16. Jayne
JAYNE
“SO, YOU TALKED to Mason for a while, he gave you the creeps, and then you made your way outside to the bonfire?”
“Right. I really just wanted to find Sadie and get the heck out of there. Based on when our parents texted, we had maybe an hour and a half until they got back, and it was making me nervous.”
“Are your parents strict?”
I shrug. Haven’t we gone over all this already?
“They’re normal,” I reply. “My dad tends to be a little more lax than my mom. He was really popular back in his high school days, and he likes to encourage me and Sadie to go out and let loose a little bit. My mom draws a hard line, although Sadie crossed it a lot. I’m not sure if my parents really knew about half the stuff Sadie and Liz got up to, or if they did, maybe they decided to ignore it because they were trying to give Liz the benefit of the doubt.
You know, tell themselves that Sadie was going to be a good influence on her or whatever. ”
“What about you?”
“I would think it’s pretty clear by now, Detective, that I have approximately zero interest in the usual high school stuff. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a four-year sentence I have to go through until I can get to college and get out of this town.”
“Yes, I did start to pick up on that. So, back to the party…”
The bonfire is blazing, and the heat coming from it takes my breath away.
I start scanning the crowd for Sadie, looking for Ben first, since I’m more likely to see his tall head sticking up above everyone else.
Something about the conversation I just had with Mason really doesn’t sit right with me, and I’m starting to worry that Sadie was playing one of her classic games and she messed with the wrong kid.
“When you say ‘one of her classic games,’ what do you mean?”
Ugh. I would prefer that this not even come up, but it’s also increasingly clear that I can’t really talk about what happened last night without talking about some of Sadie’s… darker tendencies.
“She liked to mess with people,” I say. “She never meant anything by it. I don’t want you to think she was some kind of mean girl, but there were these games she liked to play, especially with boys.
Sadie and I were both really awkward in grade school and middle school.
We got made fun of a lot for having red hair, and freckles, and being too pale when all the other girls started tanning in junior high.
That kind of thing. But then, in eighth grade—I don’t know how else to put this—we got cute.
Grew into ourselves, I guess you could say.
And I enjoyed it, sure, but Sadie relished it.
Then, a few years later, she got together with Ben, and it was like she entered the social stratosphere. ”
“Did you ever feel envious of that?”
I laugh before I can stop myself. “Sorry. It’s just that we’re twins.
I wasn’t jealous of her looks or style, because I have looks and style.
And as far as her being the literal homecoming queen, I don’t mean to sound disrespectful, because I love my sister, but I just could not possibly care less.
It’s sort of like asking me if I’d like to be the queen of the dump.
It’s still a dump, even if you’re sitting on the highest pile of trash. ”
This time it’s Detective Budd who laughs.
I smile. Okay, so I was right to like this woman a little bit. “You know what I mean, don’t you?” I ask.
“Let’s just say that I certainly got out of Dodge myself the minute I could.”
“And you probably don’t care about whether or not you were the most popular girl in high school, do you?”
“Not a lick.”
“And you’re probably more successful now than everyone else you went to school with, aren’t you?”
Detective Budd shrugs. “That may indeed be the case. But I don’t keep up with anyone, so I wouldn’t know.”
“You and I are very much alike.”
She nods and makes a few more notes. For a moment, there is no sound in our room except the scratch of her pen.
“Tell me, what kind of game do you think Sadie was playing with Mason?”
“She knew that he’d asked me out a month or two ago and that it really creeped me out.
Maybe she wanted to get revenge on him or make him feel stupid; maybe she was pretending to be me to play a trick on him and make him think that I wanted to get together with him after all.
And then he could have found out and gotten angry.
Or he could have thought it was me all along.
She could have started it, and then he took it too far—”
Seconds ago Detective Budd and I were bantering like we were in some kind of movie, but as I start to talk about what I think could have happened to Sadie, all the air goes out of the room.
For a minute, I forgot this was real. For a minute, I was just having fun going toe to toe with someone who has a brain worth its weight. For a minute, it was all fun and games.
“Jayne? Can you continue?”
I take a deep breath. Of course I can continue. I have to. This is the important part.
Evan and I are still texting, and I’m sending him photos of the bonfire and the old barn illuminated in the background.
Given that he lives in Palm Springs, Evan quite literally can’t wrap his head around the idea that kids in the Midwest actually party in cornfields.
I wish I could say it wasn’t true, and up until tonight, even I couldn’t verify it with photographic evidence, which Evan tends to demand for everything.
But now I’m here, and he is clearly reveling in what appears to him like the absolute absurdity of the heartland.
I put my phone away. Evan can be a little bit demanding, and every so often, I get annoyed at his almost gleeful disdain for people and things that he sees as beneath him on the scale of culture.
Although, as long as he and I are on the same level, I guess I can’t complain too much.
After all, it’s hard to find people who truly understand you.
But Evan is going to have to wait. I still haven’t been able to find Sadie, and I’m starting to panic a little bit. Finally, I spot Liz on the other side of the bonfire. I weave my way through the crowd of people and grab her arm.
“Shit!” she says, spilling some of her drink. It smells strong. “Jayne, you scared me!”
“Are you telling me that the first time you saw Miss Stratton at the party, it was around ten thirty at the bonfire?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“You didn’t see her or speak to her before that time?”
“No. I’m sure she was around, but I didn’t see her until I got down there, and I asked her if she’d seen Sadie or Ben because we really had to get going.
She was a little drunk, and she got weird when I mentioned Ben.
Given their history, I didn’t think too much of it, although I was surprised that she was drinking, given what a big deal she made about giving it up and all that.
I’m not trying to get her in trouble. I just—I don’t know what she was up to last night exactly, and Liz can get super emotional when she drinks, so just knowing how she reacted when I asked about Ben and how she didn’t know where Sadie was…
I’m not trying to imply anything; I just wouldn’t trust her memory of everything that happened last night. ”
“I see. So what did you do after you spoke to Miss Stratton?”
“I mean, no offense to Liz, but I realized she would be pretty useless to me as far as finding my sister, so I started to walk back up to the house. I was calling and texting Sadie the whole time, but I still had no response from her. I feel guilty saying this now, but I was starting to get really angry. Here I was, dragging myself through a field in the middle of the night, just because I was trying to save my sister from getting in trouble with our parents, and she didn’t even have the decency to respond to one of my texts. ”
Putting my head in my hands, I take a few more deep breaths. “It’s really awful,” I say, my voice muffled, “to know that while my sister was being killed by some psychopath, I was angry at her. That was the emotion I felt. That’s what I was directing at her. Anger. If only I’d known.”
“It was impossible for you to know, Jayne. No matter how strong your connection was.”
“But that’s the thing,” I say. “When I was on my way to the house, I got this feeling. Honestly, it was like a stabbing pain in my gut. It probably sounds crazy to you, but I knew in that moment that my sister was in serious danger. And when I looked out at the old barn, I saw that there was a light on in it. I tend to pay good attention to my surroundings, and I just knew the light wasn’t on when I was walking down to the fire. ”
“And you decided to investigate?”
“Yeah.”
“I understand from Miss Stratton and Mr. Carrera that the barn is where kids go to hook up with one another at Trevor’s parties. Why didn’t you just assume that’s what it was?”
“I told you, Detective, I’d never been to one of Trevor’s parties before. I had no idea that’s what the barn was for until just now.”
I’m annoyed she interrupted the most important part of the story with such an ancillary detail.
“Anyway,” I say pointedly, “I was going to head to the barn anyway when Ben showed up out of nowhere and asked if I was okay, because I was practically doubled over on the ground. My stomach hurt so bad. I told him something didn’t feel right and I was worried about Sadie, that I thought something bad might be happening in the barn.
He agreed to check it out with me, because he didn’t know where she was either.
We were walking together at first, but the closer we got to the barn, the worse I started to feel, and I just knew something was seriously wrong.
So I took off running. I don’t know what Ben was thinking—maybe I was panicked and so he got panicked too; we obviously haven’t talked about it after everything that happened, so you would have to ask him—but I think on some level, he knew something was wrong too. ”