The Herd(62)

“There are counselors available if you’d like to speak to someone,” Ratliff said. She was starting to gather her things. “Thanks again for your time. We’ll see ourselves out.” But still, I rose and ushered them to the door. I pointed them back in the direction of the elevators and wished them happy holidays. When I looked back, the snow outside had thickened.

My phone had more missed calls and texts than I could fathom. Mikki’s fought its way to the top: “CALL ME NOW.”

“Someone leaked the news about Eleanor to the press,” she said, her voice pinched with fury. “Eleanor’s parents hadn’t even had a chance to tell their friends yet.”

She directed me toward the Gaze article (“EXCLUSIVE”) that’d broken the news an hour ago, written by a reporter whose byline I didn’t recognize; it had very little information, the cause and time of death missing, but it did have the date and location of the discovery of her body. A whole wave of other articles had come out rehashing the same sparse details, and a showy obituary was on the homepage of The New York Times. I fought down a groundswell of nausea as Mikki’s righteous anger chopped itself up into profanities.

“Okay. Okay. I’ll call my contact at The Gaze,” I said soothingly. “I’ll figure out who did this. It could just be a crooked cop, someone trading secrets for cash.” I flopped back on the couch and glanced out the window, where a curtain of snow had smeared away the outside. Would every Christmas from here on out be haunted by visions of this one—Mikki’s disembodied sobs, Katie sniffling on the bed next to me, Eleanor’s boots poking out from behind the lounge chair, toes up like they belonged to someone admiring the night sky?

Katie was calling.

“Did you see the alert?”

The urgency in her voice poked at me—so unlike the milky sadness I’d just settled into.

“About Eleanor? I’m trying to figure out who leaked it.”

A beat. “I was talking about our flight. They just canceled it.”

“Shit.”

“What should we do?”

“Call the airline. Both of us.”

For seventy-five minutes I paced my apartment, intermittently tidying up and then crashing onto seats to stare out the window. I hated the hold music for a while, then got into it, nodding along involuntarily, and then circled back to hating it again. When I finally reached someone, the news wasn’t good.

“So we’re missing Christmas,” Katie wheezed into the phone.

“I mean, Christmas is occurring regardless,” I replied. “But I feel bad we’re not going to see Mom.”

“Me too. Plus I wanted to get away and curl up in my own bed and block everything out for a while. And now we can’t.”

There was something fluttering in me, mothlike: I was relieved. Not having to interact with Mom, to deal with her bright, fake laughter and needling criticism, not having to sit around a tree and sip cocoa and listen to old hymns while Eleanor’s unsolved death hung over us—there was something appealing about it, a bottle uncorked.

“I’m disappointed too,” I said, “but what can we do? At least we’re stuck here together.”

“I guess.” Katie’s misery was contagious. “Well, I’ll call Mom and let her know. She’s probably been watching the flight and already knows.”

That stung, deep in my torso. “Tell her I’ll call her tomorrow. And that we’ll talk on Christmas, obviously.”

“Tell her yourself,” she snapped—then three beeps, and she was gone. Outside, the snow churned and throbbed against the window, like something trapped in a glass cage and trying to get out.

Suddenly I realized what I was forgetting, the to-do that had been flickering in the back of my brain all day. It blared inside me, cranked up my pulse. On shaking legs, I walked over to the coat closet and pulled out the blackmail note, popping out the crease and swiveling my wrists to smooth it. I read it over one more time, although by now I could recite it by heart. The same page had been showing up in my own mailbox for a full year now.

With practiced hands, I ripped it in two and rolled the first into a tight cigarette. I crossed the kitchen and turned the stove on, four even clicks and then the boorrsshh of a blue flame.

As I had with three blackmail notes before it, identical but for the deadline at the top and the name on the envelopes they arrived in, I burned its halves one after the other. The ashes swirled like snow before coming to rest on the steel below.





CHAPTER 17





Katie


SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21, 5:15 P.M.

I was grateful for the flight cancellation, in a way; for the ninety minutes I was dealing with it, groaning and texting and falsely thinking each intermittent “please stay on the line” was a human about to help, I didn’t have to think about what my agent, Erin, had told me earlier in the afternoon. Because I couldn’t think about it, couldn’t face it, the sixty-foot tsunami about to come crashing down all over me. Mentally I stuck it on my to-do list: Solve problem, save my own ass.

I called Mom, who picked up this time. I told her about Eleanor, my voice fracturing into sobs as I tried to answer her questions, and she kept repeating, “My poor baby, my poor baby.” Then I told her about our canceled flight, and she was as composed and soothing and deeply, deeply sad as I imagined she would be. She clearly already knew about the cancellation but feigned surprise, a long three-note moan between “awww” and “ohhhh.”