Last Seen Leaving

by Caleb Roehrig

  It wasn’t until January asked me if I thought we could drop her off at Tiana’s house on my way home, however, that I realized how unnerved she’d been by the scene in the kitchen—and how much she didn’t want to spend a night alone in the house with Anson.

  THIRTEEN

  I’M NOT SURE what the hell I was thinking—maybe I wasn’t thinking at all—but I started marching immediately up the stairs to the second floor, my emotions turbulent and sharp. The self-satisfied look on Anson’s face when he’d realized I’d overheard the awful things Eddie was saying about January had hit me just as hard as the nineteen-year-old’s clumsy fist that night in the kitchen. She’d stood up to him for me once, and I needed to return the favor.

  I was still totally outclassed, of course; Anson could easily pound me into the hardwood floors until the maid would need a putty knife to scrape me up again, and there was no one around to stop him this time. But his little smirk had made me just angry enough to ignore common sense and, at the moment, the rage felt really good.

  The head of the upstairs hall formed a horseshoe around the curving staircases, opening in the front on the gaping cavern of the Walkers’ foyer, with its triptych of stained-glass windows and wedding cake chandelier that dangled from the high ceiling like a flamboyant spider. To the back, there was a view over an ornate rail down into the grand room, where Tammy was still asleep on the sofa. Twin doors of paneled wood set into the east wall guarded the entry to the master suite, but a long corridor into the west wing of the mansion gave access to the remaining bedrooms on this floor.

  Anson’s room was at the end of the hallway, the farthest one from the master suite and therefore the one with the most privacy. Not only was it massive, and situated in a corner with views in two directions, but he even had an adjoining, bay-windowed study with access to a roof-level balcony. I’d seen the inside of his private quarters only once, when he was out of town visiting his mother for the July Fourth weekend, and his were undeniably the best quarters in the house after his parents’—despite being so filthy and disordered that even a dedicated slob such as myself had to think twice about touching anything without rubber gloves on.

  That’s why I was startled nearly out of my righteous fury when I discovered that it had not been his own spacious sanctuary to which Anson had retreated.

  The door to January’s bedroom, which always, always remained closed—no matter what, under penalty of gruesome torture—was standing open. I drew up short, then advanced closer and peered in, eyes wide with mounting outrage as I watched Anson Walker casually rummaging through his stepsister’s private belongings.

  It was not a girly bedroom, because January was not a girly girl; she’d even fought a determined, if quixotic, battle to paint the whole room black. Not a glossy black, either, but a sepulchral, matte-finish, emo black that would have made the place look like a satanic chapel with a walk-in closet and sunken tub. I was ninety percent sure that the crusade had merely been about getting under Tammy and Jonathan’s white-bread skin, though; January really couldn’t have cared less what color her walls were, but the very suggestion of an “all-black bedroom” made her Town & Country–obsessed parents squirm with horror, and that’s what really mattered.

  They compromised by letting her cover one whole wall with blackboard paint, like the project Tammy had undertaken at the condo, which was thereafter forever covered with chalked messages, song lyrics, and drawings in pastel hues. Another wall was plastered with impossibly detailed photographs of the night sky, the Milky Way glowing like phosphorescent mold above mountains, lakes, and glaciers. Elsewhere were pictures of me, Tiana, and Micah, as well as some of her other friends from Riverside; album art from Panic! At the Disco, Fun, and the Disasters; and images of Luke Hemmings, the lead singer of 5 Seconds of Summer. January didn’t actually like 5SOS, but thought Hemmings was hot enough to rise above the group’s musical failings—an opinion I’d secretly shared.

  None of her old furniture made the trip up the tax bracket from the condo; her twin bed had been traded for a queen with a satin-upholstered headboard, the Ikea dresser for a handcrafted bureau of cherrywood, and her refurbished PC had become a brand-new MacBook Air as quickly and easily as a rotting pumpkin turned into a set of designer wheels before Cinderella’s very eyes. This particular Cinderella, of course, had far preferred the scullery to the ballroom.

  Anson was rooting through an open drawer at January’s desk, another of her new acquisitions, pulling things out and tossing them aside as he examined them and grew instantly bored. Letters she and Ti had passed to each other in class freshman year, a deck of tarot cards, and a box of colored pencils hit the floor while I stood there in disbelief. “What the hell are you doing?” I finally found my voice. “This is January’s room!”

  “Fuck off,” Anson countered lazily. He sounded as drunk as Tammy had, only I didn’t think he had the same excuse; for him, this was just another Tuesday. “Hey, you know if she keeps anything good in here? Weed, or cash, or whatever? I already checked her laptop for nudes, but I couldn’t find any, and I don’t see her phone around.”

  From the top right drawer of the desk, he pulled out a small, dried flower—the rose I’d given January on the night of our fateful two-month anniversary date. Until that very moment, I hadn’t even realized she’d kept it, but I recognized it immediately because of the little heart she’d painted on one leaf in silver marker. Anson gave the flower a disinterested glance and then tossed it to the floor, where the fragile, blackened petals crumbled like charred newspaper.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I took two unsteady steps forward. “We just found her clothes out there covered in blood! Her mom is totally losing it right now, and you’re ransacking her room for weed and selfies?” I was getting angrier by the second, just hearing it out loud. “Who do you think you are?”

  “How ’bout I promise to cry myself to sleep tonight?” He turned to face me with a sardonic chuckle, but his expression was flat, most likely deadened by controlled substances. As if to confirm my impression, he pulled a joint out of his back pocket and lit up right there, standing beside January’s desk. “We both know she’s dead, so you can just save your breath. It’s too late to impress her with this pussy-ass white knight routine.”

  “You’re an asshole,” I fumed as the pungent, earthy aroma of pot unfurled from his mouth in a smoky tangle. “What the hell did she ever do to you, anyway? You’ve been nothing but a grade-A dick from the minute your dad started dating her mom, and she never deserved that. You call her trash, when you’re nothing but a spoiled fuck-up sponging off your dad!”

  “Oh, ouch! Your dumbshit opinion matters so much to me.” He clutched at his heart, the joint clamped between his teeth. Then he crossed heavily to the bureau and began searching among January’s underwear. I could feel brain cells starting to burst like popcorn as I watched this callous asswipe simultaneously smoke up and paw through his maybe-dead stepsister’s panties; the injustice of it all was suffocating. Downstairs, Eddie was off on his insulting rant about January’s having been Jonathan Walker’s “Achilles’ heel” because she drank sometimes and spoke her mind, while the man’s own son was a deviant sleazebag without even a hint of a moral compass.

  “Get out of her room,” I ordered, as if I really expected Anson to listen to me.

  “She have a diary, or anything, dude? Might be good for a laugh.”

  “Should I tell your dad you’re getting high up here?” Threatening to tattle was a bitch move, but it’s not like I stood a chance of intimidating him on my own.

  “Shit, would you just go back to your Section 8 apartment already? You’re like one of those yappy little dumb-ass dogs that nip at your ankles till you kick ’em,” Anson grumbled dismissively, his dirty hands bunching up piles of silk and lace as he looked under and around January’s lingerie. “You don’t even know who it is you’re up here trying to defend.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”
r />   “Sorry to break it to you, but your precious little Saint January was a dirty, lying slut. And I mean that literally. She was fucking around behind your back. So that’s whose honor you’re all worried about right now.”

  “Screw you.”

  “You think I’m the liar?” He yanked a particularly insubstantial G-string out of the drawer and held it up for my inspection, his rough, knobby fingers stretching out the dainty fabric. “Why’d she have these, then? She wear ’em for you?”

  “It’s just underwear,” I said uncomfortably, feeling my face heat up.

  “Nuh-uh.” He grinned maliciously. “All this lace and shit? A chick doesn’t buy these to wear, she buys ’em to take off. You only get sexy panties for one reason, and it ain’t keeping skid marks out of your jeans.” He tossed them aside and then leered at me. “So? How ’bout it, chief? Was she a good fuck?”

  “Like I’d tell you anything about that.”

  Anson laughed as if I’d just supplied the punch line to a cruel joke at my own expense. “She didn’t even let you hit it, did she?” He snorted blithely, stepping on the G-string as he shifted his huge feet. “She bought them slutty little panties to wear for somebody else, and you didn’t even know about it!”

  “Sure.” I gave the word a bored affect, to let him know he wasn’t getting under my skin and, predictably, he became annoyed.

  “Fuck you, I know she did,” Anson snapped, his thick brows coming together. Somehow, my doubting him seemed to have struck a nerve where my direct insults had failed. “She was never gonna settle for banging your broke, skinny ass. She was like her mom—she was only gonna spread her legs for money. Serious money.”

  It was my turn to laugh. The thing that January had disdained the most about the Walkers and their rarified social echelon was their obsession with wealth—their pride in having it, their greed for more of it, and their snobbish attitude toward those without it. I didn’t know who Anson was describing, but it sure as hell wasn’t his stepsister, and the more I thought about it, the funnier it seemed.

  “You don’t want to believe me, shit-smear?” Anson snarled, slamming the underwear drawer shut and yanking open the next one. “Fine. It’s the damn truth, though. Your girlfriend was a dirty fucking whore who tried to Lolita my dad.”

  The suggestion was so twisted I almost choked. “That’s bullshit.”

  “You wish.” Seeing he’d scored some kind of a point, Anson’s reptilian grin returned. “I came home one night from a friend’s house and caught her trying to get him to do her in the kitchen. She was deep-throating a banana and everything! Guess the kitchen gets her gears running, huh?”

  “That is such a load of crap,” I snarled, disgusted. “You need mental help.”

  “They were making sundaes,” he elaborated, still giving me that obscene, cold-blooded grin, “or at least she was. She was wearing her little bikini, like always, and she had all this shit all over the counter—whipped cream, peanuts, potato chips, maple syrup … I don’t even know what she needed all that junk for, but it was everywhere.” As he was talking, a hairline crack appeared in my confidence. Potato chips with maple syrup was January’s favorite topping combo for ice cream, a quirk I’d sometimes teased her about, and one Anson couldn’t possibly have hit upon by accident. “And my dad’s like, ‘That looks good, I haven’t had a sundae in forever.’ And January goes, ‘This one’s my specialty,’ and then she deliberately gets syrup on her fingers and starts slobbering it off like a porn star.

  “And my dad says, ‘You know, we have bananas in the fruit bowl, if you want a banana split,’ and she says, ‘Oh, girls can’t eat bananas!’” He did a breathless Marilyn Monroe voice for January. “And my dad asks what she’s talking about, and she’s all, ‘Men think every cylindrical object is a proxy phallus, and if a girl eats a banana in public, she’s automatically a slut.’ And my dad says, ‘Freud said sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,’ and she goes, ‘A cigar is only just a cigar when a guy is smoking it; if a girl is smoking it, it’s a dick.’” Anson laughed maliciously and my lips tightened against my teeth. “And then she goes, ‘No guy can watch a girl eating a banana without breaking out in a cold sweat, wanna see?’ And she grabs this banana from the fruit bowl and starts giving it a blow job right there! She put whipped cream on it and everything, and just went to town like Jenna Jameson. Then they finally noticed I was standing there, and my dad told her to quit.”

  He was smirking at me triumphantly, arms folded across his chest so that his massive biceps nearly ripped the seams out of his shirtsleeves, and the joint trailed a long ribbon of smoke that threatened to strangle us both. All kinds of thoughts and emotions were running through me—the strongest of which was the desire to kick his asshole pelvis out from under him—but I felt rooted to the spot, affronted and horrified by the scene he’d just described.

  “What are you doing up here?” The stern, unhappy voice came from behind me, and I spun around with a start. It was Mr. Walker himself, standing in January’s doorway with a deep frown, his gray eyes zeroed in on me with a distinct lack of friendliness. “I thought you’d gone home, Flynn.”

  “I—I was on my way out, and then…” And then? I had no idea how to finish that sentence without explaining what a foulmouthed, sex-obsessed muckraker his son was, and the moment didn’t seem right for that.

  “It isn’t appropriate for you to be in January’s bedroom,” the man went on, blatantly ignoring the fact that Anson was right there with me—and the fact that the older boy was openly smoking weed. “Our family has suffered a terrible shock today, and we are entitled to a little privacy. I appreciate your help from this afternoon, but now I think it’s time for you to leave.”

  And then, as if he hadn’t been the one who’d invited me into the house in the first place, he escorted me brusquely back down the stairs and through the elaborate foyer, his hand on my back the entire time as if to prevent me from turning around and running upstairs again. He was acting like a bouncer ejecting a combative patron, despite my having offered no resistance, and his demeanor was stiff and frosty as he deposited me onto the front porch. Then, without even a word of farewell, he slammed the massive oak doors shut in my face.

  FOURTEEN

  FOR A LONG moment I just stood there on the windswept stone, the chill October air wrapping itself around me while my mind reeled like a punch-drunk boxer.

  Anson was a liar, I reminded myself. January would never have done what he’d described—fellated a piece of fruit to seduce the stepfather she outspokenly disliked. Those were gross fabrications, fantasies spurred on by classism, resentment, and an overweening obsession with porn. He didn’t have an ounce of scruples, and fondled his missing stepsister’s underwear for thrills; who could believe a thing out of his mouth?

  Which thus gave rise to the obvious question: Why was I having so much trouble shrugging the story off as nothing more than an obvious attempt to rile me? “Sundaes with potato chips and maple syrup” formed part of the answer. It was a detail that was so specific, so her, that I couldn’t just dismiss it. That feminist theory stuff about proxy phalluses and the male gaze also had a distinctly January-esque sound to it—it sure as hell hadn’t come from the primitive, misogynistic imagination of Anson Walker, at any rate. He would never have invented that on his own.

  I also couldn’t pretend that, just twenty-four hours earlier, I hadn’t been grappling with my own growing realization that I didn’t know my ex-girlfriend nearly as well as I thought I had—that she’d told lies that couldn’t be easily justified, for reasons I didn’t understand. What else had she kept secret? The shock of seeing her bloodstained hoodie, of realizing that she might have been killed, had sent me into a tailspin of emotional memories … but the girl who’d dried and saved a rose from our “perfect date” night was also the girl who’d told her friends I was an emotionally abusive jerk who’d tried to make her feel bad about leaving Riverside.

  Anson could easily have cherry-pi
cked some details from a random exchange between January and her stepdad and then used them as set dressing for his bullshit story, but I didn’t think he was that conniving. His preferred method of warfare was direct and physical, not psychological. More likely, he’d embellished the hell out of an innocuous conversation, because he was a dick and a pervert, and he got off on offending people. Either way, there was really only one solid truth I felt he’d exposed, even if it had come as no surprise: He liked to spy on his stepsister.

  I descended the stairs into the courtyard, walking toward the fountain as I fished in my pocket for my phone, and then stopped short when I saw a black Lexus parked at an angle across the long drive leading back out to the road. It was the only vehicle left, now that the volunteers, media, and police had all departed. Leaning against the driver’s side door in his long, dark peacoat was Kaz.

  When he realized I’d noticed him, he gave me an awkward wave. “Hey.”

  “What are you still doing here?” I asked, surprised. In the numbness and mind-wiping confusion that ensued after the discovery of January’s clothes, I’d completely forgotten about him.

  “I … I thought you might need a ride home.” It sounded lame, and he offered me a clumsy smile that would have been endearing if I weren’t so annoyed.

  “I was just about to call my parents,” I reported in a surly voice. This had been an awful and confusing day, and the last thing I really needed was to revisit the scene in the hayloft—not after everything else that had gone down since. “You shouldn’t have waited around.”

  “I wanted to.” He had his hands jammed in his pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold, and I wondered if he’d actually been standing there staring at the door all this time, like a dog waiting for its owner to emerge from a grocery store. “I thought … it’s been a shitty day, right? I just wanted to.” He gestured at the Lexus, which was shiny and obviously a recent model. “Come on, get in.”