Page 13 of Valley of the Moms
Back home, once the kids were cleaned up and in bed and once Denny had settled onto the couch with a martini, Anna begged off on her own. “I’m going to take a bath,” she said, kissing her husband lightly on the lips. He didn’t look up from the show he was watching about whether or not the Loch Ness Monster was real (spoiler: in fifty-five minutes they gave no answers at all).
“Did all that stuff stop?” he asked.
“To be honest, I haven’t really looked,” she lied. For whatever reason, he believed her. Denny rarely checked his social media on weekends, and by the time he looked again, her accounts would be gone.Hackers,she’d say. Case closed. Honestly, he was probably right. It was probably just a bunch of kids messing around. But better to run it by Di first anyway.
Upstairs, Anna went into her ugly bathroom, with its tiny and dark bathtub, and drew a bath for herself, the water so hot she could barely stick a toe into it. Sitting stark naked on the edge of the porcelain, she paused and then pressed the button on her phone. The Apple icon appeared. Boot up. Then the phone sprang to life, the green icon denoting texts, and suddenly a windfall ofnew messages. Two. Six. Sixteen. Fifty. Over a hundred and thirty-five. They spiraled in. Emails. Facebook messages. Instagram notifications. Her phone was suffering a full-scale assault.
The texts came from unknown numbers, every one of them similar in language and in detail, as if a script had been copied from a master.You fucking bitch, who the fuck do you think you are. Anna Plummer, watch your back.But they weren’t identical. A few contained details about her kids. One offered up her address, another the address of the house where she had lived before, on Long Island. Still another:I hope Denny has a good life insurance policy on you, little sister.She googled a few of them, but they were cell phones and led to dead ends, and she gave up after a few tries. It all felt futile, because the messages kept coming, furiously, stacks of them. She was overwhelmed by the onslaught. So she stopped. Fuck it. She wasn’t going to get to the bottom of these mysteries, not one by one, anyway. Looking up phone numbers wasn’t going to stop them from barreling forth.
She slid into the hot water, moving the phone to the corner of the tub, where she had room for it. Clearing the phone took time, but she scrolled through the offenses, taking screenshots of the worst of it. She sent a series to Di. No heads-up. Not a simple text with a “whaddya think” preceding it. It was too exhausting. Let her friend see what it meant, all of these messages, tumbling over one another, tripping into the next.
What the fucking fuck is this, Di wrote back.
About a fraction of what has been spamming my phone since 6pm
I mean I think we both know what this is
But Anna didn’t know anything. Outside, she could hear a high-pitched whistle, probably a fisher cat; they were deep chocolate brown and larger than a fox, a variety of weasel, she found out when she moved. They could take down a full-size dog. She had learned to identify the noise, but when they had first come here, to these woods, she had thought that sound was something else,someone calling for a dog, maybe even a far-off train whistling in the distance.
I have no idea what this is Di
You do know what this is, Anna, a noise inside her said. Somewhere, little kids were rolling in from their dance, taking off shoes that pinched, wiping their faces clean from spaghetti and ice cream.
To send a person this kind of shit—that was a campaign. You had to organize it. You had to have power behind you. You had to be some kind of, well, organization. Say you were, oh, thepresidentof thePTOand in anticipation of a hotly contesteddanceyou had organized your minions to harass a member. This—this was the kind of thing that might result from such an event. Yes, it was a theory. A wild theory. But Anna knew it could be exactly what had happened. She could picture Mimi getting people on board, telling friends and conspirators what time, what number, what email to use.
Of course, this was all very far-fetched. More likely was Denny’s initial suggestion that the messages were from neighborhood kids fucking around. She could picture her husband now.Stop twisting yourself into a pretzel, Anna. This is all in your head. No, the PTO isn’t coming after you. You sound like an insane person.
There had, though, been just that one flash: Mimi’s face, for just one second, an inkling of what was possible. Was it ridiculous? Maybe. Mimi, for all of her peccadilloes and annoying Hamilton mommy traits, was just another mom. She picked her kid up just like everyone else, made sandwiches with the crusts cut off and wiped tears away and brushed hair and stacked pajamas into little squares so that they fit into cabinets and made lunches before anyone else in the house was awake and lived by the same mom promise that they all did: that they would serve their kids first, even when it hurt, even when it broke them, even when it meant that they would have to live a life that was a little less meaningful,or a little forgotten. Mimi wasn’t on the other side of some looking glass; she was right there, a slightly altered version of Anna.
Well, that was what shehadthought, but now, as messages continued to pour in, another and another and another, Anna had a less generous reading. She pictured a snake, she pictured something insidious, she pictured the spread of a virus that could not be stopped. She could not stop the febrile rush, spiders of fire crawling beneath her skin and outward as she contemplated the possible, if improbable truth of it.
The water in the bath looked like a tidal wave, the vibration from her phone was unforgiving, the sound outside—the fisher cat—did not stop, and Anna Plummer closed her eyes and pulled beneath the surface, with her hair loose around her in waves, and the phone pinging incessantly until her submersion finally silenced it, and the drowned-out sound of a wild animal, muted and still in the thick, black night.
Chapter 8
DENNY HAD LEARNEDall kinds of new terms since his wife’s death, terms that filled up his brain when he should have been doing things like going through her personal effects or thinking about flowers or greeting the people who showed up at the house to pay their respects. He learned aboutresponding officersand theright to know,aboutevidence techniciansandpublic information officers,about thesafeguarding of evidence, trace evidence, evidence control, fibers, notification of next of kin.
Back in the old version of his life—theAnnaversion of his life, as he now came to see it—he had spent Friday nights watchingDatelinewith his wife. Keith Morrison’s voice, smooth as Scotch, oozed over murder.But was he a suspect?Morrison loved to ask. If Denny had been in an episode ofDateline,a narrator might have asked the same question. Was the Hamilton Police Department focused on him? He couldn’t quite tell. In the first frenetic days and weeks after Anna’s death, Denny had been preoccupied with the physical details—how to operate his home, his life, the lives ofhis children. That the police kept showing up every once in a while felt both important and unimportant. Denny desperately wanted to know what they knew, but he also felt unmoored from the burden of his new responsibility.
Back from the interrogation, he felt breathless but also determined. As Denny was walking out of the station, Sticks had softened, if only slightly. Maybe the whole “bad cop” routine was just an act. Maybe he hadn’t really been a suspect at all. Sticks promised to keep Denny updated with anything related to the case, though it had been Denny who had checked in with the station every couple of days, asking about potential leads. Had anyone come forward as a witness? (Not a single one.) Had the couple who found Anna seen anything else at the haul-out that day? (No.) Had any fibers or other evidence been retrieved from her body, like material under her fingernails or hairs or DNA on her body? (Negative biological evidence.) Had there been blood or fingerprints detected in her car? (The vehicle was swabbed and found clean.)
In return for his many inquiries, Denny faced a series of his own. Had he found anyone to corroborate his Ski Bradford timeline? (One instructor remembered seeing him picking up the kids.) Would he be willing to submit DNA for a sample for the police? (Gladly.) Did he recall what he had been wearing the night of the murder, and would he be willing to deliver his clothing to the police department for analysis? (He did not honestly recall what he had been wearing that night, no.) Sticks had gotten into the habit of texting Denny with follow-up questions, which Denny didn’t mind. It gave him the opportunity to ask questions of his own. He asked about leads on suspects, but Sticks said the police couldn’t tell him anything about the current status of the case. It was natural, Denny supposed, to feel singled out in a murder investigation, and maybe also natural to feel like the police department wasn’t taking seriously his own sense of urgency. He had read, ofcourse, that most progress in homicide cases happens within the first few weeks, and he was beginning to feel that Anna’s case was losing steam.
Maybe that wasn’t fair. Or maybe Sticks and the team at the Hamilton Police Department were taking every piece of information he passed their way with a grain of salt because they believed him to be involved. Twice now, Denny had noticed cars passing him on the road near his house—slowly, in the kind of way that a car passes when they’ve been driving with no particular place to go. They weren’t cruisers but large domestic cars, the kind that Denny had always associated with municipalities. Almost certainly unmarked vehicles, he had thought to himself, which gave him even more reason to believe that the police were watching him to see if he was up to anything suspicious. He did have a gnawing feeling, too—something he shoved aside, because to think it was to sink into the despairing realization that he couldn’t trust anyone, not even the police—that maybe the surveillance was less about him and more about his being a nuisance, a simple attempt to get him to stop doing what he had been doing, which was sending nonstop inquiries to the police department. In any case, it hadn’t worked. It wasn’t working.
You said ligature marks, he texted Sticks the first week of February.Can you tell what it was from?
Three dots. Pensive. Then a reply. Sticks did this a lot, like he was considering the nature of his response.
Belt of some sort, the reply said, when it came.
Is there a way to find out what kind of belt? Maybe something about the belt marks? I’m no expert but don’t different belts leave different marks?
You’re no expert, Sticks responded.So leave the work to the experts.
Denny wanted to help, and he wanted answers. He had left the station bruised, of course, and had even made a call to hismother-in-law, herself a law school graduate who had never practiced (and who sometimes proffered free advice based purely on academics). She was a decent woman who trusted Denny, and she told him to tread lightly with the police but to try to get information from them when he could.
“Stay in their orbit,” she said. “You have a right to know what’s going on with the investigation, too.” There was, she let him know, something called the Victim Bill of Rights in Massachusetts, meaning that he was entitled to know how any criminal case was progressing through the system, if it made it that far. He also had the right to know any details about a caseinvolvinghim, including significant developments. Just knowing this made Denny feel better, even though it infuriated him that Sticks blew off any of Denny’s attempts at crime-solving but felt no remorse about tearing up his life piece by piece. Neighbors had left him messages, expressing discomfort over what they called the new “surveillance state” in the neighborhood.
