Everything was whimsical to Emmy, and so she probably thought I meant emotionally, spiritually, that I needed to seek out a new place for some personal growth. Not that I literally needed to leave this city before shit hit the proverbial fan.
“I have to get out of here,” I said, more serious now. Not talking about the wild egress of our thirties, as my friends called it—the mass exodus of thirtysomethings who get married and buy houses and commute in. But because I had to. There was nothing left for me here, not as Leah Stevens. Everything was a precipice.
Her eyes found mine over her glass, like she was reading something within me as well. “So come,” she said, as I knew she would.
She glanced once over her shoulder, to the clock, our bags dropped on the kitchen counter, the door. I saw her eyes again. Knew she didn’t want to go home until her fiancé was out of the apartment.
“You can stay here tonight,” I said.
In my memory, the rest of that night sounds like Emmy’s laughter and feels like a spell, dizzy and only half-real. I threw a dart at the map, she’d said, and all at once we were twenty-two again, in a bar, one eye closed, lining up to make that throw. How do you feel about western Pennsylvania?
I wondered if any of my other friends would do something like this, then I laughed to myself. Of course they wouldn’t. There was something so wild and free about Emmy. About the type of person who got kicked down and didn’t stay there. Who threw a dart at a map and thought, There, I’ll try again there.
How did I feel about western Pennsylvania? I felt good about it right then, with the words rolling off her tongue. It was familiar and yet new. It was close enough to come back, far enough to start fresh. I whispered it aloud, decided the name, the syllables stretching and slurring together, was bizarrely beautiful. I saw myself sitting on the front steps of a white porch. My hair down, coffee in hand. My laughter echoing in the open spaces. “Yes,” I said.
It was almost a joke. In the morning, I’d wake up, sober and with a headache behind my eyes, and I’d face the day.
But when I woke, Emmy was on my bed—how did she get there? The details were hazy. All I knew was she sat up and rubbed her eyes and said, “When do you want to go?”
We’d made the plan half-baked on hypotheticals, but there she was, and I stared at her, a mirror reflecting back. Wondering whether I could really upend my life, excise it from one place and set it in another; wondering whether such a thing was truly possible.
And then I stopped myself, sat at the computer, said, “Okay, let’s do this.”
Because thinking things through, which I’d done my entire life, carefully and deliberately, had gotten me absolutely nowhere but back to the start. A single misstep in an article, a calculated risk, and everything I’d accomplished, everything I’d become, had been wiped clean in an instant. There would be no do-over. There would be no coming back. Everything inside me vibrated with the word Go.
* * *
NOW I STOOD OVER the bathroom sink, staring deep into the mirror, as if I might blink and see Emmy instead.
I opened the mirrored medicine cabinet again. Her toothbrush sat at the same angle, the bristles stiff and dry. If she’d planned to stay with her boyfriend, wouldn’t she have taken it? Come back for it?
Maybe Jim bought her one. Maybe they shared one. But it was obvious now—now that I was looking for it—that she hadn’t been back. I hadn’t seen her in five days.
I was preoccupied by the empty bed, and the empty house, and the two warring sides: Don’t make a statement. But Emmy. Don’t get involved. But Emmy.
I checked the clock and out the window for the third time in as many minutes, holding tight to the hope that her car might round the bend at any moment. Went through the list of reasons I shouldn’t worry, yet again. She was a grown adult, probably staying at her boyfriend’s. It was so Emmy, honestly. Going wherever the wind took her, eventually landing here.
I checked every corner for missed sticky notes. Or forced entry. For signs of a struggle or blood.
Air, I just need some air. A clearer head.
I opened the secondary door at the end of the hall, past our bedrooms, which opened to a square of wood, one step down, straight to woods.
The afternoon light caught something on the decking. Something stuck between two boards. I used my nails to pry it out, the dainty silver chain glinting in the sunlight. The weight of the pendant—a black oval, misshapen edges—unraveling my last bit of rational calm. The chain hung from my palm, and the pendant fell off at a split in the chain itself. Two links, bent open, as if it had been ripped from someone’s neck.
The chain settled into the crease of my hand, and I began to shiver, as I had the first time I’d seen a crime scene.
I heard a car coming up the drive, and I didn’t think for a second that it was Emmy.
I raced around the side of the house to meet the cruiser moving slowly up the drive. He stopped in the middle of the lane and opened the door, his brow furrowed—this kid no older than Emmy and I had been when we first met.
“Everything okay?” he asked, one foot on the pavement, one foot propped on the floorboard. The engine was still running.
“I need to speak to Detective Donovan,” I said, gasping for breath. My hand went to the base of my throat. My pulse rebelled.
He looked beyond me at the house, as if he expected something to spring forth. A hand rested on his holster.
As if the danger were something either of us could see or defeat.
CHAPTER 8
By the time Kyle Donovan arrived and let himself in through the sliding glass door, the young cop who first pulled up, Officer Calvin Dodge (as he introduced himself once he’d realized there was no imminent threat), had gone through the basics. He’d sat in a vinyl seat across the kitchen table from me, the gnome between us, while I still had Emmy’s necklace clutched in my fist.
Officer Dodge asked me the typical questions after I showed him the necklace: Was there any sign of forced entry? Did anything look disturbed?
I clenched my fist tighter as I answered every irrelevant question, No, no, but he didn’t understand. I thought of the dangers of home rentals—copied keys and old locks, a history I couldn’t begin to know. People who might’ve gained the ability to come and go without disturbing anything. To move undetected. The danger you didn’t even know awaited.
I said, “The light was on in the living room three nights ago.”
I said, “Someone called the home line and hung up.”
I said, “Something happened to my roommate.”