Jared felt like a prisoner in his own house.
News of the discovery of the body broke quickly and spread through town like a rushing tide of water. The phone started ringing off the hook again, and local reporters in their makeup and perfectly tailored clothes showed up at their house. They parked their news vans at the edge of the property and crept up to the door, smiling ever so brightly and trying hard to convince Jenna to let Jared just say a few words on the air.
It was a frenzy like nothing Hawks Mill had ever seen: a missing woman, a dead woman, and a dead man . . . all within the space of a few months.
Jared felt as if he’d been transported to the set of a TV show or movie. So much craziness. So many rumors and ideas and theories.
So much fear.
His mom turned all the reporters away, begging them to give her son his space.
“He’s only fifteen,” she said over and over as he listened from his bedroom.
Then the reporters tried her, asking for her comments on the, as they put it, bizarre turn of events. His mom refused to comment, except to remind the reporters that a family in town had suffered a terrible loss and everyone should be thinking about them.
She also called the police, asking Detective Poole to send someone around to shoo the reporters away. A patrol car arrived, and two beefy cops in dark jackets, their badges and shiny zippers visible from the house, stepped out. They smiled as they talked to the reporters, but Jared could tell they were trying to get them to leave. The reporters kept pointing at the house, and he could imagine the case they were making. The public’s right to know. The first amendment.
The reporters moved back to the property line, but they didn’t leave. Jared considered it a small victory.
He tried to concentrate on school. He worked ahead in his classes, tackling the readings and assignments for the next day and the day after that. But he had a hard time getting anything accomplished. His mom buzzed around the house, cleaning the kitchen floor and then the bathrooms, her usual routine when something was bothering her that she couldn’t do anything about.
Around noon, Detective Poole called and suggested Jared and his mom put out a statement, something asking for privacy and referring all future questions to the police. So they did, hoping everything would calm down.
Jared’s phone pinged all day. His closest friends called and texted, and then kids he barely knew wrote to him through e-mail and social media. The friends wanted to know how he was doing. The acquaintances said all kinds of things. They wanted to know how bad the body smelled or why weird shit kept happening to his family.
He heard his mom talking to his grandma. He knew what Grandma was saying. The old lady was like clockwork with her complaints.
How do you expect to raise a child with the police there all the time?
Jared didn’t know how his mom put up with it. And he didn’t know how she turned out so well adjusted with his grandma for a mother.
He also tried to ease off on feeling too sorry for himself or thinking of himself as a prisoner. Natalie had been a prisoner of some kind. He’d seen the lock on the outside of her door. He knew the strict curfew she lived under. And her father had simply taken her away, swept her up and out of town. Back on the run. If she was lucky. If something worse hadn’t happened to her.
Could his first love really end that way?
? ? ?
Shortly after dinner, while the reporters were still out on the lawn but seemed to be wrapping up after doing some kind of live shot of their house for the evening broadcasts, his mom retreated to her office. Jared sat in the kitchen picking at the remains of the leftover spaghetti he’d heated in the microwave. His mom said she didn’t have an appetite.
Jared thought he’d imagined the light knocking against the door. It could have been the house settling or a squirrel running through the gutters.
But then the knock came again.
He didn’t bother his mom. He figured it was a rogue reporter, one who hopped the fence into the backyard because he felt bold, hoping to get a scoop by bugging the family while they sat in the kitchen. Jared intended to tell him to get lost, refer him to the statement the police had issued on their behalf.
He eased the door open.
Ursula blinked as the light from the kitchen spilled out onto the small back stoop. Jared jumped a little. Hers was the last face he’d expected to see out there.
“What do you want?” he asked.
Ursula raised her finger to her lips. “I need you,” she said, her voice just above a whisper. “Someone needs to talk to you.”
“Who?”
“Look, can you just come out? There aren’t any reporters back here. We can cut through the yard behind us and talk to my friend. It won’t take long.”