The Last Place You Look

by Kristen Lepionka

  The free fall I’d felt when I was talking to Tom was far from over. I felt like I was only gaining velocity. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this the other day?” If it’s true, I added in my head. Although my arm was beginning to tremble, I kept the gun trained on him.

  “Because I don’t like talking about it,” he said. “Shit, I’m sure you can see why.”

  “You never talked to the cops investigating her death. Did you?” I guessed.

  He shook his head. “The lawyer told me not to.”

  I rubbed my forehead with my free hand. “The lawyer.”

  “Mort. Uncle Mort. I mean, I told my dad first, that I knew Mallory. Then he had me tell the lawyer.”

  It took a certain kind of family, I thought, to have a lawyer named Mort, let alone one close enough to be called uncle. “What did you tell him?” I said.

  “I told him that we used to hang out, get high, you know, that kind of stuff. And he had me talk to Mr. Lassiter, who told me to just keep that to myself.”

  “The police chief just kept that secret for you?”

  “My dad and him, they go way back,” Kenny said. “He’s kept me out of a lot of trouble, over the years. And listen, it’s not like I feel good about this. It fucking haunts me, what happened to Mallory.”

  This really could not be happening. I wasn’t sure which was worse: that Lassiter had the nerve to jam me up for interfering with an investigation when he was clearly capable of the same, or that after everything in the last twenty-four hours, I was starting to believe what Kenny was telling me.

  “Talk to me about Colleen Grantham.”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t know her, Curt’s only been working for me for a year. I didn’t know he had another daughter. I’ve met his other two, but not Colleen.”

  “Where did you go Monday night? During the game.”

  “I had to check on some displays, I told you that. I went to this bar, the Varsity Lounge. And to Kroger, it’s in the same plaza, and to the liquor store on Clover. I needed to make sure they had the right displays set up because my client, the owner of the vodka company, he was coming to town yesterday to have dinner with my dad, and they wanted to check it out.”

  I lowered the gun slowly, unable to keep my arm up anymore. Kenny visibly relaxed. I didn’t know what to think of any of this, the way he seemed to have an answer for everything all of a sudden. But he was no longer tripping any of my shiftiness detectors the way he had been before. “Why do you still drive down Mallory’s street?” I said. I snapped out the cylinder of the revolver and saw that it was indeed empty. I wondered which of the Belmont cops had relieved me of my bullets.

  He rubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s like, I just like seeing her kid. She looks exactly like Mallory. Like exactly. And I like knowing that she’s okay. It makes me feel, I don’t know, calmer. Please, you have to believe me. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you all this the other day, and I’m sorry my dad called Mr. Lassiter and set all of this in motion. But I am telling you the truth. And if I could help you find that girl, Veronica, I would. I would help you in a second.”

  “You didn’t see her when you were at the Varsity Lounge.”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t drive down that street on Monday night.”

  “No.”

  “How did you know the body in the woods was Colleen Grantham?”

  “Mr. Lassiter,” Kenny said. “He came and told my dad, because my dad’s an investor in the apartment development back there. He thought he had a right to know, before it came out in the news.”

  I sagged against my car, barely feeling the damp, cold metal. I wondered if Lassiter had told Mr. Brayfield before he even told Colleen’s parents. There was not a single person in this story who came out looking good. I finally said, “Kenny, you can never tell anyone what you told me. About Mallory’s daughter. Never. Joshua Evans is her father.”

  “I know that.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I know.”

  I opened the car door. “I will destroy you if you ever say anything.”

  He nodded at me like he believed me. And although it was the last thing I wanted to admit, I was pretty sure I believed him now too.

  * * *

  My phone, now that it was powered up, told me Joshua Evans had been three of the six missed calls and five of the texts. Shelby was two of the calls and the rest of the texts. No real news, just a handful of operational updates—such as the Amber Alert—followed by apologies for bugging me. Danielle Stockton was the sixth call, a detail I could not consider at the moment. No calls from the unknown number while I was in the cell, a small blessing. I drove back to Providence Street and parked in front of the Evanses’ house. It was just before eight. Joshua’s car was still in the driveway. A light was on in the living room. I hoped he hadn’t been up all night. He answered the door about two seconds after I knocked, as if he had been waiting for hours for someone to show up. At first he looked relieved that it was only me, but then he looked confused as he took in my face. “What happened to you?” he said.

  “I’m sorry for the radio silence,” I said. “I got arrested.”

  “What…?”

  “It’s a long story. But I hope I didn’t add to your stress.”

  “No, I just wasn’t quite sure what to think,” Joshua said. “You were here, and then you weren’t.”

  “I’m sorry. I was trying to help.”

  We looked at each other. It seemed like he had indeed been up all night, his eyes bleary but wild. He was wearing a too-tight Ohio State sweatshirt with a coffee stain on the front. “There isn’t anything new,” he said softly. “Last night, there were police all over the block, talking to everyone. A neighbor down the way thinks he saw her cutting through to go to the Wildflower Plaza, but that’s the last anybody saw. The police have been real helpful, real on top of it. Amy Wexford’s in bad shape, though.” He shook his head. “I can’t even imagine, your kid missing.”

  My face burned. This man is her father, I repeated in my head. “I know,” I said. I didn’t know how anyone could think the police were doing a good job here. But I didn’t want to take that small comfort away from him. Not when I had nothing to replace it with. “Is Shelby at school?”

  “No, she’s in the shower. I told her she didn’t have to go to school. Just thinking about what you said, to keep her nearby. We’re going to go out, put up some flyers. We did some last night, but Shel’s been making a list of other places Veronica likes to go. You, uh, you’re welcome to come with us,” he finished.

  It broke my heart, the way he said it. The way he still thought I could help them. I wanted to stay, even if I couldn’t help. But I could only make things worse at this point, what with the entire police force hating my guts. I needed to go home and regroup and try to figure out another connection between the girls. A real connection this time. “I can’t,” I said, and he nodded quickly, embarrassed. “I just wanted to check on you guys this morning. But can I take some flyers?”

  “Sure, yeah, yeah,” Joshua said. He went into the kitchen for a beat and then returned with a stack of printouts. MISSING. Below the headline, Veronica smiled out from the same picture Shelby had given me yesterday, the one with the ceramic turkey.

  We both looked at the photo. Everything about it looked impossibly normal.

  Except Veronica was gone.

  She was gone, and I was here. It didn’t seem fair.

  “Keep me posted,” I told him.

  But on the street, a Belmont cruiser was parked next to my car. “What do you want?” I snapped at the street, although I couldn’t see who was inside the car. If it was Jake Lassiter, I was going to scream.

  But the door opened and Meeks got out, holding his hands up like calm down. “I didn’t call this in yet—”

  “Call in what?” I crossed the lawn in a few strides. “Is there no parking on this street? Tell me what the fuck you could possibly ca
ll in.”

  He looked slightly afraid of me. “You can’t be here. Lassiter is adamant that you be arrested on the spot for disorderly conduct. And charged, this time.”

  Disorderly conduct was a blanket charge that covered any number of wrongdoings. Still a fourth-degree misdemeanor. But the Belmont police clearly weren’t just talk where it came to their misdemeanors. I felt my teeth grinding together. “I just want to find this girl.”

  “I know. But listen, so do we.”

  I shook my head, smiling out of disbelief.

  “We do, Miss Weary,” Meeks said. “There’s an Amber Alert. We’re checking area hospitals, jails, bus stations, you name it. We are on top of it. The best thing you can do for Veronica Cruz is just leave us to it, okay? Every cop in town is looking for her. We don’t need to waste time looking for you too.”

  “That’s on your boss, not on me,” I said, but the meaning of his words was clear. And I realized that he was right. It was absurd that Lassiter was doing this, but I couldn’t deny that he was. Even the three minutes we’d been talking here meant three minutes Meeks hadn’t spent on Veronica. I didn’t think it was possible to feel worse, but I did.

  “We will find her,” Meeks said. “I promise.”

  He couldn’t promise that, not to me, not to anyone. I got into my car without saying anything else.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I slept all day. When I woke it was after six and my room was dark. The experience in the jail cell seemed crazy enough to be a dream, but it wasn’t. I hurt all over. But I got out of bed and checked my phone, running a quick Google search to see if Veronica had come home. She hadn’t. I sighed. Then I pulled on clean clothes, because I was due at my mother’s house for our weekly dinner.

  I made a point of not looking at the cardboard square still taped to the front door as I walked down the hall. I would deal with it at some point—soon—but not right now. In the bathroom I considered my cheekbone in the mirror, my seldom-used makeup bag in hand. Then I decided not to bother. The bruise was too big to effectively conceal with makeup, and the cut was still painful to the touch. The rest of my face was pale. I dragged a brush through my hair, which was tangly and strange because I’d gotten directly into bed after taking a shower. I would be impressing nobody tonight. But my family, now that my father was gone, could be counted on to accept me more or less as I came.

  Or so I thought. When I walked into the house, it was clear that this was not the place to be if I wanted to take my mind off my problems. Matt was parked on the couch and barely looked up from ESPN, while I could hear my mother’s and Andrew’s raised voices from the other room.

  “I don’t see why you can’t just leave it!” my mother was saying. “How many times do I ask you for anything?”

  “Are you happy now?” Matt muttered.

  “Me?” I said.

  “Yes, you,” he said.

  “What’s the difference?” Andrew said. “Nobody else is going to drink it.”

  “Oh,” I said, realizing what was going on: Andrew must have freed the liquor stash from the office.

  Matt looked up at me now. “What happened to your face?” he said.

  “I tripped.” I dropped my coat on a chair and went into the kitchen. “Hey, Mom.”

  “Hello,” my mother said, voice cool.

  “Jesus, what happened to you, Rox?” Andrew said.

  “Watch your language!” my mother said, but then she looked at me and gasped. “Honey, what happened?”

  “It’s okay, it’s nothing,” I said. “I tripped and fell, it looks worse than it is.”

  “That’s almost never true,” Andrew murmured to me, which was correct. I met his eye. He flicked his glance at the source of all the present trouble, the Midleton bottle on the table, and I nodded.

  My mother turned back to the stove in a huff. “Did you see a doctor?” she said.

  “No,” I said, impatient, “it’s just a cut.”

  “Just a cut,” she said, “Roxie, you could need plastic surgery!”

  “No one needs plastic surgery,” Matt called from the living room. “That’s a total vanity procedure.”

  “What, are you going to med school now?” Andrew called back. “Shut up.”

  “And where did you fall?” my mother said. She turned around again, brandishing a wooden spoon at us. “And didn’t you try to catch yourself?”

  Matt appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. “Were you drinking, when this happened?” he said, watching as Andrew poured the Midleton into a rocks glass and passed it to me.

  “No.”

  “Sure.”

  “Matt,” I said flatly. “Don’t worry about it.” I brought the glass to my lips.

  “Are you sure you want to drink that?” Matt said. “Because you never have to take another—”

  “Jesus, shut the fuck up,” Andrew snapped.

  “Language!” my mother said.

  “Thanks, all, for your concern,” I said, downing half the whiskey, “I was out for a hike and I tripped on a branch, okay? The subject is now closed.”

  “A hike?” Andrew said.

  I spun at him. “Please, don’t you start with me too,” I snapped.

  He looked a little shocked. I never snapped at Andrew. I held up a hand in silent apology.

  My mother made ham and green beans and crescent rolls for dinner, one of the five or so meals in heavy rotation from when I was growing up. She had always wanted to be more creative in the kitchen, as evidenced by the series of ethnic cookbooks she checked out of the library all the time, but my father liked things a certain way. My mother still read the cookbooks, but to my knowledge she hadn’t cooked anything new since he died.

  I didn’t blame her for not wanting anything to change where Frank was concerned—not the sink, not the food, not the liquor—but I didn’t understand it.

  Like I was ten years old again, I pushed soggy green beans around on my plate and listened to the conversation going on around me. I kept hoping my phone would ring, but it didn’t. My mother reported that she’d invited Tom to dinner and he said he might try to make it later, which sounded like the worst thing possible right now. Meanwhile, my brothers argued blandly with each other, all of us in a petty bad mood tonight. “I’m telling you, Trabue Road turns into Renner at Hilliard-Rome,” Matt was saying.

  “No, it’s east of there,” Andrew said. “Your sense of direction is fucking terrible—remember how you got us so lost going to Michelle Lindstrom’s party that one time?”

  “I didn’t get us lost—you wrote down the address wrong because you were stoned.”

  “Oh, please,” Andrew said, “I didn’t even have her address, she was your friend.”

  “You were stoned.”

  “It turns into Renner east of Hilliard-Rome, Matt.”

  This had been going on for ten minutes. What started as a discussion on where the Test Pavements were playing that weekend had devolved into a meaningless rehash of every other argument they’d ever had.

  Veronica was gone and my brothers were fighting about nothing.

  “Why are you even arguing about this?” I said. “It’s objectively one way or the other. Look it up.”

  “You drive all over the city, which is it?” Andrew asked me.

  Matt scoffed. “She’s obviously going to agree with you,” he said.

  “Did you put some bacitracin on it, at least?” my mother chimed in, still worried about the scrape on my cheekbone. “That could really scar.”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “Because I have some, in the first-aid kit upstairs.”

  I took a deep breath. “Mom, I’m fine.”

  “I don’t even understand why you were out hiking, the weather’s been terrible,” she said.

  It had not been the greatest of cover stories, I realized now.

  Matt and Andrew had their heads bent over one of their phones, the former looking pissed. “Well, whatever,” he said, as if it no longer mattered
now that he’d been proved wrong.

  “I’m sure the Test Pavements will be so devastatingly brilliant that I’ll forget all about this,” Andrew said.

  “Shut up,” Matt told him. “I don’t even want you guys there.”

  “Come on, Matt,” my mother said. “We’re all going to be there. Right, Roxie?”

  “Can’t wait,” I said flatly.

  “Oh,” Matt said, tapping at his phone. “I talked to Danielle today.”

  “Okay?” I said. How perfect it would be, I thought, if after everything, my brother had been instructed to fire me. I pulled out my own phone, thinking maybe I’d accidentally switched it to silent. I hadn’t. But I saw a missed call from Tom and dropped the phone facedown on the table.

  “She’s been trying to get ahold of you, I guess. And you never called her back.”

  I sighed. “It’s on my list for tomorrow.”

  “Isn’t that sort of unprofessional?” Matt said. “To wait that long?”

  I wanted to stab him with a bread knife. “Matt, thanks for your concern for how I run my business, but you don’t know anything about it.”

  “I know that. I also know that I referred her to you and instead of helping her, you’re just getting shit-faced with people she went to high school with? She told me one of her friends met you at some party and you were practically incoherent. I should have known better. Aren’t you getting a little old for that?”

  I wanted to tell him that helping Danielle was the least of my concerns at the moment. “Why did you refer her to me at all then, if you should have known better?” I said.

  “Because you used to be good at it,” he said.

  A tense silence settled over the table. I took another deep breath, about to let it go and continue pushing my food around on my plate. But then I couldn’t. “You know what,” I said, “Matt, you’re right. It’s unprofessional. I’m going to go call Danielle back right this minute. Thanks for dinner, Mom.”

  “Oh Roxie,” my mother said, “he didn’t mean anything by that, please, sit down, your brother’s just worried about you.”