My eyes watering, I did as he instructed.
“Now spit it out.”
I spit into a napkin. The oh-shit level of spiciness receded from my mouth.
“See? It works.”
“It does,” I said.
“You’re very brave. But I still can’t tell you, okay? It’s private.”
I nodded at the bottle of sauce. “I think you’re onto something here. It has a good flavor, underneath the spice. Something a little sweet.”
“That was Mickey’s idea. He’s the one who said we should take it to farmers’ markets and whatnot. He said it could be his second act. But the recipe was in his head, and I don’t know what it is. So I guess it’ll just be for me now, at least until it runs out.”
* * *
Something had happened at Nightshade or nearby. I knew that much. But it was basically all I knew. The something had involved Addison, Wyatt, and Shane, and possibly Mickey as well, since he’d wound up in the Olentangy River the same night that Addison freaked out and Wyatt and Shane began hiding at the East Side Motor Lodge. In the meantime, both Wyatt’s and Addison’s vehicles had disappeared. As far as I knew, Mickey’s Thunderbird still hadn’t turned up either.
But how did Corbin Janney fit into any of this?
What was I supposed to make of Addison’s two BusPass profiles?
After Rick had gone back to work, I remained in our booth and made a list of theories that could fit with the facts, such as they were.
1. Mickey Dillman was catfishing Addison using Corbin Janney’s profile. After figuring out her identity and going to her apartment to talk to her about????, he found her at Nightshade, scared the shit out of her, and jumped in the river.
2. Addison was chatting with both the fictitious Corbin Janney and Mickey Dillman, regardless of whether her friends thought he could be her type. Mickey wanted to meet, but Addison didn’t. So he employed some light stalking to track her down, scared the shit out of her, crashed his car somewhere, and fell into the river.
3. Addison had invented Corbin Janney for some reason, had lured Mickey to the club somehow, got Wyatt involved in something, then promised to meet him last night but instead called 911 on him with a made-up story.
4. Corbin Janney did exist and was just some home-birth, homeschooled, no-social off-the-grid type who had managed to lead a life entirely off the books, until he felt the burning desire to create a BusPass account one day.
5. Nothing meant anything.
These theories all sucked.
I needed something else to go on here.
* * *
Jordy’s stepsister was loading two suitcases into the back of a silver CR-V when I parked on California Avenue. Her face was pale, her eyes red. When she saw me, she ducked back into the duplex. A beat after that, Jordy came out. Her long hair was in a messy bun on the top of her head, adding a good four inches to her already-intimidating height.
Her eyes were red too.
“What the fuck is going on?” she said. “Carlie’s gonna come stay with me for a while, until this gets figured out. After what happened last night. I mean, thank God she wasn’t home.”
I nodded. “Is she okay?”
“Not really.”
“Are you okay?”
“Not really.”
We stared at each other.
“My dad and I came over this morning, to help her fix the door. There’s apparently some kind of voucher, from the police? For breaking in the door? Like they’ll pay to get it fixed, somehow. It’s the dead of winter, who has time for a freaking voucher? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it’s just stupid. To stay here. We don’t know what happened to Addison. For all we know, someone grabbed her off the street right here.”
That was not what had happened. But I had to agree that getting as far away as possible from Addison was a good idea.
Jordy went on, “I’m just so worried and mad all at once. I’m terrified that something awful happened to my friend, and then two minutes later I’m furious at her for being the kind of person who sucks at responding to texts sometimes. And then two minutes after that I feel like shit because I know she’s had her struggles, and maybe it’s not her fault.”
I remembered that she’d sort of pulled back from this topic the first time we met. “What do you mean?”
She bit her lip. “Well, when we were seventeen, eighteen. She kind of had a little bit of a breakdown. She had—she got super skinny, just acting really erratic. She had to go into a treatment center for an eating disorder for a while, get therapy for anxiety. And it, well, it sort of came out of nowhere. She didn’t ever want to talk about it. It was so weird, because it’s just her nature to act like things are so dramatic when they aren’t. But when something really was the matter? For a long time, I felt like we let her down. Like why didn’t she want to talk about it to her best friends? I know now that’s not how mental illness works. I just don’t know what to think.”
I didn’t either.
* * *
When I turned onto my street, I saw a pair of taillights idling in a haze of exhaust in front of my building. I drove past for a look; it was Vincent Pomp’s Crown Victoria. As I parked I saw him get out of the backseat, dressed in a long black wool coat and brogues that looked both expensive and slippery. “I thought we talked about this,” I said, my voice echoing across the dark street, “the whole showing up at my home thing.”
“This is a friendly visit.”
“Oh?”
“I just wanted to tell you, personally, thank you.”
“For?”
“Whatever you said to Shane Resznik.”
I stopped on the sidewalk a few feet away from my door. “What are we talking about?”
“You were very persuasive.”
I didn’t recall being very anything except annoyed at Shane; maybe one slap across the face was all it took. “What happened?”
“Well, after over a week of us trying to get ahold of him, he walked right into my office today and said he wanted to come clean.”
My heart started to speed up. “About Nightshade?”
“Yes, about the money he’s been stealing from me.”
I felt my eyebrows pressing together. “Now why would he do that?”
“He’s not cut out for the life, I suppose. But the point is, you can stop poking around in the whole affair.”
I didn’t respond right away.
“Isn’t that good news? That your work here is done?”
“Just because you don’t have questions doesn’t mean I don’t. How do you even know what he told you is true?”
“Why on earth would he lie about stealing from me?”
A fair point.
“Anyway, he was very forthcoming. He told me all about his method, how he’d ring in cash transactions ending in a specific amount so he could find them later and void them. Twenty-three cents.”
As he said it, I remembered the note written on the white board in the shitty little Nightshade office.
Then he added, “Bo mentioned what you found on the wall in there.”
“That’s hardly proof of anything. Something happened that night. I’m absolutely sure of it.”
He nodded, the buttons on his coat flashing in the ashy streetlight. “Addison, the deejay you were asking about.”
“What about her?”
“She found out what he was doing. Confronted him. He yelled at her and she got upset and left.”
I waited for the punchline, but one didn’t come. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I thought you’d be relieved that misfortune didn’t befall her.”
“There’s not even a chance that all of this is over her getting yelled at. Did you hear about what went down last night? There’s a kid on a ventilator in the hospital—he worked there. As a bouncer. At Nightshade. And someone set him up to get killed in a hail of SWAT team bullets. Did Shane tell you about that?”
Pomp’s eyes
hardened. I took that as a no.
“So I’d take his entire story with a grain of salt.”
“Okay, what is it that you think he’s really covering up?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I don’t think this is the moment to stop poking around. You don’t want to know what actually happened in the club that night?”
“Every day it’s closed, I’m losing money.”
“Ah, so that’s what this is about.”
“What do you mean?”
“You want to resume regular operations over there, and you’re here to ask me if I’m going to interfere.”
Pomp chuckled. “I was thinking of it more like telling you that you’re not going to interfere anymore.”
“Where’s Shane?”
“You don’t need to worry about him anymore.”
“Thanks, but I’ll be the judge of what I need to worry about.”
“Leave Resznik alone, is what I’m saying.”
Though Pomp wasn’t too much taller than me, his voice could take an edge that was way more intimidating than height.
“So you weren’t actually here to thank me,” I said.
“I suppose not.”
“You really just want to buy whatever bullshit he’s selling you, I guess.”
“Thanks, but I’ll be the judge of who’s selling me bullshit. Stay away from him.”
“He thinks I’m working for you, doesn’t he?”
Pomp’s mouth said nothing, but his hard eyes said yes.
“So what you’re telling me is that he fed you some nonsense story about Addison catching him in the act of stealing, in an attempt to convince you that everything was fine, and hoping you’d get me to stop poking around. A ploy that apparently worked. I thought you were smarter than that.”
“Listen—”
“No. Enjoy untangling whatever Shane Resznik got you involved in,” I said. “Good night.”
Pomp made a sound that might have been a growl. I walked past him, daring him with my eyes to touch me.
He didn’t.
* * *
Inside, I flung a load of laundry into my washing machine and slammed the lid and kicked over my ironing board, which was really just a place to stack things, and I didn’t feel even a little bit better. A minute later, I heard a tentative knock on my front door.
“Roxane, everything okay in here?” Shelby called.
“Fine. Great, even.”
But I opened the door and tried not to scowl, which was easier than expected, because she was holding a plastic container of chili. “I thought you might be hangry,” she said.
We sat on opposite ends of my office sofa while I ate. “I think this is even better a week later,” I said. “How is that possible?”
“Well, I froze it the day after I made it. So it’s still fresh, but the flavors had a chance to meld. So do you want to talk about what’s going on?”
“No.”
She waited for me to go on, but there wasn’t anything else to say.
“I’m sorry, Shel, I’m just in a shitty mood.”
She gave me the side-eye and got up and went over to the rolling wardrobe rack where my leggings stash was stored. “Any progress on these guys?”
“No. None. I haven’t checked my mailboxes in days.”
“Why not?”
There was no simple answer to that. “A lot on my mind.”
“My grandma has this framed embroidery thing on her wall,” Shelby said. “It says, You can’t do everything at once, but you can do something at once. It makes me feel better every time I see it. Because when things are overwhelming, you don’t have to figure out the whole thing right this minute—you just have to start.”
I thought about that. An old soul didn’t even begin to describe Shelby, something that probably made life both easier and harder for her. But she was right. I said, “Is that your way of saying you want me to go see if there are any leggings for Miriam just sitting in my boxes?”
“I mean,” she said, giving me a sly smile, “if you said you had a reason for me to text her, I wouldn’t say no. I mean, I could just say, ‘Come eat chocolate with me,’ but I feel like that’s not very cool.”
“Chocolate.”
She nodded at the bowl I was holding. “There’s chocolate in the chili. It’s called Cincinnati style, I think.”
I got an idea. “Hey, have you ever made your own hot sauce?”
“Like Sriracha?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“No, I just buy the Kroger brand, it’s like a dollar. Why?”
“I’m looking for a recipe for a hot sauce with chocolate in it.”
“The Case of the Fancy Flavor Profile?”
“Exactly.”
“Do you want me to work on one? I don’t think hot sauce is all that involved, it’s just throwing some stuff in a blender.”
“That sounds incredibly involved to me, but yes, that would be great. Even trade, hot sauce for leggings? I promise I’ll go to the post office tomorrow.”
“I’ll take that deal.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
I woke up mad, still thinking about Shane Resznik’s weasely little goatee and wondered where the fuck he was hiding now. I didn’t believe for one hot second that all of this trouble was over Addison getting yelled at. The bigger question was almost why would Shane lie to Vincent Pomp about it? Shane had actively sought him out. Because he was scared after what happened to Wyatt? Because he was scared of me?
I went back to the list of Addy Marie’s BusPass connections. There were ten in all—probably the maximum number the site would display on a profile. All of them were from the last two weeks.
WYATT A
BD E
I recalled a meme I’d seen floating around on social media recently. BDE: Big Dick Energy. Is that what this meant? Straight men were the worst, so probably.
JOSEPH J
BD E
BD E
MICKEY D
RAJIT M
BD E
* * *
The Big Dick Energy profile looked a lot like the first Addison profile I found—no selfies, no faces, just random objects and food. Not a serious profile by any stretch of the imagination, probably using the app as a game.
Joseph J’s profile picture was of a clean-cut thirtyish man in a suit, nice jaw, razor-part hair. Subsequent pictures showed him in various Ohio State attire, always with a beer in his hand. His bio said: Just looking for a cool girl to spend money on.
Rajit M was a tall, wiry guy with brown skin and curly black hair and a stubbly beard and a good smile. One of his pictures showed him with a sign from a protest: FAMILY SEPARATION IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL. Another featured him in hiking gear in what looked like Scotland, posing quizzically next to a sign that said FERAL GOATS FOR 2 MILES.
I shelled out some more cash for additional app tokens so I could send each of them a message without waiting to match with them using my “Rose Warner” profile. But what to write? I made a cup of tea and paced up and down my hallway, trying to compose the perfect message.
Not unlike actual online dating, I realized.
Then I sat back down and looked at BD E’s profile. I was clearly overthinking things and went with a classic hook:
Hey ;)
* * *
This time when I showed up at Elise Hazlett’s house, I only brought coffee, assuming it was safe to do so without anyone feeling like they had to throw an entire meal away out of deference. Elise had forgiven me, though. “God, yes, coffee, please,” she said when she answered the door. “The joy of having kids is that they wake you up at six-thirty in the morning every day, even Sundays, and there is not enough coffee in the world to make up for those two hours of sleep that should’ve been mine.” She took the lid off a Starbucks cup and doctored the coffee with almond milk creamer. “Jordy just texted that she’ll be here in ten minutes. I guess the ramp to 70 is closed again.”
“Typical central Ohio
,” I said. I had brought tea for myself and it was somehow still too hot to drink.
“Do you mind if I finish folding some laundry before she gets here? My husband took the kids to story time at Barnes & Noble and I only have about a half an hour of peace before they get back.”
“No, that’s fine.”
Elise disappeared down a hallway, leaving me to lean against her kitchen counter and survey the spotlessness of her home. It was a typical suburban house circa the nineties with a kitchen island, neutral flooring, and a ceiling with that pointless meringue texture in the paint. But the furniture was nice, modern enough without looking out of place with the slightly dated warm-wood baseboards. The living room offered a sectional sofa and a huge ottoman with toys trailing out of the storage compartment in the middle and a tangle of blankets on the top. On the fifty-some-inch television, a lady was selling reusable sandwich bags on QVC.
The doorbell rang, two quick bursts, and Jordy came in with a tray of coffees too.
“Coffee for everyone!” she said. “Where is she?”
“Laundry room,” Elise called.
Jordy laughed. “And you just left Roxane out here with your infomercials?” Now she looked at me. “Sorry I’m late. The fucking construction! I got my place by the Commons almost three years ago, and the construction has literally not stopped.”
“You must be doing well for yourself,” I said, “buying a place at age twenty-three?”
She smiled and sipped her coffee, holding one pinky out. “I’m so fancy. Actually, no, I’m totally not. I’m sort of renting-to-own from my older brother—he moved to California to work for Google. He’s fancy, what with his new house in Palo Alto—it is unreal. The bathroom has heated floors. I’m like, who even thought of that?”
“Thought of what?” Elise reappeared with a round laundry basket bent against her hip full of onesies and tiny socks.
“The heated floors at my brother’s new place.”
“Heated floors sound damn good right about now,” I said, and Jordy laughed.
“Touché.”
I explained to Addison’s friends that I wanted to talk about BusPass. “It looks like she has two different profiles. One that she uses to talk to Corbin—BPG—and one that she uses to talk to a lot of people.”
The Stories You Tell Page 20
