by Andrea Bartz
A recording clunked on: “This call will be monitored and recorded. You have a collect call from … Mikki Danziger.” Hearing her voice made me jump. “… an inmate at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. If you would like to accept this collect call, please press one.”
I was a human whirlwind, somehow whipping out a digital recorder, accepting the call, and putting her on speakerphone all in one scrambling swoop.
“Mikki?”
A rush of static. “Katie? Is that you?”
“Oh my God. Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you. Thanks for picking up.”
I sat there, staring at the phone. Was this real? “The blisters on my fingers and ears from the frostbite are finally healing—thanks for asking.”
“I’m sorry. I am. For everything.”
“Are you?”
“I am.” Her voice trembled. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am. And how awful I feel. I’m not a bad person, Katie, and I want to make it up to you and Hana and, and everyone. That’s why … that’s why I’m here.” The emphasis was subtle, too subtle for the recording to catch, but I heard it: I’m locked up alone, without Hana, without the Walshes, without the guilty people I could’ve implicated. I’m taking the fall.
“I don’t know what to say, Mikki.” Thank you wasn’t right. Something crested and plunged in me, this unbearable sadness.
“I wish I could say more. But—but I won’t. And I’m sorry. And I have a question.”
“What’s that?”
Sine waves of static as she breathed in and out. “There’s another woman here, she was a sex worker who shot and killed her pimp—and a journalist is talking to her about her life story, she’s gonna do, like, an as-told-to memoir. With both their names on it.”
I frowned. “Okay.”
“And I’ve had all these requests from journalists, which I’m ignoring. But I thought maybe you’d want us to do one together. Since you’re the only one I’d trust with it. And I know you still want to write a book.”
In Cold Blood popped into my head—my very own true-crime thriller. Only I was a character, I was the one with a blow to the skull at the climax. Before I could stop it, my brain started spitting out lines of description, the way I’d describe the scene as I awoke on the fire escape, shaking like a jackhammer. The instant flow was at once intriguing and sickening.
“I don’t know, Mikki. That’s a—that’s a crazy thing to ask.”
“I couldn’t make any money from it, obviously. But just think about it, okay?” she said. “Talk to your agent. It’d be … cathartic for me. And good for you. It’s the least I could do.”
“It really is,” I replied, but the snap was out of my voice. An automated voice told me to load more time onto the call, and I hung up, blinking into my cold, dark room.
That evening, I arrived at Hana’s a little after six, carrying a cake I’d made from a mix and nearly dropping it as I squatted to scratch Cosmo’s ears. Hana had replaced the usual bell on his collar with a little disco ball, and I told him he looked very festive.
The plan was to ring in the New Year with a quiet night at Hana’s place; we were making spicy fish tacos for us and Mom. The recipe was one of our more successful endeavors from that sleepy period right after I’d moved back, which felt like years ago, now. Hana and I clattered around her kitchen, discussing food-prep logistics and sipping old-fashioneds I’d made.
Finally, I took a deep breath. “I have an announcement.”
“Oh?”
“I’m going to write Infopocalypse. I mean, if they’ll still let me.”
“Really.” Hana leaned against the kitchen island.
I nodded. “It’s what I committed to doing. And I’m going to make it part memoir and talk about how lonely and miserable I really was while I reported it, but how on social media I made it look like everything was great. The book’s going to be about fake-news culture as a whole—including in our personal lives. Curation, editing, thinking our actual realities, our selves, aren’t enough.”
“Wow.” Hana nodded slowly. “I love it. Why the change of heart?”
I shrugged. “I kept telling myself the reason I didn’t want to write it was that I didn’t have enough material, after all my interview subjects stonewalled me. But that’s not it—I was just ashamed. I cared so much what everyone thought and how, like, all these randos from high school who seemed vaguely impressed that I was writing a book were going to think I was a loser. So dumb.” Cosmo slinked by and I bowed to stroke his back. “I want to channel some Eleanor energy. She didn’t give a flying fuck what anyone thought of her. But … but in my own, non-destructive way.” I hated the way Eleanor had trampled on Mikki and other women—much as I disliked peering at this side of her, I knew it was as real as the Eleanor I knew and the “Teleanor” she showed the world. But it wasn’t how I’d do things. I’d remember her magnificence, the power of her confidence and bubbling laughter and ability to make you feel inspired, capable, invincible … and I’d find my own way to give zero fucks. Without destroying those around me.
Hana smiled and made vague congratulations. I pulled a cutting board out from under the sink and pressed it on the counter. “There’s another thing.”
Hana’s face was in the fridge, lit up by its yellow bulb. “Oh yeah?”
“Remember how, right after I got home from the hospital, I had you share the time and transaction number of your last Bitcoin payment?”
She slid the vegetable drawer open and lifted a fat purple cabbage. “Yep?”
“I … I know a little bit about how cryptocurrency works. There’s, like, a massive ledger showing every transaction—anonymously, of course.” I’d dipped my toe into cryptocurrency reporting back at Rocket; I knew how to sift through the blockchain and triangulate a particular transaction. “And I figured something out.”
Hana closed the fridge door slowly and turned to me. She gripped the cabbage with both hands and frowned. Surely she’d also noticed today was the deadline of that final demand. Surely she, too, was wondering what’d happen at midnight.
“Hana, there were only two payers,” I said. She blinked and I repeated myself: “Two wallets—two accounts—transferred funds to the blackmailer. Not three. Ten thousand dollars near the end of every quarter.”
In her eyes, understanding caught on like kindling set aflame. She placed the vegetable on the counter.
“It was Mikki,” she said, “all along. She told me. She told me how deep into debt she’d fallen, how she’d do anything to keep up. Oh my God.” Her fingers found her temple. “She showed up in Eleanor’s office and told us she’d gotten a letter, too, but of course it was her. She said it had to be Jinny’s mom. Because of the Tennessee postmark, and because her mom supposedly had looked at Mikki on LinkedIn or something. We never doubted her.” What came out was a laugh, barking and strained.
“Yeah, apparently it’s really easy to find a service to print and mail stuff for you. Without leaving a trace.” No one else had thought to Google it. No one else had thought to question Mikki.
Hana shook her head. “Wow. So it’s really over.”
“It’s over.” I sighed. “Can I ask you something?”
“Yes. But the offer expires with 2019.”
“Turns into a pumpkin at midnight—got it.” I pulled a knife from the block. “Do you think Eleanor was really going to leave? Run off to Mexico?”
She held the cabbage under the tap, then gave it a shake. “I think she just liked knowing she could. That she could drop everything and be out of here in a minute. And I think the blackmail had something to do with that. She realized this horrible accident from her past was going to keep following her.”
“God, the irony: Mikki didn’t actually want word to get out either. She just wanted money.”
“And they both started feeling suffocated by the masks they were wearing.” She pointed at me. “Exactly like you’re going to talk about in your book. I love this new dire
ction so much. It’s the kind of messaging we actually need.”
I didn’t tell her about Gary and Karen’s offer or about Mikki’s proposition. They were frozen assets, useless to me for now. Instead I asked when Mom would come by for dinner (“any minute now”) and she asked, absentmindedly, what Mom had done for New Year’s last year.
“She went to Aunt Emmy’s.” I frowned at the limes in front of me, debating which way to slice them first. “I can’t remember if she had more people over or if it was just them.”
Hana turned on a burner, then the vent hood. She had to yell to be heard over it. “Remember when Mom and Dad had that big New Year’s party?” she called. “And they invited my band teacher, Mr. Zimmerman, and he got kind of drunk?”
I laughed, piling lime wedges in a bowl. “Did you talk to Dad today?”
She looked at me over her shoulder. “Have I talked to Dad all year?”
I pulled tortillas from their wrapper and padded over to the stove. “I haven’t either. But maybe we should text him.” She didn’t reply and I swallowed. “What’s your thing with him?”
She flipped two tilapia fillets and then shut off the fan. Instantly, the room felt calmer. “Did you know Dad had to talk Mom into adopting me?” She half laughed. “Apparently that’s very rare. Usually the woman wants to adopt and the man is like, ‘Hell no, I’m not raising someone else’s spawn.’ Some BS caveman stuff. But they both wanted kids, and they weren’t having any luck, and Dad was sick of trying, apparently. Enter: me.”
The fillets frizzled on the pan, growing hazy in the smoke the fan was no longer inhaling. “And then I was three when Mom found out she was pregnant. I’ve probably made this up, but I could swear I remember her telling me, pointing at her belly and just leaving me mystified.”
She nudged the fish with a spatula. “And then I was at peak bitchiness when they split. Of course I wanted to go live with Dad in Los Angeles. California over Kalamazoo? When you’re fourteen? No-brainer.”
“But you left me,” I said, like the ten-year-old I’d been at the time. “It was bad enough that he abandoned us. Then you left too.”
“Ohh, Katie.” She put down the utensil and pulled me into a hug. “I’m so sorry. Fourteen-year-olds are stupid.” She smoothed my hair. “I guess I thought you’d be okay, because you and Mom were so close.”
“But you’re my sister.”
“I know. That’s why I had to move to New York. I realized what an idiot I’d been. Well, that and Eleanor begged me to come help her launch the Herd.” She suddenly noticed the tilapia was leaking smoke and switched the vent back on. “Whoops.”
“Blackened tilapia is totally a thing. Cajun.”
She smiled. “Now, should we—”
I took her by surprise with another hug, and I heard her little giggle/sob near my shoulder. She pulled away and we were both laugh-crying. There was a sharp knock at the door, followed by the doorbell, and we both wiped our eyes, breathed deep.
“What are we gonna do, Katie?” Hana rubbed at her nose.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But at least we’re together.”
Mom fell asleep on the loveseat a little after eleven, and Hana and I stayed up, squished next to each other on the couch, sharing a faux-fur blanket and attacking the funfetti cake whole with our forks. Hana kept finding YouTube copies of old Christmas specials we’d taped off TV and watched every year as kids: Frosty the Snowman, Garfield, this odd Claymation California Raisins special (“Now that’s some branded content,” I’d remarked). My phone buzzed on the cushion next to me—a text from Ted, the first time I’d heard from him since Beverly. I had a vague sense he was still in Massachusetts, ahead of Eleanor’s funeral. I’d see him then, red-eyed and somber, but I hadn’t dared to hope I’d get together with him socially again.
“Here’s to a happier 2020,” it read. “Meeting you was a bright spot in an otherwise shit year.”
I smiled, flicked through a few funny things I could write back. Instead: “Likewise. And happy new year. ☺”
I checked the time. “Quick, Hana! We’re going to miss the ball dropping!”
She switched over to live TV, plosive and blaring, and I shook Mom awake as Hana dashed into the kitchen to open a bottle of Champagne. We counted down together, time moving backward for once, backward to when we were carefree little kids, arranging benches in the snow for elaborate games of make-believe. We hit zero and cheered, clinking our glasses and smiling at one another, and Hana’s and my phones blooped with a text from Daniel: “HNY!” I volleyed the well wishes back. He was with his parents tonight, Hana had mentioned, and doing fine.
“Mom, what does ‘auld lang syne’ mean again?” I asked, because it’s one of those unspoken, knee-jerk family traditions, like Hana pointing and saying, “That’s Jean Shepherd, he wrote the book” during his featured-extra moment in A Christmas Story.
Mom grinned. “To times long past!”
To auld lang syne. To clever little Eleanor and her neighbor Cameron, biking back and forth between their grand front doors. To gawky teenage Mikki, thrilled to be part of a crowd, one of the girls, for the first time in her life. To Hana and me, stealing cheese cubes and red-spangled sugar cookies from the table and sitting under the Christmas tree, watching Mom and Dad’s glamorous New Year’s Eve party, observing all the adults in their blouses and dresses and jackets and confidence, such grown-ups with their glasses of foamy Champagne.
Hana refilled all of our flutes, slender cups of kindness yet, and we clinked them together one more time.
EPILOGUE
Karen sat in the kitchen, a fluffy white robe tied around her, practical cork-bottomed slippers on her feet. It was March, but frost still licked the windows and coated the grass beyond the patio and pool. She and Gary had just returned from two weeks in Saint Martin, hot, sunny days at the pool or on the beach or on one of their two balconies, watching the sun rise and then set, over and over.
It’d been Gary’s idea, a way to relax and reconnect after the hellishness of the holiday season. Her beautiful daughter’s funeral, the saddest day of her life. The sudden loss of their best friends, the Corrigans down the street—a For Sale sign had just appeared in front of their white-columned mansion, mercifully. The weird, tense weeks when detectives kept popping by the house, asking more and more questions about a weekend in 2010 that Gary and Karen couldn’t possibly remember. Neither of them kept diaries or hung on to their old agenda books. But clearly the police were taking seriously the awful rantings of Eleanor’s killer. Karen went to check the weather on Gary’s laptop one day and found “posthumous trial” at the top of his recent Google searches, and she’d rushed to the toilet and thrown up on the spot: The idea was just too awful, Eleanor’s ghost being tried for some ghastly crime. But she’d never mentioned it to Gary, and eventually, the visits from detectives had stopped.
The sun wouldn’t set for a few more hours, but it seemed late enough to treat herself to a glass of wine. She rifled through the fridge and cabinets and, finding none there, opened the door to the basement and flipped on the light. She hated going down here, past the refurbished part, the leather sofa and enormous TV—hated pushing through the folding doors into the dank, cold section where bald lightbulbs hung, their pull cords swaying. She especially hated passing the spot, now a jumbled four-shelf storage unit, where the chest freezer once sat. She hurried past it, reaching the rack of dusty bottles, and selected a 2015 Cab Sauv from Sonoma Valley. She tugged on the string near her head, flicking off the light, and turned to leave. Then she locked eyes with a face staring out from the storage rack.
She screamed and dropped the bottle, wine splashing onto her slippers and spreading out along the cement floor. Flailing around, she found and yanked the bulb’s cord again, bathing the area in light. She stepped forward, her pulse pounding, and squinted, but she couldn’t figure out what object on the shelf—books, ski gear, boxes, old magazines, a bin of gently used gift bags and crumpled bows�
��had looked to her like a face. On the ground, the blob of wine lapped at a nearby box, and she hurried back upstairs to grab paper towels from the kitchen.
As she ripped the roll from the wall, her memory betrayed her, cueing up the one thing she begged it nightly not to show her: that beautiful black-haired girl, a chunk of her hair sheared down to fuzz, her smooth skin frosted over like it was dusted in flour, resting calmly in the chest freezer while Gary ordered Eleanor away, yammering about all the ways you can identify a body: clothes, teeth, marks, fingers. He ranted and muttered and slammed the freezer door closed as Karen’s mind homed in on the smallest detail, one that worked its way into her dreams even now—the girl’s beautiful nails, ebony speckled with tiny white stars. How rich the black looked against her delicate, milky fingers. Gary had walked in small circles, repeating the words, turning them into a mantra: clothesteethmarksfingers. Clothesteethmarksfingers. Like a puzzle he had to solve.
And he had, somehow, though he’d never told Karen how. He and Cameron had handled it one night, a night Gary assumed she’d slept through, and in the morning, to be kind, she played along. Cameron had never been the same after that, poor thing—missing work, moving from painkillers to heroin, his life like a car speeding off a cliff. All for Eleanor. All for their luminous little girl. All for Eleanor, dead at thirty.
She’d never told Gary her horrible secret. There was no point, not by the time they got home and found the body in the breakfast nook, just inside the patio doors. She heard the girls’ story, looked at the missed calls and voicemails on Gary’s phone until she’d nailed down their timeline, figured out exactly when Mikki, Hana, and Eleanor had given up and called it a night. But Karen knew how long it took for rigor mortis to set in, for a soft body to grow stiff; she was, after all, a nurse, familiar with this odd biological detail. And their story didn’t check out. The pale neck Karen thrust her fingers against to feel for a pulse—still supple. The body they carried into the basement once the girls had packed their things and left—not nearly stiff enough. Karen knew her daughter and her friends weren’t lying; there was no doubt in their hungover minds that this black-haired girl was dead by the time they went upstairs. What good would it have done to correct them, after the fact?
