The Perfect Stranger

Chapter 30

I am the tie that binds. Not Emmy. Not Bethany. Me.

Me to Davis Cobb. Me to Emmy. My name in Bethany’s apartment, where it looked like she’d been attempting to slowly assume my identity.

Me to Theo. Me to the newspaper delivered to my door. Me to Aaron and Paige.

It’s no wonder the police pulled back to get a better view. It’s no wonder Kyle was skeptical. Look at what I’d left him with. Untraceable email accounts sending me proof that they were watching; a man calling me up at night; a woman with my face; a girl whom I could not prove existed. A dead body that I had identified beforehand. A history of inventing people – as if I were setting up a defense in advance.

I am the perfect mark.

I was back then, and I still am now. Loyal to a fault. Looking for the stories. An ear trained to pick up intrigue. Look at how you’ve channeled your weaknesses into strengths, my mother had said. The way I’m drawn to the morbid, the cop cars gathered on the side of the road, a streak of blood in the grass. How I throw myself into something, one hundred percent, until I achieve the desired outcome. Needing the construct of the story – a beginning, a middle, an end – to make sense of things.

I should’ve known, should’ve understood – that these strengths could be weaknesses instead. Looking for stories. Stepping too close, never putting up walls. An ear trained to pick up intrigue that you could feed me. A play on my emotions, an appeal to something baser inside. I welcomed Emmy into my life, into my head, with no boundaries. I thought we were protecting each other. I assumed we were on the same side from the start.

THE NEXT MORNING, AS I walked into school, I saw him in the front office through the glass windows. Davis Cobb, his head down, smiling at the secretary. He had some paperwork in his hand, probably allowing him to officially start working again. I pictured him on the other side of the wall, in another room; on the other side of a screen, his face glowing as his thick fingers typed out a poem about me and a man I’d brought home.

What more did he know?

I waited outside the back entrance of the front office near the classroom wings, waited for him to come out the locked door, so I might catch him off guard, unplanned. The door flew open, and there he was, towering over me, looking somewhere beyond.

“I need to talk to you,” I said, stepping directly into his path.

Davis’s eyes went wide. I had forgotten that they were blue. I had forgotten all the pieces that made him real – a real person, a real threat. He backed away, hands out in defense, as if our roles were reversed. His eyes shifted from side to side down the empty halls. “No,” he said.

I stepped closer. “You’ve seen her. My roommate. You’ve seen her. I just need to know.” I heard myself, felt the urgency, the desperation, could do nothing to stop it. “You’ve been watching.” If nobody could prove she existed, it all circled back to me.

“I don’t watch you,” he said, taking another step back until he was practically pressed up against the front office door. He had his hand on the knob, but it had locked behind him, and he was stuck with me now. “I don’t. I never did. I told them that.”

In my head, I heard his voice dropped low to a whisper, his breath in the phone from somewhere outside. The things he said and knew. “But in the emails. .”

He shook his head. “I can’t talk to you. My lawyer said.”

The handle turned from the other side, and the door flew open. He spun away, back into the office, just as Kate walked out.

She looked between him and me and gave me a quizzical look as she passed. I shook off the moment, joined her walking down the hall.

“I see you’re in as big a rush as I am today,” she said, pretending she hadn’t noticed what she’d just seen.

“Ugh,” I said.

“Well. To Friday,” she said. “Any chance you’re up for going out again?”

“I want to,” I said, “but I can’t tonight.” There was too much up in the air, too much I couldn’t get a grasp on.

She slowed her steps. “I feel like you’re avoiding me. Is this a friend breakup? Because if it is, I can take it. I’m a big girl. I just don’t want to keep asking you if you don’t want to hang out.”

“I do.” I grabbed her arm, pausing in the hall. “The week has been a disaster,” I said, and then, to appeal to something deeper, “I let the police search my house a few days ago.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh. How did it go?”

“They haven’t found her yet,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Leah,” she said, a hand on my arm. We parted in the middle of the hall as the warning bell rang and the students started filing down the hall behind us.

IZZY WAS ALREADY AT her seat, and I felt a sinking sensation, thinking that maybe she had been here waiting for me. Waiting to tell me something, and I had missed it. Molly and Theo came in right after me, and I couldn’t get a moment alone with her.

I tried not to look directly at Izzy, so she wouldn’t feel the weight of being watched. I wished for an empty classroom, a fire drill, a reason to pull her aside and tell her: I’m listening.

But moments did not create themselves; fate did not line itself up at one’s whim. There was no vodka, or dart, or map pinned to the wall. There was only a girl I didn’t know whom I followed to a place I didn’t belong, for reasons I didn’t understand.

At the end of class, I almost asked Izzy to stay, but she took off in the first stream of students. She didn’t make eye contact as she walked out the door.

I looked up her class schedule on our computer system, saw that she had art history during fourth period, my free block. I had to make the effort – had to let her see that I was meeting her halfway. That I’d noticed her sitting here early, waiting for me. That I was listening.

Mitch caught me in the atrium on my way to the history wing after the bell for last period. “Hey,” he called. “You’re not heading out early, are you?” But he was smiling, trying to make a joke of it.

“No, sir,” I said, emphasis on sir, also a joke. “Off to schedule a research day in the media center for my students.” The quickest excuse I could come up with, since we were standing just outside the library doors.

Mitch stepped closer, checked over his shoulder to make sure no one was near. Our voices carried through the empty atrium. “Coach Cobb was here this morning with his paperwork.”

“I know, I saw.”

“He’ll be back any moment now. I was on my way to see you. Didn’t want you to run into him on your own in the hall.” He lowered his voice again. “He’s not going to bother you.”

Mitch’s words felt too thick and cloying, and I wanted to extricate myself. “Thanks, Mitch. I’ll be fine.”

“I’d feel better if I accompanied you to the library. You can call me from your classroom whenever you need, and I’ll come. I’ll walk with you, just until this is all sorted out. Until everything’s back to normal.”

“I’m not afraid of him,” I said. “Besides, there are cameras in the halls.”

Mitch tilted his head. “There are no cameras in the halls. Those are motion sensors for the lights. That’s just what we tell the students, Leah.”

“Oh,” I said. Oh. “Listen, thanks for the offer, but I don’t want anyone to make a big deal of it. A bigger deal of it, at least. I don’t want people to think I need the escort. I have a hard enough time getting my students to take me seriously as it is.”

He smiled at that. “Don’t take it personally. It’s all in the reputation, and you don’t have one yet. It’ll come.” Just like in my last job. Reputation is everything, everywhere.

I waited outside the library until Mitch disappeared around the corner, and then I switched direction and walked down the history wing, where the classroom doors were open, the teachers’ voices resounding down the hall. I peered inside until I saw Izzy, sitting at the desk beside the window, looking out.

I angled myself so the other students wouldn’t turn to see, and then I coughed once in the hall. She turned her head at the noise, and she blinked when she saw me, her face frozen as if I’d caught her doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing.

I stared at her until she turned back around and raised her hand. “Bathroom,” she said, and then she picked up her purse and slung it over her shoulder. I heard her footsteps following as I walked down the hall, veering into the alcove just inside the women’s bathroom.

I did a quick check of the stalls, throwing open the doors, but I was alone. And then I wasn’t. Izzy stood just behind me at the entrance, her body stiff, and I didn’t know what to say, what to ask, after all. But she was here, and that was proof.

“Whatever you’re trying to tell me, I need to know,” I whispered. To hell with protocol.

She looked panicked, cornered. “It can’t come from me.”

“What can’t come from you?” I squeezed my eyes shut. “Please, Izzy.”

Her eyes darted around the bathroom, trailing over our reflections in the distorted mirrors. “Ms. Stevens, please. Please, you can’t say it was me. I know you won’t, right? You have to protect the source, right? I read your old articles, I saw how you do nameless sources. Can you do that for me?”

I froze, reimagining the scene. My paper showing up on my porch. A question. Can I be a girl like this? I have something to say. Watching me, seeing if I was someone to be trusted, because she had reached that point and she didn’t yet know.

“Yes, Izzy. I’ll never tell.” But she looked unconvinced. You have to give to get. “You know why I’m here, Izzy? Why I’m no longer there, being a journalist? Because I protected a source. Because I wouldn’t give her name. A girl not much older than you are now. You saw that in the paper you left for me, didn’t you?”

Her fingers raised to her mouth, her brown eyes growing shiny with tears.

“It’s okay,” I said.

And then she spoke, in a voice just above a whisper. “We ride together to school sometimes because we’re neighbors. Some days I have to come in early to finish work. So we hang out at the library. I saw an email screen once. I only read it because of the name. Because it said TeachingLeahStevens, and I thought that you were, you know, having some affair or something.” She looked to the side, to the mirror. “That’s what I thought.”

She thought I was messing around with a student. That aura of I have one over on you that I could always feel coming off her. The way she’d bait me, as if to say I dare you to say something to me–because she thought she had me beat.

All those emails I thought had come from Cobb. I saw them all in a different light now. Theo sitting at the library computer, breathing heavily at the screen. Typing vigorously, knowingly, waiting to see my reaction.

“Everyone thinks Coach Cobb is stalking you, right? That’s why the police called you down to the office that day? Why they arrested him? Only it’s not him.” IT WASN’T COBB.

The emails, referencing what I was wearing. The phone calls, down to a whisper. The prepaid phone that had probably been purchased with no identification. That I had believed was Davis Cobb – had imagined as I listened to his breathing on the other end, imagined the words whispered from his mouth, pictured his eyes watching through the window. Had I made him up all along? I felt sick to my stomach, dizzy and outside myself.

“You need to tell someone.” And then I realized she was, that was exactly what she was doing, because I was that person. How to explain that I was not a reliable source any longer? That she needed to go to the front office, to Mitch Sheldon, to Kate Turner instead?

“I don’t want him to know. Please. He’s my neighbor. If he can do this to someone else. .” She let the thought trail, and I tried to focus my thoughts. “Ms. Stevens?” she asked, as if wondering what I was going to do. Whether I was going to keep my promise to her.

“I’ll take care of it, Izzy. I promise.”

And then I let her go. Let her disappear out the bathroom entrance while I waited for all the pieces within me to realign.

I SCROLLED THROUGH MY phone, to the number I ignored so often, pressed send, held it to my ear. It rang once, then cut over to an out-of-service message. Ditched when Davis Cobb got taken in by the police. The emails had stopped back then, too, until this last one after Davis Cobb had been cleared. I’d been called down to the office, and Theo had heard. He’d overheard the rumors, too. That Davis Cobb was stalking me. That Davis Cobb had hurt that woman by the lake. Was it possible that all along it had been someone else?

The end-of-class bell rang, and I stood in the atrium, letting the crowd move around me. I closed my eyes, imagined getting lost within them, hearing all the voices around me – I could blend right in, I knew I could.

So many bodies pressing together, so much noise. And then Charlotte said–

Did you see what she did in–

No fucking way, I’m not–

So much goddamn work, if he thinks–

“Ms. Stevens?” A cool voice in my ear. I opened my eyes, spun around to see Theo standing before me. “Are you okay? Ms. Stevens?”

I stared at Theo, seeing him as someone new. Someone worse. All those messages I deleted, sent from down the hall in the school library.

He’s the one who knows. He’s the one who sees.

I opened my mouth, closed it again. Remembered Izzy’s eyes, her face, the fear in her words. “Yes, thanks,” I said, and then I continued on my way back to my classroom. Trying not to let it show how the words got to me, how they circled my head as I felt him watching, even now.