There was something about Egan’s voice that made me follow them all, our steps echoing on the wooden floors, out to the front porch, down the splintered steps. Egan looked at me watching them. His eyes drifted to Kyle’s, asking a question.
“There’s something under the porch,” Egan explained, his voice lower, as if to say: This isn’t for you, girl.
“What?” I asked, picturing the worst. Always the worst. A makeshift grave. A body.
He still didn’t look at me, though he responded: “Not sure yet. Some sort of containers. They yours?”
I shook my head. “No. We rent the place. I’ve never really gone under the house.”
Only Emmy had looked under here, with the flashlight that night we’d found the cats, scared them out.
Egan crouched down, his shoes and belt and knees creaking as he did, and shone a flashlight like Emmy had. I could tell they wanted to keep me back, but this place was mine. This wasn’t an official search. They had no warrant. I had every right to know. I leaned forward over Egan’s shoulder and followed the light. Something white was illuminated, tucked mostly behind a wooden support beam.
Kyle gestured for Dodge to go check it out, and Dodge pulled on gloves and climbed on his hands and knees into the darkness.
“Careful,” I called. “We get animals under there.”
Egan looked slowly over his shoulder at me. We waited in silence, and then Dodge came crawling back out with his flashlight and a cylindrical container. It was one of those cement mixing containers or fertilizer crates. Whatever label had been on the outside had long ago worn off. It was white, plastic, coated with streaks of dirt and mud, and sealed shut.
Dodge brushed the dirt from his uniform, wiped his hands against the sides of his pants.
Egan slipped on his own pair of gloves before bracing the container between his legs and peeling back the top. Inside, there was a bottle of bleach, yellow gloves, a scrubbing brush, and rags underneath.
“She cleans houses,” I said. This must’ve been where she kept her supplies, which she would then load into the back of the car.
“I thought she worked at a motel,” Kyle said. He squinted from the sun low in the sky, flipped his shades down over his eyes, his expression shuttered.
“Both. She did both,” I said.
“Do you know of any specific homes?”
“No,” I said.
He gestured toward the container. “This is hers, then?”
“I don’t know. It could be. Or it could be the owner’s. I really don’t know.”
“There’s something more under there,” Dodge said, shining his light back underneath. “Or there used to be.”
We all crouched down to follow the beam of light, to where I could see a mound of fresh dirt, kicked up. “Something used to be here.”
Something buried under the house. Or something digging.
“I told you, we get animals,” I said. “Cats, mostly.”
The scratching under the porch, echoing in the floorboards.
I imagined the noise in the middle of the night, the night when everything changed. The dog barking next door, the woman found down by the lake—the day I realized Emmy had been gone.
All those sounds in the dead of night.
It’s nothing, Leah.
Just the cats.
* * *
THEY STARTED WITH THE questions that evening, all three of them sitting around the kitchen table, taking notes. Asking again when I had last seen Emmy—James Finley had been dead for a while, on first look. Now they were paying close attention. Sifting through the details. Circling around and brushing up against something that made me bristle, that made me worried. The way they were asking, the way they were circling around it, not quite bringing it to the surface. As if Emmy herself might be a suspect. And I had to shape the story. I had to make them understand: She was not. Something had happened to her.
So when they asked about her state of mind, whether she was scared or worried, I told them maybe. I told them about that morning she went missing, how she was watching the woods for something. How she told me not to worry, how I was in a rush and left. And I noticed Kyle taking it all in, this account slightly different from the first time. I was giving him more, a fuller picture—the truth, then. I had to hold nothing back.
“I gave Officer Dodge her necklace,” I added, so they would remember. She had struggled on the back porch. Her necklace broke and fell, and she’d never come back for it. She couldn’t.
“Is this in character? Was it like her to just take off? Leave?” Kyle asked.
“No,” I said, but the word hovered in the air, unfinished, uncertain. I was sure they could feel it, the doubt creeping in.
“Okay, then,” Kyle said, pushing his chair back to stand.
“Thank you, Ms. Stevens, for your help,” Clark Egan said, mirroring Kyle, and Officer Dodge followed in kind.
“Will you be okay here?” Kyle asked, though his face gave nothing away. Nothing to make the other men look twice. Nothing to let me know whether his concern was for more than the typical bystander.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m exhausted.” I saw the faintest twitch of his lips, an indication of a secret only he and I knew.
They left the place much as they found it, even pushing the white container back under the porch, though not as deep as it was. But when I shut and locked the door behind them, the house felt different. The chairs were askew, and the scent of them lingered. There were shoe prints on the floor, and I couldn’t remember if they’d been there all along—nothing was as it had seemed.
I watched them drive off, the headlights dimming and fading. Pictured Emmy looking off into the woods. Heard Kyle’s question once more. Was it like her? The doubt in my voice, creeping into my head.
I thought of the stories I’d told Kyle. How she would come into my room late at night whenever she brought someone home. How she’d stay there until morning, behind my locked door, waiting them out.
For them, she was always a disappearing trick. She had just never done it to me.
CHAPTER 21
Despite what I’d told Kyle, I couldn’t get to sleep. I kept imagining the sounds of animals under the porch: cats or rabbits; bears, maybe. Imagined the shadow I’d seen on my front porch, the light on in my house after Emmy had already gone missing. And knew it could not have been James Finley. He had been dead for a while, Kyle had said. And a while was all they could give me at the moment, though the medical examiner would get back with specifics sometime in the future.
But these were the facts: The man Emmy was seeing had a criminal record. Her car was in the lake, with James inside. Emmy had not returned.
I thought of the scratching under the porch again. The timing. Wondered if it was Emmy coming back for something. If she’d found that hiding spot the night when she shone her flashlight under the porch, and thought: Mine. If she’d used it for herself, knowing I’d never look. That I was too afraid.
I knew there were two possible outcomes: that Emmy was dead somewhere, alongside James Finley—maybe somewhere in the lake but maybe not. Or she could have run because she’d gotten tangled up in something with James Finley.
This was not the first time Emmy had gotten caught up in a mess. She’d taken a knife to Aaron’s arm; she’d stolen a watch from John Hickelman’s apartment; always baiting the danger, daring it to come closer.
Once she’d been confronted in a bar. A man had grabbed her arm, leaned in close, said, “I saw you. You took that money right off the bar top. It’s not yours. I saw what you did.”
She’d wrenched her arm away, but he’d grabbed on again. Finally, she’d taken the five-dollar bill out of her pocket, thrown it at him, and then she’d run, pulling me along with her. She’d laughed the whole way home, and it had caught, the nervous giggle escaping as I ran alongside her. But I kept looking over my shoulder, every corner we’d turn. I worried we’d be followed. Maybe I suspected that one day something would catch up
with her.
Right now she could be in hiding somewhere, still in danger.
By proxy, I could be, too. Except she wouldn’t have left me here if she truly believed that. She wouldn’t—not the Emmy I knew.
* * *
EIGHT YEARS AGO, LYING on the concrete floor with her feet up on the couch, she spoke with a voice that had cut through the fog of vodka. “All relationships fall into three categories. Three. That’s it.”
She’d tipped her head to the side, her hair spilled out around her, to check if I was listening, whether I was awake. I liked moments like this, staying silent and letting her spin a tale.
She’d looked back to the ceiling. “Okay, here’s the hypothetical. Take anyone you know. Anyone. Let’s say you know they’ve killed someone. They call you and they confess. Do you either, A, call the police.” She held up her thumb. “B, do nothing.” Her pointer finger. “Or C, help them bury the body.” Her third finger went up, and she held them over her face, waiting.
I laughed, realizing that she was serious. “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” she said. “That’s how you know.”
Emmy’s world operated like this, all blacks and whites, nothing in between. Three choices and that’s it. Not that there were degrees, and that these things shifted at any moment, at every moment. How Paige and Noah were each in one category and then were in another. All of us constantly in motion.
But Emmy said such things instead of saying what she meant, which I believed at the moment to be I love you.
And yet for years, I would find myself classifying people like this. Deciding how much I liked someone and the status of a relationship based on a single multiple-choice question.
* * *
DAWN WAS BREAKING, THE world coming back to life. Before I took my shower, I grabbed the flashlight from the kitchen drawer and marched down the wooden steps. Got down in the dirt in front of the porch. Felt the cold earth, the dried clay clinging to my clothes and my palms. Kept the flashlight in one hand as I moved, crawling my way to the white container Dodge had left underneath. I used the bottom edge of my T-shirt to keep my prints off, as the police had done. And then I opened the bin, peeling back the lid again. It smelled chemical, like bleach.
Peering inside, I found a wooden stirring stick near the base, thick yellow gloves, chemical cleaners, a scrubbing brush. Tried to imagine Emmy unscrewing the cleanser, tried to picture her hands in these gloves, this brush in her grip.
It could’ve been here for ages, for when the owners needed to clean the place between tenants. I replaced the lid and crawled farther, to the hole Dodge had found. The dirt was kicked up in a mound, and the hole was symmetrical and narrow, like an animal home. It didn’t seem deep enough for something to have been buried. No space for things Emmy would want to keep hidden.
I was about to crawl back out toward the sunlight when I heard footsteps. Just out of sight. Coming from nowhere. No car up the drive or voices far away. I held my breath, trying to think of an excuse as to why I was currently under the house, if it was a police officer. But the footsteps didn’t climb the front steps. They just shuffled back and forth on the side of the house, pausing for a moment and then moving to a new spot. Like someone was peering through the windows one at a time. Looking for me. Looking at me.
I held my breath, turned off the flashlight, pushed myself farther out of sight, heard my heartbeat echoing inside my head. There was a dark corner tucked away around the wooden post, and I found myself less afraid of what might be lurking in the shadows than what might be waiting outside. My breathing felt too loud, my heartbeat too strong, and I was sure the person on the other side of the wall knew I was here. I backed up farther, until my leg hit resistance. I eased to sitting, then felt something press into my spine—something protruding from the wall.
I jumped but stopped. Reached around and grabbed for whatever had touched me. It was metal, circular, had a dial . . . It was a padlock. I held it in my hand as I heard the footsteps moving away. Then I flicked on the flashlight, saw that it was one of those school Master locks looped through the metal latch of a small wooden door. There was a crawl space built in to the base of this house that nobody had found. Not the police and not me.
I aimlessly spun the dial a few times and pulled at the lock, but nothing happened.
Bolt cutters. I’d need bolt cutters. A pair of pliers, maybe. This lock was for school lockers, not bank safes, after all. The footsteps had disappeared, but I counted to a hundred, then two hundred, waiting. Making sure.
Then I crept back into the morning light and stared off into the woods. I checked the porch, and around again, but didn’t see anything left for me. An animal, Leah.
I was a creature of habit, sticking to routines, relying on them to get through the day. And now I was wondering how often someone roamed the outside of my house in the time when I was typically in the shower. In the time before Emmy got home.
With the open curtains, before I’d had coffee or gotten dressed, with the shower fog clinging to the mirror and sleep still softening my focus. Someone who knew our routines, who knew when I’d be home and alone. Someone who watched me.
Who watched us both.
CHAPTER 22
I was sitting at my desk before the school bell rang, tapping my heel against the floor. Listening to the footsteps in my memory—and the decision tipped. I pulled up our faculty listings document and scanned the names for Davis Cobb. I needed to know if it could’ve been him. If he could’ve been making it to my place each morning and calling each night.
He lived on Blue Stone Lane, and I entered his address into the map program I’d just opened. According to the map, he lived a good ten miles away, but I guessed he could’ve driven somewhere nearby and walked. Still, it seemed like a leap. Like he was going significantly out of his way, and for what?
And then, on a whim, I did the same for Theo Burton. He also lived miles away, according to the map, but his location looked closer from the aerial view, given the drive time. I switched the overview to Earth, not Streets, and saw that we were much closer than the map program would have you believe, as the bird flies. We both lived near the lake, though he was on the other side, where they were building it up. A few blocks from Lakeside Tavern, which Kyle had volunteered to walk to from my place. If you weren’t going by roads, we were almost neighbors. We certainly could’ve run into each other in these woods, out roaming the land beyond our backyards.
I pulled his sketch of the lake from my locked desk drawer, imagined a boy crouched down and watching.
Did he notice her walk by from his back window? Or see the scene while he was out to meet a girl, meet some friends, do whatever kids did around here in the middle of the night? Did he watch the fight with Bethany Jarvitz, see the hit, the blood spilling onto the ground? Or did he just stumble upon the aftermath? Or was this all his imagination—that he knew where she had been found, and so left this for me? Was he merely drawn to the macabre?
I picked up the phone before the students arrived and called Kyle’s cell. “Donovan,” he answered.
“Hi, it’s Leah, I was wondering: Who was the source who put Davis Cobb down at the lake with Bethany Jarvitz that night? Who was the witness?”
There was a pause, and his voice dropped lower. “Leah, I can’t do this right now.” His voice was overly formal, overly stiff. A tangible distance hung between us.
“Okay,” I said slowly, recognizing the familiar undercurrent in his voice. “Do you want to call me back later?”
“Leah,” he said, as if I should understand. But I didn’t. Not the sharp turn, not after the other night at the motel, the way he’d said my name, the way he’d looked at me.
“What?” I shot back in the lingering silence. There was something he wasn’t saying. Something he was hiding from me.
He let out a sigh. “Listen, I’ll stop by around four, okay? Will you be home?”
“Yes,” I said, and then he hung up, and the
students filtered in, and I felt a strange disorientation that I couldn’t quite place.
* * *
I HAD TIME AFTER school, if I left during my free fourth block, to run by the hardware store on the way home. I just had to hope nobody in the school noticed or cared. Figured I’d already run through my allotment of goodwill and understanding from Mitch but went anyway. I sneaked out the side door again, locking my classroom behind me.
By the time I arrived back home, I’d purchased a pair of bolt cutters and a new lock for good measure. I checked my watch—thirty minutes before Kyle showed up. I was running short on time.
I crawled back under the porch straightaway, pulled myself into the dark corner, now unafraid of the dark, of anything that might be lurking here. Driven instead by the pull.
I put the bolt cutters through the hook of the Master lock, heard the snap as I felt the resistance give. I unhooked the broken lock and pulled the door open. It was low to the ground, made of thick wood, about the size of a door for a doghouse or a play set. I pushed myself through the entry, and the darkness was nearly complete, save for a few slivers of dusty light in the distance. As far as I could tell, the crawl space extended all the way under the house. I pointed the flashlight in an arc across the interior. Tubes running under the floor above, pipes and vents, insulation. The ground was cold but covered in a plastic tarp. The whole thing smelled like dirt and exhaust.
I swung the flashlight around the space, caught the light seeping through the vents at the edges around the back of the house, and realized the entrance to the crawl space must’ve been put in place before the deck was added on.
Nothing here, then. Nothing unusual. The lock was probably added by the owners to keep people from messing around down here. To keep out the animals. Time to get back inside, clean the dirt from under my nails, get ready for Kyle’s visit.
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