The Stories You Tell

by Kristen Lepionka

  The picture with the Pioneer box was different. She wasn’t in control of this photo. This wasn’t the curated glimpse into a life the way the other ones were. So why would she send this to Rick? Proof that she’d spent his three grand on what she said she’d spent it on?

  I thought about what Jordy and Elise had said about her father, how he’d bought her an expensive mixer. That’s probably what this was—photographic evidence of a gift from her dad, and nothing to do with Rick at all.

  She was already stringing at least three guys along, asking for money under the guise of who knew what. So did it matter if she used Rick’s money to buy a mixer or not?

  It was almost like there were two Addisons. Two profiles, two personas? There was the quirky, mysterious Addison with her notebook poetry and cryptic social accounts. Then there was Addy Marie, confident, forward, willing to send pictures of herself to strangers for money.

  I didn’t know how to reconcile the two. Human beings were complicated, of course. It was possible to send a sexy photo to somebody even if you weren’t ordinarily the selfie type; I was willing to bet that a large number of the sexy photos in cyberspace were taken by someone stepping outside of their comfort zone. Maybe Addison just needed money—how lucrative could deejaying at a shitty nightclub be? The maxed-out Visa might be evidence of that. Or maybe she was bored, or wanted to punish the jerk men of the world, or was lonely, wanted attention, wanted someone to make her feel special, even if the version of herself she was presenting was fake.

  There was a part of this story that I still wasn’t getting.

  I thought about Brock again. Secretly talking to his wife’s childhood friend, unbeknownst to both his wife and her friend, claiming that Addison had contacted him first. Why? Similar to the first Addison profile I’d found, Brock’s BD E clearly wasn’t a real profile—he’d even admitted that it existed only because he wanted to use BusPass along with his work pals.

  What were the odds that Addison just happened to randomly contact him?

  Not great, I realized.

  Not only was it a coincidence too extreme to be believed, his profile was basically empty.

  Maybe he was lying, and he’d contacted her first. I figured the odds were about even that this was what had happened.

  Maybe Addison knew exactly who he was and wanted to rekindle their ten-year-old swim meet romance.

  Or maybe Addison knew exactly who he was and just wanted to fuck with him.

  Or fuck with her friend.

  Addison as a psycho? It would certainly explain the seemingly split personality. And I had to admit that my brother’s taste in women tended toward the psycho; in fact, Addison had already demonstrated herself to be a bit of one when she got Andrew fired from the hotel. But that was impulsive, childish behavior, not a full-scale offensive.

  Then we had Corbin Janney on the other end of the spectrum, catfishing Addison. The odds seemed pretty much zero that she was being fooled by one person at the same time she was doing the fooling on the other side.

  Much more likely that there was someone playing both sides against the middle, I realized.

  I opened a new browser tab and tried to pull up Corbin Janney’s Facebook page, but it had been deactivated since I looked at it the other day. I started clicking backward through my dozens of open browser tabs, for once grateful that my lack of housekeeping skills applied to my digital life as well. Finally I found it, still up from the other day when I’d first looked at it—the day of the SWAT situation at Addison’s place. Once I’d discovered that Addison was active in the dating app, I’d almost forgotten about this teensy bit of usable evidence. Then all hell broke loose. I saved his profile picture to my desktop, then opened a new tab to do an image search. If the image of Corbin had been posted anywhere else, this would show me where. For all I knew the man in the picture was an underwear model, but maybe I could finally catch a break.

  “Oh, shit,” I said when the results loaded.

  I was looking at the “About the Instructors” page of the Blacklick Community Center’s swim lessons schedule.

  THIRTY-SIX

  His name really was Corbin—his last name. Jamie Corbin. He was twenty-five, six foot something, dressed in nothing but some very small swim briefs that didn’t even try to cover the sharp V of his hipbones. Water poured off of him but he made no effort to wipe it off even though he was holding a fluffy white towel. “Sure,” he was saying, “ask away.”

  “Perhaps we could go sit in the lobby or something,” I said. The natatorium was hot and splashy and loud and smelled like chlorine and something sour.

  “Oh. Uh, yeah,” Jamie Corbin said. “Lemme just get changed.”

  I went back out to the lobby of the rec center and got a Coke from the vending machine and sat at a small table next to a foggy window that looked over the pool. Jamie Corbin came out of the locker room dressed in warm-up pants and a tight white T-shirt, his collar-length hair still wet. I’d learned through my research before I drove out here that he had gone to USC on a partial swimming scholarship. He was just the rec center’s most popular teacher but he seemed happy enough about it. “So hey, what are we talking about? You looking to enroll your little ones, or…?”

  “Um,” I said. “You ever use the BusPass app?”

  “That dating thing?”

  I nodded.

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t do that. Online dating. Never felt the need. Never had trouble meeting people in person. Why?”

  “I suppose it helps that you’re shirtless for your job.”

  He grinned at me.

  I showed him Addison’s picture. “You know who this is?”

  He took my phone and gave the photo a thorough look. “No. Should I?”

  “She’s been talking to somebody online, through the app, who looks an awful lot like you.”

  Corbin shrugged. His posture was easy, unconcerned. “Not me. I’m engaged.”

  “Congratulations. How about him?” Now I showed him a picture of Brock.

  “Well, yeah, that’s what’s-his-name. Mr. H. He’s the facilities manager or something here.”

  “So you do know him?”

  “Well, I know he’s the guy you call when there’s, like, an incident,” he said, lowering his voice, “of a bodily fluid–type nature. Extension nine-one-one.”

  I almost laughed. “Ew.”

  “Yes. Ew.”

  “Other than such incidents,” I said, “you ever talk to him?”

  Corbin shook his head. “Nope. He’s always stomping around with his walkie-talkie, all busy. Now, his wife on the other hand.”

  “Oh?”

  “I mean, I don’t really know her either. But I don’t know how she wound up with a guy like Mr. H.”

  “Because she’s pretty?”

  “Yeah, she’s just—look, I really shouldn’t talk about her like that. He could probably get me fired.”

  “I promise I won’t say a word to him.”

  Corbin leaned back in his chair. He was long and lean and his limbs seemed to be everywhere. “Yeah, she’s pretty. She’s had kids, two, I think? But you wouldn’t know it. Then again, she’s always up there,” he said, pointing up the steps to the level that housed the fitness equipment, “grinding away on that treadmill. So no wonder she still looks twenty.”

  “You seem to know an awful lot about her, given that you don’t really know her.”

  Finally, his chill demeanor seemed to thaw a little. “I don’t want to get in trouble. Or her to get in trouble.”

  “And why would she get in trouble?”

  He sat up, elbows on the table. “Just the lowest of low-key flirting, is all.”

  It was entirely possible that this was just his ego talking, that he assumed any woman who spoke to him was flirting with him. He probably assumed that I was. But while I was interested in something now, it wasn’t him. “Oh?”

  He scooted his chair closer to me so he was practically inches away from my
ear. “Upstairs, on the fitness floor? There’s windows that look over the pool. She’s always on the same treadmill, right above the shallow end, which is where I teach her son’s class. And she’s always up there, the whole hour, just cranking on that thing. Sometimes I’ll look up, and she’s looking right at me. Not just looking out at the pool. Looking at me. Eye contact is sexy, you know that? But nothing ever happened, obviously. When she gets her kid after class she acts like the rest of the moms.”

  “Which is?”

  “Impatient and kinda mad.”

  Before I could ask him more about that, I heard someone say my name.

  I glanced over my shoulder and saw Jordy in the atrium, expression confused. “What are you doing here?”

  Jamie Corbin, sensing trouble, got up and disappeared into the men’s locker room. “Just following up on a couple things,” I said. I got to my feet and went over to her. She was dressed for work—grey suit, ankle boots—and snowflakes dusted her hair and shoulders. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m just getting really worried,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know why she’d tell him she was with me if she wasn’t.”

  I stared at her. “Elise?”

  “Yeah.”

  I remembered what Brock had told me last night—that he and his wife had argued, she’d taken the kids to go stay with Jordy for a few days. “She’s not staying with you?”

  “No! My stepsister is, but Elise isn’t. What the fuck is going on? Come on, let’s go talk to him.”

  “Jordy, wait,” I said.

  She’d gone a few steps down a hallway toward the administrative offices of the rec center but she paused, tapping the toe of her boot on the tiles. I thought about Elise, cranking away on the treadmill with the only hour she really got to herself every week. I thought about her throwing out the fish she’d made for dinner the night I brought over fried chicken and nibbling on a tiny portion of kale. I thought about the ways in which she and Addison were complete opposites, and how that must have been infuriating, that her idiot husband had a thing for her friend, her messy, breezy, eccentric friend who’d made all the mistakes that Elise tried so hard not to make. That Addison was still the one men looked at, not her.

  Then I thought about how she was the only connection to both Addison and the tattooed hunk that Addison thought she’d been talking to on BusPass all this time.

  About Brock’s claim that Elise had failed to mention her old friend had been missing for two weeks.

  I’d assumed that he was lying. Or was so tuned out to his wife that her words straight-up hadn’t registered.

  But what if she actually hadn’t said anything?

  Jordy was staring at me. “What?”

  Worry squeezed my chest. I said, “I just got a theory, and I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Brock Hazlett turned white as a sheet when I explained. He said, “You mean that I was really talking to my wife? She was pretending to be Addy?”

  “I think it’s possible,” I said. We were in his office with the lights off—either he was hungover from last night or hiding from someone—Brock behind the desk, Jordy in a chair opposite him, and me leaning against the credenza below the windows. Beyond them, the parking lot was turning white again; the snow was falling quickly now. “But look, never mind that. I think that if Elise lied about where she was going, and if neither of you can reach her right now, she might be in a bad place. Mentally. And Brock, she’s got your kids. So it’s really important that we figure out where she might be.”

  “Oh my god,” her husband murmured into his hands.

  Jordy said, “But she—why—” Then she gave up on verbalizing it, just sort of flapped her long arms.

  “I think Elise was pretending to be Addison on the app. I think she talked to a lot of different men through there, using pictures of the real Addison, which she got from Addison herself—under the guise of the guy she called Corbin Janney, but who’s really named Jamie Corbin and he’s your son’s swim teacher.”

  Brock slapped the desk so hard the cold coffee in his mug rippled.

  “And one of those men happened to be related to a Columbus police officer, who took it very personally that his cousin was being jerked around this way. So he launched a bit of an investigation to figure out who she was, and because”—I paused to make air quotes—“‘Addy’ sent a picture of herself at the club, he succeeded. And he went there to confront her about it. Except he found the real Addison, who didn’t know anything about it. And, by the way, he’s dead.”

  “This is so messed up. It’s just—but she—she wanted to help me pay you. Why would she do that?” Jordy’s voice was tight.

  For the same reason that Gail Spinnaker had paid me to prove something unprovable. “Because the only thing that matters is how it appears.”

  The three of us stared at each other.

  “Addison took her suitcase when she left. But she didn’t tell you guys, her best friends, where she was going. She didn’t tell her dad. Or her roommate.”

  “But maybe she told the guy, this Corbin guy,” Jordy said. “Which means she did tell Elise, right?”

  I nodded. “Brock, did your wife take her computer?”

  * * *

  The traffic was heavy but the Hazletts lived just around the corner from the rec center. The three of us drove separately, a convoy of big, dark vehicles moving through the snow. Brock opened the front door and briefly paused to wipe his boots on the doormat. But then he looked down and seemed to realize that the status quo in his home had changed. He gave up and tracked the snow down the linoleum and Jordy and I did the same. “Computer’s here,” Brock said, pointing to the brand-new iMac in a corner of the living room. “But she doesn’t use it much. She has an iPad she’s always reading on.”

  Another dawning flickered through his face as he realized that his wife had probably not just been reading on her iPad.

  I wondered how many times they’d sat in the same room, communicating through “Addy.”

  The thought gave me chills.

  I said, “If she ever signed into it using the same log-in as her iPad, some of her history might be saved in the browser.”

  Jordy nodded and stabbed at the space bar to wake the computer up.

  “Brock, you check Elise’s things in her bedroom. I’ll check the basement.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  I ran down the basement steps and into Elise’s “sanctuary.” The mystery of how she’d managed to afford such a well-appointed yoga space in her house seemed to be solved. I wondered how much money in total she’d gotten on “Addy’s” behalf. Five grand? Ten? I opened the desk’s only drawer and found only a manila folder full of user guides and warranty info for various appliances in the house, with receipts stapled to each.

  The fancy refrigerator had been three thousand alone.

  The new Mac upstairs was twenty-one hundred.

  The washer and dryer were nine hundred apiece.

  I put the folder back and kept looking, but the room yielded no secrets.

  Somewhere else in the house, I heard Brock yell, “Fucking fuck.”

  Jordy’s long strides echoed on the floor above me. “Did you find something?”

  I left Elise’s sanctuary and took the steps two at a time. When I got to the kitchen, Brock and Jordy were both staring at a black case, open on the counter between them.

  Brock said, “She took my gun.”

  His expression was deadly serious.

  “I’m gonna kill her—”

  “No, nobody’s killing anyone—”

  He shoved me out of the way as he headed toward the front door.

  “Nope, no, Brock, back to the kitchen,” I said. I squeezed by him to block his exit. “We need to take a minute and think about this, not just go out on a rampage, okay?”

  My own handgun was holstered at the small of my back, and
it dug into my spine as I leaned against the front door.

  “Get out of the way.”

  I shook my head. “Where are you going to go?”

  He was sweating, breathing hard. But he blinked and took a step back. “I don’t know.”

  “Exactly. We need to think about this.”

  Brock hung his head.

  “I know this is a lot. And hopefully, I’m just wrong, and you can go back to being pissed off at me. That’s the best-case scenario. Worst case—well, where might she go?”

  “Her sister?” Jordy said. “In Tampa?”

  Brock shook his head. “No, I texted her this morning. To ask if Elise had talked to her since Sunday. I was just looking for a way to … I don’t know … an idea to get back in her good graces. But anyway, Meg said she hadn’t heard from her in a while.”

  “Other siblings?”

  “No, just the one.”

  “Her parents?”

  “They’re on the great American road trip in that stupid fucking RV,” Brock said.

  I tapped the edge of the counter as a thought came into focus. “Jordy, do you remember anything else Addison said about BusPass Guy? Where he lived, where he worked, anything?”

  She scrubbed a hand over her face. “She said he traveled a lot. A photographer, or art director? Something like that. He was working in Detroit, temporarily, she said. But that was months ago.”

  “Detroit?” Brock paced the length of the room, his muddy boots still squeaking on the floor.

  “Does Elise know anyone in Detroit?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Jordy, what else did Addison say about BusPass Guy?”

  “He’d been in the Air Force? He hates cilantro?”

  “This isn’t helping,” Brock snapped.

  “Hey, let her talk. You don’t know what’s going to help.”

  “She’s got my boys with her. She has my gun. What if there isn’t time to talk about cilantro?”

  Jordy grabbed my elbow. “She showed me this place on Airbnb. Like six months ago, maybe longer. I think she was saying that it’s his. That he rents it out while he’s gone.”