The Herd

by Andrea Bartz

  I gripped my fists under my chin, thumbs digging into my windpipe. No, no, no, no. Mikki’s face softened. “But Cameron had an idea. Apparently she’d come to him with questions about getting a fake passport. So he knew she was hiding something too. We got out her phone, and it’s turned on by face recognition, right? So Cameron ran back to the roof and, and held it up to unlock it.” Her eyebrows flashed. “We were shocked to find all this stuff about moving to Mexico. It felt like a gift from God. If we could just make her seem alive while people noticed that, we’d be in the clear.”

  She was quiet long enough that I cleared my throat. Mikki had accessed all of Eleanor’s plans for escaping to Mexico—this was unfathomable, but it was my one shot, my chance to ask what I couldn’t ask Eleanor herself. “Did she say why she wanted to leave? Was it the blackmail—she thought she was close to being ratted out?”

  Mikki stared at me, her eyes stony but small muscles contracting around her nose and mouth.

  “I don’t know. She didn’t say. I don’t know why Eleanor did anything she did.” Mikki spoke faster now, like she was eager to get the rest over with. “You know how this ends. Cameron sent out a few emails and texts from her phone the next day. And then when it was clear you and Katie were onto her, had figured out her Mexico plans, Cameron sent that final email from her laptop. We still had no plan for the body, though. Our luck was up on the security cameras: I asked a lot of questions and learned they were back up and running.”

  “Oh, Mikki.” The air around us was charged, staticky with the knowledge that this was the very last time things would be okay. Could she feel it too?

  “Then once you found her, I was taking it an hour at a time. And I was grieving—it was almost like I’d convinced myself she really was in Mexico, before that. When the Walshes invited us to Beverly for Christmas, I thought getting away from New York could be good—plus I could check on Cameron, make sure he was solid. But seeing Gary and Karen was awful. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking.”

  We sat like that for a second. The heater hissed.

  “You need to tell Ratliff,” I said. “I’ll come with you—we’ll tell them everything. It won’t be so bad if you’re cooperative, if you’re a witness for the prosecution.” With a prickle of fear, I realized she’d slipped my phone from her lap down under her thigh, out of reach.

  “But Cameron’s gone—there’s no way for me to prove it was him. There’s no point.” I thought I heard a thunk from the hallway and we both glanced that way. It was too cold and too late and too dark; the night was careening away from me.

  I leaned forward. “Mikki, they found Cameron. In Canada. Gary just called me.”

  “No.”

  “It’s true. He’s in custody.”

  Another thunk and I sat up, twisting my trunk, then turned back in time to see Mikki’s hand emerging from the pocket of her hoodie.

  Her movement was so swift, so precise, it was as if she’d been practicing for this moment. A little “hah!” escaped from her lungs as her arm shot forward, then hard pressure on my lower-right ribs. My chin swung down to take it in: The entire blade swallowed by the flesh below my bra. Blood oozing out around it like wine soaking into a tablecloth. I thought, oddly, of Mom, the cancer in her breast, scalpels rooting around for the poisoned tissue.

  A second passed, then another, and then, with the brutality of a stampede, sudden, epic pain. The last thing I noticed was Mikki’s knuckles, still wrapped around the X-Acto knife’s handle.

  CHAPTER 26

  Katie

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 24, 10:25 P.M.

  An earthquake.

  I kept my eyes closed because the earth was shaking, tectonic plates shifting, and I couldn’t let the ceiling fall in on me, or slip into a crevasse and let the ground swallow me whole. I squeezed them shut and then had an idea:

  Open them.

  The earth wasn’t shaking: I was. I was in the fetal position and my hands in front of my face were an odd color, orangey white. I couldn’t get a good look because they were quivering, and my head, too, my vision, nothing but shakes.

  I tried to loll my head back and something burned the back of my skull, a branding iron, and through my shuddering jaw I moaned. I tried to sit up, failed. Banged my cheek back down on the iron below me.

  Iron—iron bars, below and in front of me. I looked beyond them and made out a wall of brick a few feet away, spotlit in the dark by the same orange glow. My logic kicked in, stitched the world together: I was outside in the freezing cold, without a jacket. I was…it came together, a pouncing revelation, I was on Mikki’s fire escape, the one I’d seen in her bedroom, dumped and left to die. Why was I out here? Why did my head…she’d hit me, right? I tried moving my neck again and found the white-hot patch.

  I had to think. Thinking was hard, slow, thick, thoughts like crankcase oil in a freezing cold engine. The first order of business was warming up. I needed to get inside. I ordered my hands to collect under me and was alarmed when they only half obliged. I wrenched open my chattering jaw and tried to scream, but what came out was a dry rasp, a white cloud, there and then gone. My heat—warmth from the inside, from my lungs, I needed to conserve it.

  Roll call: Knees? Present. I awkwardly army crawled across the cold iron until my shoulder hit the window. I tried to look inside: darkness, the door between her bedroom and hallway closed. I rocked away and then slammed against the glass, once, twice, explosions of pain and the knowledge this would never work—it wouldn’t open it, wouldn’t attract attention, nobody would hear it in the cold with their windows sealed so tight, if only it were summer, in summer people are—

  Focus. I was four floors up. Too many to jump, and in this state, my arms and legs shaking so violently I couldn’t see straight, I wouldn’t make it down three ladders. I wanted to cry, to scream, let the shaking overcome me and roll me right off the side.

  One floor: I only had to go one floor to be on someone else’s fire escape. I closed my eyes for a moment, listening to my own gasping breath, to the pounding of blood in my ears. I heard distant Christmas music, the honk of a horn. I said a silent prayer, and then I moved.

  I made it down two rungs before my hands, stiff like Barbie’s, failed me and I fell hard onto my tailbone. The impact jolted me but didn’t hurt, and in a faraway, filmy way I knew this wasn’t good, this indicated something bad. I stared at the stars overhead, a few visible even here in our huge city, with all its light pollution and pollution-pollution and people, people are garbage, there’s so much garbage in the city streets, it flies up from the sidewalk and smacks into you when you—

  A strange scraping sound. “Are you okay?” It was a girl’s voice, a kid or maybe a teenager, and it took me a moment to realize that since it was a question, I was supposed to answer.

  “Eeugh.” I wasn’t sure what I meant, but that’s what came out. I heard her gasp and step away from the window and I started to cry, please don’t leave me, please stay and—

  “Yes, hello, there’s a woman on our fire escape, it appears she fell coming down and she’s not wearing a coat, she’s shaking pretty violently, she could be—ma’am, are you drunk? Are you okay?” It was a woman’s voice, an adult, and she appeared above me with a phone pressed to her ear, and I pointed a shaking hand at the back of my head, sucked cold air into my lungs, and said the one word I’d been unable to utter for months: “Help.”

  The woman and her daughter brought me inside and spread me on the floor with a blanket over my body and a pillow under my head. The shaking intensified as heat worked its way back into my limbs, firecrackers from the inside, heat and light. My brain still felt sludgy, logy, slow. I heard sirens warbling through the night and for the first time in months, I didn’t tense, didn’t summon Chris and with her a rushing meteor of shame and heartbreak. I was grateful for them. Eager to get to the hospital. Then I coul
d tell—

  The EMTs arrived and none of them would listen, none could hear what I was trying to tell them. I kept pointing at the ceiling and they kept tucking my hand back under the blanket. Finally I sat up and touched the back of my head, the wound there, flinching.

  “Mikki, upstairs, the apartment right above this one—she did this,” I said. “You need to get her now—I think she killed my friend.”

  But EMTs aren’t cops and so they told me they’d send the nearest squad car, and it arrived, lights flashing, right as they were lifting me in a gurney into the back of the ambulance. They’d strapped me down and had just slammed the doors when there was more commotion, shouting, walkie-talkies crunching and snapping and medics hustling back outside. The woman from upstairs was going to ride with me—my angel, her name was Sue, I never did see her again—and she saw the alarm in my face and said she’d try to figure out what was going on.

  The ambulance door flew open and they were lifting a second body into it, a stranger, who the hell was this? I watched as the body, unfamiliar, foreign, was locked into place next to me.

  And then it was like the big twist in a movie, the huge reveal, the unfathomable surprise, the bombshell that leaves you almost elated with its unexpectedness, how everything you thought you knew was wrong.

  It wasn’t just a body. It was Hana.

  CHAPTER 27

  Hana

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 25, 6:51 A.M.

  In my mind, Katie had gotten older just three times in her life, time standing still and then bounding forward in great leaps: once while I was a teenager in California, another while she was in college at NYU, and then finally while she was in Kalamazoo helping Mom. During those periods, the Disney-like spell had lifted, months could pass, and when I saw her again she looked different, older, more mature. The rest of the time, everything about her stayed the same, as if the ravages of radiation and worry and other things that left us pockmarked with each passing day didn’t apply to her.

  But watching her sleep on this hospital bed, I realized that again, her peaceful face had changed. Overnight, perhaps, or else I hadn’t been paying attention, hadn’t looked at her hard enough. Her skin was still smooth and perfect, but she wasn’t the teenage-ish little sister I’d been projecting onto her.

  I couldn’t help it—I smoothed a hand along her hairline, and she stirred.

  “I’m so glad you’re awake!”

  She looked at me blankly, then around the room, and I listened as the beeping on a monitor ticked up in tempo with her heart.

  “It’s okay, Katie. It’s okay.” I patted her shin. “You had a concussion and some frostbite, but you’re okay.”

  “You’re okay?”

  I smiled. “You saved my life.” She frowned and shook her head in confusion, then gasped and reached for her head. “Ooh, you’ve got a massive contusion there,” I said, for some reason echoing the doctor’s words. “It’s where you were hit.”

  “By Mikki.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In a holding cell. She was arrested.” I lifted my shirt to show her the bandage below my bra. “After she gave me this.”

  “I thought you were dead.”

  “Oh, sweetie.” I grabbed her hand. “You were hit on the head, hard, and passed out—they think for at least twenty minutes. And for most of that you were outside without a coat, so your core body temperature was dropping. They said it’s totally normal for you to be confused today.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “But you were in the ambulance.”

  “I was.” I took a breath. “I went back to Mikki’s apartment to ask her about something. She told me you’d already left, but in reality you were just passed out and she’d pushed you onto the fire escape—presumably until she could get rid of me.” I brought my other hand to hers, clutched it between my palms. There were bandages on her fingertips where the cold had seeped inside. “But you came to and you got help. It’s incredible, I don’t know how you made it down without killing yourself. But when the neighbors called the ambulance, you made them call the police too. For Mikki.” I shook my head. “If they’d arrived even a few minutes later, I don’t know what would’ve happened. I’d just confronted Mikki and she—she got out—”

  “The X-Acto knife! Not a scalpel!”

  “Exactly!” We nodded at each other.

  Tears welled and I looked away, pretended I was telling someone else’s story. “She just missed puncturing my lung, apparently, and had taken a few steps back like she was trying to figure out what to do now, when the cops arrived. They banged on the door right behind me and I started yelling for help and trying to undo the locks and let them in. The good news is: A woman screaming for help is probable cause to enter a home.”

  I was trying to sound cheerful and it of course fell flat. Katie looked horrified. “Why did Mikki do that?”

  “There’s a lot we don’t know. But it sounds like she made a full confession. For killing Eleanor.”

  She thought about this, then nodded. “How long have we been here?”

  “Well, it’s almost seven, so…a while.” I tugged at a curl and looked away. “Mom’s on her way here now. She’s supposed to land around noon.”

  “Okay.” She creased her brow. “So it’s Christmas?”

  “That’s right. Merry Christmas, Katie.”

  “Why did you…” The heart-rate monitor hit the gas again, beep! beep! beep! “Why did you go back to Mikki’s?”

  I told her about the cease-and-desist Daniel had uncovered—how Mikki had explained it away, swearing she knew nothing about Cameron, and sent me off into the night still convinced of her innocence. And then I told her about the cell-phone video, which I now knew was from a random dude who worked at a start-up across the street; he’d begun taping the drum line, same as us, and then noticed the lineup of women across from him. He’d had no idea what he’d captured until Eleanor’s death became public earlier this week. (And, with true entrepreneurial initiative, he’d sold the clip to the highest bidder instead of handing it over to the police.)

  “It was clear she knew Eleanor’s body was on the roof, so I wanted to know why she was covering for him,” I said. “And she told me she’d gone over to the Herd and helped him hide the body. It was when I told her Cameron was alive and in custody that she snapped.” I sighed. “I didn’t mention that he was unconscious and at death’s door. She must’ve taken that to mean he was going to start talking—the jig was up. She had the blade in her hand—told the cops it was a reflex.”

  “How is Cameron?”

  “He’s doing well—he’s fully conscious and cooperating with authorities,” I said. “Ratliff called a little while ago and said he’d given a full confession with the hope of a lighter sentence.” It was now obvious that everything Mikki had told me last night—the desperate scramble to hide a body and clean up the evidence—was true. The critical difference, which Ratliff expected cell-phone records to corroborate, was that it’d been Mikki who’d been alone with Eleanor in her last moments, and Cameron who’d swooped in to help.

  I smiled and gave Katie’s hair a little pat. “Anyway, you saved my life. You’re the reason they got me in an ambulance in time.”

  “I thought I was gonna die,” she replied.

  A knock on the doorframe—I stood and greeted Ratliff and Herrera.

  “Sorry for—er, thanks for coming on Christmas,” I said. Not apologizing for things that weren’t my fault: an early New Year’s resolution.

  “I’m Jewish, so.” Ratliff’s lips flickered in and out of a smile. She turned to Katie. “How are you feeling?”

  “Merry and bright,” she deadpanned.

  Ratliff clasped her hands together. “Well, we’re glad you’re safe and grateful for your bravery.”

  Katie pulled he
rself up into a sitting position, then yelped; I hadn’t mentioned the bruised tailbone. “I want to know what’s going on with Mikki.”

  “Ms. Danziger is in a holding cell in the station. We’ll be interviewing her later today.”

  “Did Mikki say anything?” Katie asked.

  Ratliff shifted her weight. “She did some talking last night. She’ll have a court-appointed lawyer this afternoon. But we have a pretty complete picture from Mr. Corrigan already. He’s been moved to a hospital in Cambridge.”

  “Cameron, right?” Katie broke in.

  Ratliff assented, and I added: “Ted’s fine. He’s still at his parents’. Gary and Karen talked to him this morning.”

  “That’s good.” Katie swallowed.

  Herrera turned to me suddenly. “Hana, can we talk to you in the hall?”

  I glanced at Katie, whose eyes flashed in alarm, but I smiled soothingly. “We’ll be right back.”

  In the cold, blue-white hallway, we formed a triangle. I gazed at them calmly as my heart thwacked in my chest. My heartbeat was a drum in my ears, pulsing over what was about to come out of their mouths: the blackmail, Jinny’s mom. Jinny’s cold, slight body. The tangled cover on the Walshes’ pool. The Walshes themselves, watching stone-eyed as we’d backed out of their driveway with a secret the size of a hurricane in our chests.

  “We’ll be reopening a cold case on account of something Ms. Danziger told us,” Ratliff said. “From May 2010.”

  Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Eye muscles relaxed, shoulders down.

  “She indicated that she and Ms. Walsh had been involved in the incidental death of a young woman in the Boston area. A missing-persons case.”

  What had Cameron told them? And Daniel—the blackmail note he never should have seen? I pursed my brows. “From 2010. When we were at Harvard?”