The Herd

by Andrea Bartz

  “And Cameron showed up at Eleanor’s apartment,” she went on, her voice small. “I let him inside. He said he’d just gotten into town and I…I’m an idiot, I believed him. He said he was there to help, but I thought he’d come to beat up Daniel or something—he was surprised when Daniel wasn’t home. But maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe he was trying to…I don’t know, remove some evidence or something.”

  “Let’s back this up,” I said. The facts were poking out at odd angles, a tent frame I couldn’t snap into shape. “We know Cameron was in town on Monday. The night Eleanor was killed. And he was still there on Wednesday, when you saw him at Eleanor’s apartment.”

  Hana looked up. “Maybe when Eleanor finally scheduled the big announcement about Titan, he decided to drive down to see her. Make his final plea.”

  “But you really think he would hurt her?” Mikki rocked forward, snuffling. “Maybe we’re looking at this wrong. Maybe—maybe he did reach out to Jinny’s mom, maybe he said something that made her want to confront Eleanor. Maybe he learned she was gonna try to hurt Eleanor, and he came down to protect her.”

  “Hello?” Ted’s voice boomed down the hall.

  We froze and stared at one another, like naughty pets caught red-handed.

  “Cameron?” Ted appeared in the doorway and I blushed at the sight of him.

  “Ted, hi!” Hana swept us all into the hallway, casual and smooth. “We were just about to head back over to the Walshes’.”

  “Is Cameron here?” Ted craned his neck to look behind us.

  I spotted an opening: “No, he said he was gonna go looking for you. Have you heard from him?”

  Hana had nonchalantly led us back to the doorway. Ted shook his head.

  “I texted him earlier, right after—when I got back from Mr. and Mrs. Walsh’s.” His ears reddened. Right after we’d been walked in on mid-hookup, right after he’d called me selfish and I’d told him to leave. “Cam didn’t reply, but I was down in the basement with the game on so I don’t know if it went through. I just came upstairs to get a beer and saw that his car was gone, but all his lights were on. I figured he went out and I was just gonna shut ’em off.”

  “And then you saw all our coats here,” Mikki finished.

  He was looking at his phone, Hana had said, right before you rang the doorbell. “What’d you say to Cameron?” I asked. “When you texted?”

  He shrunk a bit, frowned. “Nothing important. Hey, so where’s Cameron? And what are you guys still doing here?”

  “What’d you say in your text?” I squared my chin at him. “Was it about me?”

  “What? No.”

  I took a step forward. “Were you in a rush to tell him what a bitch I am? For trying to write about Eleanor?” I knew it wasn’t the case, wasn’t in character for him at all, but I could see how uncomfortable I was making him. That mounting eagerness to set the record straight. “How her death is basically my fault?”

  “No! Jesus! You think I think that?” He shook his head. “I asked him about that old photo of Eleanor. Okay? Like, ‘Hey, have you been posting this online?’ I thought it was kind of a shitty thing to do when she hated that photo. I don’t even know if he saw it—he didn’t reply.”

  Of course. Cameron had received that text and put two and two together, spotted the walls closing in.

  I can’t imagine what face we were all making, but his glance shot between us. “What, what is it?”

  “We’re heading back to the Walshes’,” I said, before anyone could break in. We think your brother’s a killer was not a conversation I felt prepped for; Mikki seemed reticent to accept it as a possibility, and typically Hana was conscientious to a fault…but tonight we were all loose cannons. “Why don’t you keep trying Cameron? It’s coming down hard out there—he really shouldn’t be driving.”

  Ted continued to frown, but he nodded as we gathered our things. He flicked off the lights and walked outside with us, then hooked toward the main house with an awkward wave. The snow felt heavy on my cheeks and eyelashes and the crown of my head, like small, cold loogies. Everything still felt very wrong. Where was Cameron?

  Gary and Karen, at least, were in the kitchen, sliding vegetables and salmon fillets into the oven.

  “Well, there you all are!” Gary said, trying to sound jolly, but his face fell when he saw our expressions. “What is it?”

  I cleared my throat. “Something weird is going on,” I said. “We were over at Cameron’s and he…took off.”

  Karen set down her knife. “He what?”

  “He grabbed his keys and ran out. Really gunned it,” Hana said.

  “In these conditions?” Karen brought a hand to her mouth. “That’s dangerous!”

  “We called Detective Ratliff because we realized some weird things about him. About”—I sucked in a breath—“about what he was doing the night Eleanor died, and why he didn’t tell anyone he was in New York.”

  “You’re kidding,” Gary gasped. Karen moaned and reached for him.

  “Why don’t we all sit down,” Hana said. Rustling and squeaking as everyone yanked back kitchen chairs.

  Again, I felt the instinct to pull back and let Hana do the talking, but instead I walked them through it: The strange posts in the Antiherd. The parking ticket the night of the crime. How he’d just grabbed his car keys and sped off mid-conversation, which was not exactly the behavior of an innocent man. Karen and Gary kept nodding blankly, their eyes dull as the room filled with the smell of root vegetables and fish.

  “Let’s not jump to any conclusions,” Gary said when I’d finished.

  “Does anyone smell burning?” Karen added, pushing her chair out noisily. We watched, stiff as ice sculptures, as she slid the trays out of the oven and swiped her potholder at the smoke. Gary rose and began pulling plates from a cabinet; without speaking, and with all the ease of a bunch of robots, we set the table, spooned things onto serving trays, found our seats again.

  “Let’s say grace,” Gary said, and Hana, Mikki, and I exchanged frantic looks as the Walshes bowed their heads: Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts…

  We passed the pepper. We remarked on the garlicky pistachio breading patted onto the salmon’s side. The Walshes asked about our New Year’s Eve plans and we answered, in turn. The three of us kept catching one another’s glances as our forks clanged against our plates. We were Norman Rockwell’s most fucked-up tableau yet: two healthy, round-faced parents, three beautiful young women, eating off pretty patterned china while the snow throbbed outside.

  Gary half-stood to pour more wine into my goblet and Karen grabbed at the water glass he’d nearly tipped, and I felt a rush of cold, bracing as menthol: Behold these sweet, straitlaced Baby Boomers who’d opened their home to me. Who’d opened their home to Eleanor and her friends, too, and then somehow made it all go away when things fell apart. Did they see Jinny’s face every night? Was the guilt gnawing at them from inside?

  “So, I think we’re gonna head back to New York first thing tomorrow,” Hana said, when we’d all given up pretending to eat, food flaked apart and pushed around our plates. “We’ll connect with the detectives there, and…get out of your hair.”

  One would expect them to insist having us here was no trouble, even out of knee-jerk Catholic guilt. Instead they stared. Our facades were collapsing, solid outsides thawing and crumbling apart from head to toe.

  “Cameron’s a good kid,” Gary announced, and we all turned to him. Mikki started to cry. “He’s a good kid.”

  “Thank you so much for letting us be here,” Hana concluded.

  Karen nodded slowly. “It’s been a long day. I’m going to head to bed. Gary, let’s go.”

  “We’ll take care of cleaning up,” I added, rising to pile dishes.

  Karen stared at me, then nodded. She and Gary shuffled away.
/>   “What the fuck was that,” Hana hissed, once they were out of earshot.

  “I thought that dinner was never going to end,” I said. “Clearly they cannot handle the idea of Cameron having anything to do with Eleanor’s death.”

  “They’re close—he’s basically their surrogate son.” Mikki turned on the faucet and stuck a plate under the tap. Her tone confused me—was she still defending him? “They really don’t want it to be him.”

  “Here’s what I don’t understand,” I said. “Obviously I barely know Cameron, way less than you two. But if he was driving down to New York to talk to Eleanor, why would he bring a scalpel? Or whatever sharp tool?”

  “I don’t know.” Hana shook her head sadly. “We don’t know what she said, what went down. I don’t think it was planned, I really don’t.”

  “But what about the graffiti?” Mikki added. “And this stolen phone? The original one, from back before—before any of this.”

  I took this one. “I don’t think it was related. Some people really did just hate her. And the Herd. All of it.” I sighed. “Some people are just shitty.”

  Hana dropped a fistful of silverware into the dishwasher. “Another thing I don’t understand: He knew she was trying to get a fake passport. He suspected she was getting ready to make a run for it.” She repositioned a spatula. “If he thought she was about to disappear, wouldn’t that be a pretty good outcome for him? She would leave town, she couldn’t pin Jinny’s death on him, he could even turn us all in and start that…memorial fund, if that’s what he wanted.”

  I set a stack of serving dishes on the counter. “Could be. Or maybe he was lying about wanting to help Jinny’s family. For all we know, maybe he was helping Eleanor disappear. Driving down to personally deliver her starter kit for a new life.”

  “Well, let’s hope they find him and he can tell us himself,” Hana said.

  I leaned against the counter. Mikki was going to town with the pull-out faucet, fire-hosing dishes with total concentration.

  “You know, if he does, you might have to face charges in relation to Jinny,” I said. “There’s no statute of limitations on this stuff.”

  “We know.” Mikki nodded at the backsplash. Her face looked miserable, but her shoulders softened, like frozen meat defrosting.

  “I miss Eleanor,” I said. Even if she was ruthless; even if she’d threatened Cameron, and Mikki and Hana before him, in order to keep Jinny’s death a secret. She’d inspired us, made us feel sparkling and special and proud. That was a gift, even if it came with a lifetime of impersonating goodness, of being an impostor. Eleanor, unlike the rest of us mortals, didn’t give a shit what others thought, and for that we were all more than willing to adore her.

  “I miss her too,” Mikki murmured, and Hana echoed her. I looked around and saw that they meant it, that their sorrow matched mine, and somehow this helped. Cleaning up her parents’ kitchen on Christmas Eve Eve, we all took on a third of the grief.

  Mikki looped the dishtowel on its hook and walked upstairs. Staring at the sparkling kitchen, I registered that cottony end-of-day fatigue, more drained than sleepy, as if my body were eager to let today end.

  “I’m going to go too,” I announced, then headed down the hall. But once I’d gotten ready for bed, I crept upstairs and knocked on Hana’s door. I found her and Mikki sitting on the floor, old books—children’s classics and Gloria Steinem and yearbooks—scattered around them.

  I sat cross-legged and picked up a yearbook. Eleanor’s senior year, her photo bright-eyed and lovely. Below it, her chosen quote was from (who else?) Frida Kahlo: “I often have more sympathy for carpenters, cobblers, etc., than for that whole stupid, supposedly civilized herd of windbags known as cultivated people.”

  “I wonder if she felt like she created a monster,” I mused. “Like, she wanted to build this feminist utopia, and then she accidentally made this—this thing that was even more bougie and see-and-be-seen than the boys’ club bullshit she was trying to get away from. ‘Windbags.’ ” I swiveled the book toward Hana and Mikki and pointed at the quote. “I was a tech reporter—Titan is run by Silicon Valley bros. So for them, acquiring a feminist company like the Herd would be a great PR move. But for Eleanor, for her original vision…”

  Mikki looked up. “I bet an acquisition like that opens you up to scrutiny. Maybe she felt like someone was close to figuring out what happened in college, and that’s why she had to get away.”

  It struck me: I’d been investigating Eleanor myself, and I’d had no clue. This sparked in my chest a flicker of something bright: absurdity? Humiliation? Laughter, even?

  Hana leaned back. “We’re going to talk to Stephanie when she gets back from India. At the very least, they’re delaying the acquisition, she said. Maybe she can talk to Titan about increasing diversity and expanding their scholarship program and stuff.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “I know Titan uses diversity consultants.”

  She grinned. “You know more about this stuff than we do. You should talk to Stephanie with us.”

  “I’d like that.”

  Mikki pulled the yearbook off my lap and smiled at Eleanor’s headshot. “This is what she looked like when we met. The day we moved into the dorms.” She tapped the page. “I thought she was so grown-up. So beautiful and articulate and smart—you, too, Hana. I couldn’t believe you two wanted to hang out with me.”

  I gave her arm a gentle punch. “That’s funny, ’cause when I first got to know you and Eleanor, I had the same thought. Only about you. I was this dorky teenager and for some reason you let me hang around.”

  “That’s honestly how I felt—here I was this weird kid from North Carolina who grew up splitting Hamburger Helper with my four siblings. But then”—her lips cracked into the tiniest smile—“Eleanor liked me. Took me under her wing. You, too, Hana. I was like—I dunno. Your arty friend. Some hipster flair.”

  “Hey, you weren’t just…a token.” Hana frowned and I wondered if she and I were thinking the same thing: a bit odd for Hana to have to reassure blond-haired, blue-eyed Mikki here.

  “No, I loved it.” The yearbook’s slick pages hissed softly as she flipped through them. “It didn’t even bother me when Eleanor would occasionally, like, ask me to put her name on an attendance sheet for her or look over her stats homework. Which meant…finishing it.”

  I reared my chin back. “Really?”

  She shrugged. “I was the outsider, and she was so casual about it. I kind of figured…I guess this is how it works in the real world? If I want to run in these circles? Which I really, really did.”

  Hana and I exchanged a look over Mikki’s hunched shoulders. She felt like an outsider?

  “I’m sorry you felt that way,” Hana finally said. “You know we love you.”

  “If anything, I’ve always been jealous of how you can march to the beat of your own drum,” I added.

  Hana nodded. “You don’t need anyone’s approval, and meanwhile I’m constantly trying to talk people into loving me.”

  “Same here,” I said. “Only I’m trying to…impress them into loving me.” I rubbed my palm against Mikki’s back and she jumped, then looked up and gave us both a small smile.

  “Thanks. Sometimes I convince myself I’m the only one who feels like she’s faking it.”

  “Sweetie. Not at all.” Hana crawled forward and hugged her, and I wrapped my arms around both of them.

  “Thanks, Bradleys,” Mikki said, giggling and sniffling as we let her go. “You two are all right.”

  “More than all right,” I replied. “We’re all fucking badasses.”

  “It’s true.” She wiped both eyes and exhaled, whew. “Okay, I’m going to sleep.”

  We bid her good night and then I pulled out another book: A Wrinkle in Time, plus all its sequels behind it.

  “Katie?�
�� Hana looked at me intently. “Why were you trying to write a book about Eleanor?”

  I leaned on my palm and looked out the window, where everything was as round and gray and marshmallow-soft as everything else. “I didn’t even want to write it,” I said softly. “But I couldn’t write Infopocalypse. I was backed into a corner and scrambling for a way to not ruin my career.”

  I looked down at the yellowed paperback in my hands. There was a broad-winged Pegasus on it, and below it the face of a glowering red-eyed man.

  “What happened in Michigan?”

  “I’m so ashamed, Hana,” I said, my voice breaking. “I wish I could take it all back.” And then I told her, in fits and starts as gray-white swirls rolled past the window, as if the Walshes’ estate were actually on the moon or in a cloud or at the bottom of the ocean, wherever we’d found ourselves.

  “I’m sorry,” I finished. “I fucked up over and over. I don’t even know what to say for myself.”

  “Aw, Katie. I’m sorry too,” she said. “I’m sorry I was mean on the train. And for all the times I made you feel less-than. I want to do better.” She gave me a hug. It felt like an ending, a coda, and so I left her with Eleanor’s books spread out around her like ripples in a pond.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, I woke to Hana banging on the door.

  “They spotted Cameron,” she called. “We need to move.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Hana

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 24, 8:48 A.M.

  I packed my things in a haze, concentrating hard on the fabric under my fingers, folding clothes into small, neat rectangles and smoothing them into my suitcase. I popped into Katie’s room and helped her strip the bed and heave the mattress back inside the sofa’s belly. We dropped her sheets in the laundry room, and suddenly it was like we’d never been here, like this was all a dream.

  Ratliff’s voicemail had run through me like ice: A search of the automatically catalogued license plates stacked up at the US Customs and Border Protection in Derby, Vermont, showed Cameron had driven into Canada around 9 p.m. last night. He’d used a fake passport and had a huge lead on us. Finally, she believed us. If Eleanor showed us anything, it’s that innocent people don’t try to run. Ratliff was coordinating a search with local precincts, and she was eager to have us back in New York.