Despite what I’d told Kyle, I couldn’t get to sleep. I kept imagining the sounds of animals under the porch: cats or rabbits; bears, maybe. Imagined the shadow I’d seen on my front porch, the light on in my house after Emmy had already gone missing. And knew it could not have been James Finley. He had been dead for a while, Kyle had said. And a while was all they could give me at the moment, though the medical examiner would get back with specifics sometime in the future.
But these were the facts: The man Emmy was seeing had a criminal record. Her car was in the lake, with James inside. Emmy had not returned.
I thought of the scratching under the porch again. The timing. Wondered if it was Emmy coming back for something. If she’d found that hiding spot the night when she shone her flashlight under the porch, and thought: Mine. If she’d used it for herself, knowing I’d never look. That I was too afraid.
I knew there were two possible outcomes: that Emmy was dead somewhere, alongside James Finley—maybe somewhere in the lake but maybe not. Or she could have run because she’d gotten tangled up in something with James Finley.
This was not the first time Emmy had gotten caught up in a mess. She’d taken a knife to Aaron’s arm; she’d stolen a watch from John Hickelman’s apartment; always baiting the danger, daring it to come closer.
Once she’d been confronted in a bar. A man had grabbed her arm, leaned in close, said, “I saw you. You took that money right off the bar top. It’s not yours. I saw what you did.”
She’d wrenched her arm away, but he’d grabbed on again. Finally, she’d taken the five-dollar bill out of her pocket, thrown it at him, and then she’d run, pulling me along with her. She’d laughed the whole way home, and it had caught, the nervous giggle escaping as I ran alongside her. But I kept looking over my shoulder, every corner we’d turn. I worried we’d be followed. Maybe I suspected that one day something would catch up with her.
Right now she could be in hiding somewhere, still in danger.
By proxy, I could be, too. Except she wouldn’t have left me here if she truly believed that. She wouldn’t—not the Emmy I knew.
* * *
EIGHT YEARS AGO, LYING on the concrete floor with her feet up on the couch, she spoke with a voice that had cut through the fog of vodka. “All relationships fall into three categories. Three. That’s it.”
She’d tipped her head to the side, her hair spilled out around her, to check if I was listening, whether I was awake. I liked moments like this, staying silent and letting her spin a tale.
She’d looked back to the ceiling. “Okay, here’s the hypothetical. Take anyone you know. Anyone. Let’s say you know they’ve killed someone. They call you and they confess. Do you either, A, call the police.” She held up her thumb. “B, do nothing.” Her pointer finger. “Or C, help them bury the body.” Her third finger went up, and she held them over her face, waiting.
I laughed, realizing that she was serious. “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” she said. “That’s how you know.”
Emmy’s world operated like this, all blacks and whites, nothing in between. Three choices and that’s it. Not that there were degrees, and that these things shifted at any moment, at every moment. How Paige and Noah were each in one category and then were in another. All of us constantly in motion.
But Emmy said such things instead of saying what she meant, which I believed at the moment to be I love you.
And yet for years, I would find myself classifying people like this. Deciding how much I liked someone and the status of a relationship based on a single multiple-choice question.
* * *
DAWN WAS BREAKING, THE world coming back to life. Before I took my shower, I grabbed the flashlight from the kitchen drawer and marched down the wooden steps. Got down in the dirt in front of the porch. Felt the cold earth, the dried clay clinging to my clothes and my palms. Kept the flashlight in one hand as I moved, crawling my way to the white container Dodge had left underneath. I used the bottom edge of my T-shirt to keep my prints off, as the police had done. And then I opened the bin, peeling back the lid again. It smelled chemical, like bleach.
Peering inside, I found a wooden stirring stick near the base, thick yellow gloves, chemical cleaners, a scrubbing brush. Tried to imagine Emmy unscrewing the cleanser, tried to picture her hands in these gloves, this brush in her grip.
It could’ve been here for ages, for when the owners needed to clean the place between tenants. I replaced the lid and crawled farther, to the hole Dodge had found. The dirt was kicked up in a mound, and the hole was symmetrical and narrow, like an animal home. It didn’t seem deep enough for something to have been buried. No space for things Emmy would want to keep hidden.
I was about to crawl back out toward the sunlight when I heard footsteps. Just out of sight. Coming from nowhere. No car up the drive or voices far away. I held my breath, trying to think of an excuse as to why I was currently under the house, if it was a police officer. But the footsteps didn’t climb the front steps. They just shuffled back and forth on the side of the house, pausing for a moment and then moving to a new spot. Like someone was peering through the windows one at a time. Looking for me. Looking at me.
I held my breath, turned off the flashlight, pushed myself farther out of sight, heard my heartbeat echoing inside my head. There was a dark corner tucked away around the wooden post, and I found myself less afraid of what might be lurking in the shadows than what might be waiting outside. My breathing felt too loud, my heartbeat too strong, and I was sure the person on the other side of the wall knew I was here. I backed up farther, until my leg hit resistance. I eased to sitting, then felt something press into my spine—something protruding from the wall.
I jumped but stopped. Reached around and grabbed for whatever had touched me. It was metal, circular, had a dial . . . It was a padlock. I held it in my hand as I heard the footsteps moving away. Then I flicked on the flashlight, saw that it was one of those school Master locks looped through the metal latch of a small wooden door. There was a crawl space built in to the base of this house that nobody had found. Not the police and not me.
I aimlessly spun the dial a few times and pulled at the lock, but nothing happened.
Bolt cutters. I’d need bolt cutters. A pair of pliers, maybe. This lock was for school lockers, not bank safes, after all. The footsteps had disappeared, but I counted to a hundred, then two hundred, waiting. Making sure.