It’s been more than twenty-four hours since I sent Harris Blanchard’s name to 0001. Outside of showering, I’ve spent every waking moment on the Kaya chat, reading stories and commenting, commenting, commenting . . . joining in this Greek chorus of grieving women, inventing fitting deaths for the thoughtless drivers and pill-addicted doctors and senseless, shameless, worthless murderers who have stolen our children without paying for it, putting all my thoughts and energy and strength into this thread, to the point where it feels as though we truly are one all-powerful entity, a great machine, as 0001 had put it, capable of killing with the combined force of our words.
But I still have not received an assignment.
I’m thinking now that during my exchange with 0001, I flunked some sort of test and now I’m stuck on level one, never to learn the intricacies of the collective. That’s fine, I guess, as long as I’m not kicked out of the chat. If that were to happen—and I know how this sounds—I’m not sure I’d be able to survive on my own.
I haven’t been out of the house during this time. I haven’t watched the news or checked my email, and I’ve barely slept or eaten. It’s hard for me to believe these other women have accomplished much more than I—and I’m a newcomer. How long have the regulars been on the Kaya chat, starving in front of computer screens, their husbands and boyfriends and living children powerless to stop it? Has it been weeks for some of these women? Months? What’s happening to Mom? Why is she disappearing on us?
The son of the mayor of 5590’s small town was driving Daddy’s Ford Explorer when he ran down 5590’s eight-year-old son, killing him. I’m describing what might happen if the mayor’s son were to be pushed out of a speeding vehicle onto a highway packed with long-haul trucks when I hear the galloping thump of a bass and reflexively delete the comment; I’m so unused to noises.
After a second or two, I recognize the bassline as the opening of Heart’s “Barracuda.” It’s coming from my phone, the ringtone I’ve chosen for Luke. (Heart. Get it?) I always pick up for Luke, and so I do now. “Hey there,” I say, putting him on speaker so I can keep typing.
“Are you okay?” he says.
My eyes stay on the screen, on 5590 telling 2948, The mayor’s son never did any time. He was never even arrested. In my town, justice and the Law are two different things.
“In my town too,” I whisper.
2948: In my town too.
“Huh?” says Luke.
“Of course I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be okay?”
“You were going to call me when you got home. Remember?”
I have no recollection of ever having said this. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
“No worries. I’m just glad you’re . . . you know. Alive.”
5590 says that the Law shields people like the mayor’s son from justice, and 2948 replies that if she were justice, she’d rip him limb from limb. As quietly as I can, I type, We ARE justice.
“You are alive,” Luke says. “Right?”
“I’ve . . . I’ve been caught up in a work project.”
“Oh. Sure.” He sounds odd and detached, as though he doesn’t believe me. It makes me feel the way I did in high school, when I was stoned with friends and forced, for whatever reason, to talk to my mom on the phone. I have an urge to hang up on Luke, to tell him I’m not feeling well or that I have an appointment scheduled or that there’s a call on the other line. It’s so strange, this divide between us. It’s never been there before.
Just give me a few days, Luke. A few days with my new friends, and then I’ll be back to my old self. I promise.
But what’s this?
4566: We are MORE than justice. As long as each of us does her part, we are A DEATH MACHINE.
0001: A reminder that this is a public forum.
4566: I wasn’t going to be specific. I swear. Sorry. I’ve had a few glasses of wine.
0001: Log off, please. Get some rest. You can come back when you’re sober.
Whoa . . . I open up a private message window and try to type in 4566, but the numbers don’t register on the screen. I try a few more numbers from the chat, but they don’t either. The only number I can private message is 0001.
Luke says, “Are you typing?”
Please go away. “I’m just . . . Yes. It’s . . . it’s that work project I was telling you about.”
“I should let you go. We can talk later.”
“I’m sorry, Luke.” And I am. I truly am, but . . . When I asked 0001 if this was a game, she never answered me one way or the other. “I’ll be done with this soon.”
“No worries. Wait, though. I’ve been meaning to ask you . . .”
“Yes?”
“Did you ever find out what Niobe was about?”
I squeeze my eyes shut, then open them on the screen.
0001: 0417, check your private messages.
Luke says, “Niobe. Greek mythology, remember? The woman gave you that card?”
My heart is pounding, my hand hovering over the touch pad. I need to get him off the phone, but Luke knows me so well. I’ve come to believe that when my daughter’s heart was implanted in his chest, her intuition somehow came with it. And so I can’t lie to him. He’ll know it.
“It’s just a stupid Facebook page. One of those groups for grieving parents, where they try and help you find ‘closure.’”
Luke sighs.
“Exactly.”
“That’s too bad.”
“It’s really not a big deal.”
“I was hoping you could find some . . . I don’t know. Some company.”
My gaze is pinned to the screen, the private messages box. I force out a chuckle. “Because misery loves it?”
“No, Cam,” he says quietly. “Because you deserve to feel better.”
“Luke.”
“Yeah?”
“I love you. You know that, right?”
“Yes.”
“I’m doing okay. I’d tell you if I weren’t.”
“Good,” he says. In the background, I can hear Nora calling his name. And then: “Is that Camille? Did you tell her?”
“Tell me what?”
“Nothing. I’ll tell you next time we talk.”
“Okay.” Normally, I’d press him a lot more, but I don’t even sound curious, which is not like me at all.
“Cam?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you too.”
I let out a long sigh. “Let’s talk soon.”
After I end the call, I click on my private messages again and open it—a one-line message that sticks in my head long after it vanishes, filling me with a strange new sensation, part thrill, part dread, as though I’m at the start of a roller coaster that might possibly collapse.
0001: Look in your mailbox.
I hurry downstairs and out my front door without a coat on, searching up and down my road for a sign of a car, a puff of dust. I don’t think I heard one drive by, and I usually do from my office, which faces the road. But sure enough, when I open the mailbox, there’s something in there. Who came to my house? How did they know to come here? I slip the package out very slowly. Hold it between the tips of my thumb and index finger, as though it’s covered in poison.
It’s an unmarked manila envelope. Something short and bulky is inside. “What is going on?” I say it as though someone is watching and can answer, and part of me believes that someone is, someone can.
I have an urge to throw the package into the bushes and run back into my house. But the urge to open it is much, much stronger.
I tear the envelope apart. There’s a flip phone inside—the kind you get prepaid at a convenience store, complete with a car charger, and when I press the button, it shows that I have one text, from an unfamiliar number.
REPLY “YES” TO RECEIVE YOUR ASSIGNMENT.
I reply yes and receive a lengthy text immediately. It consists of seven steps, the last of which is to place the phone and charger in a plastic bag, drive to a public dump in Red Hook, and dispose of it in the non-recycling bin.
I scroll back up to the top of the text and read step one: Believe in each step. Commit to each step. Question nothing. My face flushes. My blood hums.
Check that one off. I’m ready.
THE REST OF the steps are simple but are described in great specificity. For one of them, there’s an actual script.
Twenty minutes ago I finished step two, which was to go to the ATM of my choice and withdraw $140 in cash from my checking account. Easy peasy, as Denise would probably say. But it gets more interesting from here.
Step three involves buying some items at the Walmart at the Hudson Valley Mall, and so I’m in here now—this cavernous blue-tinged store I hardly ever go to since 1) I hate parking at the mall and 2) Walmart makes me nervous. As per the assignment, I’m supposed to use some of the cash I just got to buy a baseball cap (No team names. No bright colors. Nothing identifiable) and two sets of gloves (one wool, neutral color, no pattern; one latex), a pocket notebook, and a pen. I’ve found the cap already—a plain black one that matches my hair. I’ve also grabbed a pair of matching black gloves, a no-brainer, as are the notebook and pen. For the latex gloves, I’m supposed to go to the pharmacy (you’ll find them in First Aid; they come in packs of twenty, but you will take just two pair (one backup in case the first rips) and dispose of the rest of the pack in the garbage can outside the store). And sure enough, there they are, bottom shelf. Latex surgical gloves. Pack of twenty.
I’m heading for the checkout line when I catch sight of two laughing young women in the makeup department, their faces and voices achingly familiar. I duck into the next aisle before they spot me, and stand here amid the ladies’ razors, watching these lovely creatures. “He’ll love you in this color,” says the taller one, whose name, I remember now, is Gia. “Are you kidding me?” says the shorter one. “It makes me look like his mom!”
The shorter one is Fiona, the girl I caught Emily smoking weed with when they were fourteen. She goes to Brown now, a chemistry major. I learned that from the high school’s newsletter—the issue that came out on what would have been Emily’s graduation. Fiona wears a bright red puffy coat and Gia is in yellow—two joyful twenty-year-old women in primary colors—and watching them is to see what could have been, what should have been if there were no such thing as Harris Blanchard.
Gia must feel me watching her because she glances over in my direction, but I turn away in time and all she sees is some woman in baggy clothes, a head of hacked-off black hair. “What do you think of the pink?” Fiona says, her voice as high and plaintive as when she was fourteen. Don’t be mad at Emily, Ms. Gardener. It was my idea, I swear. My eyes fog up. I turn and walk the full length of the aisle and head for the checkout counter, the gloves and hat clasped in my hands, the flip phone straining against my back pocket.
Get out of here fast—that’s the goal. Those words run through my mind as I hand my cash to the bored-looking teenage clerk and collect my change, the laughter of Emily’s friends somewhere far behind me, a world away. Forget those girls, forget the past. Live in the assignment. Move on to the next step.
STEP FOUR IS to take Route 9 to Staples and use their computer equipment to print out a mail label. Drive .4 miles west, the assignment reads. You will see it on the right. Impressive how correct these instructions are. Staples is exactly that far from the Walmart, and I wonder if 0001 made them up, or if she has regional teams running through dress rehearsals to make sure the game’s instructions are as easy to follow as possible.
Once I’m inside, I make the mail label as specified, the address a PO box in Burlington, Vermont, and pay in cash for the use of the computer and printer.
So far, so good, I think, once I’m back in my car. And then I flip open the phone, return to the assignment text, and read step five. It’s the one with the script.
SCOTT BROS. HUNTING and Fishing is located fifty-two miles north of Staples, in a tiny strip mall on the outskirts of Albany. As with the rest of the assignment, the directions here are so perfect, I have no need to plug the address into my GPS.
Once I’m in the parking lot, I take a long look at Scott Bros., which is located between a nail salon and a check-cashing place and seems very out of place in a strip mall—all that camo and killing equipment in a brightly lit space that probably used to be a Dressbarn. In a few minutes, I’m going to walk into Scott Bros. and buy a certain brand of hunting knife. There is no mention in this assignment of how or when or on whom the knife will be used. But what I’m supposed to believe is that, at some point in the not-too-distant future, it will play a role in the murder of one of the guilty.
I know that’s what 0001 would like us to believe, that this collective is real, that it’s been effectively meting out justice for years, none of its members getting caught, all of them (all of us?) working together to form, as 4566 drunkenly put it, A DEATH MACHINE.
Part of me wants to believe it. A lot of me wants to believe that Gerard Krakowski’s accidental shooting death was not some dark coincidence but the work of the collective, and that these steps I’m taking today will result in tangible justice for someone else. But the more I think about it, the more certain I am that this is nothing more than an elaborate role-play exercise, a type of behavioral group therapy for the mortally wronged.
It just doesn’t make sense as a real thing. If we truly are contributing to the murders of unpunished child killers, and if this has been going on for more than three years, as 0001 says, wouldn’t someone have messed up by now and wrecked the whole operation? We’re grieving mothers, all of us. Wild cards. How could this “great machine” continue to run smoothly when all of its parts are faulty and damaged?
The fascinating thing, though, is that it doesn’t matter to me. I’m willing to commit to this role-play, to believe in it when I haven’t believed in anything at all for the past five years. I’m willing to work my hardest to get every one of these steps to-the-letter right because of the way this all makes me feel—as though my rage has a purpose. As though I have the power to kill, and I’m no longer alone.
And so I do what the assignment asks. I pull out the notebook and the pen and write Buck 119 on one of the pages, then I rip it out and shove it into my coat pocket and go over the script one more time.
I’m ready.
“SO, A KNIFE, huh?” says the man behind the counter—a fiftyish wannabe tough guy with a bushy salt-and-pepper beard, a tattoo of a fanged snake on his biceps, and a thick chain around his neck that reminds me of a choke collar for a rottweiler.
“Yep.”
“Mm-kay.” Outside of the accessories, he’s not terribly threatening-looking. His build is bulky but soft, his voice nasal and high-pitched, almost boyish. But clearly, he wants to look like he belongs in this place, with its sleek handguns and rifles, its ammo belts and pocketed vests and knives with gleaming blades, displayed under the glass counter like engagement rings. It’s freezing outside but sweltering in here, and I imagine it’s so this guy can comfortably wear the tight camouflage T-shirt he’s got on, along with the matching cargo pants—head-to-toe hunter drag, save for a somewhat incongruous nametag. “Your name is Ashley?” I ask him, going off script. I can’t help it.
His face reddens. “My mom was a Gone with the Wind fan.” He clears his throat, and his voice comes back, deeper. “What are you hunting?”
“Deer.” I’m back on script. “Actually, it’s for my brother. A birthday present.”
“Nice!”
I put on a practiced grin. “I’m a good sister.”
“Okay, if you’re talking deer, you’ll want a pretty big blade for gutting and skinning. Personally, I like the Silver Stag Cascade—”
“I’m looking for the Buck 119.”
Ashley’s eyebrows go up. “Lady knows her knives. We’ve sold four of those this week.” He beams at me, holding my gaze a lot longer than I’d like. I’ve dressed in neutral colors—a baggy beige sweater under my puffy coat. Faded jeans. I’ve combed my hair and put on just enough makeup to cover the dark circles under my eyes. In short, I’ve dressed like I always do—so as not to be remembered. But not being remembered is easier said than done when you’re probably the only female a man has spoken to in weeks, maybe months. “Not many women are into hunting.” He says it like he’s been reading my thoughts.
“I’m not.” I avert my gaze. “I don’t know anything about knives, actually. We were talking about my brother’s birthday, and he not so casually mentioned the name. See?” I pull the piece of notebook paper out of my coat pocket and show it to him, clueless as can be. “I even had to write it down, so . . .”
The smile dissolves. “Oh. Okay.”
He opens the glass cabinet. Removes a large knife with a black handle and a curved silver blade that makes my knees weaken. “This is the Buck 119,” he says. “Nothing fancy, but a good, solid, versatile knife. Your brother’s got impressive taste.”
“I’ll take it.”
“You want it gift wrapped?”
“What?”
“Kidding. We don’t do gift wrapping. I’ll need to see some ID, though.”
I look at him.
“Well . . . you gotta be eighteen to purchase a hunting knife, young lady.”
I force out a laugh. “Oh . . . Ashley.”
He winks. “Got ya again.” He leans so far over the counter that I have to take a few steps back. “You . . . uh . . . live in this area?”
“Nope.”
“You here for a little while? I get off soon and I could show you around—”
“My husband was born here. So I’m familiar with it.”
“Ah.” He sighs. Back to business. “Okeydoke. Tax included, the knife costs $96.32.”
I give Ashley cash, as instructed by 0001. “Here you go.” I smile politely.
Ashley doesn’t. He opens the cash register, counts out my change on the counter, and slides it to me. “Not for nothing, but you should wear a wedding ring.” He says it in a huffy tone, as though I deliberately misled him.
“Tomorrow’s another day, Ashley.”
He glares at me, and I wince. I shouldn’t have said that—it wasn’t in the script. But come on. Who does this guy think he is, scolding me over jewelry choices? Or assuming that buying a murder weapon is the same thing as swiping right on a dating app?
Ashley starts to pack the knife into its box. I want to tell him that frankly I don’t give a damn about his stupidly hurt feelings, but instead I hold back. “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”
He doesn’t look up at me, but his expression softens. “My pleasure, ma’am,” he says. Then: “I really do need to see your driver’s license.”
I swallow hard. The instructions said this would happen. The instructions said not to worry.
He gives me a sleazy smile. “Protocol.”
I pull my wallet out of my pocket and hand Ashley my license.
The picture’s an old one, taken when Emily was still alive and I was healthy and busty and freshly highlighted. He takes a longer look at it than I’d like. “Camille,” he says. “That’s a pretty name.”
“Thank you.”
His gaze shifts from the license to my gaunt face, the amateur dye job, and I can sense him taking it all in, the before-and-after shots. There’s a flicker of something in his eyes—understanding? Pity? Recognition? Please don’t let it be recognition. Whatever it is, Ashley doesn’t verbalize it.
He goes back to packing the knife, and when he’s done, he presents me with the slim box, pressing it into my waiting hands like a gift-wrapped bauble. “Hope your brother bags himself a big juicy buck,” he says.
I’VE DRIVEN EIGHTY-ONE miles to get to step six, which is to be completed at the post office in Ellenville. There’s no script for this step, but there is a costume—the black baseball cap, black wool gloves with the latex ones underneath. Like the rest of this town, the post office is small and unassuming—a one-story building made of stone, with blue painted shutters—and I feel strange and out-of-place here, in my serial killer’s costume, carrying a boxed hunting knife along with the mailing label I made at Staples.
As I approach the entrance, I spot two surveillance cameras glaring down at me. I reach for the door. It flies open and I jump back, gasping, the box gripped to my chest—an overreaction if there ever was one.
“Whoa, sorry!” says a voice. A man’s voice. I don’t know what he looks like because my head is down, my gaze glued to the sidewalk. I don’t want him to see my face.
“No worries.”
I can feel him gaping at me, and my skin prickles.
Believe. Commit. Question nothing.
The post office is small inside, with dark wood paneling and a huge mural on one wall. With the last of my cash, I purchase a padded envelope and, as specified in step six, $14.90 in postage from the sweet-faced elderly woman at the counter. I manage a smile at her as I check the room. It’s too warm and library-quiet, but empty, which is the important thing. I hope it stays that way.
I make for a far corner, where I remove my wool gloves, slip the box into the padded envelope and seal it, affixing the label I made at Staples: that PO box in Burlington, Vermont.
As I complete this step, I peer at the mural above me—a group of Founding Father types standing outside an old-fashioned wooden building, some holding muskets, others raising their arms triumphantly. One of them plays with his dog. All of them seem to be watching me with X-ray eyes, the nuclear heat of them boring into the contents of the package and my latex-gloved hands as I smooth the label. The door opens behind me, a whoosh of cold air rushing in. I grab the wool gloves and put them on before turning around. A young woman approaches the window, a stack of packages in her arms. There’s no telling whether she noticed me in my latex gloves. But I suppose, it doesn’t matter, does it? It’s just a game, after all.
Isn’t it?
In part two of this step, I will dispose of the baseball cap and both sets of gloves at a rest stop twenty miles south of here. And then, at last, it will be time for step seven. I want it all to be over, but also I don’t. There’s a rush in this off-kilter feeling, the thrill of secrecy and potential danger blended with something I haven’t felt in years—a sense of purpose, I think.
As I drop my package in the appropriate slot and head for the door, I could swear that sweet-faced elderly woman is watching me, too, and smiling. Do you know? I want to ask her. Do you understand? Are you one of us?