Since She Went Away(58)

Because she couldn’t look away once she came near it.

She took a quick glance at the Dealey Society page. She avoided all mention of Celia. She could guess what they would be talking about on the new threads, the ones that rose to the top of the page with a flaming icon next to them indicating they were the most popular discussions of the day. They’d be talking about the affairs. They’d be talking about her.

She skipped past them and went to the index, the listing of the names and details of thousands of missing persons cases going back to the turn of the twentieth century. Jenna scanned through them. So many were familiar to her after so much time looking, but she scrolled past the faces anyway.

They progressed from black and white to color, from slicked-back pompadours to hippie curls to mullets. Some of the faces looked happy and optimistic in their photos, just people smiling for the camera before some unimaginable tragedy befell them. Others looked haunted and scared, as though they could already see some doom rushing toward them, and they merely hoped to stay out of its way as long as possible.

The faces haunted Jenna. They scared her. As they paraded by, her skin crawled, a deep and profound unease settling over her body. We are all so vulnerable, she realized. We all dance on the knife’s edge. One push, and we are over. Even someone like Celia. The wrong place at the wrong time and you become a statistic, one of the many missing, their faces fading into the past with every day that went by.

Jenna shivered. She looked behind her like a scared child.

Nothing there. A closed closet door, a shoe box full of photos. All the things people would find if she disappeared or died. A collection of dead objects that might not even mean anything to her son. He’d just have to dispose of it someday.

“Why are you thinking this way?” she whispered to herself.

Because you’re scared.

She clicked the back button a few times, reversing to the home page.

She saw the story about a suspect in an abduction and murder being spotted in Louisville, just an hour away.

And then she saw the photo that froze her.

She knew where she’d seen Tabitha before.

? ? ?

She stared at the screen for what felt like an eternity. While she stared, her mouth went dry. She felt a tingling along her scalp, something uncomfortable and itchy.

A man named William Rose was a suspect in the murder of his ex-wife and the abduction of his daughter. His daughter, the girl who had stood right there in her house, the girl she’d stood face-to-face with in the parking lot of Hawks Mill Family Medicine, was named Natalie Jane Rose.

In the photo, she looked younger, her features less defined and more childlike. It appeared to be a school photo, and the girl—Tabitha!—wore a plain red sweater, the ruffled collar of a white shirt peeking out of the top. She looked nervous in the photo as lots of kids did on school picture day. Her eyes were wide, her smile forced.

But she was the same girl. Tabitha.

Jenna had read about it a few times during her search for information about Celia. Unlike the amateur sleuths online, Jenna never believed she’d actually solve a crime herself, never thought she’d stumble across a missing person in the grocery store or cross paths with a suspect at a gas station.

And yet she had. The details came back to her, vague and sketchy. A man in Nebraska who was believed to have murdered his wife and daughter. Their bodies were never found. The man was on the run, possibly headed to Mexico.

Jenna remembered seeing the girl’s face on the Dealey Society site, that awkward school portrait. Even the nervous look, the deer-in-the-headlights stare as some photographer told her to smile before the flash went off, couldn’t hide the girl’s beauty. What a pretty girl, Jenna thought then. What a tragedy that she was likely dead, her short life snuffed out while she was still a teenager.

Jenna couldn’t say how many times she’d scrolled past Tabitha’s face over the past few months. Ten? Twenty? Enough that it stuck somewhere in the folds of her subconscious.

She was even more beautiful two years later when she stood in Jenna’s hallway. When Jenna had made the bumbling comment about her mother, and the girl answered her like someone who had seen so much more of the world than most adults.

But not the girl. The girl wasn’t dead, as the authorities feared, at least not as of a few days ago. Her father, the murder suspect, had shoplifted from a store and been filmed on a closed-circuit camera. A cop working security in the store recognized him from a wanted poster. A new alert was issued . . . but no one had seen the girl with him. And the story was front and center again.

Jenna stood up. Her legs felt wobbly. She needed to remain calm. She needed to tell the police.

And she needed to tell Jared.

How on earth was she going to tell Jared?





CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT


Jared felt sleepy. He’d spent the past two hours reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court for English class. At times the book was funny, and at other times it became quite disturbing. He liked it okay but probably not as much as other things they’d read, such as Lord of the Flies or even The Last of the Mohicans. But the book passed the time, and he knew a quiz and a paper were coming up, and he needed to do well on both.

He’d spent the weekend thinking about his life and what he wanted to do next. He liked his friends a lot. He liked Hawks Mill, even if it did seem small compared with most places in the world. But there was enough to do—a bookstore, a movie theater, a comic shop.