The Perfect Stranger

Chapter 24

I had originally thought we were on the same side in our quest to find Emmy. But this was no longer the Kyle who wanted to stand in the bedroom and listen to me bring Emmy to life. They had already decided that Emmy wasn’t the full picture, the real picture. If they wanted her brush, her toothbrush, or her clothes for DNA, they could’ve asked. I would’ve given that.

But instead they wanted to piece through her life, as if she had something to hide. I thought of John Hickelman’s watch with my fingerprints. Everything in this house with my fingerprints. All the stolen pieces she’d surrounded us with, that I’d never questioned. The box under the house with those pictures.

I had already searched her drawers, her room, her closet. I should’ve known that Emmy would hold her own secrets close, as she had held mine. She was a secret herself. Maybe that was why I’d felt safe sharing mine with her, because in the days after we first met, I was not myself, and she wasn’t fully real to me yet. Or because she was a stranger, and had these brown eyes and was joining the Peace Corps in three months, and would be gone with no access to the rest of the world, like a vault I could bury secrets inside. And I did. Fell under her spell and told her everything.

When I’d arrived at her place that first day, she looked at my bags, my belongings, all grouped together in the middle of the living room concrete floor, and she’d seemed to see it all: that I’d left in a rush because I’d had to.

“This one’s yours,” she’d said, leading me to the room to the right of the main living area. “Sorry, I know it’s not much.” There was a full-size mattress on the floor, stripped of all bedding. A low ceiling and no windows. There wasn’t much room for other furniture. “I’ve been selling things instead of buying them – I’m leaving at the end of the summer, and I can’t take anything with me when I go.”

It wasn’t much, but it was mine – it had a door, and a lock, and it was perfect. I’d smiled and said, “Thank you,” dragging my stuff inside. She left me alone, and I hung up some of my clothes on the metal hangers in the closet. The rest, I left inside my suitcase. It worked just as well as anything else would.

I had clothes, a toothbrush, a few boxes of my things from college that I’d never unpacked at Paige’s. I’d have to get sheets, but the rest I could live without.

When I’d emerged from the room, Emmy was opening and closing cabinets in the kitchen, looking for something. She pulled some vodka out of the freezer, found some plastic cups that were lined with dust, rinsed them out in the sink before pouring us both a hefty portion, even though it was the middle of the day. But underground, it could be night. It could be any time at all.

Though there was an orange sofa, dusty and stained in places, Emmy opted for the floor. She told me she worked at a bar and was leaving in a few months. I told her I had a degree in journalism, was just starting my internship. She said she was single, that the dating scene after school was just shit, that she was limited to the people she worked with or the people who came into the bar, sitting lonely at the counters, looking for something.

I told her how I didn’t get the job I wanted, had to move in with my best friend, Paige, and her boyfriend. How I hadn’t told my mother when she’d come for graduation. How I’d let her think I had that other job the whole time, made it seem like Paige and I were renting some two-bedroom place together. Not that I was crashing with her because I had no other options.

Emmy and I had gone about halfway through the bottle. I couldn’t remember how it started, what she had asked, what had prompted it, but somehow I was in the middle of it, just in the middle already, and I kept on going. I was telling her about the shower. How, that first week at Paige’s place, I’d been taking a shower when I’d heard the click of the lock popping, the turn of the handle, the chill of cold air. How I’d called, “Hello?” and peered around the shower curtain but had seen nothing but fog and the cracked door.

Paige had already begun working, down in the Financial District. Aaron had gotten a grant for his Ph.D. and spent some mornings working from home. There we were, the picture of early-twenties success. There we were.

I told Emmy how I’d pushed the door closed again, locked it, and checked it by pulling – and it hadn’t budged. How I’d gotten dressed and then stood with my hair dripping wet, just outside Paige and Aaron’s closed bedroom door.

I’d knocked, and Aaron had called, “Come in!”

He had his earbuds in, and he pulled one out as I stood in his doorway.

“Did you open the door?” I’d asked.

“Did I what?” He was sitting at his desk in front of the computer, and he looked me over, confused.

“The bathroom?” I cleared my throat. “Did you need something?”

“No,” he said, his voice rising in question. “Do you need something?”

I’d shaken my head, confused, and closed his door again.

How my things started going missing only to turn up someplace new. How I’d have to ask, Have you seen my toothbrush; my packet of birth control pills; my black strapless bra, only to have them turn up in the bathroom cabinet; the coat closet; Paige’s drawer. Her wrinkled nose as she held up my bra, wondering at the path that had led it there, the hand that had put it there. Were you looking for something, Leah?

I told Emmy how I’d wake in the middle of the night, still on my right side, as I always slept, and find the comforter pulled back, kicked to the floor, the cold itself waking me in the dead of night – and no one there.

How I could not say to Paige, “Your boyfriend is scaring me.” Not when I’d known him for almost a year. Not when I was relying on her generosity. Not when I had no proof. It was a gut feeling, nothing more.

How, the day before I’d met Emmy, Aaron and Paige had been going out to some function for her work, some trendy restaurant for an awards banquet, and he’d mixed us all drinks before they left. And something had happened to me. I’d sat on the pulled-out couch, watching television, and my head had gone woozy and my stomach sick, and I’d put down the cup, noticed a blue debris in the bottom, mixed in. Like pulp but grainy. How I’d run to the bathroom, feeling something desperately wrong but not sure what it was. How I had opened the medicine cabinet, looking for something for my stomach or my head, unsure which – when I’d seen the vial in his name. The pills for his back, some muscle relaxant. The color of the tablets. My drink. I’d held on to the counter as my legs gave out, as my mind was almost, almost clear. .

“Whoa there, you okay?” Losing focus, confused by the scent of him as he’d caught me under the arms, the proximity of his voice. “Whatcha doing in here, Leah?” I’d seen his face in the mirror, and that was when I’d known – something was wrong. I’d twisted around, because wasn’t he supposed to be out? But his grip had tightened, and I couldn’t form any thought in response, my mind scrambling to keep up.

He placed a hand over my mouth, and my body tensed.

“Shh,” he’d said, “you’re not feeling well.” His hand on my mouth felt rough, unfamiliar. A boundary he had breached, from which there would be no going back.

My hands had clawed at his forearm, too slow, too ineffective, and I’d felt myself slip further away, the room fragmenting, the edges spinning.

He’d laughed and tightened his hold. “I’m helping you. You’re drunk. You’re hurting yourself. Stop fighting.”

I remember thinking it seemed so primitive to scream. So destructive and embarrassing and life-changing. The last words I remembered clearly, over the sound of running water in the bathtub, the very last thing: “Be quiet, Leah.”

And then nothing.

The next morning I’d awakened in my bed, like always, bolting upright in a panic, gasping for breath. My lungs burned, my ribs ached, the ends of my hair were slightly damp, and my head pounded in an odd, detached way. The apartment was dark and quiet. I rolled out of bed, my stomach recoiling, and I found myself back in the bathroom, leaning over the toilet, coughing and coughing. I sat on the cold floor before pulling myself upright, searching through the medicine cabinet – and finding nothing. Searching my skin – a bruise here, a faint scratch there – and then through the images in my mind, fighting for the thing that I could not remember – a gap of time, a thing forever lost to me.

Sometimes, in the months that followed, I would wake to the feeling of water flooding my lungs, coating my throat, a pain in my ribs as they seized from the pressure. Sometimes I would dream of things that I couldn’t be sure of – and then Emmy’s hand would be on my shoulder, shaking me awake.

I remember thinking: This does not happen to people like me.

Not girls who stayed in, dressed in pajamas, sleeping on pullout couches at their best friend’s apartment.

“He drugged me,” I told Emmy. “He drugged me, and I left.” The only thing I was sure of, the only thing I had done.

She poured me some more vodka. Held it up in a toast that could’ve meant good riddance, or to fresh starts, or any of the thousands of meaningless things people might have said. But she said nothing at all, and the vodka burned a path straight down, and she crawled across the floor to pour me another shot, sat beside me this time, her back against the wall. The first of many vodka-filled evenings, of me and her talking in foggy dreamlike states because we had no television. I felt her arm against mine as we tipped our heads back, and in that moment – the warmth of the vodka in my stomach, my arms, my legs – I was hers.

But here’s the thing I thought later, after we had gone our separate ways, when I’d find myself sitting across from a source who could not speak the thing they wanted to tell – the thing I could see in their expression, the clenching of their back teeth, the subtle tightening of the shoulders. For Emmy to see it in me, to recognize the things I didn’t say – she must have experienced something like it herself. The way her mouth had flattened into a straight line, and she’d nodded once, and there was nothing more to say.

When Paige showed up at our place three weeks later, saying she was in the area, it wasn’t the fact that Aaron was with her that leveled me. Wasn’t even the fact that he came inside. It was the fact that he smiled right at me, didn’t act contrite or embarrassed or anything at all. As if he knew I would never say anything, that I had nothing to go on, that I didn’t even know–he smiled because he knew he had won.

I’m not sure what I was most taken by with Emmy. The fact that she had the knife in her hand and used it? That I wished to do the same? Or the fact that she didn’t cut deeper? I was drawn to both the impulse and the restraint.

This was what I could never explain to them, how I knew her deeply if not thoroughly: how she barely scratched the surface. And I don’t know if I could’ve had the same restraint.

IN THE END, AGREEING to the early search didn’t save me anything. I didn’t have time to move the Boston newspaper, which was inside an empty kitchen drawer. I saw Kyle look at it briefly before placing it aside. I wondered if he recognized it from the night he’d spent here, if the memory hit him from the side, a reminder from an unexpected place. I also didn’t have time to hide the things I was sure Emmy had stolen; I had to believe they were small enough that they wouldn’t be an issue for me or for her.

But my cooperation led to information, which was all I had to work with, anyway. It was the thing I was most accustomed to trading for, and this was no different.

I knew, from the conversation between the officers, that they were looking for a specific type of knife: serrated-edge four-inch blade, give or take.

They took and sealed every knife in the kitchen, even those that were too small, too large, too dull or double-edged or part of a steak set. What was missing as damning as what remained.

And then they fanned out from the kitchen, lifting sofa cushions, opening closets, peering under furniture, and I felt a laugh bubble out unexpectedly.

“What’s so funny?” Kyle asked.

“Do people really do that? Leave murder weapons stuffed between couch cushions?”

“You’d be surprised,” he said.

“I should rephrase. Do people bring weapons back home to discard when they’re already someplace more convenient – like a lake?”

He stopped taking inventory of the kitchen, turned to face me. “You think it’s there?” he asked.

If it were me, I would’ve tossed it after using it. Left it to the lake or a sewer. Let nature take its course and wiped my hands of it. “Seems like that would’ve been a safer bet.”

He nodded, then continued bagging the knives.

“Are you going to drag the lake?” I asked. I doubted they would. Not enough resources in a place like this, not enough evidence to claim it might be there.

“He wasn’t killed in the car,” Dodge said from the living room, and the other officers froze. Gave him a pointed look.

“What?” Dodge said.

“Where was he killed?” I asked, seizing on the moment.

Clark Egan sighed from his spot beside the couch. “Don’t know. Not in the car, not at his room or at his place of work. And not here, it seems.” He gestured to my kitchen, my living room.

“It seems?” I asked, my voice rising of its own accord.

“The floors are dusty,” Kyle responded, concentrating on the knives on the counter. “To get blood out, you’d have to do a deep clean. With bleach.”

I stared at the back of his head. The first day they were here, looking through my house – they were looking for evidence that James Finley had been killed here, and I had no idea. They saw the container under my porch and found the bleach inside, wondering something more. The story was spinning around me, and I was too many steps behind. I wanted them to stop. Wanted to tear up the paper I’d signed. But I didn’t want to make a scene, didn’t want them to think there was something worth hiding here.

I concentrated on the facts instead. James Finley had not died in that car. He had been moved. He had been placed in Emmy’s car and driven into the lake, where he’d sat for who knew how long.

Had they imagined he had bled out on my kitchen floor with Emmy standing over him? Did they imagine a fit of passion? Self-defense? I had to see the story they were working with in order to prove it wrong.

“Have you found his car?” I asked. I remembered him inside it, rusting beige paint, a scent I must’ve imagined just from seeing him light the cigarette.

“Gone,” Kyle said. “He’d been living at the motel since May, it seems. Worked in the office for a pretty good deal on his rate. To be honest, nobody was really surprised he’d up and left one day,” he added. “Nobody had seen his car, either. They just assumed he took off.” A transient, not only working at the motel but living there. The type of person who didn’t stay in one place for long.

And now James Finley’s car was gone. Disappeared. If Emmy had done this, as was the theory they appeared to be operating under, she’d had at least a week’s head start on them. They wanted to know who she was in order to know where she might go.

“Was Emmy right-handed?” Egan asked, and I thought about it. Thought about her holding the bottle of vodka or a dusty glass. Thought about her lining up to throw a dart at the bull’s-eye, one eye closed.

“I think so. Yes. And this matters because?”

“Because James Finley was attacked from behind, by a right-handed perpetrator, and he had no defensive wounds.”

A surprise attack. Someone had crept up behind James Finley with a serrated blade already in hand and taken it to his neck in an instant, before he had a chance to fight back. Not in self-defense at all.

They continued looking for evidence, going down the hall to the bedrooms, peering into mine as well. “Wait,” I said.

“I told you, Leah,” Kyle said, though he said it low. His face was set. He looked at me as if to say, Please. Please don’t, Leah. Please call it even. As if maybe I wouldn’t notice that half of the things here belonged to me, and they did not differentiate.

I felt my nails digging in to my palms, and I felt the need to scream, to let it tear up my throat from my lungs. Pictured another version of myself standing beside me in the hallway, opening her mouth and letting it loose. Felt something settle, briefly, inside me.

I moved to the front of the house with Dodge and Egan. Dodge lifted the gnome, peered underneath, and let it drop a little too hard on the table, slightly off-center. I had an itch in my fingers to move it, to twist it the right way, to keep things as they should be.

I stifled the urge and went to the front porch for the fresh air, the clear head. But I saw a handful of people scattered at the edge of the road.

They were looking at the police cars and watching the search. People who had walked from the woods, maybe. People with vehicles parked nearby.

Someone who had heard about this and passed on the information, letting it snake its way through the public – a call to action. A trail of whispers gaining force.