“I called the police,” she said a few minutes later, once we were sitting at a small round table in the kitchen, mugs of tea in front of each of us even though I’d already had enough caffeine to power me for a few days. “On Friday. When I said that he’d replied to a few of my texts, the officer kind of laughed and said Wyatt was probably just out sowing his wild oats. I tried to explain that my son is—he doesn’t do that, he doesn’t not come home. Ever.”
I could see where the police might have been coming from but disagreed—the fact that something unusual had happened with or to both Addison and Wyatt on the same night didn’t seem like a good sign. I said, “What did he say in the texts?”
She took her phone out of the pocket of her housecoat and showed me their exchange.
Honey, where are you?
Wyatt?
I had to get a ride to Dr. Franco’s office with Lenny next door.
Where are you?
I’m sorry mom
When are you coming home?
I need to get my pills from Kroger
I don’t know
I’ll get you an Uber
I don’t want an Uber, I want you to tell me where you are
Taking care of something.
I’ll be back when I can
What’s wrong?
Nothing
What are you taking care of?
Wyatt?
What on earth is going on?
The last response from Wyatt had been Saturday afternoon.
“I take it that it’s unlike him not to respond to you?”
“He’s glued to his phone. And he knows that I know he’s glued to his phone. He always texts me back. Especially since I’ve been sick…” Wyatt’s mother trailed off. Her name was Gwen and Wyatt was her only son. “And you know, I get it. The police probably get calls about all kinds of things that don’t amount to much, but when I say my son would not do this, I am absolutely positive.”
“You’re close?”
“Very.” She dabbed at her eyes. “Also, I’m having a procedure in two weeks. So things are stressful lately, which Wyatt knows, of course, so he definitely wouldn’t do this, not right now.”
“And the last time you saw him was Wednesday.”
Gwen nodded. “Around seven. I fixed dinner for us. Then he went to work. When I got up in the morning, his door was closed so at first I thought he was still asleep—he always sleeps late, since he doesn’t get home till four a.m. Sometimes a bit later, if he decides to go to the gym after. The yellow and purple one over by North Broadway. But anyway, he’s always home in the morning. At about ten, I saw his car wasn’t here, and that was when I knew something had to be wrong.” She swirled her tea bag idly around her mug. “He shouldn’t be working in a place like that. But he’s—he’s a felon now,” she said, shaking her head. “So his options are limited.”
“Mind if I ask what happened?”
“Oh, it was a terrible thing. He tried to break up a fight outside a bar on campus—a transgender classmate of his was being harassed. Wyatt stepped in and it—it wasn’t a fair fight, of course, it was two against one, but he’s very strong, my son. He put these boys in the hospital, one of them had a broken jaw. And of course it turned out that he’s the nephew of some bigwig who gives a lot of money to the school. So in one swoop, Wyatt’s expelled and charged with assault. All because he was trying to help.” She shook her head slowly, disbelieving. “This world is not fair.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said. It was probably a safe bet that the bigwig’s nephew was white, and Wyatt was not, which was at the heart of a lot of the unfairness. “So not a lot of places are hiring people with felonies on their records.”
“He’s still looking for something better. But without his student loans, and with my health … he needed to start working right away. So that’s where he wound up. A real snake pit, from the sound of it. Rather than a paycheck, he just gets a stack of cash from the register. His boss is always having him run weird errands. I keep telling him, you need to keep records of what you’re getting paid, what he’s having you do. Don’t get wrapped up in whatever funny business this is. And do not socialize with those people.”
“What kind of weird errands?”
“Well, he told me about going to Microcenter to buy a bunch of techy stuff.”
“Techy stuff?”
“Cameras, computer stuff. A couple thousand dollars’ worth. And then the next day, they made him return it all.”
“Why?”
She shook her head.
That was definitely weird. Laundering cash from the bar, maybe? It was a wildly inefficient way to do that, especially when you were already in cahoots with something of a master of the medium. But maybe Shane was trying to short Vincent Pomp’s proceeds and lacked the brainpower to devise a better system?
I said, “Did Wyatt ever mention a young woman named Addison? A deejay?”
Gwen’s eyebrows went together. “Yes,” she said, an edge in her voice. “He told me about her. He said she had some trouble with someone, in the club. He had to toss some woman out because of it.”
“Really.”
She nodded.
“When was this?”
“Oh, I don’t know. A while back.”
“Do you know what the trouble was?”
“It sounded like something to do with a man. Like so much trouble is, you know. But I don’t know the specifics. Wyatt just said that Addison is a real nice girl with the worst luck.”
There was that word again: nice.
“Do you think they might’ve been involved?”
“Involved? No. My son is gay. They’re just friends.”
“Any idea if they hang out together outside of work?”
Gwen said, “Unless she likes to lift weights, I don’t think so. But like I said, my son is glued to that phone. I’m sure they message each other and whatnot. I just hope he’s been smart enough not to get involved in anything ugly over there.” She shook her head. “The past year has been nothing but pain.”
There was no answer at Shane Resznik’s motel room. That was my first guess as to Wyatt’s whereabouts, since he’d been driving Shane’s car just a few days earlier. But the car wasn’t here either. I sat in the parking lot for a while just in case one or both of them spontaneously showed up, and I mulled over what Gwen Achebe had to say: trouble at the bar, over a man, which led to Wyatt throwing some woman out.
There was definitely something brewing between Shane Resznik’s two lady loves, Lisette and the braless Goth bartender, but it didn’t seem like Addison fit into that saga. Resznik had seemed downright surprised when I asked about her.
That left me with BusPass Guy, who could easily have had a wife, along with pictures of Addison on his phone. But who, also, could have been literally anybody.
People, in general, weren’t all that mysterious. But when you looked into their lives from the outside—no background, no context—they suddenly looked that way. I was no different; if a detective who didn’t know anything about me needed to figure out where I might have gone or who I might have gone with, there weren’t many obvious answers.
An interesting thought experiment: my own disappearance, and how I’d investigate it. I’d check my mother’s house, my brother’s place—Andrew’s, not Matt’s, because he sucked—and Catherine’s place, if anyone pointed me in her direction. I’d already checked Wyatt’s mother’s place, his sister lived in Michigan and hadn’t heard from him, and I didn’t know of a love interest or any friends other than Addison, who was, of course, also nowhere to be found.
I spent a bit of time systematically “friending” some of Wyatt’s connections in case this would magically release any clues hidden behind his profile privacy settings. According to his mother, he worked, went to the gym, and came home—no exceptions or diversions. I didn’t know how likely that was, but the purple and yellow gym by North Broadway could only refer to one place—the Planet Fitness on Indianola. It was beside a large Volunteers of America thrift shop, where I’d once tracked down a porcelain urn containing the remains of someone’s beloved pet ferret.
Clients hired me to find lots of things, and I took them all seriously—but people, most of all.
When neither Shane nor Wyatt had resurfaced in close to two hours, I decided to try the gym. There was a perky blond woman in a black-and-purple uniform behind the counter when I went into the gym. I wondered if she owned SpinSpo leggings and assumed she did. Proof that the universe has a sense of humor: two different fitness-related cases at the same time, despite my firm anti-exercise stance other than running my mouth. I showed her a picture of Wyatt on my phone. “I’m looking for my friend,” I started, not expecting much.
But then her face lit up. “Wyatt!”
“You know him?”
“Sure. He used to come in here all the time.”
“Used to?”
I noticed she had a streak of purple in the lock of hair tucked behind her ear. “Like last year.”
“Was he friends with anyone here?”
“Friends? I don’t know, probably not. Although, he applied for a job here, had an interview and everything. Then he started going to another gym. I’m not sure why they wouldn’t hire him. He’s super nice. Great smile.”
I figured I knew why—a failed background check—but there was no point in splashing Wyatt’s business around. “Do you know what gym he goes to now?”
She tipped her head to the left, the way people so often did when trying to remember a name or to think of a lie. I hoped it was the former in this case. “He told me what it was called but it’s just gone, you know? But it was something like—it sounded like a deodorant brand.”
“What, like Speed Stick?”
She laughed. “No, fresh or something.”
“Any idea where it was?”
Purple Streak shook her head. “Sorry.”
I went home and spent an hour making a list of gyms in Columbus that also potentially sounded like deodorant brands:
Speed Round
Clear Confidence Fitness
Purity
Stride
CleanSweat
Crystal Sweat
X-Treme System
But by now it was Sunday night and it looked like most of them were closed.
I stood at the front window and looked out at the dark street. There weren’t any headlights shining this time—where was my low-key stalker when I actually wanted to speak to him?
A woman in a parka with a fur-lined hood walked by, a husky trotting alongside her. The dog looked happy. The woman looked miserable. I sat down on my sofa and said to the empty room, “I am so fucking frustrated I could scream.”
Sometimes saying it out loud helped a little. This time it didn’t. All of this runaround might be over nothing, but without knowing what exactly had happened at Nightshade, I’d never figure it out.
I grabbed my keys and left.