The Herd(45)

I stared at him for a second. Did he really not see why she had to work eleven times as hard as her white friends? How she didn’t have the luxury of screwing up? But then I shrugged. “She gets shit done, so I can’t blame her for being controlling. When you’re dependable, everyone depends on you.”

“Which is fine, if you can do it without the martyr complex.” I took a tiny bite in lieu of answering. The mix of salt and fat and spice made my stomach churn. “Anyway, I hear you, man,” he went on. “Siblings are the worst.”

I swallowed. “Does Cameron treat you like you’re childish and incompetent?”

He laugh-snorted. “He’s still living at home and playing video games all day, so he wouldn’t have much of a case.”

My antennae went up—I’d heard very little about this Cameron fellow. “Was he always sort of a slacker?”

“You could say that. He was hot shit in high school. Tons of friends, really good snowboarder. Just kinda effortlessly popular, you know?”

I nodded. “Then what?”

“He didn’t really try in school. Part of his whole cool-guy thing. I was lucky—I was a huge nerd. Robotics club and everything.”

I set my fork down. “So he had, what? A failure to launch?”

“He did fine at the community college for a while. Then halfway through he sorta suddenly announced he wasn’t going to finish. My parents were furious. Mr. Walsh got him a job at his company; they were always close, they bonded over sports and shit. But then a few years later, Cameron managed to fuck that up too.” He stopped short and stuffed the rest of his burrito into his mouth, a gargantuan bite. I waited approximately four hundred minutes as he struggled to chew, then realized he wasn’t going to go on.

“That must’ve been rough. For the whole family.”

With effort, he swallowed. “Yeah, I didn’t mean to start airing out all my family shit.”

“All families are fucked, right?” He nodded, wiped at his mouth with a napkin. So I went on: “Hana and my mom can’t stand each other. They can’t even be in the same room without fighting. They’re like…you know those little fighting crabs?” I pummeled the air up near my chin. “So then my mom got diagnosed with cancer, and when I moved home to help her, Hana was supposed to stay for a couple weeks—she made it two days. I think she considers it her most obvious personal failing and she hates when anyone brings it up.” I was being cruel now, the words like fire, but I couldn’t stop. “Meanwhile, my dad left us when I was ten, just got fed up with Mom always criticizing him and didn’t come home one day, and Hana saw her opening and moved out to L.A. to live with him.” I paused, took a gulp of water. It felt oddly good, prattling on about my own minor difficulties as if everything were normal, as if Eleanor were a few blocks away, hard at work inside her beautiful outfit and office and company and life.

“Whoa,” Ted said. “But you and Hana are pretty close now, right?”

“We get along.” I shrugged. “I don’t know if we’d be this close if I wasn’t separately friends with Eleanor and Mikki.” I didn’t know I was thinking it until I said it, and then it was out, hovering in the air between us, somewhere over the basket of hot-sauce bottles. Scrambling, I tried to pierce it with a joke: “Did I say that out loud?”

He leaned back and smiled. “You don’t need to worry,” he said. “This is a safe space.”

“Oh, good. What the Herd is to women, Benny’s Burritos is to family drama.”

“That’s right. And speaking of the Herd, I looked into what you sent me about the new surveillance system. It’s kinda complex.” He blathered on about video compression and DVRs and digital streaming. “My best guess is that us resetting the router kicked the new cameras off the network. Which sucks.”

“Damn.”

“I know. Hey, were you able to get into the router?”

“Yeah, thanks again for that info.” I leaned forward. “When I called yesterday, you said you and Eleanor are pretty close, right?”

He shrugged. “We’ve known each other our whole lives, yeah.”

I pulled the folder from my bag. “Okay, don’t tell anyone. But I found some stuff about Eleanor that—well, I’m not sure what to make of it.” I plucked out a sheet. “White Plains, New York. Does she have any connections there?”

He sipped his margarita thoughtfully. “That’s in Westchester, right? Nothing comes to mind.”

“Right. Okay, do you know what bank she uses?” He raised his eyebrows and I pressed: “I don’t know, did she ever make you stop at an ATM with her?”

He shook his head. “Sorry. I feel like this is a quiz and I’m failing.”

“It’s okay. I’m just looking for clues.” I flipped to the Chase bank statements, where I’d highlighted all the withdrawals. “I think she was hoarding cash. Can you think of anything she said, or—”

“Is that Daniel?” I was tilting the bank printout toward me and Ted slid out the page underneath. It was Daniel’s Click profile. “Wait, what the fuck?”

I sucked on my teeth. “Yeeeeahhh. He told us about this right away, and the cops—Eleanor had, uh, opened up their marriage. She was actually on the site too.” I flipped around the second printout and he reared back in his chair.