Last Seen Leaving

by Caleb Roehrig

  Beside the bed was a little nightstand with two drawers, one large and one small, and I decided it was as reasonable a place as any to stash something one might want to keep private from guests. I was correct, as it turned out, just not quite in the way that I had expected. The large drawer yielded up a trove of Ziploc bags in every imaginable size, and as I lifted some out to see what was in them, a cold thrill pinballed its way up my spine; each bag contained a single item, and each bore a hand-printed label that consisted of a girl’s name. They were the same few names over and over, I realized as I sifted through the strange collection—Erica, Alexis, Grace … and January.

  My breath caught in my throat as I scrabbled through the entire cache, pulling out anything marked with my ex-girlfriend’s name; but when I had the bags spread out before me, I was as disappointed as I was disturbed. What I had found was evidence of obsession, but not rape or murder—some blond hairs tangled around a broken bit of elastic in one; in another, an earring I recognized and which January had complained about losing in early September; the lid from a coffee cup in a third. It was a treasury of leavings, things Cedric had scavenged from trash cans and dirty floors, and while it certainly didn’t speak in favor of his mental health, neither was it incriminating.

  Nevertheless, I photographed the hoard of bags, convinced that each name corresponded to one of Cedric’s past—or future—victims, and then moved on. When I opened the smaller drawer, my heart hiccuped hard in my chest as I found myself staring down at a large and preposterously real-looking pistol.

  I didn’t know much about firearms, but it looked plenty big enough to do the deadly job it was designed for—and, just like that, I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of Cedric’s place, even if it meant slinking away with nothing to show for myself but a handful of possibly useless pictures. The increasing risk of getting caught suddenly made my quest not feel quite as worth the trouble anymore.

  The drawer had just slid shut when my phone vibrated again in my pocket, and my entire body went rigid. It was Kaz. My mouth dry, I answered quietly. “Please tell me you’re just having another panic attack.”

  “I saw a man go inside!” Kaz practically yelped in my ear. “I just came around the corner of the building and saw him go through the door—I didn’t get a look at his face, but he was big, and sorta bald, and he started up the stairs, and … Flynn, you have to just get out of there! Now!”

  “I’m on my way,” I mumbled, energy starting to spark around me like a Catherine wheel. I jammed the phone back in my pocket and turned, getting ready to sprint for the living room. At that moment, however, my eye finally fell on exactly what I’d been looking for all along.

  My jaw dropped, and for a split second I was stunned into paralysis. I had been so focused on identifying all the little nooks, crannies, and cubbies in which Cedric might have been able to conceal something that I had completely ignored what was right there in plain sight. And now I couldn’t imagine how I had ever missed it, because the thing grabbed at me like a vortex, pulling my attention away from anything else in the room.

  I knew I had no time to waste, that if Cedric had been the man Kaz saw entering the building, my lead time on him was already at well under a minute and dwindling fast; but I was looking at proof that the man was a killer, and I couldn’t leave it behind. If he realized someone had been in his apartment, he would destroy it immediately.

  Darting over to where the thing was mounted on the wall across from Cedric’s bed, I tucked my fingers into the sleeves of my hoodie and started trying to work it loose from its moorings. I didn’t want to leave any fingerprints, didn’t want to give Cedric the chance to claim it had been planted, but the thick, wet fabric of my sweatshirt made my grip clumsy, and escalating worry made my hands shake.

  I was telling myself that Kaz had to be overreacting, that the rehearsal at Dumas couldn’t possibly be over yet, but that’s when—with a wave of sick-making horror—a terrifying image suddenly leaped from my memory: a poster in the Dumas theater lobby, right where I’d told Kaz to wait for me while I looked for Reiko’s friends. The truth of it was so unbelievably awful that I tried to promise myself it wasn’t real, even as I understood just how deeply fucked I actually was.

  There had been no play rehearsal at Dumas that day—the theater was being used for January’s and Reiko’s remembrances.

  I ripped my find down from the wall, my chest feeling like it had been stabbed full of holes from the inside, and bolted for the living room. I was trying to figure out how I could make it down from the balcony as quickly as possible without breaking anything, but I’d only taken three steps out of the little hallway before a key rattled in the lock of the front door and the dead bolt snapped open with a deafening click.

  Cedric was home.

  TWENTY-SIX

  A WARM BREEZE swept in from the backyard, bearing the lingering smells of summer through the screen of our sliding doors—earth, warmth, the mouthwatering scent of someone’s nearby barbecue. It was Labor Day weekend, and our freedom officially ended on Tuesday morning with the first day of school, so a sense of imminent loss imbued every tick of the clock. January and I were sprawled on the couch in my living room, watching TV and trying not to think about how little time we had left.

  “Did you enjoy your cute little block party?” she finally asked, her tone playful as she looked up from where her head rested on my chest. We were making a point not to discuss the fact that, pretty soon, we would effectively be having a long-distance relationship in our own hometown, separated by learning institutions as well as several zeros before the decimal point of her new family’s net worth.

  “Yeah, Micah and I got turned up,” I replied with mild sarcasm, rolling my eyes a little. Ever since the advent of that toddler group where I met my best friend, our neighborhood threw block parties straight out of the 1950s for all major warm-weather holidays. The gatherings were all basically the same: potluck dinner, kids running around with sparklers, beer and soda fished from ice-filled coolers, and music blaring from the Harrisons’ crappy sound system. They were actually kind of fun, but there was no possible way to admit that out loud without sounding like a paste-eater. “How was your superswanky banquet or whatever?”

  “Ugh, please don’t make me think about it anymore. I spent, like, four straight hours grinning like a mental patient and playing Perfect Obedient Stepdaughter for the cameras. And I barely ate anything, either, because every time I tried to put some food in my mouth a photographer would show up out of nowhere, trying to get a scandalous picture of me fellating a bratwurst or something.”

  “My mom made enough potato salad to fill a nuclear cooling tower, if you’re still hungry,” I offered. My parents were off at a movie, and January had been released from Family Photo-Op duty for the night, so we had the place to ourselves. “And Mr. Culbertson talked her into taking home about eighty pounds of some weird eggplant casserole with asparagus and capers.”

  “Gee, how could I ever turn that down?” she asked drily, pushing her hair back over one shoulder. For a moment, she gazed up at me silently. “I’m going to miss you, Flynn. This whole thing fucking sucks.”

  “I know. I’m gonna miss you, too.”

  Carefully, she pulled herself along my body until we were face-to-face and then leaned in to kiss me. It was gentle at first, sweet, but very quickly became needy and more aggressive. That had been happening a lot lately, and it always made me nervous. I reached up to put my hand on her arm, thinking that maybe I could figure out a non-offensive way to back her off just a little, but she shifted unexpectedly and my fingers closed squarely around her left boob instead.

  I jerked my hand away immediately, my face going red and hot, and January ended the kiss. Propping herself up on her elbow, she looked down at me with a strange frown. “They’re just boobs, Flynn. They don’t bite.”

  “I—I know,” I stammered awkwardly. “I just … I don’t want you to think I’m like … sexually harassing you, or
whatever.” She was still frowning, so I tried to make it into a joke. “We’ve had about a million school assemblies where they say I’m not supposed to touch you anywhere without getting your permission first. I’m just trying to be a gentleman!”

  “I hereby give you permission not to freak out when your hand accidentally grazes my boob,” January responded, too theatrically for her to be entirely serious, and I heaved a secret sigh of relief. The way she’d been looking at me, I’d worried that maybe my compulsive skittishness had begun to make her suspicious; that maybe she’d noticed how I sometimes looked at Matt Bianco during the pool parties she threw at the mansion, and how maybe I hadn’t ever really looked at her that way.

  “Well, thanks,” I said, forcing a smile that I hoped looked far more comfortable than it felt. “I guess it’s just that when it comes to sex and, you know, sex stuff, I just … I want to wait. I just want it to be right. Special.”

  January stared at me blankly for so long that I started to sweat, completely unsure of how to read her reaction, and then the corners of her mouth flicked upward. “Flynn, I swear, sometimes I have no idea what goes on in that head of yours. I’m not trying to bewitch you into sex with my aphrodisiac boobs, or whatever! Just for the record, I am totally on board with the waiting plan. I am definitely not ready to lose the V-card yet, and when I am I want things to be special and right, too—with all that soft-focus, mood-lighting, Hollywood-magic crap we chicks are supposed to want. There’s no pressure here, okay? But if you touch my boobs once in a while, I’m not going to call the cops.”

  She settled back down, putting her head on my chest again, and for a little while we just lay there and listened to the wind chimes tinkling in the backyard. Then she spoke again, her voice so muffled I almost didn’t make out what she said.

  “When the time is right, though—when it feels right … I hope it’s with you.”

  * * *

  Sweat prickled like a rash across my scalp, the air around me stifling, and my heart chugged like the engine of an ocean liner. Some plastic attachment from Cedric’s vacuum cleaner dug painfully into my hip, and I struggled against every single instinct I had to remain utterly motionless.

  The minute I’d realized he was coming through the door, I had reacted on autopilot, lunging backward and then yanking open the little hallway closet. The sound of Cedric’s absentminded, lumbering entrance had just barely managed to conceal the rasp of the linen cupboard’s bifold metal door as it rattled shut behind me along its aluminum track. Or so I hoped. I had been plunged into almost total darkness, the only light leaking through a series of thin, horizontal slats that afforded me no decent view of what was happening just outside my hiding place.

  I could hear Cedric moving about in the apartment’s little entryway, kicking off his shoes, shrugging out of his coat, hanging it up; then the heavy tread of his footsteps moving into the kitchen. What was I going to do? What the fuck was I going to do? I couldn’t just stand there, holding my breath until the man went to sleep. Unless he went out again, I was completely and totally screwed. Could I figure out some way to make him go? If I could somehow get Kaz to lure him out …

  As if on cue, my phone buzzed to life, and my heart lurched up into my throat and stuck there. I had never been more grateful that I always kept the ringer off, but the sound made by the vibration was practically deafening to my panicked ears, so loud it might as well have been a band saw in my pocket. I couldn’t stop it, either—couldn’t risk adding to the noise by moving to shut it off.

  Sounds were coming from the kitchen—cupboards banging, a package tearing open with the rough crinkle of reinforced paper, a cascade of something clattering into a ceramic bowl. Impossibly, it masked the thunderous droning of my cell phone, which mercifully died out just before Cedric completed his anvil chorus. After making a series of strange clucking sounds with his tongue, the man then called out, “Dinnertime, Hippolyta, you little minx!”

  Hippolyta—the Amazon queen from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Riverside drama club had performed the play only the year before, and the guy who’d played Theseus had constantly called his bride-to-be “Hippo-lighter” to the mean-spirited delight of Micah, January, and myself. I’d have bet anything that the cat’s name matched the password needed to access Cedric’s computer, and I cursed myself for not thinking to check if the animal had been wearing a tag.

  And then, as Cedric left the kitchen, his feet plodding across the linoleum and onto the carpeted living-room floor, I thought of one more careless oversight I had made—one so serious that my blood turned instantly cold and hard in my veins: My shoes were still sitting on the mat by the balcony doors.

  Before I even had time to entertain the ridiculously optimistic notion that maybe Cedric wouldn’t notice them, I heard him stop short. He couldn’t have been standing more than ten or fifteen feet from where I was still hunched awkwardly in that darkened closet, clutching tightly onto the telltale item I’d removed from his bedroom wall, and in my mind’s eye I could picture him staring at the canvas high-tops that were right there in the open, all but sitting under a spotlight. His feet moved again on the carpet—swiveling?—and his voice sounded out, thin and nervous, “Is someone—? Wh-who’s here? Show yourself!”

  I stayed quiet, my eyes scrunched shut, pain spearing through my core with every violent beat of my heart, as if there were still maybe some fairy-tale chance he could decide there was no one else in the apartment after all; that perhaps an intruder had already come and gone, leaving behind a pair of shoes as a courtesy. The place was tiny, and although there were plenty of places to hide drugs and diaries full of criminal confessions, there were only a few spots big enough for a human male with size 10 feet, and he would check them all in short order—whether before or after calling the police, I wasn’t sure.

  Then, as his steps starting pounding decisively in my direction, the same direction as the bedroom, I remembered the gun in his nightstand. I couldn’t let him get to it, or I would never walk out of there alive.

  There was no time to think, to plan, to consider, only to act. Just as he passed the closet, turning to enter the bedroom, I shoved the door open and yelled, “Stop!”

  Cedric whirled around, his eyes wide with alarm, and when he saw me, he did a double take. Fear was quickly joined by confusion, surprise, and an obvious trace of anger. “You! How did you get in here? What on earth—How dare you break into my home!”

  “The game is up, Cedric,” I announced, quoting every single private-detective movie I’d ever seen. It sounded like a joke, but I was too scared to think straight, too rattled to come up with my own words. My jaw was actually chattering as I spat out, “I know what you did. I know everything!”

  “This is … I won’t stand for this kind of harassment,” Cedric blustered, although he didn’t move. “Creating a disturbance at my rehearsals is one thing, but this … I shall call the police!”

  “Good—do it! You’ll save me the trouble,” I shot back, realizing at the exact same moment that the threat had been a double bluff. He’d caught me burgling his home red-handed, and I should by all rights be begging him not to involve the police; by doing the opposite, I’d made it clear that I really did know something—that I was, perhaps, truly dangerous. The wariness that crept into his eyes as he regarded me anew made me certain I’d screwed up again. Nervously, I continued, “In fact, why don’t you call them right now?”

  “You are becoming quite intolerable, Mr. Doherty,” he informed me, after a brief pause, his voice suddenly cold and flat, “and now you are a home invader—a juvenile delinquent, a common thug.”

  “It’s better than being a rapist,” I returned savagely, “and a murderer.”

  His face twitched, but he stifled the reaction quickly. “That is an outrageous allegation, and you had better not repeat it if you—”

  “It isn’t an allegation, it’s the truth! You raped January, and then you killed her when she threatened to tell—and when R
eiko confronted you about it, you killed her, too!” I stepped forward, anger blasting through me like a gust of hot desert air. “I had some time to look around before you got home, you sick psychopath, and I know.”

  “I—I don’t have to stand here and listen to this kind of slander,” Cedric stammered, his face flushed and his jowls trembling. He inched backward. “I am going to call the police right now, so you had better stay where you are!”

  He spun around and started moving again, but not for the phone sitting on the edge of the desk—instead, he was making a beeline for the nightstand. My nerves snapping taut as a leather strap, I played my ace card in desperation, screaming out, “Where did you get this?”

  The tone in my voice made him stop, turn, and look at what I was holding in my hands, what I’d stolen off his wall. It was a portrait of January, so startling in the exactitude of its sure, delicate strokes that when I’d seen Reiko creating it, I’d been amazed by her profound talent. It was the very drawing FBA told me the girl had wanted to complete for January’s memorial the night she’d stayed late at the theater—the night she’d been killed. And I had found it in Cedric’s bedroom.

  His eyes were huge and troubled, his face an unhealthy shade of vermilion. “That’s mine! You … you put that down this instant!”

  “You took this from Reiko,” I accused furiously. “You killed her, and you stole it, and then you put it on your wall—”