Since She Went Away(107)

She looked over at Bobby. “What the f*ck is wrong with you?” she asked, her voice harsh and brittle in the cold air.

“He knows. Everybody’s going to know. And I’m glad.”

“You didn’t meet me. I waited at school with my f*cking bag, you moron. We could be gone. Long gone.”

“Don’t call me that,” Bobby said. “You can’t bully your way out of this one.”

Jared reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. It was soaked, the screen blank. His hands were cold, and it slipped out of his grip and plopped into the water next to Celia’s body, sinking down beneath it to the bottom of the pool.

Ursula came closer to the ladder, staring down at Jared where he shivered. She stepped away, and Jared started climbing, his hands so cold he struggled to grip the railing.

Before he reached the top, Ursula was back. And she held a long metal pole in her hand, the kind people attached a skimmer to in order to remove leaves.

Jared thought she was going to hand it down to him, to use it to help pull him up.

But then he saw the look on her face. She swung it at his knuckles, intending to knock him off the ladder and back into the water.

He ducked her first swing and her second.

And then someone called her name.

? ? ?

Ian went through the gate first.

He called for Ursula, and when Jenna came through behind him, she saw Ursula standing at the edge, a long metal rod in her hand, and Bobby Allen sitting on the rim staring down into the water.

Jenna wondered: Why are these two rich kids cleaning their friend’s pool on a Saturday morning in February?

Then Ursula dropped the pole. It clattered down into the pool.

And Bobby stood up and leaned over, extending his hand down the ladder to the deep end.

Ursula locked eyes with Ian. She clutched her arms across her midsection as though she was about to be sick.

“Oh, Daddy,” she said. She folded in half, as if she’d been struck in the stomach. She sank onto the concrete that surrounded the pool, her body curling into a ball.

Ian rushed to her. Jenna tried not to be cynical. She tried not to see Ursula’s wheedling behavior as manipulation of her father.

But then she saw Jared, soaking wet and shivering, lifted out of the pool by Bobby Allen.

Jenna rushed across, taking her coat off as she went. She reached him and wrapped him in her coat. “What are you doing, Jared? You’ll freeze.”

“Mom, don’t look down there,” he said, his lips blue, his teeth chattering.

But Jenna looked.

And she understood.





CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT


“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” Ursula was saying. She said it over and over.

Ian continued to hold her.

Jenna listened. She felt far away, as though she were watching the scene unfold from a great remove. A million miles or more.

But it was real. She was there, hearing the nightmare words.

“We fought that night, the night she disappeared.” Ursula leaned back and stared directly into Ian’s eyes. “I knew you were out. I thought . . . I thought Mom was going to see someone, a man. I heard her making plans on the phone.”

“It wasn’t a man,” Jenna said. “It was me.”

“I didn’t know that,” Ursula said, her voice rising to a higher pitch like that of a wronged child.

“Honey, what happened?” Ian asked.

“I tried to stop her from going, and she wouldn’t listen to me. I thought she was lying to me when she said she wasn’t meeting a man. She’d lied to you about other men. Why else would she be sneaking out late at night if it wasn’t for a man?” Ursula’s voice grew more petulant as she went on. “She insisted on going. And I couldn’t stop her.” She wasn’t crying. “I didn’t mean to shove her as hard as I did, but she wouldn’t listen. She fell by the laundry room and hit her head against the wall. She didn’t bleed. But her neck was turned kind of funny. Her eyes were open. I could tell . . .”

Jenna’s arm slipped from around Jared’s back. She felt nauseated, felt her mouth filling with saliva. She raised her hand and bent down on one knee as though genuflecting. She heaved, her mouth filling with bile, and she spit it onto the concrete.

“I helped her cover it up.” Bobby stood to the side of the scene, his face vacant. “She called and we brought the body over here. The Embrys are always gone. They’d just closed their pool. And we dropped that earring at the spot where Ursula said her mom and Mrs. Barton always met. Ursula knew right where to put it. Mrs. Walters said she was going to meet you, so we thought that would throw people off. I thought it was a shitty idea. I didn’t think anyone would even see it. But Ursula said the cops would look over every inch of that area. She was right.” He looked over at Ursula. “She tried to keep the other earring. Like a keepsake of her mother, after she’d killed her.”

“It belonged to me,” Ursula said.

“We would have gotten caught,” Bobby said. “I had to take the earring from her and throw it out. I should have thrown it in the f*cking river, but she wouldn’t shut up about it. I barely got it away from her.”

“Bobby—”

Bobby didn’t stop. “You’d already taken money from the house. She said it would make her dad think her mom had run off on him. Then she went on message boards and tried to make people think her mom was alive, that she’d just run away.”