Megan MIRANDA - The Perfect Stranger

“Okay,” I said. I could not bring myself to thank him.

“Hey, Leah? This is only between you and me.” A promise, or a threat, that he would not say the same to the police. That I was now his only confidante, and he mine. “I’m only telling you because we’re the same, I can tell.”

He made my skin crawl, but there was something to it. We were both drawn to this, if for different reasons. We were each seeing just a piece of the puzzle, letting the story fill in around it. Bethany and I were not identical, but in the dark. . Theo had seen what he wanted to see.

There had been a few different sequences of events, depending on whom you asked at first. For Theo, I was the suspect. For Izzy, it had been Theo. For the police, a man named Davis Cobb. And now, for me, there was a different lead. We forced the pieces until they fit what we thought we knew.

Question witnesses and they’ll say: It all happened so fast .

They misremember.

They pull on pieces, let their minds fill in the rest. We crave logical cause and effect, the beginning, middle, and end.

Theo had given me something: Bethany Jarvitz pulling the body of James Finley through the woods. Not such an innocent victim. Not such a victim at all.

THE BAD GUY, THEone we could only imagine in the mask, in the shadows – it was always closer than we liked to imagine. A man living in the same apartment. A professor in front of your class. There was a time, for some, when it was even closer – an unfamiliar stirring, a spark, like I imagined inside Theo. I tried to remember that age, that moment. To go back to that time in my life when I saw it head-on for the first time. When we flirted with danger and strangers. When we tested our boundaries, the wild calling to us. When we called it closer to see how close we could get. We crossed the line to find it.

And then, for most, the danger became something else, separate and unapproachable. A monster.

But there was a moment first, before we categorized it and filed it away, when it wasn’t so unapproachable just yet. When it brushed up against you and you had to decide.

Theo, watching the woman he thought was me, dragging a man soaked in blood. Watching and wanting.

I STUMBLED BACK TOmy place in a daze. The facts re-sorting themselves. Bethany had dragged a dead James Finley through the woods to Lakeside Tavern, where they’d disposed of him in Emmy’s car. And then what? And then Emmy had disappeared and Bethany had turned up near-dead.

I was breathing too heavily when I slid open the glass doors – I felt everything too strong, too sharp. I had answers, and yet what did I really have? An unreliable witness. An unreliable witness who believed it had been me. Everything back to me.

“Leah?” Rebecca had a hand on my arm, suggesting she’d already said my name once. “Are you okay?” She led me to a chair at the table. “Sit,” she said, and she placed her fingers at the base of my neck as if taking my pulse.

I wanted to sink into her, into Rebecca the doctor who could help the ones who could still be helped. “Rebecca?” I said, and I was asking her for something. Really asking this time.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

I could tell her. She was my sister, and we were alone in the woods, and her fingers were on my pulse point, the most vulnerable spot. “I wrote an article,” I said. “I wrote an article about a girl who committed suicide, implicating a professor in her death.”

She wordlessly pulled up a chair, sat across from me. And I told her all of it.

“So Aaron killed himself after the article,” she said – the first words she had spoken since I began.

“Yes.”

“Aaron killed himself, and the paper found out you couldn’t prove the statement. That you made it up. That there wasn’t a source who could back it up.”

“That’s what they thought.”

“Could you be charged legally?”

“It’s complicated. The paper won’t say that’s why I was fired – actually, they won’t say I was fired at all. And, I mean, there are connections between Aaron and this girl, if they really want to play that game. The pills were his. I’d bet anything on it. I knew him, Rebecca. He wasn’t a good man. Nobody wants it to come out.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Paige. Paige is the problem. She could file a civil suit against me, basically take me for all I’m worth, and ruin my name forever. Not that she’d need to, she has plenty of money on her own. But she could. She had a restraining order against me–”

“A restraining order ?”

“I was trying to warn her. Over and over, I told her. I told her I was going to print it, that she could get out, and she twisted it all around that I was verbally assaulting her, that I was stalking her. .”

Rebecca’s brows drew together. “That’s a big leap, from calling to stalking.”

“When she wouldn’t pick up the phone, I went to her house.”

“Jesus, Leah.”

“I know. I know. But it was Paige .”

Paige, who always saw the good in people. Who saw the good in me. She’d changed, or I had – I wasn’t sure which anymore.

“You’re sure it was him?” Rebecca asked, and I didn’t hesitate, I said yes, like I always did. To let in doubt at this stage would be fatal. The darkest corner, from which there would be no coming back.

“How are you so sure?”

I couldn’t tell her this part, like I’d told Emmy. Rebecca was not going anywhere. She was not a secret. She had ties to everyone else in my life. And it wasn’t that I was ashamed it had happened. Not anymore. I was ashamed I had left it alone.

Who does the truth belong to? I thought back then that it was mine. That it was enough for me to know. I didn’t tell Paige. The words had simmered up, and I had stifled them back down. Your boyfriend – Aaron – he–

Didn’t tell the police, even though that was what I would’ve told someone else to do. I didn’t want to be exposed, to get dragged into a case of he said, she said, the most difficult to make stick, I knew from experience. He tried to kill me. I never said it. And I’d left Paige with him, unaware of the danger. Ignored it, let them get married, have a baby.

And by not telling the police, I was ultimately responsible for all that followed. He could not have gone eight years before trying again. He could not have made the leap so seamlessly. There had to be more of us. And this was the part I was ashamed of: that there might be one less square on the grid of that newspaper article had I done something years earlier. It was my wrong to right.

“I knew him, Rebecca. I know what he’s like. What he does.”

Rebecca must’ve sensed something in the silence, something from which there would be no going back. “So,” she said, cutting it off, looking the other way, letting us continue, “you can’t go back, then.”

“No, Rebecca. I really can’t.”

She looked around the house again, sniffed at the dust lingering in the streams of sunlight. “I mean, there is something charming about it all. Nature, I guess.”

I laughed, a pained sound, and Rebecca laughed, too.

“Also,” she added, “I would kill for this square footage.”

Is this the girl from the hospital?”

“Hello?” I said it again, disoriented by the unfamiliar voice on the line, the unfamiliar number on the display, early on a Sunday morning.

“You came to visit once.”

I racked my brain, trying to come up with the name. Graying hair, the slippers streaked with blood, the woman waiting vigil. “Martha?” I asked.