In the kitchen, Keeley and Delaney find all their other friends, and my mom gets pulled into a conversation about our healthcare system. That leaves me standing on the outskirts by myself until Dustin and Eli appear in the empty spot next to me. I can’t help but eavesdrop on their conversation.
“I didn’t know. I swear. If I had, then . . .” Eli doesn’t finish because Dustin pipes in.
“Nobody is saying you knew. Do not beat yourself up, man. I didn’t know either. How would we? She never said anything.” Dustin glances around the room, and just as he’s about to look at me, I avert my eyes down to my phone in my hands.
“He’s not my brother anymore. I . . . I could kill him,” Eli says. “If I ever see him again I will. I’ll kill him.” He hangs his head, and Dustin puts a hand on his shoulder.
I never really got to know Dustin, and Jenna didn’t talk about him much, but I can tell from the expression on his face that he’s feeling just as miserable as Eli sounds.
“Eli, I heard that Jenna met with your . . . brother that night. Do you know if the police think he might know where she is?” Dustin asks.
“No,” Eli shakes his head. “I don’t know. My parents . . . they won’t tell me anything. I don’t even know if they know anything other than what he told them. But anything he says could be a lie, so I’m not interested in hearing what he has to say. They just don’t get . . . it’s like they don’t care what he did . . .” Eli says to the floor.
Suddenly, Dustin looks over at me without warning, and I’m so afraid of what he must think of me, that I begin to walk away.
“Leighton, wait,” he says, pinching the sleeve of my shirt. I stop and slowly turn to face him and Eli but keep my eyes down. “How are you doing?”
I look up, shocked by the concern in his voice. “I’m . . . okay. Just missing Jenna . . . just like all of you.” Suddenly, I’m overcome by emotion because no one else has asked me how I’m doing, probably because no one knows how close Jenna and I have become. No one knows how important her friendship is to me. I’ve felt like an outsider trying to be part of the search for her, even when I delivered her diaries to Keeley. All these people have known her for so long, so it’s reasonable to think that their grief over her disappearance is deeper than mine. But it’s not. In some ways, I feel like I know Jenna better than any of them. Time doesn’t necessarily make a friendship stronger.
“Hey, it’s okay.” Dustin puts his hand on my shoulder, just like he did with Eli.
“Thanks,” I say.
“Hey, everyone, could we all please gather in here for a moment?” Mrs. Kemp’s voice fills the air, and people begin squishing into the living room where she’s standing on a chair in the corner. “Joseph and I just want to thank you all for helping today. I can’t believe we got every place on the checklists covered. I mean, you all plastered Jenna’s posters across the city from downtown to the lakefront, the area all around UW-Milwaukee to the far north shore, and within all the busiest areas of surrounding communities. We’ve already gotten a few calls, but I don’t know how helpful the information is yet. For those of you who don’t know, my cousin Mary—over there in the red shirt—” Everyone looks at Mary for a moment and back at Mrs. Kemp. “She’s created a Facebook page where we can keep all of you informed of any information we find. Please share it, and there are also extra flyers on the table by the door if you’d like to take some just in case you come across somewhere that doesn’t have a poster of Jenna. We don’t . . .” Suddenly Mrs. Kemp has lost her train of thought, and Mr. Kemp steps beside her and finishes with a few more words.
“We don’t know what we’d do without all of your support. We’re hopeful that these posters will be seen by someone who saw her that night or that weekend . . . So,” he brings his palms together in an appreciative gesture, “thank you all. You’re all welcome to stay or go, and please, feel free to take some food with you. We have more than enough. But before anyone goes anywhere, we’d like to take a moment of silence now, just to pray or think about Jenna.”
The room goes silent and eyes all around me drop to the floor, so I follow suit. My family is not religious, and I can’t remember the last time I prayed, but I decide to try it because what else have we got at this point?
A few moments into the requested silence, the front doorbell rings, causing heads to start popping up all around the room. All eyes are on Mr. Kemp as he makes his way to the front door and opens it. It’s still so quiet in the room that everyone clearly hears the woman at the door say, “Hi, I . . . I’m sorry, I see you have company. I should just—”
“No, come in, please,” Mr. Kemp holds the door open for her, and she steps inside.
She recovers surprisingly fast after the shock of seeing so many sets of eyes on her when she steps inside. Mrs. Kemp is already in front of her reaching out to shake the woman’s hand. By this time, some people are whispering, wondering who the woman is, and some have wandered off to the bathroom or back to the kitchen, but I’m not going anywhere until I find out who this lady is, and neither are Dustin or Eli. I notice Keeley, Delaney, and a few other girls who are sitting on the stairs looking on as well.
“Hi, I’m Bonnie Kemp, and you already met my husband, Joseph.” Bonnie gestures to Mr. Kemp who’s closing the door. “How do you know Jenna?”
“I . . . I’m Julie Bickers, Jacob Bickers’ wife.”
Several gasps travel through the room, Dustin and Eli move closer to where Mrs. Kemp and Mrs. Bickers are standing, and Keeley’s jaw drops as she brings her hands up to cover her mouth. Mrs. Kemp reacts with the widest eyes I’ve ever seen, and Mr. Kemp circles the women to stand behind Mrs. Kemp, blocking my view of Mrs. Bickers’ face.
“Why are you here?” Mrs. Kemp asks flatly.
“I . . . I feel terrible that your daughter is still missing, and I just . . . wanted to reach out to you to let you know I care.” She glances around the room as if she’s just realized whatever she says will be heard by many. So, she lowers her voice, but I’m still close enough to make out what she says, “I also wanted to apologize for my husband’s behavior. The way he connected with your daughter on that site is just deplorable. And if I ever find any reason to think he might have had something to do with her disappearance, I want you to know that I will not hesitate to turn him in. I’m sorry to have interrupted.”
And within seconds, Julie Bickers is gone.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Friday, October 27, 2017
The Day of Jenna’s Disappearance
“Let all that I am praise the Lord; may I never forget the good things he does for me. He forgives all my sins and heals all my diseases . . .”
After talking to Jenna, Thomas recited scripture as he drove to His Grace Community Church, but for the first time in his life, his faith in the power of prayer was faltering. When he arrived at the church, he proceeded straight to the front row of the chapel where he sat every Sunday during Audra’s weekly youth message. He bowed his head and continued to beg for forgiveness for the things he’d done to Jenna.
Between prayers, he contemplated his next move. If I confess, it isn’t just me who suffers. It’s Audra and Stella too. Why couldn’t I have come clean before I had them in my life? Before my demons quieted? Then again, if I’d confessed my sins prior to graduate school, there would be no Audra, because instead of being at that topless club in St. Louis the night we met, I probably would have been in prison and still suffering from my affliction to this day. Audra is what saved me.
This led Thomas to reflect on his relationship with Audra and how she’d been the Godsend that helped him overcome his demons. He thought back to when he was earning his master’s degree in theology and needed a way to unwind, which led him to become a regular at the gentleman’s club where Audra worked. She quickly became his favorite dancer. He was shocked when he found out she was twenty-two because she looked so much younger. He’d let his surprise over the fact that she was of legal age slip early on in their
relationship—but she didn’t seem to care. That’s when he began to wonder if she was the one he’d been looking for. Then, after they’d been dating for a couple weeks and Audra moved in with Thomas, she found his picture stash. He knew a normal woman would have dumped him or turned him in, but Audra didn’t do either. Instead, she’d asked him to tell her about the pictures. It was appealing to Thomas the way she’d flipped through the photos and put them into piles like she was organizing a deck of trading cards. When she was done sorting the girls—it appeared by age—she asked him to tell her about all of them. When Thomas got to Jenna’s picture, he told Audra the only lie he’d ever told her. He said Jenna was a girl he’d met when he was a camp counselor his Junior year in high school. After they’d gone through the entire box of photos, Audra waited until Thomas had to use the bathroom to douse his photo collection with nail polish remover. Then when he returned, she dropped a match on them, and they burnt to a crisp. When Thomas realized what she’d done, he wanted to be angry with her, but he wasn’t. How could he be? The pictures had represented his temptations, his filthy desires, his demons. When he asked her why she’d done such a thing, she said, “Because you’re mine now.” From that point forward, Audra became the only girl for him, his godsend, and since then, he couldn’t stop wondering if he’d really changed or if his demons were simply masked. But he always came to the same conclusion; he would never know the answer. All he knew for certain was that the remorse he felt for what he did to Jenna had become a new demon that had begun to slowly eat him up from the inside out.
Praying was not going to help.
As Thomas drove home, he thanked God that his family was still out of town because he wasn’t ready to tell Audra what he’d decided to do. But then when he got home, he found Audra’s car already in the garage. The only thing that stopped him from going straight to the police station instead of facing Audra was the sight of Stella’s beautiful face staring back at him from the screensaver of his cell phone.
Without another moment’s hesitation, he turned the car off and went inside, accepting his fate.
“Surprise!” Audra rushed over to Thomas from where she was standing at the counter reading a cooking magazine and threw her arms around him. When he didn’t hug her back as tightly as he normally would, she pulled back and examined his face. “Something wrong?”
How does she know me so well? Thomas wondered as he silently led her into his office, which was the room farthest away from Stella’s bedroom. He steered Audra toward the only chair in the room and made her sit. Then he knelt before her.
“Thomas, what is going on?”
“Do you promise not to say a word while I explain?” he’d asked.
“Well, I suppose that depends on what you have to explain.”
“Audra, I need you to promise.”
“Fine,” she said with a sigh. “What is it already?”
“Jenna contacted me tonight.”
“Jenna, your cousin Jenna?”
“Yes.”
“Okay? Did something happen to that sweet girl?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what is it? Is she okay?”
“See . . . the thing that happened to her happened a long time ago . . . before I met you.”
Audra tilted her head slightly, a glimmer of understanding appearing in her eyes.
“Do you remember those pictures I used to have—my collection?”
Audra nodded and narrowed her eyes at Thomas.
“One of the girls was Jenna.”
Audra exhaled harshly, placed her hand on her chest, and stared over Thomas’s head at a memory. “The girl you said you met at summer camp,” she whispered.
Thomas nodded and lowered his head to Audra’s knees for a moment, just to collect himself.
“Audra, Jenna has suffered horribly because of the things I did to her when she was younger.”
“What did you do to her, Thomas? She asked it as though she was clueless, which confused Thomas. How could she be clueless after seeing those pictures?
“It started out as curiosity, but then . . . I went way too far and kept pushing it even further. And now it’s time for me to come clean . . . to pay for what I did.”
“No . . .” She shook her head, a horrified expression appearing on her face. “You can’t.”
“Audra,” Thomas said, gripping her hands, “if I don’t turn myself in, Jenna is going to file a police report. So either way . . .”
“NO.” Audra pulled her hands from Thomas’s and stood so fast he fell backwards. She was now hovering over him. “You can’t, Thomas. Our reputations and our lives will be ruined. Please don’t.”
“I have to, Audra. For Jenna . . . and for myself.”
“What about me? What about Stella?” She folded her arms across her chest and thought for a moment. Then she continued as if she’d come up with a solution. “I’ll talk to her, reason with her, and you’ll beg for her forgiveness and tell her you’ve changed. I don’t know her that well, but I can tell she’s a smart girl. She’ll listen to reason. Come on, Thomas.” Audra held a hand out to him. “We’ll call her right now, ask her to come over. I’ll make some cocoa.”
Ignoring Audra’s hand, Thomas pried himself off the floor. Then he pulled her close and held her tight, but her body remained stiff, and she started up again about how they could fix everything with Jenna. No one had to know. Finally, his mind made up, Thomas had had enough. He pulled back, gripping Audra’s upper arms and looking her in the eyes. She tried to look away, but Thomas adjusted his head left and then right, not allowing her to escape his gaze. “I’ve made up my mind, Audra. God will take care of the rest.”
“No, Thomas! No!” She threw her arms up and out with such force that Thomas immediately felt a bruise forming on one of his forearms.
“Think about Stella!” As if on cue, Stella started wailing. “You’ll go to Jail! What will happen to her without a father? She’ll end up like me, Thomas!”
Audra stormed out of the office, down the hall, and into the living room. Thomas rushed after her, knocking a picture frame off a table in the hall. There was another wail from Stella when the frame crashed to the floor. Thomas paused, unsure whether to go upstairs and comfort his daughter or proceed into the living room in pursuit of Audra. The sound of the garage door opening helped him decide. But by the time he got into the garage, Audra was already gone. Thomas had no other choice than to go to Stella whose frightened wails could still be heard from upstairs.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Keeley
Thursday, November 16, 2017
Three Weeks after Jenna’s Disappearance
As I pull into a spot in the Starbucks parking lot, I see Eli. He’s staring out the window facing the opposite direction from where I’m parked. The fact that he’s sitting at a table in a far corner away from any other customers makes me nervous about what he wants to talk to me about. I check the time and realize I’m nearly fifteen minutes early. I wonder how long he’s been sitting there.
He spots me right when I enter, so I go over and say hi before ordering something.
“Thanks for coming,” he says as I lean down and give him a hug. It feels good and makes my chest flutter.
When we part, we pause to just look at each other, our faces only inches apart. His lips quiver a little, and his eyes are full of sadness, confirming that this meetup has everything to do with Jenna and nothing to do with us.
“I’m going to get a latte,” I say, standing and pointing my thumb at the counter. “Do you need a refill?”
“No, thanks,” he says, turning his head to look out the window into the darkness again.
“So, how are you?” I ask when I return.
“Not great. You?”
I shake my head. “How are your parents and your sister? Any news about . . .”
“Thomas?” His voice is filled with such hatred. “All I care to know is that he’s locked up right now. I know it won’t be that way for
ever since he’s been cleared of having anything to do with Jenna’s disappearance and since our legal system is total bullshit and my parents are standing by their Golden Boy.” He clenches his teeth and looks out into the darkness on the other side of the window.
News spread fast earlier this week that Thomas’s whereabouts that night had checked out. The police were able to secure video footage from the Walmart on Capitol Drive to verify the time Thomas and Jenna drove in and out of the parking lot, and a witness came forward to say they’d seen Thomas’s car at the church that night after he’d been with Jenna. The final thing that ruled him out was his wife’s statement that he was home no later than ten thirty and the fact that Dustin received a text from Jenna later than that.
“Yeah, my parents said the same thing. What about Audra and Stella? How are they?”
“I don’t really know, and I don’t really care . . . about Audra anyway because she’s sticking right by his side just like my parents. I feel bad for Stella.”
The thought of people standing by Thomas after what he’s done makes me sick. I close my eyes and try to breathe away the anger I’m feeling until Eli speaks again.
“You know, all this time I’ve wondered why Jenna didn’t want me around and was so hostile toward me. Did she just need time to get used to me all grown up? Of course, that theory didn’t last long,” he adds as an aside. “So, now I wonder if maybe I look too much like Thomas and she couldn’t stand to see my face. I’m still not sure about that one, though. Then there’s this theory that I think might be the most plausible, but . . . it puts me at fault.”
“Eli, stop it. It’s no one’s fault. As much as I hate to say it, Jenna disappearing isn’t even your brother’s fault, not if all the evidence is accurate.”
SPIN Page 34