All told, Mimi said, there were 218 officials on the Generals’ payroll, paid in cash, yes, though not in suitcases. It had taken a long time to establish the pipeline—nearly the entire eight years of Pamela Jansen’s PTO tenure, though she had been successful in getting her son into Harvard in the end. “Pure persuasion,” Mimi said, with a smile. But once the Generals were up and running, there was no stopping them. They developed a system: quarterly visits and payments, check-ins that looked like accidental meetings (Anna had witnessed one between Mimi and Representative Murphy at Honeycomb, after all), requests that never held any kind of paper trail. They recruited new members through the sorority, encouraged the right kind of people to move to town and encouraged their daughters to join Chi Omega, a pipeline operated in a circle. What were the checks for? Requisite fees, so far as their husbands knew. They might as well have been joining a country club. They were permitted to share with their spouses a little about howthe organization worked, if it was required to get the money, but otherwise, the organization remained tight-lipped.
All of this made Anna wonder, once more, about Sarah Saunders, a woman she had not known, but who had jumped into her own world to warn her about the Generals. That had been a risk. “What happened with Sarah?” Anna asked.
“She was a lot like you, actually,” Mimi said. “Willful. Unable to see others’ perspective. She was the first PTO position holder since 1992 to leave.”
There were, Anna knew, consequences to going against these women. Certainly there were consequences to going against the Chi Omega code, whatever that was.
“I assume she discovered that moving to Winchester and telling people about the Generals wasn’t going to work,” Anna said.
“We put an end to that. Plenty of parking tickets. Her husband got called for jury duty every month for a year. We thought she’d learned the lesson, but I guess she saw some potential in you,” Mimi said.
“But she’s alive?”
“We don’t discuss our methods of punishment with non-members, Anna,” Di said. “Mimi has been more than generous in giving you information about Sarah.”
“It’s okay, Di, we can tell her,” Karen said. “Sarah and her husband have decided to move to the Midwest. At the urging of some very forceful state officials.”
“I guess I still don’t get why I’m here,” Anna confessed. “If Sarah was the problem. I didn’t go to the authorities. I fell into all of this. And I can fall right back out. You can let me go and we can all just live our lives. See each other at the Citgo and act like we don’t even know each other, just like every other person in Massachusetts who doesn’t give a shit about their neighbors.” No one said anything, so Anna kept talking. “I could move to the Midwest. I could move to Laurel Canyon. People can start entirely new lives,”Anna said. She realized she was begging. It was the only time she could ever recall begging for anything.
“Maybe, for some of us, this is personal,” Mimi said. It was casual, but Anna could see she meant Di. Di, the girl Anna had met all those years ago, back in the shortening days of summer, back when Kaitlin Connors was still alive, back when you could still get away with jumping off Indian Rock into the Merrimack without someone calling the cops, back when riding a bike around town after dark didn’t seem so dangerous. Jealousy, that was part of it—Anna could feel that in her bones—but there was something else, too, a drive to ensure that her children could live a tony Hamilton life in perpetuity. The estate, the carriage house, the rose garden in spring. Success in their futures. Anna looked at her friend, still the tallest in the room. Those emerald eyes had lost their shine. They still had a choice, all of them, to back out, to send her to the Midwest alongside Sarah Saunders, but Anna already knew that whatever was set in motion had been set in motion a long time ago, and had less to do with her being a threat and more to do with her being an irritant, and that they could eliminate her—that it was a flex. It was the ultimate proof of who they were as the Generals, the manifestation of their power. It had ripened, then rotted. Anna was here now, in a room with the fetid reminder of it.
What if, Anna suddenly realized, it wasn’t about what people had to do, but about what they wanted to do? What if they were all here because of desire? What if she had misread the discomfort in the room? What if it was only her own? What if Mary had kept her close to keep her off the scent? What if Mimi had hunted her like prey? What if Karen followed the lead? What if Di had always wanted Anna gone? What if savage instincts just needed a place to run wild? What if things that had always seemed illogical and cruel and mad were just a matter of appetite?
Anna was beginning to see appetite in the eyes of her captors.They had an appetite—not for her so much as for power. To kill: That was the ultimate wielding of power.
“You don’t have to do it,” Anna said. She was speaking to one of them, to all of them, to their appetites, to their egos.
“It’s already done,” Di said. And it was.
They say that your life flashes before your eyes when you are dying, but that is not what Anna Plummer experienced. In real time, she had been knocked unconscious.Ligature marks,Sticks had said, but it had been tidier than that. A Gucci belt, slipped effortlessly from Mimi Mar’s cinched waist. It took two women to exert the force, but it was surprising how quickly something that had been there for so long suddenly wasn’t.
The buttons were Ellen’s idea. “We need some kind of contract,” she said, once they were all in the car. Mimi was in the driver’s seat, Karen shotgun, Di and Ellen in the captain’s seats in the second row, with Mary riding in the back next to what had once been Anna. Or maybe she was still Anna. No one talked as they slipped from discussion of what they might do into the action of what they were carrying out. But now they needed proof that this had happened, and proof that they were indebted only to one another. “I just think we should . . . seal this somehow.”
“I agree,” Di said.
“What is she wearing?” Mimi asked, turning around. They hadn’t left the driveway yet. The car was still off. They could all see their breath. Di had sent her children off with the nanny for the evening, banking on her husband having dinner and drinks with colleagues in Boston for the night. But their good fortune wouldn’t last forever. They had to get moving. A crime was only as good as its worst perpetrator.
“Black sweater, black jeans,” Mary called from the back ofthe car. She looked down at Anna, noticing the sweater’s details. “There are buttons here,” Mary said. “Gold ones.”
“That settles that,” Mimi said. “Everyone gets a button. No questions asked. We can deal with it when we get there.”
A silence consumed the car as Mimi engaged the engine. She drove slowly from Di’s house, out through the dark roads of Hamilton and toward Ipswich. Trees rose up like skeletons, bony fingers reaching toward the sky. They passed no cars on the road, saw no other headlights as they inched toward the haul-out. It wasn’t yet late, but it was cold, and most houses blew tufts of smoke from their ancient chimneys. People were at home now, safe and snug in their beds, but not the upstanding women of the Hamilton PTO. Not them. They were out and looking for a place to hide the body. They were out and looking for a place to store the evidence.
“Call your brother,” Mimi told Ellen as they got closer to the Ipswich line. “Call. No texts.” They couldn’t risk any mistakes, not now, not after they had been so particular, not after they had come so far.
Ellen nodded in the dark. She punched a few numbers into her phone. It rang twice before someone answered on the other end. It was Sticks, who had clearly been expecting the call.
“Hi,” she said a few seconds later. “The car is at Di’s house.” A pause. “Yes. Yes. Right, where we talked about. Yes. Yes, it’s all set. I’ll be gone by then.” Then she hung up.
“It’s all set,” Ellen said. “He’ll take care of the car.” Sticks would come for the Volkswagen, moving it to the haul-out once everything was clear. In a week or two, he’d pin it all on the husband, because it was always the husband, in every episode ofDateline. Di could help with that. She had known them the longest. There would be enough to arouse suspicion, at least, even if there was no hard evidence. A little unsolved mystery, gossip floating around town, leave the books open for just long enough and then abandonthe whole thing entirely. The last piece of the puzzle, proof they were untouchable.
“Fucking fantastic,” Mimi said, concentrating on the road ahead. “One less thing to worry about.”
At the haul-out, Mimi parked in the darkest spot, beneath a thicket of trees. She pulled the dark car in as far as she could so that it was nearly invisible from the road. “Karen, I want you to stand here near the road. If you see anyone driving by or anything happening, you let us know.” Karen nodded, like she had been waiting her whole life for this unique opportunity.
The others lined up at the trunk to help with the body. They pulled the buttons off the sweater, one by one, and slipped them into their pockets. They came off with surprising ease. That was all they needed. A pact. An agreement among friends. After this, they could go back to being the upstanding members of the Hamilton Fucking PTO. President, vice president, and, of course,premium members.Life as it should be, all smoothed over in a small town.
Anna was wearing a slouchy sweater. It looked less suspicious in the middle of January, like she had simply gone out for a walk and lost her way. Weren’t they all just losing their way, after all? Wasn’t everyone always just losing their way in adulthood? One big clusterfuck. Proof that life wasn’t an accident.
