The Herd(90)

Say no to Cameron, Mikki, I pleaded silently, like she could change how the story ended. Tell Cameron to fuck off. “Why?”

She turned. “Why, what?”

“Why did you go to him?”

Mikki frowned. “I don’t know. He knew about the Jinny situation, obviously. And we were—we talked every single day. When we saw each other, it was…electric. We never talked about trying to turn it into a real relationship or anything, but…” She shrugged. “Love makes you do crazy things.”

She wiped both eyes at once, then looked at the tears glistening on her index fingers. “When I got there, Cameron was calm. He’d been thinking. He said we couldn’t take her out of the building, because someone would see us carrying her. It was the beginning of that cold snap, so he had the idea of hiding her on the roof until we could come back in the middle of the night and get rid of her.”

Something surged up my throat, acidic and foul, but I kept listening.

“He carried her upstairs and left her behind the stack of lawn chairs. I helped him clean. He kept saying we just needed to buy enough time that no one would look there until a bunch of other people had passed the spot. But of course, there was still the issue of everyone looking for her. She had that presentation the next day.”

I gripped my fists under my chin, thumbs digging into my windpipe. No, no, no, no. Mikki’s face softened. “But Cameron had an idea. Apparently she’d come to him with questions about getting a fake passport. So he knew she was hiding something too. We got out her phone, and it’s turned on by face recognition, right? So Cameron ran back to the roof and, and held it up to unlock it.” Her eyebrows flashed. “We were shocked to find all this stuff about moving to Mexico. It felt like a gift from God. If we could just make her seem alive while people noticed that, we’d be in the clear.”

She was quiet long enough that I cleared my throat. Mikki had accessed all of Eleanor’s plans for escaping to Mexico—this was unfathomable, but it was my one shot, my chance to ask what I couldn’t ask Eleanor herself. “Did she say why she wanted to leave? Was it the blackmail—she thought she was close to being ratted out?”

Mikki stared at me, her eyes stony but small muscles contracting around her nose and mouth.

“I don’t know. She didn’t say. I don’t know why Eleanor did anything she did.” Mikki spoke faster now, like she was eager to get the rest over with. “You know how this ends. Cameron sent out a few emails and texts from her phone the next day. And then when it was clear you and Katie were onto her, had figured out her Mexico plans, Cameron sent that final email from her laptop. We still had no plan for the body, though. Our luck was up on the security cameras: I asked a lot of questions and learned they were back up and running.”

“Oh, Mikki.” The air around us was charged, staticky with the knowledge that this was the very last time things would be okay. Could she feel it too?

“Then once you found her, I was taking it an hour at a time. And I was grieving—it was almost like I’d convinced myself she really was in Mexico, before that. When the Walshes invited us to Beverly for Christmas, I thought getting away from New York could be good—plus I could check on Cameron, make sure he was solid. But seeing Gary and Karen was awful. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking.”

We sat like that for a second. The heater hissed.

“You need to tell Ratliff,” I said. “I’ll come with you—we’ll tell them everything. It won’t be so bad if you’re cooperative, if you’re a witness for the prosecution.” With a prickle of fear, I realized she’d slipped my phone from her lap down under her thigh, out of reach.

“But Cameron’s gone—there’s no way for me to prove it was him. There’s no point.” I thought I heard a thunk from the hallway and we both glanced that way. It was too cold and too late and too dark; the night was careening away from me.

I leaned forward. “Mikki, they found Cameron. In Canada. Gary just called me.”

“No.”

“It’s true. He’s in custody.”

Another thunk and I sat up, twisting my trunk, then turned back in time to see Mikki’s hand emerging from the pocket of her hoodie.

Her movement was so swift, so precise, it was as if she’d been practicing for this moment. A little “hah!” escaped from her lungs as her arm shot forward, then hard pressure on my lower-right ribs. My chin swung down to take it in: The entire blade swallowed by the flesh below my bra. Blood oozing out around it like wine soaking into a tablecloth. I thought, oddly, of Mom, the cancer in her breast, scalpels rooting around for the poisoned tissue.

A second passed, then another, and then, with the brutality of a stampede, sudden, epic pain. The last thing I noticed was Mikki’s knuckles, still wrapped around the X-Acto knife’s handle.





CHAPTER 26





Katie


TUESDAY, DECEMBER 24, 10:25 P.M.

An earthquake.

I kept my eyes closed because the earth was shaking, tectonic plates shifting, and I couldn’t let the ceiling fall in on me, or slip into a crevasse and let the ground swallow me whole. I squeezed them shut and then had an idea:

Open them.

The earth wasn’t shaking: I was. I was in the fetal position and my hands in front of my face were an odd color, orangey white. I couldn’t get a good look because they were quivering, and my head, too, my vision, nothing but shakes.