He blew out a breath, ran his fingers through his close-cropped hair, not meeting my eyes. There was something he still wasn’t saying. Something I wasn’t understanding.
“Do you think that this”—I gestured between us—“somehow taints the story or your part in it? Do you worry that it makes it seem like you were using me, Donovan?” He flinched at my use of his last name. “Can’t you recuse yourself?”
He stepped back, surprised, unsure. “I’m the best person for it, because of it. I was already looking for Emmy. I had already been looking into James Finley.”
It was a line I knew well. The very fine line between too close to see clearly and the closeness working in the case’s favor. Kyle Donovan knew about James Finley because I’d told him where to look. Had dug into his past because I had sent him searching. Knew Emmy’s car because I’d given him the description already. Knew more about Emmy than anyone here, other than me. He was the best person for the job because of me.
“So, say it, then.” He owed me at least that.
“I don’t want you to think it was nothing.”
I laughed. Wasn’t it?
“It’s just for now,” he said. “Just for a little while. Until we tie it all up.”
“Nobody’s going to care,” I said.
“Yes, they most definitely will.”
“No,” I said, and I felt the meanness I had in me, felt it from nowhere, the edge. “Nobody’s going to care when it happened. All that matters is that it did. It’s too late. The time line doesn’t matter. If you’re really so worried that this taints the story, you’re already screwed.”
He blinked, set his jaw, looked at me anew. “I’m sorry,” he said in a way that sounded like he thought this was me clinging desperately, a girl trying to talk her way out of being dumped. Making a fool of myself. He cleared his throat. “Are you going to continue staying here?”
“Why,” I said, “planning to swing by?” Everything I had said the night before, twisted and tinged with something else, sarcasm and anger.
“You said you were scared. I was planning to have some drive-bys scheduled throughout the night. I’ll be around, too. You can call me.”
“I called you before, and you still haven’t told me. Who was the witness that put Davis Cobb down by the lake.”
“It’s an active investigation.” A defense that had meant nothing a week earlier.
“You told me plenty already.”
“I shouldn’t have, Leah.”
“You can’t tell me about Davis Cobb? I thought that was something different. A different case.” But I knew something more, even if I didn’t understand it. The photo of Bethany Jarvitz that had been under my house. Not such a stranger. Not such a random face. But a tie, a real tie, between the Cobb case and this. And I was the only one who knew it.
He gritted his teeth, seemed annoyed, and yet he pressed on. “James Finley has been dead for weeks. When was the last time you saw Emmy again? I need times. I need you to be exact.”
Like this was a game, and I had to give him something first. He was no longer asking because she was a victim. He was asking because I was a witness and she was a suspect.
I felt myself closing off, shutting down. “I already told you this.”
“Her car, then. When had you last seen that?”
I shook my head, trying to think. Trying to make sense of the fact that her car had been gone for weeks and I hadn’t noticed. I sank into the closest kitchen chair, and Kyle sat beside me. “She parks it behind the house. You have to go looking for it. I didn’t notice.”
“She parks it behind the house,” he repeated. “And that didn’t make you think that maybe she was hiding it? Because it wasn’t hers?”
It hadn’t seemed odd to me until he said it. It just seemed like everything else: like Emmy. The little quirks that made her who she was. “I didn’t know,” I said. The words sounded tiny and defensive, even to me. Like they had when I’d stood in Logan’s office, saying the same.
Kyle closed his eyes, took a slow, steadying breath. “You want some details, Leah? Here you go. There’s no one named Emmy Grey in the Peace Corps from eight years ago. I’ve got a list of every person who went to Botswana, and there’s nothing even close. She’s not who you thought she was. Okay?” He put a hand over mine, some misguided attempt at keeping me calm. “She lied to you about her job. And that car. Leah, the car has fake plates. There’s no registration on the car. Her name is not Emmy Grey.”
I was shaking my head. Thinking of that picture under the house; thinking of the Emmy who took me in. Unable to reconcile the two. The moment she hopped off the wall, looking at me.
I had been no one. I’d stood in front of the bulletin board eight years earlier, adrift from my life. I was lost, untethered, unsure of everything. And then Emmy came along while I was this stripped-away version of a person. So was it strange that I felt her in my skin? She was there when it re-formed. She existed inside the sharper edges I erected. When he told me I didn’t know her at all, I instinctively didn’t believe him. And as he laid out the facts to support his claim, all I could think was So what?
So what if that wasn’t her name. If that wasn’t her license plate. If that wasn’t her job. When you got down to it, everyone was a mystery, just waiting to be unraveled.
And wasn’t that what we were looking for, anyway? Over coffee, over drinks, behind the dating website profiles and the painful small talk? That we would stumble upon someone who would want to dig a little deeper, uncover the parts that no one else knew. To want to know you deep inside, under everything. You wanted the person who would pick you over the job. Over their moral judgment. Over their case or expectations. You wanted the person who would pick option C. Who knew what you’d done and still put you first.
Emmy had always picked me. Over money and boys and any sense of moral code. I’d known it from the start, the day she held the knife in her hand.
So what if there’s a picture in the crawl space of Bethany Jarvitz. So what, Leah. If the situation was flipped, she wouldn’t tell. A, B, or C. You know what she’d pick.
But then I thought, You don’t know her at all. Every detail she shared, a figment of her imagination. I pictured that day we met, saw her looking at me as exactly what I was: this stripped-away version of a person; a familiar face, even. And I saw her anew. Everything shifting, worlds colliding, that moment when someone changes before your eyes—the beginning of the end.
I thought I saw things so clearly. That I was open to the stories other people let pass by. That I could wrap my hands around the truth before anyone else could even spot it. But you had to get so close to do that. You had to slip right into their world.