The Collective(73)

“Are you serious?”

“There were two cars watching me at the grocery store tonight—I even recognized one of the drivers.”

“Oh my God.”

“Not from an assignment. I didn’t even think she was with the collective, actually. I thought she was just from Niobe.”

“From where?” she says. “Forget it. It doesn’t matter. Look. I think Sheila’s going to need to meet you in person. She’s skeptical about the story, as pretty much anybody would be. Is there a safe place?”

I remember the roar of the engine outside my house the previous night, how it seemed to come out of nowhere. “I think my car is chipped again.”

“Ugh. Look. You stay put. I’m going to log on, private message 0001, see if I can get Violet to talk to me in front of Sheila.”

“What? No.”

“Why not? I’m obviously good at talking to people. Hell, look how much info I got out of you.”

“You said you didn’t want to get involved, Wendy. And you were right. It’s not safe.”

“Maybe I changed my mind,” she says. “Maybe I don’t care about what’s safe or what isn’t. My kid is dead. My marriage is over. And I’ve given three years of my life to something that wasn’t what I thought it was. Oh, and Alayah’s off the damn show again tonight. Did you see the spoiler on Reddit? What do I have to live for besides you?”

“Wendy.”

“Okay, before you think I’m nuts, I was just kidding about Alayah, even though Peter really is going to kick her off again. And I wasn’t planning on saying ‘besides you’ out loud.”

I close my eyes, tilt my head back, and breathe, the burner phone pressed to my ear. Such a strange conversation to be having over any phone, especially a burner phone. Such a strange, important friendship. I remember her standing behind Kimball’s car on the boat launch, her hand on the trunk I never should have opened. It’s over and done. It doesn’t matter. Join me. Sister. “Thank you, Wendy.”

“I’d say you owe me one, but you don’t, really,” she says. “If everything goes okay, I’ll call you tomorrow morning and we can all figure out a place to meet. Does eight o’clock work?”

“Sure, but . . .”

“Yeah?”

“What if everything doesn’t go okay?”

She laughs a little. It sounds forced. “Then I guess we won’t ever find out who gets Pete’s final rose.”





Twenty-One


Unicorn River is no longer frozen. As cold as it’s been, the stream still somehow melted, and as I try to dig up the gun I once tried to kill myself with, I can’t hear anything above the din of rushing water. It drowns out all other sounds, which is a good thing because the ground is still frozen solid, and I am grunting and groaning from the effort it takes to make the tiniest of dents with my gardening spade. At this rate, it’s going to take me all night before I even get close.

Give it all you’ve got, says a voice inside me. And so I do, raising the spade far above my head like a dagger, and plunging it into the ground with a shriek. It breaks. The ground breaks. From the spot where the spade pierced the earth, a red geyser erupts, drenching my hair, my eyes, my mouth.

It’s blood, says the same voice.

But it isn’t coming from inside my head; it belongs to Glynne Barrett. “It’s our blood.” The gardening spade turns into a beating heart. The river crests and tidal waves crash over my head, and I’m drowning, I’m drowning. . . .

I wake up in a sweat, my throat raw from screaming. I manage to catch my breath, but it takes me a while. I’m not going to fall asleep again without a Xanax, and I’m pretty sure it’s too late in the morning for that.

I’m right. While it’s dark outside, the clock on my phone reads 6:15 a.m.—a reasonable time to wake up, especially since Wendy is supposed to call in less than two hours.

What a dream that was—the kind that refuses to leave my head, even as I brush my teeth and take my morning pills and try to get myself ready for the day ahead of me.

What could it mean? If Joan were alive, she’d probably tell me the blood symbolizes my feelings of guilt, overflowing, unable to be stanched. The heart, of course, would be Emily’s, beating inside the chest of Luke, who is supposedly driving up here tomorrow with Nora.

As for Glynne, she was probably in my head because she emailed me last night, telling me how “lovely” it had been to run in to me at the A&P—not to mention dear Penelope Chambers, her old college friend from the class of ’74. Perhaps the three of us can get together sometime, Glynne wrote. I know you’d like her.

I didn’t write her back. I probably never will.

I remember Penelope’s face now, those piercing blue eyes as we left the cemetery after Harris Blanchard’s funeral, the bizarre, knowing tone with which she’d said my name. I think of her in the A&P parking lot, her dome light flashing on and off. Has she been spying on me for 0001? Has Glynne? Are they both members of the collective, assigned to frighten me . . . or worse?

I could be jumping to conclusions. After all, Glynne is a local celebrity who has given a lot of open, revealing interviews—most of which I’ve linked to on her site—and if she’d ever been a mother, I’d have read about it in at least one of them. Plus, what self-respecting collective member would side with Dean Waverly over me? But then again . . . then again.