The Herd(74)

Chris vaulted into the ambulance and they left me behind. I sat at the kitchen table and stared out at the woods outside. There were a few deer out there, a clump of does and fawns, clomping around majestically. A pack of coyotes had been picking them off one by one that season; hunters were complaining that their weekend excursions had been fruitless. A doe swung her head my way and stared. Judgmentally, I thought. Finally I gathered my things and drove home, careful not to wake Mom in the early-morning light.

Bill was fine after triple bypass surgery. I knew this because Chris texted me back exactly once, before my texts stopped going through, before calls went straight to voicemail, before Chris disappeared from my social networks and my life, one big Block. “Bill is okay. I’m sorry but I can’t talk.”

Bill didn’t contact my editor or the nearest major newspaper or threaten me or do any of the things I’d envisioned as I cried in my childhood bedroom; instead, he, his brother, and all other Northern Sky Labs employees just refused to speak to me from that day forward. It was a brilliant, passive checkmate: The book was ruined. Chris was cut off from me like a limb. And it hurt like a sickness: all the nerve endings in my head and neck and chest, crying out like a choir, ow, ow, ow. I didn’t have enough material to write the book, and even thinking of trying made me nauseous. I stayed cooped up inside for my last six weeks at Mom’s, watching movies with her at night. She didn’t ask about the book, why I was no longer out reporting, and I was grateful I didn’t have to lie.

I cried for a few minutes, gazing out the window onto the Walshes’ snowy street. I thought about the deer again. The coyotes too—all social creatures, like us. But a herd’s primary purpose is to keep the highest percentage of its members alive. Evolution doesn’t care about the individual, about survival of the least-fit. We team up for the most selfish reason possible: self-preservation.

Ted had said something odd, earlier, something that was bothering me, and I waited for my pulse to slow enough that I could search for it. Something about a ticket that for some reason was Ted’s problem…even though they lived in different cities. Cameron here in Beverly, Ted in New York.

I’d dealt with a parking ticket once, when a meter in the Bronx expired on my rental car. So I knew that you could go to New York State’s janky website and pay it online. All you need is a license plate number, which I had thanks to Cameron’s profile picture: tailgating at a Patriots game from the back of his SUV. I typed it into the online portal, and there it was: recorded at 11:56 p.m. on Monday, December 16. The night before the Herd’s big announcement, hours after Monday Mocktails, after the last known sighting of Eleanor, a traffic cop had tucked a ticket under the windshield wiper of Cameron’s black SUV. It was illegally parked in front of a fire hydrant near Watts and Varick.

A block and a half from the Herd’s front entrance.

The revelation lit my body like a Lite-Brite—suddenly everything was alive, thrumming, blazing from the inside out.

“Okay,” I said aloud. “Okay, okay, okay.”

It took longer than I would’ve liked for my thoughts to organize themselves into something coherent. I whispered them aloud, as if setting them on a mental workspace:

Cameron was in town the night of the murder.

Cameron’s car was found within a few hundred feet of the murder site.

Cameron had that photo of Eleanor, the one that ended up in a chatroom devoted to people’s hatred for her.

I tried calling Ratliff and hung up with a groan when her voicemail clicked on. I called Hana, then Mikki, feeling the precious seconds pass as both went straight to voicemail.

Whoever was behind this—they’d done what every smart predator would do. They’d separated us from the pack, nudged us into our own corners. I stood and gazed out the window toward the Corrigan house, the white columned one Mikki had pointed out on the drive here. But condensation coated the window, and impulsively I reached for the old-fashioned latch and the pane swung toward me with a little snap.

Silent night, dark and dampened with snow still swirling off of trees and bushes and onto the street. So quiet, peaceful even, until—

A scream. Unmistakable. Before I could think, I’d yanked on my boots and was sprinting down the driveway, the wind jabbing me through my sweater, cold lunging at my scalp and throat. I barely noticed, didn’t care, as I slid on a slash of snow, skidding to my knees and then taking off again, wet moons stamped across the top of my shins.

Because I kept hearing it, over and over in my mind, as though it were still playing out, a loop broadcast across this tiny little neighborhood.

Because the scream.

It sounded like Hana.





PART IV





CHAPTER 20





IF STEVE WERE EVE: LANDMARK MOMENTS FROM


     THE CAREER OF APPLE FOUNDER EVE JOBS


               By Katie Bradley         Published to Gleam On June 24, 2017



Ed. note: On June 19, a New Yorker profile of Gleam founder Eleanor Walsh called her “Steve Jobs if Steve were Eve—young, pretty, and obsessed with makeup.”

1985: As Apple’s retail spaces were gaining steam, Eve Jobs remembered an especially beautiful stone sidewalk she’d seen on a trip to Florence, Italy. She calmly insisted that her stores line their floors with authentic Pietra Serena sandstone from a particular quarry in Firenzuola, Italy. Some reasonable (male) VPs pointed out that concrete could mimic the stone’s texture and color, but Eve could not be swayed, citing her own exceptional taste. Due to her frivolity and poor financial instincts, she was promptly removed from the company.