Megan MIRANDA - The Perfect Stranger

“Have you met anyone, Leah?”

“I’ve met a lot of people, Mother.”

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

I thought of Kyle. Of Davis Cobb. “I went out on Friday with a woman I work with. We had a good time.”

“Great,” she said. “Have you decided on next semester, then?”

She didn’t seem to understand that this job wasn’t temporary. Still clinging to the idea that I was on a brief sabbatical, that I’d get it out of my system and then return to my predicted life.

“I signed a contract for the full year,” I said. “Which I’ve told you before.”

“Right. It’s just, I was speaking to Susanna – you remember her son, Lucas? – and she said he’s been freelancing in New York. Apparently, there’s a lot of movement there, if you’re looking for a change. If things went south with Noah, it’s understandable that you wouldn’t want to work together anymore.”

I pressed my fingers into my temples. Grabbed a rag and started scrubbing the counters. “It’s not about Noah, Mom.”

“Leah,” she said. “Why don’t you come home for a little while. Take a long weekend, some time away.” But I was no longer listening.

I looked out the window, saw a shadow fall across the front porch – hadn’t heard the footsteps on the stairs or any car coming up the drive. I dropped the phone to my hip, heard my mother’s voice call my name from far away.

I stepped slowly, softly, toward the glass door. Raised the phone to my face and whispered, “Mom, I have to go. Someone’s here.”

“Who?” she asked. But I’d already pressed the end key.

By the time I slid the door open, whatever had been there was gone. A pitter-patter of steps, a rustle of leaves and branches. I stared off into the woods, squinting. The sun was still low, and I wondered if something small could cast a larger shadow. A cat on the banister. A coyote. A dog. Or whether it was something more.

Whether it was the same person who had left me the newspaper.

And if so, what the hell they were after.

I DO NOT FEEL safe in this house . It was a sudden, fleeting thought, gone as quickly as it had appeared. But I had learned to trust my instincts. I had learned to pay attention to those sudden, fleeting thoughts. And so I did what I would’ve told anyone else to do before they became the story themselves.

Get out.

I thought of Emmy missing, and James Finley in my house, and his record that Kyle had detailed in this very room. I wondered if the police had already picked him up for questioning or if he was out there still.

I threw some clothes in an overnight bag, packed up my laptop and my schoolwork, my phone charger. I checked out the front doors, the side window, before I grabbed my keys and left. Then I drove myself over to Break Mountain Inn, where I parked in the lot in front of the lobby. I sat in my car, waiting, watching the road in the rearview mirror.

A single car drove by without slowing down, but the Sunday-morning streets were otherwise calm and empty. None of the cars in the lot looked familiar. I grabbed my bag and walked into the lobby.

A man looked up – the same man I’d seen the evening I went out looking for Emmy. “You again,” he said. He looked at the bag slung over my shoulder, and then at me, in my Sunday-lounge-around-the-house outfit, and grinned.

“Hi,” I said. “I need a room for the night.”

“Sure thing,” he said, his eyes glowing from the reflection in the computer screen. “The full night, then?”

“Yes,” I said. I handed him my credit card and leaned against the counter. “Hey, did the guy you were covering for ever show back up?”

He handed me a key on a ring, the number 7 written on a tag hanging from the loop. “Guess not, since I’m still here.”

“Thanks,” I said, pushing through the door.

I strode down the sidewalk, passed the three other cars in the lot, heard the television in a room as I walked by, laughter from another. Tried to picture Emmy walking this same strip with James Finley, using a key, laughing, and Jim following her inside.

I tried not to picture the moment everything might’ve gone wrong.

The room had gray carpet and tan walls and a thin green comforter over a queen-size bed. Thick beige curtains hung from the windows, and I pulled them closed and flipped the light switch, which cast a yellow circle over the bed. I slid the deadbolt and dropped my bags and thought, for a moment, that this was it. This was rock bottom.

I had brought myself to a place where people stop caring who you are or what happens to you. The type of place where people don’t look too closely or for too long.

A girl from the apartments, wandering alone at night by the lake.

Emmy, hanging around some guy with a criminal record in a place like this.

A woman by herself, paying for a motel room by the night – in the same town where she lived.

If I got called out here to report on a crime – a woman found dead in the bathtub, blunt-force trauma to the head; or strangled on the bed, eyes open and fixed on the ceiling; or robbed at knife point in the parking lot – I’d know with sickening accuracy, before I even got the facts, that it wouldn’t be seen as worthy of the front page. It wouldn’t be the big story.

Depending on the day, on the rest of the shitty things done to or by other people that particular cycle, it might get nothing more than a mention in the crime beat. Any reader would give it a quick read, a shake of the head, before moving on.

I knew what they’d be thinking, skimming for the relevant details before drawing their inevitable conclusion:

What did you expect?

You’ve done this to yourself.

It was just after midnight when my phone rang, and the room spun at first, disorienting. It took me a moment to place myself, as it had for nearly a month after I’d moved here.

First the television screen, the heavy curtains, the strip of light under the door from the outside lights. Then the numbers displayed on the clock, the phone ringing to my right. I bolted upright and fumbled for my cell.

“Leah?” It was Kyle, and he sounded worried, or frantic, or upset.

It was after midnight, and he was calling. I was jolted awake with the fear of what he was about to tell me. Picturing Emmy the last time she’d looked at me, her laughter, the piece of hair the wind blew in front of her face. “Yes?”

He paused, and I heard the sound of a car door slamming shut. “I was at your house. I am at your house. You aren’t here, and I was worried. But– Sorry, I just wanted to check.” He paused again. “I was just worried.”

I stared at the clock again. Pictured him in my driveway, lights off, my car gone. Imagined what he must’ve been thinking. Only so many places I’d be at this hour of the night. “I’m not with someone else, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“No,” he said. He was. “Okay, yes. Okay, so it’s none of my business. I was just in the area, and the day was, well, it was a day, and I thought I’d check on you, just to check, and your car was gone. .”

“I got scared,” I said, and then I laughed, realizing how ridiculous this was. I was at a motel ten miles from my house. Nobody knew I was here. “You told me about James Finley, and I didn’t want to be at that house anymore. I went to a motel. And now I feel ridiculous.”

“Oh. Oh. You’re okay, then.”

“Yeah, I’m okay,” I said.

I heard the air moving through the phone, the noises of the outside. “I’m sorry I woke you,” he said.

“It’s okay. I wasn’t really sleeping, anyway.” Which was a lie. I had been completely out, somewhere else, my brain finally off.