The Snap, page 13
“It’s not all kids’ stuff,” Morgan put in. “There’s a casino, and drinks are all included, and there’s the beach and a spa. You could go golfing. You don’t even have to see the kids!”
As if I didn’t adore my nieces and nephews. As if not liking kids and not finding someone I wanted to have them with were interchangeable.
“Let me know the date,” I said, mostly to get out of this conversation. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Inside I sent a flurry of texts to the group chat.
Can’t you just get her tickets to Hamilton? Dayanna wrote.
Nisha’s advice: If you really loved her, you’d have a kid. And then, By the way, it’s day five.
As if we didn’t know.
Nothing yet, Annika wrote. I guess you were right, Nish.
It’s business days, Sarah cracked.
I slipped my phone into my pocket. If we couldn’t be together today, then I’d keep them close to me this way. It’s nothing, it’s a prank, I repeated to myself, but my skin itched, and I wondered when I’d stopped believing it.
After a morning of meetings and checking my phone, I finally snuck off to the cafeteria around two. Nothing yet, and the chat had gone silent, but there was a lot demanding my attention at work. We were going to have to roll this new coaching hire out very carefully. Coach Russo didn’t even know about it yet and was upstairs right now preparing for this week’s game. Meanwhile Coach Washington’s agent was finalizing his bonus structure and getting ready to file the contract with the league. Should I bother releasing the announcement on Coach Russo? It would look strange not to. Skipping it would only bring more questions and therefore more work for me.
Now that I was smelling the food, that moist plastic scent from the underside of the steam tray lids, the thought of it turned my stomach, so I stuck to coffee and sat at one of the small tables. It was quiet other than the drone of ESPN from a nearby flatscreen. If I had it my way I’d take a four-hour bath, read a trashy magazine, and come back to the stadium sometime around March. My recycling bin was overflowing with empty bottles. I couldn’t remember the last time I ate something that came from the earth.
A red breaking-news banner flashed across the bottom of the TV screen beneath a headshot of Damian Jokiak. I sat up straight. Damian was the power forward for Annika’s team, a four-time all-star currently starring in a nationwide ad campaign for breakfast cereal where he was dunked on by a squirrel.
Breaking news this afternoon as superstar Madison Blizzards forward Damian Jokiak is accused of raping and assaulting multiple women. A source familiar with the situation claims Jokiak choked and strangled the women before and while forcing them to have sexual intercourse.
“Oh my God,” I breathed. Annika had worked with Damian forever. She liked Damian. I took a shaky sip of coffee as the broadcast continued.
In an unusual twist, also named in the allegation are the Blizzards organization and Blizzards in-house counsel Annika Smith. Smith is accused of having actual knowledge of these events, of offering the women hush money, and of coercing them to sign non-disclosure agreements threatening treble damages if the allegations were made public.
The cup slipped from my fingers and sent a wave of coffee across my white blouse. “Shit!” I shoved my chair back and stumbled toward the napkin dispenser, eyes still locked on the screen.
“Whoa, Poppy,” said Mo, who had just entered the cafeteria with his laptop. “Are you okay?”
“I have to go,” I managed. Leaving the coffee dripping onto the floor, I pushed my way into the stairwell, backed myself against the wall, and sank to the steps. It felt like a bird was trapped inside my chest, throwing itself against my ribs in its desperation to get out. The air was Everest-thin.
It was day five.
The story broke on day five.
This was real. And we were all on the table.
* * *
*
I managed to get myself upstairs to the Media Relations annex. “I’ll be out for the rest of the day,” I told Edward just as Chloe buzzed herself in through the doors. She took one look at my blouse and stopped short.
Edward blinked rapidly. “Today? But we’re—you just—”
“I have to go. Rodney, you’re the point person. Get rid of the little stuff and push everyone else off until tomorrow.” I swooped into my office long enough to grab my purse and shove one arm through the sleeve of my ivory coat, letting the other side dangle. The liner was going to stain from the coffee, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t at all sure I could drive myself, but I had to get out of here and back to my townhouse.
Maybe you were right, Nish.
While Annika was typing that, ESPN would have been going over its story one more time, making sure it had at least two sources to corroborate the allegations, checking the spelling of Damian’s last name. I had to get out of here. I had to be alone. I had to think.
By the time I got home I’d ignored calls from Dayanna, Sarah, and Nisha, all sent straight to voicemail. I barely even remembered the drive home. I peeled off my soiled clothes and wrapped myself in a bathrobe, a poor imitation of the comforting hug I wished there was anyone in my life to offer. Do not think about him, do not. Do not. My phone buzzed again, and for a wild second I thought that I was wrong, that Peter had somehow sensed that I was in trouble, until I saw it was a text from Nisha.
We’re in the chat. Get on NOW.
Numbly, I set my laptop up on my bed and followed the link to our video chat room. The others appeared, pale and anxious.
“Here she is,” Nisha said as she threw up her hands. “Now can we please figure out what the fuck is going on? Sarah?”
She shook her head, and her curls bounced wildly back and forth, escaping the edges of the frame. When we’d talked earlier, I could have pictured her with her feet up on the rust-colored sofa in her Hoboken apartment, oversized Penn State sweatshirt, thick socks. Relaxed and happy. Now she looked bled dry. “I haven’t heard anything. I reached out to my contacts at ESPN, but everyone’s being really tight-lipped. My one friend says they’re under threat of death from legal not to spread any unsubstantiated rumors.”
“Which means,” said Nisha, “what they’re reporting now must be pretty damn substantiated.”
We sat in stunned silence. After several tense moments, I said, “Has anyone reached out to Annika?”
“I tried,” said Dayanna. “Her phone is going straight to voicemail, and of course I texted, but I haven’t heard anything back. God, she must be sick. And her daughters…”
It hit me straight in the gut. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what it would be like to have daughters. That wasn’t going to happen for me, so thinking about it would be wasteful and unproductive. It wasn’t worth thinking about the ways I would show my daughter that I valued her by meeting her where she was, at her interests, instead of trying to color her with my own pen. There was no reason to think through the ways I would support her, tell her I was proud of her and her career.
But Annika was a mother, and her girls adored her—so much so that the older one, Carolyn, was following in her footsteps at law school. I remember when Annika told us Carolyn had applied, she’d tried to toss the information off casually, modestly, but her shining eyes gave her away. They’d danced that entire conversation.
And when Joanna, the younger daughter, chose to major in feminist theory at NYU, Annika’s husband, Grant, made a cardboard sign that read, I know, I’m wrong and wore it around his neck for a week while they all fell over laughing. The sweatshirt under the sign was NYU purple.
They were the success story, the family that had it all. This couldn’t be happening.
And who was the source?
“Okay.” Nisha licked her cracked lips. Her normally creamy complexion looked flat and bleached, and a strand of her dark bob was caught in her eyelashes. She didn’t move it away. “Brass tacks time. This doesn’t just affect Annika.”
“We know,” said Sarah quietly.
Nisha’s voice was tight and higher than normal. “Whoever sent those notes actually blew up Annika over this—”
“Didn’t she deserve to be blown up?” Dayanna cried. “We’ve all seen so much shit I can’t believe I’m this surprised, but I’m just—shocked. I’m shocked that Anni would do such a thing.”
“You don’t know what she did or didn’t do,” Sarah put in. “You know how these stories take off—”
Nisha sneered. “Oh, because of the media, Sarah?”
“All I know,” Dayanna said hotly, “is that I’m not going to live like this. Here’s my deep dark secret—I dated one of my players. For two years. And if that came out I’d get fired and lose my career, and absolutely nothing would happen to him, but I didn’t cover up a rape. I’m not going to let myself be put in the same basket as someone who would.”
Her hand reached out and grabbed the top of her laptop and then she was gone, lost to the slamming of the lid. Nisha, Sarah, and I sat in heavy silence until Nisha broke it. “I get what she’s saying, but it’s still Anni and we’re not giving up on her, right? Right?”
I tried to speak—“Right!” I wanted to scream. “Of course not!”—but nothing came out except a small sob.
Sarah rubbed her eyes and then looked to the camera with a thousand-yard stare. “First Red…then the letters…now ESPN. Someone planned this whole thing. They’re going to pick us off one by one.”
“We don’t know that Red…” But I trailed off, because even I couldn’t believe they were unrelated now. A rape cover-up and a murder. They were both too high stakes to be coincidence.
“Do we have a responsibility to tell anyone? What if this psycho is planning to hurt someone else?” Sarah bit her lip and looked at the ceiling. “I didn’t want to say anything, because I thought I was being stupid, but now…”
“What?” I felt like I was sitting atop broken glass. One flinch, one move in any direction would slice me to pieces.
“I’ve been getting these weird messages on Twitter. I mean, whatever, that happens all the time, but these are really personal.”
“Personal how?”
“So, one referenced where my car was parked, or at least, that’s what I read into it. Another said something about the hat I wear on my runs.”
“Sarah!”
“Okay,” Nisha broke in, “but you said yourself you were reading into it. And I’ve seen your Instagram, you’ve definitely posted photos in that hat. It’s the Alo one, right?”
“I don’t think—” I started, but Nisha cut me off.
“I’m not saying don’t be careful or whatever, but this isn’t a Wes Craven production. Someone sold out Annika. That’s fact. Anything else is just us guessing, and that’s not helping anything.”
“But Red—”
“Is dead, yes, but that was on day zero. It doesn’t fit. It doesn’t, Pop.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better? That there might be something else coming for me?”
“It’s supposed to snap you out of it!” yelled Nisha. “And you, Sarah. We have to keep it together and not panic. We are women who know how to handle things, we do not lose our shit. We’re going to keep trying to get in touch with Annika, and make sure Dayanna doesn’t go rogue on us. Sarah, can you go by her place? Bring some fucking cupcakes or something?” Sarah nodded. “We’re going to replace every password we’ve ever created, up to and including changing our own birthdates, if we have to.”
“The second note was postmarked from Queens, and I had a weird feeling that night in the bar, like someone was watching us,” I said. “Sarah, please be careful. I’m sure you already do, but walk with your keys between your fingers, check the back seat before you get in, lock the door before you buckle.” The litany of car safety commandments my mother had drilled into my teenage self came out as though she’d possessed me.
“Go buy a hat or a sweatshirt or something and don’t wear it out,” Nisha suggested. “Just post a photo of it from inside your apartment. Then if this weirdo brings it up, you know he’s just trying to scare you.”
“I don’t know if this is the time to be clever,” I said. “We should probably avoid posting altogether for now. And don’t go out alone at night.”
“Do you do that a lot anyway?” Sarah asked.
“No.” Although I had been out alone at night recently. On the night Red died.
“Keep it together,” Nisha reiterated. “Whoever is doing this is not going to take us down.”
“I’ll let you know how it goes with Day,” Sarah said. “I’m off today, so I can go over there in a bit.”
I didn’t have an assignment, so I just nodded firmly. “We’ll talk soon.” And then we signed off, and the ensuing silence made me feel more alone than I ever had in my life.
I sent Annika a text that read, Here if you want to talk. I hesitated, then added, Love you. It quickly changed from delivered to read, but no reply came.
Annika was a good wife and a good mother. She was an accomplished and respected attorney, had won awards for mentoring young female lawyers, and spent her very limited time off volunteering with an organization that helped women looking to enter the workforce apply and prepare for job interviews. Knowing what I knew now, maybe that work was less altruistic and more of a penance. Her name was going to be connected forever to the most despicable of crimes and an ugly propensity to shield the perpetrator from any responsibility. In the court of public opinion, Annika was as bad as Damian. Unless there really was more to the story. I, of all people, owed it to her to find out.
Poppy Benjamin, you will get through this, I told myself firmly, angrily. Focus up. Do your job. And until we know what’s what, keep a low profile.
I was still holding my phone when a text came through from Rodney.
Asbel’s looking for you. RG’s autopsy is done and the police want to talk to all senior front office staff.
PART II
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
NOW
“I knew it,” said Rodney.
Following another painful loss, we were side by side in the hallway outside our main conference room, where two detectives had taken up residence. “Fact gathering,” they called it, but that really meant “making sure not a single blessed thing gets done” because we were all wondering when it would be our turn to be interrogated. Asbel and I had planned to announce Coach Washington today, which meant we’d be introducing our new coach in the morning and then answering questions about the murder of the old one in the afternoon.
“It would take a lot of power to do something like that,” Rodney went on. “You don’t just half-heartedly smash somebody’s skull—you have to be strong.” I raised my eyebrows, indicating the powerful biceps of my gym-rat media relations manager, and he unfolded his arms, deflating the muscles. “The man spent his entire life in football. How many big-armed dudes did he come across—thousands? And he’d have to be tall, for the angle, because Red was tall. So if I was leading the investigation, I’d start with the wide receivers.”
“Are you leading the investigation? Because otherwise we have quite a bit of work to get through today.” My head was pounding, and the light hurt my eyes. For the fifth night in a row I’d fallen asleep with my glasses on and my phone in my lap, my battery run down from searching every corner of the Internet for updates about Annika. None of us had heard from her, despite repeated attempts to reach out, and the rest of us were in a constant cringe, waiting for our own detonations courtesy of the author of those notes. They might go off today or tomorrow or next week or never. My stomach ground away at itself, and I was subsisting mainly on alcohol and coffee.
I might not have a secret on the scale of Annika’s, which I still couldn’t wrap my brain around, but there were things in my past that would be problems. Big problems. There were things that, if made public, to save the team, I would have to eat. That would mean losing this job and everything I’d given up to have it. It would mean hitchhiking back to Ohio, where my smug-faced brother and sister-in-law would offer to put in a good word for me at the Millburn Turkey Farm, a Thanksgiving-themed all-you-can-eat buffet where the waitstaff dressed up like pilgrims. I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t.
“I think Lexi did it,” said Rodney.
“Red’s wife? What happened to weight-lifting wide receivers?”
“Have you ever used a Pilates reformer? She’s strong as hell.”
“And the height?”
“Okay…back to Coach Nate. He’s tall enough, he’s got the rage. The motive. He just needed the opportunity.”
“I’m taking this opportunity to go back to my office. Could you please bring the nice detectives some coffee?”
“It could have been Asbel.”
I was a full five steps away when Rodney tossed that out, stopping me in my tracks. My pulse kicked up, and I turned. “Excuse me?”
Rodney shrugged. “What? He’s tall and strong, and he had a coach problem…problem solved, you know?”
I was back beside Rodney now and dropped my voice. “I know you’re just fucking around, but that isn’t funny. Red was a real person, our colleague, and someone killed him. His kids don’t have a dad.”
Rodney nodded, chagrined. The office was warm, but as I walked back to Media Relations I rubbed at the goose bumps on my arms. It was true, of course, that none of this was at all funny, but Rodney being Rodney hadn’t bothered me before because it was gallows humor, and what else were we supposed to do to keep putting one foot in front of the other? But that joke, that scenario, hit differently.
Because it had entered my mind too.
* * *
*
