Except as I turned back toward the doorway, my flashlight hit a box in the corner. The light reflected sharply off old metallic duct tape—now sliced through. The box had my handwriting, my black Sharpie that had written EMMY on the side in careful capital letters.
I ran my hands over the fraying edges, the mildewed corners.
You have to take nothing with you when you go. That’s the trick. That’s what she’d told me back then, when she was packing up our basement apartment, when she was leaving the state, the country, me. Otherwise it’s hard to move on. You’re a clean slate. You’re anyone. You’re no one at all.
Could you do it? I had asked myself that question then, back when my life felt unfixable, tilted off its axis. No, I thought. Not even then.
But this time I was someone braver. Someone more like Emmy. And the words had been a melody.
You’re a clean slate. You’re anyone. You’re no one at all. And I had followed her here for a fresh start. I had taken very little with me.
This box had moved with me to three apartments over the course of eight years. Emmy had laughed that night when I told her I still had it. My words slurring together with hers. A bottle of empty vodka between us, wine we drank from tumbler glasses. A thought she grabbed out of the air and gave voice to: Hey, did you end up keeping that box? The one I left behind when I moved?
And I had, of course I had. As if I had been waiting for her all along. As if she knew I always would.
In Boston there was an unreachable cabinet above the refrigerator where nothing else could go. Just the things I kept for storage but didn’t need. A box of my own, stuffed with old yearbooks and family pictures. And behind that, hers. I’d used one of my barstools to retrieve it. Had to pull down the rest of the stuff in front of it.
She’d laughed when she saw it, laughed and placed it on the floor, on top of her jacket, beside her shoes. I hadn’t thought of it again. She’d left with it that morning while I was on the computer, figuring out how to leave my life behind and support myself in the middle of nowhere, a place she’d chosen from a dart and a map. Fate, she’d said.
The top was closed but not sealed, edges tucked into one another. I knew she must’ve gone back through it once she left my place with it, taking John Hickelman’s watch, restarting the game. I knew I had passed the test by never looking inside.
But now it was here, and Emmy was gone. And she had hidden it out of sight, behind a lock that must’ve been hers. I pried open the top, unable to wait another moment.
It smelled like cardboard and the cold.
Reaching inside, I felt like I was unearthing one of those time capsules we buried in elementary school, awaiting the next generation: our fashion trends and current events, newspaper clippings laminated in thick plastic, a framed photo of our class; things we thought would mark the time.
The contents of Emmy’s box: the ashtray that she’d taken from a restaurant; the magnet, shaped like the hook of the Massachusetts Cape, with the name of the bar where she’d worked; an oversize cross on a long chain that she’d probably swiped from someone’s bedside table; a see-through neon green lighter with I the Beach that I remembered we once used to light candles when the power went out; and a key. The key was gold, and cold to the touch, attached to a green-and-purple key chain, plastic threads woven together in the way that we’d made our friendship bracelets as children. Below the items was a thin layer of paper material, slightly stuck to the cardboard. It took me a moment to recognize the backing, to realize these were photographs.
My pulse picked up, and the cool air moved against my skin, and I had this feeling—that I was about to uncover Emmy herself. I picked up the first photo, and it was aged, a little yellowed at the corners. It was the image of a woman with long wavy blond hair, with high-waisted, flared pants. She was smiling at something out of view. From the clothes, I imagined this was someone from my mother’s generation. A pendant hung from her neck—and though it was too far to see clearly, it was dark and oval, and there were too many similarities to imagine that this wasn’t the same one Emmy wore. The one I’d found on our back porch.
I imagined that this was Emmy’s mother. I missed the death of my mother, and for what? she’d said.
The second photo was adhered facedown to the cardboard. I gently pried back a corner until it gave. I turned it over, shone my flashlight so the glare caught me too brightly at first. I squinted, waiting for the image to adjust. A girl’s face, up close, blue sky behind it. A girl with brown hair, her eyes shining, smiling straight into the camera, straight to me. For the briefest moment I wondered if this was something Emmy had taken from me. The girl’s features, the way I looked in high school, standing beside Rebecca in family photos.
But I couldn’t place it. Not the background, not the moment of someone saying Smile, not the finer details of the face. My gaze dipped to her smile, to the gap-toothed mouth, open as if she were laughing, and the pieces lined up—the image I’d been shown by the police, but a younger version.
I held in my hands an image of Bethany Jarvitz. From years ago.
Emmy had known her once before.
And suddenly, everything—the dart she said she’d thrown at the map, the random place we had landed, us being here at all—was not so random at all. As if the story had been set in motion months ago and I hadn’t seen it. Hadn’t seen any of it. Maybe it had started even earlier.
Rewind eight years, three apartments, to a girl sitting on the ledge next to an ad for a roommate, looking at me closely.
Hopping down and coming closer.
Closer.
CHAPTER 23
I was scrubbing my nails, using the brush from Emmy’s things under the sink, feeling the dirt and grime that would not come off, when I heard Kyle knocking on the door.
“One sec!” I called.
My hands shook over the sink as I ran through the checklist in my mind: the box, taken and moved to the trunk of my car; the padlock, thrown inside as well; the car keys . . . had I returned them to my purse?
I made sure there was no dirt clinging to my pants or elbows before heading to the living room and letting him inside.
“Hi,” I said. I tried to calm my nerves, focus on Kyle, but my mind kept drifting to that box—what I’d found and what it meant. The police had been under the house already; it was only luck that they hadn’t found it before I did.
Kyle smiled, held out his hand, dangled my car keys from his index finger. “You left these on the roof of your car,” he said.
I swiped them from his grip. “Thanks,” I said. “My mind is so scattered this week.”
He nodded, then looked over his shoulder toward the road. “I don’t have long,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, wondering if he was expecting someone else, like last time.
He hovered just inside the doorway. He didn’t sit at the table, didn’t take a step closer, even though nobody else was watching.
“So, the thing is, Leah, I’m the lead on the Finley case.”
I nodded. I’d seen the way he acted down by the lake, figured he had been in charge from the start. “Okay,” I said, and then I felt the whip-fast reality of his comment. “You can’t talk to me anymore? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No!” he said. “No. But you’re a witness. You’re part of this somehow.”
My stomach dropped, everything I didn’t want and now couldn’t avoid. I’d known it as soon as I saw Emmy’s car pulled from the lake that it was over. I’d felt it even earlier, when I’d held the necklace in my hand and run around the front of my house—when I’d asked to speak with the police. Still, I hadn’t expected this part. Not from this angle. Not from the man I’d been sleeping with, whom I’d invited into my home.
He reached a hand for my elbow, but I stepped away.
“I can’t be seen as playing favorites,” he said.
“Favorites? I’m sorry, are there other witnesses who are going to complain?”
“Th
is isn’t going well,” he mumbled, in an attempt to make me smile, it seemed.
I didn’t smile. “What are you so worried about?”
He blew out a breath, ran his fingers through his close-cropped hair, not meeting my eyes. There was something he still wasn’t saying. Something I wasn’t understanding.
“Do you think that this”—I gestured between us—“somehow taints the story or your part in it? Do you worry that it makes it seem like you were using me, Donovan?” He flinched at my use of his last name. “Can’t you recuse yourself?”
He stepped back, surprised, unsure. “I’m the best person for it, because of it. I was already looking for Emmy. I had already been looking into James Finley.”
It was a line I knew well. The very fine line between too close to see clearly and the closeness working in the case’s favor. Kyle Donovan knew about James Finley because I’d told him where to look. Had dug into his past because I had sent him searching. Knew Emmy’s car because I’d given him the description already. Knew more about Emmy than anyone here, other than me. He was the best person for the job because of me.
“So, say it, then.” He owed me at least that.
“I don’t want you to think it was nothing.”
I laughed. Wasn’t it?
“It’s just for now,” he said. “Just for a little while. Until we tie it all up.”
“Nobody’s going to care,” I said.
“Yes, they most definitely will.”
“No,” I said, and I felt the meanness I had in me, felt it from nowhere, the edge. “Nobody’s going to care when it happened. All that matters is that it did. It’s too late. The time line doesn’t matter. If you’re really so worried that this taints the story, you’re already screwed.”
He blinked, set his jaw, looked at me anew. “I’m sorry,” he said in a way that sounded like he thought this was me clinging desperately, a girl trying to talk her way out of being dumped. Making a fool of myself. He cleared his throat. “Are you going to continue staying here?”
“Why,” I said, “planning to swing by?” Everything I had said the night before, twisted and tinged with something else, sarcasm and anger.
“You said you were scared. I was planning to have some drive-bys scheduled throughout the night. I’ll be around, too. You can call me.”
“I called you before, and you still haven’t told me. Who was the witness that put Davis Cobb down by the lake.”
“It’s an active investigation.” A defense that had meant nothing a week earlier.
“You told me plenty already.”
“I shouldn’t have, Leah.”
“You can’t tell me about Davis Cobb? I thought that was something different. A different case.” But I knew something more, even if I didn’t understand it. The photo of Bethany Jarvitz that had been under my house. Not such a stranger. Not such a random face. But a tie, a real tie, between the Cobb case and this. And I was the only one who knew it.
He gritted his teeth, seemed annoyed, and yet he pressed on. “James Finley has been dead for weeks. When was the last time you saw Emmy again? I need times. I need you to be exact.”
Like this was a game, and I had to give him something first. He was no longer asking because she was a victim. He was asking because I was a witness and she was a suspect.
I felt myself closing off, shutting down. “I already told you this.”
“Her car, then. When had you last seen that?”
I shook my head, trying to think. Trying to make sense of the fact that her car had been gone for weeks and I hadn’t noticed. I sank into the closest kitchen chair, and Kyle sat beside me. “She parks it behind the house. You have to go looking for it. I didn’t notice.”
“She parks it behind the house,” he repeated. “And that didn’t make you think that maybe she was hiding it? Because it wasn’t hers?”
It hadn’t seemed odd to me until he said it. It just seemed like everything else: like Emmy. The little quirks that made her who she was. “I didn’t know,” I said. The words sounded tiny and defensive, even to me. Like they had when I’d stood in Logan’s office, saying the same.
Kyle closed his eyes, took a slow, steadying breath. “You want some details, Leah? Here you go. There’s no one named Emmy Grey in the Peace Corps from eight years ago. I’ve got a list of every person who went to Botswana, and there’s nothing even close. She’s not who you thought she was. Okay?” He put a hand over mine, some misguided attempt at keeping me calm. “She lied to you about her job. And that car. Leah, the car has fake plates. There’s no registration on the car. Her name is not Emmy Grey.”
I was shaking my head. Thinking of that picture under the house; thinking of the Emmy who took me in. Unable to reconcile the two. The moment she hopped off the wall, looking at me.
I had been no one. I’d stood in front of the bulletin board eight years earlier, adrift from my life. I was lost, untethered, unsure of everything. And then Emmy came along while I was this stripped-away version of a person. So was it strange that I felt her in my skin? She was there when it re-formed. She existed inside the sharper edges I erected. When he told me I didn’t know her at all, I instinctively didn’t believe him. And as he laid out the facts to support his claim, all I could think was So what?
So what if that wasn’t her name. If that wasn’t her license plate. If that wasn’t her job. When you got down to it, everyone was a mystery, just waiting to be unraveled.
And wasn’t that what we were looking for, anyway? Over coffee, over drinks, behind the dating website profiles and the painful small talk? That we would stumble upon someone who would want to dig a little deeper, uncover the parts that no one else knew. To want to know you deep inside, under everything. You wanted the person who would pick you over the job. Over their moral judgment. Over their case or expectations. You wanted the person who would pick option C. Who knew what you’d done and still put you first.
Emmy had always picked me. Over money and boys and any sense of moral code. I’d known it from the start, the day she held the knife in her hand.
So what if there’s a picture in the crawl space of Bethany Jarvitz. So what, Leah. If the situation was flipped, she wouldn’t tell. A, B, or C. You know what she’d pick.
But then I thought, You don’t know her at all. Every detail she shared, a figment of her imagination. I pictured that day we met, saw her looking at me as exactly what I was: this stripped-away version of a person; a familiar face, even. And I saw her anew. Everything shifting, worlds colliding, that moment when someone changes before your eyes—the beginning of the end.
I thought I saw things so clearly. That I was open to the stories other people let pass by. That I could wrap my hands around the truth before anyone else could even spot it. But you had to get so close to do that. You had to slip right into their world.
I have poor boundaries, I know that. I can see that, now that it’s been pointed out to me over and over again. Professionally, personally, I don’t see the distinction. There’s always too much overlap, and I can never figure out exactly where one element ends and the other begins.
She let me in her home, and I let her in my bed, in my head, until the point where to see her faults would be to see my own as well.
What’s your last name? I’d asked her.
And she’d smiled before she answered. You really don’t know? Buying a moment, her eyes twinkling, the bottle of vodka sitting between us. It’s Grey, she said, almost like she was letting me in on the joke, testing me.
Spell it for me, Donovan had said, and I knew I’d seen it somewhere, that it seemed right—
Her eyes twinkling as she pulled it from the vodka label between us—wondering if I would notice. And I hadn’t, not then. It was such an obvious lie, so calculated, she must’ve thought I saw it and didn’t care.
I’m not who you think.
I’m not going to tell you.
I’m no one.
I shut my eyes, felt the anger brewin
g along with the nausea as my world was shifting, and I wasn’t sure if it was toward him or toward her. “I think you should go now,” I told him. “Wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea.”
He didn’t stand. He locked his eyes with mine, and I could see he was debating something. He looked at the clock over the sink, made this noise in the back of his throat—as if I were endlessly frustrating. And then, finally, he told me: “They’re going to search this house.”
From the conversation so far, I didn’t think this was something he was meant to share. But he’d done it anyway, whether for himself or for me, I wasn’t sure. Maybe he thought he owed it to me, to give us both a fresh shot; maybe this was a bartering chip. It didn’t matter why.
“They’re getting a warrant. It’s in process. It won’t be long.”
“What are they looking for?” I asked, my voice low, so as not to disturb the balance of the moment.
His voice matched mine. “A knife.”
A knife.
“And,” he said, “any personal documents. Anything that might let us know who we’re dealing with.”
I heard her laughter again that night, with the bottle sitting between us—and wondered if it had been directed toward me instead.
“You search the house,” I said. “Go ahead.” I raised my hands, gesturing around the house.
“You’ll give your consent?”
“Yes,” I said. I had nothing to hide. And there was nothing here for them to uncover about Emmy—I’d been through it all myself. I just needed them to rule this out, move on, take me out of the center of the investigation.
“I’d have to search through everything, Leah. For the knife. For any papers.”
I thought of the box under the house, glad I had moved it to my car. For Emmy and for myself, until I understood what it was doing here. Still, there had been no knife, no papers. I wasn’t interfering with the things they hoped to uncover.
“Yes. Go ahead. Do it.”
The Perfect Stranger Page 16