The Herd(67)

But then, like a dummy, I’d thought things would be different after I graduated. I was an adult now, too, not someone he was expected to care for—not that he’d done much of that. That summer, I moved across the country at the last minute, ostensibly for a job at a tiny PR agency but in reality because I needed to run, needed to put as much land between Massachusetts and myself as possible. Then the loneliness really descended, like a heavy velvet drape: Eleanor, Mikki, and Katie having fun in New York City, and me miserably staring out at the Pacific. When Eleanor had begged me to move to New York and help her start the Herd six years later, I’d wept with relief.

I padded into the hallway and knocked on the guestroom door; inside, Mikki was crumpled on the bed, on top of the quilt.

“Hey,” I said.

“We need to go to the police,” she replied. “About the Bitcoin.”

I sat on the edge of the bed and swallowed.

Eleanor had called Mikki into her office the day she got the first blackmail letter a year ago; mine and Mikki’s had arrived that same morning, so we were all caught in the same hellish conundrum. In low voices, we’d debated; Mikki admitted that Jinny’s mother, still a high school teacher in Tennessee, had just been looking at her on LinkedIn. It might be her, we reasoned, the one person to whom Jinny had mentioned her whereabouts, now pushing us to turn ourselves in or at least make her life a little easier. The one person still searching for Jinny.

Mikki had suggested coming clean, giving the poor woman some closure, but Eleanor had shut that down. “I’ll pay for yours if you can’t afford it,” she’d hissed, and Mikki had blushed. Again, Eleanor had sealed off the incident, cauterized it on the spot: We never, ever speak of this again. And we hadn’t. And it had been working out fine, unless this woman—or someone she knew—had made their way to New York with Eleanor in their crosshairs.

“I don’t think we should,” I said. “But here’s the thing: Daniel got one of the letters. Meant for Eleanor.”

“Fuck.” Mikki tugged a pillow over her face.

“But he doesn’t want to know anything about it, about what Eleanor did. I didn’t tell him we’ve been getting them too. He let me take the letter, said the last thing he wants is to sully his memory of her. So it’s still okay.”

Mikki hugged the pillow to her chest. “I looked the mom up,” she finally said. “Definitely looked like she hasn’t been anywhere near New York this month. Or ever.”

“I did the same thing.” The minute I’d gotten home from Daniel’s apartment, before I’d even opened the envelope I’d yanked from Eleanor’s bed, I’d tracked Celia Hurst on all her feeds and apps. She always tagged a location or checked into spots on Hopscotch throughout her day, and certainly it appeared she was going about her life in Bristol, Tennessee. An alarming thought hit me and I shoved it away: What irony that’d be, if she’d collected our money and used it to fund her trip to the Big Apple—to fund Eleanor’s murder. “We’re gonna get through this. There’s nothing tying us to Jinny, and they’ll figure out who killed Eleanor and throw them in jail and, I promise, we’ll be okay.”

She wiped at her nose. “I just miss her.”

“Me too. So much.” I nestled into the pillow next to her and together, we cried.



* * *



—

I sat up. Mikki was gone and I was still on her bed, the quilt rumpled beneath me. The sky was purple gray and half a moon squinted into the window from between two clouds. Time had felt so strange this week, ballooning and shrinking from hour to hour. I spotted a clock on the wall—still late afternoon.

I crept back into my room and looked around, taking in the details, all things that Eleanor, once a living, breathing, red-blooded girl, had chosen, given places of honor in her bedroom. A Frida Kahlo portrait watched me coolly from above the door. Had Eleanor truly planned to move to Mexico, or was it a harmless fantasy? It felt so campy and farfetched. As ridiculous as my best friend turning up dead on the roof of her own company headquarters. The teenage girl who’d picked out this cloud-covered comforter never saw it coming.

My eyes fell on her yearbooks on one end of her bookshelf: thin, stapled ones in grade school and then shiny hardcovers in high school. I pulled out the last paperback one; growing up she’d gone to school with Ted and Cameron, if I remembered correctly, and I was curious to see them all as kids. But when I pulled it out, it wasn’t junior high, as I’d expected: Hillside Elementary School was splattered across the cardstock cover. But the year was just a year before high school, and Eleanor was in…

Right, the two skipped grades.

Suddenly I was sick of being alone. Why come all the way up here to hide in our respective corners? I went out into the hall and paused at the top of the stairs, facing a window that overlooked the back patio. The pool. That fucking pool.

It’d all been innocent. We were so young, drunk on our youth and promise, rising stars about to set the world on fire. We’d proposed toast after toast, clinking our shot glasses together heartily, sampling different bottles from Gary’s vast booze collection, aged Macallan and Hendrick’s Gin and a weird, licoricey Hungarian liqueur, its bottle the shape of a cartoon bomb. And that’s what we were—bombed.

I gazed down, as if this were a play, as if I could travel back in time and watch from up here. My eyes rolled across the girls below: Eleanor in her mother’s silk robe, me lining up Solo cups on a side table, Mikki in a crop top and jean shorts, fiddling with the music. And Jinny: skinny, relaxed, with huge wire-rim glasses and a patch shaved from her black hair above one ear.