The Familiar Dark(26)
I don’t know how much time had passed with me staring into the open freezer section at the grocery store. Long enough that my face felt numb from cold, not so long that an employee had asked me if I was all right. I wasn’t hungry, my appetite having disappeared along with my daughter. All my clothes hanging loose, jeans held up by the jutting bones of my hips. But eating felt like something Junie would want me to do, so I stood, staring blankly at the colorful boxes of frozen dinners. Chicken, pasta, Salisbury steak. Waiting for something to click in my head, tell me which one to reach for.
And then the thing I’d been anticipating, the hand on my shoulder. The tentative voice in my ear. “Hey, are you okay?” But when I turned my head, it was Zach Logan standing there, his brow creased with concern. I let go of the freezer door and took a stumbling step back from him, his hand sliding down my arm and away.
“I’m fine.” I waved my fingers toward the freezer. “Nothing sounds good.”
“I know,” Zach said. “Everything tastes like cardboard to me. But it’s important to eat. You have to keep your strength up.”
I wondered if he and Cal had gotten together, formulated a script between them to keep me eating. Wondered if Jenny was getting the same pressure to stick a fork in her mouth.
“I hope you came in the back way,” Zach said. “There are reporters out front.”
When the reporters had first appeared in town, a few days after Izzy’s funeral, I hadn’t connected them to the murders. Cal had driven me past a clot of them, cameras and microphones and faces full of fake concern, and I’d turned to him, confused. “What’s going on? Why do we have reporters here?” The last time I could remember anything newsworthy happening in Barren Springs was when dead fish filled up the river and half the town thought the end days were coming. And even then it was only the local Springfield news who’d shown up.
Cal had glanced at me. “They’re here for Junie,” he said. “And Izzy.” He spoke slowly, like he wasn’t sure if my question had been a joke.
“Oh,” I said, feeling like a fool. If it had been someone else’s kid laid open like a hunted deer, I would have known in an instant what the media was doing here.
I’d managed not to get cornered by the reporters, for the most part. Using the maze of Barren Springs streets to my advantage. The reporters tended to stay close to the businesses clustered along the highway, their news vans crowding the front lots of the laundromat and the now defunct florist. They didn’t seem to realize I parked in the tiny alleys behind the stores, came in through the back doors, and left the same way. Just in case, I’d taken to wearing a baseball hat, hair pulled back in a ponytail, when I ran errands. My half-assed attempt at a disguise.
Everyone in town helped, too. Told the reporters they’d seen me heading toward the Dollar General one town over, or had heard I was grabbing lunch at the sub shop, when really I was right inside my apartment waiting for their news vans to drive away. Nothing brought the people of Barren Springs together like disdain for a nosy outsider. Cal said he’d overhead one of the reporters complaining that they’d never been to a place with people so reluctant to see their own faces on the front of a newspaper. Because no one was talking, the stories, so far, had been a rehash of the same brutal facts everyone already knew, mixed with increasingly disparaging descriptions of Barren Springs.
“Thanks for the heads-up.” I let the freezer door close without pulling anything off the shelf. “Have the police talked to you lately?” I asked, fishing to see if he knew about Izzy and the older man. I didn’t want to be the one to tell him, not if I could help it.
“They came by yesterday,” Zach said. “Asking about her cell phone.”
“What about it?”
“They didn’t find it. With the girls. I guess they got a list of her cell phone activity and she’d been texting to a burner phone.”
“Do they know about what?” I asked.
“Not yet. They’re waiting on the phone company.” Zach crossed his arms, shook his head. “I can’t imagine who she would have been texting. We told her a thousand times she wasn’t allowed to text or talk to someone we didn’t know.”
“Did you ever check her phone?” I asked, only realizing how accusatory I sounded after the words left my mouth.
“At first we did every day, but there was never anything but calls and texts to us and a couple of friends. Most of the kids her age didn’t have a phone yet.” Zach paused, looked away. “But we’d trailed off the last few months. Neither one of us can remember the last time we read through her texts.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered,” I told him, because he seemed to be waiting for some kind of reassurance. “Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with what happened.”
Zach nodded, but it was the kind of perfunctory acknowledgment that meant he didn’t believe a word I was saying. That was okay; I didn’t believe it, either. “It still doesn’t seem real,” Zach continued. “That they’re both gone.” He tried to catch my eye, but I looked away. “I keep waiting for them to walk into the kitchen, demanding snacks. Sometimes I swear I can hear them giggling from Izzy’s room late at night.” He blinked fast, tightened his jaw. “I check Izzy’s bed in the morning to see if she might be there. I know it’s stupid, but every day I think maybe she will be.”