Since She Went Away(13)

“Jared?”

She scrolled through her texts, but they didn’t make sense. They came mostly from her group of friends and a cousin who lived in Ohio.

Nice one, Jenna!

Whoa, you were pissed!

Way to stick it to the media.

Um, call me?

And one from Jared: I’m staying at Tabitha’s for a while.

Jenna wrote back. Okay, but not too late. Call if you want a ride.

She hoped things went better on that end than they had gone on hers. Maybe the girl’s dad was cool and smooth, the kind who played old music for the kids and told stories about the summer in college when he followed U2 across the country, hitchhiking and chasing girls. Or maybe he and Jared would talk about sports or cars or Stephen King novels, and the guy would send him away with some poetry by Rimbaud.

“I think you’re ready for this now,” he’d say, clapping her son on the back and shaking his hand, and Jared would go along, accepting his lesson on masculinity.

Someone knocked on the door, and on her way to answer it the landline rang.

“Good God,” Jenna said. “Now what?”

She grabbed the phone first, and before she could even say hello, her mother’s voice came through.

“Are you okay?”

“Mom? Hold on.”

“You really didn’t look that great—”

She laid the phone aside and went to the door. She peeked through the window, and in the glow of the porch light—not burned out, just not turned on while Jared swapped spit with Tabitha—she saw her coworker Sally. Jenna hustled to undo the locks, and when she pulled the door open, her friend stood there with a bottle of wine in one hand and a large grin across her face.

“What’s the occasion?” Jenna asked, and Sally stepped past her and into the living room. “Did you say you were coming over and I forgot?”

“I figured you needed a pick-me-up.”

“Because of today? Sure, I guess. Hold on, my mom’s on the phone.”

Jenna picked up the receiver again. “Mom? Can I call you back? Sally’s here.”

“That’s fine. You don’t have to call me back. I just want you to know, I have no problem with women speaking their minds.” Her mother’s voice was rough and gravelly, a by-product of years of cigarette smoking. “I taught you to do anything a man can do, you know that. I didn’t raise a shrinking violet. I just wish you wouldn’t be quite so assertive in public that way. It’s . . . coarse. People judge you for those things.”

Jenna said, “Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?”

Just then her phone received a few more texts, the chiming sounding more urgent.

“You weren’t watching?” her mom asked. “Oh, boy.”

? ? ?

Jenna watched herself on the television several times. Reena Huffman seemed to be enjoying playing the clip. Jenna saw herself on camera, her face paler than she could ever have thought possible. The lights from Stan’s camera hit her at such an angle that she looked like something that had just crawled from beneath a rock.

“How the f*ck do you think I feel, Becky? Jesus.”

The offending words were replaced with long, angry bleeps, leaving it up to the viewer’s imagination to wonder what she had really said.

“I didn’t know they would show that, Sally. I’d literally just puked. I thought they were carrying Celia’s bones out of that barn.”

“I don’t think people around here will mind the ‘f*ck’ as much as they’ll mind the ‘Jesus.’ If they can read lips . . .” Sally poured herself another glass of wine. “Everybody’s on edge around here. Everybody’s scared. It won’t take much to make them angry.” She wore loose-fitting jeans and a bulky sweater, and her hair was piled on top of her head and held in place with a pencil. A pair of glasses dangled from a chain around her neck. Sally was fifteen years older than Jenna, and since Celia’s disappearance, she had been increasingly playing the roles of both mentor and friend. Jenna had a mother, but the phone call about her appearance on TV epitomized their relationship—it never lost its air of judgment, the sense that Jenna needed constant correction and guidance.

Sally held the wine bottle up. “More?”

Jenna shook her head, which still hurt. She always drank with Sally. It was one of the pillars of their friendship—alcohol consumption. The glass of wine on top of the beer made Jenna’s head feel as if it had been stuffed with cotton.

“I’ve told you before that Becky McGee is a pill,” Sally said. “I knew her older sister in high school. She was a brat when she was a little kid, and I bet she still is.”

“She’s always seemed decent.”

“As long as the story is flowing her way, she’s decent,” Sally said. “But there haven’t been any new leads. The story has to go somewhere.”

Jenna saw a freeze frame of her face on the screen. “Oh, God. That’s the worst image ever. I’m going to turn it up.”

“Jenna—”

“I want to hear it.”

Reena Huffman was ranting in her high, grating voice.

“. . . been holding off on saying some of these things. I always try to be respectful of the friends and family members of a crime victim. And make no mistake, what happened to Celia Walters is a crime. It’s a tragedy. But someone knows something about it. A young, beautiful woman like this, this Diamond Mom, doesn’t just disappear without a trace without someone knowing something about it.”