by Andrea Bartz
Not eager enough to send a police escort, however. The Amtrak was sold-out, of course—all twelve trains left in the day were full, even the one that got in at 2:30 a.m. So instead we killed time at a diner, then clambered onto a low-cost “express bus,” which was neither express nor, it turned out, low-cost when you bought the last three available tickets a few hours before its departure. We stood waiting in the cold parking lot, stomping our feet to stay warm while Mikki cried on and off, and I stupidly remarked that at least we’d be able to sit together, since we were first in line.
“There’s something else I didn’t tell you,” Mikki said at one point, her voice rickety, her hands tucked into her armpits. “Cameron told me that Eleanor broke up with him right before that weekend in Beverly. The one with Jinny. He said she basically hung up the phone from setting up her investor pitches and called him to break things off. But she told him she wanted to be the one to tell her parents, since they were gonna be heartbroken, so he shouldn’t tell anyone just yet. I guess he was super, super hurt.”
“Yikes.” My nose scrunched in sympathy. “I remember us asking where he was that night, why he couldn’t come party with us, and she just said he was busy. I thought they broke up a week or two later.” I could imagine how Cameron must’ve heard it: I need a fancy New York boyfriend to go with my fancy new life. You’re not good enough for me.
“I know,” Mikki said. “He’s been carrying that around for nine years. When he told me, he just seemed hurt, but maybe he was…angry too.”
A beat. “So we really think Cameron did this?” Katie looked back and forth at us, her eyes wide, like Cosmo when he wants to be fed.
Mikki erupted into tears and I rubbed her back. “Yeah. We do.”
The bus croaked to a stop in front of us. Mikki slumped in a window seat and I took the one next to her. I dozed off, then awoke in Jersey, and across the Hudson, the Manhattan skyline was glittering and two-dimensional, like a vast cardboard set piece studded with bluish lights. The Empire State Building was green and red, which made me sad. Christmas comes but once a year, and future ones would forever be a reminder of today, painful echoes.
The bus dumped us on Seventh Avenue and we blinked under the bright streetlamps, as we milled around in the cold.
“So do we just go home?” Katie asked.
“I’m not ready to be alone,” I said.
Katie nodded. “Alone on Christmas Eve—it’s just too much. I know we’re not about to salvage the holiday, but I’d be down to order takeout and zone out to some bad TV.”
“We could still try for Italian,” I suggested. “Our original plan from last week. Mikki, can we come over?” She shrugged and said sure.
The local Italian joints were closed (fair) so we settled on Chinese, piling onto the order potstickers and crab rangoon, hoping to drown our feelings in oil and salt. Mikki queued up This Is Spinal Tap without running it by us, which seemed odd, but soon I was distracted by its rat-a-tat rhythm, lazy off-the-cuff conversations in thick British accents, and then the concert scenes, so loud and triumphantly silly.
A particularly deafening shrawww of electric guitar roused Katie, who’d fallen asleep.
“Whew, guys, I gotta go home,” she announced, giving her head a little shake. “We should do something tomorrow, even if it’s just another dumb movie marathon. We shouldn’t be alone.” She waved from the door, and Mikki stood to lock the dead bolt behind her.
I twirled cold Lo Mein noodles around a fork as Mikki settled back and hit Play. The last few days had been awful, but there was something gentle thrumming underneath the horror: answers, a cessation, the promise that, in time, we could grieve and heal and move on. My eyes jumped to a screen on the coffee table, suddenly lit.
“Is that yours?” I nodded toward it, then saw that Mikki was on her own cell. “Dummy left her phone. Wonder when she’ll notice.”
“Good old Katie,” Mikki replied, then yawned.
I slid my own phone from my purse and checked my email. Among the holiday promotions, one from Daniel:
Hana: Hopefully you’re not checking emails on xmas eve. Karen said you guys headed back today and that she and Gary are waiting for Cameron to be found. I’m doing okay. I’m taking it an hour at a time. It hasn’t sunk in yet that we know the bastard who did this. The detective said they found a lot of activity from him in Eleanor hate groups. I guess he never got over the rejection and blamed her for his wasted life. Makes me sick to think that he was at our wedding.
I shook my head involuntarily. Spinal Tap was wandering through a basement in search of the stage door; Mikki was tapping out a text.
Anyway, when you’re back on the grid, I want your take on this: I found it in a box of old books in one of the closets in the foyer. (I’ve been tearing the apartment apart looking for clues.) I don’t know what to make of it…are we concerned about her mental health? Pathological lying, etc.? I don’t want to embarrass her but have been trying to think why E would’ve kept it, and since you were around back then, I thought you might have some idea. LMK when you get a chance. -D
I opened the attachment: a photograph of a sheet of paper, slightly off-kilter, the type a tiny bit blurred. A printed-out letter with December 18, 2016, at the top, Eleanor’s address below it, “sent via certified mail.” I zoomed in:
To Whom It May Concern:
It has come to my attention that your newly announced company, The Herd, is substantially similar to my own business plan for The In, an all-female coworking space. Specifically, the aesthetics, company branding, and corporate model of The Herd are nearly identical to the corresponding details outlined in my business plan for The In.
I am the proprietor of all copyright within my business plan for The In, an all-female coworking space (the “Work”). I had reserved all rights in the Work, which was first published on May 21, 2010. You neither requested nor received permission to use my Work, therefore your unauthorized copying and use of my Work constitutes copyright infringement in violation of the United States copyright laws.
I hereby demand that you, within 30 days of this letter, immediately and permanently cease and desist the use of my Work. If you do not cease and desist within the above stated time period, I will be forced to take appropriate legal action against you and will seek all available damages and remedies.
Sincerely,
Mikki Danziger
A snowplow rumbled in the distance. I looked up at Mikki slowly, my heart beating louder than the drums and bass now shooting out of her TV. She scrolled at her screen, scratched her nose, oblivious to the baffling news I held in my hands.
Eleanor with her cute camp origin story. The one she’d casually filched from her friend. I could remember the moment Eleanor described to me her groundbreaking idea for an all-female coworking space: her eyes sparkling, voice bouncing with excitement, Oh you have to move here to help me start it, her words tumbling out faster and faster and faster—
“Mikki, what is this?” I handed her my phone and watched her eyes slide across the screen. A flash of fear in her eyes, and then a watercolor wash of pink seeped into her nose, her chin, her neck.
“Well, that’s humiliating,” she said, handing it back. Her chuckle was laced with pain. “You know what’s funny? I was so worried about the cops finding that. I practically tore apart her office looking for it. And I even sent Cameron—I had no idea what he’d done, obviously, but once he told me he was in town—I had him go look for it at Eleanor’s apartment. I thought it would look so bad for me, make me look guilty when I’m not. But now that I see it…” She puffed her lips, looked away. “It’s stupid. A kid with an account on Legal-Documents-R-Us.”
I paused the movie, then touched her forearm. “But what is it? What’s the In?”
A surge of wind against the windows; she whipped her head toward the hallway.
“Let
’s table it,” she said, her voice wafer-thin.
“I want to know. I’m here for you.”
She sniffed. “It’s stupid. In school, I took this Start-Up R&D class Eleanor had taken the semester before—it’s where she came up with the bones of Gleam. The capstone project was to make an entire business plan for a start-up, and…” She looked up, blinked. “I came up with the Herd.”
“What?”
“I hadn’t actually copyrighted it or anything—it was a class assignment. But I was really proud of it. Coworking spaces were just becoming a thing, and I had the idea of making it a social club, too, for all the weird, smart, misfit women like me.” A dark smile. “I think I wanted to manufacture the experience of falling in with someone like Eleanor. Like I had, freshman year. That’s why I called it the In—like, the in-crowd.”
This was too strange—it was swooping around the room too fast for me to catch it. I leaned forward. “And Eleanor saw it?”
“The whole thing. She had a copy. Saw me working on it and volunteered to give me feedback.” She shrugged. “And then everything happened with Gleam. I forgot all about the In; I was working nonstop to get everything for Gleam designed and launched. In fact, I barely touched my art supplies for two years. And—sidebar—she could have, at any point, made me a full-time employee and given me insurance and PTO days and stuff. You, too, Hana. But no, I was a contractor, slaving away for her. Doing so much for Eleanor for pitiful project fees that I couldn’t even take on lucrative work. And unlike you, I have student loans. And now, credit card debt. It never crossed your and Eleanor’s minds to ask if I could swing the expensive dinners and cocktails and trips with you. You have no idea what that’s like.”
Something shot up through me, bile or a burp or years and years of suppressed guilt.
“God, can you imagine?” she went on. “ ‘Sorry, I can’t afford the thirty-eight dollar brunch, I’ll stop at a falafel truck and meet you afterward’—humiliating. Being friends with you two is nothing if not keeping up appearances.”
“Mikki, we didn’t know. We should have known. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
“I know.” A long, choking breath. “I should have just…figured it out on my own. But I was happy you two were so successful. I was overjoyed when Gleam blew up.” She streaked her sleeve against her nose again. “I’ll never forget the day she called me in to see her—she was running Gleam out of the Cave, ironically—and cheerfully announced she was going to launch a second company, and I’d be in charge of all the visuals. It was wild: She sat there, smiling, and told me all about the Herd. Basically repeated my whole pitch deck back to me all these years later. I kept waiting for her to acknowledge that, like it was a weird joke, but she never did.”
This couldn’t be. This couldn’t be. I played it in my mind again: Eleanor excitedly telling me about the Herd, making me swear I wouldn’t tell anyone, even whipping out her phone to record me stating my name and giving a verbal NDA.
But no—Mikki wasn’t rewriting history. Deep down I knew it, knew her words were true. Guilt grabbed at me, clawing at my chest.
“So I gathered up all my courage and sent the cease-and-desist letter. Certified mail. I was on pins and needles, waiting for her to acknowledge it, and she just…never did.”
“Why didn’t you just ask her? Call her out in person?”
“I did, finally. Weeks later. And she said…she said if I tried to tell people that, she’d tell people about Jinny.”
She broke down in sobs and I shook my head.
“I pushed her.” The silence bloomed, echoed around her living room.
“You what?”
“I pushed Jinny. Playfully, when we were out by the pool. Eleanor saw what happened and…and pointed out that no one could prove it was an accident, that it was best that no one know. But then it finally came out, years later: If you say I stole the Herd, I’ll tell people you pushed Jinny. A stalemate.”
Shock burst out of me like laughter, like a cough. My hands, in the prayer position, pressed against my mouth.
“Why didn’t you talk to me?”
“I tried,” she said. “But every time I mentioned Eleanor’s name, your face lit up like a Christmas tree. You were so enamored of her—you didn’t want to see.”
“Oof,” I said. All this time, I’d been envious of Mikki for seeming so carefree and unencumbered. I’d thought her and Eleanor’s relationship was uncomplicated, pure. Regret widened in me like a yawn.
And then it occurred to me, the unthinkable, the other half of the horrific Eleanor-Mikki equation. She couldn’t…?
As if she’d heard my thoughts: “Anyway, I obviously had my feelings hurt, but I would never hurt Eleanor. I miss her. Despite everything, I loved her so much.”
I felt the wheels turning. “So did Cameron…I assumed he just hated her because she rejected him all those years ago. But did he also know about this? About what she was doing to you?”
She chewed on her lip, then nodded. “He was the only person I told. He was, like, the one person who didn’t see Eleanor with this huge halo around her—he believed me.” She nodded again. “He encouraged me to stand up for myself. But I didn’t. It kills me to think that I…that he…”
“Oh, Mikki.” I pulled her into a hug and felt her shake against my collarbone. I smoothed a hand over her hair. “It’s okay. It’s over now.”
“I feel awful,” she croaked.
I swallowed. “Did Cameron tell you anything? Did you know?”
“I didn’t know anything.” She pulled away to wipe her nose. Eyes, nose, cheeks—all poinsettia red. “I had no idea he was in town. Or, Jesus, that he stabbed her and left her on the roof. I didn’t hear from him until Wednesday—the day after we realized she was missing—and he told me he’d come down to try to help.” A rickety sigh. “Like I said, I asked him to look for the cease-and-desist letter. I wasn’t thinking straight; I was worried they’d suspect me. Until last night, I had no idea the killer was actually him. And now he’s…”
She groaned and rubbed her palms over her blotchy face, then stood. “I really want to go to bed, if that’s okay,” she said.
“Of course. We’ll do something tomorrow, if you’re up for it.” I slid my arms into my coat and followed her to the door.
She unlocked the dead bolt and I turned to look her in the eye. “Mikki, I’m really sorry. I want you to be able to talk to me about anything and I’m just really sorry you felt like you couldn’t.”
She sniffled. “Thanks.” I hugged her and it was an odd, uneven hug, me in my hat and unzipped parka, her bony and birdlike under my arms. Then I trudged downstairs and spotted a yellow taxi cruising past. I lifted my arm—what luck, spotting one on Christmas Eve—and in it I rolled north into Queens, Manhattan’s skyline glittering to my left.
* * *
—
Gary was calling, his face popping up in a goofy photo I’d taken at a Harvard football game all those years ago. The cabbie peered at me in the rearview mirror as I fumbled to answer.
“They found him, Hana,” he said as soon as I picked up, his voice pulsing with hysterics. “In a motel a few hours outside Montreal. He used the fake passport to get a room at a seedy motel and they found him almost dead with a needle sticking out of his arm, they say he’d—he was—”
“Gary. It’s okay. Just breathe.” A sob welled up in my throat and I swallowed hard. “Let’s slow down. Where are you?”
“We’re at home. That Ratcliff woman called us. They’re rushing Cameron to a hospital right now.”
A sheet of snow slid off a tree, pounced on the taxi’s roof. “But he’s okay?”
“She said he’s stable. That’s all they know.” He stuttered for a second. “She said it was a huge amount of heroin. A suicide attempt.”
“But he’s stable. She said he’s sta
ble.”
“But they don’t know if he’ll be able to talk. To tell us what—what really happened to Eleanor.”
“It’s okay. It’s okay.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of any of this, and I imagined Gary didn’t either. He sounded terrified for Cameron—his surrogate kid, the son he never had—but did he still believe Cameron was innocent?
“He had—” He paused and moaned, a sound so sad tears poured down my own cheeks. It took him a few tries to get it out. “He had Eleanor’s laptop with him. And her phone.”
“Oh, Gary. I’m so sorry.” I let him cry for a moment. I was touched that he called me, but also surprised. “What can I do? Do you want me to come back up to Beverly?”
“No. I just…I thought all of you should know. Mikki too.”
Oh God—not after the night Mikki had. I’d let the poor thing sleep. “She’s in bed but I’ll let her know tomorrow. Can you keep me updated on any news?”
“I will. I will.”
“Okay. Take care of yourself. Karen too.”
“I will.”
I hung up and the driver turned the music back up.
“It will be a white Christmas, ma’am,” he said.
I didn’t reply.
CHAPTER 24
Katie
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 24, 9:48 P.M.
I rounded the corner just in time to see a cab drifting away from Mikki’s building and sighed. Now that I’d likely missed the last bus—I couldn’t confirm without the use of my damn phone, presumably still on Mikki’s coffee table—all I wanted was a direct ride home. Soon I’d be standing in Mikki’s Wi-Fi and summoning a car. Hopefully she hadn’t fallen asleep. Did her buzzer even work? My last resort would involve flinging snowballs at her window.