The Last Housewife (2)

I dabbed polish on my pinkie toe and pressed Play on the latest episode, newly arrived this morning. Jamie’s voice curled into my ears, the hills and valleys of his inflections as familiar as a map of home. “Welcome back to Transgressions, friends. I’m your host, Jamie Knight.” A memory of him flashed in my mind: seventeen and newly a man, scruff shadowing his jaw, grinning at me cheekily from the driver’s seat as he drove me home from school.

“This week’s murder—” Jamie’s voice caught, and immediately, I sat straighter. He cleared his throat. “Hits a little close to home. Actually, that’s why I’m telling you about it at all. Because technically, the cops haven’t decided whether to rule this death a homicide or suicide. I have my suspicions, and we’ll get to those, but let’s start with the facts. Two weeks ago, thirty-year-old Laurel Hargrove was found hanging from a tree on the edge of the De Young Performing Arts Center on the Whitney College campus. It was her alma mater.”

One minute, I was pressing the nail brush like a fan against my toe, spreading sunshine over the cuticle; the next, the bottle slipped from my hand into the pool, golden yellow snaking like spilled blood through the water.

Laurel Hargrove. Whitney College. It couldn’t be. Laurel Hargrove was my best friend from college. It had been eight years since I’d talked to her, but back then, we’d sworn to run as far as possible from Whitney, from Westchester, from the entire state of New York.

And I’d done it. I’d worked hard to shut the door on the past, to keep it locked, fast and tight. Don’t let it in, I warned myself, the instinct knee-jerk. All of my calm, blue boredom, my luxurious ennui, was replaced in an instant by visceral fear, my teeth sinking into my kneecap as if it were a leather bit to quell a scream.

“Laurel’s death has all the markings of a suicide,” Jamie said, his words coming faster now. “According to the police report—which I’m admittedly not supposed to have—she was hung by a rope, the kind anyone can buy at a hardware store. The furrow the rope created in her neck slanted vertical, breaking her hyoid bone and tearing her cartilage. Although some doctors have claimed injuries like Laurel’s can occur with strangulation—you’ll remember the media circus around Jeffrey Epstein’s death—most agree these types of injuries occur more often in suicidal hangings.”

I’d sworn to protect Laurel, years ago. How many things could you fail at in one lifetime? I felt as though I’d plunged into the pool after the nail polish, and now I was suspended underwater, pressure crushing me from every angle.

Jamie Knight, of all people, kept reciting the cold facts of Laurel’s death, each detail so clinical, so…familiar.

I shot to my feet, pressing my hands to my mouth. Laurel’s death was the twin of Clementine’s, our best friend from college whose blood we would never wash from our hands. First Clem, now Laurel. Two hangings, both on campus, eight years apart.

It became hard to breathe. But even in the thick of shock, I had a sudden burst, a picture of what I must look like to anyone observing. Scene: Beautiful Woman in the Throes of Grief. Or: A Portrait of Panic, All in Blue.

“The Performing Arts Center meant something to Laurel,” Jamie continued, telling me what I already knew. “According to the Westchester County police interview with her mother, Laurel was a theater nut and concentrated on costuming in college. Her mom said the Performing Arts Center was Laurel’s favorite place on campus. As an undergrad, she tried to live as close as possible so she could save time going back and forth from rehearsals.”

Yes, we’d worked hard to live in Rothschild. Laurel was a shy girl who worshipped theater, who lived to create costumes for Whitney’s drama department. And we did everything for her because Clem and I loved her, and because to know Laurel was to want to protect her. In order to live in Rothschild’s four-person suites, we’d needed to add someone to our three-person crew. We went searching, found a girl, and that was the beginning of the end. The consequences of those simple decisions—make Laurel happy, find a fourth, give the girl a chance—would reverberate forever.

“Putting these pieces together paints a picture of a woman who took her own life in a place that was meaningful to her,” Jamie said. “In fact, Laurel’s mother told the police that college was the last time she could remember Laurel being happy. So why discuss Laurel Hargrove’s suicide on a podcast about unsolved murders?”

I bent down and snatched my phone, wishing I could talk back to him, yell across the distance. Why are you, Jamie? Clem committed suicide, and it was so clearly, so irrevocably our fault. And now Laurel. What does it mean? What are you saying?

“One detail in the police report caught my attention,” Jamie said, answering me. “And yes, I’m going to get in trouble for telling you this. But Laurel was discovered with lacerations all over her hands and arms, made roughly around the time of her death. None of them life-threatening, but cuts everywhere, fourteen in all. There aren’t any pictures of her included in the police record—which is strange, by the way. But what the responding officer did note is that the cuts were thin, like from a razor blade. And they appeared in places you would expect if someone was defending herself. There’s actually a question in the police report, written in the officer’s notes, which he or somebody else later tried to scratch out. He wrote: ‘Defensive wounds? But why, if suicide?’ Why, indeed.”