The Herd(98)
Hana refilled all of our flutes, slender cups of kindness yet, and we clinked them together one more time.
EPILOGUE
Karen sat in the kitchen, a fluffy white robe tied around her, practical cork-bottomed slippers on her feet. It was March, but frost still licked the windows and coated the grass beyond the patio and pool. She and Gary had just returned from two weeks in Saint Martin, hot, sunny days at the pool or on the beach or on one of their two balconies, watching the sun rise and then set, over and over.
It’d been Gary’s idea, a way to relax and reconnect after the hellishness of the holiday season. Her beautiful daughter’s funeral, the saddest day of her life. The sudden loss of their best friends, the Corrigans down the street—a For Sale sign had just appeared in front of their white-columned mansion, mercifully. The weird, tense weeks when detectives kept popping by the house, asking more and more questions about a weekend in 2010 that Gary and Karen couldn’t possibly remember. Neither of them kept diaries or hung on to their old agenda books. But clearly the police were taking seriously the awful rantings of Eleanor’s killer. Karen went to check the weather on Gary’s laptop one day and found “posthumous trial” at the top of his recent Google searches, and she’d rushed to the toilet and thrown up on the spot: The idea was just too awful, Eleanor’s ghost being tried for some ghastly crime. But she’d never mentioned it to Gary, and eventually, the visits from detectives had stopped.
The sun wouldn’t set for a few more hours, but it seemed late enough to treat herself to a glass of wine. She rifled through the fridge and cabinets and, finding none there, opened the door to the basement and flipped on the light. She hated going down here, past the refurbished part, the leather sofa and enormous TV—hated pushing through the folding doors into the dank, cold section where bald lightbulbs hung, their pull cords swaying. She especially hated passing the spot, now a jumbled four-shelf storage unit, where the chest freezer once sat. She hurried past it, reaching the rack of dusty bottles, and selected a 2015 Cab Sauv from Sonoma Valley. She tugged on the string near her head, flicking off the light, and turned to leave. Then she locked eyes with a face staring out from the storage rack.
She screamed and dropped the bottle, wine splashing onto her slippers and spreading out along the cement floor. Flailing around, she found and yanked the bulb’s cord again, bathing the area in light. She stepped forward, her pulse pounding, and squinted, but she couldn’t figure out what object on the shelf—books, ski gear, boxes, old magazines, a bin of gently used gift bags and crumpled bows—had looked to her like a face. On the ground, the blob of wine lapped at a nearby box, and she hurried back upstairs to grab paper towels from the kitchen.
As she ripped the roll from the wall, her memory betrayed her, cueing up the one thing she begged it nightly not to show her: that beautiful black-haired girl, a chunk of her hair sheared down to fuzz, her smooth skin frosted over like it was dusted in flour, resting calmly in the chest freezer while Gary ordered Eleanor away, yammering about all the ways you can identify a body: clothes, teeth, marks, fingers. He ranted and muttered and slammed the freezer door closed as Karen’s mind homed in on the smallest detail, one that worked its way into her dreams even now—the girl’s beautiful nails, ebony speckled with tiny white stars. How rich the black looked against her delicate, milky fingers. Gary had walked in small circles, repeating the words, turning them into a mantra: clothesteethmarksfingers. Clothesteethmarksfingers. Like a puzzle he had to solve.
And he had, somehow, though he’d never told Karen how. He and Cameron had handled it one night, a night Gary assumed she’d slept through, and in the morning, to be kind, she played along. Cameron had never been the same after that, poor thing—missing work, moving from painkillers to heroin, his life like a car speeding off a cliff. All for Eleanor. All for their luminous little girl. All for Eleanor, dead at thirty.
She’d never told Gary her horrible secret. There was no point, not by the time they got home and found the body in the breakfast nook, just inside the patio doors. She heard the girls’ story, looked at the missed calls and voicemails on Gary’s phone until she’d nailed down their timeline, figured out exactly when Mikki, Hana, and Eleanor had given up and called it a night. But Karen knew how long it took for rigor mortis to set in, for a soft body to grow stiff; she was, after all, a nurse, familiar with this odd biological detail. And their story didn’t check out. The pale neck Karen thrust her fingers against to feel for a pulse—still supple. The body they carried into the basement once the girls had packed their things and left—not nearly stiff enough. Karen knew her daughter and her friends weren’t lying; there was no doubt in their hungover minds that this black-haired girl was dead by the time they went upstairs. What good would it have done to correct them, after the fact?
Karen forced herself back into the basement. Shit—her slippers had tracked wine out onto the carpet, ruby footsteps that looked just like blood. She gasped as she took it all in: jagged red ovals alternating their way past the sofa and up the stairs, out to the light, out to freedom.
She walked to the edge of the puddle, which had formed the shape of a kidney, of a baby in the fetal position. Slowly she sank to her knees, watching the wine seep into her robe. She walked her hands out in front of her, barely noticing the shards of glass cutting into her palms. She lowered her body down onto its side, her head resting on her forearm, and as the bare bulb droned overhead, she wept.