Chapter 1 #2
His jaw clenched. “No. Of course not. Why would you even think that?”
I held his gaze. I’d known him for years, long enough to recognize the flicker — the half-second delay that made me doubt him.
“You said she went for a walk.” The rest stop where her car was found was halfway between their expensive suburban house and the college campus where she taught classes three days a week.
“That’s what she said.” His mouth flattened. “I wasn’t her keeper, Hattie. Jane was an adult. She was her own person.”
When they were flush at the beginning of their relationship, Jane was head over heels for Nolan, and they were already inseparable.
She had swooned over him, and he had doted on her, but I didn’t realize until later how he’d tried to control her.
How that initial crush turned into something he distorted into ugliness.
“Was? You fucker.” Rage and bile swam in my gut.
Flying forward, I threw myself at him. “Don’t talk about her like she’s gone.
She’s not.” My fists were flailing as I hit him over and over again.
Vaguely, I realized that Nolan was pushing me away and putting up his arms, but it wasn’t until a few deputies pulled me away that I took a heaving breath.
Nolan had blood streaming from his nose. “You crazy bitch.” He shook a finger at me. “I want to press charges. That was assault.”
One of the deputies shrugged. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about. You must have tripped. Do you need a medic?”
Wrapping my arms around my stomach, I tried not to throw up as Nolan argued with them. He’d already written off his wife, or worse, he had killed her. My sister was gone.
I sat on the hood of my car as the search lights flickered across the trees, as Nolan drove away.
Good riddance. Divers had been called in to drag the lake, making me shiver thinking about the possibility of my sister being down in the water, her body floating like some lost mermaid who’d forgotten how to breathe.
I pressed record on my phone and whispered:
“My sister is missing, and I think her husband is a suspect. We found her car at a rest stop with the door open. The cops say that she could have just left her shit bag of a husband, but why would she leave the car behind? It doesn’t make any sense.”
By the second day, the woods had given nothing back. Not a shoe. Not a body. Nothing.
They’d drug the lake and found nothing. The sheriff had warned me that it wasn’t impossible for the divers not to find a body in the lake at these temperatures, and he wasn’t fully convinced about the runaway line he was pitching me.
Nolan had come back to stand by his sedan while they were wrapping things up, talking to one of the deputies.
He was crying — the kind of dry, careful crying that photographs well for the media.
He had that down already, the public grief.
But his eyes were clear when they landed on me. Fucking psycho.
I recorded it just in case I needed it later.
The way his thumb rubbed his wedding ring.
The absence of mud on his shoes. The fact that he hadn’t once gone into those woods himself after that first time.
All of that stuff made him a suspect in my book.
Not to mention the fact that he’d slipped into the past tense already. Asshole.
The sheriff approached, hat in hand like a man delivering bad news to a neighbor.
“Ms. Harper, we’re suspending the ground search for now unless something new comes to light.
” His eyes shifted past me, surveying the woods surrounding the tiny rest area, which was nothing more than a postage stamp next to the freeway.
Sure, the woods led to a recreation area and then to the lake, but that was it.
Then it bordered another freeway. We both knew there were countless other options if she had been taken.
Someone could have thrown her in a car and just… driven away. Anywhere.
“It’s Hattie,” I said automatically.
He cleared his throat. “Right. Hattie. We’ll continue to investigate. If anything turns up, you’ll get a call. We’ve talked to her husband, but it seems as if they were having trouble at home.” He shrugged as if that answered everything.
“Anything turns up?” I repeated. “She’s not a package, Sheriff. She’s my sister. The other half of my heart.”
He looked uncomfortable. “I’m sorry. I know this is hard, but none of the evidence points to abduction or foul play.”
My laugh came out sharp and broken. “You mean her car by the side of the road and footprints that just stop? If those were even hers. Did you guys even check that? Someone else was there.”
It was inconceivable to me that this was just being dropped. Jane wouldn’t just leave me. Ever. I’d known that she and Nolan hadn’t been in a good space, but she would have made other arrangements. I would have helped her. She would have known I’d have done anything for her.
“Look ma’m. Investigations are dynamic.” Biting my tongue, I let him give me the party line. There was nothing else to say then. They’d found nothing that they could use, and they’d lost any leads they thought they’d have. He gave a sad little shrug. “If something comes up, we’ll call.”
“Great,” I managed.
Then they packed up the search, as if folding away a bad dream. Yellow tape came down, volunteers drifted home, and the cops promised to “keep investigating,” which everyone knew meant we’ll move on to the next missing woman before the week’s over.
I sat in the back of my SUV, wrapped in a borrowed blanket that smelled like cigarette smoke, and watched them drive away until the last cop car was gone in the distance, leaving only me and the trampled ground around the entrance to the woods.
They’d already towed Jane’s car. My whole body felt numb, even my hands, even though the sun was up.
When he left, I sat there for a long time, blanket clutched around me, watching the sunlight move across the dirt. The woods looked calm again, like they’d swallowed their secret and gone back to sleep.
I thought about all the cases I’d seen online — the pretty women who vanished into hashtags and hashtags that vanished into silence. Jane’s name would be another one in a week. Another sad little news alert that people scrolled past while eating breakfast.
Not if I could help it.
When I got back to my apartment, I didn’t shower. Didn’t sleep. I sat at my desk and opened my laptop. Typed Missing and Jane Cannon into every social media search bar I could find. I tried more variations. Nothing yet. Just a local article quoting the sheriff and Nolan’s photo front and center.
“Distraught husband pleads for wife’s return.”
The words blurred as I stared at them.
I could almost hear Jane teasing me — You’re overanalyzing again, Hattie.
Breathe. She was the only one who called me Hattie.
It was Jane and Josephine, but she’d started using a variation of my middle name because she hated that we both had J’s.
Identical twins. If she didn’t come back, then I really would be the only J. My breath felt like glass in my chest.
I pushed record on my voice memo.
“She’s just gone. My sister. The cops say that she just left on her own, but I’m telling you right now …
they’re wrong. Someone isn’t saying something.
There has to be something. I have questions that aren’t being answered.
Why would she leave her car? Jane was smart.
Smarter than me. Whose footprints were those?
If they were hers, someone else must have been there.
I’m going to find out who.” My voice cracked, but I didn’t stop.
“If Jane didn’t walk away. Someone took her.
And I’m not waiting for anyone else to prove it. I’ll do it myself.”
Click.
That was the first recording.
Two weeks later, I quit my job at my marketing firm — the one with the corner office and the red-soled shoes and the fake smiles. My boss blinked at me like I’d lost my mind. Maybe I had. I sold the condo and moved everything I couldn’t carry into storage.
Every spare dollar was spent on ad buys and social media boosts. I built a website, a forum, and an online tracker. Nights blurred into dawns, the coffee burned my stomach, and I didn’t care.
I started posting voice clips — raw, unscripted updates. “Search day twelve. Lead in Bristol County. Possible sighting.” “Interviewed neighbor, claims argument the night before.” “No response from husband to latest request for statement.”
People started listening and then sharing. Then, sending me tips.
By month three, I wasn’t just a woman looking for her sister. I was the girl who wouldn’t let it go.
By month six, that became my whole identity, and by the first anniversary of Jane’s disappearance, the police had closed the file, but I didn’t.
Because if the world forgot her — if I forgot her — then she’d be gone twice. And I couldn’t live with that.
Then people started sending me other cases … and suddenly I had a whole new life.
By then, The J & J Hour had built a name, a logo, and a growing community of people who liked, commented, and shared. It started as a space to discuss Jane—to document what I was finding, or not finding, but it grew into something bigger.
The setup was simple: my living room, my phone, and an editing program I barely knew how to use. Sometimes I’d be traveling in my car, or you could hear me talking to someone, but I didn’t care much about polish, and my listeners loved that. I was raw and open.
When the first media outlet called, asking for an interview about “citizen sleuthing in the age of podcasts,” I nearly said no. But then I thought about Jane and how the world had turned the page on her story as if it was just yesterday’s news.
So I said yes.
They asked all the predictable questions: “What motivates you?” “What’s it like to be a woman in true crime media?” “Do you ever feel unsafe?”
I told them the truth: “I feel like if I stop, she dies again.” In my heart, I knew that my beautiful twin was gone for good. There was a hole inside me that would forever be empty.
That quote ended up everywhere.
The followers doubled. The emails tripled. People sent me tips, rumors, and half-truths. Sometimes, they sent me lies, too. I learned to tell the difference, mostly.
But through all the interviews and the increasing noise, Jane’s case remained cold.
No remains. No trace. After that, the podcast was no longer just about Jane.
It became about every woman who disappeared and was written off as “unstable,” “impulsive,” or a “runaway.” The missing girls whose families were told to move on.
Sometimes, the messages I received made me cry. Some nights, they made me terrified. All of them kept me going. These women who were missing weren’t going to disappear into the dark.
I built my own small crime squad that worked behind the scenes and helped me with my investigations. They were the ones who cut through the red tape and accessed places others couldn’t.
We skipped cases where the women didn’t actually want to be found because, occasionally, the cops got it right. There were women who just disappeared because they wanted to get away from an abusive situation.
There were times when cases came together, and cases were closed.
Those were the nights I’d pour a drink and whisper a quiet thank-you into the dark.
I no longer believed in closure for me. That was long gone. Jane’s case would always be a question mark. Now I knew that the hurt would never go away.