The Collective, page 15
“Excuse me?”
“Gary Kimball isn’t missing.” She spits out the words. “He escaped. And his wife’s in on it.”
I raise an eyebrow. “That’s an interesting theory.”
“It’s what happened,” she says. “Come on. It’s obvious. He’s probably in fucking Thailand right now.”
“I don’t get it. He did his time. I mean . . . what would he be escaping from?”
She puts down her coffee cup. “More girls were coming forward.”
“What?”
“They were planning a civil suit.” She gives me a bitter smile. “You haven’t read about it?”
“No.”
“It was on Jezebel a few weeks ago.”
“I . . . I didn’t see it.”
She sighs heavily. “Not surprising. It’d be everywhere if they were rich white girls.” Goes back to her keyboard. “Anyway . . . I hope they catch his sorry ass.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
I open the design folder on my screen and stare at it, my brain reeling. It doesn’t matter. Their case doesn’t matter. If he’d lived and if this went to trial, he’d hire the same expensive lawyers he had before, and they’d do the same number on these girls that they did on the victims in the criminal case and they would wind up broken and humiliated and none of them would see a dime. 0001 gets that. There’s no way she didn’t know about the civil case when she gave Wendy and me the assignment. And if I talked to Wendy, she’d agree. If I talked to her, just about the civil case and how it’s been in the news. Just that.
Some rules can be broken, can’t they? Look at how much it helped us to talk . . . I could find her. Her last name is unusual. Same as Iggy Pop’s. Osterberg.
I look for Wendy Osterberg on Facebook, but the only one I find lives in Germany, and looks more like Iggy Pop than the woman I know. And when I search the member list in the Niobe group, she doesn’t turn up there, either. It makes sense. After everything her son went through, why would she want anything to do with social media? I try googling her name and the tiny town of Jefferville, New York, where she told me she lives. A phone number pops up—just one, along with an address. Wendy Osterberg, on Dove Street. It has to be her. I pick up my phone. But as I start to tap in the number, I remember the last words we said to each other, Wendy rubbing sleep out of her eyes and joking, This was like a really good one-night stand, only without the sex.
I’d replied, And without the pretending we’ll keep in touch.
Wendy cast a quick, meaningful glance at Susan, still waiting in the car, and put a shushing finger to her lips. We’ll always have Alayah.
But that’s only for emergencies.
I glance around. Besides the couple, there are only two other customers—a stoned-looking bearded kid with a sketch pad and an old hippie guy I’ve seen in here a lot. The kid’s drawing furiously and the old guy is absorbed in a paperback. The couple are both clacking away on their laptops now, no one paying me any attention. I switch servers, call up Ağlayan Kaya, and click into the chat. My new world. My sisters . . .
Destroy him.
. . . rip her eyes out.
. . . make them feel the way my son did, only I want it to last longer. I want the pain to be unbearable. . . .
I open up my private messages, type a message to 0001. I’ve been listening to the news about Gary Kimball. I heard there’s a lawsuit planned against him. We didn’t take him too early, did we? But it feels strange, going into this much detail in a message. I delete most of it and just send the beginning.
0417: I’ve been listening to the news.
As I watch it disappear, I remember that Wendy and I weren’t supposed to know who or what was in the trunk of the Mercedes, and my breathing gets too fast. The make and model were mentioned on the news. If you hadn’t looked in the trunk, you’d still be able to put two and two together. . . .
The screen pulses with ellipses, and I rehearse responses in my head. I had no idea until I heard it on the radio, I swear. They said Kimball was last seen in a Mercedes S-Class. Am I wrong? I just assumed. . . .
0001: It feels good, doesn’t it?
My eyes widen. No defense needed, I guess.
“Camille?”
I minimize the screen quickly and look up. Xenia Hedges. I recognize her from her publicity shots—broad, photogenic smile; high cheekbones; a buzz cut that’s blue now (it used to be pink). She’s easily twenty years younger than Glynne, but they still look like they belong together—cut from the same fine cloth. Too bad they aren’t a couple anymore. No doubt their wedding pictures were spectacular.
I stand up to shake Xenia’s hand, and it’s only then that I notice the odd look on her face—the tightness in her deep red lips, the concern in her onyx eyes.
Xenia takes my hand in both of hers and grasps it. I try to pull away, but she keeps holding on. What is going on? Did she see my screen?
She says, “Are you all right?”
I take a step back. “What do you mean?”
“News reports are one thing, but when it’s real people . . .”
“What?”
“There’s got to be a lot. To, um, process. Did you just find out, or . . .” There’s an edge to her voice, a tremor. As though she knows I’ve killed a man. But how could she? Did she get here earlier than I thought? Did she read what I deleted?
I take a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
“Oh God,” Xenia says. “I mean . . . I just assumed you knew.”
She says it too loudly. I can feel the old hippie putting his book down to look at us, the young couple turning from their laptops.
What the fuck are you talking about? I want to say.
But she doesn’t give me the chance. She says it quietly, with the forced, professional calm of a hostage negotiator, and in that slice of time before I fully understand the meaning of the words, I feel sorry for her, a complete stranger, tasked with delivering news that sends shapes swirling in front of my eyes. “Harris Blanchard,” she says. “He’s dead.”
IF I HAD no idea that the collective existed, the details of Harris Blanchard’s death would have struck me as too perfect to be real. I would have assumed Xenia was lying—that she wasn’t a jewelry designer but a reporter or an internet troll, or maybe a friend of the Blanchards playing a cruel prank in order to get a reaction out of me.
Even knowing what I do, it seems crazy: Harris Blanchard dies nearly five years to the day after Emily, the cause of death the same: hypothermia and probable alcohol poisoning. “You’re serious.” I actually say it at one point. I can’t help myself. “This isn’t some sick joke?”
Xenia slides her phone across the table. “It’s all over Twitter,” she says. “I have an article open. Go ahead. Look.”
I shake my head. “That’s okay. I believe you. It’s just . . .”
“I know.”
“It’s a lot.”
“Of course it is.”
I take her phone after all and read the article on her screen, just so I can have something to do with my eyes. It’s hard to get past the accompanying picture: Harris Blanchard, Martha L. Koch Humanitarian Award in hand, posing by himself in front of the Christmas tree at the Brayburn Club. The photo was taken after my arrest, and I’m a little surprised by the look on his face—that shaky, uncertain smile. I enlarge it until the smile fills the screen, then make it bigger, even bigger, until it looks like something that was never human to begin with.
According to the article, Harris Blanchard had been in Vermont on a ski trip with a group of Brayburn friends, enjoying the tail end of the last winter break of his college career. He had been drinking with them the night of January 27 and was last seen leaving a bar in Burlington at eleven thirty p.m. “very, very drunk,” according to one witness. Some at the bar said he called an Uber and left on his own, while others insisted they saw him leaving with a girl—a stranger. The indisputable fact is that he died that night. His frozen body was found the afternoon of the twenty-eighth, two miles away from the bar, in the woods surrounding a ski trail.
“Who was the girl?” I whisper.
Xenia just looks at me.
I skim through the article again. He died the twenty-seventh. That was Monday. The same night I was in Poughkeepsie at The Bachelor watch party with Wendy. I knew at the time we were building an alibi—that was obvious. What I didn’t know was that it would cover two separate murders.
Xenia says, “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Believe me, I know how you feel.”
No, Xenia, you don’t. It’s as though I’ve been trapped in a dark cell for five years, and now I’m finally out—but it’s because the floorboards have given way beneath me.
Maybe the collective didn’t kill him. Maybe it’s just a bizarre coincidence.
What a ridiculous thought. When the man who killed Rachel Ruley’s son accidentally shot himself, was that a bizarre coincidence? How about when Ashley Shawger blew himself up on the thirtieth anniversary of his victim’s death? And when Gary Kimball is finally found dead in the trunk of his own rapemobile, will that be a bizarre coincidence too?
I hear myself say, “It’s very sad.”
Her eyes narrow. “It is? Really? I mean, after everything you’ve been through . . .”
“I wouldn’t wish it on any mother. Including Harris Blanchard’s.” It feels true. It’s what I feel. I grit my teeth. Stop it, stop it, stop it.
Xenia reaches across the table, places a cool hand on mine. “You’re a very good person, Camille.”
My cheeks heat up. “I don’t know about that.”
I open my laptop, Xenia’s website folder filling the screen, the private conversation with 0001 long gone. I open one of the layouts—the purply ethereal one—and turn the laptop so that she can see it. “I’m a very good designer, though.”
LUKE CALLS ME on the way home from Analog, and I don’t need to ask why. I accept the call over the Bluetooth. “News travels fast,” I tell him.
“So does karma.”
I smile a little. “Yes.”
“Listen, Cam. I just wanted to let you know that when I told you to let it go, that was for you, not Blanchard.”
I take a breath. “I know that.”
“You don’t have to forgive him, okay? You never had to forgive him.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And now that he’s dead, you have every right to feel the way you do.”
My stomach tightens. “Can I call you back in a little bit?”
I hang up before he can answer. I feel nauseous, my head swimmy. When I reach the stoplight, I open the driver’s-side window all the way and lean out of it, taking gulps of cold air. A car passes me across the road, and I can feel the driver staring at me. I’m okay, I tell myself over and over, until I’m steadier and my head clears and I can close the window again. I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay.
“I’m okay,” I whisper. The light changes, and I ease my foot off the brake. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
As I’m passing the Mount Shady Library, 0001’s message flashes through my mind. It feels good, doesn’t it? She’d obviously assumed that by “news,” I’d meant Blanchard’s death, not Kimball’s. But if I were to answer her question truthfully . . .
Maybe it’s that I didn’t get to see Harris Blanchard die or that I heard about it secondhand or maybe I’m still in shock. But I don’t think it’s that simple. I think the reason why I feel the way I do is that when it all comes down to it, yes, Harris Blanchard was a terrible human being. But he was also a kid like Emily was, with a mother and a father. And his death hasn’t changed my life for the better. It hasn’t made Emily any more alive.
I turn up the road that leads to my house, a steep uphill drive. My ears click. I drive in silence, trying to think about nothing, but I can’t stop picturing Lisette and Tom Blanchard hearing the news that their son has died, collapsing onto each other the way Matt and I did when we heard about Emily, our bones giving way. They’re like me now, the Blanchards. They’re like all of us in the collective. They are parents whose son was taken from them. They have nothing.
When I reach my driveway and pull in, I call Luke again. “I’m going to be honest with you,” I tell him. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel.”
“You should feel vindicated,” he says.
My eyes burn. I shut them tight. A hot tear slips down my cheek. Then another. “Why?”
“Because,” he says. “Harris Blanchard left this world trying to do to another girl what he did to Emily.”
“What?”
“People are talking about it, Cam. They’re calling him a rapist. They’re saying ‘Justice for Emily’ again.”
“Who’s saying that?”
“Lots of people. There were so many comments on Lisette Blanchard’s Instagram, she closed down her account.”
I exhale. “Come on, Luke. You know better than to believe online gossip. Think about what they were saying about me a few weeks ago.”
“I know,” he says. “But this stuff is true. And he was escalating.”
My hand freezes on the door handle.
“Jim Grady told me. He knows a detective in the Burlington area, so I asked him to do some digging.”
“Is that . . . Is that kosher?”
“He’s a friend. You’ve met him. He knows where my heart comes from. He wanted to find out himself.”
“Okay, fine.”
“When did you get so concerned over the sharing of police information?”
I clear my throat. “What did Jim say?”
“A lot,” he says. “For one thing, the reason why the cops were looking for Harris Blanchard in the first place wasn’t because his friends reported him missing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They only found out he was missing after they went to his Airbnb to question him, and his friends said he never came home. A girl had been in the station that morning. . . . Apparently, she had left the bar with him and they went for a walk. They were both drunk, but he was blasted. He got violent.”
“Oh . . .”
“She managed to fight him off and get away and leave him there in the woods, where he passed out. But her clothes were torn. She had cuts. She was very shaken up. I know I’m not a real cop. But I’ve done tons of research, and I’ve learned a lot from Jim over the years, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that guys like this don’t just mellow out on their own. They get a charge off hurting people and getting away with it. And the more they get away with it, the more dangerous they become.”
“She had cuts? This girl?”
“Yes. She said he held a knife on her.”
My throat closes up. “A knife.”
“It was a deer-hunting knife, Cam,” he says quietly. “A big one. They found it on his body.”
Fourteen
It was a Buck 119. I actually have to bite my tongue not to say it out loud. Luke starts talking about the recidivism rate among rapists, but all I can think about is Ashley Shawger removing it from the glass display case and showing it to me, the long blade gleaming. This is the Buck 119. Nothing fancy, but a good, solid, versatile knife.
After I left his store, I’d driven eighty-one miles, as instructed, to the post office in Ellenville, where I’d disguised myself for the security cameras, slipped the Buck 119 into a padded envelope, and mailed it to a PO box in Burlington, Vermont.
0001 knew what would happen. If everything went the way she planned it to go and if each part of this giant machine she’s assembled performed her role effectively, she knew very well where the knife would wind up, but how did she know Harris Blanchard would be there?
Luke says, “You’re so quiet, Cam.”
“Did Harris post on Instagram about going to Burlington?”
“He always posts about it. He and that group of friends go there every winter break. Why?”
“Nothing. I guess I’m just processing everything.”
“He’s gone,” Luke says. “He’ll never hurt another girl again.”
“I know.”
“And he did it to himself.”
I don’t say anything.
“When Nora and I come up, we can all toast to the future.”
“I’d like that,” I tell him, just to get off the phone. “I’d like that a lot.”
I HAVE A landline at home, but I don’t remember the last time I used it. It’s one of those things I keep telling myself I should get rid of, but there’s something that keeps me from doing it—my last tie to the past, I suppose. Plus, the turquoise rotary phone in the living room—a Salvation Army find from my college days—would be dead without it, and I don’t like that thought. I never sprung for landline voicemail. Instead the phone is attached to an answering machine that’s nearly as ancient as it is. At one point, there was a recorded message on it featuring Matt, four-year-old Emily, and me, but it got erased when she was around nine—I think by Emily herself—and it’s been the default robot voice answering that phone ever since.
That is, on the rare times it needs to be answered. Telemarketers call it on occasion, but I can’t remember the last time the red message light read anything other than 0. Once I get into my house, though, and set my laptop case down on the coffee table, that glaring light is the first thing I notice: 23. Twenty-three messages.
I push the button. “Hi, Camille.” The voice is chipper, female, and unfamiliar. “How are you feeling? This is Katie Mitchell from the Daily News, and I just wanted to see if I could talk to you about Harris Blanch—”
I press delete. The next message is almost identical, except that it’s from a New York Post reporter named Daphne something or other, and besides wanting to know how I’m feeling, she’s also “wondering if I plan to attend Harris Blanchard’s funeral.” Delete.
A serious-sounding young male voice follows, this time from the Times Union, calling me “Mrs. Gardener” and wondering how I “feel about everything.” Next up is a man from the Daily Freeman in Kingston and then there’s a producer from some radio show I’ve never heard of and then a guy calling from TMZ (Must be a really slow day for celebrity news . . .), each and every one of them posing different variants of the same question: How do you feel? As though, after five years, a light’s been switched on, and how Camille Gardener feels is the only thing that matters.
