The burner phone vibrates in my lap. I check the small screen, and sure enough Wendy has texted me two asterisks—our code, meaning she’s made contact with Violet Langford—and I do my best to put 0203 out of my mind and replace her with Olivia Weiss, the family she’s lost.
I open up my private messages, and I write to 0001.
0417: I need to talk to you.
The line disappears, and I wait for ellipses, my gaze shifting back and forth between the private messages box and the time at the corner of my laptop. One minute passes, then two. Five minutes, and still no ellipses, not even a check mark, to indicate that 0001 has read my message.
Five more have passed when I get another text from Wendy—two ampersands, meaning she and Violet have finished their conversation. Around thirty seconds later I glance at the screen again and the skin prickles at the back of my neck.
0001 is typing . . .
“Hello, Violet,” I whisper.
AS SOON AS I finish my private chat with 0001—which consists of me asking her when I can be taken off probation or notice or however she’d phrased it, and her replying, Whenever I feel like I can trust you again—I call Wendy.
“It’s her,” I tell her.
“You’re positive?”
“I can’t be positive of anything anymore,” I say. “But the two of them were not in the same place at the same time, so I’m sure enough to tell Sheila.”
“Okay.”
“What did you and Violet talk about?”
“I asked her why the library doesn’t have any L. Ron Hubbard books.”
“Seriously?”
“I figured that would make her not want to look me in the eye.”
“Ah. Good thinking, actually.”
“Not that she’d know my face,” she says. “Tyler’s story wasn’t in the news the way Emily’s was. But still. I have a lot of tells. And if she’s really 0001 . . .”
“She’s smart enough to catch on.”
“Yeah.” She clears her throat. “Anyway, I’ll call you back after I talk to Sheila.”
“Great.” My eyes go back to the screen, to the dozens of women replying to 0203, crafting elaborate deaths for her enemies, weaving their spells to make her feel whole again. . . .
Wendy says, “I’m just going to do what you said—tell Sheila I met you through The Bachelor Reddit, and that you’ve been talking about this group, and you think this librarian . . . Do you really think that sweet old lady is running the whole operation?”
“There’s nothing cleverer or more terrifying than a sweet old lady. Ask Hansel and Gretel.”
“Camille?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you sure you want me to do this?”
My gaze rests on the screen, on 0203’s latest comment: You are all giving me hope. You feel like sisters.
“You have a say in this too. . . .”
“I know,” she says. “I’m going to talk to Sheila. It’s the right thing to do.”
“Good.” I say it another time, more to convince myself than anything else: “Good.”
Wendy and I work out a new code for texting. After we hang up, I close the page and my laptop before I can read any more.
AN HOUR PASSES with no text from Wendy, and it dawns on me that while she did say she’d call after talking to Sheila, we never discussed when that would be. Pretty dumb to be sitting at home waiting for a call that could easily take hours, if not days.