Chapter 27 #2
Surprising maybe even Denny, Sticks grabbed the hand with his own meaty paw and pulled down.
For a second, it was just a generous gesture between two men, but then the officer pulled Denny in, and even with the headlamp shining in his coal-black eyes, he whispered, “It’s cold at the haul-out, Plummer.
January is the worst time of year.” He released Denny’s hand and gave the man a little shove backward, making him stumble into the muddy snow.
Denny watched Sticks disappear then, a silhouette fading toward the headlights.
Sticks was a problem that needed solving.
It was a fitful sleep, haunted by ghosts.
Anna came to him that night, maybe the memory of her or maybe whatever remained of her in the house.
Had he disturbed the dead, he wondered, riled her in destroying her papers?
Neither he nor Anna ever had much use either for religion or for any sort of belief in God.
They had passed this floating agnosticism along to their children, the bombastic, celebratory mood that accompanied all holidays but that omitted any mention of a host. No one being could have created a world as complex as theirs, they reasoned.
Couples quarreled over all kinds of things—money and sex and communication—and surely Anna and Denny had their share of battles, but one thing they never fought over was whether or not God was in the details of their lives.
When a person was gone, that was it. Evaporated. Dust.
Well, that was what he had believed. But Anna was everywhere now.
He could almost see her in his peripheral vision, and sometimes, if the light was dim in the evening, he could swear she was there, sitting at the table, or curled up on the couch.
Now, waking up from a terrible night’s sleep, Denny was convinced that he had been visited by her, that he had somehow disturbed the dead.
What did she want, this spirit, this being who was not at rest?
What could he bring her that might provide some semblance of peace?
It was early, the time of day that Anna had always preferred to keep to herself. Hank was curled up in her space on the bed.
“Is it warm where you are?” Denny said to the dark. “Did you feel it when you went?”
“I didn’t feel a thing, Denny. You don’t have to worry about that.” It was just a voice in the dark.
“Did you know? Before? Did you know what was going to happen?”
“I think everyone knows when they are going to die. Maybe not right away. But everyone has an idea that death is coming for them.”
He reached out in the dark, but there was nothing, only the cold chill of the room.
She liked it to be set to 65 degrees. They never fought about God, but they fought about the thermostat, especially in winter.
Even in the year since her death, he had not been able to will himself to set the temperature higher.
“I am doing my best,” he said. “I miss you. I don’t know why I haven’t said it more.
” But who was there to say it to, really?
His kids, who were too young to understand?
Inside, every time he breathed, he felt pierced by glass.
That was what it was like, having Anna ripped from him in this unpredictable way.
She was supposed to be here. They were supposed to have time.
Summers. Ski seasons. Long evenings looking out at the blushing dusk.
People were always wanting more, filling emptiness, failing to see what was right there, but what he wouldn’t give now for a chance to do the whole thing over again.
Rewind the tape, start from the beginning, and sink into every stupid last moment, get drunk on the things that hadn’t even mattered.
“I know,” the voice said.
“Is it enough?” he asked.
“Is anything ever enough?”
Of course nothing was ever enough. That was classic Anna.
Nothing was ever enough for her. It was why she had abandoned art.
Gerhard Richter. He was a better artist, and so she had abandoned her own lesser skill and instead became a capable copywriter, turning the often-unfinished ideas of others into brilliant phrases and paragraphs.
Pouring her artistic skills into projects that bore no true trace of her.
Nothing was ever enough for her, the world could not contain her, and that was her problem: It was never, ever enough.
Denny loved her for all of that, for her grandness, for being too bold and beautiful and wild and wide-eyed to even be contained.
He loved her because of all the ideas that she had swirling around inside her, the things she was too afraid to put on a canvas, the pieces that she felt no one would ever really understand or appreciate.
All that raw material was now gone; she was now gone.
He felt it: the rawness, the echo of grief, its true reverberation, how it could just go on forever and ever.
The things he had never told her, the life together they would never finish—the thought of it swelled inside him.
A murder is an elimination, he thought, not just of a person, but also of a marriage, of a family, of an entire way of life.
“You were enough,” he said. “You were so much more than enough.”
“Don’t go getting all sentimental on me now, Denny,” the voice said.
He laughed, in spite of himself. A slip of light was starting to appear at the base of the trees. Hank was snoring still. In the last year, the dog had lost his spark.
“I’ll untangle it, you know,” Denny said.
“There’s one more thing,” the voice said. “But you’re close.”
Anna—or whatever figment of Denny’s imagination was approximating her in this early-morning hour—was right.
Denny had scratched the itch, and he had slowly pieced together what he believed to be a reasonable explanation for how he had gotten here, to this place, alone in a bed, a widower and father of two.
His wife had been targeted. Of this he was certain.
He now knew the players and their roles, he thought, but he was not yet sure of their motivations, or how they related to one another.
And he still wasn’t sure how he was going to be able to prove any of this to anyone.
Sticks, Denny now knew, was either involved or was protecting the people who were, meaning that the police department was just as dangerous as anyone else in Hamilton.
And if Anna had somehow been lured to the haul-out by friends and foes without her own husband knowing, and had remained missing for days, who was to say that the same could not happen to him, too?
Some guiding force pointed him, in the ink-dark, to his computer, where he logged in, once more, to his wife’s email account.
He had read every email up and down, he thought, but maybe he had missed something.
Had he? He could feel his body overtaken by something—grief, or the heavy weight of a spirit inhabiting him, who could tell?
—guiding him toward the search bar. Email search: “secret society.”
And there it was, an email he had never seen before, dated December 28, 2022, from an account called anonmouse@.
Dear Anna,
Excuse the intrusion, but I’m a concerned mouse worried that you have gotten into something that you cannot get yourself out of.
I can’t say much about this over email (or at all), but the PTO is more than what it looks like.
It’s a secret society of women working behind-the-scenes to get their kids into elite colleges.
They will do anything—anything—to make sure that their kids succeed at the expense of others.
These women have political connections. They have connections to law enforcement. THEY ARE RUTHLESS. Do not trust anyone.
It’s more than a school dance. It’s a social structure. The promises they make do come true. They’ve never had a non-member as president. If you were to win, the danger of you discovering their secrets would be too great.
Be careful out there.
—Anon Mouse
Only a few days before she disappeared—before she died—Denny now knew, Anna had received this final piece of information.
The PTO was more than just an organization of well-to-do parents.
It was a society where members conspired to pay a tithe in exchange for the ultimate certainty: entrance into the right schools for their children, a lifestyle that was acceptable in towns like these.
With Mimi at the helm, all of this remained private and closed off.
She had at her disposal, Denny knew, the Hamilton Police Department, and probably plenty of other high-powered organizations.
It was unclear to Denny how far up the food chain her power went.
As was Anna’s way, she had written back a few hours later. It was right there in the thread.
Dear Mouse,
Tell me your secrets.
—Anna
The anonymous emailer waited two days to reply.
Dear Anna,
I’ve been thinking of the best way to respond to you, so I hope you can forgive me for taking my time.
I’m putting myself in some danger by telling you all of this.
I’m probably putting you in some danger, too.
Please take care of yourself. Please take care of your family.
I can’t tell you who I am or how I know what I know, but I hope that you trust that it’s true.
This covert operation has gone on in Hamilton for a long time. The kids who get into Ivy League schools get in with the help of the PTO. The parents who pay to belong to this organization do it with the understanding that they are buying a ticket to the future.