I'll Be You(103)

It had been Elli’s idea to steal the laptop, though that hadn’t been the plan. The plan was just to steal the file folder, the one that we assumed held Elli’s handwritten confession. We’d simply take back the blackmail material, so that GenFem would no longer have any leverage over Elli. It was the best option we could come up with, in those few stolen minutes in the summer camp bathroom.

And that had been easy enough. While I distracted the GenFem members in the lounge, Elli had snuck into the empty front office. The door wasn’t even locked, GenFem leadership apparently assuming that their captive congregation was a passive herd that wouldn’t have the temerity to demand their belongings back. For once, Dr. Cindy Medina made a bad psychological assessment.

The file cabinet in the front office was locked, but it was old, and a paper clip popped it right open. Elli took back her cellphone, her file folder, and then, for good measure, collected everyone else’s folders, too. So that Dr. Cindy wouldn’t be able to blackmail anyone. She shoved them all in her suitcase and prepared to come find me.

But then she hesitated. Because what if those weren’t the only copies? In this digital age, it was a safe bet that everything had been scanned and duplicated and uploaded to the cloud for posterity. Nothing is ephemeral anymore; nothing can be truly destroyed. It wasn’t enough to have stolen back only the original copy of her confession; she would need to locate and destroy them all. Which was, of course, impossible.

And even if she did somehow manage this, GenFem still knew what she had done. One anonymous phone call to the Scottsdale police department, or to the FBI, and her life would be over. Dr. Medina would always have that power over her, which meant that she could never truly escape her clutches.

No, she needed something stronger than a piece of paper, she needed—

“Collateral,” she’d finished, as we raced back along the dark freeway toward Santa Barbara that night.

“Collateral?”

“Something we can wield over them. So that Dr. Cindy is too scared to seek revenge, because what we have on her is just as bad as what she has on me.” Her eyes were wild; she’d managed to smear her face with the blood from her cut hand. She looked like a murderous nun. “So I smashed her car window with the axe and stole her laptop bag.”

“And how do you know there’s damaging material on the laptop?”

“I don’t. But I gave them over four hundred thousand dollars, all told. And there are hundreds of members, also shelling out God knows how much money—maybe less than me, but maybe more. That’s tens of millions of dollars, maybe hundreds. So where is it all going? It wasn’t exactly paying for upgrades to the retreat.” She shook her head. “Accounting isn’t my forte, you know that. But it occurred to me that things couldn’t be on the up-and-up. There has to be material on the laptop that we can use to our advantage. I mean, we don’t actually have to use it. Dr. Cindy just has to be scared that we have it, and that we might give it to the authorities.”

I laughed, understanding. “Leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone.”

“Exactly. Between that and the file folders, we’ll have everyone’s dirty secrets.” She stared out at the taillights of the cars on the 101, as traffic slowed to a crawl on the highway before us. We were almost back to Santa Barbara by then, and I could see her anxiety rising as we approached our parents’ house. Her fingers tapped out a nervous scale on the dashboard. “Even the ones we don’t want.”



* * *



—

We didn’t want them, and yet we had them; and when we did finally sit down to go through the stack of folders together, a few days after we returned from Scottsdale, it was clear we had so much more than we’d anticipated. Almost every folder contained a handwritten letter addressed to Dr. Cindy: cursives and block letters, some meticulous and others nearly illegible, occasionally written in ink that had been smudged with tears. One, composed by a New Jersey housewife named Missy, even had little stars dotting the i’s.

It was a depressing litany of confessions. Georgina had slept with her teenage son’s best friend. He was seventeen, so it was statutory rape. Alexis had broken into her sister’s home, stolen some family heirlooms she felt she’d been denied, and trashed the place. Lisa, after the end of an affair with her married boss, had skimmed a half-million dollars from the company accounts. A Canadian woman named Claire had fed her senile father peanuts, to which he was fatally allergic, so that she wouldn’t have to spend another decade taking care of him.

Many of the pages admitted to illegal activities—major and minor—that could have potentially landed their perpetrators in jail. But others were more sad than sordid. Affairs with friends’ husbands and slashed tires and addictions, sexual proclivities and small cruelties and petty acts of vengeance. Suzy had used her parents’ credit card to go on a wild shopping spree, and then pretended that it was stolen. Kelly took revenge on a noisy neighbor by shooting his dog. Leecia spread lies that her ex-husband was a pedophile.

Maybe they wouldn’t go to jail over these things, but the truth still had the potential to ruin lives, and Dr. Medina had orchestrated it all. She had manipulated these women to the edge, whispered in their ear until they jumped, and then leveraged the aftermath for her own benefit.

Elli didn’t want to read the confessions. “I knew a lot of these women,” she told me. “I liked them. It wouldn’t feel right.” But I was fascinated by them. I stayed up night after night, drinking coffee on the pullout couch in my sister’s den, consumed by the handwritten missives. They made my own past misbehavior as an addict seem so benign by comparison, or at least measurable on a quantifiable scale. Would GenFem have been able to blackmail me, use my misdeeds as collateral to ensure my undying devotion while draining my bank accounts dry?