The Perfect Stranger

by Megan Miranda

  The job got to me. I imagined who must’ve been on the other end of the line, felt my worlds colliding, felt everything in Boston too close now, as if I had summoned it here.

  “Hey, Leah, were you listening? Kassidy put him in contact. Get what I’m saying?”

  Kassidy, our favorite source in the police department, who knew that Noah and I were together.

  “Kassidy,” I repeated.

  “Yeah. So. You’re welcome. Let’s call it a draw, huh? I can only imagine the shit you’ve gotten yourself into this time if they’re calling ’round here.”

  I gripped the phone tighter, spoke through my teeth. “I’ll do it, Noah. Swear to God, I’ll do it,” I said. But he must’ve been able to hear the lack of authority in my voice. I was a terrible liar.

  “You know you wouldn’t win, right? If you make a stir, someone’s finally going to start asking the right questions. Paige Hampton has a case, and we all know it. You’ll lose, Leah. You and I both know there’s no source. Nobody will stand up in your defense.” And then he hung up.

  Fuck you, Noah. I felt the words, felt them tightening my stomach, my grip on the phone. Fuck you fuck you fuck you.

  I wondered if the paper had a plan in place for if it happened. A standard operating procedure for what to do when Leah Stevens went down.

  Whatever mess I was stuck in, I’d have to dig myself out now. From Emmy. I’d have to get to her past first, before they got to mine.

  I thought of her old friends, tried to think of who they were. Names in bars, faces flickering past, nothing that lasted. I thought briefly of John Hickelman, but there were probably hundreds of them. I imagined searching the White Pages for Hickelman, John, calling each one up, asking, Hey, did you have mirrors on your ceiling? And do you remember sleeping with a girl named Emmy? Did you have a watch that went missing?

  I remembered the name Kyle had shown me before things turned. The woman who lived in the apartment before us. Whose name was on the lease. She lived in New Hampshire now. This, I could do.

  * * *

  IT TOOK ONLY THREE calls, all placed from my classroom in the twenty minutes before first period, to get the right Amelia Kent. But I could reach her only at her place of work—I didn’t have access to her cell, and she didn’t seem to have a landline. Amelia Kent, according to a simple Internet search that led to her job profile on social media, was an accountant at Berger & Co., a mom-and-pop CPA firm in the White Mountains.

  Amelia was overly cheerful for the early-morning hour, answering on the first ring when I asked to be transferred to her direct line. I introduced myself in relation to the police investigation, explaining that I was looking for a woman who’d briefly used her address—that we could trace her as far back as that, but then we lost her.

  “I’m sorry I can’t be of more help,” she said. “I left a few months before my lease was up, figured my ex took over the rent, though I’m not sure. Never got my security deposit back. And I’d paid first and last months when I moved in. Figured the owners just pocketed the rest and called it even.”

  “So you didn’t move back to California? You weren’t rooming with a girl at any point?”

  “No, not any girl. I told that to the detective who called earlier—Kyle?”

  “Donovan,” I added, so she would see the connection, believe I was telling the truth. “That’s right. I think he mentioned a Vince?”

  She paused for the first time. “Yes. Vince had been my boyfriend for two years. He’d moved in with me back in January. And I caught him with someone else in May.” She laughed bitterly. “Made me wonder what he’d really been up to all that time.”

  “Who?” I asked. Her name, I needed her name.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t really stick around for introductions. You can’t really explain something like that away, though he sure as hell tried.”

  “How did he try?”

  “Denial, of course. But she was in our bed, God.” The memory still riled her up, still thrummed through her blood.

  “Can I get his last name, Amelia? Please, it’s important. He’s the only lead I have.”

  A pause, and then, “Mendelson. Please don’t mention my name. Please don’t mention I’m the one who sent you.”

  Amazing how something that happened so long ago can feel so fresh. How it could come back to haunt you from nowhere—the innocuous ring of a telephone, the past come to call from the other end.

  CHAPTER 27

  Vince Mendelson was a little harder to track down. I made several calls during lunch and had finally come away with what I felt was a solid lead when I saw Kate standing in my doorway.

  “Hey there, didn’t want to interrupt,” she said.

  I placed the phone facedown on my desk, wondered how long she’d been standing there.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  This was a new game for me: How much did people know and What did they think and Why were they asking.

  “Yes,” I said, and it was true. After the phone call to Amelia, I was actually feeling okay. It felt like the old days, the way one lead would spark to the next, and the next, until I had uncovered something and supported it with details that I had dug up myself.

  I was in the middle of it now, but soon there would come an end. We dig until we get there.

  “You heard about Cobb, right?”

  I froze, tried to keep my face passive. “Heard what?”

  She took a step closer. “He’s back.” My eyes must’ve widened, because she added, “Not right this second, but he’ll be coaching this afternoon, I heard. He’s been cleared.”

  He’s been cleared. Which meant they were working under some other assumption now.

  “Thanks for telling me,” I said. “No one else bothered.” Mitch hadn’t caught me on the way in, or cornered me in the hall, or paged me over the intercom.

  The bell for end of lunch rang, and the sound of students in the halls grew—one voice, two—until the voices blended together, a buzzing hive, reduced to white noise.

  * * *

  AT THE END OF class, I was ready to make some more calls but saw I had a new message on my school email. A message from the TeachingLeahStevens account for the first time since Davis Cobb was picked up by the police. No subject. I sucked in a breath, hovered the mouse over the message, clicked open.

  The message itself had only two lines:

  There once was a woman in red

  Who took a stranger to bed

  My fingers trembled over the keyboard, my reflection staring back from the screen. My pale face; the long-sleeved red sweater. I felt it scratching the skin at my collarbone. I looked down, wondered if it was a coincidence. Or if he had seen me before writing this.

  I imagined someone standing outside my house, peering in those front sliding doors, the inside of my house lit faintly by the amber light of the living room lamp. Looking down the hall to the open bedroom door, the darkness beyond. Seeing two pairs of kicked-off shoes. Kyle’s dark jeans.

  I imagined Davis Cobb outside my window, watching us. Bold, I thought. He was getting way too bold. Escalating even now.

  I forwarded the message to Kyle, adding my own note on top: You said you wanted to see them. Well, here it is. First one I’ve gotten since. I heard he’s back at school, by the way.

  I didn’t say anything about the words in the message or what they implied. I’d let Kyle come to that conclusion all on his own.

  Cobb watched my house.

  It was a terrifying, skin-crawling thought, and yet . . . I wondered what else he might know, if he knew who Emmy was, if he’d seen her. I forwarded a copy to my personal email account before I left for the day—and for the first time, I debated responding.

  Mitch caught me on the way out, beckoned me into his office. “Shut the door,” he said, his face pensive.

  “I already heard,” I said, and his face dropped for a moment before his calm demeanor slid back into place.

  “Okay, good, I’m glad.
You’re okay with it? If you need anything, or want to talk, or anything at all—”

  “I know where to find you,” I said.

  He watched me go with a faint air of disappointment. As if one thing would lead to the next and he could watch the undoing of Leah Stevens, catching me on the way down.

  * * *

  THE PHONE RANG AFTER I parked in my driveway, and I flipped it over, seeing my sister’s name. I frowned, worried briefly about my mother. I hadn’t heard from her since I’d hung up on her Sunday.

  “Hello?” I called, walking up the porch steps, keys out in my hand.

  “Did you apply for a new job, Leah?”

  “Did I . . . What? No.” I slid the door open, shut and locked it behind me.

  “That’s what Mom said, too. But I thought I’d check with you.”

  “Why?” I could already guess the answer.

  “I got some background request form for you in my email. Couldn’t figure out why the hell I’d be a reference, but it doesn’t seem to be a job reference form. It’s more . . . confirming details. The type we send to other companies when we’re checking out a candidate, fact-checking their résumé, you know.” There was a pause, and she said, “What’s going on? Is it legit?”

  I dropped my bag beside the door. “It’s legit,” I said.

  “Leah, what the hell is this, then?”

  I ran my hand across the back of my neck, felt the cold sweat, and forced myself to sit down, settle down. “I don’t know. The police, I think.” Or someone hired by the police. A background check.

  “The what?”

  “Just fill it out. Okay?” I rested my head in my hand, leaned my elbows on the kitchen table, took a deep breath that smelled like wood grain and polish. “Everything’s fine. Just fill it out. They’re making sure I am who I say I am.”

  “Who the hell else would you be?” To Rebecca, I was probably already the girl people only glimpsed, the one who slipped through the cracks.

  “It’s a long story. Do you remember Emmy? Did I ever tell you about her?”

  “No. Mom said you’re living with her now? Someone you knew after college? That’s her, right?”

  “Yeah, I lived with her for a little while after college, and we’re living together now. Only she fucking disappeared, and there’s no record of her anywhere.”

  Rebecca paused, and I imagined her switching the phone from ear to ear, swishing her hair over her shoulder, holding up a finger to a patient who needed assistance. “I don’t get what this has to do with the police and you, Leah.”

  I groaned. “Yeah, well. I reported her missing, and her boyfriend, the guy I said she was seeing, just turned up dead. In her car. Well, in a car.” I let out a laugh, felt myself cracking. Cleared my throat. “A car that she used but wasn’t registered to anyone.”

  Rebecca dropped her voice. “Are you in trouble, Leah?”

  “No.” And then I paused. “I don’t know. Don’t tell Mom. Just don’t tell Mom. Please, Rebecca. Fill out the form, okay? Fill out the form, and everything will be okay.”

  I hung up before she could object, and when she called back, I let it ring over and over until voicemail picked up.

  * * *

  I WASN’T SURPRISED TO see him an hour later. I knew he had called Kassidy in the Boston precinct, that he had spoken to Noah, that they had reached out to Rebecca. But I was surprised he came alone. It must’ve been the email I sent that implicated him. I saw him look me over, taking in the red sweater. I saw the words again: There once was a woman in red . . .

  I swung the door open, made a show of gesturing to allow him entrance. “Well,” I said when he stood in the middle of the room, looking me over, “did you get what you needed?”

  He frowned.

  “Let me put it this way. Did my sister and my old colleagues provide you with everything you needed to know, Detective?”

  He sat on my couch after taking off his jacket, leaning forward like he was wound tight, selecting his words carefully. “You never told me you were a journalist,” he said. His eyes briefly scanned me over, as if seeing me for the first time.

  Here it comes, here it goes. The moment when he realizes that this is not the girl he thought he knew.

  “Well, I’m not anymore,” I said. “And what did you do before you moved here? I didn’t know we’d made it that far yet.”

  He shook his head. “You were hiding it.” He could sense it.

  “I wanted a fresh start,” I said. Which wasn’t a lie.

  “You were forced out,” he said, the truth wielded into a weapon. And then his eyes rose to meet mine, on the other side of the room, daring me to deny it.

  I ground my back teeth. Didn’t deny it. “Who told you that?” Noah wouldn’t have outed me, not without taking himself and the paper down with him. And Kassidy didn’t know, not exactly. He knew there were whispers of libel but that they had died out. The university wanted to let the whole thing die just as much as we did, and nobody pushed.

  “Nobody had to tell me, I am capable of reading between the lines. A colleague says the job got to you, an officer says there was some fallout over an article on campus suicides. He told me there were whispers of libel or something—his words. And now you’re here, as far away as you could possibly get, professionally. I read it, Leah. You even keep a copy of it here, don’t you? I remembered seeing an old edition of a Boston paper during the search. What did you do, Leah?”

  “I didn’t do anything, Kyle.” I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, gave him the truth I’d been fighting to leave behind. “The paper thinks I made up a source. They think my claim was baseless, but they’re wrong.”

  He was silent, processing the information. “You made up a person,” he said, repeating the statement for emphasis. Ignoring the rest of it.

  “Not a person.” That was a step too far, but that was what they all believed.

  “It’s the same damn thing.”

  Except it wasn’t. He wasn’t talking about the same thing. He didn’t understand.

  “Which source was it?” he asked slowly as I sat in the chair across from him. “Please tell me it wasn’t the one about the pills and the professor.”

  And when I didn’t answer, his face blanched white, and his entire demeanor shifted. “You know what my boss thinks? That you’re keeping us busy chasing our tails. That you’re smarter than all of us combined.” He lowered his voice, looked me over again. “That there’s no one else who lived here.”

  Everything I had worried about, out in the air now. “Am I a suspect?” I asked, my voice cracking on the word, all attempts at cool and collected disintegrating, my life spiraling out of control. Again. “Is that what you think?” I asked.

  He threw his hands up. “I defended you, Leah. I defended you, told them they were wrong, that there was another explanation, and then I find out this? What am I supposed to think? You did it once before.”

  No, I didn’t, I didn’t. But perception is everything. How could I defend myself against the story? “I lost everything. Don’t you think I’ve learned my lesson?”

  He rested back in his seat. “I don’t know,” he said. “Honestly, I’m not sure. Maybe you got really good at it. Maybe you’re playing me right now.”

  I leaned forward. “I’m not the one playing. You wanted to search this house, and you did. I’m the one who shouldn’t trust you.”

  “You lied for a story.”

  “What I did”—not a lie, not exactly—“was for the truth.”

  His face twisted. I imagined what he must’ve read, must’ve heard from the police contacts or dug up with his own research. The cause and effect that he must’ve been putting together, the string of events that had landed me here in the first place. “That’s not what you got at all. If you can just sit there and believe that what happened is okay—”

  “Then what? I’m not the girl you thought I was? And here I assumed you thought I was a liar. Pick your frame of reference, Kyle.”r />
  He let out a sharp exhale. “Is this what your discussions are always like? A battle of wits over a turn of phrase?”

  I jerked back. “Isn’t this what you do for your job, too, Kyle? Say whatever you need to say to get a confession?”

  He shook his head. “My job is to solve cases, keep the criminals off the streets, keep others safe because of it. And I can only do that by getting the truth.”

  “We’re not so different, you and I.” I leaned forward. “You just haven’t been caught.” I thought of the email I’d forwarded him, wondered if he was thinking the same thing.

  He shifted, leaned his elbows on his knees. “You’d do it again, is what you’re saying?”

  I looked closely at him, lowered my voice so he’d have to lean even closer, our faces just inches apart. “Tell me, when an internal affairs investigation gets under way, and there’s an anonymous tip that you spent the night at a suspect’s house—because I am a suspect now, aren’t I?—tell me, what will you say?” His body stiffened in response, but I didn’t stop. “Will you say, Well, sir, it was all part of the plan to get her to confess. Or will you say, The end justifies the means. Or will you say, I’ve made a mistake, and await the punishment, and take the demotion, the unpaid leave, and sit at home and think: I ruined my career for nothing.” He was riveted, and I knew he was running the phrases through his mind, too. “Or will you think, I martyred my career in the pursuit of the truth, and I was willing to sacrifice my professional integrity for it.”

  He leaned back, farther away, his face closing off, this conversation shutting down.

  “Because,” I continued, raising my voice, unable to temper the anger, “your answer changes based on the outcome. Your answer changes based on everything you’ve seen that brought you to this point. On what you’re willing to do, and what you’re willing to take, and whether the idealist who landed you here still exists. Whether he’s been slaughtered in his sleep by his first case or his last. So which will it be, Detective Donovan? Explain yourself.” I was shaking, the fury fighting to the surface.