The Perfect Stranger Read online

  But this was only a couple miles from our house, and Emmy hadn’t gotten home yet. If she’d been in an accident, would they know whom to call? How to reach me? Could she be at a hospital right now, all alone?

  I passed the officer in the street and pulled my car over at the next turn, left it unlocked in the parking lot of the unfinished lake clubhouse in my rush, and backtracked toward the roadblock. As I walked, I kept to the trees, staying out of the traffic cop’s way so he couldn’t turn me back.

  The land sloped down where the water line met mud and tall grass. At the bottom of the incline, I could see a handful of people standing stock-still. They were all focused on a point in the grass beyond. No car, though. No accident.

  I slid down the embankment, mud caking my shoes, moving faster.

  The scene came into focus, despite the adrenaline, the undercurrent of dread, as I pictured all the things that could’ve happened here.

  I’d had to practice detachment early on, when the shock of blood was too sharp, when I felt too deeply, when I saw a thousand other possibilities in the slack face of a stranger. Now I couldn’t shake it—it was one of my top skills.

  It was the only way to survive in real crime: the raw blood and bone, the psychology of violence. But too much emotion in an article and all a reader sees is you. You need to be invisible. You need to be the eyes and ears, the mechanism of the story. The facts, the terrible, horrible, blistering facts, have to become compartmentalized. And then you have to keep moving, on to the next, before it all catches up with you.

  It was muscle memory now. Emmy became fragments, a list of facts, as I made my way through the tall grass: four years in the Peace Corps; moved here over the summer to escape a relationship turned sour; worked nights at a motel lobby, occasional days cleaning houses. Unmarried female, five-five, slight build, dark hair cut blunt to her collarbone.

  Light slanted through the trees, reflecting off the still surface of the water beyond. The police were picking their way through the vegetation in the distance, but a single officer stood nearby with his back to the group of spectators, keeping them from getting any closer.

  I made my way to the edge of the group. Nobody even looked. The woman beside me wore a bathrobe and slippers, her graying hair escaping the clip holding it away from her face.

  I followed their singular, focused gaze—a smear of dried blood in the weeds beside the cop, marked off with an orange flag. The gnats settling over it in the morning light. A circle of cones beyond, nothing but flattened empty space inside.

  “What’s happening?” I asked, surprised by the shake in my own voice. The woman barely looked at me, arms still crossed, fingers digging in to her skin.

  Interview people after a tragedy and they say: It all happened so fast.

  They say: It’s all a big blur.

  They pick pieces, let us fill in the gaps. They forget. They misremember. If you get to them soon enough, there’s a tremble to them still.

  These people were like that now. Holding on to their elbows, their arms folded up into their stomachs.

  But put me on a scene and everything slows, simmers, pops. I will remember the gnats over the weeds. The spot of blood. The downtrodden grass. Mostly, it’s the people I see.

  “Bethany Jarvitz,” she said, and the tightness in my chest subsided. Not Emmy, then. Not Emmy. “Someone hit her pretty good, left her here.”

  I nodded, pretending I knew who that was.

  “Some kids found her while they were playing at the bus stop.” She nodded toward the road I’d just come from. No kids playing any longer. “If they hadn’t . . .” She pressed her lips together, the color draining. “She lives alone. How long until someone noticed she was missing?” And then the shudder. “There was just so much blood.” She looked down at her slippers, and I did the same. The edges stained rust brown, as if she had walked right through it.

  I looked away, back toward the road. Heard the static of a radio, the voice of a cop issuing orders. This had nothing to do with Emmy or with me. I had to leave before I became a part of it, a member of the crowd the police would inevitably take a closer look at. My name tied to a string of events that I was desperate to leave behind. A restraining order, the threat of a lawsuit, my boss’s voice dropping low as the color drained from his neck: My God, Leah, what did you do?

  I took a step back. Another. Turned to make my way back to my car, embarrassed by the mud on my shoes.

  Halfway to my car, I heard a rustle behind me. I spun around, nerves on high alert—and caught a faint whiff of sweat.

  A bird took flight, its wings beating in the silence, but I saw nothing else.

  I thought of the noise in the dead of night. The dog barking. The timing.

  An animal, Leah.

  A bear.

  Just the cats.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME I made it to school, I was bordering on late. School hadn’t started yet, but I was supposed to arrive before the warning bell. There was a backlog of student cars lined up at the main entrance, so I sneaked in through the bus lot (frowned upon but not against the rules), parked in a faculty spot behind my wing, and used a key to let myself in through the fire entrance (also frowned upon, also not against the rules).

  The teachers were clustered just inside the classroom doorways, whispering. They must’ve gotten wind of the woman down by the lake. This wasn’t like life in a city, where there was a new violent crime each day, where the sirens were background noise and mere proximity meant nothing. I wouldn’t have been able to get a decent story about a woman found on the shore of a lake in the paper there—not one who’d lived.

  CHAPTER 3

  It wasn’t just the teachers.

  The entire school was buzzing. It carried from the halls, rolled in with the students, grew louder and more urgent as they twisted in their seats. A hand over a mouth, Oh my God. A gasp, a head whipping from one person to the next. They were surely talking about the woman found down by the lake.

  So it would be one of those days. Impossible to get first period in order.

  The school would get like this sometimes, with the buzzing, but it was like listening to a conversation in an unknown language. The gossip written in secret shorthand, a scrawl I’d long since forgotten.

  I’d begun to think the disconnect stemmed from more than just age. That they were a species in transition: coming in as kids, voices breaking, angles sharpening, and leaving as something different altogether. Curves and muscle and the unfamiliar force behind both; the other parts of them desperately trying to play catch-up.

  Behave, we’d tell them. And they’d sit at their desks, hunkered down and waiting, a toe from somewhere in the room tapping against the floor in a manic rhythm. They’d bolt from their seats at the end-of-class bell and dash for the door, taking off as if the wild had called to them, the room reeking of mint and musk long after they were gone.

  I didn’t understand how anyone truly expected me to accomplish anything here, except in appearances. This was nothing but a temporary holding cell.

  Had I been like this once upon a time? I didn’t think so. I couldn’t really remember. Even back then, I think I had narrowed my sights on a goal and homed in.

  The bell rang for the start of class, but the buzzing continued.

  I pulled the stack of graded reading responses from my bag, and I heard it—

  Arrested.

  My stomach clenched. The word razor-sharp, a constant threat. Always there, the slimmest possibility: my ex, Noah, warning me to be careful with that article—I thought that was exactly what I was doing, I truly did.

  Back when I was in college, I remembered a professor’s eyes fixing on mine in the middle of his lecture, as if he could sense something in me even then, as he explained that in journalism, a lie becomes libel.

  But it was more than that, truly. More than just a legal term, in journalism, the lie is a breach of the holiest commandment.

  Get out now, my boss had sa
id. And hope the story dies.

  I’d done just that—putting an entire mountain range between us in the process. But in the information age, distance meant nothing. I’d thought I’d escaped it, but maybe I hadn’t.

  No. I was being irrational. A woman had been found beaten just a few hours earlier; that’s what this was about.

  I weaved between desks, placing their essays facedown in front of them. Leaning closer, straining for information. An old habit.

  Connor Evans’s big wide eyes were fixed on me, and my shoulders tensed. Someone in this room?

  I took a tally of the class—who was missing? JT, but JT was never on time.

  But there, an empty seat, third row, desk beside the window: Theo Burton.

  He’d turned in his journal a few weeks earlier with a new free-write that made my skin crawl—but it was fiction, and I’d said anything. Still, he wrote with an authority and confidence greater than his imagination. Too close to something real. I closed my eyes, his words dancing across my mind:

  The boy sees her and he knows what she has done.

  The boy imagines twisted limbs and the color red.

  If Theo had done something, if that entry had been a warning—God, the liability.

  I could come up with a story for myself, a cover: I didn’t read it closely. It was a participation grade. I didn’t know.

  But then Theo Burton walked through the door, and the tension drained from my shoulders. On the way to his desk, he stood in front of the class for a beat. “The cops are crawling the front office,” he said, like he was in charge. His collar popped up, his shoes unscuffed. Too civilized, Theo Burton in real life.

  If this were my second-period class, they’d tell me what had happened, unprompted. They were all freshmen and treated me like a confidante. Third period would welcome any excuse to veer off-topic, so I could ask them without feeling at a disadvantage. But my first period had decided at the start of the year to rebel, and I’d never recovered. If I thought they were either bright enough or organized enough, I would’ve given them credit for planning it together. A coordinated attack.

  But the mistake had been of my own making, as was the story of my current life. My first day of teaching, I’d introduced myself and told them I had just moved from Boston. I thought kids in a place like this—living in a town on the downswing suddenly given a jolt of new life—might be impressed. I thought I had them all figured out.

  A girl in the back row had yawned, so I’d added, I worked as a journalist, thinking that might lend some authority. And that girl who’d been yawning, her head snapped up, and she grinned like a cat with a canary dangling between her front teeth. Her name, I soon learned, was Izzy Marone, and she said, “Is this your first year teaching?”

  I had been here three minutes and I’d already made a mistake. There was no reason for them to think I was a new teacher at thirty. That I was starting my life over, having failed at the first half.

  There were four ninety-minute blocks in the school day, but first period still felt twice as long as the rest.

  Izzy Marone was currently holding court around her desk, chairs pulled closer, boys leaning nearer. Theo Burton reached across the gap and placed his fingers on the ridge of her cheekbone, speaking directly into her ear. Her face was grave.

  I decided to try for Molly Laughlin, who was on the outskirts, both physically and metaphorically, hoping everyone else was too wrapped up in the whispers to notice. “What happened?” I asked. I prided myself on finding sources and getting them to talk, and she was an easy pick. I think I got her with the shock of it—that I’d asked her outright.

  She opened her mouth as my class speaker crackled on.

  “Ms. Stevens?” The assistant principal’s voice silenced the room.

  “Yes, Mr. Sheldon?” I responded.

  It had taken me a few weeks to catch on to this quirk, that teachers spoke to each other like this, whether it was over speakers where students could hear or out in the halls, alone. I couldn’t get used to adults going by last names like this, all antiquated formality.

  “You’re needed for a moment in the office.” Mitch Sheldon’s voice echoed through the room.

  I became aware of the stillness and the silence behind me, the twenty-four pairs of ears, listening, wanting.

  The police were in the office, and they needed me.

  I raised my hand to my mouth, was surprised to notice my fingers were trembling. I went for my purse in the locked desk drawer at the side of the room, taking my time. Realizing they all knew something I didn’t.

  The lock stuck twice before the drawer slid open.

  Izzy turned to me, frowned at my shaking hands. “You heard?” she asked.

  “Heard what?” I said.

  For all the pretense of gravity she was trying to interject, it was obvious from the quirk of her lips that she was about to take great pleasure in telling me this. As if she knew I had no idea. I steeled myself once more.

  “Coach Cobb was just arrested for assault,” she said.

  Oh. Shit.

  She got me.

  CHAPTER 4

  Davis Cobb was the reason I’d begun leaving my phone on silent at night. I ignored his calls every time they came through—always after eleven P.M., always after I assumed he’d been down at the bar and was walking back home. Always the same thing, anyway.

  Davis Cobb owned the Laundromat in town and moonlighted as the school’s basketball coach, but I didn’t know either of those things when I first met him while filling out paperwork down at the county office.

  I’d thought he was a teacher. Everyone seemed to know him. Everyone seemed to like him. They said, Hey, Davis, have you met Leah? You’ll be working together come fall, and he’d smiled.

  He’d offered a drink at the nearest bar—he had a ring on his finger, it was the middle of the day, You can follow me in your car. It seemed like a friendly welcome-to-town offer. He seemed like a lot of things—until he showed up at my door one night.

  I passed Kate (Ms. Turner) on her way down the hall in the opposite direction. Her brow was furrowed, and at first she didn’t notice me. But then she stopped, grabbed my arm as we brushed by each other, passed a quick secret: “They want to know if Davis Cobb has ever done anything inappropriate toward us. It was quick. Really quick.”

  My stomach twisted, thinking of what evidence they might already have that might drag me into this. The recent calls. His phone records. If that was the reason the overhead speaker had crackled my name.

  “You okay?” she asked, as if she could read something in my silence. After the last few months of working across the hall from me, she had become a friendly face throughout the chaos of the day. Now I worried she could see even more.

  “This whole thing is weird,” I said, trying to channel her same perplexed expression. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

  Inside the front office area, Mitch Sheldon was posted outside the conference room door, arms crossed like a security guard, feet planted firmly apart, even in khaki pants, even in men’s loafers. He dropped his arms when he saw me approaching. Mitch was the closest thing I had to a mentor here, and a friend, but I didn’t know what to make of his expression just yet.

  The door was open behind him, and I counted at least two men in dark jackets at the oval table, drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups. “What happened?” I asked.

  “Jesus Christ,” Mitch said, lowering his voice and leaning closer. “They picked up Davis Cobb for assault this morning. First I’m hearing of it, too. The calls from the media and parents started as soon as I got here.”

  The reception area with the glass windows that faced the school entrance was crawling with cops, like Theo had said. But there were no other teachers roaming the area up front, or in the hallway with the offices behind reception, where we now stood. Just Mitch, just me.

  Mitch nodded toward the door. “They asked for you.” He swallowed. “They’re interviewing all the women, but they asked for you
by name.”

  A question, bordering on an accusation. “Thanks, Mitch.”

  I shut the door behind me as I entered the room. I had been wrong—there were three people in the room. Two men in attire so similar it must’ve been department protocol, and a woman in plainclothes.

  The man closest to me stood and did a double take. “Leah Stevens?” he asked, his badge visible at his belt.

  My shoulders stiffened in response. “Yes,” I said, arms still at my sides, exposed and waiting, feeling as though I were on display.

  He extended his hand. “Detective Kyle Donovan,” he said. He was the younger of the two but more polished, more mature in stature somehow. Made me think he was the one in charge, regardless of seniority. Maybe it was just that he was fit and held eye contact, and I was biased. So I have a type.

  I reached out a hand to shake his, then leaned across the table, repeating the motion with the older man. “Detective Clark Egan,” he said. He had graying sideburns, a softer build, duller eyes. He tilted his head to the side, then shared a look with Detective Donovan.

  “Allison Conway.” Role still undetermined, business suit, blond hair falling in waves to her shoulders.

  “Thanks for agreeing to see us,” Donovan said, as if I had the choice. He gestured toward the chair across from him.

  “Of course,” I said, taking a seat and trying to get a read on the situation. “What’s this about?”

  “We have just a few questions for you. Davis Cobb. You know him?”

  “Sure,” I said, crossing my legs, trying to appear more at ease.

  “How long have you known him?” he continued.

  “I met him in July, down at the county office, when I registered with the district.” Fingerprints, drug test, background check. Teachers and cops, the last line of unsullied professions. They check criminal records but not the civil suits. Almosts don’t count. Gut feelings count even less. There were so many cracks you could slip through. So much within that could not be revealed by a history of recorded offenses and intoxicants.