I shot to my feet, pressing my hands to my mouth. Laurel’s death was the twin of Clementine’s, our best friend from college whose blood we would never wash from our hands. First Clem, now Laurel. Two hangings, both on campus, eight years apart.
It became hard to breathe. But even in the thick of shock, I had a sudden burst, a picture of what I must look like to anyone observing. Scene: Beautiful Woman in the Throes of Grief. Or: A Portrait of Panic, All in Blue.
“The Performing Arts Center meant something to Laurel,” Jamie continued, telling me what I already knew. “According to the Westchester County police interview with her mother, Laurel was a theater nut and concentrated on costuming in college. Her mom said the Performing Arts Center was Laurel’s favorite place on campus. As an undergrad, she tried to live as close as possible so she could save time going back and forth from rehearsals.”
Yes, we’d worked hard to live in Rothschild. Laurel was a shy girl who worshipped theater, who lived to create costumes for Whitney’s drama department. And we did everything for her because Clem and I loved her, and because to know Laurel was to want to protect her. In order to live in Rothschild’s four-person suites, we’d needed to add someone to our three-person crew. We went searching, found a girl, and that was the beginning of the end. The consequences of those simple decisions—make Laurel happy, find a fourth, give the girl a chance—would reverberate forever.
“Putting these pieces together paints a picture of a woman who took her own life in a place that was meaningful to her,” Jamie said. “In fact, Laurel’s mother told the police that college was the last time she could remember Laurel being happy. So why discuss Laurel Hargrove’s suicide on a podcast about unsolved murders?”
I bent down and snatched my phone, wishing I could talk back to him, yell across the distance. Why are you, Jamie? Clem committed suicide, and it was so clearly, so irrevocably our fault. And now Laurel. What does it mean? What are you saying?
“One detail in the police report caught my attention,” Jamie said, answering me. “And yes, I’m going to get in trouble for telling you this. But Laurel was discovered with lacerations all over her hands and arms, made roughly around the time of her death. None of them life-threatening, but cuts everywhere, fourteen in all. There aren’t any pictures of her included in the police record—which is strange, by the way. But what the responding officer did note is that the cuts were thin, like from a razor blade. And they appeared in places you would expect if someone was defending herself. There’s actually a question in the police report, written in the officer’s notes, which he or somebody else later tried to scratch out. He wrote: ‘Defensive wounds? But why, if suicide?’ Why, indeed.”
Thin cuts, like from a razor blade. This was too much. I rushed across the grass, blades bright and stiff under my feet despite the August swelter. Clutching the phone to my chest, I caught my reflection in the glass of the back door—wild-eyed, shoulders hunched—before I flung it open and slipped inside.
The frigid air-conditioning sucked the summer heat from my skin. I’d come inside to feel safe, contained. But one glance at the sweeping white ceilings, the gleaming kitchen, the sharp, modern furniture—all of it, my choices—and I felt suddenly wrong. Like I’d entered not a home but a museum, a mausoleum. A cold, beautiful place where things were laid to rest.
“One more thing,” said Jamie, from the center of my chest. “I told you Laurel Hargrove’s death hits close to home. Here’s why. Years ago, I met her.”
I jerked the phone away, studying the screen as if it were Jamie himself standing in front of me.
“When I was younger, I was friends with a girl who went to Whitney at the same time that I went to Columbia. The schools are an hour apart, so we’d see each other from time to time, usually after I’d begged her enough times to come visit. She and I had a…complicated relationship, to say the least. And she was friends with Laurel.”
Me. Jamie Knight was talking about me.