Her apartment was sparse to begin with, and I didn’t have much to add. “I’m leaving in a few months,” she had explained. “Got a placement in the Peace Corps, and I’ll be gone for two years. I’ve started getting rid of my things. I can’t bring it with me, you know? And the girl who lived here before, she graduated in May. Took all her stuff back home to California.”
I wondered now if she had seen me as one of those stray cats. If she’d liked the idea of me back then as she liked the idea of them now.
Kyle leaned against the kitchen counter, but he wasn’t writing anything down—he was just listening, letting me tell the story first; I appreciated this about him.
“It was a long time ago,” I said. “But she was always generous. She helped me, and then she helped people through the Peace Corps. She was selfless. One of those people who puts their money where their mouth is, you know?”
She’d left for her assignment at the end of September. I finally got offered that full-time position, saved the money from my first two paychecks, and put down a deposit on a studio in a not-so-great area. I stopped returning Paige’s calls. Was surprised how easy it was to sever a four-year unbreakable friendship by just doing nothing. Heard she and Aaron got married three years later.
“Oh,” I said, realizing there was one more piece to give Kyle. I pulled a sticky note from our spot on the wall, gave him the address. “That’s where we lived,” I said. “Summer, eight years ago.”
He took the information, put a hand on my shoulder, and left. I wondered if he’d go straight out looking for her. As his engine started, I realized he hadn’t taken anything from this house. Not her toothbrush, not her clothes. He hadn’t asked to see her room.
This woman who had once taken me in when I had nowhere else to go—who’d shown me the generosity of strangers, who’d drunk vodka on the floor with me late at night. Who had both the guts to wield a knife and the restraint to pull it back.
I waited for the lights from his car to fade down the road.
And then I made a plan.
* * *
I HAD A LIST of motels, hotels, inns, and bed-and-breakfasts within this town and the surrounding ones. This was the time Emmy was always out. Dusk. This was when her shift began. Someone would know she was missing or who she was. Someone would have to be covering for her.
I knew, just like I’d known when I was on the other side of the interview, that nobody would care as much as someone with a personal history. Nobody here knew her like I did.
I started visiting the places closest to home, gradually moving outward, coming up empty at every stop. Nobody knew her name. Nobody knew her by my description. Hair to here, skinny, my height. After a bunch of stops, there was a man working a new shift for the first time at Break Mountain Inn. He didn’t know anything at all, and I made a mental note to come back. This seemed most promising: that perhaps they needed someone to fill in after repeated no-shows. I took a photo of the contact information with my phone.
The sky was dark by the time I made it outside Break Mountain Inn. The darkness was another thing I was still getting used to here. In the city, dark was a time more than a reality. The dark was not as all-encompassing and expansive as it was here.
The last place on my list was set back from the road, a parking lot carved straight into the woods. I debated not getting out of my car at all. I had a lead already, and this place looked seriously sketchy, and the lights were burned out in the sign and the parking lot. But I thought again of Emmy taking me in that first day, and of her saying she was working at the Last Stop No-Tell Motel—this definitely fit the bill. I opened the glove compartment, feeling for the oversize flashlight I kept for emergencies.
I pulled out the flashlight, heard something jangle and fall to the floor. I flicked on the light and shone it on the passenger-side floor. The light hit something metal, and I closed my eyes on instinct—the reflection too bright for a moment. But then I reached down for it, felt the cold links, the familiar latch. I almost smiled on impulse, though everything felt off.
I was holding, I knew, John Hickelman’s watch, back from the dead. The links slid through my shaking fingers. The hands of the clock were frozen, unmoving. The silver facade had worn off at the corners to the dark and grimy layer below. How long had it been sitting here? A game brought back to life—or something more?
And as I sat in the car in the dark with nothing but a flashlight, the feeling crept up the back of my neck. It was the darkness outside, closing in from all sides, and the watch that had been left here, just waiting for me to find it.
The police at my house and my work; the woman at the lake with my face; the words I’d ignored—thinking myself safe, alone, on the other side of sliding glass doors and a mountain range.
Whatever it was I’d felt coming—it was already here.
CHAPTER 10
They had no record of an Emmy Grey at the last motel, either. And I didn’t want to picture her in a place like that. No lights outside, a sweet, cloying smell in the office, a rattling of pipes from the air in the ceilings. I held the watch tightly in my hand, as if this were the evidence I needed to present my case to the man behind the desk.
His face was pale and drawn, like that of someone not used to the sunlight. “No girls, not here,” he said after I’d described Emmy and asked if she worked there. And then he smiled wide, like we were in on the same joke.
I walked quickly for the car, the gravel drive only making me feel more exposed, my steps too fast, too fueled by the feeling of someone watching me. Emmy wouldn’t have left herself at a place like this. Emmy would know better.
I drove straight home, started tearing through Emmy’s drawers, searching through her things. Looking for anything else she might’ve left for me to find. And all the while wondering, Why? A game back in play? Or was she trying to tell me something?
I’d thought that watch was gone even before she left the first time. I wondered if it had been sitting inside that taped-up box in the corner of my place all these years, if it had been tucked safely under my arm as I moved apartments each time. I wondered if even that was the game: a test, maybe, to see whether I’d open it.