The Stories You Tell

by Kristen Lepionka

  I said, “I did you a favor. Whatever that guy has on you is nothing compared to what Vincent Pomp has on him.”

  “Thank you,” Wyatt murmured.

  “You’re still scared.”

  “And?”

  “What happened at the club?”

  “I already told you.”

  “I guess I should have specified that by taking care of Shane for you, I wanted your cooperation.”

  “Did you really talk to my mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “Not really, Wyatt, she’s been terrified that something happened to you. Why didn’t you call her?”

  “Because—there are just some things you don’t tell your mother.”

  “I can help.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “How do you know? I mean, aren’t you even a little impressed that I was able to find you?”

  At this, he gave me a tiny smile. “I’m more impressed that you slapped him.”

  “Let me guess. You’ve been wanting to do that for ages.”

  “Maybe.”

  The car was quiet as we drove slowly toward downtown with rush-hour traffic. Finally I said, “Tell me about Addison.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know.”

  Wyatt palmed his beard.

  “She’s a good friend of yours.”

  He didn’t say anything, just nodded slowly and sadly.

  “Do you know anything about the guy she was talking to on BusPass?”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Wyatt’s head snap toward me. “BusPass?”

  “Apparently everybody in the entire city uses it.”

  “Yeah, I just didn’t know she does. It’s not—Addison hates that crap. Curated existence, she calls it.”

  “Profound.”

  “She’s like that. Philosophical.”

  “And you?”

  “I just didn’t know she was on BusPass, is all.”

  “So you don’t know anything about who it was?”

  “No, she never mentioned it to me.”

  “What happened at the club that night?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Wyatt.”

  He kept quiet again.

  I tried something else. “How about a couple weeks ago? Some kind of altercation. Whatever it was, you mentioned it to your mom.”

  Wyatt cleared his throat. “That was nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing to do with—nothing. It was nothing.”

  “What kind of nothing?”

  “Just some drunk chick who freaked out on Addison, like, saying she recognized her from pictures on her husband’s phone.”

  “Really.”

  “Addison was like, ‘No way, I don’t fuck with that, sexting randos or whatever.’”

  “What happened next?”

  “I practically had to drag the lady out by the elbows and pour her into an Uber.”

  “Addison didn’t know who she was?”

  “No.”

  “Or who this husband might’ve been?”

  “It wasn’t like we stood there and talked about it after.”

  “But you talked to your mom about it?”

  “It’s just because she scratched me, here,” Wyatt said, gesturing to a spot under his eye. “So she asked, my mom asked what happened and I told her. But so what, it’s just a scratch, I never saw the woman again.”

  “I just want to find your friend.”

  But Wyatt remained quiet for the rest of the drive to his mother’s house.

  It was still early when we got there—just after seven—but Gwen Achebe had clearly been up for a while. She flung the door open when I knocked and exclaimed, “God bless you, you found him. Honey, come here.”

  She threw her arms around her son, who stiffly accepted her embrace and mumbled, “I need to lie down, Momma.”

  He brushed past her and into the house. “What—my goodness, what’s he been up to?”

  “I’m not sure, to be honest. Mind if I come in for a minute?”

  “No, of course, come in.”

  Wyatt had gone into his bedroom and locked the door. Gwen tapped a knuckle gently and said, “Honey, why don’t you unlock this door and we can talk about whatever’s going on.”

  “Nothing. It’s fine.” His voice was thick with tears.

  “Miss Weary just wants to help you.”

  There was no response from inside the bedroom.

  I sat with Gwen for twenty minutes or so, but it was clear that Wyatt had no intention of coming out and talking to me. So I put my coat back on and said, “If he wants to talk, or even if he just comes out, give me a call. I think something happened that scared the hell out of him, and I’d love to know what. Because Wyatt doesn’t seem like the type to scare easily.”

  His mother shook her head. “No, he is not. Did he crash his car?”

  “What?”

  “You brought him home. I just wondered where his car was.”

  That was a really good question. He’d been driving Shane’s car earlier. Since Addison’s vehicle was missing too, maybe all of this really had been something as simple as a car accident like I’d first suspected.

  “Hopefully we’ll talk soon,” I said.

  * * *

  I spent the morning poring over incident reports from the police department’s website, looking for traffic accidents from that morning. It was harder than usual on account of the weather that day—though it hadn’t snowed as much then as it had in the last twenty-four hours, the streets had been slippery, and the cops weren’t taking as many reports as usual. There’d been a fatality on the exit ramp from westbound 670 to Fourth Street, but that was some distance away from the nightclub and, anyway, the time on the crash report made it late enough that Addison was already at my brother’s condo, or maybe had even left by then. I wasn’t sure what kind of incident would cause something to happen to both Wyatt’s and Addison’s cars, anyway—a collision with each other? That didn’t make any sense.

  I flipped back to my research about Mickey Dillman’s cousin Rick. He was forty-two, taller than Mickey, dressed in a polo shirt and khakis in literally every photo I could find of him. He had light brown hair cut short and bronze-colored wire-rim glasses, rectangular in shape. He looked like a history teacher I’d had in ninth grade, a benevolent nerd.

  I wondered what, if anything, he could tell me. So far, no one was being especially forthcoming about Addison.

  Rick Dillman was shoveling the sidewalk in front of the Merion Village house where he lived with his parents. From a distance I thought he had on bright red earmuffs, but up close I could see that they were fancy headphones. I’d called around to all the Best Buy stores in the city, trying to figure out which one he might work at; the Reynoldsburg location was kind enough to volunteer that he wouldn’t be in until two o’clock, which meant that I didn’t have to either wait till the evening to talk to him, or pop in on him at work—something I preferred to avoid whenever possible. Having to be at work was terrible enough without a random interruption from a stranger. So there I was. I said his name but he didn’t react on account of the headphones. I looped around the driveway apron and approached from the front.

  He stopped mid-shovel and stared at me from behind his glasses. The lower half of the lenses were slightly fogged; he was breathing hard from the exertion of clearing the sidewalk.

  I pointed at my ears.

  Rick slid the headphones down around his neck.

  “Hi,” I said. “Rick, right?”

  He nodded. He was looking at me but not quite making eye contact; his gaze was around my mouth. He pushed the snow shovel vertically against the frozen mound he’d created in the yard, shoring up the edge.

  I told him who I was and why I was there. “I just wanted to ask you about last Wednesday. Did you go bowling with Mickey?”

  “Yes.” He pressed at the snow with the shov
el again.

  “How was it?”

  “I scored two-oh-eight, then one-eighty-nine, then two-twenty.” He said it flatly.

  “How was Mickey?”

  “He doesn’t bowl because of his back.”

  “How did he seem?”

  Rick shored up the snow again. I tried a different approach. “Can you tell me about what happened that night?”

  “Yes,” Rick said but didn’t go on.

  To my left, the door of the house opened and a man looked out at us. He was older, with thick white hair and a silver-handled cane. “Ricky-boy, who’s that you’re talking to?”

  Rick said, “Her name is Roxane Weary, she is a private investigator who knows Sunny and she is asking me questions about bowling.”

  The man, who I assumed was Rick’s father, squinted at me. “Come here a second, young lady.”

  “Dad, stop it.” Rick huffed a sigh.

  But the man continued motioning at me, so I went over to him.

  “You know my son doesn’t like being interrupted in the middle of things.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He’s an Aspie. He has Asperger’s. Well, that’s what they said when he was a boy. Now they call it something else.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at Rick. He was methodically finishing the sidewalk, his headphones back on. His father continued, “I’m telling you that because he doesn’t like to be interrupted. How do you know Sunny?”

  “I’m very sorry about your nephew,” I said.

  He nodded. He was still looking at me with suspicion. “And Sunny,” he said. “How’d you know her?”

  “She’s a friend of my father,” I said, “who was a cop, before he died. She wanted me to make sure she was kept informed about what happened. And she mentioned that Mickey went bowling with Rick last Wednesday.”

  “Rick’s very literal, so you have to ask him your questions the right way. But he remembers everything. You might as well wait inside here till he’s done.”

  Though the sidewalk was long and the snow was heavy, Rick was finished in ten minutes. He came into the house and hung up his coat and took off his boots. His father said, “Rick, do you want to talk to this lady?”

  “Okay.”

  Rick sat down in an armchair across from the couch where I was perched. His hair was dripping wet with sweat and his glasses were completely fogged over now.

  His father tossed a box of tissues at him. “Wipe your face,” he said.

  Rick took off his glasses, mopped his forehead, and polished the glasses on the edge of his polo shirt. Once he could see again, he resumed staring at my mouth.

  I said, “What happened last Wednesday? When you saw your cousin.”

  Rick cleared his throat. “He came over at six forty-one and he drove us to the Columbus Bowling Palace. We ate hot dogs and Mickey had a beer and I had a Coke. I bowled one game and my score was two-oh-eight. Then I bowled another game and my score was one-eighty-nine. Then I bowled another game and got two-twenty. Then he drove me back here.”

  “What time was it?”

  “Ten-nineteen.”

  “Did he say where he was going next?”

  “No.”

  “Was he dating anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Did he ever use the dating app BusPass?”

  A slight pause. Then he said, “Yes. He showed it to me.”

  “Did he ever meet anyone from there?”

  “He said it was like a game.”

  “The dating app was like a game?”

  “Like Two Dots. Two Dots has different-colored circles on the screen and you have to connect them, like this.” He drew a square in the air between us with an index finger. “The dots don’t mean anything.”

  “Is that what he said about BusPass? That it doesn’t mean anything?”

  Rick nodded.

  “Did he ever mention a woman named Addison?”

  “No.”

  I pulled up a picture of Addison on my phone and held it out. “Do you know who this is?”

  Here something flickered through Rick’s face. Recognition? I couldn’t be sure. But he said, “No.”

  “You don’t recognize her?”

  Rick glanced at my phone again, almost wincing. “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “He said no,” his father chimed in.

  “No, I don’t know her at all,” Rick said.

  TWENTY-TWO

  It took some doing to convince Jordy Meyers not to just hang up on me, and even more to get her to agree to meeting. But in the end she did, and that night at six I took a whole fried chicken, biscuits, mac and cheese, and collards from the Eagle over to Blacklick.

  “You didn’t have to do all this,” Jordy said as I unloaded my bag onto Elise’s kitchen counter. “I mean, this is amazing, but you didn’t have to. I’m the one who asked you to come the other day.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m happy to. This is a terrible situation you guys are in and I didn’t exactly make it better.”

  “Say thank you to Miss Roxane,” Elise said to her son, a little boy with blond, cowlicky hair and big, round eyes about the size of the paper plate he was holding up. His mother cut up a piece of chicken and set it on the plate. “Come on, honey, you can say it.”

  The boy mumbled something unintelligible and scampered into the living room with his dinner.

  “Thank you, Miss Roxane,” Brock Hazlett said in a mock-child’s voice. “Are you gonna make a plate for me, too?”

  “Brock. No. We’re going downstairs. Please parent your children for the next thirty minutes, okay?”

  Brock winked at me. I decided that I didn’t like him any better than Jordy did.

  The three of us filed down the steps. Jordy had a plate piled high with chicken and sides, while Elise only had a small serving of collard greens on her plate. “I’d have to do Pilates for three days straight if I ate like that,” she said, nodding at Jordy’s plate.

  Jordy sat on the velvet love seat and waved a hand at her friend. “I keep telling her,” she said, glancing at me, “there’s no virtue in being able to wear the same jeans you could wear in tenth grade. 2008 can keep its jeans, Elise.”

  “Whatever.” Elise sat on the floor and ate a tiny bite of greens, looking at me expectantly.

  “So listen,” I said. I leaned on the edge of the white lacquer desk. “What I told you, about my brother. That was the absolute truth. I guess if I’d mentioned his name, you might have realized who he was, though.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Jordy said around a mouthful of mac. “Andrew from the Sheraton? We sure would have. That was a mess and a half, let me tell you.”

  Elise, still chewing, kept quiet.

  “I’m sure it looked like I was trying to pull something on you, but I promise you, I just want to find your friend. I don’t want any money. I just want to find her. That’s what I wanted since the other day. My brother only wanted to help. I only want to help. Jordy, I don’t know if your stepsister spoke to them and told them what she told me, about Addison being home long enough to burn her eggs. But I promise you, everything happened exactly like I said it did, and now finding Addison is as critical for my brother as it is for her. Okay?”

  Jordy pointed a fork at me. “It helps that you brought food.”

  “I thought it might.”

  “So what else could help you find her?”

  “I just wanted to talk some more about BusPass.”

  “The app you never heard of till you met me,” Jordy said.

  “You’ve already broadened my horizons. But let’s talk more about BusPass Guy. BPG. Did you ever see a picture?”

  Both women shook their heads. Jordy said, “She showed us the post, but that was before she replied to it.”

  “Did she ever describe him?”

  No.

  “And she never mentioned a name?”

  No.

  I described the picture the detectives had showed me. �
�Does that sound like Addison’s type?”

  “Well,” Elise said, “if you asked her if she had a type, she’d say no. But yeah, that’s totally her type.”

  Jordy was nodding too. “The more tortured, the better.”

  I showed them a photo of Mickey Dillman. “What about this guy?”

  Jordy snorted. “What on earth,” she said. “He’s, like—who is this?”

  “I take that as a no?”

  Else shook her head.

  “Too old?”

  “Not really, I think we already told you about her daddy issues, right? Addison’s definitely dated some older guys.”

  “Real silver-fox types, handsome.” Jordy gestured at my phone with her fork. “He looks like a roofer or something.”

  “Blue collar, you mean?” I said.

  She winced a little. “Yeah, I guess, which probably makes me horrible. I’m just saying, everyone has a type, and Addison’s tends more towards the, um, handsome. You know?”

  Elise set her plate down on the rug beside her. “But I guess you never know, though, right?”

  Jordy shrugged in an okay, okay gesture. “I guess. I mean, your type is handsome too, and look what you’re stuck with.”

  Elise cracked up, a flush creeping through her face.

  Jordy said, “The joke is, Brock was the star of the swim team back in high school, and now he’s a glorified janitor at the rec center.”

  “But he’s a good provider,” Elise said, with Jordy saying the last two words right along with her.

  Next I showed them a picture of Shane Resznik, who fared even worse than Mickey Dillman had.

  “Good god, that pervy little goatee? No.”

  I looked at the picture; there really was something a bit off-putting about the shape of the goatee, too pointy. The back of my hand still throbbed from coming into contact with it and the face it was growing on. “Okay, how about him? They weren’t dating, but I wanted to know if you’d ever seen him, or heard about him—Wyatt is his name.”

  Both women looked down at a picture of Wyatt. “Okay, he’s adorable, but no, she never mentioned a Wyatt,” Elise said.

  Jordy’s expression had turned sad. “Are we the worst friends ever? That she didn’t tell us anything about anything?”

  “I think that’s just called getting older.”