“Last residence?”
“Not sure. She lived with her fiancé in Boston,” I said.
“His name?” he asked, and I shook my head. He was a jerk, he was dangerous, she was running.
“He worked in finance,” I said. The little Emmy had told me; the little I’d truly asked in response.
He tapped the pencil eraser against the tabletop as his eyes roamed the room. I was giving him bread crumbs, details to sift through, and I knew what he was thinking: None of this will help.
“You have to give me something to work with here, Leah.”
What did I have to show him? “She did two tours in the Peace Corps. Botswana, I think. Moved back to D.C. after that,” I said. There. There she was, that’s where he’d find her paper trail, trace her life forward and back. “She worked in nonprofit, then she came back up to Boston with her fiancé.” I tried to remember what she’d said that night we’d run into each other, through the foggy haze of memory and alcohol. “She was engaged, but it went bad, and that’s when we reconnected.” I didn’t tell him about the circles under her eyes, the unspoken things that only I could see, the way she so obviously needed out.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll put in some calls to D.C., see if we can’t get a picture. And go from there.”
“She has a boyfriend now,” I added. “Lives nearby. Jim something. He has blond hair to here.” I held my hand to my chin. “Bow-legged. Narrow face. Drove a beige hatchback, needed a new muffler.” Someone, it seemed, who was the polar opposite of the man she’d just left.
He made eye contact, seemed to be smiling to himself. “You’d make a pretty good witness, Leah Stevens.”
I grinned, but I was still worried. Emmy was missing, and Jim was the only person I could associate with her. “He calls here sometimes. Maybe you can trace him that way?”
Kyle’s gaze drifted to my phone on the wall. “You’d need to give us permission to get your phone records.”
“Okay, you have it,” I said. The phone line was mostly for Emmy. I used my cell for work and practically everything else. I’d registered the landline only because Emmy needed one.
“Honestly, it would be easier if you pulled them yourself. Call the phone company, ask them to send you the most recent bill, and we can at least check the public numbers. We’d need to get a subpoena for anything private.”
“But if I get you the bill, you’ll look into it?”
He ran a hand through his short hair. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll look into it.”
“Okay,” I said, letting out a slow exhale. “Thank you.”
He leaned back in his chair, folded his hands on the table. “Anything else you want to share about Davis Cobb?”
Quid pro quo, this was how it went in my profession before, too. You cannot take without a give.
I grabbed the pencil from his hand. Twisted the paper to face me. Jotted down an email address that began with the sender name TeachingLeahStevens. “He sends me emails from this account sometimes,” I said. “At school. I delete them.” I shrugged. “Honestly, they’re not that bad.”
He kept his expression even, waited a beat before responding, processing the information. “Thanks. We’ll see what we can get. Next time it would help if you don’t delete them.”
I nodded.
He looked at the page again before sliding it into a folder, then placed his hands flat on the table. “He made up this email address specifically to target you, Leah. Did you ever report this? Or the emails themselves?”
“No. Honestly, they seemed harmless.”
In hindsight, that wasn’t entirely true. They just seemed like everything else. My first boss once told me not to include a head shot with my story, and I’d been insulted. I’d thought it was because she thought it might detract from the story—that I looked too young, too happy, to write what I wrote. That people would not take me seriously.
But I thank her every day. Really, she was saving me from the world that hid behind computer screens, linking my name to a face. Their words shouted into a void instead. The things the anonymous would say if they disagreed, the things they’d imply because of my name alone. It all sort of rolled off, over time, becoming background noise.
The emails I had been receiving here were no worse, really.
No, I thought. The problem was with me. I had become effectively desensitized to the danger of words.
CHAPTER 9
If I were writing a piece about a missing woman, if I were interviewing her roommate, I’d say: Tell me a story about her. Tell me a story that will let the readers know her, too.
So when Kyle got halfway to his car, seemed to change his mind for some reason, came back inside, and asked me to tell him something more about who Emmy was, what she was like, I took some time to think about it. I did not say the first thing I thought.
I wanted to tell him about the time with the knife—two weeks after I’d moved in with her back in Boston, when Paige had called and said she and Aaron were in the area and could they see my new place? How I had frozen in the middle of the living room, the phone hanging at my hip, my head suddenly waterlogged and everything feeling too far away. How Emmy had asked, very calmly, “Who was that?”
I wanted to tell Kyle how Emmy had been cutting up an apple in the kitchen when I’d introduced them, how she’d spun around and taken the knife to Aaron’s flesh, right on the back of his forearm, how his face had fallen open in surprise and rage. How she’d made it seem like an accident but had pressed her lips together like she knew it wasn’t. How she’d stared at him, then said, Oops, didn’t see you there, and gone back to the apple. How she hadn’t said anything to me when Paige yelped and looked at me like Did you see that? And how I’d pretended I hadn’t. How Emmy hadn’t even looked up as Aaron kept saying, It’s okay, no big deal, through clenched teeth, as if she had apologized, which she hadn’t. How she hadn’t turned back around until Paige got him out of there. How I’d loved her in that moment. And how we’d never spoken of it again.
I wanted to say this to Kyle: She eats men like you for breakfast. I wanted him to know that she was strong, that she would not let someone walk all over her. She would not be a girl who did not see the danger coming.
But that’s not the story to tell. The purpose of the story, I knew, was to get people to care, to get the public on your side, to make them see everyone they’ve ever loved in the face of this missing girl.
Kyle was staring, like he could see every story running through my head—hers and mine.
I pretended he was a reporter. That what he was really saying was, Okay, Leah, show her to me.
And so I settled on the first time we met.