So I can’t say it, because I promised her. I can’t tell anyone, because I have to keep us safe. I can’t ever tell who my father is or what he did. I can’t talk about the Witness Protection Program. But I can write my name here. Katie Giordano. Katie Giordano. Katie Giordano.
Alexa slammed the notebook shut and shoved it back where she found it. Her hands were trembling. Something was going on here, and she didn’t know what.
“Katie!” she called.
There was no answer.
“Katie!” Still nothing. Alexa flew down the stairs and rounded the corner to the living room. Katie’s chair was empty. “Katie!”
“Sup?” said Katie. She was coming out of the kitchen, elbow deep in a box of Cheez-Its. “I’m right here.” She held the box out to Alexa. “You want some?”
Alexa Thornhill, did this evening’s babysitting gig meet your expectations? On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your experience?
35.
The Squad
It was early July when we began to notice that Alexa’s interest in the Griffins had become, well, for lack of a better word, surprising. One of us saw her leaving their house on Olive Street on a Monday evening. Another one of us, getting cones with her daughter and a friend at the Cottage during Alexa’s afternoon shift, heard her tell her coworker, a standout on the Pingree girls’ lacrosse team named Hannah, that she was babysitting the following evening as a favor to her mother’s friend. Gina reported it to a few of us via text, but not on the main text. A subtext, if you will. Tension between Gina and Rebecca had been high since the sleeping bag incident of 2019. Like we’ve told you, we haveno ideahow that story got out. And even ifa coupleof themoms knew, we never told our children. We thought maybe Rebecca was holding the whole thing needlessly against Gina. Not that we blamed her! She was grieving!
(Some of us still wondered. What was Rebecca doing with her summer? Except for that ill-fated pontoon ride, we’d hardly seen her.)
To the text about the babysitting we sent back various bewildered emojis. We thought,babysitting? Our children had finally reached the age where babysitters were unnecessary, unless we had younger siblings to consider, which the Griffins did not. Orunless we were going into Boston or Portland, or unless we were going to be out very, very late—for the famous/infamous Dalton Club Christmas party, for example. But surely Katie Griffin was old enough to stay by herself during the day or into the early evening. Surely she didn’t need a babysitter.
It was Esther who first posited that maybe something else was going on.
After that, we couldn’t help but wonder, every one of us.
We mean, Alexa Thornhill was a big deal. Her Silk Stockings account was verified on Instagram.
If Alexa Thornhill had some reason to hang around with Sherri and Katie Griffin, were we missing something? And if so, what was it?
We swear Nicole wasn’t thinking about any of this when she sent out the evite to Riley’s Boda Borg birthday party. If you don’t know, Boda Borg is a real-world gaming environment where you divide into teams and go through these “quests” with challenges both mental and physical. You’ve never done it? You should. You totally should. It’s really a good time. It’s in Malden, sort of a haul from us, but worth it. They don’t say this on the Web site, but a shot of tequila really makes the experience sing.
A few of us did it on a couple’s night out a while back. It was a lot of fun: we rented a van and a driver. All of our teams had color names. The Green Team won, not that we’re bragging. We invited Rebecca, but she didn’t come. (We didn’t blame her! She was still grieving!) Even so, it would have been nice if she’d specifically declined instead of just not showing up. It was that night that Brandy said she saw Rebecca getting a blowout on a random Thursday evening in February, when nobody had any plans to go out. And she was dressed up too. Not in her teacher clothes. She was wearing a pair of to-the-knee leather boots Brandy had never seen before.
It was probably nothing.
Boda Borg is not cheap. Nicole was on a budget that summer, not that she wanted everybody to know about Mason losing his job, but Riley begged and begged and begged for her Boda Borg party. She’d been counting on this all year. So Nicole had to put a limit on it, that’s all. That’s why she ended up not including Morgan or Katie.
It was nobody’s fault. Looking back, at the end of the summer, we suppose it’s possible that that’s where some of the drama started.
Call Boda Borg yourself, if you don’t believe us about the price.
36.
Alexa
Once Katie was asleep Alexa sat cross-legged on the couch, deep into Google.
She tried “Giordano” and “crime.” “Giordano” and “jail.” “Giordano” and “New Jersey” and “crime” and “jail.”
Bingo.
Google returned approximately one million articles on the arrest of a man named Bobby Giordano and three other men for the murder of a teenage girl named Madison Miller in New Jersey. The first article Alexa clicked on said that the men were rumored to be a little-known part of the New Jersey Cambellini crime family—an offshoot, as they were described. A smaller branch. They made it sound almost friendly, like the smaller, suburban banks that went with a larger city bank.
Madison Miller’s body had been found in a shallow grave in a wooded area on the outskirts of a city park by a dog walker seventeen days after she had gone missing from a local Target. She had been strangled. The four men who were tried for her murder admitted in court that Madison Miller had seen something in one of their trucks that she shouldn’t have seen.
Alexa felt like she was going to throw up, especially when she saw the photo of Madison Miller, in which she looked perky andnice, like somebody Alexa might like to be friends with, or anyway, like someone who might want to be friends with Alexa.
