No Coming Back (8 page)

“She said she was with me?” My words came out single-file, my cheeks heating up incriminatingly.

Behind us, Jenna’s older brother paused his pacing long enough to snarl: “Yeah, you were fucking her, duckweed. Of course she was with you.” Gavin was seven years older than me and Jenna, the same age as Shane Meeks, and with the same aggressive
mentality
.

Jenna’s tight-lipped mom flapped a censuring hand in his
direction
.

Jenna’s dad cleared his throat disapprovingly. “So level with us, Jake. You’re not in any trouble here. You can tell us the truth. Was she with you? It’s okay if she was. It’s okay if the two of you were doing stuff you don’t want us to know about. We’ve all been
teenagers
. We just want to get to the bottom of what’s happened, that’s all. Know she’s safe. Even if she asked you not to tell us
anything
, we need to know.”

I made a pained face. “I’m sorry, Mr. Luckman. Really, I am. I’m just as cut up about Jenna going missing as everyone else. But I’m not hiding anything here. I’m telling the truth. I didn’t see her after school. I know it’s no use to anybody, but I don’t know what else to say except that this is wasting precious time. It’s getting dark. We should be out there looking for her.” I got to my feet, but Meeks pushed me back to the couch.

“Out where, exactly?”

“I don’t know!” Panic strained my voice. Desperation indis
tinguishable from guilt. This was the longest Jenna had been
incommunicado
since we’d been dating. In some ways I felt
responsible
, but only because I was her boyfriend and I should have known
something
, anything to mitigate their anxiety. But I was as clueless as everybody else.

Meeks rose up in his seat and cornered me on the couch. “
Listen
to me, Olson. You’re this close to me throwing you in lock-up for the night. Now spill the beans. Out where in particular? Is there something you want to share with us?”

I glanced from Meeks’s accusing eyes to the frightened faces of Jenna’s parents. Mr. and Mrs. Luckman were dying to gobble up any scrap of information that would help them understand what was happening. But how do you begin to get your head around the idea your child had vanished without trace?

At this point, thirty-six hours had passed since they last laid eyes on their daughter. Jenna was missing and everything was up in the air. They needed something with weight to tether it down. Unfortunately, my answers were without substance.

“Several of the faculty witnessed you arguing with Jenna
yesterday
, during your free period.”

I rotated my wide-eyed gaze back to Meeks, who was looming over me. “That’s ridiculous. We weren’t arguing.” My cheeks felt hot enough to glow in the dark.

The Luckmans were looking on, mesmerized like jurors hearing a killer’s testimony for the first time.

“We weren’t arguing,” I reiterated, pulling back on my anger.

“What, then?”

“We were having a disagreement.”

“Same thing.”

“No, it’s not. Arguments lead to break-ups. And we definitely didn’t. I don’t know where Ruby’s got her information from, but she’s mistaken. Jenna and me, we were expressing a difference of opinion, that’s all.” I glance at the Luckmans. “There wasn’t any animosity.”

“That’s not what several eyewitnesses say.”

I turn back to Meeks. “They’re lying.”

“Really? So let me get this straight. You’re calling Mrs. Peterson, the head of science, a liar?”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“I don’t know!” I was cornered, exposed. “Okay, so maybe we were a touch louder than we should have been. It was no big deal. It was just a stupid argument.”

“I thought you said it was a disagreement?”

I scowled at Meeks.

“What were you arguing about?”

The Luckmans were watching, lungs billowing with bated breath. It was the first they knew about our altercation. It hadn’t come to blows. But they were her parents and it was their job to be protective.

Awkwardness swelled in my chest. “I can’t tell you.”

“Because it has something to do with her disappearance?”

“No. Because it’s private, and it has nothing to do with this situation.” I pull myself up on the couch, forcing Meeks to back off a little. “Now, can I please go or am I under arrest?” My heart was thumping, lungs collapsing. I needed air. All at once I needed to get outside and run.

Meeks glanced at the Luckmans, then back to me. “No, Olson, you’re not under arrest. But everyone can see you’re being evasive and that doesn’t look good for you. Something’s not right here and we need to get to the bottom of it. Like I said right at the start of this interview, it’s in your own best interest to answer my questions fully and honestly. Holding back just makes you look like you’re not telling us something. So work with me here. Where were you yesterday evening, after school?”

“Nowhere.” It was a pathetic response. A knee-jerk reaction from a teen forced out of his comfort zone. Sweat was beading on my brow, making me look as guilty as a cat burglar caught with his hand in the safe.

“Define nowhere.”

Automatically, I glanced at my hands, suddenly conscious of the slight bruising on my knuckles. There was a noticeable
tremble
, but no blood. I tucked them under my thighs before anyone noticed. “If you must know I was up at The Falls.”

“Hangman Falls?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s where I go when I want to get away from
everything
.”

“You go up to The Falls?”

“It helps me think.”

Momentarily, I closed my eyes, finding myself transported to the lip of the ravine, my bones jarred by the crashing water. Above me, the setting sun has turned the sky blood red. Down below, the mercury surface is infested with flies. Some of them come up to investigate the blood dripping from my fingertips. My breathing is labored. Mud on my clothes and matted in my hair. Sweat soaking my skin and muscles still quaking in the aftermath of exertion.

“What were you getting away from, Olson, up at The Falls?”

“Home,” I answered, opening my eyes. “My father. My brother.”

“Not what you’d done to Jenna?”

“I didn’t do anything to Jenna.” This time, through gritted teeth. Then I turned to the Luckmans and repeated the statement, less forcefully, hoping they’d believe my sincerity.

Meeks nudged my foot with his boot. “Hey. Look at me. So what got you running all the way up to The Falls, by yourself, on the evening Jenna went missing?”

I released a hot, weary breath. “Last week, my brother announced he was leaving home to join the military.”

Jenna’s dad leaned forward. “Aaron signed up?”

“Against my father’s wishes. They went to war with each other
over it. They were still arguing when I got home from school
yesterday
.
I didn’t want Aaron to go. I begged him not to. But his mind was already made up. I tried to reason with him, but he stormed out of the house. My father started smashing the place up. I was upset.”

“So you went up to The Falls?”

I nodded. “To clear my head and to get away from it all. It’s where I go. I wasn’t with Jenna and I didn’t see her.”

A mask of dissatisfaction was hardening Meeks’s face. “Anyone else vouch for your whereabouts?”

I shrugged. “I wasn’t thinking about an alibi.” I got to my feet. “Now, can I go? My father’s expecting me home.”

“Sure,” Jenna’s dad said. “Thanks, Jake.”

“Just don’t leave town,” Meeks added. “You know more than you’re telling us, Olson, and the truth will come out, sooner or later.”

At first, and in spite of my interrogation, the police were empty-handed, with no leads, no clues, and no idea where Jenna might be, alive or dead. Nothing to go on except that she argued with her boyfriend, in school, in front of witnesses, the day she disappeared. There was no trace of Jenna running away; her purse was missing but her clothes and personal belongings were all in her room, exactly as she left them before heading off to school. There were appointments penciled in her planner and arrangements to hang out with friends the coming week. Her disappearance wasn’t just unexpected, it was a mystery. What teenage girl went anywhere for any length of time without her makeup? There was no record of her purchasing either a train or bus ticket. No sightings of her hitching a ride or leaving town. No mention to any of her closest confidents that she was planning an escape.

One moment she was there, the next she was gone.

And I floundered like a landed fish.

“Jenna was not the running away kind,”
Ned Luckman reported on the front page of the
Harper Horn
, three days into his
daughter’s
disappearance.
“We had a happy home life. Jenna excelled in her
studies
. She was popular and planned to study medicine. We’re thinking somebody has taken her. There’s no other explanation. We’re asking anyone who knows anything to come forward. No matter how small or seemingly insignificant your information, it might help the police find her. We’re praying for our daughter’s safe return. Please pray with us.”

Already, he was talking about her in the past tense.

Lars Grossinger, who was good friends with Ned Luckman, ran with the story and didn’t stop running with the story, or an ever-evolving version of it, until an arrest was made. Increasingly, the Harper PD was put under pressure to produce results. My uncle held meetings in the town hall, at first to share information with concerned townsfolk, and then to work out search strategies. Nearby woodlands were combed, but it proved impossible to sieve through even a fraction of them with limited manpower.

There hadn’t been a single recorded abduction or kidnapping in Harper’s history, and there was no blueprint to work from.

As time passed and nerves got frayed, Chief Krauss made it his personal mission to solve the riddle of the missing girl. He was
fastidious
, a dog with a bone. He re-interviewed everybody
connected
with Jenna: family, friends, acquaintances, me. He went through everything with a fine-toothed comb: who was where and when; who saw what and where; who noticed anyone acting suspiciously or any visitors in a sudden hurry to leave town. It was the cusp between spring and summer. Fishing season had begun and there were strangers underfoot.

With volunteers brought in from neighboring towns, Chief Krauss organized wider searches of the local wood- and
wetlands
. They even used sniffer dogs and somebody claiming to be a
psychic
. They found nothing. No scent of Jenna anywhere other than where they knew she’d been. The chief posted her picture at all the bus and rail services within a fifty-mile radius. But no one reported seeing Jenna Luckman.

The only recurring report was that I was seen arguing with her the day she disappeared.

Then, as the days became weeks and Jenna failed to resurface, the police began thinking of her disappearance as an abduction. When her torn sweater was found in my father’s truck with her blood on it, their missing-persons case moved up a gear to
homicide
. From there, it was no great leap of the imagination to conclude that I had continued our argument after school, when we were alone. And it hadn’t stretched the scenario too far to think that the argument had ended badly, for Jenna, and by my hands.

Inescapably, one by one, the fingers of blame pointed my way, like dominoes falling. No physical body was ever found. No signs of a struggle in her family home. No evidence to suggest foul play other than the torn and bloodied sweater found in my father’s truck, which I tried to explain away, to no avail:

“We were up at the lake,” I told my police inquisitor. “It was weeks ago, way before she went missing. I don’t recall when exactly. I know it was raining. We ran for cover. She got her sleeve snagged on a tree and she had to tear it free. She picked up a deep scratch. We were soaked, so she left her sweater in the truck. She must have forgotten about it. I know I did. Do you think for one moment I’d leave it there if I killed her?”

The smoking gun. It was what the cops called culpability and what prosecutors called circumstantial evidence. Add that to the fact Jenna and I were seen arguing right before her disappearance, and it was enough to accuse me of her murder.

“The boyfriend did it!”
became the unifying cry.

True or not, I was guilty.

“But I’m innocent,” I protested as I was processed into the
system
, fingerprinted and photographed. I pleaded with Chief Krauss, begging him to rethink my arrest, appealing to his good nature. “This isn’t right. You know me. I’m at your house all the time, with Kim, studying. You can’t do this! Listen to me. I didn’t kill her! You can’t do this! I’m innocent!”

But no one was interested in the squeals of a pimple-faced seventeen-year-old who’d killed his girlfriend. My complaints of
injustice
were whispers in a whirlwind. I had no solid alibi—or at least none that I was willing to share—even though one did come from an unexpected source:

“He was with me, the whole evening,” Kimberly Krauss told her dad, in my defense. “You have to let him go, Dad. Jake didn’t do anything wrong.”

The chief couldn’t prove she was lying, but he didn’t believe her either.

“We were together,” she stated defiantly. “All evening. Just the two of us.” She was doing her best to cover for me, literally lying through her teeth, but the chief dismissed her—especially when I failed to corroborate her story independently.

“I don’t want her in any trouble,” I told him from behind the bars of my cell in the basement of the Harper police station. “Kim has nothing to do with any of this. Nothing. I didn’t see her at all the evening Jenna vanished. I swear to God.”

Chief Krauss was happy to accept my word at face value. The last thing he wanted was his daughter implicated in a potential murder investigation and causing a conflict of interest for him.