“Is it enough?” he asked.
“Is anything ever enough?”
Of course nothing was ever enough. That was classic Anna. Nothing was ever enough for her. It was why she had abandonedart. Gerhard Richter. He was a better artist, and so she had abandoned her own lesser skill and instead became a capable copywriter, turning the often-unfinished ideas of others into brilliant phrases and paragraphs. Pouring her artistic skills into projects that bore no true trace of her. Nothing was ever enough for her, the world could not contain her, and that was her problem: It was never, ever enough. Denny loved her for all of that, for her grandness, for being too bold and beautiful and wild and wide-eyed to even be contained. He loved her because of all the ideas that she had swirling around inside her, the things she was too afraid to put on a canvas, the pieces that she felt no one would ever really understand or appreciate. All that raw material was now gone; she was now gone. He felt it: the rawness, the echo of grief, its true reverberation, how it could just go on forever and ever. The things he had never told her, the life together they would never finish—the thought of it swelled inside him. A murder is an elimination, he thought, not just of a person, but also of a marriage, of a family, of an entire way of life.
“You were enough,” he said. “You were so much more than enough.”
“Don’t go getting all sentimental on me now, Denny,” the voice said.
He laughed, in spite of himself. A slip of light was starting to appear at the base of the trees. Hank was snoring still. In the last year, the dog had lost his spark.
“I’ll untangle it, you know,” Denny said.
“There’s one more thing,” the voice said. “But you’re close.”
Anna—or whatever figment of Denny’s imagination was approximating her in this early-morning hour—was right. Denny had scratched the itch, and he had slowly pieced together what he believed to be a reasonable explanation for how he had gotten here, to this place, alone in a bed, a widower and father of two. His wife had been targeted. Of this he was certain. He now knew the playersand their roles, he thought, but he was not yet sure of their motivations, or how they related to one another. And he still wasn’t sure how he was going to be able to prove any of this to anyone. Sticks, Denny now knew, was either involved or was protecting the people who were, meaning that the police department was just as dangerous as anyone else in Hamilton. And if Anna had somehow been lured to the haul-out by friends and foes without her own husband knowing, and had remained missing for days, who was to say that the same could not happen to him, too?
Some guiding force pointed him, in the ink-dark, to his computer, where he logged in, once more, to his wife’s email account. He had read every email up and down, he thought, but maybe he had missed something. Had he? He could feel his body overtaken by something—grief, or the heavy weight of a spirit inhabiting him, who could tell?—guiding him toward the search bar. Email search: “secret society.”
And there it was, an email he had never seen before, dated December 28, 2022, from an account called [email protected].
Dear Anna,
Excuse the intrusion, but I’m a concernedmouseworried that you have gotten into something that you cannot get yourself out of. I can’t say much about this over email (or at all), but the PTO is more than what it looks like. It’s a secret society of women working behind-the-scenes to get their kids into elite colleges. They will do anything—anything—to make sure that their kids succeed at the expense of others. These women have political connections. They have connections to law enforcement. THEY ARE RUTHLESS. Do not trust anyone.
It’s more than a school dance. It’s a social structure. The promises they make do come true. They’ve never had a non-member as president. If you were to win, the danger of you discovering their secrets would be too great.
Be careful out there.
—Anon Mouse
Only a few days before she disappeared—before she died—Denny now knew, Anna had received this final piece of information. The PTO was more than just an organization of well-to-do parents. It was a society where members conspired to pay a tithe in exchange for the ultimate certainty: entrance into the right schools for their children, a lifestyle that was acceptable in towns like these. With Mimi at the helm, all of this remained private and closed off. She had at her disposal, Denny knew, the Hamilton Police Department, and probably plenty of other high-powered organizations. It was unclear to Denny how far up the food chain her power went.
As was Anna’s way, she had written back a few hours later. It was right there in the thread.
Dear Mouse,
Tell me your secrets.
—Anna
The anonymous emailer waited two days to reply.
Dear Anna,
I’ve been thinking of the best way to respond to you, so I hope you can forgive me for taking my time. I’m putting myself in some danger by telling you all of this. I’m probably putting you in some danger, too. Please take care ofyourself. Please take care of your family. I can’t tell you who I am or how I know what I know, but I hope that you trust that it’s true.
This covert operation has gone on in Hamilton for a long time. The kids who get into Ivy League schools get in with the help of the PTO. The parents who pay to belong to this organization do it with the understanding that they are buying a ticket to the future.
In the early ’90s, a woman named Pam Jansen moved to Hamilton from Wenham. Her daughter was rejected from a bunch of schools: Tufts, Harvard, MIT, Penn, Columbia. It was one of those mysteries. The girl was perfect on paper. In every club. Perfect GPA. Sophisticated. Smart. It just didn’t make sense. Pam thought that maybe there was a better way for parents of means to make sure that their kids could bypass these archaic rules that enslave us to college administrators. So, when her son was a sophomore, in 1992, she came up with a bribery scheme to help him. The PTO just happened to be a convenient way to conceal her tracks, with their built-in connections to schools, financial incentives, and conduits between parents.
Ever since Pam, the PTO has essentially been a cover operation. The president is elected, and she appoints a vice-president, secretary, and treasurer. The organization has a list of vetted contacts. People within the community who know and support them. People in the state. Senators. Representatives. People who candetermine futures. The master list of members and supporters is saved in a file on one laptop that always remains with the president. The four PTO principals have access, but only the president takes the computer home. The documents are never transferred. There’s a unique payroll system. It’s entirely off-the-books. They’re ghosts.
Members pay for the privilege of getting in, and the PTO is very selective about the process. I could spend all day giving you a primer on how the operation works, but the truth is, you don’t need to know all of this (and the less you know, the better off you are). What you need to know is that they don’t want you to run because you threaten their ability to do what they have been doing, which is control their own futures and the futures of the people who pay into their club.
I hope this is helpful, and I’m sorry that I can’t tell you more. These people are dangerous. These people will do anything for power and success.
Don’t trust anyone. Look around every corner. And stay away from the PTO. I’m not kidding when I say that they’re dangerous.
