The Perfect Stranger (Social Media #2)(78)

She flips her notebook to a clean page, picks up a pen, and clears her throat. “I just want to talk to you a little bit about your relationship with Meredith, and about her blog, and yours, and . . . I’d like your take on how the whole thing works.”

“You mean blogging?”

“The dynamic you have with other bloggers, that kind of thing.”

“Oh. Okay. Well . . .” Landry looks as though she has no idea where to begin.

“Why don’t you tell me first what made you decide to write your own blog?”

“Have you read it?”

Crystal nods. She’d first stumbled across it a few days ago, having noticed that someone named BamaBelle commented often on Meredith’s page, and tracing the comments back to the blog. She did the same with a number of others.

Today at the funeral home, after asking the three women about their online identities, she’d finally been able to connect the blog titles and screen names with real women behind them.

Afterward, when she wasn’t fruitlessly searching for a link between Jenna Coeur and Meredith Heywood, she’d spent the better part of the last hour reading—and in some cases, rereading—Landry’s, Kay’s, and Elena’s blogs, noting their interaction with Meredith, each other, and fellow bloggers.

It came as no surprise to her that the attractive, genteel southern stay-at-home-mom was behind the homey, conversational Breast Cancer Diaries, or that the reserved midwesterner wrote the staid I’m A-Okay.

The shocker was that the saucy Boobless Wonder blog was penned by a first grade teacher. But a few minutes in Elena Ferreira’s presence revealed an engaging, if somewhat frenetic, personality that seems convincingly reminiscent of the voice she uses in her blog.

Nothing unusual jumped out at Crystal in any of the blogs, other than a remarkably casual level of intimacy among a collection of strangers who had ostensibly never met in person. But then, she’s seen that phenomenon within other online communities. When people come together on the Internet, the usual social constraints fall away with the promise of anonymity.

“If you’ve read my blog,” Landry says, “then you know that I was diagnosed with breast cancer. That’s why I blog.”

Crystal shoots straight, as always. “But lots of people have breast cancer and don’t blog. Why do you?”

Perhaps taken aback, Landry tilts her head.

Crystal is about to rephrase the question, but then Landry answers it in a soft voice, as if she’s conveying a secret. Maybe she is.

In a lilting drawl that sometimes takes Crystal a moment to translate, Landry talks about the fear and shock and—more importantly—the loneliness that set in after her diagnosis. She describes the support group she visited early in her treatment, and the horror of coming face-to-face with doomed patients. She smiles faintly when she mentions her first foray onto the Internet in search of information, finding not just that, but also companionship—ultimately, friendship.

“I wasn’t isolated anymore,” she tells Crystal. “I realized these women were talking about things I could relate to. And that maybe I had something to say, too. Something I couldn’t say to the people I saw every day.”

“Because . . .”

“Because they just wouldn’t get it.”

Crystal asks her a few more questions about the evolution of Landry’s own blog before leading into how she got to know Meredith.

“She was kind of like the older sorority sister who takes a new pledge under her wing, you know?”

Crystal nods, though she doesn’t know. Not from experience. But she bets Landry does.

Sure enough, the question is met with a nod and a faint smile. “I was Alpha Gamma Delta at University of Alabama.”

“Roll Tide.”

Landry’s smile widens to a full-blown grin. “That’s right!”

“So Meredith was . . . what, like a big sister? A mentor?”

The smile fades promptly at the mention of the dead woman’s name.

She forgot, for a moment there, Crystal realizes. Forgot why we’re here; forgot her friend was murdered.

Now that Landry remembers, renewed sorrow taints her pretty face as she contemplates the question. “Maybe she was more motherly than sisterly . . . is sisterly a word?”

“You’re the writer. You tell me.”

“You know . . . it’s funny, I don’t really consider myself a writer, but . . . I guess that’s what blogging is, right? I kind of like thinking of it that way, and I know Meredith did, too. It’s what she always wanted to be.”

“A writer?” Crystal knows this—some of Meredith’s blog posts referred to the literary road not taken—but she waits for Landry to elaborate.

“We talked a lot, privately, about stuff like that. She said she’d always dreamed of writing a book, and she recently told me she’d been toying with the idea of compiling some of her blogs into a collection and trying to get it published.”

“You talked on the phone?”

“No, usually e-mail.”

“Is that how you all communicate privately?”

“That, or instant-messaging.”

“No phone.”

“Well, I can’t speak for the others—maybe some of them call each other—but we don’t. At least, we didn’t, until this week, after Meredith . . .”