The Last Place You Look

by Kristen Lepionka

  I held out the bills, feeling defeated.

  FOURTEEN

  Craft-beer enthusiast Brian Zollinger called me back as I drove home and told me he’d moved to Wisconsin in April of his junior year and he never saw anyone from Belmont again. He’d gotten a phone call from my father after Mallory Evans was found—owing, he said, to his troublemaker reputation in town—but he couldn’t provide any info since he never knew her well and he hadn’t even seen her in nearly two years at that point anyway.

  So it seemed that Frank had a good reason for talking to Brian Zollinger, Michael Timpton, and Brad—their own troublemaking reputations—as well as logic behind crossing the first two off the list. All I could do was hope that Brad could tell me why his own name was crossed off, that it somehow made perfect sense, and that seeing Brad’s name in my dad’s notes about Mallory’s murder was nothing but a coincidence, not a clue.

  I really didn’t want it to be a clue.

  Once I got into my apartment, I poured a drink and stood in my dining room and looked out the window onto the alley. It was six o’clock but it was already midnight-dark. The wind rattled a loose can along the fence but otherwise, it was still quiet. In the reflection in the glass, I could see the state of the room behind me and it wasn’t good. I wasn’t sure that I’d ever eaten a meal in this room. It was mainly the room I walked to in order to get to the kitchen. The table was piled high with dirty clothes and unopened mail. I turned away from the window and walked back into the hallway, willfully not looking directly at the mess.

  I took my drink into my office and pulled my computer out of its bag. The metal finish was cold to the touch from sitting in my car all day. I opened it, then closed it immediately when I saw that Pam Gregorio was up on the open browser tab.

  “What do you want,” I muttered to my empty apartment.

  That was easy enough. I wanted to figure out if Mallory Evans’s death was somehow related to the Cook murders, or if I was just stuck on this because of a theoretical appearance of my father’s ghost. The crimes were connected, obviously, by location, and also by murder weapon. There was something weird about Brad here too, based on Kenny’s sudden change of attitude. But beyond that, they weren’t even similar. A young woman with a history of trouble, raped and stabbed and buried in the woods; a middle-aged couple stabbed to death in their home. And then there was Sarah, who was neither here nor there. I didn’t know what it meant. But it felt very much like it all meant something.

  The last thing I wanted to do was sit at home all night, thinking about what it all could mean, waiting for Camo Jacket to show up, waiting for the creepy phone calls to start again. I leaned back in my desk chair as far as it would go and let my head hang off the back of it, taking in the upside-down view of the hissing radiator and the blank square of the window above it, waiting for something else to happen. Finally, something did. The phone rang, and I nearly fell over. Then I saw that it was Catherine calling.

  I knew better than to answer, but I did.

  “Hey,” she said, like she’d been trying to reach me for weeks.

  “Hey you.”

  “I was wondering if it did any good,” she said. “The sketch.”

  I looked up at the ceiling. If not for the sketch and the fact that it led me to Jillian Pizzuti, I’d still be out there obliviously looking for Sarah on the streets of Belmont instead of tangled in the archives of another crime. “I think it did,” I said. “Or it might have made things worse.” A little like Catherine herself, always.

  “Well.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “And,” she continued, because there was usually an and where Catherine was concerned, “I wanted to tell you that a friend of mine is having a party on Wednesday, and you should come.”

  Catherine had an endless circle of friends who had parties on any night of the week and never cared who got invited. “And why is that?” I said.

  “Because last I heard, you like parties,” Catherine said. “And because I’ve been thinking about you.”

  I felt myself smiling, some of the defeat of the day slipping off me.

  “So, are you free?”

  “I’m free right now,” I said.

  Now Catherine was quiet.

  I got a terrible idea. My heart started beating faster. “You should have dinner with me,” I said.

  “And why is that?” Her tone was gently mocking. Anyone else and I would have just hung up.

  “Because it’s Saturday night and you already got to W in your phone book,” I said. “And, last I heard, you like passing the check.”

  She laughed. She had a dirty laugh, impossibly big for her quiet, demure voice. “So where are we going?” she said.

  * * *

  When I got to the Pearl, Catherine was already there, seated at a pub table in the window with a glass of red wine and a charcuterie board in front of her, nibbling at foie gras on a piece of bread. She was dressed all in black—a loose shift over leggings, moto boots with a tangle of silver chains around her ankles. Her blond hair was messy around her shoulders. She didn’t look like she was waiting for anybody at all. I sat down and she put her hand on my thigh under the table without speaking.

  “Are you going to say anything?” I said after a minute.

  “I just want to have a nice evening,” Catherine said. “I’m not sure talking needs to be involved in that.”

  We looked at each other across the table, her expression vaguely challenging. Somehow in the hour between the phone call and this moment, tension had sprung up between us. Her eyes looked a little tired, and her mood was a little prickly, and I didn’t think she was on her first glass of wine when I walked in. That, and I was already feeling frustrated and unsettled. Every time someone walked by on the other side of the window, I involuntarily looked up, half expecting to see Camo Jacket staring back in at me like I had the other night. None of this was a recipe for a nice evening. But I felt a little better just being near her. So we ordered oysters and drinks and I told her all about Brad Stockton. She had always liked hearing about my cases, the small shows of bad behavior, the mysteries people thought were worth solving. She told me about a job her husband was interviewing for this weekend, in London. I’d never met him, though Internet stalking had yielded many photos of an unsmiling man always wearing a scarf of some kind, his sole personal expression to the world.

  “You don’t seem especially happy about that,” I said.

  “I’m not especially anything,” Catherine said. Her hand was back on my thigh. “It’s up to him if he wants to go to London or Prague or Tallahassee, Florida. I’m just not going with him this time.”

  “And why not?” I said. I shouldn’t have. I wanted her to say something specific and she’d never do it. “Trouble in paradise?”

  “Because I’ve moved all my shit enough times and I’m not doing it again. And there is no trouble, and there is no paradise, there’s just the life I’ve chosen. Some days I love it and some days I hate it. But I chose it, and that’s all.”

  I looked at the melting ice in my glass.

  “Come on,” she said, “you can’t tell me you’ve just been sitting at home, crying over my senior picture all this time.”

  I laughed. It was a ridiculous thing to say, to act as if nothing had transpired between us since then, and she knew it. She said, “So who are you seeing?”

  My thoughts flicked to Tom, and then to the smiling picture of Pamela Gregorio currently waiting for me in cyberspace. “No one,” I said.

  “Lies.”

  “No,” I said, “that’s the truth.”

  She raised an eyebrow at me.

  “For a while,” I said, “I was, ah, keeping company with my dad’s partner. I’m not sure if you ever met him.”

  “Sure, yeah,” Catherine said, “Tom, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Sort of uptight, no?”

  “No,” I said. “He’s different, when you get to know him. But that’s over with
now anyway. He’s seeing somebody.”

  “And what’s she like?”

  “Haven’t met her.”

  Another raised eyebrow. “And you’re not the least bit curious, either,” she said, and pantomimed typing on a keyboard.

  “You just think you know everything there is to know about me, huh.”

  She leaned closer to me. “Don’t I?”

  I shook my head; I didn’t know what at. “She looks like a very nice person,” I said.

  “Lies,” Catherine said again.

  “Look, what’s it to you?”

  “I like to know you’re out there, being okay.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  Catherine looked at me like she wanted to kiss me and also like she wanted to get up and leave.

  I said, “So what are you going to do about it?”

  * * *

  In the car, we fit together like we belonged that way, her knees over the arm rest, me balancing one hand on the doorframe, the other hand peeling away the layers of her clothes like flower petals. She loves me. She loves me not. Dress, cami, leggings, the black lacy nothing of her thong. The windows fogged up and it felt private, secluded, even though we were parked at a meter and every so often, footsteps passed. Catherine tasted how she always tasted, like the beginning of everything. Her hands gripped my shoulders and tugged my hair as I ran my tongue along the inside of her thigh and then back up into the sweetness of her. She came hard, a shuddering release, and then she sat up on her elbows and tipped her head back and laughed.

  “You could have saved yourself sixty bucks,” she said, “and just invited me out for a ride.”

  “Sixty bucks,” I said, “bitch, please.”

  She laughed again. Some of the weariness was gone from her face. “I should just leave you here like this,” she said, nudging me with the toe of her boot. “All hot and bothered.”

  “I dare you,” I said. She was still breathing hard underneath me, her cheeks flushed pink despite the cold air in the car.

  She unzipped my leather jacket and grabbed the front of my shirt. “You know what,” she said.

  “What.”

  Catherine tipped her head to speak low into my ear. “I never feel quite as much like myself as I do when I’m with you.”

  I kissed her hard. “Tell me about it,” I said. For the first time in a while, I felt all right.

  * * *

  The feeling only lasted so long, though. I walked up the sidewalk to my apartment in a good kind of fog and unlocked the door to the building. But I froze as soon as I stepped inside. My own door was half open, one of the glass panes next to the knob neatly punched out.

  I stared at it for a second, not understanding.

  “What?” I heard a voice say from somewhere in the apartment. “I can’t hear you, why are you whispering? She’s back? What?”

  Then the owner of the voice leaned out of the doorway to my office and looked right at me.

  It was Camo Jacket. His face, illuminated by the light of his phone, flooded with panic.

  “Oh, shit,” he said.

  “Stop right there,” I heard myself say, but he darted back into the office and went for the door that led out to my enclosed porch, a voice still yelling from his cell phone. I dashed into the apartment and lunged for him, grabbing the sleeve of his coat as he fumbled for a split second with the lock, but he shrugged out of the garment and banged out onto the porch, knocking my screen door off the hinges. The intruder then vaulted over the brick ledge of the porch and dropped five or so feet to the sidewalk, immediately yelling out in pain.

  Breathing hard, I looked over the porch at him. He was clutching his knee and rolling around on the ground, his face twisted up in confused agony. “Who the fuck are you?” I snapped at him.

  “Help me!” he groaned.

  “Tell me who you are,” I said, “and then maybe I’ll help you.”

  But a car door slammed and I heard another voice—this one a bit familiar—screaming, “What did you do to him!”

  I turned to the source of the voice and nearly fell off the porch myself.

  Cass Troyan.

  She was dressed all in black, like she’d watched a Mission: Impossible movie as research for whatever gambit this was supposed to be. She ran over to him and knelt down. “Damon, baby, are you okay?” Then she glared up at me. “You hurt him. Look at him, he’s hurt really bad. Oh, baby—”

  “What the fuck is going on here?” I said, loud enough to make them both shut up. “Cass. What is this?”

  She glared up at me defiantly while Damon struggled up into a sitting position, subdued now. “You’re not a producer for a TV show,” she said.

  Shit.

  “You’re a liar. You lied right in my face. That’s so messed up. You’re a private investigator. Who do you work for?”

  I ran a hand over my face, a rush of shame hitting me. I needed to retire that particular gimmick. I supposed it was bound to happen sometime, that someone caught me in that lie and tried to do something about it. But that knowledge did nothing for my racing heart. “Cass, you can’t—”

  “Who?”

  “Brad Stockton’s family,” I said after a minute.

  Cass looked pissed, but not as pissed as I might have expected. They both just looked kind of busted. “I thought maybe you were working for my dad.”

  “What?”

  “My parents are getting divorced. It’s gonna be ugly.”

  I shook my head. None of this made any sense. I said, “Someone needs to tell me what’s going on here.”

  After a second, Cass spoke. “My mom said I was an idiot if I believed that we were going to be on some TV show. She said it was probably some scheme my dad cooked up. So I called that station, on your business card. They never heard of any Roxane Smith. And later, we were going to Taverna Athena for dinner, for our anniversary. And I saw your car. So we followed you, to that house on the north side. It was Damon’s idea.”

  He nodded proudly. I thought of the minuscule diamond in Cass’s engagement ring. Clearly she’d found the man of her dreams here: money and brains.

  “He got into your car while you were there, to find out your real name. But he couldn’t find anything with your name on it, so he went back to the house the next day and that old woman answered. She told him that you lived in Olde Town now.”

  My mother had left that part out. I gritted my teeth.

  “So we drove around till we found your car, and then he got your name off your mail. So I Googled you and that’s how I figured out you were a private investigator. I just wanted to know who you were working for.”

  As far as amateur detective work went, it honestly wasn’t bad. But I was furious—at them, and at myself. After all, it was my lie that had led to this point. “Well, are you happy now?”

  “What do you know about my cousin?”

  “Nothing, Cass,” I said. “I haven’t really learned anything. I apologize for lying to you—it’s just that you were about to shut the door and I wanted to speak to you. If you wanted to know more, why didn’t you just ask me? You obviously have my number, right? You’re the one who has been calling?”

  Cass squinted in disgusted confusion.

  “You haven’t been calling me?” I said. “And just breathing, not saying anything?”

  “No,” Cass said, somewhat indignant now.

  I ran a hand over my face again. I didn’t believe her, not for a second.

  Damon chimed in, “You owe us five hundred bucks. I need medical treatment. I didn’t even touch any of your stuff, I was just looking. For, like, evidence.”

  I was sick of them. I put my hands on my hips. “I think,” I said, “that you broke my fucking window, so we’re going to call it even. Or, we can get the police here to sort it out.”

  Apparently those were the magic words, because Damon managed to get himself onto his feet. “No, we’re good now.”

  “Do not come back here, understood?” I said
, as firmly as I could manage.

  It was one thirty when they finally left. I went back inside and locked the dead bolts on the door, a pointless act given the gaping hole in the glass. The adrenaline rush was over, leaving me shaky and exhausted and, although mildly relieved that the mystery of Camo Jacket was no more sinister than a couple of clueless idiots wound up over my own bad judgment, I didn’t quite know how to deal with the aftermath. It was the middle of the night, so there was no chance of getting anyone to come out and fix the window right now. But there was also no way I could sleep with it like this. I went into the kitchen and hit the lights, wincing at the sudden brightness. I turned them off and grabbed the pizza box off the stove, where I had abandoned it when Tom was over the night before last. I dumped the old pizza into the trash and cut a square of cardboard from the bottom of the box, also selecting a broom, a dust pan, and a roll of duct tape, making do. What it lacked in security it made up for in class, I told myself.

  When I had completed my expert repairs, I sat at my desk for a minute with my phone, wondering if Catherine had Ubered straight home and if she’d let me join her there if I asked. But my chest tightened when I saw another two calls from the unknown number. One that came in while I was with Catherine, and one from one twenty.

  Which would have been right in the middle of my confrontation with Cass and Damon.

  I closed my eyes. The vague sense of relief I’d had only minutes before was gone. I hadn’t believed Cass at the time when she said she wasn’t the one calling, but even I had to admit that it would be awfully hard for her to pull off such a call when she was standing right in front of me.

  Maybe I was wrong about what time it was when I got back inside.

  I wanted to be wrong.

  I’d assumed that the calls were part of the same narrative. If they weren’t, that meant I knew even less than I thought.

  FIFTEEN

  I met Andrew at Fox in the Snow for breakfast on Sunday morning. Ten o’clock, which was on the early side both for my hangover and for him. But I could hardly turn down the offer of a free blueberry hand pie, and I needed to get moving if I wanted to attempt to beat the crowd at the prison in Chillicothe anyway.