The line goes staticky, then I hear muffled voices, as though she dropped her phone into her pocket. After a period of time where I can hear nothing but the sound of rustling clothes, she’s back at last. “I was on my way into a meeting. What is it?”
“I think I might know who 0001 is.”
“Wow. Really?”
“Well, I’m not positive by a long shot. But I do have a theory.”
“I can’t call Sheila on a theory.”
“I know that,” I tell her. “But I also think I have a way we can test the theory.”
She doesn’t say anything, but I can almost hear her measuring pros and cons in her head. “I don’t want to get you in any more trouble,” she says after a moment.
“You won’t.”
“And to be honest, I don’t want to get in trouble either.”
“This is totally safe.”
“Are you sure?”
“As sure as I am of anything.”
More silence from Wendy. I think I can make out traffic noises in the background. She must be talking to me from the parking lot. “What do I have to do?”
I exhale. “Okay, first of all, when do you get off work?”
“I have a client coming in at one. I can probably leave by one thirty. Is that early enough?”
“It depends,” I tell her. “How far are you from Havenkill?”
I’VE GOT THE website for Havenkill Library up on my computer screen when Wendy calls on the burner phone. “I’m here,” she says.
I check the clock at the bottom of my screen: 2:00 p.m. Earlier than we discussed. “I thought you said you were an hour away from Havenkill.”
“I rescheduled with my client,” she says. “Faked a stomachache. Since I wasn’t really faking, it wasn’t that hard.”
“You ready?”
“Yep.”
“Okay. I’ll wait for your text.”
She hangs up, and I take one last look at the home screen picture—Head Librarian Violet Langford reading to kindergartners from Havenkill Elementary just yesterday, at the weekly story hour. Violet sits in a throne-like chair, her eyebrows raised, coppery hair shining, her frosted coral lips making a delighted O as she reads to the rapt group of children, the pages opened for all to see. Where the Wild Things Are. The wild rumpus. The big creatures dancing. The monsters.
I close the page, then go to Kaya. I read the chat screen while I’m waiting—a new member telling her story, her shy fourteen-year-old daughter prodded into suicide by two popular girls who went on to become homecoming queen and student body president, who headed off to college, got married. . . . Like me, she says she’s chosen her number after her daughter’s birthday: 0203. Today.
The other women post their replies, about spiking the girls’ skinny tea with rat poison, drowning them in acid, trapping them in their husbands’ fancy cars and feeding them to trash compactors.
I wish that could happen, 0203 types. I want it so badly, it would be worth my own life.
I want it for her too. It’s been years since she lost her daughter. Those girls will never be punished. They’ve probably never even lost a night’s sleep. For a brief moment I forget why I’m on the page, and all I want to do is to open a package, remove an unregistered gun and an address, and blow at least one of these bitches away. But first I’d force her to say on tape that she killed a young girl so I could make it into a GIF.
Do I really want to take that possibility away from 0203?