The Stories You Tell

by Kristen Lepionka

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  St. Martin's Press ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  For Joanna,

  my guiding star

  ONE

  I could never sleep at Catherine’s house, and it made no sense. Everything about her bedroom was engineered to combat insomnia—from the cool French linen sheets to the plush king-size mattress to the blackout curtains—but none of it worked on me. I could never relax there, never quite felt at home somehow. Maybe I missed the nocturnal rustling of people in the alley that ran the length of my own apartment on the edge of downtown, the creaks and sighs of the century-old building, the coppery streetlights that shone straight through my cheap mini blinds. Not even Catherine’s soft, even breath beside me was enough to lull me into unconsciousness when I stayed over—she was really miles away, cocooned in a satin eye mask and the chemical white noise of Ambien, and I was alone with the starless ceiling, my thoughts, and the kind of silence that only existed in ritzy neighborhoods and, I assumed, death.

  The three o’clock hour was usually when I gave up and went home; we’d known each other long enough for that not to mean anything, and maybe it was even better that way, neither of us exactly being morning people. I kind of liked the streets of Bexley in the middle of the night. The giant houses all dark and silent, the traffic lights flashing yellow. But some nights, like tonight, I just lay there and tried to wait it out. Trading the warm bed for the mid-January temperatures outside was hardly appealing.

  But then my phone rang.

  The tuneless vibration from the floor startled me. Catherine gave a soft sigh and shifted on her pillow but didn’t wake up. I swung my legs out from under the covers, cringing at the chill as I grabbed my jeans and felt for the pocket. I found the phone just as the buzzing stopped and I saw my brother’s name lit up on the screen.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d ever called me in the middle of the night.

  The last time had been the night my father died.

  I went into the guest bedroom and called Andrew back. He answered halfway through the first ring. “Roxane,” he said, his voice tense. “Are you busy?”

  “It’s the middle of the night,” I said, “so no.” Through the window, I could see that the street was already blanched white with falling snow.

  “Well, I didn’t know.”

  I sat down on the futon next to Catherine’s open suitcase, half-full of clothes for her impending trip to Rhode Island. “What’s up?”

  Andrew cleared his throat. “Something really weird just happened. Maybe bad-weird. I’m not sure.”

  I leaned forward, elbows on my knees. “What, Andrew?”

  “This girl I know—woman—Roxane, shit, I’m getting another call. Can you just come over here? Please?”

  “Andrew,” I said again, but he’d already hung up.

  * * *

  A few years ago, Andrew bought an apartment on the eastern side of Italian Village, where it was still mostly vacant lots and fixer-upper doubles. Now it was dotted with high-end residential buildings for young professionals who wanted their luxury bath fittings with a side of street crime, or at least uncertainty. My brother could probably sell his place now for twice what he’d paid for it back then, maybe more, but he liked it there. Not least because said young professionals needed to buy weed from somebody, and it might as well be from him. I punched his code into the keypad by the door and went in. It was Thursday morning or Wednesday night, depending on your mood. The lobby was empty and quiet and the elevator doors stood open as if they’d been waiting for me. I rode to the second floor and barely had a chance to knock before Andrew yanked his door open, like he’d been waiting for me too.

  I said, “You can’t just call like that and not say what’s going on—”

  But I stopped talking when I got a look at him. At the long, puffy scratch on his jaw and the side of his neck, ragged and pink.

  I started over. “Are you okay?”

  He nodded, but he didn’t say anything—just fumbled with a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. That was how I knew he really wasn’t okay. Andrew never smoked in the apartment, only on the balcony. A holdover from growing up with my father’s rules: no cigarettes indoors. I studied him. His usual dapper bad-boy aesthetic was not in evidence. His hair, dark like mine and collar-length, was matted and greasy and he wore a faded black T-shirt with sweatpants, all of which told me he’d been asleep somewhat recently. My eyes flicked toward the closed bedroom door, but he shook his head.

  “No one else is here.”

  “What about the girl you were talking about?”

  “She’s gone.”

  I waited.

  “It’s not like that. I was sleeping, okay? She rang the buzzer and I let her in.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Addison, I think her name is.”

  “You think.”

  “When I worked at the Sheraton, she was on the banquet staff for a hot second. I didn’t know her that well. But she’d, you know, been here. Once before.”

  “How old is this girl?”

  “Twenty-five, I guess.”

  “Christ, Andrew.”

  “Look, that’s not the point. The point is, she came here and rang the buzzer, and she sounded upset. So I let her in. She got up here and she was a wreck. Crying, shaking, no coat. She wanted to use my phone. I asked her what was wrong, but she didn’t want to tell me. I even asked her if she needed a doctor, she was shaking so much. But she said no, no ambulance, no police. She just used my phone to make a call, just one call, but whoever it was didn’t answer. She left this whispered message. I couldn’t really understand what she was saying. So I gave her a sweatshirt and I was fixing her a drink, and it seemed like she was calming down, like maybe she would tell me what was going on. But then something spooked her and she got up and started to run out.”

  “Was she injured at all?” I asked, thinking maybe a car accident on the slippery streets.

  “No.”

  “Under the influence?”

  “No. I don’t know. I mean, you can’t always tell.”

  “What spooked her?”

  He dragged hard on his cigarette and tapped a grey column of ash into the sink. “Not sure.”

  “Okay, and the scratch?”

  “I grabbed her arm. Which, I know. I shouldn’t have.”

  “When she tried to leave?”

  Andrew’s face was lined with worry. “Yeah. I just—obviously something was wrong. And it’s the middle of the night, plus the weather? It was a reflex. Like, to stop her from leaving, because she shouldn’t be wandering around the city like that. So I grabbed her arm. She screamed and we—she—she was shouting for me to let go, so I did.”

  “And she just left?”

  He dropped his cigarette into the sink, the ember sizzling against the wet basin. “I followed her into the hall,” he said, “and she jumped into the elevator. By the time I ran down the steps, she was gone.” He laughed humorlessly. “I tried looking a
t the footprints in the snow, like to see where she went. But you know there are drunk assholes wandering around at all hours down here. So that was useless. But something wasn’t right. I don’t know what, but something was not right.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “I called you.”

  “I’m not the police, Andrew.”

  He leaned his elbows onto the counter and dropped his head between his forearms. “I didn’t. She said not to call anyone. She said that. And, you know.”

  I nodded. He had weed in the apartment, and while most cops wouldn’t care about a little bit of weed, Andrew probably had enough to constitute intent to distribute. But that didn’t exactly matter, not compared to what might be going on with Addison. “We can call Tom,” I said. I got out my phone and started scrolling. Tom Heitker was a homicide detective and had been my father’s partner before he died. Now I considered him a close friend, though my brothers had never liked him much.

  Still facing the counter, Andrew sighed. “Tom. No.”

  “Either that, or take your chances with whoever gets dispatched here. You need to call the police. You should’ve called them first.”

  “And say what?”

  “Exactly what you said to me.”

  “That this girl who may or may not be named Addison showed up here three years after I slept with her—one time—and she was hysterical and crying and she scratched me and then left?”

  My thumb hovered over Tom’s name on my phone. “How sure are you that her name’s even Addison?”

  “It was something like that. Addison, or Madison? Maddy? Rox, I called you because it was strange, and I just want to make sure she’s all right. I tried reaching out to a few folks from the Sheraton, but so far no one remembers her. That’s why I hung up on you, by the way. A dude from the hotel was calling.”

  “But he didn’t have anything?”

  “No.”

  “What about the number she called?”

  “It goes straight to voice mail. The greeting is just that robot voice reading the number.”

  “So you essentially have zero information about her.”

  “Exactly. So there’s no point in calling the police, even if she hadn’t told me not to.”

  I wasn’t sold on that yet, but I put my phone down. “What do you expect me to do?”

  “If anyone can figure out what’s going on with her, it would be you.”

  I shook my head. “I appreciate the vote of confidence but the best thing to do is probably to call the police and get them on the lookout for her.”

  But even as I said it, I wondered if that was the right call. The police wouldn’t have more information than I did, but they would have less time. Other things to do. And if Addison was in some kind of trouble, it might be the sort that she didn’t want help from the cops getting out of. My brother wasn’t looking at me, though. He was looking down at my phone, the screen of which had gone dark.

  I said, “What aren’t you telling me?”

  He dropped his eyes to the floor.

  I folded my arms over my chest. “Andrew, you’re my brother, and I love you. But I need to know what happened. Right now.”

  Finally he said, “I told you what happened. Tonight, everything happened like I said. But here’s the thing. She and I … it was only twice.”

  “Twice.” I folded my arms over my chest. “You said once.”

  “It was only once here, and once at the hotel. And here’s the thing, it didn’t end that great. She got me fired.”

  Now it was my turn to slump on the counter. “Why?”

  “She thought it was a more serious thing, her and me. It wasn’t, that was never going to happen. She didn’t take it well. She told management that I was selling weed from the bar. And that was that, really. I hadn’t seen her or heard from her since then.”

  “So why’d she come here tonight? If you’re just someone she went crazy ex-girlfriend on a few years ago?”

  My brother looked at me. His eyes, bluish-grey like mine, were anxious but honest. I saw that he was telling me the whole truth this time. He said, “I have absolutely no idea. It makes me think she’s really in trouble, if she’d come here after all that.”

  There was an unspoken ugliness in the air—that the police would listen to his story, take one look at the scratch on his neck, and assume the worst of him.

  I nodded. “Fine. I’ll try.”

  TWO

  At home, I made a cup of tea while my computer booted up, a strange sense of déjà vu taking hold of me. Andrew, calling with bad news. It had been a cold morning just like this when my father died—in fact, it was almost two years to the day. Last year, to mark the first anniversary, the police department had put together a prayer service and we all knew how to act. But the two-year anniversary loomed up ahead, dark and shapeless and unspoken.

  I pushed the thought out of my mind and sat down at my desk with my tea. I started with the phone number she had called from Andrew’s phone, but it went directly to the voice mail greeting robot voice announcing the digits of the number I had just dialed. A quick search around the number turned up nothing either. Then I switched gears to see what I could uncover about Maybe Addison Something herself. It should’ve been harder than it was. But living in the modern world meant latent traces of a person all over the place—social media tags, online petitions, user names, it all told a story that was alarmingly easy to follow if someone wasn’t careful. After noodling around on LinkedIn for a while, looking at people who had listed the Sheraton as their employer, there she was: Addison Stowe. She had dark reddish-brown hair, wide brown eyes, generally my brother’s type: a small silver stud in her nose and a pair of feathery earrings dangling from her earlobes. Her build was the heavier side of medium, and she smiled like she had a secret.

  Her job at the hotel had been “catering associate” and she’d left a year earlier, and either hadn’t bothered to update her LinkedIn page since or hadn’t gotten another job yet. Her Facebook and Instagram profiles were set to private so there wasn’t anything for me to see there beyond the same photo from LinkedIn. But that was fine; all I needed was her name in order to get an address.

  It turned out to be a shambling yellow half-double on California Ave., near where it dead-ended into the river. The street, already narrow, was even tighter with cars parked on either side and clogged with snow that hadn’t been cleared from the last storm. My boots crunched as I climbed the slippery front steps. The hope was that she’d answer the door, tell me everything was fine, maybe even be a little pissed at the interference, and then we’d all go about our day with the matter squarely behind us. I rang the doorbell and I listened; the house was emptily silent.

  I peered through the slats of the mini blinds in the window next to the front door and saw a darkened room with an old, puffy couch and berber carpet and a television atop an entertainment stand packed with the trappings of modern life—DVR, stereo, multiple video game consoles. The other half of the double was similarly quiet, though its blinds were pulled firm.

  Stepping off the porch, I looked down the alley between Addison’s unit and the apartment building beside it. The snow there was deep—at least eight inches, thanks to Ohio’s semiweekly winter storms—and muddled with footprints, lots of them. I added my own to the pattern and moved quietly to the back of the house.

  The fenced backyard was long and narrow, like mine. The snow was mostly undisturbed except for a scuffed path from the alley to the back of the duplex. A set of slippery wooden steps led to a tiny screened-in sunporch. Beside them, a dimple in the snow, a length of dirty garden hose, an oscillating sprinkler.

  It definitely wasn’t sprinkler weather.

  I picked it up. Why would someone have gotten this out at this time of year? On closer inspection, the rest of the hose was still under the porch, but someone had been digging at the snow to get to the sprinkler. I flipped it over and saw a flap of duct tape stuck to the side with an outline of
a house key on it.

  I had to give somebody credit—that was a decent hiding place for a spare key. I wondered if Addison had been here this morning already, or if the sprinkler had been unearthed by someone else.

  I looked around, still didn’t see anybody nearby, and tried the screen door; it was unlocked. The porch was barely three feet square, a sloping deck with a piece of green Astroturf covering the slats. Three bins stood along one side of it with corresponding signs taped to the wall above them: TRASH, RECYCLE, COMPOST. Next to the back door that led into the house, there was a pair of ankle boots, corduroy, soaked through from bottom to top, and a lump of grey fabric. I picked it up with a gloved finger; an Ohio State hoodie, damp and very cold.

  I took out one of my business cards and wrote Andrew’s sister on the back and underlined it. Call if you need anything.

  I tucked it between the door and the frame.

  * * *

  I had other things to do. I did. Not necessarily better, but other. For example, I had to go check my new post office boxes—plural—to see if any of the four had received packages in the past few days. It was as thrilling as it sounded. I’d been hired by the owner of SpinSpo, a viral women’s apparel startup whose leggings and sports bras, supposedly unparalleled in their quality and fit, were being knocked off by a competitor and sold in a variety of online stores. Unsuspecting consumers had taken to social media to complain about the sharp decrease in quality, and Gail Spinnaker was sick of it. I was to figure out where the knockoffs were coming from, something that was impossible to tell from simply studying the online listings because it turns out most photographs of black leggings look the same.

  Gail Spinnaker was an energetic, rigid blonde, barely thirty but already quite successful, if success was to be measured by people’s eagerness to rip you off. A few weeks earlier, I’d gone to the SpinSpo office by the airport to discuss the drama. She’d made the dingy warehouse space surprisingly cheery with patterned rugs and painted murals on the cinder block walls. One was even in progress when I got there—a young lady with a shaved head and tattoos from her chin on down was inking multicolored flowers over a stark black-and-white typographical piece in the small lobby. O MORE THAN JUST BE was all that was still visible.