The Perfect Stranger
Page 6
He frowned, the overhead light catching the scar on his forehead. “When did you last see her?”
“Five days ago,” I said. Five days while I went about my life, barely giving her a second thought.
He blinked too long, tried to hide it. “But you weren’t worried, not at first?”
“No, she’s an adult. We work opposite schedules. But she’s late on the rent, and with the calls, your questions, and the woman found down at the lake . . . I started to worry.”
He nodded. “Have you checked in with her work?”
I paused, embarrassed. A fault; the holes in our relationship. “I’m not sure where she works, exactly. A motel lobby, the night shift.” I had a feeling her job cleaning houses was all under-the-table stuff. I wondered if the motel was, too. A temporary way to pay the bills until she found something more permanent and fitting.
“Okay, why don’t we start with the basics, then.” He took out a pencil, a pad of paper, wrote her name at the top. “G-r-e-y or a-y?” he asked.
“G-r-e-y,” I said. “I think.” I knew this, didn’t I? I’d seen it written somewhere? It felt right, so I went with it. Tried to project sure and assured. “Yes, that’s right,” I said.
The lead scratched against paper, echoing through the kitchen. “Date of birth? Where she’s from?”
How to explain that I didn’t know these things. I almost said, Her birthday isn’t in June through October, because wouldn’t she have told me? But then I thought, Maybe not. Maybe Emmy thought birthdays were trivial and meaningless. Maybe she cast them aside as she had cast off the rest of her life, flying to Africa with nothing.
Detective Donovan wanted to know the facts, the type of things we report in the paper. But these weren’t the right questions for me and Emmy. I didn’t know where she was from, the names of her parents, her blood type or place of last residence.
But: the sounds she made, the lies she told the men in her bed, the hours she kept and slept. The nightmares, the way she paced the hall before knocking, and the words she said when she thought no one was listening. I knew the squeak of her mattress, restless or otherwise. I knew the arch of her spine and the sunken skin beneath her rib cage, where she once was all curve and allure.
I knew her mother was dead. I knew, like me, she couldn’t go back.
“A phone number? Her cell?” he asked, his gaze piercing my own.
“She left her last phone in Boston,” I said. “When she broke it off with her fiancé. Not sure about the rest.”
“Okay, how about email or social media accounts?”
I shook my head. “Not that I know of. She doesn’t have a computer. Or, like I said, a cell phone. I don’t think she wanted her ex to be able to find her.” Emmy had also spent four years overseas, off the grid. Maybe she’d grown accustomed to it, preferred it to the way most of us documented and framed every aspect of our lives online.
But he raised an eyebrow at this, like he couldn’t believe it.
“I don’t have any social media accounts, either,” I said, crossing my arms. “And I bet neither do you.” Because there was too much danger for someone like him, and someone like me, to be out there. Too much exposure.
“Because you’re a teacher?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, the easiest response.
“Okay, do you have any pictures of your roommate?”
I didn’t. Back when Emmy and I met, eight years earlier, the cell phone dependability had only just begun. We took photos with disposable cameras or with purchased rolls of film when the moment was big enough—got them printed at the drugstore, put them in boxes, and lost them in moves.
And now the few I took I sent to my mother and my sister—which felt slightly defensive even to me. Nothing more than a way to convince us all: See the way the moon shines through the trees of my front yard? I’m happy here. I did not send anything of real consequence.
“How long have you known her?”
This answer could’ve been either eight years or, if adding time, the actual time we’d spent together, nine months. “We were roommates for a while after college. We reconnected this summer.”
“Did she leave behind a purse? A car?”
“She drives a brown station wagon, but I don’t know if she owns it.” That was generous. I knew she didn’t. I hadn’t owned a car when I’d moved, either. Emmy had picked me up at the airport, and I had shipped whatever couldn’t fit in my luggage. I’d bought my first car a few days later, brushing aside every extra mentioned, taking the baseline price, and then I had to wait for the model to come.
Emmy let me drive the station wagon until the paperwork went through. It smelled faintly like cigarettes, though Emmy didn’t smoke. You could feel the engine sputter under the cloth seats. The plastic coating of the steering wheel was beginning to fade away. But none of these things mattered or helped.
“Plates?” he asked.
“Not sure.”
“Would you have the registration or insurance or anything else on file?”
I laughed. The idea of Emmy keeping records or files. The idea of Emmy doing anything with a long-term plan. “She wasn’t the type.”
“Wasn’t?”
My expression faltered. Wasn’t that exactly what I was worried about? Why I’d called him? That she was gone. “Not in all the time I’ve known her,” I said.
“Her purse, then?”
“I haven’t seen it.”
“What was she doing the last time you saw her?”
I almost told him about the owls but then stopped. “I was on my way to work Monday,” I said. “She was coming in, I was heading out.”
“Last residence?”
“Not sure. She lived with her fiancé in Boston,” I said.
“His name?” he asked, and I shook my head. He was a jerk, he was dangerous, she was running.
“He worked in finance,” I said. The little Emmy had told me; the little I’d truly asked in response.
He tapped the pencil eraser against the tabletop as his eyes roamed the room. I was giving him bread crumbs, details to sift through, and I knew what he was thinking: None of this will help.
“You have to give me something to work with here, Leah.”
What did I have to show him? “She did two tours in the Peace Corps. Botswana, I think. Moved back to D.C. after that,” I said. There. There she was, that’s where he’d find her paper trail, trace her life forward and back. “She worked in nonprofit, then she came back up to Boston with her fiancé.” I tried to remember what she’d said that night we’d run into each other, through the foggy haze of memory and alcohol. “She was engaged, but it went bad, and that’s when we reconnected.” I didn’t tell him about the circles under her eyes, the unspoken things that only I could see, the way she so obviously needed out.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll put in some calls to D.C., see if we can’t get a picture. And go from there.”
“She has a boyfriend now,” I added. “Lives nearby. Jim something. He has blond hair to here.” I held my hand to my chin. “Bow-legged. Narrow face. Drove a beige hatchback, needed a new muffler.” Someone, it seemed, who was the polar opposite of the man she’d just left.
He made eye contact, seemed to be smiling to himself. “You’d make a pretty good witness, Leah Stevens.”
I grinned, but I was still worried. Emmy was missing, and Jim was the only person I could associate with her. “He calls here sometimes. Maybe you can trace him that way?”
Kyle’s gaze drifted to my phone on the wall. “You’d need to give us permission to get your phone records.”
“Okay, you have it,” I said. The phone line was mostly for Emmy. I used my cell for work and practically everything else. I’d registered the landline only because Emmy needed one.
“Honestly, it would be easier if you pulled them yourself. Call the phone company, ask them to send you the most recent bill, and we can at least check the public numbers. We’d need to get a subpoena for any
thing private.”
“But if I get you the bill, you’ll look into it?”
He ran a hand through his short hair. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll look into it.”
“Okay,” I said, letting out a slow exhale. “Thank you.”
He leaned back in his chair, folded his hands on the table. “Anything else you want to share about Davis Cobb?”
Quid pro quo, this was how it went in my profession before, too. You cannot take without a give.
I grabbed the pencil from his hand. Twisted the paper to face me. Jotted down an email address that began with the sender name TeachingLeahStevens. “He sends me emails from this account sometimes,” I said. “At school. I delete them.” I shrugged. “Honestly, they’re not that bad.”
He kept his expression even, waited a beat before responding, processing the information. “Thanks. We’ll see what we can get. Next time it would help if you don’t delete them.”
I nodded.
He looked at the page again before sliding it into a folder, then placed his hands flat on the table. “He made up this email address specifically to target you, Leah. Did you ever report this? Or the emails themselves?”
“No. Honestly, they seemed harmless.”
In hindsight, that wasn’t entirely true. They just seemed like everything else. My first boss once told me not to include a head shot with my story, and I’d been insulted. I’d thought it was because she thought it might detract from the story—that I looked too young, too happy, to write what I wrote. That people would not take me seriously.
But I thank her every day. Really, she was saving me from the world that hid behind computer screens, linking my name to a face. Their words shouted into a void instead. The things the anonymous would say if they disagreed, the things they’d imply because of my name alone. It all sort of rolled off, over time, becoming background noise.
The emails I had been receiving here were no worse, really.
No, I thought. The problem was with me. I had become effectively desensitized to the danger of words.
CHAPTER 9
If I were writing a piece about a missing woman, if I were interviewing her roommate, I’d say: Tell me a story about her. Tell me a story that will let the readers know her, too.
So when Kyle got halfway to his car, seemed to change his mind for some reason, came back inside, and asked me to tell him something more about who Emmy was, what she was like, I took some time to think about it. I did not say the first thing I thought.
I wanted to tell him about the time with the knife—two weeks after I’d moved in with her back in Boston, when Paige had called and said she and Aaron were in the area and could they see my new place? How I had frozen in the middle of the living room, the phone hanging at my hip, my head suddenly waterlogged and everything feeling too far away. How Emmy had asked, very calmly, “Who was that?”
I wanted to tell Kyle how Emmy had been cutting up an apple in the kitchen when I’d introduced them, how she’d spun around and taken the knife to Aaron’s flesh, right on the back of his forearm, how his face had fallen open in surprise and rage. How she’d made it seem like an accident but had pressed her lips together like she knew it wasn’t. How she’d stared at him, then said, Oops, didn’t see you there, and gone back to the apple. How she hadn’t said anything to me when Paige yelped and looked at me like Did you see that? And how I’d pretended I hadn’t. How Emmy hadn’t even looked up as Aaron kept saying, It’s okay, no big deal, through clenched teeth, as if she had apologized, which she hadn’t. How she hadn’t turned back around until Paige got him out of there. How I’d loved her in that moment. And how we’d never spoken of it again.
I wanted to say this to Kyle: She eats men like you for breakfast. I wanted him to know that she was strong, that she would not let someone walk all over her. She would not be a girl who did not see the danger coming.
But that’s not the story to tell. The purpose of the story, I knew, was to get people to care, to get the public on your side, to make them see everyone they’ve ever loved in the face of this missing girl.
Kyle was staring, like he could see every story running through my head—hers and mine.
I pretended he was a reporter. That what he was really saying was, Okay, Leah, show her to me.
And so I settled on the first time we met.
“She took me in,” I said. “I couldn’t afford a place, and I had nowhere to go, and she took me in.”
It was a Monday morning, and I’d suddenly, inexplicably, needed a place to live. This was after I didn’t get the job I’d expected and instead took that unpaid internship. This was after I’d spent a month living on Paige and Aaron’s couch. This was after.
I’d headed straight for our old campus—to the bulletin board in the lobby atrium I’d passed a hundred times before, numbers ripped from the bottom of stapled papers. Lost animals, job announcements, roommate searches. I haphazardly took numbers, stuffed them in my pocket, all the details swirling, the prices too high, my stomach churning.
I didn’t hear her at first. “I said, looking for a place?”
There was a girl to my side, perched on the stone wall along the front steps. She was sitting cross-legged, eating a bagel, and she swiped a long strand of brown hair from the corner of her mouth, tucking it behind her ear. She hopped off the wall.
“Hi. I’m Emmy,” she said, sticking out her free hand. “I’m only asking because that one’s mine—” She pointed the bagel toward a paper in the upper-right corner: Short-term rental. $500/mo. Basement walk-out. Females only.
“Leah,” I said, taking her hand.
She looked like she could’ve been a student. Low-slung jeans, cropped T-shirt, kohl-rimmed eyes, and maroon lipstick. “I think I made a mistake with the Females only comment,” she said. “Because ninety-nine percent of the calls are from creepers.” She made a face, some mock gag, like we were conspirators already. “Figured I’d come and do some pre-screening.” She narrowed her eyes, taking me in. “And you don’t seem like a creeper.”
I was on my way to my internship, trying to pretend this was a normal day. Khaki pants, flats, sleeveless blouse, hair brushed up into an easy bun. But I could feel the way I was standing, too self-aware, too stiff. I was not yet myself. My head pounded in an odd, detached way. My ears were ringing. The sight of her bagel suddenly nauseated me.
I looked back at the bulletin board. “I can’t afford that,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow, looked me over again. “Then you’re probably looking in the wrong area of town. What do you think you can get for under five hundred?”
I didn’t know. I’d never been on my own before. I’d worked hard for my scholarship, had periodic jobs on campus to bridge the difference, and had banked any leftover money, using it for clothes and nights out. Room and board had always been covered. I was certain I would get the job I wanted; I had been editor of the college paper, not to mention my impressive transcript and self-assured interview. That job would come with a signing bonus, and I was only waiting on the confirmation letter before placing a security deposit on a nearby studio.
And then I didn’t get the job. I was unprepared for the shock of failure—it had never happened before. The only other position I’d interviewed for began with an unpaid internship.
Paige, sitting cross-legged on her bed across the room when I found out, had said, “So take it.”
It was difficult to explain to her. She would have thought nothing of taking an unpaid internship. She had family money to fall back on. I couldn’t even tell my mother. The failure was gutting; I would hear it in the silence on the other end of the line. “I can’t afford to,” I’d said, my voice faltering.
“You can stay with us,” Paige had said. She had gotten a great job right out of college, but her parents planned to put her up in a nice one-bedroom until she got on her feet—and she was always more than happy to share her good fortune.
“Shouldn’t you ask Aaron?”
“Just for a couple months,” I’d said.
I’d moved in after graduation, putting my clothes in the drawers under their television, pulling out the couch at night after they closed the bedroom door, folding it back up in the morning when the coffeemaker started up on a timer. My shampoo in a corner of their shower, my razor resting beside Paige’s and Aaron’s, a thin wall between my head and their bed, and the sound of them keeping me up or waking me.
And now reality settled in, cold and blunt—I could not stay there. Who the hell did I think I was, taking an unpaid internship? Who could do things like that? Who believed that the world would just prop them up in the meantime, with nothing but optimism and naïveté? I was falling flat on my face, and this Emmy was here to witness my demise.
She put a hand on my elbow, steadying me. “How much can you afford?”
I thought of the money I had in my bank account. Subtracted food and the T-pass, divided what was left by three months. Winced. Regretted that spring break trip the year earlier, the clothes I’d just put on my credit card for this job. “Three fifty, maybe,” I whispered.
She scrunched up her nose. “You’re not going to like what you can get for three fifty. Listen, I’m bleeding cash over here, waiting for someone not crazy to come along, and I really can’t afford to pay double. Something’s better than nothing. Why don’t you come see it, see if you like it. See if we can work something out.”
“I can’t right now. I have to be at my job.”
She cocked her head to the side.
“It doesn’t pay,” I added.
“Never really understood the purpose of those.”
“It’s to get a paying job. Ironically.”
She gave me the address, and I agreed I’d stop by on my way home. Except I got to work and changed my mind about waiting. I took a half-day, called her at lunch, told her yes right then, and packed up my stuff and carted it over to the basement two-bedroom before Paige or Aaron could return home. Texted Paige so I wouldn’t have to say it to her face. Good news! Found an apartment over in Allston. Friend of a friend. The place is all yours again.