Chapter 27 #3
In the early ’90s, a woman named Pam Jansen moved to Hamilton from Wenham.
Her daughter was rejected from a bunch of schools: Tufts, Harvard, MIT, Penn, Columbia.
It was one of those mysteries. The girl was perfect on paper.
In every club. Perfect GPA. Sophisticated.
Smart. It just didn’t make sense. Pam thought that maybe there was a better way for parents of means to make sure that their kids could bypass these archaic rules that enslave us to college administrators.
So, when her son was a sophomore, in 1992, she came up with a bribery scheme to help him.
The PTO just happened to be a convenient way to conceal her tracks, with their built-in connections to schools, financial incentives, and conduits between parents.
Ever since Pam, the PTO has essentially been a cover operation.
The president is elected, and she appoints a vice-president, secretary, and treasurer.
The organization has a list of vetted contacts.
People within the community who know and support them.
People in the state. Senators. Representatives.
People who can determine futures. The master list of members and supporters is saved in a file on one laptop that always remains with the president.
The four PTO principals have access, but only the president takes the computer home.
The documents are never transferred. There’s a unique payroll system.
It’s entirely off-the-books. They’re ghosts.
Members pay for the privilege of getting in, and the PTO is very selective about the process.
I could spend all day giving you a primer on how the operation works, but the truth is, you don’t need to know all of this (and the less you know, the better off you are).
What you need to know is that they don’t want you to run because you threaten their ability to do what they have been doing, which is control their own futures and the futures of the people who pay into their club.
I hope this is helpful, and I’m sorry that I can’t tell you more. These people are dangerous. These people will do anything for power and success.
Don’t trust anyone. Look around every corner. And stay away from the PTO. I’m not kidding when I say that they’re dangerous.
In good health.
—Your Faithful Mouse
After that, Anna wrote back twice more, but it was into the void; no more emails arrived.
Denny had never needed a sounding board so badly, had never wished for a partner so fervently.
He had always been solitary in his work, the kind of artist who thrived on time spent alone in a shed, but this kind of problem was bigger than him, bigger than Anna.
It was a problem that bubbled beneath the crust of a respectable-looking town.
There was a reason that Anna couldn’t tackle it herself, even though she was strong-willed and bold.
Unstoppable force, immovable object. Which was stronger in the end?
It was the force: The force would win. Anna was just another object in the way, and they had numbers, so many of them, pushing her out of the way, making her yield: She had no choice but to yield.
Denny now realized that his wife had stumbled onto genuinely grave danger, the kind of danger that could get a person killed.
A secret society might be hard to believe, but there wasn’t much about any of this that was easy to believe, and if his revelation about Life Time and the pool incident with Louisa had taught him anything, it was that Mimi Mar was cold and unyielding, like New Hampshire granite.
Whatever mess had started with the Ziti with Your Sweetie Dance and had escalated with the PTO elections may have been only that: a mess.
But the minute that Anna discovered a wide and flowing river of deceit, that just may well have sealed her fate.
The Gerhard Richter painting that had followed Anna around for so many years, Denny knew, was called Candle, or Kerze in German.
In 2011, it was sold to a private collector for over eleven million pounds.
Sometimes when Anna was feeling bad about having abandoned some of her creative pursuits, she looked the painting up on the Internet and stared at it.
Denny had caught her doing this before. She would close the browser just as he was walking into the room, but he knew.
This was one of the things he knew about his wife: that she had some regrets, and that these regrets lingered. They had a long half-life.
And maybe that candle, with its tormenting glow, kept her thinking of other things. She wasn’t painting, but she was planning. Planning to make Hamilton better. Planning on ushering in a better generation of kids. Always planning. Denny could see the candle himself now, the flame slightly blurred.
“When the time is right, I’ll be here to help you,” the voice said. It was Anna’s voice, or it was his voice, or it was just a whisper in the emerging light. But Denny knew that he would put the pieces together. Anna had left a trail for him to find, breadcrumbs leading him to a destination.
“Thank you,” he said to the ghosts he didn’t believe in. “Thank you.”
One year. At the bottom of the stairs, Denny looked at the markings on the wall where he had notched the growth of his children, now a year without their mother.
Louisa had grown in leaps and bounds. Anna had never been tall—diminutive in stature but never in substance, she liked to say.
But Louisa was proving to be a counterpoint, sprouting faster than her father could account for.
Ben was a smaller, softer version of his parents.
Was it Denny’s imagination, or was his son a little quieter and more reserved now?
He was sensitive to the world around him, and he could recite obscure facts and figures about it.
“The lion’s mane is the longest jellyfish in the world,” Ben said over breakfast. The house felt more empty than usual, like a hole had opened up that morning, just for them.
“No, it’s the Portuguese man-of-war,” Louisa said.
“It’s the lion’s mane!” Ben said. He knew about these things. His best friend from school, Liam, was as studious and knowledgeable as he was when it came to sea animals and their accompanying factoids. “It can grow to be almost as big as a person.”
“Disgusting,” Louisa said.
Denny didn’t find it disgusting, though.
He was fascinated by what lurked below in nature, by how other species survived.
The ocean, so calm and serene on its surface, hid so many secrets beneath.
You never knew what you might find if you dipped a toe below.
A black-tipped shark, hunting for prey. A school of angel fish, dancing in the afternoon light.
Or a lion’s mane jellyfish, tentacles searching for something to hold on to.
We are all just full of secrets, Denny thought.
Every last one of us. Anna had been full of secrets, and he had his secrets, too, even now, a year later.
He was still reeling from the ghost. Was she real? Was he? Now it was time, Denny knew, to put the last pieces together, to make right what had been made wrong a whole year ago. The center of his world had been set askew, corrupted. It was up to him to correct course.
All those sea creatures were more dangerous than they looked.
Anna would have used the word insidious.
The danger was the kind you couldn’t see immediately.
Maybe a bear looked ferocious, its fangs glistening, threatening to draw blood.
But it was the jellyfish that could get you.
Wasn’t it the box jelly, after all, that could kill a person with just a single point of contact?
Wasn’t the box jelly the creature that had defeated the indefatigable Diana Nyad, who had doggedly pursued the swim between Cuba and Florida multiple times before finally achieving her goal?
Box jellyfish crept up in the middle of the night, caught unlucky swimmers by surprise, injected them with venom so poisonous and toxic that they could not go on.
The venom was a paralytic, entering the bloodstream swiftly and effectively.
Anna had found herself, too, amid a community of box jellies, women so swift and poisonous that extrication was impossible.
You could scream, but who was there to listen, after all?
It was a sea full of them, box jellies, pulsing in the night.
Sticks, of course, was a lost cause, and he wasn’t going to get anywhere with Mimi.
But Denny wondered if he might still have some luck with Di.
Her husband, Mark, worked long days in Boston as a corporate lawyer.
He wouldn’t be home until evening. Denny considered a peace offering, something that would feel organic and natural.
He never stopped by Di’s house, not even when she and Anna were at the peak of their friendship, and it would stretch the limits of credulity to think that he would be doing so now, unless he needed something from her.
Denny was good at making people need him, though.
That was the art of being a furniture maker: He produced beautiful things that people didn’t know they needed that they suddenly made space for in their lives, that they suddenly had to have.
He could make people fall in love with items, like the Windsor chair that he had recently made with no distinct owner in mind.
It was just sitting in the work shed, waiting for someone to find a home for it.