“We’ve been best friends ever since,” she said to Sally.
The wine bottle on the coffee table was nearly empty, and Jenna felt a drunken tingling forming at the back of her neck. But she didn’t feel sick anymore. She was hungry, her stomach sending gnawing messages to her brain. It felt good to talk to someone, someone who seemed content to listen without judgment. Talking of Celia made Jenna feel lonely and guilty again, but the pain wasn’t as sharp.
She looked at the TV. Reena came back from yet another commercial, so Sally turned up the volume. Jenna checked the clock. It was nearing the end of the show’s time slot.
“No,” she muttered to herself.
“If you’re just joining us, we’re covering the breaking news that an earring, an apparent match to the one apparently lost by Celia Walters on the night she disappeared, has been found. What we know now is that a man tried to sell this earring at a pawnshop in Hawks Mill, Kentucky, and an alert clerk notified the police. The man is in custody, but the authorities aren’t saying anything else at this time. Tune in to our coverage at eleven o’clock tonight, after The Foreign Affairs Hour, which is coming up next.”
“No.” Jenna jumped up. She scrambled around the living room until she found her phone and dialed Detective Poole. “Come on, come on.” It went straight to voice mail. She tried three more times, feeling Sally hovering behind her. The detective still didn’t answer.
“She’s busy,” Sally said. “A new can of worms just opened.”
“Drive me to the police station.”
Sally reached over and gently took the phone out of her hand. “No. Let them do their jobs. The cops are having a hard enough time around here. Everybody’s buying guns and jumping at their own shadows, even three months later. No one’s relaxed. Are you hungry?”
“You’re trying to change the subject.”
“Yes. Are you hungry?”
Jenna gave in. “I could eat something,” she said. “And that wine’s almost gone. But I have more in the kitchen.”
Jenna pulled some grapes and decent cheese out of the refrigerator and found a box of crackers in the cupboard. She pointed across the room. “There’s another bottle in there. Cabernet if you want to open it.”
Please, she thought. Let me learn something about this case. Something real.
Even if I have to wait until tomorrow.
I promise I’ll drink less.
“I have to pace myself,” Sally said.
Jenna looked up at the clock. Seven o’clock. “Shit.”
“What is it?” Sally asked. She dug in a few different drawers until she found the wine opener, and then she went to work on the bottle.
“Jared. Get a load of this.” She tried to shift away from Celia. From the earring. A man in custody. “Did your sons ever have girls in the house? I mean, without you knowing it?”
“Probably all the time. I don’t want to know what they did.” She poured them each a glass. “Ignorance is bliss.”
“I came home today after all that crap at the barn. I walk into his room, and he has this girl on top of him. I’d never seen her before, didn’t even know he was hanging out with a girl. What am I supposed to do with that?”
“Buy him some condoms,” she said.
Jenna had just started chewing a cracker with cheese on top, but she paused to give Sally a look. “That’s all the motherly wisdom you could come up with? He’s over at this girl’s house now. But how do I know that? Should I call over there? Or go over?”
“Relax. Kids are going to do what they’re going to do. I thought you trusted him.”
“I do. But how do I know I trust her?”
“You think she’s a bad influence?”
“I just met her. And ever since Celia disappeared . . . I try not to be too paranoid or crazy about what Jared does.”
“But it seeps in.”
“Exactly. It colors everything I do. I check the back of my car before I get in, even in broad daylight. I rush from the car to the front door like the bogeyman is about to get me. Like I’m a dumb girl in a horror movie. And I worry about Jared when he leaves the house. He’s a boy, so I figure he’s a little safer. But still . . . he’s young. He could be a target for something.” Jenna sipped her wine, then threw a grape into her mouth and bit down. She pictured the girl, Tabitha, in her mind again, tried to reexamine her first and only impression of the girl objectively. “And there was something about this girl, Sally. Something about the look in her eye. There was an edge to her, a toughness, something you wouldn’t acquire just growing up the way Jared did. Even with his dad leaving us high and dry.”
“A lot of kids come from shitty homes,” Sally said.