The Collective(70)

Thinking about it now, I’m not sure what I expected to get out of 0001. She barely told me anything about herself back when I had her trust. Why should I expect her to identify herself to me now that I don’t?

I head into the bathroom, brush my teeth, take my nighttime meds, along with half a Xanax. I need to sleep. I need to escape, even if it’s only for a few hours.

I exit the Kaya page, so many women still on it, repeating those phrases that just a few days ago I used to find exhilarating. Make him pay. . . . Cut out his heart. . . . Give that bitch a death as miserable as my baby’s. . . . The comments used to feel like witches’ spells; they were that magical and empowering. But now they read like groupthink, the chants of cult members, 0001 the charismatic, invisible leader. Your eyes are closed, she had said to me. OPEN THEM.

And now that I’m remembering, she also said something else. . . .

0001 said she changed like Niobe did when her children were killed. Not child. Children. In the plural.

Of course, she could have just been trying to throw me off.

But she could also be a woman who has lost two sons. . . . Someone like Violet Langford—a sweet librarian with three cats whose mind immediately went to surveillance cameras when I introduced myself to her at her workplace. A woman whose eyes lit up when she spoke of killing, and who explained the act of taking part in a murder with such contagious energy, she sold me almost instantly. A woman who had described herself as having “walked through fire”—exactly the way 0001 just did.

Your eyes are closed. OPEN THEM. . . .

I do. And as I do, it strikes me that when I drove to Havenkill to talk to Violet, my car was chipped—same as it was when, motivated by a similar curiosity, I followed Edward Duval out of the train station. We’re not supposed to see other members in person unless specifically instructed. Yet while 0001 had been all over the Duval incident, she never mentioned my visit to Violet’s workplace.

OPEN THEM.

Other details are coming to me now—how both Violet and 0001 had referred to Ashley Shawger by his given first name of Richard, and how, of all the deaths I’d known of since joining the collective, none had been as baroque and intricate as Shawger’s had been—a collar bomb strapped to his body, detonated in his own house. As though 0001 saved the most theatrical revenge for herself . . .

Something explodes outside my window, making me dive for the floor and cover my head. It takes me time to register that it’s only the roar of an engine, a car winding up my road too fast, gunning it. It passes my house, and I calm down a little bit, but still. Still. There are a couple of houses past mine toward the top of the mountain, but they’re second homes—summer homes. Cars hardly ever drive by my house at this time of year, especially this late. It’s nearly midnight.

I can’t help but think it’s intended for me, how the driver leaned into the accelerator like that, like the punctuation at the end of an angry note.

I’m so alone in this old house. So isolated. It would be so easy to make me disappear.





Twenty


At eight in the morning I call Wendy on the burner phone. “Camille,” she says in a hushed, nervous voice. “I’m at work.”

“Okay. Well . . . can I talk to you? It won’t take long.”

“Wait a second,” she says. “Just hang on.”

The line goes staticky, then I hear muffled voices, as though she dropped her phone into her pocket. After a period of time where I can hear nothing but the sound of rustling clothes, she’s back at last. “I was on my way into a meeting. What is it?”

“I think I might know who 0001 is.”

“Wow. Really?”

“Well, I’m not positive by a long shot. But I do have a theory.”

“I can’t call Sheila on a theory.”

“I know that,” I tell her. “But I also think I have a way we can test the theory.”

She doesn’t say anything, but I can almost hear her measuring pros and cons in her head. “I don’t want to get you in any more trouble,” she says after a moment.

“You won’t.”

“And to be honest, I don’t want to get in trouble either.”

“This is totally safe.”

“Are you sure?”

“As sure as I am of anything.”

More silence from Wendy. I think I can make out traffic noises in the background. She must be talking to me from the parking lot. “What do I have to do?”

I exhale. “Okay, first of all, when do you get off work?”

“I have a client coming in at one. I can probably leave by one thirty. Is that early enough?”

“It depends,” I tell her. “How far are you from Havenkill?”


I’VE GOT THE website for Havenkill Library up on my computer screen when Wendy calls on the burner phone. “I’m here,” she says.

I check the clock at the bottom of my screen: 2:00 p.m. Earlier than we discussed. “I thought you said you were an hour away from Havenkill.”

“I rescheduled with my client,” she says. “Faked a stomachache. Since I wasn’t really faking, it wasn’t that hard.”

“You ready?”

“Yep.”

“Okay. I’ll wait for your text.”