Chapter 7
Susan
Wednesday
The news report continues, but I don’t hear it. I’m stuck on her name.
Savannah Holmes.
“Oh my god.” My hand flies to my mouth.
“What is it?” Leesa startles. “Are you OK?”
“Savannah Holmes…”
“What—do you know her?” Leesa asks.
I’m shaking my head. I don’t know her. Not really. But still.
“Susan, what’s going on?”
Greta, visibly pale, fills her in—the packages, the address, the alter ego conversation—which now seems silly and trite.
I slide down in my chair, sagging against the back.
“So you did kind of know her,” Leesa says, eyes wide.
“We’d texted about misdelivered packages, arranging for them to be picked up and re-delivered. I dropped them off myself at her porch a couple of times. And…I suppose I liked living her life vicariously, through her purchases and her Instagram. A kind of one-sided bond that was all in my head.”
Leesa nods. “You connected with her. I get it.”
Greta purses her lips. Clearly, she does not get it.
“I guess she had the life I might have, if I wasn’t walking around with a muslin cloth on my shoulder,” I explain. “If I was that kind of person—beautiful and poised and glamorous.”
Beautiful and poised and glamorous and dead. I google the story, and her photo comes up now, a familiar one from Instagram, and suddenly, I feel like crying.
Grim-faced, Greta rubs my shoulder. Leesa takes over making tea.
More details begin to emerge—on Facebook mostly, not on official news channels. Savannah’s body was found by a courier, it seems. A man there to collect a package. He’d peered through a crack in the blind and had seen something that made him call the gardaí.
“Oh my god,” Leesa says as we read this update, heads bent together over the iPad. “Maybe it was your package. Are you missing any deliveries?”
I nod slowly, thinking of the skincare order that hasn’t arrived.
“So maybe he was there to pick up yours and found her dead? Jesus.”
Silence as the three of us take this in.
“Wait.” Leesa again. “What about the death threat you got? The doxing. Like, your address was put online. And she looks like you. It’s almost as if…”
“Oh, come on, that’s a leap,” Greta says.
But Leesa is adamant. “No, wait, listen. Savannah Holmes, a dark-haired, medium-build woman living at 26 Oakpark, the same address as yours. You got a death threat and she is dead. Jesus Christ, Susan, is Savannah Holmes dead because someone mixed you up? Because…because it should have been you?”