The Perfect Stranger

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The Perfect Stranger Page 24

by Megan Miranda


  “Okay,” I said. I could not bring myself to thank him.

  “Hey, Leah? This is only between you and me.” A promise, or a threat, that he would not say the same to the police. That I was now his only confidante, and he mine. “I’m only telling you because we’re the same, I can tell.”

  He made my skin crawl, but there was something to it. We were both drawn to this, if for different reasons. We were each seeing just a piece of the puzzle, letting the story fill in around it. Bethany and I were not identical, but in the dark . . . Theo had seen what he wanted to see.

  There had been a few different sequences of events, depending on whom you asked at first. For Theo, I was the suspect. For Izzy, it had been Theo. For the police, a man named Davis Cobb. And now, for me, there was a different lead. We forced the pieces until they fit what we thought we knew.

  Question witnesses and they’ll say: It all happened so fast.

  They misremember.

  They pull on pieces, let their minds fill in the rest. We crave logical cause and effect, the beginning, middle, and end.

  Theo had given me something: Bethany Jarvitz pulling the body of James Finley through the woods. Not such an innocent victim. Not such a victim at all.

  * * *

  THE BAD GUY, THE one we could only imagine in the mask, in the shadows—it was always closer than we liked to imagine. A man living in the same apartment. A professor in front of your class. There was a time, for some, when it was even closer—an unfamiliar stirring, a spark, like I imagined inside Theo. I tried to remember that age, that moment. To go back to that time in my life when I saw it head-on for the first time. When we flirted with danger and strangers. When we tested our boundaries, the wild calling to us. When we called it closer to see how close we could get. We crossed the line to find it.

  And then, for most, the danger became something else, separate and unapproachable. A monster.

  But there was a moment first, before we categorized it and filed it away, when it wasn’t so unapproachable just yet. When it brushed up against you and you had to decide.

  Theo, watching the woman he thought was me, dragging a man soaked in blood. Watching and wanting.

  * * *

  I STUMBLED BACK TO my place in a daze. The facts re-sorting themselves. Bethany had dragged a dead James Finley through the woods to Lakeside Tavern, where they’d disposed of him in Emmy’s car. And then what? And then Emmy had disappeared and Bethany had turned up near-dead.

  I was breathing too heavily when I slid open the glass doors—I felt everything too strong, too sharp. I had answers, and yet what did I really have? An unreliable witness. An unreliable witness who believed it had been me. Everything back to me.

  “Leah?” Rebecca had a hand on my arm, suggesting she’d already said my name once. “Are you okay?” She led me to a chair at the table. “Sit,” she said, and she placed her fingers at the base of my neck as if taking my pulse.

  I wanted to sink into her, into Rebecca the doctor who could help the ones who could still be helped. “Rebecca?” I said, and I was asking her for something. Really asking this time.

  “What happened to you?” she asked.

  I could tell her. She was my sister, and we were alone in the woods, and her fingers were on my pulse point, the most vulnerable spot. “I wrote an article,” I said. “I wrote an article about a girl who committed suicide, implicating a professor in her death.”

  She wordlessly pulled up a chair, sat across from me. And I told her all of it.

  “So Aaron killed himself after the article,” she said—the first words she had spoken since I began.

  “Yes.”

  “Aaron killed himself, and the paper found out you couldn’t prove the statement. That you made it up. That there wasn’t a source who could back it up.”

  “That’s what they thought.”

  “Could you be charged legally?”

  “It’s complicated. The paper won’t say that’s why I was fired—actually, they won’t say I was fired at all. And, I mean, there are connections between Aaron and this girl, if they really want to play that game. The pills were his. I’d bet anything on it. I knew him, Rebecca. He wasn’t a good man. Nobody wants it to come out.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Paige. Paige is the problem. She could file a civil suit against me, basically take me for all I’m worth, and ruin my name forever. Not that she’d need to, she has plenty of money on her own. But she could. She had a restraining order against me—”

  “A restraining order?”

  “I was trying to warn her. Over and over, I told her. I told her I was going to print it, that she could get out, and she twisted it all around that I was verbally assaulting her, that I was stalking her . . .”

  Rebecca’s brows drew together. “That’s a big leap, from calling to stalking.”

  “When she wouldn’t pick up the phone, I went to her house.”

  “Jesus, Leah.”

  “I know. I know. But it was Paige.”

  Paige, who always saw the good in people. Who saw the good in me. She’d changed, or I had—I wasn’t sure which anymore.

  “You’re sure it was him?” Rebecca asked, and I didn’t hesitate, I said yes, like I always did. To let in doubt at this stage would be fatal. The darkest corner, from which there would be no coming back.

  “How are you so sure?”

  I couldn’t tell her this part, like I’d told Emmy. Rebecca was not going anywhere. She was not a secret. She had ties to everyone else in my life. And it wasn’t that I was ashamed it had happened. Not anymore. I was ashamed I had left it alone.

  Who does the truth belong to? I thought back then that it was mine. That it was enough for me to know. I didn’t tell Paige. The words had simmered up, and I had stifled them back down. Your boyfriend—Aaron—he—

  Didn’t tell the police, even though that was what I would’ve told someone else to do. I didn’t want to be exposed, to get dragged into a case of he said, she said, the most difficult to make stick, I knew from experience. He tried to kill me. I never said it. And I’d left Paige with him, unaware of the danger. Ignored it, let them get married, have a baby.

  And by not telling the police, I was ultimately responsible for all that followed. He could not have gone eight years before trying again. He could not have made the leap so seamlessly. There had to be more of us. And this was the part I was ashamed of: that there might be one less square on the grid of that newspaper article had I done something years earlier. It was my wrong to right.

  “I knew him, Rebecca. I know what he’s like. What he does.”

  Rebecca must’ve sensed something in the silence, something from which there would be no going back. “So,” she said, cutting it off, looking the other way, letting us continue, “you can’t go back, then.”

  “No, Rebecca. I really can’t.”

  She looked around the house again, sniffed at the dust lingering in the streams of sunlight. “I mean, there is something charming about it all. Nature, I guess.”

  I laughed, a pained sound, and Rebecca laughed, too.

  “Also,” she added, “I would kill for this square footage.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Is this the girl from the hospital?”

  “Hello?” I said it again, disoriented by the unfamiliar voice on the line, the unfamiliar number on the display, early on a Sunday morning.

  “You came to visit once.”

  I racked my brain, trying to come up with the name. Graying hair, the slippers streaked with blood, the woman waiting vigil. “Martha?” I asked.

  “They’re removing life support. There’s been no brain activity. I thought you should know. That you might want to be here.”

  Bethany Jarvitz was about to die. Except that wasn’t exactly true. She had been dying since the day she was found, there on the shore of the lake. She had just taken a long time in doing it.

  There would be no follow-up in the papers. Not for
a girl like this, in a place like this, so long from when the event took place. She would die in a hospital, regulated and medicated. There was nothing newsworthy. Not like there would’ve been if she’d died right then on the side of a lake, bleeding out.

  “I can’t come,” I whispered. I couldn’t be at her side with the police and doctors waiting around. Drawing the connections between us once more. Not with what Theo knew and what he might say.

  “Nobody has,” Martha said, and the line went dead.

  I had disappointed her along with everyone else. I was not the girl she thought I was. I said a silent prayer for Bethany Jarvitz, sitting at the empty kitchen table, which I hadn’t done since long ago, when my father left. I said a prayer for all of them, the quietly overlooked, the ones whose stories would never be heard, who fade away with no one there to watch them go.

  * * *

  REBECCA LEFT SUNDAY EVENING because of work. I could see, in her face, that she was debating not going at all. That she could sense something brewing here, under my skin, and I fought to keep it from her. “You’ll come home for the holidays?” she asked, proof that I would be fine between now and then.

  “Yes,” I said. After she left, I knew what I had to do. I called in to the school hotline, left a message that I would be taking some accrued sick days, and lined up a substitute for the next two days.

  I was to blame for many things. But I wasn’t about to serve time for something I didn’t do.

  All relationships fall into three categories, Emmy had said with her feet up on the couch, the fog of vodka clearing. And she’d laid it out for me in that simple, straightforward way.

  Take anyone you know. Let’s say you know they’ve killed someone. They call you and they confess. Do you either, A, call the police. B, do nothing. Or C, help them bury the body.

  I thought about it now, thought about what I’d said back then with my head foggy, and the room blurring, in the basement apartment with the inescapable heat making everything feel closer.

  “So, which is it, Leah?”

  “For you?”

  She flipped onto her stomach. “Of course.”

  A test, even then.

  “None of the above,” I said. “You can’t escape the truth. It finds you eventually.”

  This was my belief. That the truth rises to the surface like air bubbles in boiling water. That it rushes upward like a force of nature, exploding in a gasp of air when it reaches the surface, as it was always intended to do.

  “Not always,” she said. “Not for Aaron.” It was the first time she’d used his name.

  “It would if I wanted it to,” I said.

  She paused, her eyes flitting over mine, as if brushing up against something brief and fleeting. “Okay, fine, so you pick option B, then? You’d do nothing?”

  “No, not nothing.” I rolled onto my stomach. “I wouldn’t hide a body. But I guess I’d hide you.”

  “A life in your basement, huh? Or a passport in a fake name to a country with no extradition?”

  “No, no,” I said. Something was forming in my mind. A way. An option D. “No, the way to hide . . . You’d have to be erased.”

  “This sounds like an assassination euphemism.”

  “Ha. No, the best way to hide is to pretend you never existed in the first place.”

  She raised her eyebrows, the corners of her mouth tipping up, and then she burst out laughing, like she couldn’t contain it anymore—and I did the same. How impossible; how outlandish.

  I looked around our house again, the one that was only in my name. The car that could not be tied to her. I heard people’s witness statements—nobody had seen her. Nobody could vouch for her. And I wondered if this was her plan all along.

  She would disappear as if she had never existed at all—and I was the only one left to take the fall.

  * * *

  I KEPT A LOW profile. I wanted no evidence of this trip. Not in credit card receipts, or phone traces, or witness statements. I would travel like Emmy would have traveled in order to find her.

  No plane tickets. Cash only. No nice hotels that require ID and a credit card for incidentals. To stay off the grid, you’re pushed to the fringe of society. You’re pushed to the No-Tell Motel, with all the other people trying to keep off the grid for one reason or another. You’re pushed to find cash any way you can get it, to barter with safety as an afterthought. When the police come to question others for your whereabouts, you can’t count on your friends. Someone had turned Bethany in, seeing her face in the paper. Someone who knew where she was staying. A friend, I guessed. Most people have too much at stake. Children, jobs, spouses, their integrity. They won’t lie if there’s a chance they’ll be found out.

  I left before sunrise; I had plans to sleep in my car if needed, freshening up at rest areas off the highway, with nothing but Emmy’s box for company in my trunk.

  I kept my phone off.

  I imagined Emmy, or Melissa, or whoever she was, doing the same. No license, no credit cards, no name. Leaving again—So here I go again, she’d said that night when she found me again. But first she had come for me.

  I had assumed what I now held in the trunk was what she had come back for. This box. Something inside that she needed eight years later. Something she had left behind after all.

  I arrived in the late afternoon—hitting the beginning of rush hour in reverse. I hated driving in the city. Hated it then, hated it now. Hated it even worse when the streets were so congested that the people walked faster than you drove. So I parked in a lot near Fenway, paid the attendant cash, and made my way to the nearest T stop.

  The fall air was crisp and the sky a deceptive clear blue. It was cold, but winter hadn’t turned yet, and people walked the streets in sleek coats, no gloves or hats or scarves necessary. I stepped into the mass of people, and I wished suddenly for winter.

  In Boston, they don’t really do a good job of warning you about the winter. The postcards look snow-covered and beautiful, the streets still filled with people, the wisps of cold air and the wool coats and waterproof boots all part of the charm, the allure. They don’t tell you that most of the time, it’s pure misery. Waiting for the bus, walking to the T stop, the persistent dry cough that permeates through the office. The bathrooms and office lobbies covered in melted snow. And us, slowly thawing out inside. The chapped lips, the red noses, the dry skin around our knuckles, and the way the sweaters itch across our collarbones. How you want nothing more than to stay in. The things you do to stay warm.

  And then there’s the gray. How the sky cover goes dark in the late fall and seems to stay that way for weeks on end, always ready for snow or rain. How the cold seems to hover in a fog, like a mirage, just off the ground. And everyone bundles up in layer after layer because you all have to walk everywhere, the puffs of white escaping like smoke as you elbow past one another.

  And nobody seems to notice you. You could be anyone under the down jacket and scarf wrapped over your mouth, your hat pulled down over your ears and your hair. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. A sheep in wolf’s. And this is why, no matter how many people are out on a street, this does not make for more witnesses but somehow fewer. It could be anyone. Anyone standing on their toes, peering in the window.

  Can we get a description? the police ask.

  Jacket. A hood. No sense of width or breadth or height underneath.

  I craved the anonymity, had the distinct feeling that I wasn’t supposed to be here, that the city itself had banished me and would no longer accommodate my presence. That I might run into Noah, or that the cop on the corner might be Kassidy or someone I’d once met at a crime scene. That they would see me and call after me or call someone else—my name floating through the city like I was something they’d been looking for.

  I found myself in our old neighborhood from eight summers ago, standing in front of our old apartment, which seemed even more shabby and decrepit than when I’d seen it last.

  I had the key from the
box in my pocket, with the green-and-purple woven key chain. There were no apparent noises coming from within. I stepped down, the sides of the stairwell narrowing as I descended, and then I slid the key into the lock of the worn black door. It stuck halfway in, and I pulled too hard as it disengaged.

  It could’ve been changed, I thought. New locks, maybe. But the key appeared to be made for a different type of lock altogether. I backtracked to the sidewalk, where puffs of smoke were rising from somewhere underground. Tried to picture the girl who would stomp down these steps, whom I would always hear coming.

  The liquor store was no longer next door. It had been replaced by a sandwich shop. Nobody here to remember her—the girl I could not imagine sliding under the radar.

  I followed up on the clues left behind in the box. Everything she felt was worthy of remembering, sealing it all up with silver duct tape. The green lighter, with the I the Beach decal, was the type found at any souvenir shop up and down the East Coast. But the ashtray, the magnet, these types of stolen items all had specific identifying details, and I let them lead the way. I stood in darkened, musky bars, saw storefronts replaced by newer, brighter places. I followed the address on the magnet from her old place of work. A bar in the South End, a place I’d never visited.

  The bar was dark, it seemed on purpose. And it still had the name from the magnet. The hostess was wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt with the pub name. “Can I speak with your manager?” I asked.

  “Malcolm!” she called without turning around.

  The man wiping down the bar walked around, tucked a rag into the back of his dark jeans. “Can I help you?” he asked.

 

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