The Perfect Stranger

Chapter 10

They had no record of an Emmy Grey at the last motel, either. And I didn’t want to picture her in a place like that. No lights outside, a sweet, cloying smell in the office, a rattling of pipes from the air in the ceilings. I held the watch tightly in my hand, as if this were the evidence I needed to present my case to the man behind the desk.

His face was pale and drawn, like that of someone not used to the sunlight. “No girls, not here,” he said after I’d described Emmy and asked if she worked there. And then he smiled wide, like we were in on the same joke.

I walked quickly for the car, the gravel drive only making me feel more exposed, my steps too fast, too fueled by the feeling of someone watching me. Emmy wouldn’t have left herself at a place like this. Emmy would know better.

I drove straight home, started tearing through Emmy’s drawers, searching through her things. Looking for anything else she might’ve left for me to find. And all the while wondering, Why? A game back in play? Or was she trying to tell me something?

I’d thought that watch was gone even before she left the first time. I wondered if it had been sitting inside that taped-up box in the corner of my place all these years, if it had been tucked safely under my arm as I moved apartments each time. I wondered if even that was the game: a test, maybe, to see whether I’d open it.

I sat in the middle of a heap of clothes, faintly shaking, rifling through things that were not mine. Her possessions were minimal, as they had been years earlier. The clothes were not branded by any familiar label. Some labels had been torn off or were faded. I thought they were probably thrift store purchases. I tried to think if anything specific was missing. Tried to picture Emmy in her clothes, or shoes, or jewelry, and then look for them here. But Emmy was fading. Every time I thought I had her in focus, she’d slip away, back to the girl she was in her early twenties. I pictured black V-neck tops cut short, sleeves trimmed with black lace. I pictured dark jeans slung low, that black studded belt she always wore. Cuffed bracelets and chipped nail polish. I pictured us out at night together, the way she’d push her way up to the bar, lean on the counter, drawing attention.

She had adopted a new wardrobe since then. This dresser was full of casual button-downs, tunics, leggings. Thick socks and ribbed camisoles. It seemed that this Emmy favored practicality above all else.

Gone were the boots I’d come to associate with her – chunky heels, laces woven up past her ankles, worn with pants and skirts alike. Missing only when she’d let me wear them. Now there was only an old pair of sneakers with muddy laces in the corner of her closet. She must’ve been wearing whatever other footwear she owned.

I pushed aside the metal hangers in her closet, piecing through her nicer things. A sundress, too lightweight for the weather now; a cardigan I’d seen her shrug on at night when she was cold. I pushed some more hangers aside and was surprised to recognize a black fitted button-down shirt as my own. She had never asked to borrow anything, though I would have been happy to share. I tossed the shirt on the bed, sorting through the rest of the items, seeing what else she might’ve borrowed: three more tops that I’d attributed to being lost in the move. I wondered if she even realized they belonged to me and not her.

She’d come here with so little, essentially starting over. I was used to this Emmy, who did not take things with her when she left. The only things that were hers here, like her car, the furniture, once belonged to someone else.

I tried to picture her clearly by thinking of the morning with the owls. She had been barefoot. Her hand had reached for that necklace. What else had there been? Had I seen a bare shoulder? A colored top? These leggings stretching toward her ankles?

I closed my eyes and saw her in profile. Narrowed eyes, a twist of her neck, a smile.

Don’t do this, she’d said.

Do what?

Worry. It’s your default state.

But how could I not? I’d spent my adulthood with a front-row seat to the atrocities of life, so much so that it had become expected. The story doesn’t truly begin at first, not when the person disappears. It begins when they are found. Emmy had disappeared, and now I felt like I was waiting for something inevitable, a clock that I had no power to stop.

I searched through everything again. Looking for anything I’d missed the first time, the second time. Until I fell asleep in her bed once more, surrounded by all that was left of her.

SATURDAY MORNING AND THE birds were calling. It wasn’t even nine A.M., but the day was breaking open as if nothing had happened. That was the other thing you noticed when interviewing someone after a tragedy – they were surprised by the mundane. The plants would need to be watered like usual, and the paper would be delivered at dawn, and the kids would laugh at the corner bus stop. Whatever they were feeling, they would have to feel it alone.

And so: I would have to go to work on Monday. I’d have to turn in grades. I’d have to turn in my assignment for my certification classes. I’d have to teach.

I checked my phone, but nobody had called in the night. And if the cops had driven by, I hadn’t noticed.

I sent an email to my phone company, asking for the requested information, and then tried to distract myself with work.

The stack of student essays was in my large tote bag, and I pulled it out to read at the kitchen table while awaiting news. I was not good at the passive, at the waiting, and at least this felt like something.

The essays could be broken into two categories: pro and con Davis Cobb, some more subtle in their support or accusation than others. Some students probably weren’t even aware they were doing it, but I could tell their stance without fail. Whether they wasted their ink lamenting the lack of perceived safety or whether they used it in a defense. I ended up sorting the papers into piles.

The first essay, by Molly Laughlin, blamed everything on the influx of strangers to town. I decided to put that one pro-Cobb, since he was originally from here. He was not one of the new people – like me – who might be contributing to the sudden danger, in her eyes.

Most of the boys came to his defense in a more transparent way. Coach Cobb is an honest guy and a great coach. I’ve known him for years. There’s no proof he did anything at all. This is a witch hunt.

It was, after all, basketball season. And Coach Cobb hadn’t been permitted back on school grounds. The school had decided it was in everyone’s best interest to place him on leave, with pay, until the story tipped one way or the other. The calls from the parents and the media made that decision easy. And the fact that he was calling me, potentially stalking me, was probably already making the rounds. It would likely become public knowledge within the course of the week. I could do nothing to stop it.

Connor Evans surprised me by being one of the few boys in the con pile:

We sit in a room together and are told to trust each other. We are taught that good is the default and evil is rare. And then we learn that good was the mask. That we trusted too easily. Now people keep telling us to think for ourselves, look out for ourselves, keep an eye out for one another, and report what we see. But who should we report to? If we’re not sure who to trust? How do we know who wears the mask?

I flipped to the next paper.

Coach Cobb is innocent and this is total bullshit. I know why you were called into the office. I know.

There was no name on the page, but half of my students usually forgot to put their names (the simplest part of an assignment, and two months into the school year I still had to remind them). I had a pretty good sense of their handwriting by now, though. This, I was nearly certain, belonged to Theo Burton. I wrote his name in the upper corner, checked him off in my grade book, added the paper to the pro-Cobb pile.

I took a break to pull one of Emmy’s beers from the fridge, twisting the top off with the hem of my shirt. Then I tied my hair in a knot on top of my head, ran a cold hand over the back of my neck, and started again.

Izzy had written in purple pen, with her loopy print that brought to mind hearts dotting lowercase letters, gum chewing, hair twirling. It was hard to take anything she wrote seriously:

School is supposed to be the place we don’t have to worry about our safety. There are cameras in the halls and teachers in the classes. We sacrifice our privacy for safety. There are locker checks and teachers stationed outside bathrooms during breaks. We shouldn’t have to worry that THEY are the danger. We shouldn’t have to worry here at all.

A check in the grade book, a roll of my eyes, and a tilt of my neck. Another sip from the beer.

I knew girls like her. There was a time when I thought like this, too, and it made me irrationally angry. That she should act surprised by the twist of events. That she believed enough in the we shouldn’t have to worry to present it as a defense, as if the world owed it to her. As if she didn’t know it was all for show.

I was an adolescent when I first started to see myself as two people. The feeling that you are at all times both subject and object. That I was both walking down the hall and watching myself walk down the hall. Surely, Izzy Marone, of all people, knew this. She held herself as if she knew it. She must’ve thought there were certain rules that still applied.

But then you learn. Your backbone was all false bravado. An act that was highly cultivated, taught, and expected of girls now. The spunk that was appreciated and rewarded. Talk back to the professor to show your grit. Wait for his slow smile, his easy laugh, the tilt of his head in acknowledgment. Flip off the asshole who whistles on the street. There’s no harm in it.

These were the facts of life I had believed, that Izzy still believed. The danger had not yet made itself apparent, but it was everywhere, whether she wanted to believe it or not.

I flipped her essay over, marking it with a check, as I had all the others, and found a slip of paper stuck between the next two sheets. It was folded in half, a piece of lined paper like all the others. The note was written in pencil, in all caps: IT WASN’T COBB.

The handwriting wasn’t immediately familiar. Maybe it was just the capital letters and that there wasn’t much to go on.

I stuck it in the second pile, of those pro-Cobb, and figured I’d go through at the end to find who the nameless writer was, working backward.

But by the end of first period’s pile, everyone was accounted for. Even JT. This was an extra paper, a note someone wanted to slip me. In warning, or as a joke – or because they knew.

I kept it. Left it in the middle of the table, where it would catch me anew each time I passed.

Sources come from everywhere. They used to turn up in my public email account at the paper, but you had to really weed through the shit to find it. Most people were coming at me with an angle already. Some of the tips would turn out to be lies or gross overstatements. Facts twisted and laced with a malicious undercurrent or self-righteous indignation. Facts that didn’t stand up to closer inspection.

You had to come at things like this with skepticism. You had to figure out whom you were dealing with first. The information and the source, they come hand in hand. One means nothing without the other.

THE POLICE HADN’T CALLED by the time school rolled around on Monday, and I didn’t see any sign of them in the front lobby. The hallways were empty, and I caught Mitch’s gaze through the glass windows as I passed. He quickly looked away.

My key stuck in the classroom lock, wouldn’t turn, and I realized it was already open.

I moved my hand to flick on the lights, then froze. A scent, movement in the corner of my eye, a gut feeling.

I pivoted around to find Theo Burton at his desk, hands folded on top, smiling. He had dirty-blond hair and thin lips, features that would have bordered on feminine if not for the sinew working its way down his neck and over his exposed forearms.

“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to scare you. The door was unlocked.” But I was pretty sure I’d locked up after I’d left Friday.

“What can I do for you, Theo?” I remained near the door, remembering my orientation training: Don’t be in a room alone with a student and the door closed. There was too much that could be said or implied.

“Nothing. I just wanted to get some homework done before class. I hope that’s okay?”

It wasn’t, really. The first bell hadn’t rung yet, but I was a stickler if I called him on it. It would ring in three minutes, anyway. He would have every right to be here then. And I was supposed to be open to students coming in before or after school for extra help. I was graded, as my students were graded, by somebody else. Even the school itself was graded.

I didn’t answer. Instead I unloaded my bag and got ready for the start of class.

I sat at my desk against the side wall, but the green monitor light of the computer was already on, the tower humming. I moved the mouse, and the black screen came to life. The computer was set to the sign-in page, awaiting my user name and password. Impossible to tell whether someone had gotten in and signed out again. I thought of the email address I’d given Kyle – wondered if it was just the police who’d been here, checking the hard drive.

But Theo was sitting here, in an unlocked room, with the computer on.

I stared at the side of his face, watched the corner of his mouth tick up, like he was waiting for me to accuse him. Everything was a game here, and I was coming in late, learning the rules as I went.

I opted for silence, as if I didn’t notice, as if I didn’t care. If I said anything, he’d deny it, and then he’d know he’d shaken me. I logged on, scrolled through my email. Could see no indication that anyone had been in there. I even checked the sent message log, the trash, but everything looked as I’d last left it.

I pretended to work, as he was obviously pretending to work. I shuffled papers on my desk, listening to the footsteps in the hall. Wanting out of this room but not wanting to leave him with free rein over the space. I was never so grateful for Molly Laughlin’s early entrance to class. I think even she was taken aback by my overly cheerful greeting.

As the rest of the students funneled in, I handed back their responses from Friday. When the bell rang, I wasted no time. “It seems you all have strong opinions on the events of last week. So we’re going to write anonymous letters. It should be a persuasive argument to address a new proposed safety measure in our school. We’re starting in class, and it will be due, final copy, tomorrow. Type it up, print it out. Whether you sign your name or not is up to you. I’ll check off your name when you turn it in.”

Someone in this class was talking to me. I had to let them speak. Listen without pushing, without nodding in encouragement, lest they get spooked. This was the type of source you had to let lead the way.