Chapter 61
Night Twenty-Six
Sybil
Levi’s text was one sentence long. An address.
Sybil hadn’t been to Los Angeles in years.
She and Mark had come out to Beverly Hills for a medical conference half a decade ago, but she didn’t know the city well enough to orient herself at night, as her car from the airport wound through the streets of Beverly Hills.
She was startled when they pulled into the hotel driveway.
She was so discombobulated that she hadn’t expected to arrive so soon.
She checked in, dropped her bag in her room and caught a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror.
Even with the soft lighting of a five-star hotel, she looked undeniably wrecked.
Puffy eyes, splotchy skin. Her highlights had grown out, leaving an inch of muddy brown roots; her Botox was totally gone now, and that crease between her brows made her look somewhere in a state between bitchy and furious.
She rubbed in two pats of cream blush and dotted her lips with gloss.
It was the best she could do for now. How delusional had she been?
Hoping Zeke Rodriguez would make a move in Georgia!
She looked every day of her middle age. She stepped back to get a better look in the mirror.
She thought even her boobs looked saggier than they had just a few days earlier.
Levi lived on the second floor of an apartment building in Ocean Park.
One of those cute retro buildings with a shared pool that reminded Sybil of Melrose Place, even though she knew the reference dated her.
His door was a lime green that needed repainting, and before she could knock, it swung open as if he had been staring out the peephole waiting for her.
“Levi?” she asked. Like it would have been someone else.
“Come on in.”
The apartment was nicer inside than the door implied. Pristinely clean, inexpensive furnishings that had been well maintained, attempts at decor with framed black-and-white photographs, a rich emerald green rug, a pretty gold lamp like something that Eloise would rustle up at a flea market.
He sat on an upholstered armchair and gestured for her to do the same on the gray fabric couch facing him.
“I—first, thank you for agreeing to meet me,” Sybil said.
She had a long speech prepared, about how worried she was about Betty, how grateful she was that he answered her text, but Levi’s intensity spooked her, the way his eyes bored into her but were also wholly aware of everything around them, like if he needed to bolt at any second, he’d disappear before she could even realize what was happening.
“I wouldn’t normally,” he said. “But I believed you in your text. And…I remember Bets called me from your house, left me a message. Thanksgiving. She liked you, I could tell. And that you figured out the postcards”—he shrugged—“I realized that you were smart. If Bets trusted you, and you were smart, I figured I could trust you too.” He cleared his throat.
“I normally block all unknown numbers on my phone, even hers—if I don’t have your cell number, then you don’t need to have mine.
But I left home the week after Thanksgiving, so, um, I was feeling lonely, nostalgic, I guess, and I decided to check my messages.
Sometimes I give myself, like, an hour to wallow.
” He shook his head, like he wasn’t sure if he’d made a mistake or wasn’t sure that he should admit such vulnerabilities to a stranger.
“Still, I wasn’t certain if I was being played.
” He sighed. “When you reached out over the flip phone I’d given her—I mean, I realized then it really was her calling me that night.
I still have a lot of residual trust issues, I guess. Obviously.”
Sybil glanced around.
“So…she’s not here? With you? I was hoping you texted me on her behalf, that she’d be in LA. Safe.”
His brow furrowed. She saw the resemblance between them now, if Betty had dark brown hair and a square jawline.
Their eyes were the same, the straight slope of their noses too.
Levi still looked a little bit like a kid who had to dress up as a man for a job he didn’t like, in a button-down shirt and khaki pants that needed an iron.
“No,” he said. “And what she did—calling me at Thanksgiving, was stupid. She knew better than that, to use her cell phone; I told her in no uncertain terms: She has to be smarter than that. It’s why I didn’t, couldn’t, call her back, couldn’t trust the message until I was sure.
” He dipped his head, then raised it. “I’m sorry if you thought you’d find her here. That you came all this way.”
“I don’t mean to…pry,” Sybil said. She did mean to pry, but she didn’t want him to throw her out of his apartment. “But I don’t really understand what is going on. We went down to Georgia—”
At this, Levi jolted up in his chair.
“You went down to Georgia with Bets?”
“No, I’m sorry. I went down with, well, do you know the baseball player Zeke Rodriguez?”
“Sure, yeah, of course. I’m a child who escaped a cult, but I did not just land here from Mars.”
Sybil hadn’t meant to insult him, so she talked faster, like that could mask her embarrassment. “Right, well, Zeke and I went down there. He’s friends with her too.” She watched Levi’s eyes narrow in confusion. “I know your general story. The church, your dad, the fire, that Betty was orphaned.”
His eyebrows rose now, but he didn’t interrupt.
“Our other friend Julian, he…” Sybil sighed, stared up at the ceiling and tried to think of what to say that didn’t make this sound absolutely ridiculous.
Whenever she lost herself to her true crime podcasts, she never once thought how preposterous it all sounded.
What an absurd confluence of events had to unfold for these stories to be real, to be told, to be believed.
“I know this sounds like a lot, but he was killed.”
“I’m sorry,” Levi said.
“He was close with Betty, and the night it happened is the same night she disappeared.”
“You don’t think Betty did—”
“No, oh god, no,” Sybil said. “I think she got spooked. It turns out, Julian was investigating your dad or, I mean, the church.”
“Oh fuck.”
Sybil passed him her phone. “Julian had been sent this photo of her the same night. I can’t help but think—” She stopped when the blood drained from his face.
“Levi?”
“Someone sent this photo to your friend?”
“Yes, why?”
“And you trust your friend Julian?” Levi dropped her phone on the coffee table between them, then was on his feet, twisting the rod that closed his blinds.
Then four long steps later, he crossed the apartment and locked the door.
Sybil’s heart began to thud so loudly she could hear it throbbing in her ears.
Was Levi the one who started the fire, casually killing four people—even if they were very bad people—then running?
Was he about to chop her up, dispose of her body?
She grabbed her cell, typed in a frantic message to Zeke before she could think clearly.
She wasn’t na?ve enough not to recognize that she was totally out of her depth here.
Sybil: I found Levi, in LA. If you never hear from me again, it was him!!!
He sat back down in the leather chair, dropped his head into his hands.
“Fuck,” he said. “Fuck fuck fuck. I spent four, no, six years warning her to be careful.”
“I don’t—” Sybil felt foolish. Not at all the smartest person in the room. “I’m sorry, Levi. I don’t understand.” Then: “Are you about to murder me?”
“What?” Levi looked so stunned that Sybil wanted to slink out of his apartment and forget she ever contacted him in the first place.
“What? No! Oh my god.” His eyes floated over to the locked door, the shuttered blinds.
“Oh shit, I’m so sorry. I do all of that whenever I panic. Oh god, oh Jesus, I apologize.”
Now Sybil was triply embarrassed.
“No, no, I’m the one who should apologize,” she said.
“I overreacted. I’m not…I’m not always a people person.
” And shit, she’d texted Zeke, like a damsel in distress.
She couldn’t now text him and say to ignore the first text, because that just drew even more attention to the fact that she’d texted him in the first place.
Shit shit shit. She breathed in, breathed out.
Like she was at a yoga class she used to take that felt like it was of utmost importance, how long she could hold her crow pose, how many calories she burned.
Still, now, her breath slowed, calming her.
“I don’t keep meaning to say that I don’t understand, but this picture…
” She gestured to her phone. “What just happened?”
“Shit,” he said again. “Give me a second.” He disappeared behind a closed door, and she heard his muffled voice on the phone. Then he emerged, grabbed his coat from a hook on the back of the front door.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll drive. We need to hurry.”