by Amy Engel
“Thanks for the heads-up.” I let the freezer door close without pulling anything off the shelf. “Have the police talked to you lately?” I asked, fishing to see if he knew about Izzy and the older man. I didn’t want to be the one to tell him, not if I could help it.
“They came by yesterday,” Zach said. “Asking about her cell phone.”
“What about it?”
“They didn’t find it. With the girls. I guess they got a list of her cell phone activity and she’d been texting to a burner phone.”
“Do they know about what?” I asked.
“Not yet. They’re waiting on the phone company.” Zach crossed his arms, shook his head. “I can’t imagine who she would have been texting. We told her a thousand times she wasn’t allowed to text or talk to someone we didn’t know.”
“Did you ever check her phone?” I asked, only realizing how accusatory I sounded after the words left my mouth.
“At first we did every day, but there was never anything but calls and texts to us and a couple of friends. Most of the kids her age didn’t have a phone yet.” Zach paused, looked away. “But we’d trailed off the last few months. Neither one of us can remember the last time we read through her texts.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered,” I told him, because he seemed to be waiting for some kind of reassurance. “Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with what happened.”
Zach nodded, but it was the kind of perfunctory acknowledgment that meant he didn’t believe a word I was saying. That was okay; I didn’t believe it, either. “It still doesn’t seem real,” Zach continued. “That they’re both gone.” He tried to catch my eye, but I looked away. “I keep waiting for them to walk into the kitchen, demanding snacks. Sometimes I swear I can hear them giggling from Izzy’s room late at night.” He blinked fast, tightened his jaw. “I check Izzy’s bed in the morning to see if she might be there. I know it’s stupid, but every day I think maybe she will be.”
I wasn’t sure what he wanted from me. We shared a loss, but I didn’t know Zach Logan, not really. We weren’t friends. We were barely acquaintances. And unlike him, I understood, down to the marrow of my bones, that my daughter was gone. Now I had one more thing to envy.
* * *
• • •
I’d avoided the park since Junie’s death, made sure I went the long way to the grocery store or gas station. But after I left Zach in the frozen food aisle and got back in my car without buying anything, I found myself taking a left on Elm and gliding to a stop at the park. It was empty, yellow crime scene tape tied around a tree at the edge of the playground, the other end loose and flapping in the breeze. I got out of the car, made my way across the scrubby grass to the mouth of the cement tunnel where my daughter had died. There was a dark patch in the dirt, a stain that might have been blood soaked into the earth. I put out a hand, steadied myself on the rough surface of the tunnel.
“I had the same reaction,” a voice said, and I whipped my head up, saw Jenny Logan sitting on a picnic table to my right, feet resting on the bench. “But then I told myself it wasn’t blood.”
“Did that help?” I managed.
She shrugged. “Does anything?” She patted the table next to her hip. “You may want to come sit down. You’re looking a little green around the gills.”
If I didn’t know better, I’d think the Logans were following me around, inserting their lives, their grief, into mine. But I wasn’t that convinced of my own importance. This was just a small place, everyone bumping up against each other. I crossed to the picnic table and hoisted myself up, the spring chill of the wood worming its way through my jeans into my skin. “I saw your husband at the Piggly Wiggly a few minutes ago.”
Jenny gave a wan half smile. “Always dangerous, sending Zach to the store. Even when I give him a list, he always ends up with a random assortment of crap. I was going to go with him, to get out of the house. But at the last second I couldn’t do it.”
“Too many people asking how you’re doing?”
“Yeah.” Jenny nodded. “But some days it’s not even that. It’s Zach. He keeps reading things online, about how to deal with grief. It’s like he thinks if he follows the steps, he can instantly make it better. And when it doesn’t work, he freaks out, has no idea what to do when I’m crying and losing my mind. It gets exhausting, you know? Acting like things aren’t as bad as they are so he doesn’t fall apart. I needed a break.”
I didn’t know. I guessed that was one benefit of being alone in the aftermath. I didn’t have to keep my chin up for someone else, could let myself sink as dark and deep as I pleased.
Jenny leaned back, using her hands behind her for balance, and tipped her face up, eyes closed. She was more disheveled than I was used to seeing her, hair tangled and a little greasy at the roots, dark smudges under her eyes, her shirt wrinkled. Even her speech was looser, words flowing easier off her tongue. Was I seeing her differently since my talk with Cal, aware, suddenly, of the chip on my shoulder? Or maybe Jenny had always been more human than I’d given her credit for and I hadn’t had any good reason to notice it before now.
“I wasn’t going to come back here, to Barren Springs, after college, did you know that?” she asked without opening her eyes.
Pondering Jenny Logan’s life choices wasn’t a topic I’d ever spent much time on, but she didn’t need me to answer, kept right on talking.
“It wasn’t even something I really thought about, never said to myself, ‘You’re getting out of Barren Springs and never looking back.’” She gave a watery laugh and opened her eyes, leaned forward again. “But it was a given. I thought I’d go to Mizzou, get a degree, then move to Kansas City or St. Louis, someday maybe Chicago.”
I didn’t really care about this story, about Jenny Logan’s life, but I liked focusing on someone else for a change. It felt like a vacation from my own buzzing brain. “What happened?”
“Have you ever left here?” she asked instead of answering my question.
I shook my head. I’d been to Branson once, years ago, for a day. That was the extent of my travels. All I really remembered of it was the bumper-to-bumper traffic, the sea of tourists crowding the sidewalks. How foreign and far away it felt from the quiet green of home. I’d been thinking about moving with Junie, trying to claw our way up in the world. I could have made a little more money there, working at a chain restaurant instead of the diner. But everything else would have cost more, too. At the end of the day, I would’ve still been poor, still been scraping by. Only I would have been poor in a place without Cal, without Louise and Thomas, without the safety net of Barren Springs—where every square inch was familiar. Branson was a life I couldn’t picture for myself, no matter how hard I tried.
“I thought I would love it. All those new people, new experiences.” Jenny picked at a thread on her jeans. “But it turns out the world is big. Even a place as small as Columbia felt overwhelming. I didn’t know who to talk to or how to act. I spent almost every day of those two years desperate to get back here. I remember one night I got a flat tire and no one on the highway stopped to help me. I was standing out there in the rain, trying to change my tire, sobbing like a baby and thinking that if I were in Barren Springs, if I were home, I would’ve had ten people stopping to help me.” She cocked her eyebrows at me. “Can you believe that shit? What a goddamn wimp.”
She wasn’t wrong, though. That was the thing about Barren Springs; for all its ugliness, there was hidden beauty, too. The way people relied on each other when things got bad, the resourcefulness of a community that most of the world ignored, the sheer stubborn willfulness that kept people breathing when it might have been easier to give up. The rolling hills and the wind in the trees. I had to remind myself of those things on the days I wanted to burn the whole place to the ground.
“When I met Zach and then got pregnant, it seemed like the perfect excuse t
o drop out of school and come home. Maybe part of me even planned it that way. And God love him, Zach never uttered a word of protest, even though he’d always wanted to move to a big city, get a job at some fancy company. I thought he might resent me for it at some point. But he never has. I’m the one who gets itchy feet sometimes, tries to talk him into moving, and he’s the one who wants to stay. God knows why.” She glanced at me. “He gave up all his dreams for me and Izzy, and right now I could kill him for it.” Her eyes glistened with tears, a few of them spilling over onto her pale cheeks. “I’m furious with him for agreeing to this life because if he hadn’t none of this would have happened.” She flapped a hand at me. “And I know how unfair and awful that is of me. You don’t have to say it.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
That startled a laugh out of her, whisking tears off her cheeks with the backs of her fingers. “You’re a breath of fresh air, Eve, honestly. Nothing seems to surprise you.”
I shrugged. “It takes more than what you just told me, that’s for sure. You’re not the only one who looks back after all this and wishes for different choices.”
Jenny stared at me like she was trying to unravel my thoughts, crawl inside my brain and fish out the things I wasn’t saying. “Like what?” she asked.
“Nothing in particular,” I said, eyes drifting away. “Whatever choices led to our daughters dying in this park.”
“It wasn’t our fault, though,” Jenny said, voice small.
“Maybe not,” I said, not sounding convincing. “But it definitely wasn’t theirs.”
Across from the park, a screen door slammed and we both looked up, caught the tail end of Mrs. Stevenson retreating into her house. “God,” Jenny said, “you’d think that nosy old bag could have done us a favor and been peering out her front windows when . . .” She gestured toward the tunnel. “She watches this park like a hawk every other day of the year.”
“How do we know she wasn’t?” I asked.
“Land already talked to her. She said as soon as the snow started, she pulled her drapes and hunkered down. Didn’t want to run her furnace in April.” Jenny snorted. “Sounds about right. My mom knew her growing up and said she’s never met a woman as tight with a dollar. And that’s saying something around here.”
I squinted into the weak sunlight poking through a tear in the wispy clouds. “You get regular updates from Land?”
“Yeah, pretty regular.” Jenny paused. “You don’t?” When I shook my head, little plumes of embarrassment flared on her cheeks. “Well, maybe he figured your brother tells you everything anyway.”
“Yeah,” I said, voice dry. “Either that or he’s too busy stuffing his fat ass with doughnuts to bother.”
I let my gaze wander the perimeter of the park, but whoever had chosen this spot to go after the girls had chosen well. The Stevenson house was the only one around, and even it was partially obscured by trees. Barren Springs wasn’t laid out like the small towns I saw on television, everything extending neatly from a center square. It was almost as if the original settlers hadn’t anticipated it ever becoming much of an actual town and so they’d built their houses wherever they pleased, no thought of a master plan. More every man for himself rather than a collective endeavor. Streets were added in over time to accommodate the houses, not the other way around, so that some streets had only a single house or ended with no warning. It was a maze of a place, the thick green woods crowding the edges of everything the only constant.
I started to scoot forward, ready to hop down from the table and end this conversation, but Jenny put a hand out, laid it gently on my forearm. “I liked Junie,” she said. “I wanted you to know that. Really liked her. Sometimes better than my own daughter, if I’m being honest. Izzy was in that awful preteen phase where you never know if you’re going to get a hug or an insult.” She sighed. “The last six months felt like an endless eggshell walk around her. Was Junie like that with you?”
I settled back on the table, moved my arm out from under her hand. “No.”
Jenny smiled a little. “Yeah, that’s what I figured. Junie had a . . . gravity about her, I guess is the best way to describe it. She seemed more settled in herself than Izzy. More settled than I was at that age, that’s for sure.” Jenny elbowed me gently. “Did she get that from you?”
I was stumped by her question. Not because I didn’t have an answer but because I didn’t know how to explain it to her. As a child, I’d had Junie’s seriousness about life and my place in it because I learned early that to be frivolous, to take things for granted around my mama, was asking for a world of hurt. I hoped that Junie’s gravity came from somewhere else entirely, that it was because she was born a little wiser than other babies, a little surer of herself, more secure in the love I always, always gave her. “I don’t know,” I said finally. “I’d better get going before the reporters figure out where we are.”
“This was nice,” Jenny said as I made a second attempt to slide off the table. “Spending time with someone who gets it. It’s a relief.” I understood what she meant. Losing a child the way we had resulted in instant isolation. After the initial flurry of sympathy, people gave you a wide berth in case your bad luck, the dark cloud of murder and violence you lived under, seeped over onto them. She smiled at me as I stood. “Why did we never do this before? Our girls were so close and this is the first time we’ve ever really had a conversation.”
I shrugged, looked away. “Just busy, I guess.”
“Well, better late than never. Although I think I did most of the talking. Next time, it’s your turn, okay?”
I forced my mouth into a half smile. “Okay,” I said, knowing, even if Jenny didn’t, that there was never going to be a next time.
TWELVE
When a reporter finally cornered me, I had no one but myself to blame. I’d gone to the laundromat as the sun was rising, hoping to get my laundry done and be back at the apartment before anyone else was stirring. My luck held when I let myself in through the screen door in the back of the laundromat, the smell of perfumed dryer sheets smacking me in the face, and not a single other person in sight. A couple of dryers were full of clothes someone hadn’t bothered to pick up from the day before, but all six washing machines were empty. I filled one with whites, the other with everything else, feeding quarters into the slots without really paying attention, my eyes roaming over the bulletin board behind the machines. Notices about yard sales, offers to babysit with phone numbers scrawled on paper tags no one had pulled off, pleas for the return of lost dogs, and there, in the middle, a picture of Junie’s face.
It was like taking a punch to the gut, completely unprepared for the sharp stab of pain. I flinched as I stared at her gap-toothed smile, her freckled nose, a number for anyone with tips to call printed below. I fought against the sudden urge to rip down the flyer, to hide her away where other people couldn’t gawk at her. I didn’t want her to belong to the whole world. I wanted her to still be only mine.
Behind me, the screen door opened on a squeal of hinges and then banged shut again. I stepped away from the washing machines, tugging my baseball cap lower on my forehead. From the corner of my eye, I saw a woman approach, lugging a canvas bag of laundry behind her.
“Morning,” she said.
“Hi.” I busied myself gathering up my detergent and extra quarters with my back to her, tossing everything into my empty laundry basket for a quick getaway. I knew already that she wasn’t from around here. Not enough twang in her vowels, too many expensive highlights in her hair.
“Is there anywhere in town to get coffee this early?” she asked my back. I could hear her opening a washing machine, the clink of quarters.
“The Bait & Tackle, about half a mile down.” I gestured west without turning around, waiting for her to start loading in her dirty clothes so I could slip out behind her.
She sighed. “Guess I should
have grabbed some at the motel before I left this morning.” The nearest motel was five miles east of here, next to a gas station and not much else. Filled now with reporters, which confirmed the sinking feeling in my gut. “I gotta ask, is there anything to do around here, or is this it?”
I pictured Barren Springs the way she was seeing it, a sad collection of buildings nestled right up against the highway. Half of them unoccupied, not even hopeful For Lease signs in the windows anymore. The ones that were occupied—this laundromat, the general store with its half-empty shelves, the sub shop, a tiny bar, the bank—not exactly shouting Come on in to strangers. The Piggly Wiggly a mile outside of the town proper was the biggest draw we had, bringing residents in need of groceries from all over the county. What she would never see was Jackson Creek, where Cal fished in solitude, or the valley near my mama’s trailer, the woods so deep and lush you could get lost ten steps in.
“You lived here long?” she asked, her voice waking up, laundry bag forgotten at her feet as I edged around her toward the door. “Because I’m a reporter. Doing a story on the murdered girls and I’d really love to talk to someone who knows this place. Are you interested?” She moved closer to me, ducking her head a little to get a better view of me.
“No,” I said, not looking at her. I reached out to push open the screen door, and the air in the room changed, tightened on her quick inhale.
“You’re Eve Taggert, aren’t you? Junie’s mom?” She laid her hand on my arm.
I did look at her then, watched her brown eyes go wide at whatever she saw on my face. She took her hand away. I shoved the door open with my shoulder, crossed the parking lot, and tossed my laundry basket in the trunk. She was waiting for me by the driver’s door of my car, blocking me from opening it with her body. “Listen,” she said, voice pitched low and even. “I just want to talk. It doesn’t even have to be about Junie. It can be about anything. Whatever you want. Don’t you have anything to say?”