Chapter 28 #3
Anna looked over at Mary, who had until now refused to make eye contact.
She realized that she had misjudged her friend.
Hadn’t Anna misjudged everyone, though? Friendship with Mary had been rooted in sympathy.
Girl from South Hamilton, so deserving of Anna, but all along, it was Mary who had been sending out warning flares, telling her to get out, and Anna who had been too stubborn to listen.
The silence was thick, but Anna could almost feel those words floating above, the words of admonition.
I told you to stop. I told you this was dangerous.
I told you there were things you didn’t want to hear.
Yeah, well, the things she didn’t want to hear, to be fair, didn’t seem like Skull and Bones crazy.
And this shit was definitely Skull and Bones crazy.
Mary had said nothing to Anna since they arrived at the carriage house. She looked at Mary, and Mary looked back.
“I really did think we were friends,” she said.
“Actually, I think you pitied me,” Mary said.
She wasn’t entirely wrong. Anna had believed that something was difficult in Mary’s life, that there were money troubles or gambling troubles or addiction troubles, the kind of troubles you just don’t talk about when you’re from New England.
But the things that Mary had been keeping to herself had nothing to do with shame.
Her buried secrets had been for want of a better future, of buying into a dream. She was socking it away, all right.
“In the end, I guess I didn’t really know you,” Anna said.
“I guess you didn’t,” Mary said. “Small house, big bank account. My husband works for the Baupost Group. You always seemed to forget that about me. You saw what you wanted to see. And I let you.”
That was true, and there wasn’t any point in denying it.
All of this, though: It was . . . ridiculous?
That was the only word Anna could come up with.
She would have been less surprised if Ashton Kutcher had shown up, announced that Punk’d was being revived, and told her it had all been a big joke.
Anna wondered if this coven of women knew how insidious, weird, and, yes, crazy this all looked from the outside, or if they had operated within its limits for so long that they had just started to accept a lack of boundaries as normative.
“Does this seem normal to any of you?” she asked.
“Who has the time or patience for normal?” Mimi asked.
Maybe, Anna thought, they were all just delusional. Maybe power had made them drunk. Or maybe they just didn’t care.
Anna shivered at the thought. “Just explain this to me, because I genuinely don’t understand. Why would a secret society like the Generals, with half of Massachusetts on board, be so threatened by one person?” Anna said.
Mimi and Karen exchanged glances. “You’re not the only irritant to us,” Mimi said.
“Why don’t we talk about those emails. I’m sure you were wondering who sent them.
” She paused and walked around Anna in a circle, momentarily contemplative, maybe waiting for Anna to say something in recognition.
The emails. Of course Mimi had known all along.
“That was Sarah Saunders,” Mimi continued.
“Our former treasurer. At some point, Sarah grew a conscience. She and her husband and daughter moved to Winchester and started getting the state police involved. Sarah thought that since she had the entire roster of contacts saved, she could go around the order of operations.”
“I can’t imagine that sat well with you, Mimi,” Anna said, acting as if the revelation did not bother her. Her own response was bait. But Mimi didn’t go for it.
“We’ve worked hard,” Mimi said. “This is our masterpiece.” The Generals, Mimi seemed to believe, deserved to be protected—and Anna believed that she believed this.
A delusion, maybe, but her delusion. Their delusion.
Anna could empathize with the desire to create something.
She had been a stalled artist herself; what would it feel like to have put something in motion in the world, something larger than herself?
Probably magnetic. Probably powerful. Probably important.
A feeling like that—to know that you were responsible for lifelines and futures, to know that you could make things happen—could have become addictive, and fast.
All told, Mimi said, there were 218 officials on the Generals’ payroll, paid in cash, yes, though not in suitcases.
It had taken a long time to establish the pipeline—nearly the entire eight years of Pamela Jansen’s PTO tenure, though she had been successful in getting her son into Harvard in the end.
“Pure persuasion,” Mimi said, with a smile.
But once the Generals were up and running, there was no stopping them.
They developed a system: quarterly visits and payments, check-ins that looked like accidental meetings (Anna had witnessed one between Mimi and Representative Murphy at Honeycomb, after all), requests that never held any kind of paper trail.
They recruited new members through the sorority, encouraged the right kind of people to move to town and encouraged their daughters to join Chi Omega, a pipeline operated in a circle.
What were the checks for? Requisite fees, so far as their husbands knew.
They might as well have been joining a country club.
They were permitted to share with their spouses a little about how the organization worked, if it was required to get the money, but otherwise, the organization remained tight-lipped.
All of this made Anna wonder, once more, about Sarah Saunders, a woman she had not known, but who had jumped into her own world to warn her about the Generals. That had been a risk. “What happened with Sarah?” Anna asked.
“She was a lot like you, actually,” Mimi said. “Willful. Unable to see others’ perspective. She was the first PTO position holder since 1992 to leave.”
There were, Anna knew, consequences to going against these women. Certainly there were consequences to going against the Chi Omega code, whatever that was.
“I assume she discovered that moving to Winchester and telling people about the Generals wasn’t going to work,” Anna said.
“We put an end to that. Plenty of parking tickets. Her husband got called for jury duty every month for a year. We thought she’d learned the lesson, but I guess she saw some potential in you,” Mimi said.
“But she’s alive?”
“We don’t discuss our methods of punishment with non-members, Anna,” Di said. “Mimi has been more than generous in giving you information about Sarah.”
“It’s okay, Di, we can tell her,” Karen said. “Sarah and her husband have decided to move to the Midwest. At the urging of some very forceful state officials.”
“I guess I still don’t get why I’m here,” Anna confessed.
“If Sarah was the problem. I didn’t go to the authorities.
I fell into all of this. And I can fall right back out.
You can let me go and we can all just live our lives.
See each other at the Citgo and act like we don’t even know each other, just like every other person in Massachusetts who doesn’t give a shit about their neighbors.
” No one said anything, so Anna kept talking.
“I could move to the Midwest. I could move to Laurel Canyon. People can start entirely new lives,” Anna said.
She realized she was begging. It was the only time she could ever recall begging for anything.
“Maybe, for some of us, this is personal,” Mimi said.
It was casual, but Anna could see she meant Di.
Di, the girl Anna had met all those years ago, back in the shortening days of summer, back when Kaitlin Connors was still alive, back when you could still get away with jumping off Indian Rock into the Merrimack without someone calling the cops, back when riding a bike around town after dark didn’t seem so dangerous.
Jealousy, that was part of it—Anna could feel that in her bones—but there was something else, too, a drive to ensure that her children could live a tony Hamilton life in perpetuity.
The estate, the carriage house, the rose garden in spring.
Success in their futures. Anna looked at her friend, still the tallest in the room.
Those emerald eyes had lost their shine.
They still had a choice, all of them, to back out, to send her to the Midwest alongside Sarah Saunders, but Anna already knew that whatever was set in motion had been set in motion a long time ago, and had less to do with her being a threat and more to do with her being an irritant, and that they could eliminate her—that it was a flex.
It was the ultimate proof of who they were as the Generals, the manifestation of their power.
It had ripened, then rotted. Anna was here now, in a room with the fetid reminder of it.
What if, Anna suddenly realized, it wasn’t about what people had to do, but about what they wanted to do?
What if they were all here because of desire?
What if she had misread the discomfort in the room?
What if it was only her own? What if Mary had kept her close to keep her off the scent?
What if Mimi had hunted her like prey? What if Karen followed the lead?
What if Di had always wanted Anna gone? What if savage instincts just needed a place to run wild?
What if things that had always seemed illogical and cruel and mad were just a matter of appetite?
Anna was beginning to see appetite in the eyes of her captors. They had an appetite—not for her so much as for power. To kill: That was the ultimate wielding of power.
“You don’t have to do it,” Anna said. She was speaking to one of them, to all of them, to their appetites, to their egos.
“It’s already done,” Di said. And it was.