Chapter Twenty-Five

Nelson the doorman had just finished putting an elderly woman and her pocketbook-size dachshund into a cab.

“You were right, Nelson. The Langstons seem like a very nice family.”

He smiled politely. “Have a nice day, ma’am.”

“Ramona seems to get along with Mrs. Langston?” Unless Julia Whitmire had a reason of her own to threaten Adrienne, the most obvious explanation was that she was doing it on Ramona’s behalf, and that someone else was now continuing the pattern. “I’m sure at that age it must be typical for a teenaged girl to fight with her parents.”

“I just watch the door.”

Outside on Park Avenue, Rogan shook his head. “Seriously? You thought he was suddenly going to tell you all he knows? Like, some magic doorman interrogation code, where all you have to do is ask three times?”

She was too busy reading a text on her phone to bother with a comeback. “It’s from Max. He’s working on the subpoena for Social Circle.”

“Good. Maybe the IP addresses will tell us something.”

“In the meantime, was it just me, or is that woman in serious denial about those threats? She’s trying to convince herself they’re only words, but I could tell that part of her was terrified. She’s working so hard not to be scared that she refused to focus on whether Julia might have had some motive for posting a comment like that on her blog.”

“You’re not thinking of her for the perp, are you?”

“No, I don’t get that vibe. Plus, she said she was at a party in the Hamptons Sunday night. Easy enough to check that out. Add it to the to-do list.”

“Maybe she honestly doesn’t know,” Rogan said. “If she and Julia had some kind of beef, presumably she’d just tell us, especially if she’s got a rock-solid alibi.”

“Unless the beef somehow involved Ramona. She seems pretty protective over that girl. If Julia was lashing out at Adrienne on behalf of her friend, Adrienne might not want to admit there’s a rift in her perfect stepmother-stepdaughter relationship.”

“So let’s go talk to Little Miss Truant again.”

Ramona was waiting, as she had promised, on a park bench next to the playground by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was fiddling with her iPod but stood up and pulled out her earbuds when she spotted them walking toward her.

The words started tumbling from her mouth before they had a chance to speak. “Did you talk to her? Does she know who’s threatening her? Are you going to be able to find out who’s doing this?”

Ellie pointed to the bench, and Ramona returned to her seat. “Slow down for a second, okay? So, we talked last night about the importance of your being extremely honest with us about Julia.”

“Of course.”

“We need to know: Did Julia have a grudge against your stepmother?”

The girl’s mouth moved but nothing came out. She looked like a beautiful goth puppet. “My mom?”

“Yes.”

“Why would you even ask that?”

Ellie was starting to wonder herself. First-year cops learned the maxim of Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation was also the most likely. When you’re in Kentucky and hear hooves, think horses, not zebras. Here they had a dead high school girl in the bathtub and an Upper East Side housewife receiving online threats. Because Julia had posted the first threat, they’d automatically concluded the two events were related. Made sense. But maybe the threats were just one more indication that Julia Whitmire was, as Ramona had put it, the fucked-up head case who killed herself, while some mean-girl friend of hers was continuing to wreak havoc against Adrienne now that Julia was gone.

Rogan was the one who broke the news. “When you called us about your mother’s blog, we were completing a search of Julia’s computer to see if we could get a better idea of the circumstances that might have led to her death. Those offensive comments on your stepmom’s blog? Well, it turns out that Julia’s laptop was used to post one of them the night before she died.”

“That’s impossible. She didn’t even know about my mother’s blog. I just found it today.”

“You may not have been aware of it, but Julia apparently was. We searched her computer.”

“You can’t know that she’s the one who posted it, though, right? It just means it came from her laptop. So whoever’s still posting those threats against my mom somehow knew Julia?”

“That’s right,” Ellie said. “We’re trying to figure out who that might be.”

“I have no idea. It doesn’t even seem possible.”

“This might be hard to talk about, but if there’s a simple explanation for this, we need to know about it. Ramona, is there any chance that maybe you were having some kind of tension with your stepmother? If Julia was aware of a fight between the two of you and stumbled upon the website—”

“No. No way. I mean, I know you keep saying she’s my stepmother, but I call her Mom. I always have. And, I love my dad and everything, but you met him. He’s—well, he’s, like, you know, lucky to have found her. And so was I. That’s why I was so freaked out when I saw those comments. We’re, like, really close. I couldn’t believe she didn’t tell me. No way would Julia do something like that to her.”

Ellie still didn’t know what to think about the possible connection between Julia’s death and the comments on Adrienne Langston’s blog, but she was convinced that, if there was a connection, Ramona certainly didn’t know about it.