The Herd(46)

“Are you serious? Was she meeting up with random dudes? Why is this not—isn’t this a huge lead?”

He was so worked up, so quickly. “I’m trying to figure that out. Daniel said it was her idea. And not…not just for meeting dudes.”

Ted missed it—his eyes slid over the page, reading. “Do the cops know you’re doing your own investigation?”

I shook my head and tucked the pages back into the file. “Like I said, it’s keeping me busy so I don’t sit around all day worrying.”

“Your book’s not keeping you busy? I want to hear more about it.”

I crunched at my plastic water cup. “I didn’t tell Eleanor this,” I said, “but I’m not even sure I can write that book. It’s a long story.”

“What happened?”

“It just ended up being…kind of a shitshow.” The shriek of sirens. The spastic light splitting into red and blue. Skin sweaty under my palms as I willed the heart underneath to beat.

“I’m definitely missing something.”

“I really don’t want to talk about it.” My words splatted onto the table between us and Ted looked down, like a chastised dog. I cleared my throat and tried to sound pleasant: “But I’d love to hear more about the weird tech stuff you’re working on. What’s the kookiest thing you’ve had to design?”



* * *



—

As we were splitting the bill, Ted nodded at my bag again. “Can I get a copy of the stuff in that file?” he said. “Maybe I’ll notice something you didn’t.”

“You can take this. I have everything backed up.”

“You sure?” He was already slipping the folder into his backpack. “Thanks. I’m just…I’m worried. Nobody seems that freaked out; Cameron was like, ‘Whatever, she’s a sensation-seeker, she probably just got bored with her life and moved on.’?” He put on a surfer drawl, bobbling his head. “But I dunno. She’s a public figure now. Between this and that stupid graffiti I had to wallpaper over—it doesn’t sit right.”

“I know. I feel the same way.” I smiled sadly. “It makes me feel a tiny bit better that we’re both on the case.”

“And you know what, hopefully Cam’s right.” He reached for his coat. “We’ll get a call any minute that they found her, like, boarding a flight to Fiji from LAX.”

Something fluttered, a shadow lurching across my skull. “Say that again.”

“What, that I hope she’s on her way to Fiji?”

It was gone. We hugged on the sidewalk and parted ways. I had a missed call from Fatima and a text that I should call her in an hour. On the subway ride home, I read the Wikipedia entry on White Plains, still a dead end—why had she been looking it up on a map? It played a pivotal role in the Revolutionary War, I learned, and was the birthplace of a certain Mark Zuckerberg. My eyebrows lifted: White Plains was also home to a small international airport, a nerve center for private jets and sleek chartered planes.

Fatima started chattering the second she picked up the phone: “I still haven’t gotten into the dude’s account,” she said, “but MoreFracturedLight? You won’t believe this. She was only talking to one person: a woman in Mexico. About moving there. She called it her, quote, ‘go-to mental escape hatch,’ said she’d always dreamed of starting over there.”

It was so obvious, it was like I’d been nosing around the idea without allowing myself to think it. The relief was intense, a deep bath I plunged into: Eleanor is alive.

“And you think she actually went there? That’s different from a…a mental escape hatch.” That’s outrageous, I wanted to say. But it wasn’t, of course. The secret bank account and email, the cash withdrawals. The airstrip thirty-five miles north of here.

“I don’t know, dude. Read it yourself. It starts out pretty harmless, just kinda flirtatious, but then it’s clear Eleanor has really done her research, talking about these small cities and asking this woman—the other woman’s British, I think—how she made it work. Then suddenly, like a week ago, she asks if they can talk offline. And all their messages were deleted, I found them in a temp folder. That’s a pretty big coincidence, right?”

My phone buzzed, but I kept it pressed against my ear. I stared hard at the ceiling, feeling this new information whorling around my skull. Could Eleanor really do it? Leave it all—leave us all—behind for a new, secret life over the border? To illegally slip down there, hope, absurdly, that no one would notice or look for her…?

“What cities did she mention?” I asked, sitting up on my bed. Fatima spelled them out and I typed them into separate tabs, and Google helpfully tossed some flight paths at the top of my search results.

Oh God. ESE, Ensenada Airport. GYM, Guaymas International Airport. I scrambled for the shaded Post-it on my desk, and now it felt obvious:

ACA 1010 CUU ESEGYM

Acapulco. Cancun. Ensenada, then Guaymas. She was researching flights.

“Send me everything you’ve got,” I told Fatima. “I need to figure out what plane went from White Plains, New York, to a Mexican airport sometime after Monday Mocktails.”

“Monday what now?”