Searching For Jenna novel Chapter 1

"What the...?" Jenna Matthews looked up from her homework when she heard the garage door open. She got up from her desk and walked to the window overlooking the front yard.

Jenna's father's black Ford F-250 truck was backing into the garage. Looking at her black sports watch, Jenna noted the time. Four o'clock. Her father should have been at work. His shift at the Vanderburgh County Sheriff's Department started at two o'clock. What was he doing home?

Shrugging, Jenna went back to her homework. She couldn't care less why her father was home. The two of them had never gotten along. There were only a few weeks left until she graduated from high school, after which Jenna would get a job to keep her busy until she could leave in the fall for college.

Her girlfriend, Cara Marshall, tried to talk Jenna into staying with her and her mother, Caroline after they graduated, but Jenna declined the offer. Caroline approved of the idea, but Jenna knew her father would use it as an excuse to mess with Caroline. He'd stop her for stupid reasons to give her tickets in retaliation for helping Jenna get away from his house.

Jenna wished that her mother would leave too, but Darlene Matthews was too afraid of her abusive husband to risk it. Jenna hoped being close to her in Bloomington, Indiana, where she would be going to college, would be enough of an excuse for her mother to finally get away from Michael Matthews.

The garage door closed and Jenna heard her father leave. She wondered what he was doing home in the middle of his shift. She looked at her watch again. He'd been there less than ten minutes. Curiosity plagued Jenna until she finally gave in and went downstairs to the garage to see what her father had been doing.

Jenna made her way through the kitchen and utility room to the door that opened into the garage. The garage was off limits, but that had never stopped her before. It was kind of a game she played with her father. She would go into the garage and snoop around to see if he would notice that someone had been out there. He'd only figured it out a couple of times because Jenna made the mistake of moving something. She may have just moved it a fraction of an inch, but her father had known someone had been out there.

Each time Jenna's father had noticed someone had been in the garage, her mother had said it was her, taking the cussing out or beating. The last time it happened Jenna had been fifteen. She stepped in between her parents and took the blow that had been meant for her mother. Jenna told him that her mother was covering for her mistake which made her father madder. He'd beat up both of them pretty badly that night. They should have called the police, but Jenna knew, as well as her mother did, nothing would happen to her father, and they would get beaten for calling.

At first, Jenna didn't notice anything unusual in the garage, but she had a feeling her father had brought something home. She wasn't familiar with the sheriff department's rules, but usually, when her father stopped by the house during his shift, he would be in his patrol car. The fact that he had been in his truck was weird.

Jenna was running her eyes over the room, trying to see if anything new stuck out when she noticed that the lock on her father's freezer was not fastened. This was extremely unusual.

Besides not being allowed in the garage unless her father sent her out there to get something, which was rare, the freezer was off limits period. Her mother had bought a bunch of meat one time and was going to put some out there, and her father gave her a severe beating for touching the freezer. After that, he put a lock on it and made it very clear that no one was to touch it.

Jenna had always thought that was strange. Why have a freezer if you're not going to store meat in it? She assumed he used it to store venison and fish from his many fishing and hunting trips, but she had never actually seen him take anything out of that freezer.

Seeing the lock undone was too much of a temptation. Jenna always wondered what he kept in that freezer that was so important that no one was allowed to touch it. She looked at her watch. Four forty-five. Surely, he wouldn't come right back. She glanced at the closed garage door and then rushed to the freezer. Noting how the padlock was hanging from the hasp, Jenna carefully took the lock off keeping it in her left hand. She lifted the freezer lid with her right.

She received a blast of frigid air in the face. "Wow! That's cold."

The weight of Jenna's new knowledge made each step she took toward her bedroom seemed more cumbersome. What was she going to do? She had to tell someone.

"My God!" she whispered as the realization set in. Her father had a dead body in his freezer. Did he kill her? Probably, Jenna thought. He was totally capable of it.

When she got back to her room, she picked up her cell phone. She wanted to call Cara and tell her about it, but she didn't want to get Cara involved. Jenna paced her room with her phone in hand. Who could she call? Obviously not the city police department or the sheriff's office, her father would hear it over the radio. He'd come there and kill her before the first police car could arrive.

If her father wasn't listening to the city police department's scanners, Terry Howard, one of the city police investigators would find out about it. He used to be her father's best friend. Terry would call her dad right away.

The Indiana State Police? They would have to do something, right? But what if one of her father's hunting buddies got the call. They would call him.

"Shit!" Jenna hissed. What was she going to do?