“Was it reported as a Missing Persons case?”
“No,” I say. “Sarah was spontaneous; a free spirit. She was known to take off on weekend trips and things of that nature, but something about it didn’t feel right to me. I hadn’t heard from her in three days, so I started to get concerned.”
“That seems normal,” Detective Thomas says. “Did you go to the police?”
“No,” I say again, knowing how it sounds. “You have to remember, this was in 2009. People weren’t attached to their cell phones like they are today. I tried to tell myself that maybe she just took a last-minute trip and left her phone behind, but then I noticed that Ethan was starting to act strange.”
“Strange how, exactly?”
“Every time I mentioned her name, he got flustered. Kind of rambled a little bit and changed the subject. He didn’t even seem concerned that she was gone—he just offered up vague ideas about where she could be. He would say something like, ‘It’s summer break, maybe she went home to visit her parents,’ but when I said I wanted to call them and make sure she was there, he told me I was overreacting and needed to stop inserting myself into other people’s business. I started to think that the way he was acting, it was like he didn’t want her to be found.”
Detective Thomas nods in my direction; I wonder if he really has heard this all before, from the recording at the police station, but his expression gives away nothing.
“I went into her room one day and started poking around, trying to see if I could find a clue or something as to where she had gone. Like a note or something, I don’t know.”
The memory is so vivid, pushing her bedroom door open with one finger, listening to it creak. Stepping inside, quiet, like I was breaking some kind of unspoken rule. Like she could come barreling in at any moment, catch me digging through her laundry or reading her diary.
“I ripped her comforter off her bed and I noticed that there was a bloodstain on her mattress,” I continue. “A big one.”
I can still see it, so clearly. The blood. Sarah’s blood. The spot taking up almost the entire bottom half of her bed, no longer bright but a burnt, rusty red. I remember pushing my hand into it, feeling the moisture seep up from somewhere deep inside. Smears of scarlet on my finger pads, still wet. Still fresh.
“And I know this sounds strange, but I could smell Ethan on her bed,” I say. “He had a very … distinct smell.”
“Okay,” he says. “Surely, at that point, you went to the police.”
“No. No, I didn’t. I know I should have, but—” I stop, compose myself. I need to make sure I word this correctly. “I wanted to be absolutely certain that there was some kind of foul play involved before going to the police. I had just moved to Baton Rouge to escape my name, my past. I didn’t want the police dragging that back to the surface again. I didn’t want to lose the normalcy that I was finally starting to find.”
He nods, judgment in his eyes.
“But just like I had invited Lena into my house and introduced her to my father, I was starting to feel the same way about Sarah and Ethan,” I continue. “I had given him a key to our apartment. And now she was missing, and it was starting to feel like maybe she was in trouble, and if Ethan had something to do with it, I felt obligated to do everything I could to figure that out. I was starting to feel responsible.”
“Okay,” he says. “What happened next?”
“Ethan broke up with me that week. It came out of nowhere. I was blindsided, but the fact that this was happening right around the time of Sarah’s disappearance felt like proof to me. Proof that he was hiding something. He told me he was getting out of town for a few days, heading home to his parents’ house to work through everything. So I decided to break into his place.”
Detective Thomas raises his eyebrows, and I force myself to keep talking, to push on, before he can interrupt me again.
“I thought I could get some evidence to take to the police,” I say, my mind on the jewelry box in my father’s closet, the physical embodiment of undeniable proof. “I knew from my father’s murders that evidence was critical—without it, there’s just suspicion. Not enough to make an arrest or to even take an accusation seriously. I don’t know what I was expecting to find, exactly. Just something I could put my hands on. Something to make me feel like I wasn’t going crazy.”
I flinch slightly at my own choice of words—crazy—and continue.