The Lost Night (Page 47)

“You, too! You’ll have to send me the video or site or whatever you end up putting together.” He produced a business card for me. “Have you talked to other people for it?”

I nodded. “Her…her mom, and her old roommate Sarah, just some old friends.” Bringing up Alex, whom she’d dumped Greg for, seemed unwise.

He hooked his thumbs around the strap of his bag. “If you haven’t yet, you should talk to her best friend. Jenny…Jenna, I think.”

“Jenna,” I repeated. “Do you remember her last name?”

“God, not anymore. But you remember her—Edie’s roommate in Calhoun. The one she was really close with.” He shrugged. “Although, come to think of it, they weren’t talking much by the time we broke up. But you know what Edie was like. Anyway, great running into you!” He gave me another cheerful handshake and jogged across the intersection, never looking back.

I stood there for a while, the wind rustling my hair and dress. Jenna. Sarah and Kevin had gossiped about her as they played Jenga in one of my Flip cam videos, but I couldn’t remember much else. I called Tessa from my watch during my long walk home. “I need your help with one more Edie-related thing,” I said. “I promise I’m not being obsessive. I just need you to look someone up for me. I feel like she’s probably in the case files somewhere, but I missed her. I’ll check on Facebook when I’m home, but her name is Jenna something.”

A BMW gunned through the red light just as I stepped off the curb; I jumped back, heart pounding.

“You said it’s Jenna?”

“Yeah, Jenna. She was one of Edie’s old roommates. I didn’t know her at all and Edie literally never mentioned her, but Greg said they were close.”

Tessa was quiet for a second, presumably taking notes. “Wait, you talked to Greg?”

“Yeah, I just happened to run into him on the street. Craziest thing. He was—”

I stopped talking as a new theory crashed through me: In the video, Sarah said that Jenna had been busted for selling drugs. Could that explain the Molly in Edie’s system that night?

Was Jenna still living in Calhoun when Edie died?

“Lindsay, you there?”

“Sorry, I’m here.” I motored around an old woman. “Can I call you again later? It’s kinda hard to hear.”

“Sure. I’m on it. I’m actually still at work, want me to come over?”

A curl of happiness that someone wanted to see me. Yet I hated the idea of making small talk while I should be at my computer, picking this final lock. “I think I’m just gonna order in. Kinda need a quiet night.”

“A White Lotus Thai kind of evening?”

“Pad See Ew know me too well,” I cracked, and she giggled appreciatively. We hung up and I headed home, hope billowing in me for the first time in weeks.

* * *

First I tried Greg’s Flickr; the account existed, but the password didn’t work. I emailed, texted, and called him from my watch, figuring a full-court press was my best bet here. Then I set to work finding Jenna.

An hour later, she was yet another digital ghost. I’d found her full name in an old email, but it was laughably generic—Jenna Smith—and I had no other identifying details to go on. Still, I sent it to Tessa and kept searching. The name returned thousands of hits, which I waded through with mounting annoyance: LinkedIn profiles and Instagram feeds and Twitter handles all devoid of real info and fitting neatly into my vague notions about this mystery woman—brunette, unremarkable, born sometime in the eighties. I couldn’t picture her clearly, and no one with the name seemed to fit into my Calhoun network, no common Facebook friends or LinkedIn connections. I shot off a few emails and messages to Jennas who sort of seemed to fit the profile, politely asking if they’d lived in Calhoun around 2009, but half the messages bounced right back.

I rewatched the video of Kevin and Sarah at the Levee. I wanted to smack myself for overlooking this: Here Sarah had offered up that Jenna had been busted for selling, but the drugs were Anthony’s, and the two of them were probably sleeping together—meaning Jenna might have been the mystery caller who had brought Anthony to the scene. I filled out a FOIL request for the drug arrest records from that month—the Jenga video had a date, June 6—but I knew my lack of specificity about the actual day and charges would likely result in a rejection, or at best, a slower-than-usual retrieval. I hit submit and groaned in frustration, grabbing a fistful of hair and tugging it against my scalp.

Was this her? Was she just on the other side of all of this, somehow aware that I’d been investigating and feeling endangered enough that she’d cracked open Edie’s email and sent me a vaguely threatening email? I answered my door to a dazed-looking man, holding out my bag of Thai food and looking winded from the climb. I thanked him and watched him slowly turn around, as if he’d been counting on more repartee.

Tessa finally called around nine, splintering my hope that she’d have more luck than I. “I can’t find a damn thing,” she reported. “There are a lot of Jenna Smiths, obviously, but I can’t find anything tying one to Calhoun or even Bushwick. We could try to track down the lease—Will says they aren’t confidential unless there’s a confidentiality clause, which I doubt—but we’d need the landlord to hand it over.”

“Well, he’s dead.”

“Shit, that’s right.” Tessa clicked her tongue.

“Ugh. And here I got so hopeful when I saw you were calling.” I was eating the last of my noodles. Tonight they tasted kind of lame. “Thanks for trying, though.”

There was a beat. “Well, I have other news,” she said. “My coworker helped me trace the IP address on that email.”

“The one from Edie?”

“Right, the one from her address. I’m not—Lindsay, I’m not sure how to say this.”

“What is it? Just tell me.”

“Well, that’s the thing, it’s not—”

“Who sent it?”

“Okay, I don’t…I’m not sure what this means, but the email…it came from you.”

Static fizzed in my ears, the volume high. My insides all jolted in closer to my spine.

“What?”

“The IP address is yours. It shows that the email—”

“Like from my building? Someone was nearby?”

“Not nearby—from you. The same…An IP address is like your fingerprint. It’s your coordinates on the internet. It identifies you by your specific computer, your laptop alone.”

The room twisted; I grabbed onto the table for support.

“So what are you saying?”

“Lindsay, I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“You’re saying I sent it?”

“You did send it.”

“You’re lying.” She wasn’t lying. I was the liar. I was the fucking crazy lunatic liar.

Her voice warning, rich with annoyance: “Linds.”

“You’re insane! I ask you to be on my fucking side for once, and instead you’re trying to manipulate me.” I was falling apart; I was a shack tearing to pieces in the wind. I was spinning so fast I didn’t have time to stop and ask if any of this made sense. “Admit it, Tessa.”

There was a silence, so long and sharp and quivering that the world zoomed in on itself until it was the size of the speaker on the underside of my watch.

“You know what, Lindsay, I’m done,” she said, and hung up.

Chapter 15

ALEX

The apartment kind of sucked.

The Craigslist ad made it sound like there’d be high ceilings and tons of artists and a steady stream of music and partying and pussy. But this was, like, pretty fucking gross. The bedroom was smaller than my college dorm room. The kitchen was shitty and looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in years. One of my new roommates had taken a kitten in off the street that was cute but kinda nasty, with matted hair and little bits of god-knows-what that caught in your fingers when you tried to pet it. She named it Animal. This was nothing like the house Lance and I had sublet over the summer in Philly.

But the part about people partying a lot, that was pretty true. My roommates seemed to have drugs tucked all over the place, so the good news was that they were constantly offering me something and the bad news was that they were all high pretty much all the time, lying around on the gross crusty sofa and staring at all my boxes with these freakity doll eyes. Kevin, the only roommate of the three who seemed to actually care about making music, would sometimes sit at his drum kit and jam with me, and the other kids would get up and dance like jerky strung-out puppets on the rug in front of them.

But it’d only been five days, maybe things would change. It was in the hottest part of the summer and we’d all just dragged ourselves here from various boring corners of America—Syracuse, Santa Fe, Cincinnati, Atlanta—so maybe we were just exhausted and trying to get our hometowns out of our systems before we started doing what we were all here to do, which was obviously to make decent art in our respective fields. Show our parents up for rolling their eyes at our BFAs and nagging us all the damn time to get the minor in computer science, just as a backup, “you were always so good on the computer back home.” Well, Calhoun had once been home to the lead guitarist in The Sinks. So fuck you, Mom and Dad.