Callie
She makes a list of halfway houses, but they can be tricky—no one wants to give up residents’ privacy, but sometimes she’s able to drop words like chief and missing person, and they’ll at least tell her Jenna’s never been there.
She drives from one halfway house to another, in between shifts babysitting Opal.
The next on her list is a place called Ocean’s Haven.
She pulls up to a faded Victorian in Asbury Park on a Sunday afternoon expecting nothing, jittery with too much gas station coffee, and underneath that, a deep, abiding exhaustion that makes the bones of her face ache.
“I know you,” a woman says from the porch, between hard draws on a vape pen. She’s cross-legged on a rattan peacock chair, a faded streak of blue hair unspooling from under the pulled-up hood of her sweatshirt.
“You’re Jenna’s kid.”
Her breath catches in her chest, the cold ocean air tingling in her lungs. “You know her?”
“Sure. She was here for a while. This summer. She was always showing people your picture.”
Callie takes a big step closer, leans over the porch railing. “Have you heard from her lately?”
“Nah. She left in July. She doing okay? I liked her.”
“She’s missing,” Callie says.
“Damn. Who did it?”
The woman’s question hits like a hammer at the base of her spine. Sure, Callie hasn’t mentioned the drugs, but this is the first person who hasn’t assumed Jenna did this to herself. “What makes you ask that? Who did what?”
“She said she knew this was going to happen. She talked about someone who was going to hunt her down.”
“She wasn’t talking about the devil, right? That’s always been her thing.”
“Nope. Some guy from when she was a teenager. She said she was keeping some secrets for him.”
“Did she say a name? What he looked like?”
“Nah.”
“What secrets was she keeping?”
“Whatever they were, she sure as shit wasn’t telling me. Something that was still hot to the touch, I’ll tell you that much. She played tough but she was scared. You could tell. She’d pick her nails. Get this look on her face. Like she was far away.”
Callie thinks the same thing. She felt the fear in the room that last time they saw one another. Underneath Jenna’s obstinance, her bitterness, pulsed a worry she had been too scared to name, tender and vulnerable as her bare feet on the gravel-strewn road.
Callie leaves the woman from the halfway house—Dawn—her card and tells her to call, day or night, if she hears from Jenna or she remembers anything else that might be relevant.
The word she used sticks in Callie’s mind all day. Hunted.
As she gets ready for her second date with Adrian, Jane sends her a link to a TikTok video that she watches to the end, realizing that all the young women remind her of Rebecca Nixon.
That ladylike, perfectly polished makeup, and underneath their eyeliner and mascara that same bright-eyed eagerness for gore—considered okay in a woman so long as it is packaged right.
Headbands and pearls and lipstick. Shiny hair and Pilates-toned arms.
I’m supposedly going on a date tonight. Don’t fill my head with this shit.
The creeper from the woods???
The scientist. Yes.
He must be hot. Have fun. And tell me everything!!!
I’m this close to canceling. My head isn’t in this. Too much going on.
Don’t you dare! You need this, Calliope Hauser.
Callie sighs. Jane’s right. And what Jane isn’t saying, but she’s surely thinking, is that this might be the rest of Callie’s life: Jenna gone.
Already the images on the missing posters are weather faded, the ink gray.
There has to be some part of her that moves forward.
Some kind of relief. Something that is hers.
She and Adrian have agreed to meet at the bar.
Callie is glad they chose somewhere a little further afield than the tavern where the guys drink, even if it means a forty-minute ride each way.
The last thing she needs is anyone from the squad listening over her shoulder as she struggles through second-date banter.
In the car she puts on lipstick, wipes it off, puts it on again.
It’s different, going somewhere where they’ll sit close to one another, without the water between them.
She wonders if it will feel the same as it did the last time, both the conversation and the silence—easy, natural.
The churn in her head, her thoughts of her mother, going still for just a little while.
He’s there first, even though she’s five minutes early, sitting on the wooden bench out front, head bent toward a book.
“Work or pleasure?”
He holds up the cover so she can see it. The Left Hand of Darkness. “I’m a big science fiction nerd.”
“I gather. Shall we?”
They enter the bar and it’s the same as any of the others in the Pines: stained glass chandeliers slung over the pool tables, a taxidermy deer head near the entry, a jukebox against the back wall.
Men in hunting caps, men in leather biker vests.
Heavy pours of dark liquor and cheap beer on cork coasters crumbling to bits.
“I hope you aren’t a martini kind of gal.”
“I mean, I can be. But I’m also a beer in a plastic pitcher kind of girl.”
“That’s very good news.”
He orders for them and she watches him from the small table they’ve chosen. She likes the way he moves, an unhurried ease to his gait, all long legs and slim hips.
“Scare any other unsuspecting ladies this week?”
“Not this week, no. Not quite that lucky.”
They’re talking and things are going well, so well that she forgets her nerves, that she doesn’t mind when he tells her about the plot of the book he’s reading, that she feels herself smiling so much when he talks about his students and feels the tug of muscles she hasn’t used in a while.
Or she feels that way until he starts to go a little quiet, and she notices him looking over her shoulder, longer pauses between their exchanges.
Maybe she misread the moment. Is he eyeing the door?
“Hey, so do you know those guys over there? They keep looking this way.”
She turns and sees Collins and Reynolds, who raise their drinks from the bar.
“Oh god. Those are two of my esteemed colleagues. I’ll go over and say hi. And by say hi, I mean, tell them to stop being creeps.”
She crosses the bar and they watch her approach, grinning like a pair of tweens who have caught a glimpse of a teacher outside school.
“What are you two doing here? I thought the guys all favored the Pine Tavern close to the station.”
“Mac is a dick,” Reynolds says.
Collins rolls his eyes. “They got into a fight. Some hunting thing. I don’t know.”
“So now you’re here.”
“So now we’re here. And so are you. You letting the ball drop?
There’s gotta be someone with a headlight out to bust, someone going forty in a thirty-five mph zone.
” A part of her is glad, that at least Collins and Reynolds are friendly enough now to joke.
In the wake of Jenna’s disappearance she’s been even more regimented, more of a hard-ass.
That same old compunction at work: When her personal life was messy, the other side of her life had to compensate.
Some of the other guys on the squad are unhappy about it, but what are they actually complaining about? Doing their jobs?
“Har har har. More tickets, more funds. You guys want overtime back? We gotta get those citations up. Among our other issues.”
“Could use that OT pay, that’s for sure,” Reynolds says.
“Yeah, you owe me a shit ton of money from our poker game last week.”
“Not as much as Jimmy. And Frank.” Callie’s smile contracts.
Maybe she was wrong about them warming up.
Weekly poker games with the old guard. All of them talking to Frank all the time—no way she can ask any of them about Luke, about what might be going down at the nursery.
But they can still be useful to her in this setting, loosened up and cheered by the drinks.
“What’s the latest with Fauver? We needed probable cause on him, like, yesterday.
” She’s tasked her guys with monitoring him.
She doesn’t have enough to get a warrant on the drugs, let alone anything relating to Jenna, but she’s asked them all to do more drive-bys of his residence, keep their ears to the ground.
Reynolds sighs. “Well we’ll never see him out this way. Pretty sure he’s barred from every drinking establishment for fifty miles.”
Callie watches two bikers make their way to the back of the bar, where there’s another door leading to the dumpsters, and behind that, woods.
Could be going to smoke, could be going to do a deal.
Back in the day she would have had an undercover team who could have gotten close to them.
Could have used all this time setting up stings and surveillance ops.
Instead she’s here, prodding two of her tipsy patrolmen to make sure they’ve been following up on her assignments.
“Reynolds, you would have gone to high school with him, right?” She hasn’t talked to them about Jenna’s phone call to Fauver’s garage, about the connection with the Baby Doe case.
How she’s circling him like he’s got the key to it all and all she needs is one slipup on his end before she can crucify the slimy bastard.
For now, they only think she’s on him for the drug rumors.
She’s keeping everything else close to her chest. “What was his deal then? Was he selling? Who did he hang out with?”
Reynolds groans. “Look, can we talk about this when we’re on the clock? All I want to do is get wasted right now.”
One of the bikers she had seen slip out back moves past them. There’s a Pagan gang patch on the sleeve of his leather jacket and he gives Callie a stare that makes her go still. Even Collins and Reynolds are quiet until he slides back into a booth in the corner of the room.
Collins looks over her shoulder. “Who’s your guy? Someone from Major Crimes? Skinny nerds up there wasting away behind their desks, huh?”