by Andrea Bartz
The train thundered along its track, jolting suddenly and sending both of our shoulders swaying. But she kept her eyes on me and, after a second, my insides did something complicated. I’d thought it would make me feel better, winning the fight, landing a true burn. Instead I just felt sick.
“Well, that escalated quickly,” I said feebly. The second that followed contained this whole shimmering alternate timeline where Hana cracked a smile and pulled me into a hug and said something smart and soothing about how stressed we both were, how racked with grief, and let’s try it again and find a way forward.
The vision faded as the intercom crackled: “South Station, South Station, this is the last and final stop, all passengers must depart.”
“If you’re so independent,” Hana hissed, “find somewhere else to stay tonight.” Then she stood and reached over me, yanking down her suitcase with such ferociousness, it almost clocked me in the head.
The snow was lighter here, and actually pretty, an idyllic scene like those porcelain winter villages old ladies set up in their living rooms. Orange-brick churches with spindly spires and immaculate parks and fat streetlamps all stamped with quivering towers of snow. I admired it with a kind of Dickensian sullenness, feeling unwanted and pitiful as I stood behind Hana, looking out over the parking lot. She’d huffed off of the train and out of the terminal without so much as a look back, and I’d trailed her here, darting around people and tripping over suitcases to keep up. Now she was sighing impatiently and calling someone over and over, presumably Mikki, who’d gotten into town a few hours ago and was supposed to pick us up. Hana flung her arm in the air—“I’m waving, can you see me?” and finally I tapped her arm and pointed toward Mikki on the opposite end of the pickup zone. Hana spotted her and took off.
Usually Angry Hana was exasperated and lively, rolling her eyes and muttering, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” This was worse. Quieter, more controlled. We finally, mercifully, all made it inside the car, and Mikki and Hana chatted in the front: This was the Walshes’ car, yeah it was nice of them to invite us, they seemed to be doing okay, keeping it together. Hana ignored me so completely, so aggressively, that Mikki followed suit.
I tried to find a hotel for the night, halfheartedly, but since it was Christmas Eve Eve, most places were fully booked or astronomically expensive. Hopefully the house would be big enough for Hana and me to avoid each other inside. And she’d have to be nice to me in front of the Walshes, I figured. The last thing she’d subject them to was our own familial strife.
I texted Ted: “You with your fam this evening?”
Warmth spilled across my torso as I saw he was typing right back. “Glad you’re coming. Heading over to the Walshes’ now to snow-blow their driveway.”
Knee-jerk, my brain whipped up a joke (“Does this make you the blowjob guy?”), and then I felt a sickening punch. Eleanor is dead. None of your stupid wisecracks matter.
We rolled through the eerie white streets as Christmas jazz leaked from the speakers. A few final turns and Mikki turned into a driveway. Here it was, the Walshes’ grand eighteenth-century home, now squatting on the corner of a street with smaller, newer Colonial houses spreading out in all directions. It was like something out of a novel: a perfectly symmetrical mustard-yellow Georgian with an odd stubby roof, orderly white trim, and huge, stark shutters flanking the seeming millions of windows. A portico stuck out over the front door like a snout, and beneath it Ted was clearing off the front porch. Everything was frosted in a dollop of snow.
As Mikki killed the engine and we gathered our things, I went over my mental checklist: tracking down the photo album. Meeting Cameron, perhaps asking a few pointed questions about his feelings toward Eleanor, his activity on secret Facebook groups. Seeing Ted, getting one of his long, healing hugs. Hana may be furious and the book might be fucked, but those were feelings I pushed down the road, onto the snow-covered lanes that stretched to the left and right of us.
CHAPTER 18
Hana
MONDAY, DECEMBER 23, 12:50 P.M.
I could feel Katie smiling in the backseat, I could feel it without looking, as if the corners of her mouth were disturbing the air inside the car, shaking up the molecules. I was so angry the anger was blinding, something I had to keep blinking through, like a blindfold somehow yanked on from beneath my skin. We passed the Corrigans’ white mansion, and while the columned home was dark, light spilled out from the cottage in the backyard. Cameron’s domain, the old carriage house. A half block down, we pulled into the Walshes’ driveway, snow crackling under the tires, and Ted stopped snow-blowing and waved cheerily. Ted, the reason the Herd lacked security-cam footage from Monday, December 16. I hated him in that moment.
Gary and Karen appeared in the door: “Come in, we can’t have you freezing to death out there.” We stamped our boots on the welcome mat and hoisted our suitcases into the foyer. I breathed deeply—a faint cedar smell, that woody tang of historic homes.
Pleasantries were even more awful than expected: The Walshes had crinkled bags under their eyes, sadness wafting off them in waves, and yet they welcomed us bravely, took our coats, offered us cider. They’d set out sandwich fixings in the kitchen, but none of us ate anything. In my torso, I felt a deep, internal ache, more like exhaustion than hunger.
Gary and Karen had pulled out the sofa in the den for Katie and made it up with plaid sheets and a triangle-pattern quilt, and the sight of it made me want to weep. Their perfunctory kindness blasted through me, a grenade. They left us alone to “freshen up” and Katie turned and said something about hotels being sold out tonight, and I stalked upstairs without letting her finish. I rolled my bag into Eleanor’s room—they’d placed me here and Mikki in the guest room, which only felt creepy now that I was alone among Eleanor’s things.
This was where we’d hung out when visiting from college, sprawling across her bed or on the floor. I could almost see the three of us, our younger, silkier, frothier selves. Once, fascinated by these close new friends whose pasts were a mystery, we’d all described what we were like in high school. Mikki had been an arty kid, choosing her outfits from the thrift store at first out of necessity and then with determined weirdness. And though she didn’t use the word, it wasn’t hard to ascertain that Eleanor had been popular. At the time I’d felt even more thrilled that they wanted to be friends with me: straight-A, straitlaced, teacher’s pet Hana, now in with the A-listers.
Nearly a decade had passed since graduation, but the room was untouched. I felt like someone entering a museum exhibit as I moseyed up to the bed, smoothing a palm over the cloud-print comforter. Framed posters studded the teal walls: a Miro print she’d purchased at a museum store, a woodcut pattern that was probably a sheet of expensive wrapping paper, an unofficial movie poster for Pan’s Labyrinth, pink and black and eerie. I flopped onto the bed and cried, an indulgent, sobbing, sniveling cry with long wet sniffs powering huge, braying cries.
The holidays always made me feel sad. Ninety-nine percent of the year, I could be happy with my life, with everything I’d built for myself: the close friends who served as my surrogate family, the career I loved and clients who adored me, the quiet thrill of competence and action and determination and, of course, external validation: You did good. And then the holidays rolled around and with them, a torrent of pictures and updates and hashtag-grateful (somehow less basic than #blessed), shiny happy people with their beloved families, writing odes and ’gramming pies. And something about all the Rockwellian joy split something open, a crack through which envy flowed, a little girl crying up at the sky and realizing life’s not fair. I want that. I wanted a mom who actually wanted to see me. A dad who made special cheese dips and built fires on Christmas Eve, not a man I’d stopped calling years ago only to realize he didn’t care, wasn’t about to pick up his end of the relationship. I knew these were Champagne problems, peanuts compared to the family strife millions of others felt. But every year, around this time, I’d look around a
t the wreaths and pies and blinking holiday lights and ask into the starry heavens, my own Silent Night: Why these parents, why this, why me?
But at least I’d had Katie. Even when we were thousands of miles apart on a holiday, I knew I could reach out, squeeze her hand under the metaphorical table. She had the same shitty dad, one even more distant to her than he was to me, and while she and Mom were closer, she saw it, understood how Mom pushed me away like the opposite end of a magnet.
And then this year, my makeshift, chosen, surrogate family had whiffed away like a candle flame. Eleanor with a hole in her neck. Katie with her secret project, just inches behind my back. It was so hurtful, it still felt unfathomable. And then to whip it around on me? I realized why that move felt so familiar: It was right out of Mom’s playbook.
I was an idiot. I’d stupidly thought being here would be nice: This loving couple, unlike the parents I’d grown up with, scooping us in as if we were their foundlings. This grand home, with its multiple family/living/recreation rooms—it was like a life-size dollhouse, unlike the small ranch we’d all lived in before high school, and then the two-bedroom apartment Dad rented in Culver City.
Oh, Culver City. What a bold move that’d been, in retrospect: announcing, adultlike, that I was leaving Kalamazoo and joining Dad in California. He and Mom had been fighting for months, for years, and then one night, as Mom was scooping out the casserole and complaining that he was late for dinner, he called to say he was in a hotel in Wheaton, heading west and never coming back. I was fourteen years old and gutted by the two months that passed without him. I told everyone it was just because Mom and I had never gotten along; Dad was laid-back and lax, the kind of “cool” parent all teens want. Plus, as I admitted only in my angsty middle school diary, Mom seemed to resent my presence, though it was entirely her own fault: She and Dad had adopted me when I was two, shortly after a series of miscarriages and dismayed acceptance that they’d never be biological parents. Two years later, Katie had been their miracle, their dream come true. And I was the odd-looking child inconveniencing them.
Of course, Dad wasn’t any more interested in parenting than Mom was. He set me up on the daybed in his new apartment—I never got a real bed, never thought to ask—and continued on with his adult life, finding a job and dating new women and leaving me to fend for myself. How lucky for him, for both my parents, that I was smart and determined, that I got myself into Harvard no thanks to them. When he’d driven me to LAX for my flight to Boston, my suitcases almost bursting in the trunk, he’d turned up the baseball game on the radio in lieu of talking. I’d spent the entire drive—plus the six-hour flight—panicked about how I’d get myself from Logan International to my dorm.
But then, like a dummy, I’d thought things would be different after I graduated. I was an adult now, too, not someone he was expected to care for—not that he’d done much of that. That summer, I moved across the country at the last minute, ostensibly for a job at a tiny PR agency but in reality because I needed to run, needed to put as much land between Massachusetts and myself as possible. Then the loneliness really descended, like a heavy velvet drape: Eleanor, Mikki, and Katie having fun in New York City, and me miserably staring out at the Pacific. When Eleanor had begged me to move to New York and help her start the Herd six years later, I’d wept with relief.
I padded into the hallway and knocked on the guestroom door; inside, Mikki was crumpled on the bed, on top of the quilt.
“Hey,” I said.
“We need to go to the police,” she replied. “About the Bitcoin.”
I sat on the edge of the bed and swallowed.
Eleanor had called Mikki into her office the day she got the first blackmail letter a year ago; mine and Mikki’s had arrived that same morning, so we were all caught in the same hellish conundrum. In low voices, we’d debated; Mikki admitted that Jinny’s mother, still a high school teacher in Tennessee, had just been looking at her on LinkedIn. It might be her, we reasoned, the one person to whom Jinny had mentioned her whereabouts, now pushing us to turn ourselves in or at least make her life a little easier. The one person still searching for Jinny.
Mikki had suggested coming clean, giving the poor woman some closure, but Eleanor had shut that down. “I’ll pay for yours if you can’t afford it,” she’d hissed, and Mikki had blushed. Again, Eleanor had sealed off the incident, cauterized it on the spot: “We never, ever speak of this again.” And we hadn’t. And it had been working out fine, unless this woman—or someone she knew—had made their way to New York with Eleanor in their crosshairs.
“I don’t think we should,” I said. “But here’s the thing: Daniel got one of the letters. Meant for Eleanor.”
“Fuck.” Mikki tugged a pillow over her face.
“But he doesn’t want to know anything about it, about what Eleanor did. I didn’t tell him we’ve been getting them too. He let me take the letter, said the last thing he wants is to sully his memory of her. So it’s still okay.”
Mikki hugged the pillow to her chest. “I looked the mom up,” she finally said. “Definitely looked like she hasn’t been anywhere near New York this month. Or ever.”
“I did the same thing.” The minute I’d gotten home from Daniel’s apartment, before I’d even opened the envelope I’d yanked from Eleanor’s bed, I’d tracked Celia Hurst on all her feeds and apps. She always tagged a location or checked into spots on Hopscotch throughout her day, and certainly it appeared she was going about her life in Bristol, Tennessee. An alarming thought hit me and I shoved it away: What irony that’d be, if she’d collected our money and used it to fund her trip to the Big Apple—to fund Eleanor’s murder. “We’re gonna get through this. There’s nothing tying us to Jinny, and they’ll figure out who killed Eleanor and throw them in jail and, I promise, we’ll be okay.”
She wiped at her nose. “I just miss her.”
“Me too. So much.” I nestled into the pillow next to her and together, we cried.
I sat up. Mikki was gone and I was still on her bed, the quilt rumpled beneath me. The sky was purple gray and half a moon squinted into the window from between two clouds. Time had felt so strange this week, ballooning and shrinking from hour to hour. I spotted a clock on the wall—still late afternoon.
I crept back into my room and looked around, taking in the details, all things that Eleanor, once a living, breathing, red-blooded girl, had chosen, given places of honor in her bedroom. A Frida Kahlo portrait watched me coolly from above the door. Had Eleanor truly planned to move to Mexico, or was it a harmless fantasy? It felt so campy and farfetched. As ridiculous as my best friend turning up dead on the roof of her own company headquarters. The teenage girl who’d picked out this cloud-covered comforter never saw it coming.
My eyes fell on her yearbooks on one end of her bookshelf: thin, stapled ones in grade school and then shiny hardcovers in high school. I pulled out the last paperback one; growing up she’d gone to school with Ted and Cameron, if I remembered correctly, and I was curious to see them all as kids. But when I pulled it out, it wasn’t junior high, as I’d expected: Hillside Elementary School was splattered across the cardstock cover. But the year was just a year before high school, and Eleanor was in …
Right, the two skipped grades.
Suddenly I was sick of being alone. Why come all the way up here to hide in our respective corners? I went out into the hall and paused at the top of the stairs, facing a window that overlooked the back patio. The pool. That fucking pool.
It’d all been innocent. We were so young, drunk on our youth and promise, rising stars about to set the world on fire. We’d proposed toast after toast, clinking our shot glasses together heartily, sampling different bottles from Gary’s vast booze collection, aged Macallan and Hendrick’s Gin and a weird, licoricey Hungarian liqueur, its bottle the shape of a cartoon bomb. And that’s what we were—bombed.
I gazed down, as if this were a play, as if I could travel back in time and watch from up here. My eyes ro
lled across the girls below: Eleanor in her mother’s silk robe, me lining up Solo cups on a side table, Mikki in a crop top and jean shorts, fiddling with the music. And Jinny: skinny, relaxed, with huge wire-rim glasses and a patch shaved from her black hair above one ear.
Her backstory was the stuff of legend: Jinny, the story went, had hopped a train north to escape from her family, squashed in a trailer home in Appalachia. She’d stopped in New York but hated the vibes there, so she continued north, settling somewhere outside Boston. She was a few years older than us, and Eleanor had met her during her high school years. We rule-following Harvard students all had girl crushes on her—we were honored when she chose to hang around after making a delivery, shooting the shit and enjoying her wares with us. She’d dropped out of high school the moment she turned eighteen, had lived on the streets when she and her crust-punk boyfriend had split, and there was an aura of danger around her, a thrilling rebellious streak. She lived somewhere between Cambridge and Beverly—we were never sure where, and it probably changed by the week—so it was a no-brainer to hit her up while the three of us were in Eleanor’s hometown.
We’d all been giddy that night—it was finally warm and graduation was a few weeks away, and Eleanor had just scored her investment meeting to get Gleam off the ground. In fact, it was a celebration: Eleanor’s parents were out of town, so we’d have a secret party, not telling anyone or posting on social media so that our other friends wouldn’t feel left out.