The Stories You Tell

by Kristen Lepionka

  It looked better with the lights off.

  The floor was a scuffed tile in a brownish-black shade and dotted with smears of spilled liquor and fuzzy with dust. A network of amplifiers was arranged above the dance floor, the grille cloth ripped and hanging down like the wings of bats. A trash can near the front door was overflowing with crumpled plastic cups and a pool of murky liquid was slowly leaking out of the bottom, and other cups and beer bottles were scattered around the place—on the floor, on the edge of the stage, on bar stools.

  Bo turned off a few of the lights. “What the fuck.”

  I shined my flashlight around, looking for security cameras: one above the door, two behind the bar, two more in the hallway that led to the restrooms. They looked old and possibly defunct. I pointed at a door at the end of that hallway. “What’s that?”

  “Basement.”

  There was another door opposite the restrooms. “And that?”

  “Office.”

  “I assume that’s where the security system would be?”

  We went down the hall, our shoes sticking to the floor. I supposed that most bars were probably this gross, but you couldn’t hear the suction under your feet because of the music. Maybe that was why bars played music in the first place.

  The door to the office was locked. Bo consulted his key ring again and got it on the second try this time.

  The office was little more than a closet with a desk, a decrepit old computer monitor, and a bank of file cabinets. Bo nudged the computer’s mouse; the monitor stayed black. While he felt around for a power switch, I studied a white board on the wall opposite the desk.

  MIN 10 FOR SKELETAL, someone had written in messy block letters.

  ADDISON BAR XCEPT 10–1230

  FIND NEW DOOR GUY?

  .23

  I took a picture of the list, though I had no idea what it meant. Bo was still rooting around under the desk, so I turned my attention to the file cabinets—thinking maybe they contained personnel records or something useful.

  But no: they were empty.

  At least the one closest to the door was. The second was jammed full of promotional items like T-shirts and can koozies. The third just had packages and packages of black napkins.

  “Goddammit,” Bo said behind me. He shoved the computer monitor in disgust. It had booted up but was asking for a password, presumably one that he didn’t have. “I don’t know how to see the camera footage. They don’t even work, for all I know. But can we agree that nothing sinister happened here?”

  Things were rarely that simple. I had to agree that the place looked like a crappy nightclub after a regular crappy night. Plus, I assumed, there would have been patrons around on Wednesday night—people who would have seen some kind of incident, if there had been one. So maybe my theory was just plain wrong. Maybe Addison was upset about being told she had to work behind the bar in addition to deejaying, she quit in a huff, and Wyatt and Shane were still off partying together somewhere.

  I could almost believe it, but not quite.

  I dragged a chair from the office to the security camera in the bathroom hallway and climbed up; the device had a layer of dust on it so thick that it obscured the little light that was supposed to blink in green if the camera was operational; under the grime, the light was off. I sighed in disgust. But while I was up there, I could see a spot above the door to the office, where the painted cinder block was a slightly lighter shade of beige, like something had recently been ripped down.

  I moved the chair, Bo watching me with annoyed amusement, or amused annoyance.

  Up close, the spot was half-moon shaped and still sticky.

  But that didn’t tell me anything.

  I did one more lap of the place, looking for other sticky half-moon spots on the walls. The exposed brick walls of the bar and dance floor area weren’t painted. So unless I went around touching every inch of wall looking for a sticky patch, there was no way to tell.

  And there was no guarantee of the composition of any sticky patches I might find. The thought made me shudder.

  I turned the basement doorknob but it, too, was locked. “Can you?” I said.

  “That’s not supposed to be locked. It’s one of the exits.”

  “Well, it’s locked. So can you?”

  “You’re very demanding.”

  “I prefer thorough.”

  Bo unlocked the door.

  A rank, moldy smell wafted up the steps. I covered my mouth with my hand, suddenly afraid of what the basement contained.

  But halfway down the steps, I found the problem—standing water, a lot of it, almost the whole floor submerged. Or, rather, the layer of flattened cardboard boxes and trash that covered the floor was almost submerged.

  “I guess he was telling the truth about the pipes bursting,” I said.

  Bo looked down the steps in disgust. “This is a fucking health hazard. I’m going upstairs.”

  I went down a few more steps and looked at the mess from top to bottom; I could see a segment of pipe near the ceiling with an ominous bulge, and another with a jagged tear in the metal, something brown dripping from it.

  I gagged a little and took the steps two at a time back up.

  “So we’re done here, then?” Bo said, in a way that meant we definitely were.

  * * *

  After Bo left—with a word of advice to leave Vincent Pomp alone now—I stood on the street and stared up at the club. The vinyl sign over the neon one fluttered in the cold night air. I tried to put myself in Addison’s shoes: on the sidewalk in front of her job, upset about something, but not the kind of upset that makes you jump in the car and just drive. No, the kind that made her go across the street and ring the doorbell of a guy who was an acquaintance at best and ask to use his phone.

  An emergency. An I have to get off this street immediately type of emergency.

  I presumed her phone call had not been about the sewage in the basement, though I was feeling a fairly urgent need to wash my hands.

  But she hadn’t gone into Andrew’s place to do that.

  She needed to make a call.

  Where was her phone?

  Who had she called?

  Also, where was her car?

  She’d walked home, had to use the spare key to get into her place, so that meant her keys were probably AWOL as well. I thought about the lockers in the hallway back in the club, imagining that her phone and keys were locked in there during her shift. And, what, she left suddenly, without a chance to grab them?

  Whatever had happened, it must have been bad.

  I looked up and down the street. Most of the cars were shellacked with snow and ice, their colors and makes hidden from view.

  I’d never be able to find Addison’s maroon Scion this way, even if it was here.

  FOURTEEN

  I washed my hands more thoroughly than I ever had in my life at Andrew’s sink, and he gave me a shot of Crown Royal and a blanket, both of which were necessary to ward off hypothermia from being outside.

  Andrew sighed and poured us both another shot. “I just had this feeling. That it was bad. That’s why I called you. And you obviously had a feeling too. I was really hoping we’d both be wrong this time.”

  “Unfortunately, no one is ever wrong at the right time. If they were, no one would ever be wrong—we’d all just be right.”

  “I can’t tell if that’s the whiskey talking or if you just said something profound.”

  I threw back my shot and held the glass out for another. “Maybe both.”

  Andrew poured. We were on opposite ends of his sectional sofa, grey and soft. It always reminded me that I needed to get a new sofa but I always forgot about it by the time I went home. He said, “So now what?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping the club would give me an idea of what to do next, but it didn’t.”

  I yawned.

  “You look awfully cozy over there.”

  “This blanket is the best thing that ever happ
ened to me.”

  He refilled my glass again and I didn’t stop him. “Do you think something bad happened to her?”

  I sat up long enough to swallow my shot and then burrowed back under the blanket. “I definitely think something weird happened. I don’t want to think about it in terms of good or bad. Not yet.”

  “Since when is the Weary family the denial type?”

  “Since always.”

  Andrew tipped the whiskey bottle in my direction but this time I shook my head.

  All things in moderation.

  “And it’s always worked out so well,” he said.

  We went silent again.

  Finally, Andrew said, “Maybe February is just cursed. Did anything good ever happen in February?”

  “Catherine was born in February.”

  “I said did anything good happen.”

  I flashed an upright middle finger at him.

  “So where is the witch this week? I’ve seen an awful lot of you.”

  I sat up and rearranged the blanket over my lap. “You always see a lot of me. And this week, in particular, you’re seeing a lot of me because you somehow found yourself in the middle of a fucked-up situation and you asked for my help.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “But,” I said, “she left this morning for Rhode Island, some kind of conference.”

  “I knew it.”

  “You did not. Lucky guess.”

  “No, I could tell. You think you’re the only perceptive member of the family?”

  “Hardly, but it was still a lucky guess. And don’t call her a witch. I seem to remember you getting bent out of shape that time I told you Trina—or whatever her name was, the one with the dolphin tattoos—when I told you she was an idiot. And, to be clear, she was an idiot.”

  “And Catherine is a witch. Not in a cool, pagan way. A Macbeth-style evil manipulator.”

  I shook my head at him, but I didn’t argue. I didn’t have the energy, not after the disorienting conversation en route to the airport. Not when I hadn’t heard a word from her all day, even though she had said she’d text me later. To Catherine, later could mean not at all.

  Andrew added, “Trina just really liked dolphins.” His phone started ringing from the bedroom. “Jesus, what time is it?”

  We both looked at the clock on the wall opposite the sofa. One of those minimalist things with no numbers or even little tick marks. It was sometime between one and three, that was all I could tell.

  A bad time for a phone call, either way.

  Andrew got up and went out of sight for a moment and I listened as he answered the call.

  A note of concern entered his voice. “Who is this?” he said. He put the call on speakerphone and rejoined me on the sofa.

  “Put her on the phone, asshole,” a man said.

  “Who is this?”

  “Let me talk to my daughter. I know she’s there. She called from this number.”

  Andrew winced. He covered the mouthpiece of the phone and whispered, “What do I do?”

  “I don’t know. Tell him—”

  “Do I need to call the police?” the man barked.

  “No—”

  “Then put her on.”

  “Give me the phone,” I said. “Mr. Stowe? My name is Roxane Weary, and I left a message for you on your work line?”

  He made a gruff sound of affirmation.

  “We’re all trying to find Addison, and—”

  “Yeah, I bet. Just wait till I’m—”

  Abruptly, the call disconnected.

  “What the fuck,” my brother said. He dropped his phone on the cushion like it was hot to the touch. “What—okay, so that’s one mystery solved. She called her dad.”

  The guy who was off in Dubai for business. Maybe that was why he hadn’t answered her call, had taken so long to get worried. “Maybe we should reconsider here,” I said. “About the police.” Getting Tom involved now seemed like the wrong call—he had enough to worry about. But it was one thing when Addison’s friends hadn’t heard from her; another if her father hadn’t, given that she was the one who used her emergency phone call to get in touch with him.

  “I don’t—but I offered to get her help that night. She said no. She didn’t want help.”

  “If that’s really true, and she doesn’t want help, then what the hell am I doing?”

  Andrew sighed. “Fuck. Maybe you’re right.”

  We just sat there for a while, the only sound the ticking of the useless clock.

  Finally he said, “I need to get some things in order, if we’re going to do that. Can it wait until the morning?”

  “I think so.”

  “I need to go to sleep.”

  I nodded. “I’m sleeping here.”

  “It folds out, into a queen.”

  I shook my head. “This is fine.”

  “You’ll regret it in the morning.”

  “Andrew,” I said, “that’s my personal motto.”

  * * *

  I woke up to the smell of fried eggs and espresso. “Good morning,” Andrew said as I emerged from my blanket cocoon. My neck was stiff and I regretted not folding out the sofa, as predicted. “Do you still like your eggs over-hard?”

  I nodded and stretched my arms above my head, trying to work out the kinks in my spine. The clock on the wall said it was sometime between nine and twelve. “Shit,” I said, “I didn’t mean to commandeer your sofa for the entire morning.”

  I pulled myself up to a standing position and folded my blanket into quarters and set it on the ottoman next to a black duffel bag that hadn’t been there last night. “Where are you off to?”

  “What? Oh—nowhere. I just thought about it, what you said. I need to take that somewhere if I’m going to talk to the police.”

  “Well, you don’t have to talk to them here,” I said. I peered into the bag and was greeted by the woodsy tang of weed. “Hello.”

  “It’s not that much.”

  “How much?”

  “Little less than half a pound.”

  “That seems like a lot.”

  “Eight hundred bucks’ worth, maybe. Why, did you want some?”

  “I’m good.”

  “You know,” Andrew said as he brought me a plate of eggs with salsa, “I’ve been thinking lately. It’s only a matter of time before Ohio goes for free-market legalization. The medical marijuana system is just getting up and running, and I’m thinking I might like to give that a try. Get a job at one of the dispensaries, maybe open my own, eventually.”

  “Really?” I said around a bite of eggs. “Wouldn’t that be crazy expensive?”

  “Yeah, but it’s also going to explode. Have you seen what it’s like in Denver? Shops are everywhere, and they’re nice places, I mean, it’s not like Waterbeds ’N Stuff, they’re more like cell phone stores. Clean, and organized. There’s nothing sketchy about it.”

  “And after almost twenty years of sketch, you’re over it?”

  He shrugged. “A little bit, yeah. I’m over drunk businesspeople and entitled party girls and the special type of asshole who shorts me ‘by accident’ and then acts like, ‘What are you going to do about it? You’re just a drug dealer.’ That term, I fucking hate it. And there’s going to be money coming, at some point. From Dad’s stuff.”

  We ate in silence for a while. My father’s death benefit—what a phrase—was root-bound in some kind of trust. Our mother kept the specifics to herself, mostly, but I assumed I’d never see any money, if it even existed. “And what better way to honor Frank Weary than opening a head shop? Opening a bar might be more appropriate.”

  “You know what, Dad would’ve loved weed, if he’d ever tried it.”

  “Maybe he did,” I said, “in Subic Bay, along with the Filipino ice cream and whatever else he did that we had no idea about.”

  Andrew sighed. “People never seem mysterious until they’re gone.”

  “Hey, tell me about it.”

  * * *r />
  Andrew promised we’d meet up later and walk into the police headquarters together, once his pungent duffel bag was squared away. I didn’t like thinking about his side-hustle much; what was exciting and convenient when we were teenagers just seemed reckless and a little stupid to me now. Maybe it seemed that way to him too. The idea of getting in on the legal marijuana trade was an interesting one, and I knew my brother was smart enough to make something work if he really wanted to. And who was I to judge—I trafficked in reckless and a little stupid as well.

  As I was driving home, my phone rang. “What do you know about my daughter?” Jason Stowe said before I even had a chance to say hello.

  “Sir,” I tried, “I’m a private investigator and I’m just—”

  “Are you related to him or something? This Andrew?”

  “Yeah, he’s my brother—”

  “Where is she?”

  “If you’d stop interrupting me,” I said, getting a little annoyed, “I could tell you that I don’t know where Addison is, but I’m trying to figure that out. She went to Andrew’s apartment in the middle of the night, scared about something. She left, and we’re not sure where she went after that. But if—”

  “I just got in,” he interrupted yet again, “so maybe we ought to talk about this in person.”

  “I’d rather—”

  “I’ll come to you,” Stowe said, rather ominously, before hanging up.

  I called my brother next—to warn of a potential angry visitor—but he didn’t pick up.

  At home I made a cup of tea and sat down at my laptop and pulled up my list of potential gyms where Wyatt Achebe might have been a member. It didn’t look like much, but it was all I had to go on for the moment, which made it feel like more. I started making calls—“Hi, I just realized that I grabbed someone else’s watch by mistake somewhere—and I think it might have been at your location. It’s engraved and everything! Can you tell me if someone named Wyatt is a member there too?”—and went down the list. The first two said no, Purity’s phone number was out of service, no one answered at Stride, and CleanSweat didn’t appear to have a phone number at all. Or a real website for that matter—just a Facebook page with a lot of photos, mostly of the owner, a spandexed, ponytailed man called Boomer K. Wiggins, author of Sweating Through the Pain: An Addict’s Journey Back to Fitness. But as I clicked around, I glimpsed Wyatt’s broad smile in one of the photos.