The Perfect Stranger

by Megan Miranda

  * * *

  I NO LONGER TRUSTED that I was the one to decide on innocence or guilt. Still, this was what I wanted to believe: She made a mistake, and it snowballed. She and Bethany had set out to burn down that house, knowing he was in it, or not. But targeting him for a personal reason. The reason she could see things in me. And then: running, thinking she could somehow outrun her past, with enough time or distance. Bethany getting caught and Emmy running some more. Flirting with the idea of setting me up as another suspect, reasonable doubt. But for some reason, she hadn’t done it. Maybe she realized it would drag her too close to the case, putting her at risk. Maybe Bethany had pleaded guilty before Emmy had the chance to set me up instead. Maybe it was because of me.

  Whatever the reason, she kept on running. She missed the death of her mother, she’d told me. And for what? Eight years running. Eight years, scared to go home. Scared she’d be spotted. In case Bethany had given her name after all—afraid people might be looking for her still, after all this time.

  And then Bethany got out. Time served. And what had Emmy been granted? Not freedom, not yet. She owed Bethany. She knew it, and she’d promised. Not realizing the rage simmering in the letters that she’d never received. Walking straight back into the flame. She’d just come for my things, never intending to bring me along. Never believing I’d really up and leave my life behind. She just needed my ID, my credit cards—something to give Bethany, to start over.

  There wasn’t much else for a girl like Emmy to give.

  There’s a voice in my head that begs, Leave it alone. That the answers might not be what I want them to be. But I never could let these things lie.

  * * *

  FALL TURNED TO WINTER. And the world went eerily silent.

  Sometimes I thought if I were to go stand out in the middle of the woods and scream her name, she’d come to me. That she’d have to. That she was merely waiting for me to want it badly enough. But I never did.

  I didn’t want to call her here. I didn’t want to call her back and face the truth.

  I liked to believe that phone call I received that night, the blocked number, the breath in my ear, was her—just checking in. To make sure I was still alive, still all right. But maybe that was just me naively wanting to see the best in everyone.

  * * *

  SOMETIMES I DON’T KNOW what the truth is from the facts. I hear her breath on the other end of the phone line in the empty silence. I see her standing guard outside the house, protecting me—as she once had, with a knife in her hand. I think that she must’ve made a mistake and caught people along with her on the downswing, as I had once done. I had brought down my boss and Noah. I had taken Aaron down with a hammer, and so went Paige.

  Of course, there’s the other option, too. That she lured Bethany to our home with purpose, not in my defense at all. Killed her there. Getting rid of the one person she was still running from. Cleaned up after herself. Brought her to the lake and left her in the place where she could blame the whole thing on Davis Cobb. Coming back home, standing on the porch, and pulling the necklace off herself, dropping it between the boards. Leaving everything behind, as she knew she must. Then placing the call that would lead back to me as the source. With the murder weapon in my house.

  Sometimes I wondered if that picture I found in the box under my house was not a memento to look upon fondly, with regret, but the thing that fueled her anger, her drive. If she went looking for Bethany as I had gone looking for Aaron. To end this. To end her.

  Maybe I was wrong about Emmy all along. I want to believe she chose me over everyone—that she defended me to the end in the only way she knew how.

  But the sliver of doubt, it eats at me. And I cannot let her go.

  * * *

  SHE LEFT SOME THINGS behind for me, and me alone, whether she meant to or not.

  Part of me thought that if she knew me at all, she should know: I would use this, and I could find her. But the other part of me thought that maybe, if she was a person who had preyed on my weakness, then she would be blinded to the rest. And maybe she didn’t know me at all.

  Maybe she didn’t realize I would be the one to find her name. To call the high school and wait for the photocopied image of her black-and-white square to make it to my email, her name below—Melissa Kellerman—so I was sure.

  Maybe she didn’t realize I would be willing to wait, as she had. That once I began, I would dig until I got there. She missed the death of her mother, she’d said. Another piece given. Another dot to connect.

  It took a month to talk my way into family records. A credit card to see the old obituary. A search of the county records to find the property. A house on a plot of land owned outright by Andrea Kellerman in upstate New York. A piece of family land a few hours from the town of the high school. I could find no record of sale on the property since it was owned by Andrea Kellerman.

  * * *

  ALL THINGS RETURN WITH time. But you have to go looking for them. You’ve got to be ready for them. You’ve got to be willing to take the risk over and over again.

  * * *

  IT WAS WINTER BREAK, and the roads were snowy, salt and sand mixed into my tires. Kyle was still asleep in the hotel—a sleepy town on the way home for Christmas. My mother would be meeting him for the first time; Rebecca, the second. The joint trip was Kyle’s idea. The detour, though, was mine. “I’m stopping to see an old friend,” I’d said. And he had agreed.

  I passed the mark on my GPS first, circled back around, and parked down the bend, at the dead end of the road—out of sight—then walked back up the semi-paved lane. Whatever animals inhabited these woods were silent. Pockets of ice lined the sides of the road, crunching under my feet. The house was somewhat visible through the trees, but I had to get closer to see it clearly. Weaving through the trees, ready for someone or something to sneak up behind me. Picturing her watching the woods.

  She wasn’t. The house came into view, all alone. It was a one-story cape, clapboard-style, with weather-scorched shingles. A wind chime hung from the front porch. A gnome stood guard on the bottom step. A chill hung in the air with the breeze, faint music from the porch, from the chime.

  There was no car out front, and the windows were dark. It was set out of the way, in its own section of woods, not unlike where I now lived.

  Still, there were signs that it was not abandoned any longer, and I held my breath as I walked closer. Wondering whether I would find her here. A small hunch, a gut feeling, that suddenly seemed real.

  There was a pot of flowers hanging from the eave over the porch. The curtains were tucked back. And when I reached the side of the house and cupped my hands around the glass, I could see a mug left out on the counter.

  I took the key from my pocket, with the purple-and-green plastic woven into a patterned chain. A child’s key. My hand shook as I slid it into the front door, and it clicked. It turned.

  Open this door, and something opens inside of me. The scent of vanilla. A candle left burning.

  I stood at the threshold, but I didn’t step inside at first. After all this time, I felt a boundary here that I didn’t think I should cross. I remained on the other side, squinting at the photos on the mantel, just barely visible in the distance. The faces obscured, as they were intended to remain. “Hello?” I called.

  I tried to picture her here, walking from down the hall, curled up on that sofa in front of the fireplace.

  My hand was on the knob when I heard the noise from a distance—a car coming up the road. I fumbled in my purse. I could dart into the woods, make it back to my car, watch from a distance—watch and decide what to do. But something else, whatever thing grew deep inside me, for better or for worse, made me step over that threshold, locking the door behind me.

  The scent of vanilla. A wisp of smoke. The floor creaking under my steps. Heavy curtains coated with dust, pulled back. The ghost of Emmy in this house, beside me.

  I watched from the front window as the car pulled int
o the drive. The car was green, but I couldn’t see the driver from this angle. I held my breath. I could see her only in the reflection of the window as she exited the car. She’d let her hair grow. She was in a blue parka, tan boots. I closed my eyes and could see her just as clearly.

  * * *

  KYLE ONCE ASKED ME, when I told him, how I knew it was Aaron. Not if but how. He already knew all the details, the connections that could tie one case to the other. But that wasn’t what he meant.

  Couldn’t Bridget have gotten the pills elsewhere? Couldn’t she have taken them herself? Well, sure, all of this was possible. Those slivers of doubt that it’s best to ignore.

  It’s hard to trust someone’s memory. Especially after time. It’s all bogged down in what the person wants to remember and the narrative they’ve constructed. Sometimes, and I know this is where my old colleagues and I disagree, the facts don’t really matter.

  Sometimes I don’t remember if I saw the pills in the medicine cabinet before I fell. If the water was running before or after. I don’t really remember if I tried to fight the darkness, if I was able to draw any blood, make any sound. Maybe I didn’t. And this is where things get murky, because what does it mean if I didn’t do either of those things?

  I am sure of nothing.

  But what I do remember is the hot fear, the simmering rage, the anger that coursed through me eight years later at the prickle of his name. His face in the mirror—that’s the clearest image I have. The moment I knew I was in trouble, before his words, before anything at all.

  His face was how I knew.

  * * *

  THIS WAS WHY I stood at the window. For this moment. Of course she’d be coming home now. This was always her schedule—a creature of the night, returning in the early morning when the rest of us were just beginning our day. I heard her steps up the porch. Heard when they paused. The sound of metal on metal as she reached the doorknob; I imagined the links sliding through her fingers. She ran back down the steps, and I could finally see her clearly. She had John Hickelman’s watch in her hand, and she was scanning the road, then turning toward the woods, looking into the trees off to the side of the house—her face in profile. And that’s when I saw it, the moment I was sure.

  I snapped a picture of her with my phone as her face was in motion. Her head darted back and forth, and she balled the watch tightly in her fist. She called my name tentatively into the trees, standing perfectly still, the breeze moving her hair. My name sounded foreign on her lips. Laced with something else. Fear, I thought.

  She stepped back, and then again, watching the tree line as she moved. And then her hand found the railing and she backed slowly up the steps, as if she could see the world stretched before her. As if she could see the danger coming.

  Not realizing she’d already welcomed it inside.

  CHAPTER 38

  When the door opened, I saw Emmy. For a moment, she was the Emmy I had always known. And then, suddenly, she was not. Or she was exactly who she’d always been, and finally, I was the one who could see it.

  I caught her in profile. I saw Ammi, and Melissa, and Leah. All the versions of her and the parts I didn’t want to see. I saw her, truly, for the first time.

  Her steps faltered when she noticed me standing beside the window; like her, I abruptly didn’t know what I was doing here. But then she switched on, nudging the door shut with her hip, smiling her practiced smile, like this was all still a joke, roles we were playing.

  “Leah,” she said, my name rising and falling from her lips in feigned delight. So different from the way she’d said it outside, as someone else. She dropped her parka to the nearby chair, slid the watch around her wrist, the links jangling up her arm. She shook them again, making music. Her laughter was both familiar and foreign.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said, stepping closer, like this was what she had planned all along. “You know what happened, right? I couldn’t go back.” She shook her head, the ends of her hair longer now, brushing over her shoulders. “But I knew you would find me,” she said.

  I wanted it to be true, but I could also taste the lie on her, the desperation, see the many faces of her as she set out to frame her story. “Well, here I am,” I said, waiting, for once, to see where she would take this. If she would tell me what had happened. If she would wait to see what I knew.

  She rubbed her hands together, fighting the chill, and glanced out the window. “Did you walk?” she asked.

  I didn’t answer. Held the house key out to her, the childish woven key chain. “You left this.”

  Her fingers, I noticed, were shaking as she took it. She must’ve known what else I had found in that box. I wondered if she realized I’d traced both her crimes, then and now.

  “Are you staying?” she asked, as if I would be welcome.

  “No, I’m just passing through town, here with my boyfriend.”

  Her eyes lit up. “Boyfriend, huh? Who is it?” Slipping closer, so effortlessly working around my edges.

  “His name is Kyle. He’s a police detective. I met him when I reported you missing. I met him when they thought I was involved in the death of James Finley. I met him because Bethany Jarvitz was taking over my identity, which was given to her by you.”

  Her eyes widened in shock. “Leah,” she said, and she held out her hand like I had everything all wrong. “Bethany Jarvitz killed James Finley. I found out what Bethany was doing. I protected you. I did it for you.” And I could see it in my head, the story playing out in a film. Emmy sitting at the edge of the woods, that day with the owls, watching for her. Protecting me. The version of her I’d hoped she would be.

  But the beginning didn’t match up with the end. There were too many pieces that wouldn’t fit, no matter how desperately I wanted to believe it.

  “Really?” I said. “Because this is how I see it: You lived as the woman in the basement apartment in Boston, using her name. Taking my money. You stole my wallet, used my identity when you needed a job. And then you ran. You ran and did God knows what, but you weren’t leaving for the Peace Corps.” I was shaking now, unable to control the anger in my words. The betrayal. The realization that there was no other explanation than that she’d been using me from the start.

  She flinched, and I realized she had underestimated what I knew, what I had learned.

  I pressed on, showing her that I’d figured her out. That she couldn’t fool me any longer. “You hopped from one identity to the next until Bethany got released. And then you came back for me. Eight years later. Eight years later when you knew Bethany would be released from jail. I was like a gift you brought to her. Until you didn’t like what you found and got rid of her, too. Left the murder weapon in my house. The call from my school. I was the only one left behind.”

  “Leah, I can explain it. You know me. I know you.” She kept coming closer, as if by mere proximity she could prove none of this was true.

  I held up my hand to stop her. “No, this is what I know. You killed a man, with Bethany, long ago. And now she’s dead. And here you are, finally able to live as yourself. You’re out. You’re free. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “I didn’t kill that man. That was Bethany again. I swear it—”

  “He was from your hometown, Emmy. Melissa. Whoever you are. You were the one who must’ve known him.”

  “You of all people should understand, Leah. You don’t know what he was like. What he did.” I thought of the scar on her ribs. The fear in her eyes. The pieces I was fitting together on her behalf as she spoke. But I didn’t know. I didn’t know if it was true. If I believed her. A nonexistent fiancé who’d scared her; a boyfriend who’d kicked her out—so many stories, and I wasn’t sure if even she knew who she was anymore.

  If she herself was anything more than a story, with gaps that she left for us to fill in ourselves. Never telling me anything real, letting me fill in those blanks with my own story. Appealing to something so basic, so needed—that I wanted to find a
nother person like me, who was strong, who had made it. I had constructed her in my own likeness.

  There was a twitch above her eye, and her gaze darted quickly to the side, and I took inventory of the room—all the things she could be looking at. The knives, the base of the candlestick, the stakes beside the fireplace. I knew what she had done to Bethany. I had seen her not even flinch when she’d taken a knife to Aaron’s arm so many years ago. If she hadn’t killed that man years earlier, she’d at least gone along with it.

  And for the first time, I was afraid of the woman before me.

  Paige could see that there was something wrong with Emmy. But I was too blinded to her. She was, I believed, the person I wanted to be. Capable of anything. I had let her too close, it was true, but she had let me come so close as well.

  “Kyle’s probably up by now,” I said.

  “So? Time to go, then?” I felt her excitement in the air, that she was gaining the upper hand again.

  I shook my head. “No, I left this address for him this morning with your name. Sent him a picture of you getting out of the car a few minutes ago.”

  She shook her head. “No, Leah. You didn’t.” Because wasn’t that the Leah Stevens she knew?

  I held up my phone for her now, showed her the string of responses from him. The fact that he was calling the local police. The What were you thinking. The Hold on, I’m coming.

  A sound escaped her throat, and she looked around the room.

  “Leah,” she said, “what did you do?”

  “I gave you a head start,” I said. “It seems only fair after all you’ve done for me.”

  This house was her beginning and her end. The thing she was working back toward. The only way she could get there—without Bethany, without James Finley, without me. I saw her stare at it longingly, then set her jaw, a version of her stripped bare.