I take a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
“Oh God,” Xenia says. “I mean . . . I just assumed you knew.”
She says it too loudly. I can feel the old hippie putting his book down to look at us, the young couple turning from their laptops.
What the fuck are you talking about? I want to say.
But she doesn’t give me the chance. She says it quietly, with the forced, professional calm of a hostage negotiator, and in that slice of time before I fully understand the meaning of the words, I feel sorry for her, a complete stranger, tasked with delivering news that sends shapes swirling in front of my eyes. “Harris Blanchard,” she says. “He’s dead.”
IF I HAD no idea that the collective existed, the details of Harris Blanchard’s death would have struck me as too perfect to be real. I would have assumed Xenia was lying—that she wasn’t a jewelry designer but a reporter or an internet troll, or maybe a friend of the Blanchards playing a cruel prank in order to get a reaction out of me.
Even knowing what I do, it seems crazy: Harris Blanchard dies nearly five years to the day after Emily, the cause of death the same: hypothermia and probable alcohol poisoning. “You’re serious.” I actually say it at one point. I can’t help myself. “This isn’t some sick joke?”
Xenia slides her phone across the table. “It’s all over Twitter,” she says. “I have an article open. Go ahead. Look.”
I shake my head. “That’s okay. I believe you. It’s just . . .”
“I know.”
“It’s a lot.”
“Of course it is.”
I take her phone after all and read the article on her screen, just so I can have something to do with my eyes. It’s hard to get past the accompanying picture: Harris Blanchard, Martha L. Koch Humanitarian Award in hand, posing by himself in front of the Christmas tree at the Brayburn Club. The photo was taken after my arrest, and I’m a little surprised by the look on his face—that shaky, uncertain smile. I enlarge it until the smile fills the screen, then make it bigger, even bigger, until it looks like something that was never human to begin with.
According to the article, Harris Blanchard had been in Vermont on a ski trip with a group of Brayburn friends, enjoying the tail end of the last winter break of his college career. He had been drinking with them the night of January 27 and was last seen leaving a bar in Burlington at eleven thirty p.m. “very, very drunk,” according to one witness. Some at the bar said he called an Uber and left on his own, while others insisted they saw him leaving with a girl—a stranger. The indisputable fact is that he died that night. His frozen body was found the afternoon of the twenty-eighth, two miles away from the bar, in the woods surrounding a ski trail.
“Who was the girl?” I whisper.
Xenia just looks at me.
I skim through the article again. He died the twenty-seventh. That was Monday. The same night I was in Poughkeepsie at The Bachelor watch party with Wendy. I knew at the time we were building an alibi—that was obvious. What I didn’t know was that it would cover two separate murders.
Xenia says, “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Believe me, I know how you feel.”
No, Xenia, you don’t. It’s as though I’ve been trapped in a dark cell for five years, and now I’m finally out—but it’s because the floorboards have given way beneath me.
Maybe the collective didn’t kill him. Maybe it’s just a bizarre coincidence.
What a ridiculous thought. When the man who killed Rachel Ruley’s son accidentally shot himself, was that a bizarre coincidence? How about when Ashley Shawger blew himself up on the thirtieth anniversary of his victim’s death? And when Gary Kimball is finally found dead in the trunk of his own rapemobile, will that be a bizarre coincidence too?