The Stories You Tell

by Kristen Lepionka

  Bingo.

  I was writing down the address when I heard a knock at my door.

  FIFTEEN

  There are different kinds of knocks. Most people might not have a reason to think about it much, but I did. There was the classic, friendly, shave-and-a-haircut knock. There was the impatient double knock, two sharp raps in quick succession, favored by UPS drivers and solicitors from radon remediation companies who hoped you weren’t actually home so they could just leave the flyer in your door frame. Then there was the cop knock, from the side of the hand, not the knuckles. Pound pound pound.

  This knock was one of those.

  Was Jason Stowe ex-police? With a career in defense contracting, it certainly seemed possible. But when I parted the curtains, the man I saw was clearly someone else. I didn’t recognize the guy but if the knock hadn’t given it away, his wardrobe made it clear that he was a cop: not-quite-tailored suit, thick-soled black shoes, a telltale bulge under his wool coat where his handgun was holstered.

  I opened the door. Frigid air from the unheated lobby pooled around my ankles.

  “Roxane Weary?”

  “That’s me.”

  “I’m Detective Mizuno, Columbus Police. Do you have a moment to talk?”

  I let him in. We sat in my office, me at the desk, him on the couch I kept meaning to replace. He said, “I’d like to talk about a young lady named Addison Stowe.”

  I nodded.

  Mizuno was taking a notebook and a pen out of his coat, but he looked up at me—scowled, really. He was somewhere in his late forties, with black hair threaded with grey and hard eyes. “Oh, so you admit that you know her?”

  “Yeah, when did I say that I didn’t?”

  “Why don’t you tell me how you came to be involved with this?”

  I summarized—the call from my brother, the shoes and the hoodie and the burned eggs, the unshakeable feeling that something was wrong, and what had happened since. “I already looped in the detectives from the homicide unit, about Mickey Dillman.”

  His ears perked up on homicide. “And why would you do that?”

  “Loop them in?”

  Mizuno nodded.

  It was kind of a long story—how I’d asked Tom for the lowdown on Dillman a few days before his body was found, how I was with Tom at dinner when he got the call. I just said, “My father was a homicide detective. So I have contacts.”

  “Contacts,” Mizuno repeated.

  I was getting the feeling that he didn’t like me.

  “So you’re trying to locate her because…?”

  I repeated what I’d said about Andrew trying to help her that night.

  “At what point did you reach out to her friends in an attempt to get yourself hired to locate her?”

  I stood up without meaning to and then tried to sit casually on the edge of the desk. But I felt anything but casual. “That’s not what happened at all. I spoke to Addison’s roommate and the roommate’s stepsister, who’s one of Addison’s close friends. Jordana Meyers. On Saturday morning, Jordy called me and asked me to come out to Blacklick and talk with her and another of their friends, because Addison hadn’t shown up for a coffee date they had planned.”

  “And why would Miss Meyers call you?”

  “I don’t know, maybe because when we spoke, she was aware that I was interested in her friend’s well-being too.”

  Mizuno wrote something down.

  “Is she saying that she didn’t call me?”

  “You were up front with them, about how you came to be involved here, is that right? Your brother and everything?”

  I was starting to feel a little sick. “I’m not sure exactly what I said, but I told them about how my brother used to work with her at the Sheraton three years ago.”

  “Do you know why Addison would’ve been afraid of your brother?”

  “What—no. She went there for help.”

  “For help.”

  “Yeah, for help.”

  “Why would she do that? Someone she worked with three years ago?”

  “Well, that’s what I’ve been trying to figure out. She works at the nightclub across the street, and I can only assume that something went down, and she—”

  “So what you’re saying is that something—you don’t know what—went down at a nightclub and scared Addison so much that she ran directly to the apartment of a former coworker, with whom she had a sexual relationship that ended badly, asked him for help, then left a few minutes later? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  I stared at the worn wood floor between my feet, my brain still a few words back. Andrew’s relationship, such as it was, with Addison—how had anyone else known about that? Then I realized how big of a mistake I’d made with Addison’s roommate and friends. “Yeah,” I said. My voice was small.

  “I just want to find the young lady,” Mizuno said. “That’s it. If you can help me do that, I’d really appreciate it.”

  “I want to find her too,” I said, “but—”

  “You need to be truthful with me, Miss Weary.”

  “I’m being truthful.”

  “Why did your brother really call you on Thursday?”

  “I told you why.”

  “I just want to find Addison, okay? Let’s start over. Why did your brother call you?”

  “He was worried about her—”

  “Why did he call you?”

  “I think this conversation might be over,” I said, my chest tight.

  Mizuno stood up too and continued, “Because here’s the thing. That call Addison made from your brother’s phone? She left her father a voice mail, frantic, scared, begging him to come get her.”

  I gripped the edge of the desk against a jab of worry so sharp it made me a little dizzy.

  “I’ve heard the message, okay? This is a young lady who’s absolutely terrified of something. Not of someone who then calmly walks away. So I’ll tell you again, I’m only interested in finding her. Help me find her.”

  “I told you everything I know.”

  “Help me find her, Miss Weary.”

  “I’m not saying anything else. This conversation is over.”

  Mizuno raised an eyebrow. “A cop’s kid, you’d think the spirit of cooperation would be a bit stronger. I wonder if your brother will be any more forthcoming. Maybe a search warrant will persuade him to be?”

  There were a lot of things I wanted to say to that. But I kept my promise by keeping my mouth shut.

  Eventually he set a business card on the coffee table and said, “If you change your mind, give me a call.”

  * * *

  I punched in Andrew’s code at the front door and took the steps up to the second floor and pounded on his door with the heel of my hand. “Andrew. Open the door.”

  There were no sounds from inside his condo, just like there was no answer when I called him, and no texts back, either.

  I banged on the door again. “Andrew, I swear to god.”

  The unit down the hall opened and a woman peered out. It was two in the afternoon but she’d clearly just woken up. “Can you not,” she said.

  “Sorry, it’s an emergency—”

  She went back inside and slammed the door.

  As I drove over to the Westin, I called Matt. “Have you heard from Andrew today?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I need to get ahold of him and he’s not answering.”

  “No,” my oldest brother said, “I meant, why would I have heard from him.”

  I laughed, decidedly without humor. “You’re such an asshole,” I said.

  “I love you too, sis.”

  I hung up.

  The bartender at the Westin hadn’t heard from him either. “And it’s not really like him, to not let us know if he’s going to be late.”

  “When was he supposed to be here?”

  “He usually comes in at three on Mondays.”

  I calmly walked out into the bright light of the lobby and sat down on
a low couch and tried to breathe evenly.

  It didn’t work.

  I went back into the bar and ordered a shot.

  “He probably just misplaced his phone,” the bartender told me, splashing whiskey into a glass for me, barely even enough to call it a shot.

  “Yeah,” I said, throwing it back quickly. “I’m sure that’s all it is.”

  I returned to Andrew’s building, but he still wasn’t answering. Maybe he went to the gym. To the movies. I ran through a list of possible midday diversions, but it was pointless. I knew something was wrong. Why hadn’t I pushed? I always pushed. On the street, I looked around for my brother’s car, a taupe-colored Escape. Twelve hours earlier, I’d been doing the same thing, except looking for Addison’s car instead. I pulled on a pair of gloves and gave it another try. Taupe Escape, maroon Scion. What would either car tell me? If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you won’t find it, my first boss in the PI business had once told me. But that was never my experience. On the contrary, you’re more likely to miss something if you look too closely for it. I thought about what old Gil Safka would do in this situation—go home and call Detective Mizuno and set up a time to come in for a formal interview—and decided to do the opposite.

  With shaking hands, I called Tom. He said, “I was just getting ready to call you.”

  His voice had a note of warning in it.

  “Why?”

  Tom said, “Because I just saw your brother going into an interrogation room on the third floor.”

  * * *

  The lawyer’s office was on City Park Avenue in German Village, a weird little brick structure nestled among the colorful houses that lined the cobblestone streets. The lawyer herself was named Julia Raymund and my brother had given me her magnetic business card years earlier as the person to call if anything ever happened. So I’d called, but she already knew the drill, had already been downtown to sit in on the interrogation, and suggested that I meet her here. Then she left me to wait in a massive conference room that contained an antique set of encyclopedias and a huge map of the world with Yugoslavia still on it, while she heated up a late lunch—a chicken Cup Noodles. I squinted across the room at the map, trying to make out the capital city; I couldn’t remember.

  “Sorry,” she said, gesturing at the room with the hand holding the soup. “I just rent space from the office upstairs. This is their conference room. They have a flair for the old world.”

  “I really don’t care,” I said. I was impatient after waiting for the Cup Noodles. “Just explain what’s going on.”

  “Well, some judge signed off on a search warrant, which is, frankly, shocking. Of course there was nothing to find in regards to this missing woman, but your brother did have some marijuana in the apartment.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “Andrew is going to be arraigned on some possession charges,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

  I opened my eyes again. The room was still the same and so was the lawyer—dark blond hair, fortyish, pantsuit and heels that looked like a bad idea in this weather—and so were the circumstances.

  She continued, “It was in a duffel bag on the floor. Apparently they first asked if Andrew was planning on leaving town. Now he’s probably looking at a third-degree felony. Definitely a fine, possibly a stint in jail. There’s a good chance that the warrant shouldn’t have covered the bag, which was zipped closed. But honestly, if they were just trying to keep him occupied for a couple days while they continue investigating the woman’s disappearance, this would definitely do the trick.”

  “Great.”

  Julia stirred her Cup Noodles and the smell of it wafted saltily in my direction. “Mizuno and Blair are very interested in this voice mail from Addison.” She paused to take a bite. “I heard it. And, I have to say, it’s troubling. She sounds very afraid.”

  “But we don’t know what happened. What she was afraid of.”

  Julia gave that faint smile again. “Look, Andrew’s side of the story is that a woman who got him fired from his job several years ago, showed up in a panic at his apartment in the middle of the night, used his phone, and left. From the outside, what it looks like is that she made a panicked phone call to her father, specifically asking him to come get her, and she hasn’t been seen since.”

  I pushed away from the table and stalked across the room to the map. Belgrade, the current capital of Serbia—that had been the capital of Yugoslavia and it couldn’t have mattered less right now. “Her roommate said she’d been home. Even that she burned her eggs that morning, as usual.”

  “Eggs?”

  “She’d been home that morning, is the point. So there’s no reason for anyone to think that Andrew did—I don’t know, whatever, anything.”

  She stirred her noodles. “Sure.”

  “Do you even believe him?”

  She smiled that smile again. “It doesn’t matter if I believe him. It only matters what they can prove. I’m aware of how this looks. Given that she’d been to his place before, and why.”

  I studied her. The way she said why, a slight flare of the nostrils—something about it gave me the feeling that Addison wasn’t the only one who’d gone to bed with my brother.

  But there wasn’t space in my brain to sort through that one at the moment. “So the only thing you can make out from this voice mail is my brother’s address?”

  “It’s hard to understand. She said something like ‘he found me’ and she mentions something about a bus pass.”

  My ears perked up at that. “BusPass. It’s an app, a dating app.”

  “A dating app?”

  “Apparently Addison was talking to some guy she’d met on there.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “No. What exactly did she say about BusPass?”

  Julia shook her head. “Like I said, you can’t make out most of what she’s saying.”

  “Why would she be talking about a dating app in this phone call she was frantic to make?” I chewed my lip for a second, stopping when I got the metallic taste of blood. “Maybe she met up with the guy from the dating app and it went badly—”

  “Let’s not worry about a dating app at the moment.”

  “So what do I do? Go in to do a formal interview?”

  “It might not be the best idea.”

  “Why?”

  “Because talking to the police is like going to Target—you always end up paying for it.”

  I shook my head. “Can I just say, that’s the worst metaphor. I hope my brother didn’t hire you for your brilliant metaphors.”

  She looked mildly offended. “It might be an okay idea if you can corroborate your story in some way, though.”

  “How?”

  “Did you record the conversations with Addison’s friends, for example?”

  Who did she think I was? “No.”

  “Well.”

  “But there’s more going on here than just Addison. The nightclub, where she works—did my brother tell you about that?”

  “Briefly.”

  “Well, there’s another employee who’s sort of missing.”

  “Sort of?”

  “The bouncer, his name’s Wyatt Achebe—he didn’t come home the same night Addison showed up at my brother’s place. Plus the owner is mixed up with a player in the—for lack of a better word, the underworld. He’s been hiding out at a motel.” I could tell that I was talking faster and faster but I couldn’t quite seem to get ahold of myself. “And yesterday, I spent two hours talking to the police about the officer they found dead in the river.”

  “Wait a minute,” Julia interrupted. “What are you talking about?”

  She gave me a look that said I was acting as crazy as I felt. “Let’s stick to one puzzle at a time.”

  I stood up to pace the room again. “What exactly do you suggest?”

  “We’ll know more after your brother’s arraignment.”

  I wondered how long my brother had known her, and how much h
e was paying her. Was there a law about lawyers not fucking their clients, or was that doctors? Or maybe it was neither. I sat back down. “Sure. Fine. Do I need to get bail money together, or—”

  “No need.”

  “Oh.”

  “Your brother has a plan in place for just this kind of situation.”

  “Well, probably not exactly this situation.”

  Julia said, “Andrew did want me to ask you to give this to your mom.”

  She passed a white envelope to me.

  I probably would’ve preferred the bail money. “What’s this?”

  “Part of the plan. He just doesn’t want your mom hearing through the grapevine. News can travel in cop circles, and I know she’s currently dating one. I’d avoid mentioning Addison to her, though.”

  “So what do I do in the meantime?”

  Julia stood up and pushed her chair in. “Other than talk to your mother? Nothing. Whatever you normally do.”

  “That’s—no. That isn’t how I’m wired. I need to do something.”

  “Right, the old how I’m wired defense. I get that you want to help, but you really can’t. The immediate issue is the drug charge. That’s always been a risk your brother chose to take—it’s just compounded now by the fact that Addison made this phone call from his number. Now, I’ll give you a call when I know a bit more about what’s going to happen next. Okay?”

  It wasn’t okay, not by a long shot, but saying so wouldn’t make any bit of difference.

  SIXTEEN

  Andrew was my mother’s favorite. It was no secret growing up, though of course it would break her heart if she knew how obvious it had been. It was even less of a secret now, what with all of us being adults at this point and above pettiness like favorites—in theory, anyway, as my oldest brother Matt actually wasn’t. I typically stayed out of the ongoing battle for favorite son. But I knew that being the bearer of bad news in this case wasn’t going to improve my standings.