Only his food,” I said, trying to keep the mood light.

  But Reece wasn’t smiling. He looked around the room, taking it all in. The TV still played with the sound down, showing highlights of a hockey game from the night before. There were dirty dishes in my sink, discarded gym clothes on the floor. I needed to pick up, and I would have if I’d only known the police were going to show up.

  “Have you seen your ex-wife lately?” Reece asked.

  “Not in six weeks,” I said. “Not since . . . that night you and I met.”

  “The night of the late unpleasantness,” Reece said.

  “I wasn’t stalking her.”