Chapter 9
IN HER MARRIAGE, there were things she told Denny Plummer and things she kept to herself.
It wasn’t that Anna didn’t trust her husband so much as the fact that she considered herself the self-reliant type.
She had sworn, in the years leading up to her engagement and marriage, that she would never become the type of woman who fell too hard for a man, that she would never become the type of woman who lost her grip.
Finances: She shared these with her husband.
Travel plans: Of course she shared. What she intended to make for dinner: Everyone was in on this, to avoid any possible fuss.
But if there was something that bothered Anna Plummer—truly bothered her, down to the core of her being—she might sock it away, bury it the way her old pet Russian tortoise had buried himself beneath layers of substrate to keep warm.
She had debated telling Denny about the rest of the messages.
There had been so many of them, after all, it had been hard to keep track.
But the more she thought about it, the more she was sure that he would only weigh in on the matter in a way that would not be helpful.
You should never have opened this box, he would have told her, or I did tell you to just let this one go.
She could picture him sitting on the couch, looking straight ahead, not bothering to see the injustice she felt, scolding her, as if this had somehow been her fault. As if she deserved it.
It was easier, then, to disable the social media accounts, and to change the settings in her MacBook, one by one, blocking every single unknown address from contacting her.
It took the better part of the next day, a Saturday, but she had sent Denny and the kids up to Salisbury Beach to the arcades to get energy out.
She had to work, she told them, a deadline for a copywriting client.
After they left, she made herself a coffee and stared at the computer.
Where to begin? Facebook account: delete.
Instagram: comments deleted, settings privatized.
One by one, she ticked away at them until there were just a few manageable emails left to go.
Things had slowed down from the night before, and she felt less like a stranger in her own skin.
She had blocked over forty-seven accounts, though she wasn’t really sure what to do now.
Her phone was dead, her only text capacity on her computer.
She’d have to go to the Verizon store tomorrow with Denny to handle that piece of the puzzle.
An accident, she’d say, and he’d be pissed, but he’d get over it.
Di texted to ask what her situation was. How many more???
Oh hundreds but I just finished blocking most of them
Not enough!!!
Leave it to Di to be the better angel. Anna was content to leave the conversation at that, but her friend wasn’t done.
I’m on my way, the kids are at that methuen trampoline park lol bday party
How many times had Anna thanked her own lucky stars that she hadn’t become a baseball mom like her best friend, since the sport was interminable, and yet on this cold Saturday morning, Di had somehow been strategically relieved of her sports momming duties, just ten minutes down the road and on her way, somehow intuitively aware that Anna was here, alone, staring at the MacBook and not quite sure how to purge the menace from all of her electronics, Gen X Luddite that she was.
One thing Anna was good at: making notes. She opened a Word document on her computer and wrote a stupid little note to herself:
Note to self, February 12, 2022, tons and tons of emails, messages, facebook scam replies, totally and completely unhinged messages on Instagram, and text messages from unknown numbers.
Have blocked all of them, disabled FB, changed privacy settings on Instagram, etc.
, last nite threw phone in bathtub (lol oops it’s me I’m the problem it’s me) but just making a note in case of emergency! !!
She saved the note into a folder on her desktop that was marked MISC.
, where other notes she had written to herself lived, notes about passwords and about what she wanted to do if she ever won the lottery and about her hopes and dreams for her children and about where she had buried the time capsule in the backyard, because she was certain that she would forget (and it was true; she had forgotten).
Di let herself in without knocking. She was tall and ruthlessly thin, about six inches taller than Anna if she stood without hunching, which she rarely did.
Ever since they were younger, she possessed the kind of unaware beauty that made people stop and look at her.
She could command attention in a pair of Adidas track pants and an old ratty sweatshirt, which was equal parts infuriating and admirable.
Today she wore loose jeans and a hooded sweatshirt from American Eagle that she must have brought along with her from the Dark Ages, from before they had kids, from college, even.
She looked like a teenager despite two unmistakable diamond earrings peeking out from beyond a blond bob.
“Well, I know what we do first,” she said, marching into Anna’s office.
“You could bring coffee, you know,” Anna said.
“How do you know that wasn’t the ‘do first’ part?”
“If it was, it had better include a donut, because I’m starving.”
“Fine, but don’t tell my kids.”
It was more like Don’t Tell the Hamilton Mommies, because they would be horrified to know that anyone would go to get a chocolate glazed donut at Dunkin’ rather than a pain au chocolat at Honeycomb, but girls from the North Shore, they knew better.
Di got her coffee iced and light, no matter the season (“regular,” actually, in Massachusetts-speak, which meant cream and enough sugar to kill an adult from diabetes if they drank it every day, and Di swore she didn’t, but she ran pretty regularly, so who knew if it was exercise or just genetics that kept her looking like she wasn’t drinking bad coffee and sugar in her free time).
“So what’s next?” Anna wanted to know. She had a feeling she was not going to like the answer, just like she hadn’t liked the answer when they were teenagers, borrowing her mother’s Mercury Villager minivan for what was just supposed to be an hour and ending up across the border in New Hampshire with a carton of P-Funks for under twenty dollars, smoking butts in the back of the car, legs up on the sea wall at Hampton, home late, her mother smelling the smoke, getting caught even though she had set the clocks back a little, always getting caught because her mother knew to watch the 11 p.m. news.
“The truth is, we gotta report it,” Di said. “Simple as that.”
“Report what to who?” Anna said. Big ideas, always, Di with her big ideas.
“The calls. The messages. All of this shit. You have got to file a police report. If you’re not going to talk to Denny about it, well that’s one thing.
I can’t talk you out of that, I guess. Your marriage, your mess.
But you can’t just put your head in the sand here.
These people are doxing you. How do you know someone isn’t going to take things to another, crazier level?
It’s just stupid to let this go.” At Dunks, they had parked in a space designated for takeout orders, but the lot was mostly empty.
Anna’s Volkswagen ticked. She had gotten in an accident, side-swiped by a pickup truck on 113 in Newburyport in the fall, and ever since, the car made all kinds of bad noises.
Unholy noises. Rattles. It shook on the highway.
She sometimes wondered if a tire would just shimmy loose from the friction.
Right now, the ticking felt like some kind of warning.
“It’s ridiculous, all of it,” she said. “You don’t really think these adult women are responsible for this, do you?
And, let’s be honest. It’s not scary as much as it is immature.
My address . . .” Anna paused and laughed, because, truly, it was actually almost funny.
“I mean, all of this stuff is public information! If these people are people who know me, they already know where I live. Plus, this shit is all on the Internet anyway. What is the fucking point?”
“I think the point is to scare you.”
“It’s not scaring me. It’s annoying me. I’m annoyed. Mission accomplished.”
“I still think it’s worth going to the police,” Di said.
“Is that really necessary?”
“What is it that people always say?” Di said. “When people show you who they are?”
Anna knew the expression. Believe them. When people show you who they are, believe them.
Mimi’s face, twisted up, like the knot from a balloon.
Believe them. Believe that they are who you think they are, she said to herself, but believing something like that meant stepping into a place where terrible things were possible, things that Anna didn’t want to accept.
“I know what you’re saying,” Anna said. “It’s not like I’m trying to be generous. I’m just trying to be realistic. I don’t think these are serious threats. The only thing I have to fear is fear itself.”
“And maybe the Hamilton PTO,” quipped Di.
“It seems unlikely that the PTO is going to plot my untimely demise, Di. We’re talking about women who don’t even do their own nails.”
“So, realistically,” Di asked, “do you think that timing is an accident?”
Accidents. Were there any accidents? Anna thought it was possible—possibly possible—that the attack, if it was, in fact, an attack, had been planned to coincide with the dance.
But what if it wasn’t that? She could hear Denny in her head still.
What was more likely was that this was just a kid.
That this was just a prank. That this was just some stupid overreaction.
“And realistically,” Di continued, “do you think there are that many people out there who have your phone number and a big Rolodex of people who they can give it to?”
It was that last part that stuck with Anna.
The access. The assault. The PTO, they had strength in numbers.
But then, the kids in Hamilton, they had Internet-savvy, too.
They could just as easily rile up a crowd.
She wasn’t sold. “I’m not convinced that Mimi Mar is smart enough to be able to execute this kind of thing,” Anna said.
“Maybe you’re underestimating her,” Di said. “I don’t really know. I don’t know her that well. But she’s on, what? Her third term as president of the PTO? Six years? She’s been in the PTO for practically her entire time as a mom. That sounds pretty powerful to me.”
“I’m not sure how much power I want to give to a parent-teacher organization, to be honest,” Anna said. “It gives me the creeps.”
“Fair enough,” Di said. “All I’m saying: Maybe give the blonde the benefit of the doubt.” She shook her own shorn blond hair like a little wet dog. Anna giggled. Di was anything but a prototypical blonde.
Maybe warnings were everywhere. A scrim of ice, creeping across the windshield, formed a bony finger. “Would you look at that,” Anna said.
“It’s pointing right at us,” Di said, and it was true; it really was.
Di had always been a gifted partner in crime.
She was born to do it, as the youngest child.
Diane Foley, before she was Diane Maguire, forgotten child, tomboy in childhood who had somehow outgrown ugly duckling status far earlier than the rest of their motley crew.
She had been the first to be noticed by boys, but she never let it stop her, never let the attention divert her from hijinks and adventures.
Maybe it even made her a bigger prankster than the other two: Anna and Kaitlin Connors, who had died of a heroin overdose back in the early 2000s, when the stuff was consuming all of the northern New England towns, back in a bleak winter that was not unlike this one.
Stuff like that, stories like that, were what bonded Anna and Di together after all these years, Anna sometimes thought.
It was why they were here, at the Hamilton Police Department, on a Saturday morning—okay, fine, call it early afternoon by now—rubbing hands together in the cold, looking at each other for confirmation.
Are we going to do this? Okay, fine. Let’s do it.
Inside, they asked to speak with an officer and were directed to have a seat: two filthy and nubby orange chairs that looked like they had never been reupholstered, like they had been there at least since the 1970s.
In time, a short, meaty officer with a crooked name tag that read Malkin came out and shoved a paw at them.
“Ladies,” he said. “Right this way.”
Perhaps predicting what she was thinking, Di jabbed an elbow into Anna’s rib cage, like they were thirteen all over again.
A mistrust for authority, that’s what she had always been accused of possessing, right or wrong.
There was the old Wayne’s World joke: smells like bacon.
Cops. Pigs. Anna thought of it now. Wrong time to piss an officer off, of course.
She knew that, though she couldn’t help but think of the cops as the enemy.
“Thanks for taking the time,” Di said, putting on her best Hamilton Mom performance.
“Ever been in the station before?” Malkin asked, making a joke about upper-middle-class mothers from Hamilton and the station, and this time Di elbowed Anna hard.
Hampton Beach, 1998. Weed wasn’t legal yet.
A joint. Officers’ flashlights right in their fucking eyes.
Locked up and cuffed to a metal bench for two hours until they paid bail.
Plus, the assholes grabbed their fake IDs and threatened them with possession of false identity, a felony.
“Now what would two fine upstanding women like us be doing in a police station, officer?” Di smiled her best mom smile, flashed her perfect white teeth, which she now got bleached regularly by a very expensive North Shore dentist. Her husband was a corporate lawyer, and she could afford to do that, even if she didn’t wear Moncler every single day.
She was no Mimi Mar, but she could perform with the best of them.
“You’d be surprised,” Malkin said. “You sure would be surprised.” He laughed a tinny little laugh, ineffectual for a man of his heft.
It made Anna want to laugh, too, but she didn’t.
She stared straight ahead at the narrow little hallways with their yellow-white light.
Malkin took the lead and opened a conference room for them. “Right in here,” he motioned.
Inside, at a table meant to look like wood that was actually plastic, Anna filled out five pages, signed her scrawled cursive signature. Anna Plummer, February 12, 2022, beside a long and detailed accounting of every message and threat sent to her.
“We’ll handle it from here,” Malkin said. “I’m sure you’ll have no more trouble, Mrs. Plummer.”
“You can call me Anna,” she said.