The Collective(48)

Destroy him.

. . . rip her eyes out.

. . . make them feel the way my son did, only I want it to last longer. I want the pain to be unbearable. . . .



I open up my private messages, type a message to 0001. I’ve been listening to the news about Gary Kimball. I heard there’s a lawsuit planned against him. We didn’t take him too early, did we? But it feels strange, going into this much detail in a message. I delete most of it and just send the beginning.


0417: I’ve been listening to the news.



As I watch it disappear, I remember that Wendy and I weren’t supposed to know who or what was in the trunk of the Mercedes, and my breathing gets too fast. The make and model were mentioned on the news. If you hadn’t looked in the trunk, you’d still be able to put two and two together. . . .

The screen pulses with ellipses, and I rehearse responses in my head. I had no idea until I heard it on the radio, I swear. They said Kimball was last seen in a Mercedes S-Class. Am I wrong? I just assumed. . . .


0001: It feels good, doesn’t it?



My eyes widen. No defense needed, I guess.

“Camille?”

I minimize the screen quickly and look up. Xenia Hedges. I recognize her from her publicity shots—broad, photogenic smile; high cheekbones; a buzz cut that’s blue now (it used to be pink). She’s easily twenty years younger than Glynne, but they still look like they belong together—cut from the same fine cloth. Too bad they aren’t a couple anymore. No doubt their wedding pictures were spectacular.

I stand up to shake Xenia’s hand, and it’s only then that I notice the odd look on her face—the tightness in her deep red lips, the concern in her onyx eyes.

Xenia takes my hand in both of hers and grasps it. I try to pull away, but she keeps holding on. What is going on? Did she see my screen?

She says, “Are you all right?”

I take a step back. “What do you mean?”

“News reports are one thing, but when it’s real people . . .”

“What?”

“There’s got to be a lot. To, um, process. Did you just find out, or . . .” There’s an edge to her voice, a tremor. As though she knows I’ve killed a man. But how could she? Did she get here earlier than I thought? Did she read what I deleted?

I take a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

“Oh God,” Xenia says. “I mean . . . I just assumed you knew.”

She says it too loudly. I can feel the old hippie putting his book down to look at us, the young couple turning from their laptops.

What the fuck are you talking about? I want to say.

But she doesn’t give me the chance. She says it quietly, with the forced, professional calm of a hostage negotiator, and in that slice of time before I fully understand the meaning of the words, I feel sorry for her, a complete stranger, tasked with delivering news that sends shapes swirling in front of my eyes. “Harris Blanchard,” she says. “He’s dead.”


IF I HAD no idea that the collective existed, the details of Harris Blanchard’s death would have struck me as too perfect to be real. I would have assumed Xenia was lying—that she wasn’t a jewelry designer but a reporter or an internet troll, or maybe a friend of the Blanchards playing a cruel prank in order to get a reaction out of me.

Even knowing what I do, it seems crazy: Harris Blanchard dies nearly five years to the day after Emily, the cause of death the same: hypothermia and probable alcohol poisoning. “You’re serious.” I actually say it at one point. I can’t help myself. “This isn’t some sick joke?”

Xenia slides her phone across the table. “It’s all over Twitter,” she says. “I have an article open. Go ahead. Look.”

I shake my head. “That’s okay. I believe you. It’s just . . .”

“I know.”

“It’s a lot.”

“Of course it is.”

I take her phone after all and read the article on her screen, just so I can have something to do with my eyes. It’s hard to get past the accompanying picture: Harris Blanchard, Martha L. Koch Humanitarian Award in hand, posing by himself in front of the Christmas tree at the Brayburn Club. The photo was taken after my arrest, and I’m a little surprised by the look on his face—that shaky, uncertain smile. I enlarge it until the smile fills the screen, then make it bigger, even bigger, until it looks like something that was never human to begin with.

According to the article, Harris Blanchard had been in Vermont on a ski trip with a group of Brayburn friends, enjoying the tail end of the last winter break of his college career. He had been drinking with them the night of January 27 and was last seen leaving a bar in Burlington at eleven thirty p.m. “very, very drunk,” according to one witness. Some at the bar said he called an Uber and left on his own, while others insisted they saw him leaving with a girl—a stranger. The indisputable fact is that he died that night. His frozen body was found the afternoon of the twenty-eighth, two miles away from the bar, in the woods surrounding a ski trail.

“Who was the girl?” I whisper.

Xenia just looks at me.

I skim through the article again. He died the twenty-seventh. That was Monday. The same night I was in Poughkeepsie at The Bachelor watch party with Wendy. I knew at the time we were building an alibi—that was obvious. What I didn’t know was that it would cover two separate murders.