She turned and started hustling down the street toward her house, moving away from him quickly for the second time that afternoon. Jared looked in the direction she hurried, and on the porch of the fourth house on the left, a man stood, pacing back and forth, the red glow from a cigarette burning in the darkness.
Jared couldn’t make out the man’s features. He looked broad, even a little heavy through his chest and stomach. And he paced like a panther Jared had once seen in the Louisville Zoo, a desperate-looking animal that simply moved from one end of its cage to the other. The animal depressed Jared, even as a child, because the big cat seemed so eager to run, to charge, to hunt, but it couldn’t.
Jared jogged after Tabitha. “Wait. If that’s your dad, I can tell him it’s my fault. I’ll say my mom was talking to you—”
She wheeled around. Even in the dark, he saw the tears glistening in her eyes, about to spill over. She jabbed the air with her index finger, the stubby nail pointing directly at his heart.
“Go,” she said. “Please. Go. Now.”
She didn’t wait for a response but turned back around and kept walking away. Jared turned and left, not sure if the smoking man—Tabitha’s father—had seen them together or not. And if he had seen them, what would it mean for Tabitha when she entered her house?
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jenna saw Celia again.
Her best friend walked along the edge of Caldwell Park, wearing a white nightgown. Celia’s hair was down, lifting in the light breeze. The trees were colored by autumn—vivid reds, oranges, and yellows—even though it was dark. The trees practically burned. And on the porch of every house a jack-o’-lantern glowed.
Jenna knew when the scene was taking place. A week after Halloween. The week Celia disappeared.
Jenna watched her friend through thick hedges, the leaves and branches jabbing at her and tickling her face. She tried to extract herself but couldn’t move. She couldn’t slip out of their grip. She couldn’t step forward onto the sidewalk where her friend walked.
And then the car. Always a different car. Sometimes a white van, sometimes a hearse. It pulled alongside Celia, and a hand reached out to grab her. Never a full body. Never a face. Only that bone-white hand, reaching through the dark to take her friend.
Celia looked back. She knew Jenna was there, trapped in the bushes. Celia didn’t speak, didn’t scream or call for help. But she looked back, terror etched on her face like a frozen mask.
Jenna couldn’t make a sound. She tried to shout, tried to scream, but she couldn’t make a sound. Her voice was choked off, silenced—
? ? ?
The chiming of her phone woke her on the couch.
Her heart thumped, even though she’d had some version of the dream . . . how many times? Fifteen at least. She vowed to stop counting, vowed to not let the image of Celia’s terrified face haunt her anymore.
But how could it not? How could she not contemplate, in her darkest, most desperate moments, what must have happened to her friend?
Jenna sat up on the couch. Her neck ached from the crooked angle. She felt lonelier than ever, the dull ache of Celia’s loss worming through her body. She missed Celia so badly. Missed her laugh, missed the sound of her voice. It felt as if someone had cut a piece out of her on that November night.
An empty beer bottle sat on the coffee table, and her head swam a little. Good work, Jenna, she told herself. Puke. Don’t eat anything else. And then drink a beer. And you’re a nurse. Shouldn’t you know better? For the twentieth time since November, she promised herself to drink less. To maybe—just maybe—stop drinking altogether.
The phone chimed three straight times. She checked her watch. Six ten. How long had she slept? Thirty minutes or so?
The house around her was quiet. She replayed the events that had occurred right before she dozed off. Jared left to walk his girlfriend—girlfriend?—home. Jenna’s face flushed with embarrassment, and she had to laugh. What an introduction for that kid. Nowhere to go but up.
“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?”