Since She Went Away(44)

“Jared?”

She hurried back out to the living room. His coat was gone.

She knew right away what had happened.

He’d left to go check on Tabitha.





CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX


Jared knew what running out that way meant. It meant his mom would probably call the police.

But she didn’t know where Tabitha lived. She didn’t know how to find him.

He pulled his coat tighter around his body. It was close to six, the sky fully dark.

He decided to cut through Caldwell Park. It offered a more direct route, one that might shave a few minutes off his travel time. Kids from school hung out there in the afternoon and evening. On summer nights, it was impossible to go there without running into someone he knew. When he walked Tabitha home the other night, he’d bypassed the park for that very reason. He didn’t want to share his limited time with Tabitha with anyone else. Alone, he didn’t care.

He entered on the east side, a couple of blocks from where Celia disappeared. For a while, after her disappearance, the sidewalk was littered with candles and notes and stuffed animals. Most of that stuff was gone, the spot empty and back to normal. Jared wondered what the police did with all those trinkets. Did they keep them somewhere, as some kind of evidence or memento of the case? Or did they just trash them? He could imagine some cop with a garbage bag, showing up at night and sweeping it all away, tossing it in a Dumpster behind the police station.

There were swings and jungle gyms at the south end of the park. His mom had taken him there when he was little, letting him run around while she studied her anatomy textbooks. In the middle sat a statue of Abraham Lincoln, Kentucky’s favorite son. Never mind that he lived in the state only until he was six years old and spent much more time in Illinois, people in the Bluegrass State liked to claim him.

On the far side of the park, the west side, the city had constructed a little band shell. They painted it light blue, and in the summers offered live music. Mostly old guys trying to play bluegrass, their banjos and fiddles twanging across the lawn while even older people in lawn chairs nodded along. In the winter, the place looked desolate. It filled with dead leaves, and only the skateboarders congregated there, using the place for dramatic takeoffs and landings.

As Jared passed by the band shell, he saw a group of four people, their figures dark outlines in the fading light. Kids from school, he figured, and he hoped he didn’t know them. He didn’t want to talk. He wanted to get to Tabitha’s house and put his mind at ease.

“Look who it is,” a voice said.

Jared turned to the right, toward the sound of the voice, but he kept walking quickly.

“Hey, hold it.”

A girl’s voice.

Jared slowed down, squinting as he peered into the quickening darkness. The girl was moving toward him, her long, wavy hair and tall boots growing visible. He thought he knew her, but it took a moment.

She reached the lit path he walked on, stepping into the glow of one of the lamps.

“Oh,” he said.

“Hi, Jared.”

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken to Ursula Walters. He knew it was before her mom disappeared, way before. Their moms made them play together when they were kids, sometimes on the very swings Jared was just remembering. She had fascinated him when they were little. She was bossy and brash, braver than any of the boys he knew. He never forgot the time she shoved him, causing him to crack his head against the corner of a coffee table. With friends like that, who needs enemies, right?

But he also used to go to sleep at night and think about her, imagining that they’d grow up and become more than friends. His mom and Celia liked to try to embarrass both of them by mentioning the way they used to bathe together as babies. Jared always felt his face turn red when one of the moms brought it up, but Ursula never blushed. She acted as though nothing in the world bothered her or knocked her off stride.

“Hey, Ursula,” he said, hoping she didn’t want to talk.

But she studied him up and down, taking in his clothes and his face, inspecting him as if she needed to know everything he was up to. A surprising amount of interest considering how little they spoke to each other. Around the time they became teenagers, Ursula had transformed into a mean girl, someone who ran with a crowd of rich kids. Their parents belonged to the country club, and they all wore the best clothes, as if they had Abercrombie & Fitch on speed dial. Jared felt squeezed out of her life, and he really didn’t mind. Once she’d started acting that way, his nearly lifelong crush dissolved.

“Where are you going in such a hurry?” she asked.

He looked behind her. Three bigger, older-looking guys accompanied her. Ursula was that kind of kid. She couldn’t spend time with people her own age.

“Just walking,” Jared said, and started to move on.

But the voice of one of the guys stopped him again.

“Ursula, isn’t that the kid whose mom got your mom killed?”

Two of the guys came forward, looming behind Ursula in the dark. The third guy, bigger than the other two, hung back, a red glow near his head telling Jared he was smoking. For the first time, Jared felt scared. The adrenaline and emotion that had fueled his rush toward Tabitha’s house shifted to something more desperate and pointed. His own safety might be in jeopardy.

He wasn’t a fighter. He’d skirmished with a couple of kids on the playground years ago, winning one battle by pinning his opponent to the ground and emerging with a bloody nose and a detention from the other. But these guys were bigger and older, and they sounded tougher.