The Herd

by Andrea Bartz

  I looked around in confusion, but Aurelia answered: “She had questions about the acquisition. Who would benefit, if anyone was against it, that kind of thing. I was pretty useless—I didn’t know about it till this week either.”

  Ratliff must have shown up earlier than I’d thought, chatting with Aurelia before conducting her half-assed search. It shook me that Ratliff could’ve walked right by Fatima and me.

  “And could you think of anything?” Mikki asked.

  “Not really. I wish Hana were here, she knows more than I do. The detective asked for files on all our members. Oh, and everyone working on the Fort Greene site.”

  I pulled at the backs of the framed photos, the one of Mikki, Eleanor, and Hana as big-eyed, thick-banged eighteen-year-olds, plus the one of Daniel and Eleanor vacationing together. Nothing written on the back of either.

  “Have either of you been to the construction site?” I said. “Maybe there was a creepy contractor.”

  Aurelia shook her head, but Mikki looked up. “I’ve gone a couple times, to sign off on changes with the design,” she said. “But I don’t remember anyone leering or anything. I mean, it’s construction workers. They’re just tired and trying to do their jobs.”

  “Eleanor’s really picky about who we work with—I know because I was in charge of getting bids.” Aurelia leaned back on her hands. “The contractors we went with are expensive but super professional. She didn’t want to hire anyone who’d do anything, you know. Below board.”

  “Undocumented workers, that kind of thing?” I said.

  “Yeah. Or even just cutting corners, forging ahead without the right permits or whatever. She kept saying we wouldn’t survive a scandal. I guess ’cause of the acquisition.”

  Mikki flung herself into an armchair. “Speaking of scandals, did they ever figure out who was calling us ugly cunts?”

  “The detectives know about it, but no progress, no.”

  Suddenly a phone buzzed, and for a brief, wild moment I thought it was Eleanor’s, hidden here in her office, and it would solve everything and prove she was okay. My heart took off, but then I realized the phone was mine, vibrating inside my bag on Eleanor’s desk.

  Fatima. “It’s for a story,” I told them, my get-out-of-jail-free card. “I gotta take this.”

  But of course, when I called her back a minute later, Fatima didn’t pick up. I texted her and then tried Hana again: It was strange enough being here without Eleanor, and it wasn’t like Hana to blow me off. Where had everyone gone? Suddenly the frustration surged up like nausea and I found my cheeks dripping with tears.

  I needed distraction, needed to keep digging. I thought of Ted, who this morning had mentioned meeting for food, and sent him a text: “I’m wrapping here—what’s your plan?” He suggested a burrito place nearby, and though I couldn’t imagine eating a fucking burrito at the moment, I’d do anything to get out of here, away from Eleanor’s once-perfect and now-rumpled things.

  I glared at those I passed in the street, well-dressed and good-looking even under their thick winter layers—lucky bystanders, people who didn’t know or care that Eleanor was someplace she shouldn’t be. That my writing career was fucked, that there was a bloodstain somewhere in Michigan where a Chris-shaped hole had been cut from my chest. I gulped in the frigid air and hurried over to Eighth Avenue.

  I spotted Ted through the fogged-up windows and felt my spirits lift. He wore a down vest over a plaid shirt, all mountain man-y. We hugged hello, a little awkwardly, and when he ordered a margarita, I did the same. I sucked at it when it appeared, eager for the softening, the way tequila sanded down the rough edges.

  “So how’re you holding up?” he asked. Chips arrived, the oily deep-fried variety, and he plunged one into salsa.

  “I’m okay. I’m trying to keep busy—makes me feel like I’m doing something.” I pulled a napkin from the little dispenser.

  “I hear that. I just keep getting stuck on…we were all high-fiving over your computer on Friday. A few days ago. Where could she have gone?”

  “She didn’t seem like someone with any plans to leave.” I sighed. “How often do you normally see her?”

  He shrugged. “Every few weeks. When she needs something at the Herd, usually. I saw her twice last week, with that spray paint in the bathroom.”

  “It’s the Gleam Room, Ted,” I said, with mock seriousness, and he raised his palms.

  My phone, facedown on the placemat, buzzed a few times in a row, and I flipped it over. Dammit—automated texts from a political campaign. “Sorry. I haven’t heard from Hana all day and it’s kinda freaking me out. It’s not like her.”

  “Do you want to try calling her now?”

  “No, it’s fine. Sometimes she…” I plonked my elbows on the table. “Sometimes she gets stressed out, and it’s like I’m the only one she can…punish is too strong a word. Take it out on?” I cocked my head. “She uses up a lot of energy trying to seem together. All cheerful and easygoing and all that. But she’s actually so tightly wound, sometimes I worry she’s going to, I don’t know, implode into a little diamond or something.” I squeezed my fists to demonstrate.

  Our burritos arrived, fat rolls in red baskets.

  Ted slopped sour cream onto his plate. “Oh, for sure. Does she think she’s hiding it?” He chuckled and even though I’d brought it up, I felt a flare of irritation: I could criticize Hana, but he couldn’t.

  I thought back to Hana’s and my walk down Fifth Avenue, how her eyes had flashed at the mention of Ted. I made my voice light: “Be honest, do you two have bad blood? She was weird when I asked about you.” I smiled conspiratorially. “I smell unresolved sexual tension.”

  “Oh God, no.” He tossed his head. “Er, I mean, not that she’s not—she’s great! But that’s definitely not it.”

  “You’re sure?” I raised an eyebrow and gave my margarita a sip.

  “Positive. All I meant was—” He took a breath. “I knew all of them in college. Harvard girls are no joke. And even of the three of them, she was the serious one. Super driven, super focused, like she had something to prove. You can…” He waved at the air in front of him. “I’m not crazy, right? She comes across as determined as shit.”

  I stared at him for a second. Did he really not see why she had to work eleven times as hard as her white friends? How she didn’t have the luxury of screwing up? But then I shrugged. “She gets shit done, so I can’t blame her for being controlling. When you’re dependable, everyone depends on you.”

  “Which is fine, if you can do it without the martyr complex.” I took a tiny bite in lieu of answering. The mix of salt and fat and spice made my stomach churn. “Anyway, I hear you, man,” he went on. “Siblings are the worst.”

  I swallowed. “Does Cameron treat you like you’re childish and incompetent?”

  He laugh-snorted. “He’s still living at home and playing video games all day, so he wouldn’t have much of a case.”

  My antennae went up—I’d heard very little about this Cameron fellow. “Was he always sort of a slacker?”

  “You could say that. He was hot shit in high school. Tons of friends, really good snowboarder. Just kinda effortlessly popular, you know?”

  I nodded. “Then what?”

  “He didn’t really try in school. Part of his whole cool-guy thing. I was lucky—I was a huge nerd. Robotics club and everything.”

  I set my fork down. “So he had, what? A failure to launch?”

  “He did fine at the community college for a while. Then halfway through he sorta suddenly announced he wasn’t going to finish. My parents were furious. Mr. Walsh got him a job at his company; they were always close, they bonded over sports and shit. But then a few years later, Cameron managed to fuck that up too.” He stopped short and stuffed the rest of his burrito into his mouth, a gargantuan bite. I waited approx
imately four hundred minutes as he struggled to chew, then realized he wasn’t going to go on.

  “That must’ve been rough. For the whole family.”

  With effort, he swallowed. “Yeah, I didn’t mean to start airing out all my family shit.”

  “All families are fucked, right?” He nodded, wiped at his mouth with a napkin. So I went on: “Hana and my mom can’t stand each other. They can’t even be in the same room without fighting. They’re like…you know those little fighting crabs?” I pummeled the air up near my chin. “So then my mom got diagnosed with cancer, and when I moved home to help her, Hana was supposed to stay for a couple weeks—she made it two days. I think she considers it her most obvious personal failing and she hates when anyone brings it up.” I was being cruel now, the words like fire, but I couldn’t stop. “Meanwhile, my dad left us when I was ten, just got fed up with Mom always criticizing him and didn’t come home one day, and Hana saw her opening and moved out to L.A. to live with him.” I paused, took a gulp of water. It felt oddly good, prattling on about my own minor difficulties as if everything were normal, as if Eleanor were a few blocks away, hard at work inside her beautiful outfit and office and company and life.

  “Whoa,” Ted said. “But you and Hana are pretty close now, right?”

  “We get along.” I shrugged. “I don’t know if we’d be this close if I wasn’t separately friends with Eleanor and Mikki.” I didn’t know I was thinking it until I said it, and then it was out, hovering in the air between us, somewhere over the basket of hot-sauce bottles. Scrambling, I tried to pierce it with a joke: “Did I say that out loud?”

  He leaned back and smiled. “You don’t need to worry,” he said. “This is a safe space.”

  “Oh, good. What the Herd is to women, Benny’s Burritos is to family drama.”

  “That’s right. And speaking of the Herd, I looked into what you sent me about the new surveillance system. It’s kinda complex.” He blathered on about video compression and DVRs and digital streaming. “My best guess is that us resetting the router kicked the new cameras off the network. Which sucks.”

  “Damn.”

  “I know. Hey, were you able to get into the router?”

  “Yeah, thanks again for that info.” I leaned forward. “When I called yesterday, you said you and Eleanor are pretty close, right?”

  He shrugged. “We’ve known each other our whole lives, yeah.”

  I pulled the folder from my bag. “Okay, don’t tell anyone. But I found some stuff about Eleanor that—well, I’m not sure what to make of it.” I plucked out a sheet. “White Plains, New York. Does she have any connections there?”

  He sipped his margarita thoughtfully. “That’s in Westchester, right? Nothing comes to mind.”

  “Right. Okay, do you know what bank she uses?” He raised his eyebrows and I pressed: “I don’t know, did she ever make you stop at an ATM with her?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry. I feel like this is a quiz and I’m failing.”

  “It’s okay. I’m just looking for clues.” I flipped to the Chase bank statements, where I’d highlighted all the withdrawals. “I think she was hoarding cash. Can you think of anything she said, or—”

  “Is that Daniel?” I was tilting the bank printout toward me and Ted slid out the page underneath. It was Daniel’s Click profile. “Wait, what the fuck?”

  I sucked on my teeth. “Yeeeeahhh. He told us about this right away, and the cops—Eleanor had, uh, opened up their marriage. She was actually on the site too.” I flipped around the second printout and he reared back in his chair.

  “Are you serious? Was she meeting up with random dudes? Why is this not—isn’t this a huge lead?”

  He was so worked up, so quickly. “I’m trying to figure that out. Daniel said it was her idea. And not…not just for meeting dudes.”

  Ted missed it—his eyes slid over the page, reading. “Do the cops know you’re doing your own investigation?”

  I shook my head and tucked the pages back into the file. “Like I said, it’s keeping me busy so I don’t sit around all day worrying.”

  “Your book’s not keeping you busy? I want to hear more about it.”

  I crunched at my plastic water cup. “I didn’t tell Eleanor this,” I said, “but I’m not even sure I can write that book. It’s a long story.”

  “What happened?”

  “It just ended up being…kind of a shitshow.” The shriek of sirens. The spastic light splitting into red and blue. Skin sweaty under my palms as I willed the heart underneath to beat.

  “I’m definitely missing something.”

  “I really don’t want to talk about it.” My words splatted onto the table between us and Ted looked down, like a chastised dog. I cleared my throat and tried to sound pleasant: “But I’d love to hear more about the weird tech stuff you’re working on. What’s the kookiest thing you’ve had to design?”

  * * *

  —

  As we were splitting the bill, Ted nodded at my bag again. “Can I get a copy of the stuff in that file?” he said. “Maybe I’ll notice something you didn’t.”

  “You can take this. I have everything backed up.”

  “You sure?” He was already slipping the folder into his backpack. “Thanks. I’m just…I’m worried. Nobody seems that freaked out; Cameron was like, ‘Whatever, she’s a sensation-seeker, she probably just got bored with her life and moved on.’ ” He put on a surfer drawl, bobbling his head. “But I dunno. She’s a public figure now. Between this and that stupid graffiti I had to wallpaper over—it doesn’t sit right.”

  “I know. I feel the same way.” I smiled sadly. “It makes me feel a tiny bit better that we’re both on the case.”

  “And you know what, hopefully Cam’s right.” He reached for his coat. “We’ll get a call any minute that they found her, like, boarding a flight to Fiji from LAX.”

  Something fluttered, a shadow lurching across my skull. “Say that again.”

  “What, that I hope she’s on her way to Fiji?”

  It was gone. We hugged on the sidewalk and parted ways. I had a missed call from Fatima and a text that I should call her in an hour. On the subway ride home, I read the Wikipedia entry on White Plains, still a dead end—why had she been looking it up on a map? It played a pivotal role in the Revolutionary War, I learned, and was the birthplace of a certain Mark Zuckerberg. My eyebrows lifted: White Plains was also home to a small international airport, a nerve center for private jets and sleek chartered planes.

  Fatima started chattering the second she picked up the phone: “I still haven’t gotten into the dude’s account,” she said, “but MoreFracturedLight? You won’t believe this. She was only talking to one person: a woman in Mexico. About moving there. She called it her, quote, ‘go-to mental escape hatch,’ said she’d always dreamed of starting over there.”

  It was so obvious, it was like I’d been nosing around the idea without allowing myself to think it. The relief was intense, a deep bath I plunged into: Eleanor is alive.

  “And you think she actually went there? That’s different from a…a mental escape hatch.” That’s outrageous, I wanted to say. But it wasn’t, of course. The secret bank account and email, the cash withdrawals. The airstrip thirty-five miles north of here.

  “I don’t know, dude. Read it yourself. It starts out pretty harmless, just kinda flirtatious, but then it’s clear Eleanor has really done her research, talking about these small cities and asking this woman—the other woman’s British, I think—how she made it work. Then suddenly, like a week ago, she asks if they can talk offline. And all their messages were deleted, I found them in a temp folder. That’s a pretty big coincidence, right?”

  My phone buzzed, but I kept it pressed against my ear. I stared hard at the ceiling, feeling this new information whorling around my skull. Could Eleanor real
ly do it? Leave it all—leave us all—behind for a new, secret life over the border? To illegally slip down there, hope, absurdly, that no one would notice or look for her…?

  “What cities did she mention?” I asked, sitting up on my bed. Fatima spelled them out and I typed them into separate tabs, and Google helpfully tossed some flight paths at the top of my search results.

  Oh God. ESE, Ensenada Airport. GYM, Guaymas International Airport. I scrambled for the shaded Post-it on my desk, and now it felt obvious:

  ACA 1010 CUU ESEGYM

  Acapulco. Cancun. Ensenada, then Guaymas. She was researching flights.

  “Send me everything you’ve got,” I told Fatima. “I need to figure out what plane went from White Plains, New York, to a Mexican airport sometime after Monday Mocktails.”

  “Monday what now?”

  “Never mind. But thank you. Are you able to tell me anything about the woman she was messaging with?”

  “No dice. Whoever it was shut down her account between their last exchange and now, so there’s just nothing to go on.”

  “Bummer.” This mystery woman—she knew where Eleanor was, didn’t she?

  “I’ll keep working on the other profile you sent me, the guy’s.”

  “Maybe hold off—I don’t need to check his alibi if Eleanor really did walk off on her own.”

  “You got it. And also…I’m sorry? Er, I guess congratulations that she’s okay?”

  “I don’t know how to feel either.” My stomach was contracting as if I’d swallowed something spiky. “But thanks.”

  I hung up and then saw Hana’s group text: Guys, I think I know where Eleanor is. I couldn’t call her fast enough, my fingers slipping over the commands.

  “Katie. I’m so sorry I wasn’t around today. But I think I figured it out.”

  “She’s in Mexico.”

  A long silence.

  “How did you—”

  “Hana, I’ve been trying to find her too. Did you find out about the Click messages?”

  “The what?”