You seem a little jumpy tonight, Jenny,” Dad said.
That was because every time the phone rang, that’s what I did. Jump. I was praying the landline was still in lockdown mode, but what if it wasn’t? What if Mom needed to take a call from a client, or Dad from his mother in Florida, or what if Ben decided to pick up the phone just to be an asshole? And the voice on the other end said, I have news for you. That lost and found headline in the paper was only half-right.
What then?
And there was the front door.
It was growing bigger, just like the door in the police station, capable of letting in all sorts of people I didn’t care to see, number one being someone who’d last seen her daughter going off to Home Depot with her husband, Lars.
Halfway through a pretty silent dinner—Mom asked Dad how work was and he said fine, then asked Ben how school was and he said, Fucking fantastic, and Mom said, Can you please not curse, and Ben said, I’m not sure—halfway through all that scintillating conversation, someone rang the doorbell.
I dropped my fork, which would’ve been okay if it was onto my plate, but it was smack onto the floor, and it had spaghetti all over it.
For a second, no one said anything.
Maybe because they were still treating me like I had HANDLE WITH CARE stamped on my forehead. So, no one was going to say Jesus, Jenny, eat over the fucking plate, or even Can you please be more careful? Everyone just looked at the floor instead, where the spaghetti sauce had splattered in ten different directions. I could see some on the bottom of the picture frame that held the four of us—Mom having scoured the family archives to produce a photo of the Kristals BTK—before the kidnapping. It looked like blood.
“Sorry,” I said.
“It’s fine,” Mom said. “Accidents happen.”
One of them was about to happen now. The doorbell rang again.
“I’ll get it,” I said, Mom already heading to the kitchen to clean up the spill, Dad edging out of his seat, Ben leaning on his elbows and warily eyeing me as if I’d just upchucked all over the table.
I was thinking this:
If she’s standing there, I will slam the door in her face and tell everyone it’s a reporter. Then we will all huddle in the living room like last time and outwait her.
Dad had stopped in mid-rise—looking like a kid who’s afraid the music’s about to stop in a game of musical chairs.
“Seriously, I’ll get it,” I said.
“No,” Dad said. “If it’s one of them we don’t need you answering the door.”
Them being a reporter. I couldn’t think of a good reason why we would need me answering the door if it was a reporter. I sank back down in my seat.
I will deny knowing her.
I will say she’s crazy—one of those loony tunes Detective Mary warned us would start coming out of the woodwork.
I will say, Who you going to believe—her or me?
Dad peered through the eyehole. He hesitated, then swung the door open.
“Come on in,” he said.
“I’m going to my room,” I said. “I feel sick.” I lurched off the chair and headed for the stairs.
“Wait a minute,” Mom said—she’d made it back from the kitchen with a dripping dishcloth in her hand.
I wasn’t waiting a minute. It was Le Mars all over again. And Peoria. And Duluth. And Wichita. And . . .
“I really feel sick.”
Someone was walking through the front door.
“Look . . . ,” I said. “Look . . .”
But I wasn’t looking. I was refusing to look. Instead I was staring at that picture of the four of us. Which reminded me of a different picture, the one that had given me the whole idea in the first place—a story in an old People magazine about a kidnapped girl who’d been rescued somewhere in Texas after ten years or something like that, and the parents saying they’d never given up hope even after all that time and other parents shouldn’t either. And something else—that they’d hardly recognized their daughter at first because she’d been so young when she was kidnapped, they could’ve passed her on the street and never known it was her. And this picture of the four of them going to church and playing in their backyard pool and saying grace at the dinner table and they looked like a family you wouldn’t mind being part of—okay, that you’d kill to be part of. Which is when I started looking for those other parents they’d talked about, the ones whose daughters hadn’t come back.
And found the Greers.
Who’d kept a night-light on in their daughter Karen’s upstairs bedroom every single night since she’d disappeared. So she could find her way home. Karen Greer was blond and blue-eyed and fair-skinned like me, which got me to thinking that it could be me, why not, why couldn’t it? Why couldn’t I have had a best friend named Samantha and a cat called Puss and a knack for drawing flowers and a crazy love for trampolines and all the other stuff I read about her? Why couldn’t it have been me at the neighborhood pool with the rest of my day camp that morning when the counselor took one of the other kids to the nurse for five minutes and the lifeguard was too busy staring at the counselor’s ass to notice some perv ushering me away? Why not?
And the Greers were only two states away, two little states that on the map looked small enough to almost walk across.
I am Karen Greer.
I am Karen Greer.
I am. I am. I am. I am. I am. I am. I am . . .
Saying it and saying it until I finally believed it.
“What do you want?” Dad said to the person who’d walked into the house.
“I cleaned up the leaves this morning,” the landscaper said in a thick Spanish accent. “Eighty-two dollars.”
“Sure,” Dad said. “No problem.”
There was another reason I’d been jumpy at the dining room table.
I should’ve mentioned. I’d created my very own Facebook page.
Counting my friends made everything realer.
Jenny Kristal’s friends.
Currently at a whopping 1,372 and counting.
Sure, okay. I’d basically friended everyone who’d friended me. Most of them the same people who’d barraged the house with phone calls—the ones Jake had told to screw off.
Reporters. TV people. PR people. Agents. People with companies attached to their names, trying to make an end run around the Kristal palace guards.
Some regular people too.
Welcoming me home. Praising the Lord. Asking me to marry them.
And then there was this one:
Be careful.
You’re not safe in that house.