The Perfect Stranger

Chapter 14

I pulled in at home with not much time to spare before Kyle was supposed to arrive. I quickly changed from my work clothes to jeans and tied my hair up.

Kyle showed up promptly at five, which made me smile. I liked that he was the type of person who knew exactly how long it would take to get somewhere. I watched through the sliding glass doors as he walked from his car. His eyes skimmed the surroundings, and I noticed him pause on the drive. My smile faltered as I wondered what it was he was looking for. In the daylight, I loved these windows: You could see out, and no one could see in. But at night, they worked the other way around.

He was in a dark jacket and a light button-down, what I’d come to think of as his uniform, his strides measured, and he took the steps two at a time up to my front porch before knocking. I noticed he was chewing gum. For the first time since I’d met him, I thought he looked nervous. Or anxious. That cusp I’ve been on myself, the edge of a story, so sure it would all be mine soon.

I flipped the lock, slid the door open, forced an easy smile when he smiled first. But when he stepped inside, his nerves dissipated, and so did mine. I liked how I had to look up to see him, and the way he smelled like peppermint gum, and how he put a hand to my waist as he stepped around me. And I knew I was in trouble.

I got him a glass of water as he sat at my table, and I felt his eyes on me, even as I was turned away. Suddenly, I didn’t want to get started, get serious, with the conversation. I knew how this worked. Cops were like reporters: compartmentalizing.

I purposely didn’t sit down, prolonging the moment.

“How’ve you been?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said, “all things considered.”

He nodded, sat straighter. “Speaking of things to consider. . I have something I want you to take a look at.”

“Okay.” I lowered myself into the chair across from him.

He took out a photo of a man, slid it my way. “Ever seen this man before?” The switch was flipped, and we were a go.

The man in the photo had sandy blond hair cut to his chin, his face narrow and angular, his eyes a dull gray. I sat up straighter. “Yes,” I said. “This is him. Emmy’s boyfriend.” My eyes locked with Kyle’s, and he tilted his head to the side. “Jim.”

But Kyle’s expression was not matching my own. The corners of his mouth tipped down. “James Finley,” he said. “He’s the one who worked at Break Mountain Inn, as you said. He was the one who stopped showing up for work, who they replaced.”

“Oh,” I said. Not Emmy, then. No sign of Emmy. “Still, this is something, right?”

“Have you ever spoken to him, Leah?”

“Only on the phone. Only to take a message for Emmy.”

“Not in person, then?”

“No. I only saw him a few times, when he was leaving. Or dropping Emmy off.”

“He’s got a record,” he said, and I froze. Kyle raised his hand. “Nothing violent, nothing like that. But a record.”

“What kind of record?” I asked.

“B and E, check fraud, drunk and disorderly conduct. Your basic lowlife fuckup.”

“You think. .” I swallowed air. “You think he did something to her?”

“I don’t know what to think, Leah. But we’ve got people on it. They’ll pick him up, bring him down, question him, okay?”

I pressed my thumbs into my temples, resting my elbows on the table. He’d been in my house. In this hall. Maybe even while I slept. Maybe standing right outside the door. Maybe he’d once seen Emmy hiding a key under the deck and knew where she kept it. Maybe he didn’t like the way Emmy could change her mind so quickly, leaving people behind.

I should’ve seen it. She should’ve seen it. I thought of what I knew of them together, tried to pinpoint the signs, see the warnings in hindsight.

Early morning, woken by low words from her room, a man’s laughter. “Shh, you need to go,” Emmy had said. Firm and unwavering.

“You sure about that?” His laughter again.

My alarm had sounded, and I’d waited in my room. Waited him out. Waited for his steps down the hall. I’d gone out to the hall once I’d heard the front door slide shut, the scent of cigarettes and honey lingering in his wake – stale and sweet. Watched him through the glass as he shrugged on his jacket, tucked his chin-length hair behind his ear. I saw Emmy’s reflection in the glass behind my own.

“My car broke down, he gave me a ride,” she said.

I laughed. “Euphemism?”

I saw her face in the reflection, saw it break into a smile, could imagine the sound of her laughter in the moment before I heard it. “Jim,” she said, as if I had forced it from her.

I had filed it away in a list of names that wouldn’t mean anything: John and Curtis, Levi, Ted, and Owen – a name uttered and soon forgotten.

When he’d called later that day, asked for her, left his name, I almost wanted to tell him: She’s not going to call you back. Let it go.

So I was surprised when I saw him again, then again. When his car pulled up and she tumbled out the passenger side. When I heard his voice in the early morning or the middle of the night. When Emmy didn’t tear herself away from him after he fell asleep, to knock on my door, seeking an escape. When I scrawled his name on the sticky notes and slapped them to the wall, and I heard her on the phone later, her voice indecipherably low, pacing as far as the cord would allow.

“Leah?” Kyle was gesturing toward a paper in front of me.

“What? Sorry.”

“This.” Kyle was pointing to a highlighted call on my bill. Labeled Anonymous. Arriving in the dead of night, late last week. When I’d stood in front of the sliding glass doors, listening to the soft movement of air on the line. “Is this Davis Cobb?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. Nobody spoke.” Had they let him go already that evening? Had he meant to scare me? To threaten me, as the police believed? I needed to calm down.

Kyle leaned back in his chair, placed his hands palm-down on the table. “They think she was hit with a rock,” he said. “Bethany Jarvitz. A rock probably picked up from the shoreline.”

An unplanned attack. I pictured a man following her through the woods. A man picturing me instead.

“You have some options here,” he continued. “You can document what you have, especially with the emails, and try to file a restraining order against Davis Cobb, keep him from making contact. But I think it will be tough to make stick. Still, getting it going in the system can’t hurt.”

I was already shaking my head. Definitely not. My stomach churned. If I filed anything, it would go on record, and the police would have to go digging through mine. Then they’d see I had one set against me back in Boston. They’d see the details: harassment, unwanted calls, showing up at the residence of Paige and Aaron Hampton – the whole thing was ridiculous. If the police here found out, everything I said would be tainted – for Kyle, for Emmy. Maybe even for my job.

I would become someone else. They wouldn’t believe me.

I was only trying to warn her. Paige, who was always too good-hearted to see the darkness in people, who was too self-assured, who always smiled. I presented her with the evidence; I begged her to get out. What I should have done before I moved in with Emmy those years earlier, if I’d been a better friend.

But Paige didn’t want to see it. She filed the order against me the month before I left the city. I was banned from going near her house or her place of work. I could not call her number. I could not initiate contact. And now I could not go on the record.

“What about Emmy?” I asked, bringing the line of questioning back around.

“We don’t have anything to go on, Leah. There’s no sign of her anywhere.” He looked around the house again. I remembered the questions he’d asked earlier: This place, it’s only in your name, is that right?

I felt a tremor in my fingers. Nerves or anger, I couldn’t tell the difference. “You don’t believe me,” I said.

There was no evidence she was here–that’s what he was here to tell me. There’s no evidence of a girl named Emmy Grey anywhere. As if I had plucked her from my imagination and set her loose.

“You don’t believe something happened here,” I said. My hands tightened into fists.

Kyle held out his hands. “I do, Leah. I do. I know something’s going on. I just can’t figure out what it is yet.”

“I’m sorry, was there something confusing about a person going missing?”

He squeezed his eyes shut. “I thought this information about your roommate was your way of reaching out and talking to me about something else. She was a dead end, and if I’m being totally honest, it was starting to feel like a wild-goose chase. I thought – Well. I was beginning to think maybe this was your way of getting me here to talk about Cobb.”

I let out a bark of laughter. “Kind of like asking for a friend?”

As if I had been scared and needed an excuse. And maybe my roommate would suddenly just turn up a few days later from a vacation I’d conveniently forgotten about.

“This is real, then,” he said, tapping the papers. “Emmy Grey is her name, and she was here until Monday, and you have not seen her since. You don’t know where she is.”

“Yes, this is real. I can’t believe you thought I was lying.”

“Not lying, no.”

“Yes, lying. I found her necklace broken on the back porch. I showed you her necklace.”

“I know, I know. But I couldn’t find anything on her, here or elsewhere. And I thought there was something you were trying to keep from me. I just thought. . I’m sorry, I was wrong.”

Except he wasn’t; he was so close. Kyle was right that I’d been hiding something, he’d just thought it was about the wrong thing.

“And now,” I said, “you’re telling me the man my missing roommate was seeing is a criminal, and he’s been in my house.” If Jim had hurt her, and he knew I’d seen his face, would he be thinking about loose ends? A witness? Someone who would give his name, his description. “What if he has Emmy’s key?”

I thought of the light on in the house. Wondered if he’d tried to take anything else, anything that would place him here. Covering his tracks. And whether I’d be added to that list.

Kyle turned around, placed a call, giving my address to whoever was on the other end and asking for immediate service. He sat on my couch after he hung up. “Listen, there’s a good chance he and Emmy took off somewhere together, and she’s fine.” I opened my mouth to cut in, but he held up his hand and continued. “But it’s best to play it safe. We’ve got a call out on him. We’ll pick him up. In the meantime, I’d feel a hell of a lot better if you’d change the locks.”

I didn’t argue. Knew I’d have to clear this with the owners, but I’d do it later. Ask for permission first or ask for forgiveness after – I was always drawn to the latter.

“I’m sorry, Leah. I couldn’t figure you out, and I was wrong.” Such a smooth, practiced apology. One given too freely, in my opinion.

I was right that he had been assessing me from the start. That he could see something underneath, worthy of figuring out, which at first had been so appealing. But now it made me shut down, close off. A switch flipping.

“I promise you I am taking this very seriously. I promise you.” His hand was over mine, as if I might need to be reassured. But I didn’t respond.

“Tell me everything,” he said. “Show her to me.”

Like this was a dare or a challenge and I had to win him over. Prove that Emmy Grey existed, that she had lived and loved and deserved to be found.

I had done this before: fighting my way in the editor meetings about why my stories were important and relevant. Laying out my case about why they should care and why readers would care. You find the angle, and you strike.

I didn’t know whether Kyle was genuine in his concern. But I did know how to make her real. I knew how to make him believe. I stood, gestured for him to do the same, showed him her bedroom, her clothes, wondered if he could conjure her into life, imagine her standing in this very spot. I saw his eyes drift to the watch on her dresser, but he didn’t touch it.

And I brought her to life. I brought her to him.

THE EMMY I MET the second time was much thinner than the girl I’d met eight years earlier. Back when we were younger, she used to wear her jeans low and her shirts high, and the strip of skin right before the flare of her hips begged men to touch it. And they did. I’d watch as their hands brushed up against her back, her side, as they said Excuse me with a hand on each hip, gently passing. She didn’t seem to notice. There’s an eight-year gap of missing time that I can’t give Kyle, but this is what I know, what I really know:

She sleeps with her mouth open, on her right side. The tip of her nose is always cold. She’s not afraid to use a knife.

I know she laughs when she’s nervous, falls silent when she’s angry. I know there’s a scar on the side of her rib cage, white and raised, and a constellation of freckles across her shoulders and her upper back.

The wooden walls have little insulation, is how I know her this well. The old creaky floors. The vents that cut to both our rooms across the hall. The shared bathroom. The fact that one of us will sometimes have to use the bathroom while the other is in the shower, or vice versa. Because I had to pull a stinger from her back this summer. And because, eight years ago, she’d caught a fever that went straight to her head, made her mad, and too hot, and deliriously thirsty, and she wouldn’t let me bring her to the hospital – the only compromise a tepid bath that I sat beside, terrified she’d pass out and drown if I left her.

I know her this well because, eight years ago, she would sometimes knock on my locked door in the middle of the night and say, He snores, or Restless leg syndrome, or His arm is a vise, I had to claw my way out to escape. She’d climb into bed beside me, and later I’d wake with the tip of her nose pressed against the back of my neck – always cold, even in the heat of summer. I’d feel her breath in a steady rhythm as I drifted back to sleep.

And after I said this all, I felt suddenly parched, the air too dry, my throat exposed, as if I had wrenched something from deep inside. I licked my lips, then felt my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth.

Kyle was standing in the middle of her bedroom, transfixed. I had woven him a story, cast him under a spell, hooked him, and he was mine.

“It’s not the way you think,” I said.

His eyes narrowed slightly, and his breathing stilled. This was another thing I had learned. You had to break a piece of yourself open to get them. You had to give something up. Something real.

“What’s the way I think?”

I swallowed. “I can tell from the way you’re looking at me what you’re thinking.”

I knew her the ways one might know a lover, not a roommate.

I knew her the way, I realized, only someone fixated would know another. And maybe I was. Maybe I was looking for something. Maybe I clung to her because I needed to cling to something. Maybe I kept that box because I couldn’t let go enough, and because I didn’t want to.

Emmy and I connected because there was something in her past that was hidden, as there was in mine. A wordless understanding. The turning of the door lock; this belief that we were protecting each other from something both ever present and infinitely far away.

Kyle shook his head, as if clearing out cobwebs or a spell. “I’m thinking this is a girl who has zero paper trail. Who did not want you to bring her to a hospital. Whose name is not on any lease. I’m thinking she was scared of something.”

It wasn’t until he spoke the words that I realized they were true. Emmy in the dim barroom, looking over her shoulder. Emmy pacing the halls at night, her steps lulling me to sleep. Emmy at the edge of the woods, standing perfectly still and watching for something.