And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(14)

“No, thanks. I’d like to look through Jenny’s room.”

Susan got herself a glass of water from the tap, then led him to a bedroom just down the hall from the garage. She flipped on the light, revealing a room painted light blue. The queen-size bed was neatly made with a yellow bedspread. A desk next to the door had a MacBook Air and a lamp and books stacked on it.

Susan turned on the desk lamp and walked around the bed to turn on the lamp on the far side.

“What do you notice is missing?” Packard asked her.

Susan looked around. “Her letter jacket. Her purse.” She noticed a blue container on the bedside table and opened it. “Her retainer.”

Packard pulled out the three desk drawers as far as they would go. Mostly pens and pencils, old school notebooks, batteries, hand lotion, lip balm, a box of thank-you cards, outdated electronics, and charging cords.

Her backpack was on the floor beside the desk, split open like it had been gutted, its contents a notebook and an AP English textbook and a paperback copy of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.

On top of the dresser was a sharps container filled with needles, discarded infusion sets, and used reservoirs from her insulin pump. There was also an old square TV and an even older VCR. “This is ancient technology,” Packard said.

“She’s got Star Wars VHS tapes that Tom bought long before she was born. We watched them a million times when she was little. She still likes to put on The Empire Strikes Back when she can’t sleep. She doesn’t want new DVDs. I asked.”

Packard pulled out the dresser drawers, went through them methodically, but found only clothes. He stopped for a minute to look out the bedroom window. If it were January, he would have been looking at a neighborhood buried waist-deep in snow and imagining winter’s worst reasons why these kids didn’t make it home. A car sliding sideways into a deep ditch. An icehouse with a leaky propane heater.

A snowmobile dropping into open water.

It was almost May 1. The snow and the ice were gone. It was dark out, but he could see tulips in the neighbor’s yard across the street.

Packard lifted the mattress on one side, walked around the bed, and lifted the other side. Nothing. Susan was sitting at the desk, looking at Jenny’s computer. Packard pulled away the pillows at the top of the bed and froze.

“Susan.”

She turned in the chair, got up without a word. She put her knee on the edge of the mattress as she reached for what Packard had uncovered.

Jenny’s phone.

***

Packard and Susan sat at her dining room table, Jenny’s phone in front of them, shiny and black and inscrutable on its surface. Susan had poured herself a glass of red wine. She hadn’t offered Packard any.

Susan had the password to Jenny’s phone, so they were able to unlock it. Jenny had nine missed calls and twenty-three unread text messages, mostly from friends wondering where she was and why she wasn’t replying. No calls or texts from Jesse.

Under her recent calls, Packard could see Jenny and Jesse had talked for forty minutes around midnight. The last text Jenny received between when Susan saw her before bed and when she noticed Jenny wasn’t home at 6:45 a.m. came from Jesse at 1:38 a.m. It said, On my way. Jenny had responded with Meet u @ the corner. Nothing in their previous messages gave any hint about where they were going or what they were doing.

Packard and Susan went through Jenny’s photos and emails. They checked her social media accounts. There had been no recent activity on any of them.

There was an app that gave them access to Jenny’s bank account and credit card. “She took out $100 in cash a week ago. She used her credit card three days ago to buy gas for her car and pay for food at Hardee’s. Two days ago she got charged the monthly fee for her Apple Music. Nothing since. Nothing today.”

After they went through the phone, he’d told Susan about his phone call with Ann Crawford and the BOLO he’d put out on her car. He sent himself several photos from Jenny’s phone of her and Jesse that he then emailed to dispatch to update their files. He called to see if there had been any sightings in the last couple of hours, shaking his head for Susan when he was told that, so far, no one had seen anything.

It was nearly 10:00 p.m. Packard got lost in thought for a minute about how the size and shape of the object in front of them now represented the idea of a phone—it had become a symbol of itself—and how odd it was that we still called them phones even though that was probably their least used feature.

Susan said, “This changes everything.” She nodded at the phone as she set down her wineglass. “I assume I don’t need to explain to you about sixteen-year-old girls and their phones.”

Packard shook his head. What he knew about the internal lives of modern teenage girls would fit in a single tweet with characters left over, but he knew everyone these days—himself included—was glued to their phones. Even his memory of first meeting Jenny was of her working at the restaurant and looking at her phone every chance she got.

“Let’s think about why she might leave it behind,” Packard suggested.

“She wouldn’t. That’s the problem.”

“But she did. So…it’s almost two o’clock in the morning. She’s meeting her boyfriend. Maybe she decides she doesn’t need it. Who’s she going to call or text at 2:00 a.m.?”

“But it’s not just about calling or texting. She and her friends don’t go anywhere without their phones. They’re constantly taking selfies, recording, snapping, posting, chatting. Any chance she gets, she’s scrolling and scrolling.”