Megan MIRANDA - The Perfect Stranger

Can you leave it all behind? A life I had just started building for myself; a handful of people; an open investigation.

No, I never could. Not even now.

I had to see things through to the bitter end. Something kept me tethered. The difference between me and her.

I DROVE BACK TOmy house, drove straight through the night, stopping only for gas and restrooms in populated areas with overhead parking lights. It was dawn when I entered our town limits, and I still had off for the day.

Someone had been by my house while I was gone. On the front porch, there was a small potted plant with a single flower. Purple and newly bloomed. I brought it inside with me, surprised it had survived the night frost. I left it on the kitchen table, wondering who could’ve left it and what it signified.

I called Kyle, still staring at the potted flower.

“Leah?” he answered before he heard my voice.

“Hi, did I wake you?”

“Where have you been?” he asked. “I’ve been by your place. I’ve been trying to call you. I thought you up and left.”

I looked at the flower on the table again, wondered if it was Kyle who had left it here. “I went to Boston,” I said.

“Why?”

“To find her. To find out who Emmy was.”

“And did you?”

I paused. “I found out she was playing me even back then. I found out I have no defense.”

“All you have to do is tell the truth. Everything will be fine if you just–”

“I told the truth back then, Kyle. I told it then, and it ruined my life.”

“What are you saying–”

“Kyle? I don’t want to do this. I have information for you. Meet me at Bethany’s place, okay? You know where it is?”

“Yes, I know where it is. Do you?”

“Yes. I do.”

A pause before he answered. “Right. Of course you do.”

HE WAS THERE WAITINGfor me. Leaning on the hood of his off-duty car in jeans and a worn leather jacket.

“What are we doing here?” he said.

“You want to close the case, right? The Finley case?”

“You know I do.” He pushed off the car, his breath escaping in a puff of cold – the morning air sharp with the warnings of winter.

“It’s Bethany,” I said. I needed to tell him in person so he could look at me and see it written across my face.

“ What’s Bethany.”

“She killed James Finley.”

He blinked at me. “How do you know this.”

Theo saw a woman dragging his body. They put him in Emmy’s car. What did I really have to give him? There was a witness who was unreliable – who might say it was me instead. And the accused was dead.

I focused instead on the scent I remembered, and the feeling that the kitchen had recently been wiped clean. Theo relaying the conversation between Bethany and Emmy that night.

“Did you search her place?” I asked.

“For what?”

“For knives,” I said. “Blood. I don’t know. It smells like bleach in there.” The police had gone into her place before James Finley was found in the lake, before they knew his name. They wouldn’t have been looking for anything back then. Bethany and James had been discovered in the wrong order.

Kyle shook his head, angry above anything else. “Why do you know this.”

“Her neighbor let me in. Thought I was related. Bethany Jarvitz was trying to take over my life, Kyle. She had my Social Security card. Credit cards in my name. I had never seen her before, but she knew me. Both of them left me here with nothing.”

I laid out all the pieces, let him do with them what he may. That Emmy had come here for Bethany, bound by a crime in the past, and was using me to help her. That she must’ve enlisted James Finley’s help – check fraud, B&E, he would know how to go about assuming a new identity and have the connections to do it. And then the two of them were indebted to him, somehow under his power. What must he have done with that power? Bethany said he had shown up at her place demanding more. That she’d had to do it.

I wondered if Emmy believed her. If it was true. Or if she could see straight through Bethany. What must Emmy have discovered about Bethany that night, after all this time, as she dragged a dead James Finley through the woods? Had Emmy finally realized the depth of Bethany’s rage? The things she could do? The things she would do?

“Am I going to find your prints in there if we search it?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “But not on the dishes in the sink. She had company that day, before she was attacked. There are two sets of dishes, at least. It’s from someone who was not me.”

“Emmy?” he asked.

I shrugged, the name Melissa on my lips. And yet I still wasn’t sure of her role. Whether Bethany had played her. Whether she had played me instead. “Someone who went by that name.”

“So we have to take your word. Your word on a ghost. That none of this was you but someone else.”

“I guess that’s the way it works.” I met his eyes, begged him to see it in me, the belief that this was the truth. That finally, finally, I had uncovered the story.

He squinted up at the apartments behind me. He shoved his hands into his coat pockets, stepped closer so his voice was eerily quiet. “Who hit Bethany, then?” he asked. “Who left her for dead down by the lake?”

“Does it matter?” I knew that it did, that it should, but I wondered, if she were recast in their eyes as a perpetrator instead of the victim, whether they would still feel the need to push for the answers.

“Yes, Leah, it matters what happened to Bethany Jarvitz.” Kyle was someone else who saw the cases of the nameless faces, the faceless names, and knew their stories mattered, too.

I thought of Theo again. Thought of what he had seen. He’d said there were two women dragging the body of James Finley. He’d said one of them was panicked. And then I thought of what the cops had given me, what they were going on. Why they’d picked up Cobb to begin with. “Can I hear the call?” I asked. “The call about Davis Cobb?”

He shook his head, just barely.

“Please, Kyle. You don’t have to tell me anything. I already know about the call. I know it was anonymous.”

“How–” Then his voice dropped to a mumble. “You got that out of Officer Dodge, didn’t you?”

I shook my head. “I wasn’t trying to get him in trouble. Just trying to understand how it’s all connected. And don’t be mad at him. He wouldn’t tell me where it was placed from.”

“Poor kid,” he said. “He didn’t look so good when he left your place. Now it all makes sense.”

“And here I thought it was the dead body.”

“We expect that part. He never saw the body. It was you, twisting him around, keeping him on his toes. Kid’s not used to that yet.” He sighed. “Okay, here’s the thing. It’s not enough to really get a match, even if we had a voice to compare it to. It’s. . breathless. Like she had been running. Or crying. We wouldn’t be able to match it.”

Crying – I wouldn’t be able to match that, either. Of all the memories I had of her, I’d never heard her cry. I’d seen only the parts of her that she’d wanted to share.

“What did she say?” I asked.

He closed his eyes as if seeing the words. “She said, I saw Davis Cobb down by the lake last night. Heard him arguing with some woman. ”

“But she didn’t place the call right away.”

“No, not right away. Not until after Martha Romano called it in first. Early the next morning. Guess she probably heard the commotion, started to put two and two together.”

My fingers twitched, imagining Emmy still there, watching as the pieces unraveled.